Politics In Vivo – Political and Cultural Commentary, and Whatever Else…

You know the old economist joke:

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist solution: “Let’s smash the can open with a rock.” The chemist solution: “Let’s build a fire and heat the can first.” The economist solution: “First, assume a can-opener….”

In graduate school we read a book called Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords, and while it offered some good analysis, we mostly made fun of it because somehow, amazingly, it only mentioned Hamas on two of its 254 pages. An entire book about modern Palestinian politics only mentioned Hamas twice, both of them throwaway references! The consensus of the class was that it’s pretty easy to talk about the Palestinian national movement and the way forward in the peace process if you elide a major impediment to both. First, assume no Hamas!

I felt the same way reading John Judis’s much-praised essay in the New Republic in support of the Palestinians’ bid for statehood at the UN. Judis accuses the U.S. of severe myopia in promising to veto the bid in the Security Council. He lays much blame for the failed peace process on the Netanyahu government, which he says essentially scrapped the entire negotiation framework built by previous administrations, instead deciding to go on a “construction binge” in the occupied territories in order to appease right-wing domestic constituencies. Judis suggests that the process by which the state of Israel gained UN recognition in 1948—with strong U.S. support—is eerily similar to the current Palestinian appeal. He argues that our opposition to the latter is not only hypocritical and craven, but antithetical to our interests in the region.

Andrew Sullivan nods approvingly at Judis’s essay, calling it “an elegant, factual, calm dismemberment of where the Obama administration has ended up on Israel-Palestine.” Sullivan blames the U.S. fumbling of this whole UN episode on the Obama admininstration’s capitulation to what he calls the “Greater Israel Lobby,” as well as the president’s inability or unwillingness to overcome “Netanyahu’s adamant resistance to any serious attempt at a two-state solution.”

Both men seem to be in agreement that if not for Obama’s lack of vision, pro-Israel lobby fundamentalism, and Netanyahu’s cynicism and bad faith, we’d be in much better shape. I agree with a lot of both mens’ analysis. But do you notice anything missing from them? There is hardly a mention of Hamas! And no mention of the fact that the Palestinian leadership is currently cleaved geographically, politically, and militarily. “Palestine” is now much more accurately described as the two competing statelets of Hamasistan and Fatahistan. Remarkably, this fact doesn’t merit mention in either Judis’s or Sullivan’s essay.

Judis’s 2200-word piece mentions the word Hamas exactly twice. The first is just to point out Hamas’s “important role” in the Second Intifada (along with “other radical Islamist groups”). The second Hamas mention is this:

By seeking to win statehood through UN recognition and assistance, the Palestinian leadership is visibly underscoring its commitment to a two-state solution; by doing that, and by rejecting a strategy based on terror and violence for one based on negotiation and multilateral assistance from the United Nations (which, again, was created to resolve exactly the kind of conflict that is occurring between the Israelis and the Palestinians), it is potentially marginalizing Hamas.

But is “seeking to win statehood” through the UN really a good mechanism for Hamas-marginalization? What happens the day after statehood when all of the core issues remain as unresolved and intractable as ever? What if the Abbas/Fayyad strategy of “negotiation and multilateral assistance” is shown to have gotten us no closer to the end of occupation or settlements or to real autonomy for the Palestinian people? Might that discredit the conciliatory approach and end up embolding Hamas even more? Judis doesn’t say.

Judis does make other oddly oblique references to Hamas. For instance, he scoffs at those who argue against the UN bid just because “some Palestinians still don’t recognize the right of Israel to exist.” I agree in principle, but again, who are those “some Palestinians?” A couple of bad eggs? Well no, they are the political and terrorist organization that won a sweeping legislative victory in 2006, whose official charter calls for the destruction of Israel, who currently governs nearly half of the Palestinian people after it took over the Gaza Strip by force in 2007, who continues cross border rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, and who is against the UN statehood bid that Judis wants the U.S. to support! Why not mention any of this?

