Brooks and Bruni

Bobo has so many hats!  Today he’s wearing his linguist hat.  In “What Our Words Tell Us” he informs us that gradual shifts in language use over the centuries reflect tectonic shifts in culture.  It’s amazing what you can glean from Google, and of course there’s no link to the “study” he mentions…  In “One School’s Catholic Teaching” Mr. Bruni says with just the briefest acknowledgement of her life partner, Carla Hale lost the job she’d loved for more than 18 years.  Here’s Bobo:

About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used. Still, results can reveal interesting cultural shifts. For example, somebody typed the word “cocaine” into the search engine and found that the word was surprisingly common in the Victorian era. Then it gradually declined during the 20th century until around 1970, when usage skyrocketed.

I’d like to tell a story about the last half-century, based on studies done with this search engine. The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

The second element of the story is demoralization. A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently.

The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.

Usage of humility words like “modesty” and “humbleness” dropped by 52 percent. Usage of compassion words like “kindness” and “helpfulness” dropped by 56 percent. Meanwhile, usage of words associated with the ability to deliver, like “discipline” and “dependability” rose over the century, as did the usage of words associated with fairness. The Kesebirs point out that these sorts of virtues are most relevant to economic production and exchange.

Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine. He found further evidence of the two elements I’ve mentioned. On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”

Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni, datelined Columbus, Ohio:

No one at the Catholic high school that fired Carla Hale in March claimed that she was anything less than a terrific physical education teacher and coach, devoted to the kids and adored by many of them.

No one accused her of bringing her personal life into the gym or onto the fields. By nature she’s private. And she loved her job too much to risk it that way.

But she lost it nonetheless, and the how is as flabbergasting as the why is infuriating.

Rather suddenly, her mother died, and an hour afterward, she and her brother numbly went through the paces of a standard obituary, listing survivors. Her brother included his wife. So Carla included her partner, Julie, whom her mother had known well and loved. Leaving Julie out would have been unthinkable, though Carla didn’t really think it through at the time. Her grief was still raw.

A parent of one of the school’s students spotted the obituary, and wrote an anonymous letter to the school and to the Diocese of Columbus, saying that they couldn’t allow a woman like Carla to educate Catholic children.

So they don’t, not anymore. In a termination notice, the principal explained that Carla’s “spousal relationship violates the moral laws of the Catholic Church.” That was the sum of the stated grievance against her, and after more than 18 years at Bishop Watterson High School, Carla, 57, was done.

“The way it all came about was just so unfathomable,” she told me on Sunday. “An obituary?”

I met her and Julie, 48, in their house outside Columbus, where the front lawn was neatly tended, the refrigerator was plastered with photos of relatives, the chocolate lab dozed in his reserved spot on the sectional and Carla kept a box of tissues handy. Whenever she’s asked what her work meant to her, she cries.

“Every morning,” she said, “from the time you walked into the building, kids would be yelling down the hall, ‘Hey, Miss Hale, what are we going to do today?’ ‘Hey, Miss Hale, I remembered those shoes.’ It felt so comforting.” She had a sense of belonging. Of purpose.

Even now, after nearly two months of exile from the school, she’s still on what she calls “bell time.” If the clock on her kitchen wall says 10:45 a.m., the voice in her head says, “Fourth period.”

There’s so much in the media, and in this column, about the progress of gay rights, especially on the marriage front. But in the republic of Georgia just days ago, Orthodox priests led thousands of people in an antigay attack. In Greenwich Village, a young gay man was fatally shot in what’s been deemed a hate crime.

And at a kitchen table here in central Ohio, a typically cheerful woman dabbed her eyes and wondered aloud what she’d done wrong.

The answer is in one sense simple: she made a life with another woman. While the Catholic Church doesn’t condemn homosexuality per se, it considers any physical expression of it sinful. And Carla’s “public declaration of an extramarital relationship,” meaning the obituary, indicated that she was flouting Catholic tenets and thus breaching her contract, according to a statement the diocese e-mailed me.

But things get complicated when you consider the selectiveness of the church’s outrage, the capriciousness of its mercy.

Until public exposure shamed them, many church leaders protected priests whose sexual transgressions involved minors and were criminal.

Church leaders tolerate teachers at Catholic schools who are married with no kids or with few. Some are surely using artificial birth control, which the church officially opposes.

Besides which, Carla was guiding students through sit-ups, not psalms. The school hired her though she’s Methodist, not Catholic.

She was then married to a man, but they split and, more than a decade ago, she became involved with Julie.

Perhaps six colleagues met Julie over the years, though they probably weren’t the only ones aware of Carla’s sexual orientation. “I’m sure it was surmised: gym teacher, divorced, short hair, didn’t have a bow in it,” Carla said. “Come on.”

There was no discussion or upset, not until the anonymous letter.

Neither the federal government nor Ohio outlaws employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Columbus does, though whether it can be applied to religious groups is uncertain. Carla’s lawyer, Thomas Tootle, has filed a complaint with the city anyway.

It’s been a big story here, with thousands of people publicly expressing support for her. She’s moved but mortified. She didn’t seek and doesn’t enjoy the media attention.

“A lot of people want me to be bitter and go after the Catholic Church,” she said, adding that others want to cast her as a lesbian heroine. She just wants her job back, a recognition, she said, “that I’m a moral individual who happens to be gay.”

Brooks, solo

Prof. Krugman is off today, so Bobo is flying solo.  In “When Governments Go Bad” he says the I.R.S. and Justice Department scandals disrobe a culture festering in unrestraint and overreach.  Not in the least surprisingly, the word “Republican” appears only in comments.  Bobo saw no reason whatsoever to include it in his piece…  Here he is:

Government, Clinton Rossiter once wrote, is something like fire: “Under control, it is the most useful of servants; out of control, it is a ravaging tyrant.”

So you want government workers to be acutely aware of the ambiguous and perilous nature of their position. You want them to have a heart full of affection for the people they serve. They should regard the people as a mentor, respecting their wisdom, grateful for their trust and longing to serve them with deference and respect.

As they love and respect the voters, you also want government workers to fear themselves. You want officials who are aware that they probably went into government in part because they have a desire to shape and help other people, and that this desire comes with its own form of immoderation.

You want government workers who are alert to their own tendency toward bossiness; who ladle out their power carefully, gram by gram; who are aware that they are not really as benevolent and disinterested as they seem to themselves. Most of all, you want people with a strong sense of self-restraint.

As a surgeon abhors sloppiness, the best government workers instinctively abhor any hint of domination. Knowing how power is liable to corrupt them, they tend to shrink back at any hint of their own overreach and desire for control.

But we don’t exactly see this attitude in the big stories about government today, do we? Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries. But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.

The I.R.S. scandal and Justice Department’s invasion of The Associated Press are just the most recent examples of overreach. They rest on top of the daily intrusions of the post-9/11 security apparatus and much else.

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem. If that’s the case, then the members of the I.R.S. leadership are suffering from a tunnel vision that turns outside reality into abstractions. When government workers lose touch with the normal human context of their job, that’s when the real horror show commences.

Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?

I would have thought a dozen Justice Department officials would have risen up and splashily resigned when they learned of the scope of this invasion. Aren’t there some lawyers in the Justice Department, and, if so, did they go to law schools where the Constitution is left unassigned?

This scandal arises from a larger cultural virus: leakaphobia. Every administration centralizes power more tightly than the one before and is more paranoid about leaks than the one before. Every administration successively narrows the circle of debate, forsaking wide deliberation for the sake of reducing leaks (except the politically useful ones). Why do they do this? Because people who go into government not only have a tendency to want to control other people but also to control information.

We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.

The rest of us just have to be more wary. For example, I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier. I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them. They’d take a nudge and expand it into a shove.

And what are we to make of financial regulatory reform and the new health care law? In a culture of unrestraint, will federal regulators use these rule-writing opportunities to expand their reach beyond anything now imagined?

People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now.

Bobo had no problem at all with the previous administration…

Brooks and Bruni

Mr. Nocera is off today.  Bobo, in “The Next Scapegoat,” says political one-upmanship has just hit a new low with the recent charges leveled against Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman for the State Department.  Well, well, well…  Bobo’s knickers are in a knot because he knows Ms. Nuland, not for any other reason.  Mr. Bruni, in “Our Ceaseless Circus,” says from Benghazi to gun control, we pivot too quickly from the substance to the sideshow of who’s winning and losing.  Here’s Bobo:

Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.

The next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is available on the State Department’s Web site. She had two main points. There’s a lot we don’t know. The attack was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.

On Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., gave a classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.

C.I.A. analysts began work on the talking points. Early drafts, available on Jonathan Karl’s ABC News Web site, reflect the confused and fragmented state of knowledge. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated.

The C.I.A. analysts quickly scrubbed references to Al Qaeda from the key part of the draft, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Nuland didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker level.

At this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.

