Keller, solo

Prof. Krugman is off today.  In “How To Legalize Pot” Mr. Keller asks a question:  Can you avoid black markets, drugged drivers and salmonella?  Billy, I’d rather have buzzed drivers on the road than drunk drivers…  Here he is:

The first time I talked to Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at U.C.L.A., was in 2002, and he explained why legalization of marijuana was a bad idea. Sure, he said, the government should remove penalties for possession, use and cultivation of small amounts. He did not favor making outlaws of people for enjoying a drug that is less injurious than alcohol or tobacco. But he worried that a robust commercial marketplace would inevitably lead to much more consumption. You don’t have to be a prohibitionist to recognize that pot, especially in adolescents and very heavy users, can seriously mess with your brain.

So I was interested to learn, 11 years later, that Kleiman is leading the team hired to advise Washington State as it designs something the modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and over. The marijuana debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

“At some point you have to say, a law that people don’t obey is a bad law,” Kleiman told me when I asked how his views had evolved. He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.

Ah, but what does that look like? A few places, like the Netherlands, have had limited legalization; many jurisdictions have decriminalized personal use; and 18 states in this country have approved the drug for medical use. (Twelve others, including New York, are considering it.) But Washington and Colorado have set out to invent a whole industry from scratch and, in theory, to avoid the shortcomings of other markets in legal vices — tobacco, alcohol, gambling — that lurched into being without much forethought, and have supplied, along with much pleasure, much misery.

The biggest shadow hanging over this project is the Department of Justice. Federal law still makes felons of anyone who trades in cannabis. Despite the tolerant drift of the polls, despite evidence indicating that states with medical marijuana programs have not, as opponents feared, experienced an increase in use by teenagers, despite new moves toward legalization in Latin America, no one expects Congress to remove cannabis from the list of criminal substances any time soon. (“Not until the second Hillary Clinton administration,” Kleiman says.) But federal authorities have always left a lot of room for local discretion on marijuana enforcement. They could, for example, declare that they will prosecute only drug producers who grow more than a certain amount, and those who traffic across state lines. Attorney General Eric Holder, perhaps preoccupied with scandal management, has been slow to come up with enforcement guidelines that could give the states a comfort zone in which to experiment.

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers — the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry — a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. “When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales,” said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. “And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers.”

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry — a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors. It would help, too, to let individuals grow a few plants at home — something Colorado’s new law permits but Washington’s does not, because polling showed Washingtonians didn’t want that.

If you read the proposal Kleiman’s team submitted to Washington State, you may be a little boggled by the complexities of turning an illicit herb into a regulated, safe, consumer-friendly business. Among the things on the to-do list: certifying labs to test for potency and contamination. (Pot can contain, among other nasty things, pesticides, molds and salmonella.) Devising rules on labeling, so users know what they’re getting. Hiring inspectors, to make sure the sellers comply. Establishing limits on advertising, because you don’t want allowing to become promoting. And all these rules must account not just for smoking but for pot pastries, pot candies, pot-infused beverages, pot lozenges, pot ice cream, pot vapor inhalers.

One of the selling points of legalization is that states can take a cut of what will be, according to estimates, a $35 billion to $45 billion industry and earmark some of these new tax revenues for good causes. It’s the same tactic used to win public approval of lotteries — and with the same danger: that some worthy government function comes to depend on creating more addicts. And how do you divvy up the revenues? How much goes to offset health consequences? How much goes to enforcement? How do you calibrate taxes so the price of pot is high enough to discourage excessive use, but not so high that a cheap black market arises? All this regulating is almost enough to take the fun out of drugs.

And then there is the issue of drugged driving. Much about the chemistry of marijuana in human beings remains uncertain, in part because the government has not supported much research. So no one has come up with a pot version of the breathalyzer to determine quickly whether a driver is impaired. In the absence of solid research, some legalization advocates insist stoned drivers are more cautious, and thus safer. (Hands up if you want Harold and Kumar driving your taxi. Or piloting your airplane.) On this and much else, Washington and Colorado will probably be making it up as they go, waiting for science to catch up.

And experience tells us they are sure to get some things wrong. New York decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot way back in 1977, with the condition that there be no “public display.” The lawmakers meant to assure that you partied at home, not in the parks or on the sidewalks. They did not envision that this provision would create a pretext for throwing young black and Latino men in jail. When police in New York City stop and frisk, which they do a lot in rougher neighborhoods, they order their targets to turn out their pockets and — whoa, public display, come with us, son! Gov. Andrew Cuomo is promoting an amendment to curb that abuse of power.

On the opposite coast, California demonstrates a different kind of unintended consequences. The state’s medical marijuana law is such a free-for-all that in Los Angeles there are now said to be more pot dispensaries than Starbucks outlets. Even advocates of full legalization say things have gotten out of hand.

“It’s a bit of a farce when you can watch people come out of a dispensary, go around the corner and resell their drugs,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor and former San Francisco mayor, who favors legalization. “If we can’t get our medical marijuana house in order, how do we expect voters to deal with legalization?” He is now part of a group discussing how to impose more order on California’s medical marijuana market, with an eye to offering broader legalization in 2016. And, he told me, his state will be paying close attention to Washington and Colorado, hoping somebody can, as Mark Kleiman puts it, “design a system that gets us to ‘orderly’ without getting us to ‘way too stoned.’ ”

Wanna bet that he felt so good when he finished writing this that he poured himself a martini?

Keller, solo

Prof. Krugman is off today.  In “Dark Heritage” Mr. Keller tells us what we can learn from a think tank’s over-the-top attack on immigration reform.  Here he is:

Last week the Heritage Foundation delivered a report claiming that legalizing undocumented immigrants will create a more-or-less permanent underclass of benefit-sucking, wage-lowering, economy-crippling parasites, with a cost to American taxpayers of — megaphone, please — SIX POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! The report was promptly denounced, not least by reputable conservative economists, for example here and here and here. Then one of the report’s co-authors resigned from Heritage after The Washington Post discovered that he had once proposed blocking immigrants with low I.Q. scores. (More on that later.)

You might think that after such a reception the report would be quickly retired to the Bogus Science Hall of Fame. But not so fast. This one deserves a closer look.

The Heritage Foundation has never made a secret of its conservative political orientation, but it has generally tried to remain within plausible boundaries of analysis. Heritage gives you data with lots of spin, but tends to avoid being downright outlandish. On issues like health care and welfare reform, Heritage scholarship has made serious contributions to the public debate, whatever you think of the policies prescribed.

But on immigration, something else is going on. As the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economic adviser to John McCain, pointed out at National Review Online, until 2006 the Heritage line on immigrants was comfortably within the mainstream: that immigrants are not welfare sponges but rather — as consumers, workers and creators of new businesses — they, and especially their children and grandchildren, are contributors to the national wealth. Then in 2007, with an immigration bill pending in Congress, Heritage analyst Robert Rector issued the first version of the hair-raising analysis that was repurposed last week.