Sullivan’s impassioned defense of Judis’s argument is even worse. He doesn’t mention Hamas at all, not once, let alone any hint of the current divisions in Palestinian society which make any talk of a unified cohesive “Palestine” ridiculous.

Look, I believe in the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. I think continued occupation of Palestinian land is as unjust as it is unwise. I think Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank is illegal and immoral. I think anyone who believes they have a biblical deed to land comprising “greater Israel” is bonkers.

And I do agree with Judis and others, that the U.S. and particularly Israel really suffered a failure of imagination regarding this whole UN episode. The main argument here is that international recognition of a Palestinian state with defined or sort-of-defined borders is also a de facto recognition of a right of Israel to exist. There are a lot of creative scenarios that potentially follow from this, none of which Israel or the U.S. seem to have pursued.

But in apportioning blame for the ongoing failure to end the most intractable conflict in modern history, I am far more ecumenical than Judis and Sullivan. I prefer the view of Aaron David Miller, who has a more structural take on the problem:

There is no conflict-ending agreement now available to Israelis and Palestinians. The gaps are just too big, the suspicions too deep, and the regional environment too uncertain; and the capacity of an American (or any other mediator) to serve as an effective broker is just too implausible.

And Miller rejects the idea that the path not taken by the Obama administration would have yielded better results.

Did the president have an alternative? Could he have done things differently these many months? I have close friends, former colleagues whom I respect and admire greatly, who argue yes….

I don’t agree with any of this, of course. Neither Abbas nor Netanyahu would be willing to pay the necessary price required for a deal. But who really knows in the wonderful world of counterfactuals?

This is a rather depressing and fatalistic view, but I think the correct one. It’s true that Netanyahu is not a credible partner for peace. Neither is Hamas. The president of the United States cannot change that. There are insuperable structural impediments to peace right now, and wishing them away by eliding them from your analysis is not the answer. Assume No Hamas is not a negotiation strategy.

I was asked the other day what I thought about the oft-proposed idea of a repatriation holiday for profit that U.S. companies are hoarding overseas in order to avoid paying taxes. Let them bring it back home with little or no tax penalty, the story goes, and then watch them inject all that new cash into the domestic economy and stoke demand and production and new jobs all over the place.

Lovely story, but first, forgive me for thinking that the lack of supply-side tax giveaways to corporations is not exactly the most serious problem facing the U.S. economy right now. But the real issue is, as the WSJ reports today, U.S. companies already have tons of cash on hand:

Corporations have a higher share of cash on their balance sheets than at any time in nearly half a century, as businesses build up buffers rather than invest in new plants or hiring.

Nonfinancial companies held more than $2 trillion in cash and other liquid assets at the end of June, the Federal Reserve reported Friday, up more than $88 billion from the end of March. Cash accounted for 7.1% of all company assets, everything from buildings to bonds, the highest level since 1963.

The article finds a spokesman from a leading oil and gas company to say—shocker—that tax-free repatriation of corporate profits is an awesome idea, under the rationale that "whatever companies use the money for—such as investments, dividend payments or stock buybacks—the U.S. would benefit by having the funds come home. ‘That’s money that’s going to be put into productive use in the United States,’ Mr. Agosta said."

Well as Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Agosta would naturally be happy with more dividend payments. But surely the fact that these companies are already sitting on piles of cash means that giving them slightly larger piles of cash isn’t going to change their investment/production/hiring strategy very much.

The main problem is that your production/hiring strategy changes only when customer demand for your product changes. But when your customers are out of work or have stagnating wages, or underwater mortgages or major household debt, it doesn’t matter how much cash your corporation has, there’s no one to buy your stuff and no reason for you to invest in expansion or new hiring.

It is true that even using a small portion of the cash to pay out dividends to Mr. Agosta and other affluent shareholders may have some salutory downstream demand effects. But "give rich people more money so it can trickle down" has been tried before, and despite it being the central, and only, economic idea of one major U.S. political party, it is not a very good growth strategy. Yes, even if you start calling all the rich people "job creators."