On Saturday morning, what’s called a deputies committee meeting was held at the White House. I’m told the talking points barely came up at that meeting. Instead, the C.I.A. representative said he would take proactive measures to streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare nub Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was given before going on the Sunday talk shows.

Several things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A. management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.

Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus.

Gee.  Maybe we should encourage Bobo to make a few more friends…  Here’s Mr. Bruni:

Four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya: people with unrealized hopes, unfinished plans, relatives who loved them and friends who will miss them.

But let’s focus on what really matters about the attack and its aftermath. Did Hillary Clinton’s presumed 2016 presidential campaign take a hit?

We live in a country lousy with guns and bloody with gun-related violence, manifest two weeks ago in a Kentucky 5-year-old’s fatal shooting of his 2-year-old sister, evident over the weekend in a hail of bullets at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans.

But let’s cut to the chase. Did Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire senator, safeguard or endanger her political future by casting one of the votes that doomed gun-control legislation in the Senate? An d does the law’s failure mean that it’s time to write the obituary for Barack Obama’s presidency, which has more than 1,300 days to go, or can we wait — I don’t know — a week or maybe even two to do that?

Now we have a scandal at the Internal Revenue Service to factor in. And a scandal it is, in urgent need of a thorough investigation, which President Obama pledged at his news conference on Monday and which we’re very much owed.

But before we get a full account, let’s by all means pivot to the possible political fallout, politics being all that seems to matter these days. Will Republicans ever trust and be able to work with the administration again? (This is being asked as if there were all that much trust and cooperation in the first place.) Have they finally been handed the cudgel that can whack Obama and his crew into oblivion? Assess, discuss and please don’t forget to make predictions about the 2014 midterms.

It never gets better and may in fact be getting worse: the translation of all of the news and of all of Washington’s responses into a ledger of electoral pluses and minuses, a graph of rising and falling political fortunes, a narrative of competition between not just the parties but the would-be potentates within a party. On issue after issue, the sideshow swallows the substance, as politicians and the seemingly infinite ranks of political handlers join us journalists in gaming everything out, ad infinitum.

To follow the debate over immigration reform is to lose sight at times of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in limbo and the challenge of finding the most economically fruitful and morally sound way to deal with them and their successors. No, the real stakes are United States Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential aspirations. Will he pay a high price with the Republican base for pushing a path to citizenship? Or will he earn necessary centrist credentials?

And where does it leave him vis-à-vis Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who are fellow Republican senators itching for prominence and are also hypothetical primary rivals? The next presidential election is three and a half years away — an eternity, really — but instead of putting a damper on speculation, that time span has encouraged it, letting a thousand theories and nearly as many contenders bloom.

We can wonder: if Clinton decided not to run, would a door open for another woman, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of the New York? Just how well has Gillibrand positioned herself for such a turn? That story is already out there, and in it her record is framed largely in terms of her prospects for national office, as if one exists in the service of the other, as if the point of a Congressional seat is leveraging it into an even better, more regal throne.

What about the actual business of governing? Between all the preening, partisan cross-fire and of course fund-raising that consumes members of Congress, is there any space and energy for that?

Not much, to judge from either the sclerosis that now defines the institution or the obsessions of those of us in the media. Our quickness to publicize skirmishes and divine political jockeying abet both. Actors tend to do whatever keeps the audience rapt.

At Obama’s news conference, he breezed past the I.R.S. debacle too quickly, and I’m not sure why he’d stayed mum until then. He flashed too much self-righteous anger about the scrutiny of the Benghazi talking points, which strike to important matters of accountability and credibility.

But however self-servingly, Obama got one thing about Benghazi exactly right: what’s most vital, and what’s being obscured, is how we improve diplomatic security.

After all, the fates altered most profoundly by the attack weren’t his or Clinton’s or any other pol’s, but rather those of the four lost Americans: Christopher Stevens, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith.

“We dishonor them,” Obama said, “when we turn things like this into a political circus.” Indeed. But it’s what we turn almost everything into.

Brooks and Krugman

In “Started at the Bottom” Bobo has decided to tell us about four Hispanic young people who peel back the curtain into a different wiring of aspirations and loyalties than those held by the empirical kids he described in March.  He could have used this column to repudiate the bigoted Heritage Foundation study by Jason Redwine, but he apparently chose not to do so.  Prof. Krugman has a question in “Bernanke, Blower of Bubbles?”  He asks, with all the talk about financial bubbles lately, do current bond and stock prices make sense?  Here’s Bobo:

Not long ago, I devoted a column to the mostly upper-middle-class students at elite universities — the empirical kids. I thought it would be interesting to devote a column to students who at least started at the other end of the social scale. So the Times researcher Anne Snyder and I interviewed a bunch of young people whom we had met earlier through the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Edgar Leon’s background was pretty typical. Both of his parents immigrated from Mexico. His mom does janitorial work in Chicago, while his dad commuted to Indiana to fix railroad lines.

These young people have been shaped by their awesome life trajectories, from poor neighborhoods, to college, to internships on Capitol Hill. Cristi Privado is the last of seven children and the only one to graduate from high school. Kimberly Lopez has a brother and a sister who dropped out of school in the 9th and 10th grades. Her sister got pregnant at 16. “I got lucky,” Kimberly explained.

None of them had pressuring parents who organized their children’s lives for success. “College was more of an encouragement in my home, less a given,” Edgar recalled.

Almost all of them experienced a life-altering move when they were teenagers. Reuben Kapp benefited from a school choice program that enabled him to move from an urban Michigan high school to a suburban one. “I’m a big believer in school choice,” he said. “If it wasn’t for choice, I wouldn’t be here.” Cristi’s parents took her from a poorly performing middle school and moved to Greenville, S.C. At her new school there, she fell in with the smart kids. She developed a taste for country music. She ended up as class president.

She was not babied in school. “Until I got to D.C., I never heard the word mentor. When I got here, it seemed that everybody has one,” Cristi joked.

Like several of the others, she was discouraged from applying to a competitive college. Cristi said her guidance counselor mentioned that her own son had been rejected by Clemson so Cristi shouldn’t apply. “That made me definitely want to apply.”

In college and at internships, they found a new world. “My mom and dad always worked the third shift. It dawned on me that some people leave work at 5 p.m.,” Edgar remembered.

Edgar lived at home while going to DePaul, commuting 45 minutes each way. “I was just going to class and going to work,” he noted, uncomplainingly. Cristi’s father died a month before graduation. She had to finish the term through her grief.

Most of the students had some trouble gelling with the whiter, richer student body in college and hung out mostly with fellow Hispanics. “We love our culture,” said Reuben. “That’s what makes our group stronger and bonds us together.” Now they seem to flow fluidly across cultural lines.

We met them as they were finishing a stint as Congressional staffers, often answering the phones and hearing the public rage about everything from the sequester to immigration reform.

All of them have experienced culture shock in coming to Washington. Kimberly observed, “I feel that here people will do whatever it takes to get to the top. It was really overwhelming at the beginning. Are they being sincere? I could never tell.” Edgar echoed that: “Everyone is on a mission. People are all about networking. How can we use each other to get what we want? Maybe there’s a lack of genuineness?”

Still, most wanted to stay in politics. As Kimberly put it: “I really want to go back to Delaware and seek elective office, whether it is local office or national office. To be president would be really cool.”

The economy has been bad during their adult lives, but they’ve been shooting upward. Anne Snyder and I both came away with the impression that they have fewer anxieties than the more affluent students or empirical kids, less of a fear that one false move can lead to disaster.

They seemed both hardy and a bit naïve, made more resilient by reality but not jaded by it. Their conversational styles were enthusiastic, grateful, direct and earnest. They seemed to us unself-conscious about how they present themselves — unironic, matter of fact, sincere and un-meta — not tripping in loops of self-awareness. They also have a less methodical sense of the exact steps you have to take to make it in the world.

Their ambitions were perpetually sandwiched by their affections. “I know people who move across the country for a job. They see their family once or twice a year. I could never do that,” Kimberly remarked.

Without even being asked, almost all of them burst into rhapsodies about their country. “I love the United States,” Reuben explained. “I have a lot of pride in the United States. I’m not a hockey fan, but when the American team is playing I go crazy.”

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Bubbles can be bad for your financial health — and bad for the health of the economy, too. The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s left behind many vacant buildings and many more failed dreams. When the housing bubble of the next decade burst, the result was the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s — a crisis from which we have yet to emerge.

So when people talk about bubbles, you should listen carefully and evaluate their claims — not scornfully dismiss them, which was the way many self-proclaimed experts reacted to warnings about housing.

And there’s a lot of bubble talk out there right now. Much of it is about an alleged bond bubble that is supposedly keeping bond prices unrealistically high and interest rates — which move in the opposite direction from bond prices — unrealistically low. But the rising Dow has raised fears of a stock bubble, too.

So do we have a major bond and/or stock bubble? On bonds, I’d say definitely not. On stocks, probably not, although I’m not as certain.