Heritage’s abrupt turn was a puzzle to many conservatives, including some within the Heritage family. Holtz-Eakin, who had been a Heritage fellow, told me he was mystified. Tim Kane, the Heritage analyst who had prepared the earlier, immigration-is-good report and is now chief economist at the Hudson Institute, said former colleagues at Heritage now worry that the new report will cast doubt on their other scholarship.

I’m not an economist (and neither is Robert Rector, the principal author of the new report), but I’ve discussed the analysis with six economists, some of them specialists in immigration policy, four of them staunch conservatives. Their consensus is that the report issued last week is not an objective quest for enlightenment, but 100 pages in service of a boldface headline. (SIX POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS!) It systematically overestimates the percentage of undocumented immigrants who will get citizenship, and exaggerates the likelihood that they will end up as wards of the welfare state. It underestimates the contribution these immigrants and their children will make to the country’s wealth if they are allowed out of the shadows to work and study and open businesses without fear. It plays down the reality that these immigrants already cost taxpayers many millions. And it assumes that for the duration of this supposed pig-out at the federal trough — 50 years is Rector’s time frame — nothing much changes in government policy.

Rector points out that if you look closely, right there on page 33, he acknowledges a few factors that could bring down the cost of amnesty. This comes right after his longer list of factors that could make the costs even higher — which he told me is what he really believes. But none of these caveats changes the headline. SIX POINT THREE TRILLION etc.

I believe Rector is sincere in his conviction that amnesty will put a crushing burden on taxpayers. But I suspect that like many profoundly convinced people he sees what he wants to see. This is the same researcher who, according to my colleague Jason DeParle, once published a report claiming tens of thousands of poor people had Jacuzzis and swimming pools — extrapolating from a government survey that had found four. Before you laugh, you should know that Rector’s views on the deadbeat poor had considerable influence on the shape of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, and that his earlier version of the costs-of-amnesty study helped kill immigration reform last time around. He is an ideological force in Washington.

But Rector’s inflated numbers are not the worst thing about the Heritage report. His basic point, that integrating a large population of mostly poor people into the aboveground American economy will be expensive for at least a generation or two, is right, even if the costs will not be as shocking as he claims. The fundamental flaw is framing the immigration debate as essentially about the federal deficit. In fact, the case for immigration reform — and in particular the case for amnesty — is about rationalizing an inhumane and counterproductive system; about putting families that are now stunted by their illegal status on a path, not just to citizenship but to taxpaying productivity; about assimilation and mobility, innovation and entrepreneurship and, ultimately, about economic growth. Heritage is not just offering the wrong answer; it’s obsessing on the wrong question.

There are other lessons you can take away from this episode. Here are three.

First, this is an unusually stark sign of the transformation of Washington’s think tank culture into a more partisan archipelago of propaganda factories. In recent years, according to James McGann, director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, think tanks on both the right and the left have set up explicit lobbying arms, anointed leaders known not for academic credibility but for partisan ferocity, and picked their fights at least in part to help drive their fund-raising. Last year the right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch exercised their megadonors’ droit du seigneur over the libertarian Cato Institute, ousting the longtime president. The announcement in December that Senator Jim DeMint, a Tea Party darling, would become Heritage’s new president was not the beginning of a transformation, but its logical culmination. DeMint was enthusiastically front and center last week in the unveiling of the Heritage immigration report, even as scholars in his employ were telling friends they found the study embarrassing. I’m told the 2007 attack on immigration reform was gangbusters as a fund-raising message. Some speculate that this time around the issue might also make a nice platform for DeMint’s possible presidential ambitions.

Second, what we are seeing here is not just an attack on immigration reform, but a declaration of war on Republicans who would like to make their party less strident and meanspirited. To the hard right, which has been so ascendant in the G.O.P., the Republicans hoping to win Hispanic votes and soften their hardhearted image by liberating 11 million unlawful immigrants are apostates. “Marco Rubio does not understand any of this,” Rector said scornfully when we discussed the Heritage report. What is revealing is not that Rector thinks he is smarter than the Republican senator who is pushing immigration reform, but that he feels perfectly free to say so on the record.

And third, be wary of scholarship that can be twisted into the service of bigotry. The dark streak of nativist prejudice that lurks in this generally welcoming country has often been inflamed by questionable or selective research that played to popular fears and resentments: fear of competition for jobs and opportunity and resources, fear that immigration brings criminals and terrorists, and just plain fear of the other, the different, the foreign.

Which brings us to Rector’s co-author, Jason Richwine, whose 2009 doctoral dissertation was entitled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” Richwine argues that based on I.Q. tests today’s immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants “lack the raw cognitive ability” of earlier European immigrants, and that these defects persist from generation to generation. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” This, he writes, leads to “underclass behavior” and “less social trust.” Whether differences in I.Q. are the result of culture, environment, genetics or biases in the testing is one of the great unresolved debates in social science, but Richwine is convinced that these differences justify a new program of social engineering. He concludes that new immigrants should be screened for intelligence. Because I.Q. testing is “a political nonstarter” owing to its past association with racism and eugenics, he suggests that lawmakers should use the euphemism “skill tests.” By the end of the week, even some of his dissertation advisers were backing away from the document, as David Weigel reported in a thoughtful exploration of the subject on Slate.

The idea that our immigration system should make more room for well-educated and highly skilled applicants is a fixture in most reform proposals and is the practice in many other countries. Heritage supports it, and so do the various bipartisan proposals in Congress, as a way to compete for and retain the world’s best talent. But Richwine’s proposal for an I.Q. admissions test, like Rector’s portrayal of immigrants as merely a costly encumbrance, gives comfort to those who would treat immigrants as an inferior species — not just freeloaders, but mentally deficient to boot. At least Heritage can console itself that it was not to blame for Richwine’s exercise in social Darwinism. That particular piece of work earned him a Ph.D. from Harvard.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 13, 2013

An earlier version of this column contained an erroneous byline. The column was written by Bill Keller, not the Editorial Board.

 

Keller and Krugman

Mr. Keller is busily beating his little war drum.  In “Syria Is Not Iraq” he says our errors in Iraq should not keep us from doing the right thing this time.  Really.  In the third graf of this thing he tells us “… at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.”  Obviously not quite gun-shy enough…  Prof. Krugman considers “The Chutzpah Caucus,” looking for realism in all the wrong places.  Here’s Mr. Keller, telling us why it’s time to beat the war drums again:

In the search for an American response to the civil war in Syria, the favorite guidebook seems to be our ill-fated adventure in Iraq. We have another brutal Middle East autocrat holding power on behalf of a sectarian minority. We have another dubious cast of opposition factions competing for foreign patronage. We hear some of the same hawks — John McCain, Paul Wolfowitz — exhorting us to intervene, countered by familiar warnings of “quagmire.” We even have murky intelligence claims that the regime has used weapons of mass destruction.

This time, though, we have a president who, having opposed the costly blunder of Iraq and been vindicated, is holding back. The theme song at the National Security Council is “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

As a rule, I admire President Obama’s cool calculation in foreign policy; it is certainly an improvement over the activist hubris of his predecessor. And frankly I’ve shared his hesitation about Syria, in part because, during an earlier column-writing interlude at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.