As Matt Yglesias notes, it is the gap between potential and actual output that is killing us right now. In other words, a major fall-off in consumption and aggregate demand. Here’s the graph:

That gap between the lines is why companies aren’t producing more stuff or hiring more people, and magnanimously giving them a giant tax windfall wouldn’t change that. Why would we think they’d do anything other than hoard it as they’re doing now?

I’m no fan of our onerous statutory corporate tax rate (Statutory being the operative word: few pay the full statutory rate.) There is certainly a place for major corporate tax reform within the context of a system-wide tax reform effort. But right now, we can either get used to the "new normal" of depressed output levels, or else we get policymakers to take advantage of historically low borrowing rates and make up for some of the slack private consumption with increased public spending. But just arbitrarily deciding to suspend all the tax rules every so often to give corporations cash they don’t need and won’t use, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as a sound growth strategy.

I strongly oppose capital punishment, so naturally I found it revolting when the audience at last night’s GOP debate broke into hearty applause when informed that the state of Texas under Rick Perry has executed 234 people:

Perry notes that he has "never struggled at all" with the idea that one of those inmates might have been innocent. But of course, one was innocent. If you’re unaware of the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, do read this piece by David Grann published last year. It’s one of the most absorbing pieces of journalism I’ve ever read. How anyone can read this and then blithely assert that they’ve "never struggled at all" with the question of wrongful execution is well beyond my moral comprehension. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that we should not be at all shocked by this sentiment from Perry, nor from the approving audience reaction; after all, this was a Republican debate in a country that strongly supports the death penalty. I get that. One is of course tempted to point out the vertiginous dissonance exhibited by a man and a party that thinks everything the government does is unconstitutional except for the murdering of citizens, but really, the electorate doesn’t care about dissonance.

No, it’s the relishing that gets me, and I imagine it would get me even if I were a supporter of capital punishment. It’s the total absense of doubt or self-reflection in the face of woefully incomplete or conflicting information. Surety under such conditions is a shameful vice and a mark of deficient character. Rick Perry and those audience members treat it as high virtue, laudable, strong, decisive. It’s disgusting.

I admit I am not familiar with the brand of conservatism that says doubt is to be shunned, that says bloodlust and hubris are worthy proxies for statesmanship and leadership; the conservatism for which proudly asserting that you "never struggle at all" with questions of imperfect justice and state power over life and death is some sort of perverse proof of presidential fitness rather than an automatic disqualification. It’s been said many times, but the Republican party that embraces these things is not ‘conservative’ in any way. It is a psychopathological support group for the expression of distilled cultural grievance and anxiety and bravado.

Look, I understand the case for capital punishment, but in my view if you have decided that you are for it, you should be for it just barely. If you find yourself in an audience where you are whooping over the awesomeness of the very idea of state execution, something has gone awry. But either way, you must have the moral courage to reckon with the Cameron Todd Willinghams of the world. The state-sanctioned murdering of innocents is an ineluctable result of the pro-death penalty position. To me, this decisively seals the case for the other side. But if it doesn’t seal it for you, I would hope that your conception of justice and humanity at least leads you to struggle with it. After all, if you do not struggle over Cameron Todd Willingham, what DO you struggle over? Rick Perry signed the death warrant. What does Rick Perry struggle over?

Rick Perry has deftly (and quite tardily) positioned himself as the reigning champion of states’ rights and the so-called Tenther movement, which holds that most everything the federal government does is unconstitutional and should be left to the states. In his radical manifesto published last year, Fed Up, he reveals his antipathy to all sorts of federal functions: education spending, federal bank regulation, environmental regulation, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Of course all of these positions are contingent upon the demands of good ol’ political opportunism:

In one of his more well-publicized shifts, Mr. Perry proclaimed that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide, but backtracked in recent weeks and now says he supports a federal amendment banning gay marriage. He has also signaled support for various federal actions to restrict abortion rather than leaving the issue to states. And he used $17 billion in federal stimulus money to balance the state’s last two budgets.