What is a bubble, anyway? Surprisingly, there’s no standard definition. But I’d define it as a situation in which asset prices appear to be based on implausible or inconsistent views about the future. Dot-com prices in 1999 made sense only if you believed that many companies would all turn out to be a Microsoft; housing prices in 2006 only made sense if you believed that home prices could keep rising much faster than buyers’ incomes for years to come.

Is there anything comparable going on in today’s bond market? Well, the interest rate on long-term bonds depends mainly on the expected path of short-term interest rates, which are controlled by the Federal Reserve. You don’t want to buy a 10-year bond at less than 2 percent, the current going rate, if you believe that the Fed will be raising short-term rates to 4 percent or 5 percent in the not-too-distant future.

But why, exactly, should you believe any such thing? The Fed normally cuts rates when unemployment is high and inflation is low — which is the situation today. True, it can’t cut rates any further because they’re already near zero and can’t go lower. (Otherwise investors would just sit on cash.) But it’s hard to see why the Fed should raise rates until unemployment falls a lot and/or inflation surges, and there’s no hint in the data that anything like that is going to happen for years to come.

Why, then, all the talk of a bond bubble? Partly it reflects the correct observation that interest rates are very low by historical standards. What you need to bear in mind, however, is that the economy is also in especially terrible shape by historical standards — once-in-three-generations terrible. The usual rules about what constitutes a reasonable level of interest rates don’t apply.

There’s also, one has to say, an element of wishful thinking here. For whatever reason, many people in the financial industry have developed a deep hatred for Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and everything he does; they want his easy-money policies ended, and they also want to see those policies fail in some spectacular fashion. As it turns out, however, dislike for bearded Princeton professors is not a good basis for investment strategy.

And one should never forget the example of Japan, where bets against government bonds — justified by more or less the same arguments currently made to justify claims of a U.S. bond bubble — ended in grief so often that the whole trade came to be known as the “widow maker.” At this point, Japan’s debt is well over twice its G.D.P., its budget deficit remains large, and the interest rate on 10-year bonds is 0.6 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.

O.K., what about stocks? Major stock indexes are now higher than they were at the end of the 1990s, which can sound ominous. It sounds a lot less ominous, however, when you learn that corporate profits — which are, after all, what stocks are shares in — are more than two-and-a-half times higher than they were when the 1990s bubble burst. Also, with bond yields so low, you would expect investors to move into stocks, driving their prices higher.

All in all, the case for significant bubbles in stocks or, especially, bonds is weak. And that conclusion matters for policy as well as investment.

For one important subtext of all the recent bubble rhetoric is the demand that Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues stop trying to fight mass unemployment, that they must cease and desist their efforts to boost the economy or dire consequences will follow. In fact, however, there isn’t any case for believing that we face any broad bubble problem, let alone that worrying about hypothetical bubbles should take precedence over the task of getting Americans back to work. Mr. Bernanke should brush aside the babbling barons of bubbleism, and get on with doing his job.

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

In “Beyond the Fence” Bobo says opponents of immigration reform rarely say exactly what it is that they want. He’s decided to spell it out.  Mr. Nocera, in “The Chancellor’s Lament,” says as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moves on, he raises some interesting questions about the management of college sports.  In “Religion Beyond the Right” Mr. Bruni says as a closer look at the Boy Scouts’ debate shows, God doesn’t wear tidy political labels.  Here’s Bobo:

The opponents of immigration reform have many small complaints, but they really have one core concern. It’s about control. America doesn’t control its borders. Past reform efforts have not established control. Current proposals wouldn’t establish effective control.

But the opponents rarely say what exactly it is they are trying to control. They talk about border security and various mechanisms to achieve that, but they rarely go into detail about what we should be so vigilant about restricting. I thought I would spell it out.

First, immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

When immigrant areas go bad, it’s not because they have infected America with bad values. It’s because America has infected them with bad values already present. So the first thing conservative opponents of reform are trying to restrict is social conservatism.

Second, immigration opponents are trying to restrict assimilation. The evidence about this is clear, too. Current immigrants enter this country because they want to realize the same dreams that inspired past waves. Study after study shows current Hispanic immigrants are picking up English at an impressive clip, roughly as quickly as earlier immigrant groups. They are making steady gains in homeownership rates, job status and social identity. By second generation, according to a Pew Research Center study released earlier this year, 61 percent of immigrants think of themselves as “typical Americans.”

Third, immigration opponents are trying to restrict love affairs. Far from segregating themselves into their own alien subculture, today’s immigrant groups seem eager to marry into mainstream American society. Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9 percent of whites married outside of their racial or ethnic group, as did 17 percent of blacks. But an astonishing 26 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of Asians married outside their groups. They are blending into America in the most intimate way.

Fourth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict social mobility. Generation after generation, the children of immigrants are gradually better educated and more affluent than their parents.

A few years ago, the great political scientist Samuel Huntington asserted that Hispanic immigrants were not succeeding as previous immigrants had. James P. Smith of the RAND Corporation conducted the most prominent investigation into this claim and concluded: “The concern that educational generational progress among Latino immigrants has lagged behind other immigrant groups is largely unfounded.”

Some intelligent skeptics say that mobility is fine through the second generation but stalls by the third. It is indeed harder to rise in a more chaotic and fragmented society. But one of the country’s leading immigration researchers, Richard Alba of the City University of New York, calls the third generation stall “a statistical illusion.”

Much of the research that shows the effect compares today’s third-generation immigrants with today’s second-generation group. But the third-generation families originally came to the U.S. decades ago, at a time when segregation was prevalent, discrimination was high and immigrants were harshly treated. You’d expect those families to progress more slowly than families that came to more welcoming conditions a generation later.

Fifth, immigration opponents are trying to restrict skills. Current reform proposals would increase high-skill immigration. Opponents of reform are trying to restrict an infusion of people most likely to start businesses and invent things.

Alba points out that, over the next decades, the retirement of the baby-boomer generation will open up a large number of positions, especially atop the labor force. He points out that the fastest-growing ethnic groups are already rising to fill these slots. Whites occupy 80 percent of the top-paying jobs among older workers. But, among younger workers, whites occupy only 67 percent of the top jobs. The work force is already more diverse the younger you go.

Finally, opponents of reform are trying to hold back the inevitable. Whether immigration reform passes or not, the United States is going to become a much more cosmopolitan country than it is now. The country will look more like the faces you see at college commencement exercises and less like the faces you see in senior citizen homes.

One crucial question is whether America will be better off in that future with today’s dysfunctional immigration laws or something else? Another interesting question is whether a major political party is going to consign itself to permanent irrelevance. If conservatives defeat immigration reform, the Republicans will definitely lose control of one thing for years to come: political power.

From your typing fingers to God’s ear, Bobo…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

By most measures, Holden Thorp’s five-year tenure as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is coming to an end next month, was a roaring success. The university went from 19th to 9th in federal research grants. Undergraduate applications rose 43 percent. And, at a time when university budgets are under extreme pressure, Thorp helped keep U.N.C. an affordable public university.

But you won’t find a lot of people giving Thorp, 48, a pat on the back. For the last three years, North Carolina was mired in an athletic scandal. And the fact that it took place on Thorp’s watch overshadows everything else he did.

Though it started out as an N.C.A.A. rules-violation investigation, it morphed into an academic scandal when it was discovered that the chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies Department had long allowed students — athletes very much included — to take no-show classes.

For a university that had long held itself out as one of the “good schools” athletically, the scandal has been humiliating. The N.C.A.A. meted out penalties to the football team. The football coach, Butch Davis, was fired. The athletic director resigned. Even the college accrediting agency got involved.

By his own admission, Thorp was shellshocked by the experience of dealing with the scandal. As a lifelong North Carolina partisan, he had bought into the myth of the university as a place that harvested genuine student-athletes. The scandal showed him a reality he never before had to face.

It also engulfed him. If you are a college chancellor or president, you can’t delegate when there is a problem in the athletic department. “The governing board, the newspaper, the fans, the faculty, they all expect you to sort it out,” he said. He was spending, literally, half his time dealing with the football team. Yet he had no real experience with the business of college athletics — nor, for that matter, do most college presidents.

He found himself buffeted this way and that. At first, he supported his coach, but then he finally felt he had to fire him. He did so at the worst possible moment: on the eve of a new season. His press conferences dealing with the scandal were, by his own admission, “terrible.” He was, to be blunt, in over his head.

And as he departs U.N.C., his message is that virtually all college presidents are in over their heads when it comes to their athletic departments. They have no background, no experience, that would prepare them for overseeing the $6 billion entertainment complex that big-time college sports has become. In he early 1990s, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics issued a series of reports saying that college presidents needed to regain control of their athletic departments and restore “integrity.” The N.C.A.A. adopted this position.

But today, notwithstanding this supposed reform, the system is as morally corrupt as ever — and far more awash in money. It’s conference presidents, not college presidents and chancellors, who run college sports. The prototypical modern athletic director is David Brandon at the University of Michigan. His previous job — are you sitting down? — was chairman and chief executive of Domino’s Pizza. He is an unabashed revenue maximizer. Compared with the hard-nosed businessmen who control college sports, the presidents and chancellors are babes in the woods. The main thing they offer everyone else in the system is cover.