Of course, there are important lessons to be drawn from our sad experience in Iraq: Be clear about America’s national interest. Be skeptical of the intelligence. Be careful whom you trust. Consider the limits of military power. Never go into a crisis, especially one in the Middle East, expecting a cakewalk.

But in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.

The United States has supplied humanitarian aid and diplomatic pressure. But our reluctance to arm the rebels or defend the civilians being slaughtered in their homes has convinced the Assad regime (and the world) that we are not serious. Our fear that arms supplied to the rebels would fall into the hands of jihadis has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because instead of dealing directly with the rebels we left the arming to fundamentalist monarchies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they are predictably using lethal aid to appease the more radical Islamists.

It might have been easier to intervene a year ago, before the opposition was so fragmented. But back then the president was busy ending foreign engagements and in no mood to start a new one. Besides, everyone was preoccupied by the dramas of Iran’s nuclear program, Egypt’s revolution and Ohio’s electoral votes. Since then, Assad has been sly about escalating his savagery by degrees — artillery, then aerial bombardment, then Scud missiles and now, apparently, chemical weapons — while staying just below whatever threshold of horror might shame us into responding.

What you hear from the Obama team is that we know way too little about the internal dynamics of Syria, so we can’t predict how an intervention will play out, except that there is no happy ending; that while the deaths of 70,000 Syrians are tragic, that’s what happens in a civil war; that no one in the opposition can be trusted; and, most important, that we have no vital national interest there. Obama conceded that the use of poison gas would raise the stakes, because we cannot let the world think we tolerate spraying civilians with nerve gas. But even there, the president says he would feel obliged to respond to “systematic” use of chemical weapons, as if something less — incremental use? sporadic use? — would be O.K. This sounds like a president looking for excuses to stand pat.

In contemplating Syria, it is useful to consider the ways it is not Iraq.

First, we have a genuine, imperiled national interest, not just a fabricated one. A failed Syria creates another haven for terrorists, a danger to neighbors who are all American allies, and the threat of metastasizing Sunni-Shiite sectarian war across a volatile and vital region. “We cannot tolerate a Somalia next door to Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey,” said Vali Nasr, who since leaving the Obama foreign-policy team in 2011 has become one of its most incisive critics. Nor, he adds, can we afford to let the Iranians, the North Koreans and the Chinese conclude from our attitude that we are turning inward, becoming, as the title of Nasr’s new book puts it, “The Dispensable Nation.”

Second, in Iraq our invasion unleashed a sectarian war. In Syria, it is already well under way.

Third, we have options that do not include putting American troops on the ground, a step nobody favors. None of the options are risk-free. Arming some subset of the rebels does not necessarily buy us influence. The much-touted no-fly zone would put American pilots in range of Syrian air defenses. Sending missiles to destroy Assad’s air force and Scud emplacements, which would provide some protection for civilians and operating room for the rebels, carries a danger of mission creep. But, as Joseph Holliday, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, points out, what gets lost in these calculations is the potentially dire cost of doing nothing. That includes the danger that if we stay away now, we will get drawn in later (and bigger), when, for example, a desperate Assad drops Sarin on a Damascus suburb, or when Jordan collapses under the weight of Syrian refugees.

Fourth, in Iraq we had to cajole and bamboozle the world into joining our cause. This time we have allies waiting for us to step up and lead. Israel, out of its own interest, seems to have given up waiting.

Advocates of doing more (a group that included Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus before they left the administration) do not agree on every detail of what “more” means, but it might look something like this:

For starters, President Obama articulates — as he has not done — how the disintegration of Syria represents a serious danger to America’s interests and ideals. The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels — funneling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiating an orderly transition to a nonsectarian Syria. We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.

All of this must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by a symphony of diplomacy to keep our allies with us and our adversaries at bay. The aim would be to eventually have a transition government, stabilized for a while by an international peacekeeping force drawn mostly from neighboring states like Turkey.

I don’t mean to make this sound easy. It might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals. But that outcome is virtually inevitable if we stay out.

The administration is now preparing contingency plans along those lines in the event that Assad’s use of chemical weapons forces our hand. Why wait for the next atrocity?

“We have to change the calculation of the people around Assad, to have them figure out a deal is better than going down to the end,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton professor and former director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton’s State Department, who was an early advocate of intervention. “And the sooner we change that calculation, the more possibility there is for a political settlement.”

“The challenge to this administration from 2009 has been how to move this country past the Iraq war into a sensible, viable foreign policy,” added Vali Nasr. “That hasn’t happened. We’re paralyzed like a deer in the headlights, and everybody keeps relitigating the Iraq war.”

Whatever we decide, getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.

Fck you, Billy boy.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

At this point the economic case for austerity — for slashing government spending even in the face of a weak economy — has collapsed. Claims that spending cuts would actually boost employment by promoting confidence have fallen apart. Claims that there is some kind of red line of debt that countries dare not cross have turned out to rest on fuzzy and to some extent just plain erroneous math. Predictions of fiscal crisis keep not coming true; predictions of disaster from harsh austerity policies have proved all too accurate.

Yet calls for a reversal of the destructive turn toward austerity are still having a hard time getting through. Partly that reflects vested interests, for austerity policies serve the interests of wealthy creditors; partly it reflects the unwillingness of influential people to admit being wrong. But there is, I believe, a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future.

So now seems like a good time to point out that this cynicism, which sounds realistic and worldly-wise, is actually sheer fantasy. Ending stimulus has never been a problem — in fact, the historical record shows that it almost always ends too soon. And in America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception — namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power.

Let’s start with the common claim that stimulus programs never go away.

In the United States, government spending programs designed to boost the economy are in fact rare — F.D.R.’s New Deal and President Obama’s much smaller Recovery Act are the only big examples. And neither program became permanent — in fact, both were scaled back much too soon. F.D.R. cut back sharply in 1937, plunging America back into recession; the Recovery Act had its peak effect in 2010, and has since faded away, a fade that has been a major reason for our slow recovery.

What about programs designed to aid those hurt by a depressed economy? Don’t they become permanent fixtures? Again, no. Unemployment benefits have fluctuated up and down with the business cycle, and as a percentage of G.D.P. they are barely half what they were at their recent peak. Food stamp usage is still rising, thanks to a still-terrible labor market, but historical experience suggests that it too will fall sharply if and when the economy really recovers.

Incidentally, foreign experience follows the same pattern. You often hear Japan described as a country that has pursued never-ending fiscal stimulus. In reality, it has engaged in stop-go policies, increasing spending when the economy is weak, then pulling back at the first sign of recovery (and thereby pushing itself back into recession).

So the whole notion of perma-stimulus is fantasy posing as hardheaded realism. Still, even if you don’t believe that stimulus is forever, Keynesian economics says not just that you should run deficits in bad times, but that you should pay down debt in good times. And it’s silly to imagine that this will happen, right?

Wrong. The key measure you want to look at is the ratio of debt to G.D.P., which measures the government’s fiscal position better than a simple dollar number. And if you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. So debt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

And there’s a reason for that association: U.S. conservatives have long followed a strategy of “starving the beast,” slashing taxes so as to deprive the government of the revenue it needs to pay for popular programs.

The funny thing is that right now these same hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves.