But hypocrisy aside, I will attribute to him his stated maximalist position:

“From marriage to prayer, from zoning laws to tax policy, from our school systems to health care, and everything in between,” he wrote, “it is essential to our liberty that we be allowed to live as we see fit through the democratic process at the local and state level.”

But the question today is, is that really the essence of liberty? To be free to be coerced by your local and state government?

The Libertarian party does not think so. In its platform it does not distinguish between levels of government when it comes to encroachment on individual liberty:

[A]ll political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent.

We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual….

In this view, there is the individual and arrayed against him and his inviolable liberty is government, period. There is nothing special or priviliged about the liberty one enjoys within arbitrary geographic and legal jurisdictions we call “states.” To Libertarians, the regulation of private lives and the seizing of fruits of labor are not made appreciably more tolerable or noble by the fact that it’s being done from Perry’s state house instead of the White House.

Perry is clearly no libertarian. His view, consistent with the Tenther cult, is that there is something necessarily odious and despotic about federal coercion, but something pure and patriotic about state and local coercion. So Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, but retirement pensions for Texas public employees, partially paid for by taxpayers, is fine. Likewise, the EPA is some kind of envirofascist hotbed, but the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality does all sorts of things, all of which are presumably ok with Rick Perry.

I understand the philosophical case made by the Libertarian party. I disagree with a bunch of it, but I understand it. They have an ideological committment to protect the natural rights of the individual as against all collectives. They are not out to discover best governing practices or to optimize the efficacy of public policy. Presumably they think that their societal scheme is superior to all others, but the principle of individual inviolabity ultimately overrides any questions of practicality or efficacy. Fine.

The purist Rick Perry/states’ rights view I do not understand. (Leaving aside, of course, those areas in which that purity falls risibly short.) They do not claim to be individual rights champions. They openly say that their conception of liberty is endowed and ensured by a collective, in this case, the thing we call states. Perry says “it is essential to our liberty that we be allowed to live as we see fit,” but he doesn’t stop there, for his type of liberty is only derived “through the democratic process at the local and state level.”

But surely one’s definition of liberty should be universal, right? It can’t possibly be limited to the existence of a certain type of sub-national governing mechanism. Singapore, for instance, has no meaningful sub-national governance. Does this mean Singaporeans can never hope to know the sweet essence of liberty?

If, like Perry, you’ve already admitted that divining the collective will is a necessary precondition for liberty, then how we define the size and scope of that collective should not be a matter of dogma, but of pragmatism and efficacy. To pick a highly contingent and arbitrarily-sized collective—a “state” or a “municipality”—and say that it’s not just the optimal unit of collective human governance but the only means by which an individual can obtain liberty, makes absolutely no sense to me. Once you say collectives are necessary, you should be agnostic on the question of which collectives are best able to deal with various policy problems. It seems beyond obvious to me that sometimes the state or local collective will innovate, incubate, and administer best practices, and sometimes the federal collective will be the place to turn for optimal outcomes, efficiencies of scale, etc. Why people are hostile to that basic idea is tough for me to understand. We can and should have big debates about where we think problems will be best dealt with, but to say the answer is “always the states” because, well, a state’s a state, doesn’t seem to me to be the best strategy.

Here’s a good example. Matt Yglesias calls attention to one Cato scholar’s view that federal monitoring and tracking of hurricanes is illegitimate. Ok. So Matt wonders what the likely outcome would be if federal funding was eliminated for the National Weather Service and for all related weather-disaster entities. The abandoned functions, being really useful and important, would be picked up by someone else. Who?

Maybe the Gulf Coast states who are most often afflicted by hurricanes would form a consortium to do the monitoring and there would be constant disputes between the members about what constitutes a fair share of the budget to contribute. States further up the northeastern coast that are only rarely afflicted would try to free ride. Hurricanes asides, instead of having a single National Weather Service tracking the weather, maybe we’d have three or four private firms all reproducing each others’ data and selling it to clients. We’d have systematically higher costs and maybe (?) a slightly higher quality product.