Not surprisingly, Thorp’s comments have not exactly been embraced. At U.N.C., there is still a lot of indignation, some deserved, at the way Thorp handled the scandal. Some people think he is trying to shuck his responsibility.

People associated with the Knight commission are also upset. Hodding Carter III, a former president of the Knight Foundation, which finances the commission, was quoted as saying that Thorp was “wrong on every count.” But he’s not. Even the Knight commission has begun to examine whether the system is so broken that it can’t be reformed.

That is what Thorp now thinks. He is not ready to go as far as I do, namely, end the hypocrisy and start calling “student-athletes” what they really are: employees who deserve to earn a paycheck for their labors. But he does believe athletes should be allowed to attend school after their playing days are over. And, he said, “the concept of amateurism” — the current bedrock of college athletics — “needs to be examined.” For a college chancellor, those are radical words.

Thorp himself will soon move to Washington University in St. Louis, a first-rate academic institution that no one will ever mistake for the University of North Carolina athletically. It is in Division III, meaning, among other things, it doesn’t offer athletic scholarships.

Not long ago, when he was being taken around the Washington University campus, Thorp remarked, “I hear that the football stadium seats 3,500.”

“Yes,” came the response, “but it’s never been tested.”

“I’m looking forward to Division III,” Thorp told me.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

As the Boy Scouts of America reassesses its ban on gay scouts and leaders, we’re hearing a lot about the organization’s need to remain sensitive to people whose religions condemn homosexual behavior. Their morals must be properly respected, their God aptly revered.

But what about the morals and the God of people whose religions exhort them to be inclusive and to treat gays and lesbians with the same dignity as anyone else? There are many Americans in this camp, and their opposition to the Scouts’ ban is as faith-based as the stance of those who want it maintained.

Take Scott Ward, 48, a public relations executive and married father of three in Takoma Park, Md. He’s a scout leader, with a 10-year-old son who’s a scout. He’s also an elder in his Presbyterian church.

And for him, the ban must go not in spite of what Christianity says about homosexuality (or what selective literalists have decided it says), but because of what it says about humanity.

“From my faith perspective, singling people out for exclusion from the life of the church or the life of the community cannot possibly be part of God’s plan,” Ward told me on the phone recently.

He added, “If you look at the people Jesus tended to be most suspicious of, they were people who sat in positions of authority to say that they had the unique ability to judge others.”

We refer incessantly in this country to the “religious right,” a phrase routinely presented as if it’s some sort of syllogism: to be devoutly religious is to gravitate to a certain side of the political spectrum, one set of values dictating the other. “Christian conservatives” is an almost equally ubiquitous bit of alliteration.

But there’s a religious center. A religious left. There are Christian moderates and Christian liberals: less alliterative and less dogmatic, but perhaps no less concerned with acting in ways that reflect moral ideals. We should better acknowledge that and them.

And we should stop equating conventional piety with certain issues only and sexual morality above other kinds.

Our tendency to do that was illustrated by the hullabaloo last year over the Nuns on the Bus. The Vatican officials who wanted them to be more assertively anti-abortion and anti-birth control were portrayed as the dutiful guardians of tradition, while the nuns, focused on matters of economic justice, were the rebels.

Why? It’s as fundamentally Catholic and Christian to care about the underprivileged as to safeguard the unborn (or to combat homosexuality). Indeed, many Catholics look to a politician’s social welfare policies as much as they do to other positions, and vote in a manner that would be accorded a label other than conservative.

Many people of faith are pacifists, and that’s a decisive factor in how they cast their ballots, though this concern is infrequently characterized in religious terms.

“I find it perplexing the way the ‘moral values’ phrase is used,” said the Rev. Mark Greiner, the pastor at the Presbyterian church that Ward attends.

“Concern for the environment, concern for workers’ rights: those are moral values,” he told me. “But the phrase ends up being limited to matters of human sexuality, as if Jesus was primarily concerned with what people did with their reproductive parts. It’s crazy-making.” Greiner wants the ban on gay scouts and leaders lifted.

Religion is inevitably part of the Scouts’ debate: more than 70 percent of local scout troops are chartered by religious groups.

Later this month, the organization’s National Council will vote on a recommendation that the ban on gay scouts be lifted but the prohibition against gay leaders be preserved. The Mormons have indicated that they can live with this. The National Catholic Committee on Scouting has been vague.

The Baptists have cried foul, as have evangelicals like Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, which sponsored a webcast over the weekend called “Stand with Scouts Sunday.” Rick Perry, the Texas governor, appeared on it to denounce any change to the ban, and for good measure called homosexuality “the flavor of the month.” Like pralines ’n cream, I guess.

But that’s not the whole story. The Episcopal Church wants all aspects of the ban lifted, as does the National Jewish Committee on Scouting, whose former chairman, a Baltimore lawyer named Jay Lenrow, told me that while no troop should be forced to choose a gay leader, no troop should be prevented from doing so, either.

He noted that our country was founded on a principle of religious freedom; that the Scouts’ bylaws require equal treatment of every religion’s teachings; and that certain denominations — the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), for example — ordain gay and lesbian ministers. By the Scouts’ current rules, those very ministers, fit for the pulpit, aren’t deemed fit to lead a troop.

Isn’t that as much of an insult to their religions as the ban’s end would be to Perkins, Perry and their kind?

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo is all agog at the fact that people are different.  In “The Confidence Responses” he gurgles that readers’ responses to the confidence questions inspire awe at the diversity of the human experience.  The poor sod may actually think he’s doing a valid “scientifical” study…  Prof. Krugman, in “Not Enough Inflation,” says the economic hole we’re in just gets deeper and deeper.  Here’s Bobo:

A few columns ago, I asked readers to give me their feedback about questions having to do with self-confidence: Are women still less self-confident than men? Do we have more to fear from overconfidence or underconfidence?

I’ve read through a mountain of responses, and my first reaction is awe at the diversity of the human experience. I went looking for patterns in this survey. Were younger people more likely to say women are self-confident than older people?

But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there. Let me just string together some of the interesting points people made.

Many men wrote to say that the real crisis these days is male underconfidence. Here’s a law student from Chicago: “I firmly believe one of the unintended consequences of the feminist revolution has been that men in my generation are raised without a strong self-identity, and, in essence, grow up to be little more than boys looking for mothers.”

A few women wrote that family dynamics were the sources of their underconfidence. One 58-year-old mom wrote that mothers “might as well have had, as a friend of mine puts it, ‘our vocal cords cut.’ We want to talk in nice voices and stay calm and sit down and have a heart-to-heart. Our children want the five-minute version — direct, to the point. They come back at anything we say with smart remarks that knock the wind out of our sails.”

More women wrote about conflicts with other women than about conflicts with men. One retired Army officer wrote, “Girls and women are highly critical of any other girl or woman who exhibits confidence. Men, on the whole, do not ‘shut down’ women who are intelligent and confident, but women do.”

One small-business owner put it this way: “I have enjoyed a lot of professional success because I do not present a threat to other women. They trust me and attach to me and stay bonded because I pay so little attention to appearances, dress and style — theirs or mine. My strategy, if at all deliberate, was to become ‘invisible’ and pass gently through the world as wallpaper, leading as a border collie rather than an alpha dog.”

Mallory Shaddix theorized that both men and women may suffer equally from underconfidence, but they present this trait differently. Men are more likely to bluff their way through. Women are more likely to be skeptical or ask advice or be passive. Betsy Frank observed that if you create a confidence scale from “None” to “Hubris,” there seem to be more people at the extremes now than in decades past.

A few experienced coaches noted that when you criticize a team or group, the women are more likely to take the criticism personally, while the guys are more likely to figure somebody else is at fault.

I was struck by the dappled nature of self-confidence, as people transmogrify from high self-confidence to low. One political consultant wrote, “I am 71, am loving the last chapter of a very successful life, and would say I have a great deal of self-confidence. Yet, sometimes it’s as if I have suddenly become invisible — a short gray-haired woman of a certain age can become a blur, especially to powerful older men and to young women who never suspect they will get old.”

A journalist from Utah writes: “I’m an overweight woman, but I feel robust. And I know people like to hug and cuddle me because my body is, as they say, ‘comfortable.’ (I sometimes say ‘plush.’) I know I don’t look good in shorts, but I don’t hate myself for it. I choose to wear dresses that are more flattering, and I walk with confidence instead of despair.”

One of the calmest letters came from Carol Collier, who works at Covenant College. She wrote: “As a believer in Jesus Christ, I see myself as redeemed, forgiven and covered in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I believe that this is how God sees me, all the time and without exception. I believe that his smile and delight in me is unwavering. This view of myself is quite simple yet with profound implications. It allows me to accept criticism without self-condemnation and to accept affirmations without exalting myself. This is the ideal view of myself that I am always working at. It is a struggle, but a good one.”