To me, it sounds like a fiscal version of the classic definition of chutzpah — namely, killing your parents, then demanding sympathy because you’re an orphan. Here we have conservatives telling us that we must tighten our belts despite mass unemployment, because otherwise future conservatives will keep running deficits once times improve.

Put this way, of course, it sounds silly. But it isn’t; it’s tragic. The disastrous turn toward austerity has destroyed millions of jobs and ruined many lives. And it’s time for a U-turn.

Keller and Krugman

In “Erasing History” Mr. Keller has a question:  In the age of the almighty search engine, do we have a right to be forgotten?  Prof. Krugman continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness.  In “The Story of Our Time” he offers a refresher on our economic woes, and why this is a very bad time for cuts.  Here’s Keller:

One of my favorite coffee-table books is an odd volume called “The Commissar Vanishes,” a portfolio of doctored photographs from Stalin’s Russia. When Stalin purged one of his fellow Bolsheviks, the comrade who fell from favor was duly cropped or airbrushed out of official photographs. “The Commissar Vanishes” juxtaposes the before and after. Here is the party stalwart grinning alongside Lenin in Red Square; and now — poof! — he’s gone. Person, un-person. History, un-history.

For a contemporary take on the subject of un-history, I take you now to a lawsuit scheduled for argument next month in a Connecticut courtroom. The case tests the proposition that in America in the Internet age, there are benign, even humane reasons that sometimes history should be erased.

Connecticut has a law that allows people accused of crimes to expunge the official record if a case is dismissed. Most states have some version of expungement laws, or erasure laws as they are sometimes called. They are intended to let those whose cases have been dropped or overturned get on with their lives, unencumbered by the taint of arrest. Thus under the Connecticut law any person whose record is erased “shall be deemed to have never been arrested” and “may swear so under oath.”

Lorraine Martin, a nurse in Greenwich, was arrested in 2010 with her two grown sons when police raided her home and found a small stash of marijuana, scales and plastic bags. The case against her was tossed out when she agreed to take some drug classes, and the official record was automatically purged. It was, the law seemed to assure her, as if it had never happened.

But Martin found that when she applied for jobs that should have been well within her reach, she got the cold shoulder. She Googled herself and discovered what any vigilant employer would have seen: stories still sitting in online news archives with headlines like “Mother and sons charged with drug offenses.”

“It’s essentially a scarlet letter,” her lawyer, Mark Sherman, told me. “She’s become unemployable in spite of the fact that she has no criminal arrest record.”

So Martin filed a class action against local news outlets, claiming that they had defamed her and everyone in a similar situation. Defamation is the publication of information that is both damaging and false. The arrest story was obviously true when it was first published. But Connecticut’s erasure law has already established that truth can be fungible. Martin, her suit says, was “deemed never to have been arrested.” And therefore the news story had metamorphosed into a falsehood.

There are passages in the court briefs that make you think the lawyers were possessed by the ghost of Lewis Carroll. They debate the difference between “historical fact” and “legal fact.” They dispute whether something that was true when it happened can become not just private but actually untrue, so untrue you can swear an oath that it never happened and, in the eyes of the law, you’ll be telling the truth. Several pages and copious footnotes are devoted to considering what the meaning of “publish” is. Martin’s lawyers insist that every time a search engine delivers the old story to a new reader, it amounts to republishing, and constitutes a new libel. The defending news companies say that is ridiculous.

The plaintiff’s brief concedes that the suit is “novel,” and most lawyers I talked to predicted the case would probably be dismissed. It seems to collide head on with the First Amendment. The closest thing I could find to a similar case, in New Jersey’s Supreme Court, was thrown out with a ruling that suggested the plaintiff’s logic was “Orwellian.”

But the dilemma underlying this case is real, and not so simple. The Connecticut case is just one manifestation of an anxious backlash against the invasive power of the Internet, a world of Big Data and ever more powerful search engines, in which it seems almost everything is permanently recorded and accessible to almost anyone — potential employers, landlords, dates, predators. In Europe, where press freedoms are less sacred and the right to privacy is more ensconced, the idea has taken hold that individuals have a “right to be forgotten,” and those who want their online particulars expunged tend to have the government on their side. In Germany or Spain, Lorraine Martin might have a winning case.

I sense that the idea is gaining traction here. Erasure laws seem to be proliferating. States feel greater pressure to put public records offline. (After a New York newspaper published names and addresses of local handgun permit-holders, the Legislature in Albany sharply limited access to that information.) Google’s latest transparency report shows a sharp rise in requests from governments and courts to take down potentially damaging material. Editors tell me they are increasingly beset by readers who once cooperated with a reporter on a sensitive subject — nudism, anorexia, bullying — and years later find that old story a recurring source of distress. (It’s called “source remorse.”)

Greg Brock, who handles reader complaints for The Times, says he now gets about four pleas a week from readers who want something purged. Most involve items from the police blotter, though he also gets requests to delete announcements of weddings that have since ended in ugly divorce. The most heartbreaking appeal he has heard involved the story of a toddler who apparently mistook her newborn twin siblings for dolls, pulled them from their cribs to play with them and inadvertently killed them. Nearly 30 years later, the toddler is now a teacher. When her students plugged her name into Google, the first thing that popped up was a headline tying her to the death of the twins.

As if that were not enough, there is a growing flock of buzzards to feed on your distress. Mugshots.com, for example, collects and posts arrest records from all over, complete with lurid mug shots, and then offers to redact your information — for $399.

However understandable the yearning to escape painful memories, The Times’s policy is not to censor history, because it’s history. The paper will update an arrest story if presented with evidence of an acquittal or dismissal, completing the story but not deleting the story.

Some papers have compromised by agreeing in certain instances to insert a bit of code in online articles that prevents them from being fetched by the major search engines. The stories can still be found in the paper’s digital archive, just as they can be found in bound volumes at the local library, but they do not show up on Google. The Hearst Corporation, a defendant in that Connecticut libel suit, is experimenting with such a program. The Times considered a similar policy a few years ago, and we decided it was a slippery slope. But perhaps it’s time to reopen that discussion.

A number of privacy protection firms use another technique. They prepare packets of non-damaging information about their clients — academic records, philanthropic work — and “optimize” them so they pop up in search-engine rankings before the more embarrassing stuff.

Last month Owen Tripp, a co-founder of Reputation.com, which has made a business out of helping clients manage their digital profile, advocated a “right to be forgotten” in a YouTube video. Tripp said everyone is entitled to a bit of space to grow up, to experiment, to make mistakes.

“How do we give people a chance to go back and to edit, to trim around the edges, or at least drop the veil across those things that are most private?” he asked.

“This is not just a privacy problem,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, and author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” “If we are continually reminded about people’s mistakes, we are not able to judge them for who they are in the present. We need some way to put a speed-brake on the omnipresence of the past.”