I think the state-based or state consortium scenario is most likely. But would Louisiana or Mississippi’s weather monitoring system be prone to cutbacks during economic downturns? Would they stop monitoring after the threatening weather had passed their jurisdiction? Who would pay the overtime if Louisiana’s weather monitors had to stay late to keep New Jersey residents abreast of the latest data? Lots of collective action problems to sort out here.

When it comes to the question of whether hurricane monitoring should be a federal function or a state-based or private function, the relevant policy question isn’t “which view most comports with my philosophical biases or my idiosyncratic interpretation of the 10th amendment,” it’s, “which option will do the most reliable and cost-effective job at monitoring hurricanes.”  As Matt says, we have a well-functioning federal agency that does this, “it seems to work quite well and be useful to people, to municipalities, to states, etc. So why complain?” Why indeed.

Despite the current polls, I really don’t think Rick Perry will win the nomination. He hasn’t been a national politician long enough, and because he’s not very smart, he’ll blow it. But his Tenther legacy of irrational federal antipathy will surely live on.

Ross Douthat had a very astute column yesterday on something that’s been bothering me as well; how national politicians govern as if the dream of a permanant realignment of the electorate in their favor is always right around the corner:

This dream has hovered over national leaders from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. But it has loomed larger in the last decade, as our politics have grown more polarized and our country has suffered through a series of dislocations and disasters. Events like 9/11 and the Great Recession have persuaded partisans on both sides that a dramatic realignment is imminent; the breadth of the ideological divide has convinced them that it’s necessary. […]

Thus the assumption, on the left and right alike, that every presidential election is the most important in our lifetime — except for the next one, which will be more important still. […]

The dream of realignment has become the enemy of [political compromise]. It inspires politicians to claim sweeping mandates from highly contingent victories…. The losers, meanwhile, wax intransigent, while hoping for a realignment of their own. After all, why cut a deal today if tomorrow you might overthrow your rivals permanently? […]

None of this means that our parties need to give up their deep convictions, their grand plans, or their hopes of winning an enduring mandate.

But in the wake of the weekend’s downgrade, we need them to govern as though that final victory might never quite arrive.

This is good stuff. Washington is often accused of suffering from the dreaded “short-termism” with its inability to plan or focus on anything outside of a couple years’ time frame. Part of the reason of course is that we have a ton of elections every few years, and being a major officeholder seems to be enticing enough that no one really wants to give it up once they’ve got it. But most incumbents are in very safe seats so political survival can’t explain all of it.

No, I imagine Douthat is right that there is an apocalyptic tinge to the fevered anticipation and triumphalism of political operatives and officeholders. They really think that if they just play everything perfectly this time around, then the next election may just be the final decisive battle in the great partisan war for America’s soul. In their minds the zeitgeist is always forever on the brink of realizing that it was their party, all along, whom they really loved.

I remember Republicans and pundits confidently assert that the Bush victory in 2004 heralded an evangelical awakening that signalled a new normal in American politics. Four years later that was over of course, and the Democrats’ decisive triumph of the White House and Congress was the dawning of a new liberal age, buttressed by permanent ethnic demographic shifts and the newly-emboldened  youth vote. Well, that’s kind of over with as well.

Now we’re back to the trenches, with the White House and all of Congress up for grabs next year. We’ve learned that evangelicals can’t move elections on their own; and on the other side, while hispanic demographics are to some extent destiny, and young attitudes on various social issues will be dispositive, it’s not always easy to predict how all the spoils will be distributed.

I think one of the most recent examples of fatal short-termism was in 2009, when Republicans famously refused to negotiate or compromise during the health care reform debate. They calculated that total opposition and obstruction would help them in the upcoming midterms. They were certainly right about that, but in return for their sweeping House victory they got a comprehensive universal health law which they had no hand in influencing or shaping. Why did they trade seemingly transitory gains in one midterm election for a major defeat on a historic piece of substantive policy?