I’ll try to harvest more social trends later. But, in the meantime, I’m struck by how hard it is to have the right stable mix of self-confidence and self-criticism without some external moral framework or publicly defined life calling. If it’s just self-appraisal — one piece of your unstable self judging another unstable piece — it’s subjectivity all the way down.

Please, Bobo, DON’T try to harvest more social trends.  (Why anyone would actually respond to one of his requests for column fodder remains a mystery to me…)  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Ever since the financial crisis struck, and the Federal Reserve began “printing money” in an attempt to contain the damage, there have been dire warnings about inflation — and not just from the Ron Paul/Glenn Beck types.

Thus, in 2009, the influential conservative monetary economist Allan Meltzer warned that we would soon become “inflation nation.” In 2010, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development urged the Fed to raise interest rates to head off inflation risks (even though its own models showed no such risk). In 2011, Representative Paul Ryan, then the newly installed chairman of the House Budget Committee, raked Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, over the coals, warning of looming inflation and intoning solemnly that it was a terrible thing to “debase” the dollar.

And now, sure enough, the Fed really is worried about inflation. You see, it’s getting too low.

Before I get to the trouble with low inflation, however, let’s talk about what we should have learned so far.

It’s not hard to see where inflation fears were coming from. In its efforts to prop up the economy, the Fed has bought more than $2 trillion of stuff — private debts, housing agency debts, government bonds. It has paid for these purchases by crediting funds to the reserves of private banks, which isn’t exactly printing money, but is close enough for government work. Here comes hyperinflation!

Or, actually, not. From the beginning, it was or at least should have been obvious that the financial crisis had plunged us into a “liquidity trap,” a situation in which many people figure that they might just as well sit on cash. America spent most of the 1930s in a liquidity trap; Japan has been in one since the mid-1990s. And we’re in one now.

Economists who had studied such traps — a group that included Ben Bernanke and, well, me — knew that some of the usual rules of economics are in abeyance as long as the trap lasts. Budget deficits, for example, don’t drive up interest rates; printing money isn’t inflationary; slashing government spending has really destructive effects on incomes and employment.

The usual suspects dismissed all this analysis; it was “liquidity claptrap,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute. But that was four years ago, and the liquidity trappers seem to have been right, after all.

And it’s worth mentioning another issue on which the inflation non-worriers have been vindicated: how to measure inflation trends. The Fed relies on a measure that excludes food and energy prices, which fluctuate widely from month to month. Many commentators ridiculed this focus on “core” inflation, especially in early 2011, when rising food and energy prices briefly sent “headline” inflation above 4 percent even as the core stayed low. But, sure enough, inflation came back down.

So all those inflation fears were wrong, and those who fanned those fears proved, in case you were wondering, that their economic doctrine is completely wrong — not that any of them will ever admit such a thing.

And, at this point, inflation — at barely above 1 percent by the Fed’s favored measure — is dangerously low.

Why is low inflation a problem? One answer is that it discourages borrowing and spending and encourages sitting on cash. Since our biggest economic problem is an overall lack of demand, falling inflation makes that problem worse.

Low inflation also makes it harder to pay down debt, worsening the private-sector debt troubles that are a main reason overall demand is too low.

So why is inflation falling? The answer is the economy’s persistent weakness, which keeps workers from bargaining for higher wages and forces many businesses to cut prices. And if you think about it for a minute, you realize that this is a vicious circle, in which a weak economy leads to too-low inflation, which perpetuates the economy’s weakness.

And this brings us to a broader point: the utter folly of not acting to boost the economy, now.

Whenever anyone talks about the need for more stimulus, monetary and fiscal, to reduce unemployment, the response from people who imagine themselves wise is always that we should focus on the long run, not on short-run fixes. The truth, however, is that by failing to deal with our short-run mess, we’re turning it into a long-run, chronic economic malaise.

I wrote recently about how, by allowing long-term unemployment to persist, we’re creating a permanent class of unemployed Americans. The problem of too-low inflation is very different in detail, but similar in its implications: here, too, by letting short-run economic problems fester we’re setting ourselves up for a long-run, perhaps permanent, pattern of economic failure.

The point is that we are failing miserably in responding to our economic challenge — and we will be paying for that failure for many years to come.

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

In “Engaged or Detached?” Bobo says there are various styles of political influence. One compels the team by joining it and the other seeks to persuade from the view that comes from distance.  Mr. Nocera has a question in “The Detainees’ Dilemma:”  If you have been cleared for release from the prison in Guantánamo and you still can’t leave, what do you do?  Mr. Bruni looks at “Basketball’s Gay Paragon” and says only when we’re past the milestones and gay is just one adjective among many will we have won the game.  Here’s Bobo:

Let’s say you are a young person beginning to write about politics and policy. You probably have some idea of what you believe, but have you thought about how you believe it? That is to say, have you thought about where you will sit on the continuum that stretches from writers who are engaged to those who are detached?

Writers who are at the classic engaged position believe that social change is usually initiated by political parties. To have the most influence, the engaged writer wants to channel his efforts through a party.

The engaged writer closely and intimately aligns with a team. In his writing, he provides arguments for the party faithful and builds community by reminding everyone of the errors and villainy of the opposing side. For the engaged writer, the writing is often not about persuasion. (Realistically, how many times does a piece of writing persuade someone to switch sides?) It’s often about mobilization. It’s about energizing the people who already agree with you.

The engaged writer often criticizes his own party, but from a zone of trust inside it, and he is usually advising the party to return to its core creed. The engaged writer is willing to be repetitive because that’s how you make yourself an unavoidable pole in the debate. The goal is to have immediate political influence, to provide party leaders with advice, strategy and policy recommendations.

The detached writer also starts with a worldview. If you don’t have a philosophic worldview, your essays won’t even rise to the status of being wrong. They won’t be anything.

But the detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans. She is progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue.

The detached writer believes that writing is more like teaching than activism. Her essays are generally not about winning short-term influence. (Realistically, how many times can an outside writer shape the short-term strategies of the insider politicians?) She would rather have an impact upstream, shaping people’s perceptions of underlying reality and hoping that she can provide a context in which other people can think. She sometimes gets passionate about her views, but she distrusts her passions. She takes notes with emotion, but aims to write with a regulated sobriety.

There are trade-offs, no matter what spot on the continuum you ultimately choose. The engaged writer enjoys a tight community and a powerful sense of commitment. The detached writer enjoys more freedom and objectivity. The engaged writer emphasizes loyalty, while the detached writer emphasizes honesty. At his worst, the engaged writer slips into rabid extremism and simple-minded brutalism. At her worst, the detached writer slips into a sanguine, pox-on-all-your-houses complacency and an unearned sense of superiority. The engaged writer might become predictable. The detached writer might become irrelevant, ignored at both ends.

These days most writers land on the engaged side of the continuum. Look at most think tanks. They used to look like detached quasi universities; now some are more like rapid response teams for their partisan masters. If you ever want to get a political appointment, you have to be engaged, working on political campaigns and serving the team.

But I would still urge you to slide over toward the detached side of the scale. First, there is the matter of mental hygiene. You may think you can become a political partisan without becoming rigid and stale, and we all know people who achieve this, but the risk is high.

Engaged writers gravitate toward topics where they can do the most damage to the other side. These are topics where the battle lines are clearly drawn, not topics where there is a great deal of uncertainty. Engaged writers develop a talent for muzzle velocity, not curiosity. Just as in life, our manners end up dictating our morals. So, in writing our prose, styles end up shaping our mentalities. If you write in a way that suggests combative certitude, you may gradually smother the inner chaos that will be the source of lifelong freshness and creativity.

Also, detached writers have more realistic goals. Detached writers generally understand that they are not going to succeed in telling people what to think. It is enough to prod people to think — to provide an idea or piece information that sets readers on a train of thought that takes them far in front of whatever you put down.

The detached writer understands that, at the top level, politics is a bipolar struggle for turf. But the real fun is down below, sparking conversations about underlying concepts, underlying reality and the underlying frame of debate.

Since “detached writers generally understand that they are not going to succeed in telling people what to think” one must assume that everyone working for Faux Noise is rabidly engaged…  Why not address that some day, Bobo?  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif is one of about 100 detainees on a hunger strike in the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was captured in 2001 by Pakistanis after crossing the border from Afghanistan, and, by 2002, he was in the American naval detention facility. He was 20 years old. He has been there since.

Although the Americans contend that Hentif left his home in Yemen to become an Al Qaeda jihadist, he has always insisted that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. A devout Muslim, he says he went to Afghanistan to do charitable work to honor the memory of his father — and that he then left Afghanistan for Pakistan because, as one of his lawyers, Robert Palmer, put it to me recently, “the place was a mess.”

Like most Guantánamo detainees, Hentif spent years in solitary confinement. He was subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques” as it was euphemistically called. He watched the Bush administration release more than 500 of the 779 detainees who have passed through Guantánamo. He learned about lawyers arguing in court that the detainees had the legal right to a habeas corpus hearing — that is, to try to prove that they were not enemy combatants and had been detained illegally.

And, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that they did have that right. That same year, a presidential candidate headed toward the White House, Barack Obama, promised to close Guantánamo. That never happened, though President Obama continued the Bush policy of releasing detainees who were not deemed a threat to the United States.

Hentif, in fact, was among those set to be released. In late 2009, he was hours away from flying home to Yemen when a man on a flight to Detroit tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear. Because the man had purportedly been trained by an Al Qaeda affiliate with bases in Yemen, Congress demanded that the administration stop releasing all Yemen detainees. Obama complied.

And so it went: Hentif had a habeas corpus hearing in 2010, but, by then, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had made a mockery of the Supreme Court’s ruling, establishing evidentiary presumptions that made it impossible for a detainee to win a habeas ruling. (The Supreme Court has declined to hear further cases.) Sure enough, the judge ruled against him in 2012, despite concluding, among other things, that Hentif had never been to an Al Qaeda training camp, as the government alleged.

Meanwhile, along with 55 other Yemen detainees, he has been placed on a “cleared” list compiled by a commission composed of national security officials, meaning he could be transferred out of Guantánamo. But Congress, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans, quickly passed laws that put impossible conditions on their release. Shamefully, President Obama signed those bills.

Is there any wonder that Hentif — and the other detainees — are on a hunger strike? “It is a total expression of despair and hopelessness,” said Brent Rushforth, who also represents him.

It is impossible to know for sure what triggered the hunger strike. Lawyers for the detainees say that the military, after years of loosening the reins — including eliminating solitary confinement for many prisoners — was tightening the screws again for no reason. The military insists that its procedures did not change but that the detainees had begun breaking and covering cameras and refusing demands that they stop doing so.

On April 13, with the hunger strike spreading, the military raided the prison and put the detainees back in solitary. It says it has done so because the detainees are more likely to eat if they are not surrounded by other hunger strikers. If so, it isn’t working; there are more detainees refusing food today than before the April 13 raid. To force food into them, the military now shoves a tube down their nose, in an extremely painful procedure it called “enteral feeding.”

Are there terrorists at Guantánamo? Yes. The government knows who they are and keeps them away from the other detainees. But the hunger strike is a vivid reminder that Guantánamo remains exactly what it has always been: a stain on our country.

On April 13, Hentif was returning from morning prayers when the raid began. He was pushed up against a fence and shot with rubber bullets at such close range that five of them penetrated the skin. He was handcuffed and taken to the clinic. Now back in solitary confinement, he is worried that one of his wounds is becoming infected. Given their concerns about hunger strikers, the military medical staff haven’t been able to pay him much attention.

Thus it was that one more time, Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

I heard a lot of talk Monday about how “perfect” Jason Collins, the basketball player who just came out, is. Perfect as in straight from central casting. (Or maybe I should say gay from central casting.)

He went to college at Stanford. Roomed there with Joe Kennedy III. Was in the same class as Chelsea Clinton, who tweeted her congratulations to him for the courage she said he was showing.

Seven feet tall, he’s strapping even by the brawny standards of the National Basketball Association, and his designated role on the court, as a human roadblock against the most physically imposing opponents, is an aggressive one.

“I’m not proud of it, but I once fouled a player so hard that he had to leave the arena on a stretcher,” he writes in the cover article of the new Sports Illustrated, the one in which he becomes the trailblazer so many of us have been waiting for: the first active athlete in any of America’s four major professional sports leagues to acknowledge his homosexuality.

He mentions his Christian values. “I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding,” he says, getting in a deft dig at religious extremists. And he notes that he hopes to start a family of his own.

But none of these biographical details, none of these remarks, stayed with me the way the first paragraph of the article, whose co-author is the journalist Franz Lidz, did. It’s built from three short sentences:

“I’m a 34-year-old N.B.A. center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

The gay part will now define him, in the public eye, more than any other. It will be the prompt for the loudest cheers he basks in and the nastiest jeers he sloughs off.

But in the opening paragraph, it comes after his age and occupation and race, getting no more space, in that one passage and for that brief moment, than other aspects of his identity. It’s a detail among many, but not the defining one.

That’s the integrated way that things should be, the unremarkable way a person’s sexual orientation ought to be lived and perceived. And that’s precisely what Collins and his fellow trailblazers are trying to move us toward: not a constant discussion of the rightful place and treatment of L.G.B.T. people in America, but an America in which the discussion is no longer necessary. He’s letting us focus on his gayness precisely so we can focus less on others’ down the road.

I point that out because I know that some conversation in the days to come, perhaps not public discussion but certainly private grumbling, will include questions about why Collins has to rock the boat, why the news media is paying such lavish heed to him and why gays and lesbians in general make such a fuss of things. I know this from my in-box, where some readers routinely tell me that they’d be less bothered by homosexuals if we’d just please shut up about it.

Many of us want to, and will: when a gay, lesbian or transgendered kid isn’t at special risk of being brutalized or committing suicide. When the federal government outlaws discrimination against people based on sexual orientation, which it still hasn’t done.

When immigration laws give same-sex couples the same consideration that they do heterosexual ones. When the Defense of Marriage Act crumbles and our committed relationships aren’t relegated to a lesser status, a diminished dignity.

When a Rutgers coach doesn’t determine that the aptly ugly garnish for hurling basketballs at his players’ heads is the slur “faggot.” When professional football scouts don’t try to ascertain that potential recruits are straight.

When an athlete like Collins can be honest about himself without he and his co-author having to stress that he’s a guy’s guy, a godly man, someone who stayed mum about himself before now precisely so he wouldn’t disrupt his teams or upset his teammates, someone who’s inhabited locker rooms for 12 seasons already without incident.

When a gay person’s central-casting earnestness and eloquence aren’t noted with excitement and relief, because his or her sexual orientation needn’t be accompanied by a litany of virtues and accomplishments in order for bigotry to be toppled and a negative reaction to be overcome.

When being gay doesn’t warrant a magazine cover or a phone call from the president, any more than being 34 or being black does.

If you read all of Collins’s article, and you should, you’ll come away realizing that the gay part of him was and is so big only because his world — by which I mean America, and by which I mean pro sports — made it so.

From now on, he says, “I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful.” Those are adjectives and attributes also worth dwelling on.

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo says that there is “Health Chaos Ahead,” and that the implementation of Obamacare is off to a rough start. Even the law’s fervent supporters admit that things are going worse than expected.  Prof. Krugman has a question in “The 1 Percent’s Solution:”  While the austerity doctrine seems to have imploded, austerity has strengthened its grip on elite opinion. Why?  Here’s Bobo:

It was always going to be difficult to implement Obamacare, but even fervent supporters of the law admit that things are going worse than expected.

Implementation got off to a bad start because the Obama administration didn’t want to release unpopular rules before the election. Regulators have been working hard but are clearly overwhelmed, trying to write rules that influence the entire health care sector — an economic unit roughly the size of France. Republicans in Congress have made things much more difficult by refusing to provide enough money for implementation.

By now, everybody involved seems to be in a state of anxiety. Insurance companies are trying to put out new products, but they don’t know what federal parameters they have to meet. Small businesses are angry because the provisions that benefited them have been put on the back burner. Health care systems are highly frustrated. They can’t plan without a road map. Senator Max Baucus, one of the authors of the law, says he sees a “huge train wreck” coming.

I’ve been talking with a bipartisan bunch of health care experts, trying to get a sense of exactly how bad things are. In my conversations with this extremely well-informed group of providers, academics and former government officials, I’d say there is a minority, including some supporters of the law, who think the whole situation is a complete disaster. They predict Obamacare will collapse and do serious damage to the underlying health system.

But the clear majority, including some of the law’s opponents, believe that we’re probably in for a few years of shambolic messiness, during which time everybody will scramble and adjust, and eventually we will settle down to a new normal.

What nobody can predict is how health care chaos will interact with the political system. There’s a good chance that Republicans will be able to use unhappiness with what is already an unpopular law to win back the Senate in 2014. Controlling both houses of Congress, they will be in a good position to alter, though not repeal, the program.

The law’s biggest defenders will then become insurance companies and health care corporations. Having spent billions of dollars adapting to the new system, they are not going to want to see it repealed or replaced.

The experts talk about the problems that lie ahead in cascades. First, there is what you might call the structural cascade. Everything is turning out to be more complicated than originally envisioned. The Supreme Court decision made the Medicaid piece more complicated. The decision by many states not to set up exchanges made the exchange piece more complicated. The lines of accountability between, for example, state and federally run exchanges have grown byzantine and unclear.

A law that was very confusing has become mind-boggling. That could lead people to freeze up. Insurance companies will hesitate before venturing into state exchanges, thereby limiting competition and choice. Americans are just going to be overwhelmed and befuddled. Many are just going to stay away, even if they are eligible for benefits.