What that brake might be, he says, is not entirely clear. He is wary of legislation, but would like to see search engine companies — the parties that benefit the most financially from amassing our information — offer the kind of reputation-protecting tools that are now available only to those who can afford paid services like those of Reputation.com. Google, he points out, already takes down five million items a week because of claims that they violate copyrights. Why shouldn’t we expect Google to give users an option — and a simple process — to have news stories about them down-ranked or omitted from future search results? Good question. What’s so sacred about a search algorithm, anyway? After all, nobody ever called Google the first draft of history.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Those of us who have spent years arguing against premature fiscal austerity have just had a good two weeks. Academic studies that supposedly justified austerity have lost credibility; hard-liners in the European Commission and elsewhere have softened their rhetoric. The tone of the conversation has definitely changed.

My sense, however, is that many people still don’t understand what this is all about. So this seems like a good time to offer a sort of refresher on the nature of our economic woes, and why this remains a very bad time for spending cuts.

Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family.

Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.

And that’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Many people suddenly cut spending, either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to; meanwhile, not many people were able or willing to spend more. The result was a plunge in incomes that also caused a plunge in employment, creating the depression that persists to this day.

Why did spending plunge? Mainly because of a burst housing bubble and an overhang of private-sector debt — but if you ask me, people talk too much about what went wrong during the boom years and not enough about what we should be doing now. For no matter how lurid the excesses of the past, there’s no good reason that we should pay for them with year after year of mass unemployment.

So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.

Now, just to be clear, this is not a case for more government spending and larger budget deficits under all circumstances — and the claim that people like me always want bigger deficits is just false. For the economy isn’t always like this — in fact, situations like the one we’re in are fairly rare. By all means let’s try to reduce deficits and bring down government indebtedness once normal conditions return and the economy is no longer depressed. But right now we’re still dealing with the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. This is no time for austerity.

O.K., I’ve just given you a story, but why should you believe it? There are, after all, people who insist that the real problem is on the economy’s supply side: that workers lack the skills they need, or that unemployment insurance has destroyed the incentive to work, or that the looming menace of universal health care is preventing hiring, or whatever. How do we know that they’re wrong?

Well, I could go on at length on this topic, but just look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.

Is the story really that simple, and would it really be that easy to end the scourge of unemployment? Yes — but powerful people don’t want to believe it. Some of them have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins (even if the sinners then and the sufferers now are very different groups of people). Some of them see the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net. And just about everyone in the policy elite takes cues from a wealthy minority that isn’t actually feeling much pain.

What has happened now, however, is that the drive for austerity has lost its intellectual fig leaf, and stands exposed as the expression of prejudice, opportunism and class interest it always was. And maybe, just maybe, that sudden exposure will give us a chance to start doing something about the depression we’re in.

Keller and Krugman

In “A Blogger on Trial” Mr. Keller has decided to tell us why the prosecution of Aleksei Navalny matters.  Prof. Krugman looks at “The Jobless Trap” and explains that we are creating a permanent class of unemployed Americans.  Here’s Keller:

If you set out to design a political nemesis who would give Vladimir Putin the shivers, you might well come up with Aleksei Navalny. That is why the trial of the popular Russian activist on Wednesday is the most important political trial in Russia in decades.

Navalny, a lawyer, anticorruption crusader and blogger, has been likened to every political insurgent from Julian Assange to Nelson Mandela. As a potential political leader he long ago surpassed Assange and hasn’t quite caught up to Mandela, but he keeps getting better. He is young (36), thoughtful, politically astute, crowd-pleasing and apparently unafraid. He has command of the Internet and the skills of an investigative reporter. (He buys stock in state-owned oil companies and banks and uses his status as a minority shareholder to air their dirty laundry on his LiveJournal blog.)

He is an ethnic Russian who has incorporated a mild dose of nationalist sloganeering into his patter. This has dismayed some of his liberal friends, but it is shrewd. It inoculates him somewhat against Putin’s favorite line of attack, that critics are Western stooges, and, more important, helps broaden his appeal beyond the young, social-media-savvy cubicle workers who are his base.

His platform combines free-market libertarianism, which appeals to Russia’s growing bourgeoisie, and a relentless campaign against corruption, which resonates widely in a nation where it seems every transaction entails a bribe. (Russia ranks a humiliating 133rd on the Transparency International index of countries where businesses can invest with confidence.) The Moscow Times in 2011 called Navalny “the only electable” opposition figure. That might be true, although the best rabble-rousers don’t always make the best presidents — a lesson Russia should have learned from Boris Yeltsin.

This is hardly the first time the Putin regime has used law enforcement and the criminal courts (acquittal rate: 0.4 percent) to cull antagonists. The hounding of the outspoken tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was an appalling and largely successful effort to warn Russia’s wealthiest not to kid themselves that money entitled them to free speech. The sham trial of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who dared take on tax fraud in high places and died in jail from mistreatment, sent a message not to meddle with the thievery of Putin’s cronies. And the trial of the sacrilegious punk trio Pussy Riot served notice that the president does not see the joke, not when it’s on him. None of these victims of Kremlin justice, though, could mobilize a serious political following. Navalny might, especially if he ever gets off a TV black list.

The main charge against Navalny is that, as an adviser to the regional government in Kirov, he embezzled money from a state-run timber company. A review of the case by a Chicago law firm for a client sympathetic to Navalny’s plight concluded that the charges were laughably bogus, and the state has offered nothing to rebut that. In fact, local authorities conducted what seems to have been a thorough investigation and concluded no crime was committed. But the federal Investigative Committee, a powerful agency that serves Putin, stepped in and — without adding any new evidence — charged Navalny with stealing timber worth more than $500,000.

It’s probably no coincidence that one of the targets of Navalny’s recent muckraking was the head of the very same Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin. Navalny posted documents showing that Bastrykin secretly possessed a residence permit and real estate in the Czech Republic, raising questions about his faith in Russia’s future and, since the Czech Republic is a member of the NATO alliance, his vulnerability to blackmail.

The state’s obvious hope is that by convicting Navalny on charges of greed, it will diminish his credibility as a corruption-fighter and, not incidentally, head off his political ambitions. (Conviction of a serious crime is a disqualification for public office.)

I suspect the Russian public knows exactly what is going on. That, in fact, is the point. The trial is a show, and the moral of this drama is, if you stick your head up too high, you could lose it. In an interview in Izvestia that reads like a relic of Soviet-era cynicism, Vladimir Markin, the oleaginous spokesman for the Investigative Committee, left no doubt about Navalny’s real crime. Why, the paper asked, was the case propelled to the front of the court docket? The spokesman replied: “If a person tries with all his might to draw attention to himself, even, you might say, tries to taunt the authorities — says, ‘Look at me, you’re all covered in dirt and I’m so clean’ — well, then the interest in his past grows, and the process of exposing him naturally speeds up.”

Markin suggested that Navalny, who spent a semester at a Yale program for budding foreign leaders, is a kind of Ivy-League Manchurian candidate, set in motion by American mentors to provoke a conflict with the Kremlin that would end in his arrest and demonstrate that Russia persecutes truth-tellers.

The interviewer asked why, rather than threaten Navalny with jail, the state did not enlist his anticorruption expertise to help clean up the country. “No one is hindering his public activities,” Markin smirked. “Even in prison many convicts write letters and statements, struggle against the shortcomings of the system.”