I think it’s because Ross is right: they never, ever believe the gains are transitory. They genuinely think there is a zero-sum struggle out there, and if they just accumulate enough points they’ll be crowned champion of the public square for good, their political enemies having gone the way of the Whigs. No one ever comes into power thinking that they’ve just inherited a very contingent, unsteady majority that is just as likely as not to be coughed up in a couple years.

Here’s a graph showing political party control in Congress and the White House: 

The presidency is very volatile. In Congress there are some sustained periods of party domination (I did not realize that the Democrats controlled the House and Senate for a quarter century beginning in 1955), but, whatever caused that prolonged stability is clearly not operative any longer (and this chart ends in 2007).

It’s just a fact that a first-past-the-post voting system militates toward a two-party consolidation, and in the long run, the parties adapt their platforms such that something near a 50-50 split is likely. As Ross notes, true permanent transformative shifts are quite rare; and in any event, the presidency seems to be exempt from them. What a party assumes is a historical realignment is most likely a very temporary triumph which will be stifled and attenuated by powerful veto points thoughout the rest of the system. I don’t know how to get politicians to govern as if this were the case; as long as they still have visions of permanent revolution and ultimate triumph, there isn’t much reason to be optimistic about the political system’s ability to forge collective action on big problems.

Now that the debt-ceiling nonsense is behind us (for three months or so), it’s a fine time to recall that no matter if federal spending be increased or slashed, taxes be hiked or cut, Democrats or Republicans comprise the majority, the nation commit itself to one war, two wars, three wars, al-Qaida be ascendant or irrelevant; through political paralysis, economic stagnation, military impasse…

Through it all, the Domestic Surveillance State abides, grows ever larger, ever more intrusive, the one-way ratchet forever tightens, peddling phantom protection and security at the bargain price of round-the-clock invigilation, our privacy monitored, mined, collated, stored; and we don’t much notice, and when we do, we don’t much care:

If Congress had to name laws honestly, it would be called the "Forcing Your Internet Provider to Spy On You Just In Case You’re a Criminal Act of 2011" — a costly, invasive mandate that even the co-author of the Patriot Act, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), says "runs roughshod over the rights of people who use the Internet."

But because it’s disguised as the "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act," the House Judiciary Committee approved it last week by a wide margin — even though it’s got little to do with child porn and won’t do much to protect kids.

The centerpiece of this ill-conceived law is a sweeping requirement that commercial Internet providers retain a one-year log of all the temporary Internet Protocol addresses they assign to their users, along with customer-identification information. The Justice Department says this will help track down child-porn peddlers by linking online activity and real-world identities. But the government would be able to access that sensitive data for all kinds of investigations, most of which would have nothing to do with child porn.

Traditionally, citizens in a free society are presumed innocent. If the police want to look through your computer files, the Fourth Amendment requires them to show a judge that there’s "probable cause" to suspect wrongdoing. The PCIPA turns that assumption on its head, treating every Internet user as a presumptive criminal and exploiting a serious Fourth Amendment loophole.

Read the rest here.

With high-profile women like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Michèle Flournoy roaming the halls of power, it’s easy to overlook the fact that women are still highly unrepresented in all foreign policy- and national security-related professions. In academia, think tanks, and in leadership positions at the Pentagon and the State Department, women do not crack 30% representation, and in the more explicitly “hard security” areas, the number is often in the teens.

Heather Hurlburt, head of the National Security Network, veteran think tanker, and former advisor and speechwriter to President Clinton and two Secretaries of State, wrote a piece in Foreign Policy wondering why this might be, what the practical costs are, and how to ameliorate the problem. Hurlburt is particularly concerned with the dwindling effect, with women at or near parity at the graduate school- and entry-level, but steadily disappearing at the higher echelons:

As the female head of a nonprofit with “National Security” in its title, I see a flood of talented young women as interns, job-seekers, and colleagues. No one has told them they’re not supposed to like “hard security.” They want to work on everything and climb the ladder as much as the men do. In fact, their confidence and assertiveness tends to unnerve my older male colleagues. The real question is, where do they go between the time they pour into the intern ranks at 22 and the time they are my peers and my mentors’ peers?