Then there is the technical cascade. At some point, people are going to sit at computers and enroll. If the data process looks like some 1990s glitchmonster, if information doesn’t flow freely, then the public opinion hit will be catastrophic.

Then there is the cost cascade. Nearly everybody not in the employ of the administration agrees this law does not solve the cost problem, and many of the recent regulatory decisions will send costs higher. A study in California found that premiums could increase by an average of 20 percent for people not covered by federal subsidies. A study by the Society of Actuaries found that by 2017 costs could rise by 32 percent for insurers covering people in the individual exchanges, and as high as 80 percent in states like Ohio.

Then there is the adverse selection cascade. Under the law, young healthy people subsidize poorer, sicker and older people. But the young may decide en masse that it is completely irrational for them to get health insurance that subsidizes others while they are healthy. They’ll be better off paying the fines, if those are even enforced, and opting out. Without premiums from the young, everybody else’s costs go up even higher.

Then there is the provider concentration cascade. The law further incentivizes a trend under way: the consolidation of hospitals, doctors’ practices and other providers. That also boosts prices.

Over all, it seems likely that in some form or another Obamacare is here to stay. But the turmoil around it could dominate politics for another election cycle, and the changes after that — to finally control costs, to fix the mind-boggling complexities and the unintended consequences — will never end.

Regulatory regimes can be simple and dumb or complex and sprawling. When you build complex, it takes a while to work through the consequences.

Seeing that most of Obamacare doesn’t even phase in until 2014 it may be just a tad early to get hysterical about what a failure it is…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close — at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.

Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

On the first question: the dominance of austerians in influential circles should disturb anyone who likes to believe that policy is based on, or even strongly influenced by, actual evidence. After all, the two main studies providing the alleged intellectual justification for austerity — Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna on “expansionary austerity” and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff on the dangerous debt “threshold” at 90 percent of G.D.P. — faced withering criticism almost as soon as they came out.

And the studies did not hold up under scrutiny. By late 2010, the International Monetary Fund had reworked Alesina-Ardagna with better data and reversed their findings, while many economists raised fundamental questions about Reinhart-Rogoff long before we knew about the famous Excel error. Meanwhile, real-world events — stagnation in Ireland, the original poster child for austerity, falling interest rates in the United States, which was supposed to be facing an imminent fiscal crisis — quickly made nonsense of austerian predictions.

Yet austerity maintained and even strengthened its grip on elite opinion. Why?

Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent.

But it’s not just a matter of emotion versus logic. You can’t understand the influence of austerity doctrine without talking about class and inequality.

What, after all, do people want from economic policy? The answer, it turns out, is that it depends on which people you ask — a point documented in a recent research paper by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright. The paper compares the policy preferences of ordinary Americans with those of the very wealthy, and the results are eye-opening.

Thus, the average American is somewhat worried about budget deficits, which is no surprise given the constant barrage of deficit scare stories in the news media, but the wealthy, by a large majority, regard deficits as the most important problem we face. And how should the budget deficit be brought down? The wealthy favor cutting federal spending on health care and Social Security — that is, “entitlements” — while the public at large actually wants to see spending on those programs rise.

You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.

And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?

I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.

Brooks and Bruni

Bobo has seen a video.  And now Bobo thinks he can do research…  In “The Confidence Questions” he asks a bunch, leading off with:  Is there a relationship between gender and self-confidence? Dear Readers, please ponder the matter in your own lives and send in written reflections. He seeks responses from men and women.  And I’m sure he’ll draw some glib conclusions…  In “Malicious but Delicious” Mr. Bruni says invasive species run roughshod over the rest of nature. That’s where our incisors and bicuspids come in.  Here’s Bobo:

By now, many of you have seen the main Web video in the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign. It shows a police sketch artist sitting behind a curtain. He interviews women he can’t see about their own faces and he draws them, based on their descriptions. Then he asks other people to describe the faces of those same women and makes another sketch.

The portraits based on the women’s own descriptions are sadder, less attractive and more closed-off than the portraits based on descriptions from others.

But the real payoff comes as we watch the women first look at the two portraits side by side. They approach the sketches with self-conscious smiles on their faces. But when they notice how much darker and unattractive the portraits based on their self-descriptions are, the smiles collapse into looks of shocked self-realization. One woman sheds a tear.

As social science, this video wouldn’t pass muster (a lot depends on the biases of the artist and the editors). But it does highlight a phenomenon most of us recognize: many women are too self-critical about their looks while many guys are too self-flattering.

For me, the video raised questions that go beyond body image, questions about self-confidence. I was going to write a column about these questions, but I realized I didn’t know the answers and the studies I consulted weren’t helping. So I thought this might be a job for crowd-sourcing sociology. I’m going to throw out some questions. If you (women and men) send answers based on your experiences to confidence@nytimes.com, I’ll quote them in future columns. Please describe personal incidents, along with general observations.

The first question: A generation after the feminist revolution, are women still, on average, less confident than men?

For decades, surveys indicated men had a higher self-esteem than women. But there is some evidence that the gap has narrowed or vanished. A 2011 study from the University of Basel based on surveys of 7,100 young adults found that young women had as much self-esteem as young men.

That tracks with some of my experience. My perception in college was that more men were seminar baboons — dominating the discussions whether they had done the reading or not. But now, when I visit college classes, the women seem just as assertive as the men.

But I’m not sure that this classroom assertiveness carries out into the world of work, or today’s family and friendship roles. And I’m not sure we’ve achieved parity when it comes to elemental confidence. When you read diaries of women born a century or centuries ago, you sometimes see them harboring doubts about their own essential importance, assumptions that they are to play a secondary role on earth, and feelings that their identity is dependent on someone else. How much does that mind-set linger?

Which leads to the second question: Are women still more likely to flow into different domains in your organization? For example, a study by the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education found that, when working in groups, highly accomplished male students gravitated toward the technical tasks, while highly accomplished female students gravitated toward the administrative tasks.

Some psychologists have observed that male self-confidence tends to be based on efficacy, how they perform tasks, while female self-confidence tends to be based on self-worth, on more general traits like integrity and compassion. If that’s true, men may be more eager to prove themselves by leaping to do the hard jobs.

Third: Do we undervalue the talent for self-criticism the women display in that video? Obviously, you want people to be assertive enough to leap forward, but you also want them to be self-aware enough to honestly evaluate themselves.

We have piles of evidence to show that people overtrust their judgment and overestimate their goodness. Also, there is no easy correlation between self-esteem and actual performance.

Maybe the self-criticism those women displayed in the Dove ad is a rare skill to be harnessed and valued, at least to a degree. Maybe the self-observation talents that lead to bad feelings because we are imperfect also lead to better decision-making and better behavior for those capable of being acutely aware of their imperfections.

This leads to my final question: In society generally, are more problems caused by overconfidence or underconfidence? The financial crisis and the tenor of our political debates suggest that overconfidence and self-idolatry are by far the larger problems. If that’s true, how do you combine the self-critical ability to recognize your limitations with the majestic confidence required to struggle against them?

I guess I’m asking how to marry self-criticism and self-assertion, a blend our society is inarticulate about. I guess I’m wondering, as we make this blend, whether most of us need more of the stereotypically female trait of self-doubt or the stereotypically male trait of self-promotion.

I’d love to know what makes Bobo so supremely self-confident that he thinks he’s competent to undertake such a study…  Here’s Mr. Bruni who’s in Austin, TX:

For your personal health, you should probably eat more vegetables.

But for the future of civilization as we know it?

More pork. Feral hogs, to be exact.

They’re multiplying like mad — like rabbits with hooves, tusks and an epic sense of entitlement — especially here in Texas, where an estimated 2.6 million of them routinely desecrate farmland by rooting up crops, decimate reptile populations by snacking on them, devour feed meant for livestock and probably do some other pernicious thing beginning in “de-” that won’t come to me right now.

Destroy enclosures! That’s it! Feral hogs have been known to chew and stomp their way into suburban yards and even onto Army bases, said Richard Heilbrun, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “And when you have a military installation with a fence problem,” he told me, “you have a national security problem.”

You also have an excellent reason to turn these hammy hellions into dinner.

That’s what the chef Ned Elliott was up to when I dropped by his Austin restaurant, Foreign & Domestic, on Friday. He and several other cooks were using deboned flesh from two feral hogs for porchetta, the beloved Italian roasted pork dish. They planned to serve it, along with giant Asian tiger prawns and Himalayan blackberries, at a special feast at the restaurant staged in cooperation with the Texas chapter of the Nature Conservancy.

The event had a saucy sobriquet, “Malicious but Delicious,” and a serious mission: to raise people’s awareness of, and ideally whet their appetites for, the bullies of the ecosystem, more formally known as invasive species, invasives for short. In certain areas of the United States, the hogs, the prawns and the blackberries qualify.

“They’re aggressive,” Elliott told me, providing a tidy case for their digestion.