Friends of Navalny — and, you would think, common sense — say this case is a loser for Putin. He will further discredit a politicized justice system. He risks making Navalny a martyr. He jeopardizes Russia’s respectful treatment at all those meetings of the G-8, the G-20 and the P5-plus-1, not to mention the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year. And at a time when Russia badly needs foreign capital, using economic laws for political repression spooks investors. “Putin doesn’t want Russia to become a pariah,” a close friend of Navalny told me, hopefully. “He doesn’t want to be treated like the president of Belarus.”

Let’s hope this is all true, but Putin — especially in the last few years of his seemingly endless rule — has not been a cleareyed calculator of Russian’s best interest, or a man in close touch with what the world thinks of him. He has become ever more weirdly narcissistic, a stuntman posing shirtless on horseback, hugging a tranquilized polar bear, piloting a motorized glider to lead a flock of migrating Siberian cranes. And he has become more petty and vindictive, signing a law ending the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans and obliging nonprofits to register as “foreign agents.” In the campaign to make an example of Navalny, the activist’s friends and supporters have been followed, searched, harassed and threatened. Authorities have filed charges against Navalny’s brother and leaked private e-mails that suggested tensions in Navalny’s marriage.

Navalny knows, as Putin does, that sometimes fear works. The blogger’s middle-class followers, unlike the threadbare Soviet throngs who backed Yeltsin against the Communists or the miserable armies of the Arab Spring, actually have something to lose.

“The majority of the elite or business elite,” Navalny told The Times’s Ellen Barry recently, “they are people with liberal views, but they are cowardly, they are simply afraid of everything, they are trembling all the time, so they will be quiet.”

“Man is weak,” he said. “I am not blaming anyone, but man is weak.”

For the United States, Navalny’s case calls for calibrated diplomacy. President Obama and Putin have a bilateral summit scheduled in September, and the administration is busily trying to salvage a relationship on the rocks. It would be wrong to let the case impede cooperation in combating terrorism (as the Boston-Chechnya connection reminds us) or the downsizing of nuclear arsenals or possible Russian cooperation in resolving the crises of Syria and Iran, not that much cooperation has been forthcoming so far. But it would be wrong, too, to pretend Navalny’s case didn’t matter.

I hope Obama pays attention to the Navalny show trial. He will learn something about the man across the table, and about the man who, you never know, might someday take his place.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

F.D.R. told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. But when future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear, per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things.

For the overriding fear driving economic policy has been debt hysteria, fear that unless we slash spending we’ll turn into Greece any day now. After all, haven’t economists proved that economic growth collapses once public debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P.?

Well, the famous red line on debt, it turns out, was an artifact of dubious statistics, reinforced by bad arithmetic. And America isn’t and can’t be Greece, because countries that borrow in their own currencies operate under very different rules from those that rely on someone else’s money. After years of repeated warnings that fiscal crisis is just around the corner, the U.S. government can still borrow at incredibly low interest rates.

But while debt fears were and are misguided, there’s a real danger we’ve ignored: the corrosive effect, social and economic, of persistent high unemployment. And even as the case for debt hysteria is collapsing, our worst fears about the damage from long-term unemployment are being confirmed.

Now, some unemployment is inevitable in an ever-changing economy. Modern America tends to have an unemployment rate of 5 percent or more even in good times. In these good times, however, spells of unemployment are typically brief. Back in 2007 there were about seven million unemployed Americans — but only a small fraction of this total, around 1.2 million, had been out of work more than six months.

Then financial crisis struck, leading to a terrifying economic plunge followed by a weak recovery. Five years after the crisis, unemployment remains elevated, with almost 12 million Americans out of work. But what’s really striking is the huge number of long-term unemployed, with 4.6 million unemployed more than six months and more than three million who have been jobless for a year or more. Oh, and these numbers don’t count those who have given up looking for work because there are no jobs to be found.

It goes without saying that the explosion of long-term unemployment is a tragedy for the unemployed themselves. But it may also be a broader economic disaster.

The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.

One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken down for the long-term unemployed: a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time.

To test this hypothesis, Mr. Ghayad then did an experiment, sending out résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.

So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.

And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision. The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy.

It’s hard to overstate how self-destructive this policy is. Indeed, the shadow of long-term unemployment means that austerity policies are counterproductive even in purely fiscal terms. Workers, after all, are taxpayers too; if our debt obsession exiles millions of Americans from productive employment, it will cut into future revenues and raise future deficits.

Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.

Keller and Krugman

Mr. Keller has read a book about the CIA written by one of his colleagues.  In “Cowboys and Eggheads” he natters on about taking out bad guys and missing the big picture.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Antisocial Network,” addresses the fruitless search for dehumanized money.  Here’s Keller:

My Times colleague Mark Mazzetti has a new book out that is getting a lot of attention, including some cinematic excerpts published in The Times, here and here. “The Way of the Knife” recounts the recent transformation of the Central Intelligence Agency from a traditional spying shop into more of a man-hunting paramilitary — custodian of lethal drones, sponsor of dark ops, employer of secret armies and shady contractors.

As an assassination bureau, the C.I.A. has had some spectacular successes. (The Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Laden was led by the C.I.A.) It has also come in for some fierce criticism from those who are uncomfortable with assassination in general, with the eerily impersonal methods of remote killing, with the civilian casualties, or with the timid oversight of an agency licensed to kill. And of course the demand for operational intelligence to aid these manhunts drove the C.I.A. into the practice of torture and rendition.

But Mazzetti’s important thought is not that war is a dirty business; it is that by turning our premier intelligence agency into a killing machine, we may have paid a price in national vigilance.

Alone among the many U.S. intelligence outfits (the number has grown to 16 or 17 depending on how you count) the C.I.A. has the job of supplying the president with the deep strategic intelligence that anticipates dangers and shapes American policy. The agency has always housed both covert operations and the more traditional gathering and analysis of information — “cowboys and eggheads,” as one agency-watcher put it. The worry is that the eggheads have become so caught up in serving the cowboys tactical intelligence about high-profile assassination targets that they have less bandwidth to devote to longer-term threats.

“The C.I.A.’s raison d’être is preventing big strategic surprises,” said Amy Zegart, an intelligence specialist at the Hoover Institution. “They do not exist to kill third-rate terrorists running around failed states.”

Gregory Treverton, a RAND Corporation expert who is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said that as hundreds of analysts flood into the subject of the moment, they are assigned to narrower and narrower slices of the problem. There is less standing back and figuring out how it adds up, what might happen next. “All the creativity is going to, can we identify, locate and take out the bad guys,” Treverton said. But unless somebody is asking where the bad guys came from and what drives them, we are fighting the symptom rather than the disease.

We have learned, to our peril, how much it matters when intelligence lets us down. The C.I.A., having been hollowed out in the ’90s after the end of the cold war, failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the C.I.A. got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong, drowning out more skeptical voices in the intelligence units of the State Department and Energy Department, and paving the way to a colossal blunder of a war.

At least twice before in recent memory the C.I.A. has been consumed by secret warfare that had unhappy endings. In the 1980s the agency joined forces with mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan against Soviet occupiers; the Soviets were routed, the Americans moved on, and the mujahedeen turned their jihad on us. At the same time, the agency was secretly, illegally backing the Nicaraguan contra rebels; that venture ended in defeat, indictments and embarrassment.