This same dwindling effect occurs in many traditionally male-dominated fields, including scientific and biomedical research. Women swell the ranks of grad students and young research fellows, but then abandon the academic track in droves as time goes by:

Women constitute approximately 45% of the postdoctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences at universities and research institutions in the USA, but a much lower percentage of women hold faculty positions. In the US National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD) Intramural Research Program, for example, women make up only 29% of the tenure-track investigators and hold just 19% of the tenured senior investigator appointments.

It is not just a delayed effect as we wait for all those young eager female students and postdocs to make their way up: in the last ten years the percentage of tenure-track or tenured women investigators at NIH has remained unchanged.

So why aren’t women sticking around to become leaders in fields like national security and scientific research? For her part, Hurlburt notes that part of the problem is a feedback loop that tells women at formative junctures of their career that such male-dominated professions are perhaps not “for” them. So, after studying and interning in “hard power” fields:

…many more women [eventually] find themselves in “soft power” policy areas. Does this happen because of something essentially feminine? No. About once every five years, starting in college, someone has told me that women “don’t like” hard security. Eventually, many women take the hint: If moving from defense to development buys you a more congenial workplace and bosses who seem to value you more, then it’s no wonder that the ranks of women in “hard security” dwindles along the way.

I think this is a big factor. A survey of NIH postdocs reveals that while two-thirds of male postdocs say they want to pursue a tenured PI position, only a half of women postdocs say the same. Like Hurlburt’s example, there is no essentialist feminine reason why women are more apt to drop out of the ranks at a higher rate than men. Part of the problem must be that just as in the national security establishment, from the early stages of graduate school and postdoctoral work, a large majority of one’s mentors, professors, department heads, field leaders, career role models, etc., have been men. Not only does that tend to set an adverse example to aspiring women, but it creates a boy’s club environment that naturally leads to various inequities of opportunity. Hurlburt notes:

[W]e must be honest that the core problem is that many men still turn first to other men — in hiring, but also in picking conference speakers, media spokespeople, and handing out assignments. If you don’t want to call it sexism, it is at least a bias toward comfort with what’s familiar.

The cumulative effect of this bias in the sciences is clear: a large reason woman postdocs do not want to pursue a PI position is that they do not feel they have a sufficient body of promising independent work to build upon: 67% of men, and only 48% of women, said they had a project that they could take with them when becoming a PI. I find that a devastating disparity. Not surprisingly then, men (59%) were far more confident than women (40%) that they would one day obtain a PI position. Likewise, women were more apt to stop pursuing a PI position if they failed in their initial attempt. 58% of men said they would just try again, and only 41% of women said the same.

Though there’s clearly more going on here, difference of views toward family and children are also a major factor in the choice of a scientific career. I don’t have detailed data for the national security fields, but children would seem to be less of an issue there, since it’s not obvious that a soft power/development career is any less demanding or more family-friendly than a hard power/security career.

Among NIH postdocs however, “more than 21% of women, but only 7% of men, said that plans to have children or to have more children were extremely important considerations in planning their career.” Overall, male postdocs were far less concerned with issues of time availability and potential child care and family responsibilities, and women reported being far more willing than men to make changes to accommodate their spouse’s career. All of this adds up to a steady abandonment of the tenure track by women.

It’s hard to know how to disentangle the cause and effect with all this data. Why are young female scientists less confident in their ability to become PIs? Is it because they know that they will bear the brunt of family and child responsibilities later on? Is it the adverse feedback of simply not encountering many senior female role models, which leads them to question the possibility of success at that level? Is there subtle bias in how their ubiquitous male supervisors (77% of women postdocs reported that both their current and previous mentor/supervisor were men) allocate work and encourage project development?

The biggest danger to not getting this right is what Heather Hurlburt calls a “straightforward loss in the ‘war for talent.’”

