Ms. Collins, in “Everything Bad is Good Again,” says that there might be only two constants in our ever-changing world — Barack Obama is going to be on television and we always need to have somebody we can be really, really angry at. Mr. Cohen, in “The Fierce Urgency of Peace,” says pressure on President Obama to recast the failed American approach to Israel-Palestine is building. Mr. Kristof, in “Learning How to Think,” says the marketplace of ideas doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. It is about time that changed. I have a little list. They’ll none of them be missed… Here’s Ms. Collins:
National Consensus Update:
Tim Geithner — Really cool guy. Super job on that bank bailout thing. Look at the way the stock market jumped. Way better Treasury secretary than last week’s Tim Geithner,who seemed a lot … shorter.
Barack Obama — Kinda boring. Did you see the news conference? Same thing over and over again. Not that we mind. In these troubled times, we like stability. Thank God we didn’t elect somebody who was all charisma and exciting speeches.
Eliot Spitzer — He was the only one who got it, really got it, about A.I.G. before the big collapse. Great New York attorney general. What ever happened to him?
TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility) — This is the thing Tim Geithner is doing, and, you know, whatever Tim wants … We like TALF much, much better than TARP, which was the brainchild of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who had that dumb idea about buying up all the bank’s toxic assets. Which is what Tim is going to do, except it’s going to be way cooler.
Financial industry — We still hate Wall Street. Although when it sends the stock market up, it makes us like Tim Geithner even more.
In summary, there appears to be only two constants in our ever-changing world. One is that Barack Obama is going to be on television every day forever. No venue is too strange. Soon, he’ll be on “Dancing With the Stars” (“And now, doing the Health Care, Energy and Education tango …”) or delivering the weather report. (“Here we see a wave of systemic change, moving across the nation …”)
The other immutable truth is that we always need to have somebody we can be really, really angry at. The A.I.G. bonus-takers have pretty much worn out their 15 minutes. In an Op-Ed article in The Times on Wednesday, Jake DeSantis, one of the executive vice presidents of the company’s dreaded financial-products unit, offered up his side of the story about how even though he had never met a credit default swap in his life, he had promised to stay around to help clean up the mess for $1 a year and a bonus at the end of the tunnel. And then, suddenly, there was the head of the company throwing him to the wolves, or at least to the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises.
It reminded me of a time when I was in college and got a summer temp job at the purchasing department of a widget factory in Brooklyn. The office manager, who stayed hidden away in his office, had given all the power to one assistant manager, the golden Colin from England, while Colin’s two co-workers, Bernie and Frank, had nothing to do but sit around grinding their teeth.
Colin was on vacation when I arrived, and as time went on, it became increasingly clear that he was never coming back. The manager stayed in his office — and in denial. The factory started running out of everything, including toilet paper. I invented a new filing system in which all incoming letters and phone messages were divided by the number of times the petitioner had previously attempted to contact Colin. It was a big hit.
The next time I came through Brooklyn, the widget factory was gone. But suppose that instead of a small manufacturing firm, it had been an international insurance giant and Colin was selling complicated financial products based on risky mortgages? Trust me, Bernie and Frank would have expected to be paid really big bucks for cleaning up after him.
The country needs a new, improved villain. This is not a problem in New York, since we have a state government so awful that we barely noticed this week when prosecutors revealed that the state pension fund scandal is intertwined with a deal to sell DVDs of a movie called “Chooch.” The governor is terrible, and the Legislature is terrible and — we need Eliot Spitzer! Whatever happened to him, anyway?
In Congress, the person currently giving the Obama administration heartburn is Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the chairman of the Budget Committee. But this is a guy whose biggest claim to fame is that when making a budget speech, he uses so many charts that the Senate gave him his own printing equipment. I am not seeing a great target for pitchfork-waving.
Something will turn up. If Tim (Great Guy!) Geithner’s bank bailout plan works, it will mean quadrillions of dollars in profits for hedge fund managers who are already billionaires, and I can absolutely guarantee you that we are not going to be pleased. Then we can turn on him again. And Eliot Spitzer can become the next secretary of the Treasury.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Pressure on President Obama to recast the failed American approach to Israel-Palestine is building from former senior officials whose counsel he respects.
Following up on a letter dated Nov. 6, 2008, that was handed to Obama late last year by Paul Volcker, now a senior economic adviser to the president, these foreign policy mandarins have concluded a “Bipartisan Statement on U.S. Middle East Peacemaking” that should become an essential template.
Deploring “seven years of absenteeism” under the Bush administration, they call for intense American mediation in pursuit of a two-state solution, “a more pragmatic approach toward Hamas,” and eventual U.S. leadership of a multinational force to police transitional security between Israel and Palestine.
The 10 signatories — of both the four-page letter and the report — include Volcker himself, former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Senator Chuck Hagel, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, former Congressman Lee Hamilton and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering.
My understanding is their thinking coincides in significant degree with that of both George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, and Gen. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser who worked on security issues with Israelis and Palestinians in the last year of the Bush administration, an often frustrating experience.