Jeffrey Smith, who has worked on intelligence issues as a Senate staffer, a State Department lawyer and the general counsel of the C.I.A., points out that it’s not just the spy agencies that have their attention monopolized by these ventures, but their clients in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House. “The problem with these big covert action programs,” a senior official once told Smith, “is that they become the policy of the United States.”

“When you start these programs, everybody is enthusiastic about them,” Smith said. “But to run them right takes a huge focus of senior leadership.” And other things get neglected.

By most accounts, including the assessment of intelligence insiders, academics and journalists who cover the subject, the conglomerate of intelligence agencies is in much better shape than it was before 9/11. That’s a low bar, but credit where credit is due. The agencies are better staffed and better at sharing information. It’s hard for an outsider to tell until something goes wrong, but high-priority topics like Iran’s nuclear program and China’s development of cyberweapons seem to be getting the emphasis they deserve.

Gary Samore, who worked in the Clinton Administration and then returned to oversee nuclear weapons-related intelligence for President Obama until January, said he felt well served by the agency’s collection and analysis.

“Of course the C.I.A. missed all the revolutions in the Arab world,” he said. “But we always miss the revolutions. We missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, we missed the revolution in Iran, we missed the overthrow in the Philippines. … It’s a normal human condition. We all expect continuity — until there’s change.”

He’s right, but when change does happen you hope the agency will be quick to catch up with unfolding events and provide the president with cleareyed reporting that will help position the U.S. to its best advantage. That requires the difficult, patient cultivation of sources on the ground, including the opposition. In the Muslim world, Mazzetti and some experts suspect, the C.I.A. had not acquired a wealth of sources in the opposition, and that may be partly because in places like Egypt and Libya the agency was focused on cozying up to the official spy agencies, hoping to tap into their information about Qaeda operatives.

The concern that essential intelligence has suffered from the paramilitary preoccupation is shared by some of the president’s own advisers. According to a Washington Post report last month, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board warned in a secret report last year that spy agencies were paying insufficient attention to China and the Middle East and other potential trouble spots and should shift emphasis back toward traditional intelligence work. The panel included Chuck Hagel, who has since become secretary of defense.

“Who knows what you’re missing?” said Lee Hamilton, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and another member of the advisory board (he emphasized he was speaking only for himself). Hamilton supports the president’s power to authorize targeted killing, but he worries that “the tail is wagging the dog.” He points out that traditional intelligence analysis has become more urgent because in our digitized world the profusion of data is overwhelming.

In Senate hearings before his confirmation as the new C.I.A. director, John Brennan conceded that the agency’s military focus is “a bit of an aberration from its traditional role” and promised “to take a look at that allocation of mission.” There is talk of transferring much of the killer drone program to the Pentagon, where it would be more accountable and better integrated with other military activities. But President Obama will almost certainly choose to keep some drone operations at the C.I.A., for those occasions when the mission requires secrecy or venturing into a sovereign country. (The C.I.A. ran the bin Laden mission because the military, on its own, would not be allowed to violate the air space of Pakistan without its permission.)

Rebuilding traditional intelligence collecting and analysis is not a simple matter of reassigning case officers. The expertise is not always transferable; the skills are not fungible. “You’ve had a whole generation of intelligence people who have come into the C.I.A. now that have only worked on military operations,” Hamilton said. Treverton says people in the clandestine service tell him of case officers who arrive at Langley after a few tours in Iraq:  “Their idea of meeting a source is with a Humvee and a military escort. They’ve never done real espionage tradecraft.”

Of course, reorienting the C.I.A. depends on the demands of its clients in the White House and its overseers in Congress. Much as policy makers insist they want smart, “over the horizon” intelligence, it’s today’s news that grabs their attention, and covert operations that excite them. I don’t suppose many of the boys in Congress grew up playing egghead.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Bitcoin’s wild ride may not have been the biggest business story of the past few weeks, but it was surely the most entertaining. Over the course of less than two weeks the price of the “digital currency” more than tripled. Then it fell more than 50 percent in a few hours. Suddenly, it felt as if we were back in the dot-com era.

The economic significance of this roller coaster was basically nil. But the furor over bitcoin was a useful lesson in the ways people misunderstand money — and in particular how they are misled by the desire to divorce the value of money from the society it serves.

What is bitcoin? It’s sometimes described as a way to make transactions online — but that in itself would be nothing new in a world of online credit-card and PayPal transactions. In fact, the Commerce Department estimates that by 2010 about 16 percent of total sales in America already took the form of e-commerce.

So how is bitcoin different? Unlike credit card transactions, which leave a digital trail, bitcoin transactions are designed to be anonymous and untraceable. When you transfer bitcoins to someone else, it’s as if you handed over a paper bag filled with $100 bills in a dark alley. And sure enough, as best as anyone can tell the main use of bitcoin so far, other than as a target for speculation, has been for online versions of those dark-alley exchanges, with bitcoins traded for narcotics and other illegal items.

But bitcoin evangelists insist that it’s about much more than greasing the path for illicit transactions. The biggest declared investors in bitcoins are the Winklevoss brothers, wealthy twins who successfully sued for a share of Facebook and were made famous by the movie “The Social Network” — and they make claims for the digital product similar to those made by goldbugs for their favorite metal. “We have elected,” declared Tyler Winklevoss recently, “to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”

The similarity to goldbug rhetoric isn’t a coincidence, since goldbugs and bitcoin enthusiasts — bitbugs? — tend to share both libertarian politics and the belief that governments are vastly abusing their power to print money. At the same time, it’s very peculiar, since bitcoins are in a sense the ultimate fiat currency, with a value conjured out of thin air. Gold’s value comes in part because it has nonmonetary uses, such as filling teeth and making jewelry; paper currencies have value because they’re backed by the power of the state, which defines them as legal tender and accepts them as payment for taxes. Bitcoins, however, derive their value, if any, purely from self-fulfilling prophecy, the belief that other people will accept them as payment.

However, let’s leave that strangeness on one side, along with the peculiar “mining” process — actually a process of complex calculation — used to add to the bitcoin stock. Instead, let’s focus on the two huge misconceptions — one practical, one philosophical — that underlie both goldbugism and bitbugism.

The practical misconception here — and it’s a big one — is the notion that we live in an era of wildly irresponsible money printing, with runaway inflation just around the corner. It’s true that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have greatly expanded their balance sheets — but they’ve done that explicitly as a temporary measure in response to economic crisis. I know, government officials are not to be trusted and all that, but the truth is that Ben Bernanke’s promises that his actions wouldn’t be inflationary have been vindicated year after year, while goldbugs’ dire warnings of inflation keep not coming true.

The philosophical misconception, however, seems to me to be even bigger. Goldbugs and bitbugs alike seem to long for a pristine monetary standard, untouched by human frailty. But that’s an impossible dream. Money is, as Paul Samuelson once declared, a “social contrivance,” not something that stands outside society. Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment.