With American women now a majority of college graduates, receiving an ever-larger proportion of postgraduate degrees, and outperforming men academically, we’re missing brainpower if they don’t form a significant part of our national security infrastructure.

And likewise for our scientific research infrastructure. If left unaddressed, we’ll continue losing bright women to less demanding fields and sub-fields, and we’ll concede more scientific achievement to countries that have more generous public family support structures and more equitable norms. All of this is obviously way better than it was a few decades ago (here is a Bloggingheads episode of Heather discussing the issue with her mother, who graduated from the Fletcher School in 1961). But clearly there’s a lot to be done.

A literary digression today. Via the Browser, I came across this charming piece in Vanity Fair on Joseph Heller and the long genesis of his masterpiece Catch-22, which was published forty years ago this fall. The novel’s radical structure and tone made editing and marketing an arduous task; but as it turns out, not as arduous as finding a proper title for the thing:

And then one day Heller got an urgent call from [his editor] Gottlieb, who said the title Catch-18 would have to go. Leon Uris was preparing to release a novel called Mila 18, about the Nazi occupation of Poland. Uris was a well-known writer—Exodus had been a huge best-seller. Two novels with the number 18 in the title would clash in the marketplace, and Heller, the unknown, was bound to get the short end of the deal. The number had always been arbitrary, part of the joke about military rules. Still, Heller, Gottlieb, and Bourne had long thought of the book as Catch-18, and it was difficult to conceive of calling it anything else.

“We were all in despair,” Gottlieb recalled. In his office, he and Heller sat opposite each other, spitting out numbers like two spies speaking in code. They liked the sound of “Catch-11”: hard consonants followed by vowels, opening up the mouth. Ultimately, they decided it was too close to the new Frank Sinatra movie, Ocean’s Eleven. They agreed to sleep on the question of a title and try again later.

On January 29, 1961, Heller sent Gottlieb a note, bringing to bear all his adman persuasion: “The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you’ll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)” Gottlieb wasn’t sold.

[Heller's agent] Candida Donadio would one day attempt to take credit for retitling the book with the name that eventually stuck. The number 22 was chosen as a substitute because October 22 was her birthday, she said. “Absolutely untrue,” Gottlieb said later. “I remember it totally, because it was in the middle of the night. I remember Joe came up with some number and I said, ‘No, it’s not funny,’ which is ridiculous, because no number is intrinsically funny. And then I was lying in bed worrying about it one night, and I suddenly had this revelation. And I called him the next morning and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect number. Twenty-two, it’s funnier than eighteen.’ I remember those words being spoken. He said, ‘Yes, it’s great, it’s great.’

Irrational as this is, it’s tough to imagine anyone sitting around forty years later marveling at the impact and accomplishment of that seminal anti-war novel CATCH-14.

Likewise, it’s worth contemplating whether high school students everywhere might have been saddled reading about Nick Carroway’s adventures with Daisy Buchanan in that great American novel…Trimalchio in West Egg. Or worse:

A month before publication, after a final review of the proofs, [Fitzgerald] asked if it would be possible to re-title it Trimalchio or Gold-Hatted Gatsby but Perkins advised against it. On March 19, Fitzgerald asked if the book could be renamed Under the Red, White and Blue but it was at that stage too late to change.

Hemingway famously looked to the bible, particularly Ecclesiastes, for all his book titles. In 1927 he wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald about his difficulties settling on a title for his novel Men Without Women:

So, I being up in Gstaad at the time went around to all the book stores trying to buy a bible in order to get a title. But all the sons of bitches had to sell were little carved brown wood bears. So for a time I thought of dubbing the book The Little Carved Wood Bear and then listening to the critics’ explanations. Fortunately there happened to be a church of England clergyman in town who was leaving the next day and Pauline borrowed a bible off him after promising to return it that night because it was the bible he was ordained with. Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it—although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.

PoliticsInVivo had a working title of Jason Bloggins for a while so be happy with what you’ve got I guess.