All you principled environmentalists out there, you’re being lax. Your recycling is admirable and your farmers’ market patronage appreciated, but there’s a whole class of animals, fish and plants that are throwing the earth out of balance, and it’s time you turned not just your attention but also your bicuspids and incisors toward them.

They aren’t evil in and of themselves. They just don’t play so well with others, and proliferate ostentatiously. Many aren’t even meant to be part of the habitats they now maraud across, but thanks to human meddling, they ended up there, then got bossy about it.

“It’s as if you came home from work and a bunch of people had moved into your house,” said Laura Huffman, the Texas director of the Nature Conservancy. “Maybe they’re nice enough, but they’re still eating all your food and sitting on your furniture, and that’s going to disrupt the way your family lives.”

She was referring not only to hogs and tiger prawns but also to European green crabs, now common in Maine, where they prey on unsuspecting scallops.

Also Asian carp, the thuggish mobsters of the Mississippi, though maybe not for long. There’s been talk of rebranding them as “Kentucky tuna.”

Edible invasives are cataloged on a Web site aptly titled Eat the Invaders. It reflects a slowly growing awareness of the problem and a fledgling effort by ecologically minded chefs to address it.

In New York not long ago, the chef Kerry Heffernan prepared Asian carp and lionfish, which pose a ferocious threat from the Caribbean to the Carolinas, for a dinner at the James Beard House. At Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Bun Lai regularly promotes such invasives as Asian shore crabs and burdock, a plant whose root is a delicacy in Japan.

And since November, a lionfish appetizer has been a mainstay at the restaurant Haven in Houston. Its chef, Randy Evans, told me that one problem with serving it and other invasives is cost. Absent an established market for them, suppliers are few and supplies expensive.

He said he paid $20.99 a pound for fillets of lionfish, which are absurdly plentiful in the nearby Caribbean, but $17.99 for tuna flown all the way from Hawaii.

Feral hog meat, used at Haven for a “wild boar chili,” is less exorbitant and more available, partly in response to a piggy population explosion sometimes called the “pig bomb.” Across dozens of states, there are about five million feral hogs, descendants of imports from Europe, and Heilbrun said that the fecundity of females, which give birth more than once a year, is the stuff of legend.

“The old joke is that their average litter size is six, but 10 survive,” he told me.

While Texans have accelerated their killing of hogs to about 30 percent of the population annually, that still allows for a doubling of the population over a five-year period. And that underscores the strange blind spots in the ways of us conscientious omnivores, who congratulate ourselves on foraging and on nose-to-tail eating while failing to chow down adequately on an entire breed just begging to be bacon.

Brooks and Krugman

In “The Second Wave” Bobo informs us that the meltdown of the gun control bill won’t have an overt political effect on the Republican Party. He’s convinced that immigration, rather, is where it’s at.  Prof. Krugman has a question in “The Excel Depression:”  Did a coding error basically destroy the economies of the Western world? You be the judge.  Here’s Bobo:

Liberals are furious, but the gun issue will not significantly damage the Republican Party. Sure, it looks bad to oppose background checks, which have overwhelming popular support. Sure, the Republican position will further taint the party’s image in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia and Northern Virginia. Sure, the party looks extreme when it can’t accept a bill sponsored by the conservative Senator Joe Manchin and the very conservative Senator Pat Toomey.

But, let’s face it, the gun issue has its own unique dynamic, which is that the people who oppose gun limits vote on this issue while the people who support them do not.

Moreover, Democrats never made a compelling case that the bill would have been effective, that it would have directly prevented future Sandy Hooks or lowered the murder rate nationwide. Even many of the bill’s supporters were lukewarm about its contents.

The main reason the gun issue won’t significantly harm Republicans is that it doesn’t play into the core debate that will shape the future of the party. The issue that does that is immigration. The near-term future of American politics will be determined by who wins the immigration debate.

In the months since the election, a rift has opened between the Republicans you might call first-wave revolutionaries and those you might call second-wave revolutionaries. The first-wave revolutionaries (the party’s Congressional leaders) think of themselves as very conservative. They ejected the remaining moderates from their ranks. They sympathize with the Tea Party. They are loyal to Fox News and support a radical restructuring of the government.

These first-wave revolutionaries haven’t softened their conservatism, but they are trying to adjust it to win majority support. They are trying to find policies to boost social mobility, so Republicans look less like the party of the rich. They are swinging behind immigration reform, believing that Hispanics won’t even listen to Republicans until they put that issue in the rearview mirror.

The second-wave revolutionaries — like Rand Paul (on some issues), Jim DeMint, Ted Cruz and some of the cutting-edge talk radio jocks — see the first-wave revolutionaries as a bunch of incompetent establishmentarians. They speak of the Bush-Cheney administration as if it were some sort of liberal Republican regime run by Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits. They argue that Republicans have lost elections recently because the party has been led by big-spending, mushy moderates like John McCain and Mitt Romney and managed by out-of-touch elitists like Karl Rove and Reince Priebus.

The second wavers are much more tactically aggressive, favoring filibusters and such when possible. What the party needs now, they argue, is an ultra-Goldwaterite insurgency that topples the “establishment,” ditches immigration reform and wins Hispanic votes by appealing to the evangelicals among them and offering them economic liberty.

The first and second wavers are just beginning their immigration clash. A few weeks ago, I would have thought the pro-immigration forces had gigantic advantages, but now it is hard to be sure.

The immigration fight will be pitting a cohesive insurgent opposition force against a fragile coalition of bipartisan proponents who have to ambivalently defend a sprawling piece of compromise legislation. We’ve seen this kind of fight before. Things usually don’t end up well for the proponents.

Whether it’s guns or immigration, it is easy to imagine that the underlying political landscape, which prevented progress in the past, has changed. But when you actually try to pass something, you often discover the underlying landscape has not changed. The immigration fight of 2013 might bear an eerie similarity to the fight of 2007.

The arguments that might persuade Republicans to support immigration reform are all on the table. They came on election night 2012. The arguments against are only just now unfolding.

It is just a fact that the big short-term beneficiaries of this law are not generally Republicans: the 11 million who are living in the shadows; the high-tech entrepreneurs who will get more skilled labor. The short-term losers, meanwhile, are often Republicans: the white working-class people who will face a new group of labor-market competition when they try to get jobs in retail; the taxpayers who, at least in the short term, will have to pay some additional costs.

In the past, Republican politicians have had trouble saying no to the latest and most radical insurgency. Even if they know immigration reform is eventually good for their party, lawmakers may figure that opposing it is immediately necessary for themselves.

It would be great if Republicans can hash out their differences over a concrete policy matter, especially immigration, which touches conservatism’s competing values. But if the insurgent right defeats immigration reform, that will be a sign that the party’s self-marginalization will continue. The revolution devours its own.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

In this age of information, math errors can lead to disaster. NASA’s Mars Orbiter crashed because engineers forgot to convert to metric measurements; JPMorgan Chase’s “London Whale” venture went bad in part because modelers divided by a sum instead of an average. So, did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?

The story so far: At the beginning of 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, circulated a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that purported to identify a critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.

Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff had credibility thanks to a widely admired earlier book on the history of financial crises, and their timing was impeccable. The paper came out just after Greece went into crisis and played right into the desire of many officials to “pivot” from stimulus to austerity. As a result, the paper instantly became famous; it was, and is, surely the most influential economic analysis of recent years.

In fact, Reinhart-Rogoff quickly achieved almost sacred status among self-proclaimed guardians of fiscal responsibility; their tipping-point claim was treated not as a disputed hypothesis but as unquestioned fact. For example, a Washington Post editorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.

For the truth is that Reinhart-Rogoff faced substantial criticism from the start, and the controversy grew over time. As soon as the paper was released, many economists pointed out that a negative correlation between debt and economic performance need not mean that high debt causes low growth. It could just as easily be the other way around, with poor economic performance leading to high debt. Indeed, that’s obviously the case for Japan, which went deep into debt only after its growth collapsed in the early 1990s.

Over time, another problem emerged: Other researchers, using seemingly comparable data on debt and growth, couldn’t replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results. They typically found some correlation between high debt and slow growth — but nothing that looked like a tipping point at 90 percent or, indeed, any particular level of debt.

Finally, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff allowed researchers at the University of Massachusetts to look at their original spreadsheet — and the mystery of the irreproducible results was solved. First, they omitted some data; second, they used unusual and highly questionable statistical procedures; and finally, yes, they made an Excel coding error. Correct these oddities and errors, and you get what other researchers have found: some correlation between high debt and slow growth, with no indication of which is causing which, but no sign at all of that 90 percent “threshold.”

In response, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff have acknowledged the coding error, defended their other decisions and claimed that they never asserted that debt necessarily causes slow growth. That’s a bit disingenuous because they repeatedly insinuated that proposition even if they avoided saying it outright. But, in any case, what really matters isn’t what they meant to say, it’s how their work was read: Austerity enthusiasts trumpeted that supposed 90 percent tipping point as a proven fact and a reason to slash government spending even in the face of mass unemployment.

So the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs.

What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to.

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.