This overlap gives the report particular significance.
Of Hamas, the target of Israel’s futile pounding of Gaza, the eminent Group of 10 writes that, “Shutting out the movement and isolating Gaza has only made it stronger and Fatah weaker.”
They urge a fundamental change: “Shift the U.S. objective from ousting Hamas to modifying its behavior, offer it inducements that will enable its more moderate elements to prevail, and cease discouraging third parties from engaging with Hamas in ways that might clarify the movement’s view and test its behavior.”
Although this falls short of my own recommendation that the United States itself — rather than European allies — engage with moderate elements of Hamas, such a shift is critical.
Without Hamas’s involvement, there can be no Middle East peace. Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, is a beleaguered figure.
The report goes further: “Cease discouraging Palestinian national reconciliation and make clear that a government that agrees to a cease-fire with Israel, accepts President Mahmoud Abbas as the chief negotiator and commits to abiding by the results of a national referendum on a future peace agreement would not be boycotted or sanctioned.”
In other words, stop being hung up on prior Hamas recognition of Israel and watch what it does rather than what it says. If Hamas is part of, and remains part of, a Palestinian unity government that makes a peace deal with Israel, that’s workable.
Henry Siegman, the president of the U.S./Middle East Project, whose chairman is Scowcroft and board includes all 10 signatories, told me that he met recently with Khaled Meshal, the political director of Hamas in Damascus.
Meshal told him, and put in writing, that although Hamas would not recognize Israel, it would remain in a Palestinian national unity government that reached a referendum-endorsed peace settlement with Israel.
De facto, rather than de jure, recognition can be a basis for a constructive relationship, as Israel knows from the mutual benefits of its shah-era dealings with Iran.
Israeli governments have negotiated a two-state solution although they included religious parties that do not recognize Palestinians’ right to statehood.
“But,” Siegman said, “if moderates within Hamas are to prevail, a payoff is needed for their moderation. And until the U.S. provides one, there will be no Palestinian unity government.”
The need for that incentive is reflected in the four core proposals of what the authors call “a last chance for a two-state Israel-Palestine agreement.” Taken together, they constitute the start of an essential rebalancing of America’s Bush-era Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.
The first is clear U.S. endorsement of a two-state solution based on the lines of June 4, 1967, with minor, reciprocal, agreed land swaps where necessary. That means removing all West Bank settlements except in some heavily populated areas abutting Jerusalem — and, of course, halting the unacceptable ongoing construction of new ones.
The second is establishing Jerusalem as home to the Israeli and Palestinian capitals. Jewish neighborhoods would be under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, with special arrangements for the Old City providing unimpeded access to holy sites for all communities.
The third is major financial compensation and resettlement assistance in a Palestinian state for refugees, coupled with some formal Israeli acknowledgment of responsibility for the problem, but no generalized right of return.
The fourth is the creation of an American-led, U.N.-mandated multinational force for a transitional period of up to 15 years leading to full Palestinian control of their security.
Obama has told Volcker that he would, in time, meet with the signatories of the letter. He should do so once an Israeli government is in place. And then he should incorporate their ideas in laying out the new realism of American commitment to Palestine and the new price of American commitment to Israel.
And now here’s Mr. Kristof:
Ever wonder how financial experts could lead the world over the economic cliff?
One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.
More on that in a moment. First, let’s acknowledge that even very smart people allow themselves to be buffaloed by an apparent “expert” on occasion.
The best example of the awe that an “expert” inspires is the “Dr. Fox effect.” It’s named for a pioneering series of psychology experiments in which an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators.
The actor was introduced as “Dr. Myron L. Fox” (no such real person existed) and was described as an eminent authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior. He then delivered a lecture on “mathematical game theory as applied to physician education” — except that by design it had no point and was completely devoid of substance. However, it was warmly delivered and full of jokes and interesting neologisms.
Afterward, those in attendance were given questionnaires and asked to rate “Dr. Fox.” They were mostly impressed. “Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening,” wrote one. Another protested: “Too intellectual a presentation.”
A different study illustrated the genuflection to “experts” another way. It found that a president who goes on television to make a case moves public opinion only negligibly, by less than a percentage point. But experts who are trotted out on television can move public opinion by more than 3 percentage points, because they seem to be reliable or impartial authorities.
But do experts actually get it right themselves?
The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.
The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.
“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.
Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!
Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.
This was the distinction that mattered most among the forecasters, not whether they had expertise. Over all, the foxes did significantly better, both in areas they knew well and in areas they didn’t.
Other studies have confirmed the general sense that expertise is overrated. In one experiment, clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses. In another, a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent.
The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. We trumpet our successes and ignore failures — or else attempt to explain that the failure doesn’t count because the situation changed or that we were basically right but the timing was off.
For example, I boast about having warned in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq would be a violent mess after we invaded. But I tend to make excuses for my own incorrect forecast in early 2007 that the troop “surge” would fail.
So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!
If that ever comes to pass Bloody Billy Kristol will spend the rest of his life asking “You want fries with that?”