Actually, you’d expect the Winklevosses, of all people, to get this, because in a way money is like a social network, which is useful only to the extent that other people use it. But I guess some people are just bothered by the notion that money is a human thing, and want the benefits of the monetary network without the social part. Sorry, it can’t be done.

So do we need a new form of money? I guess you could make that case if the money we actually have were misbehaving. But it isn’t. We have huge economic problems, but green pieces of paper are doing fine — and we should let them alone.

Keller and Krugman

Oh, gawd…  Bill Keller’s back.  In “About the Children” he’s decided to tell us all about what it means for kids when gay parents can marry.  I’ve got to admit, my hackles rise whenever I hear people wringing their hands about “the children” when we as a nation seem hell-bent on shredding the safety net that provides for those children.  According to the National Center for Children in Poverty 22% of American children live in poverty.  When do you think Mr. Keller will start writing about them?   Prof. Krugman has a question in “Insurance and Liberty:”  Is health coverage the death of liberty?  Here’s Keller:

The defenders of traditional marriage tell us the argument is, first and foremost, about the children. You might not know that from the buzz surrounding the Supreme Court deliberations. The children of gay and lesbian parents got a few splashes of attention, including a powerful endorsement of marriage equality from the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics and one sympathetic-sounding aside from Justice Anthony Kennedy during the hearings. But for the most part, the debate has focused on the rights of grown-ups and the powers of states, not so much on the well-being of children. And when that subject does come up, the discussion is often shallow or misleading.

So let’s talk about the children.

The stakes for children in this debate fall roughly into two categories. One is legal: A great scaffolding of laws and benefits created to keep children secure and loved is denied to children who grow up with parents of the same gender. Can that be solved without letting same-sex couples marry? The other is social: Researchers have attempted to ascertain whether kids who grow up with two moms or two dads fare differently from kids growing up with one of each. Is there any reason to think same-sex households are bad for children, and if so should policy makers tread carefully?

Take the legal question first.

Nobody knows how the Supreme Court will rule, but the best guess of court-watchers is this: The justices will throw out the federal Defense of Marriage Act, assuring that married same-sex couples will be entitled to approximately the same treatment under federal law as other couples. But they seem likely to leave it up to the states to decide whether gays can get married in the first place.

That means, first of all, that states can continue to deny children of homosexuals many safeguards that protect children of straight couples. The history of this issue is filled with stories of hardship and heartbreak befalling children whose parents are not recognized as — well, as parents. There are the cases of mothers and fathers turned away from a child’s hospital bed because they are not “family.” There are the cases of beloved adults denied visitation rights after a breakup. Many states restrict the ability of a gay parent to adopt or to respond to a child’s medical emergency. Divorce laws were created in large part to assure that children get financial and emotional support when marriages end: no marriage, no divorce, no support.

It is true that a well-crafted civil union law — one that assures gay and lesbian partners the same spousal parenting rights as marriage — can help remedy these cruelties. But many states do not offer civil unions at all. Among those that do, not all civil union laws are so rigorous; some are mere approximations of equality that do not confer full parental rights. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might refer to them as “skim-milk civil unions.”

And civil unions do not address the stigma attached to being treated as if your family is not a “real” family — a stigma that amounts to an official imprimatur for bullying and humiliation. “Kids understand and internalize the sense that something is wrong with their families and that they should be ashamed,” said Camilla Taylor of Lambda Legal, who has followed many of these cases through the courts.

Which brings us to the social question. Defenders of the status quo (including Justice Antonin Scalia) would have you believe that the research on children growing up with gay parents is deeply ambiguous. If you spend time in the recent archives of such periodicals as Pediatrics, Applied Developmental Science, Social Science Research and the Journal of Marriage and Family, you will learn otherwise.

Taken one by one, the studies are far from perfect. The samples are usually small and not random. Few are “longitudinal” — that is, following subjects over years or decades. Social science rarely delivers conclusive results under the best circumstances, and with same-sex marriage researchers face particular handicaps. The number of children who have been raised entirely by stable, same-sex couples is relatively small. (According to the demographer Gary Gates of U.C.L.A., a majority of children being raised by gay or lesbian parents were born to opposite-sex couples who later broke up.) Homosexuality still encounters bigotry that makes potential study subjects wary. And it is hard to untangle all the variables in the raising of children.

But it is fair to say that the research shows no significant disadvantage associated with being raised by lesbian mothers or gay fathers — not in academic performance, not in psychological health, not in social or sexual development, not in violent behavior or substance abuse. And the research leaves little doubt that stable, two-parent households (of whatever flavor) are likely to be better off financially, more attentive to the upbringing of children and more secure than single-parent households.

(You can find excellent roundups of this work in the March issue of Pediatrics, and in the amicus brief of the American Sociological Association.)

Of course, the burden of proof lies with opponents of marriage equality. In legal parlance, they are the ones who seek to establish a “governmental interest” that justifies discriminating against gay couples. So where’s their evidence?

They lean heavily on one study published last year by Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas. He compared two groups of young adults. The first group told interviewers that at some point in their upbringing a parent experienced a same-sex “romantic relationship.” In most cases, the parents subsequently broke up. In other words, this group wasn’t the offspring of committed gay couples but of failed unions, some of them probably sham marriages. It’s not even clear whether the parents who strayed were gay or lesbian, or simply experimenting. The second group consisted of kids who spent their childhoods in lasting, married, mom-and-dad families.

Guess which group had problems?

The study was pretty well demolished by peers. It may have confirmed the emotional toll of broken homes, but it said nothing much about growing up with gay parents. Regnerus, when I talked to him, conceded that his study compared apples and oranges, because “I didn’t have oranges.” He was unable to articulate what bearing his study had on gay marriage except that it “paints the reality of people’s lives as fairly complicated.”

Activists against same-sex marriage, however, are not all that particular about the quality of their evidence. They are happy to enlist and exaggerate dubious research to create the illusion that there is a scientific stalemate, and they often get away with it. When David Gregory of “Meet the Press” brought up the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics endorses marriage equality, Ralph Reed of Focus on Family retorted, “And the American College of Pediatricians came out the other way.” Nobody pointed out that this “college” is a tiny, conservative rump that broke away from the main pediatric group in 2002 over gay adoption. To quote its Web site, “The College bases its policies and positions upon scientific truth within a framework of ethical absolutes.” Among its inviolable beliefs are “the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death and the importance of the fundamental mother-father family (female-male) unit in the rearing of children.” Naturally, the college loves the Regnerus study.

Even if the research showed that children of same-sex couples were less well adjusted, which it does not, would we really want government to intervene? After all, there is research showing that children whose parents are of different races struggle more, on average, than children with parents of the same race. But no serious person suggests we turn back the clock on interracial marriage.

“It really doesn’t matter very much what Regnerus or anybody else shows,” concludes James Wright, the editor of the journal that published the Regnerus study and its critics. “It’s a question of fundamental civil rights.”

Next up is Prof. Krugman:

President Obama will soon release a new budget, and the commentary is already flowing fast and furious. Progressives are angry (with good reason) over proposed cuts to Social Security; conservatives are denouncing the call for more revenues. But it’s all Kabuki. Since House Republicans will block anything Mr. Obama proposes, his budget is best seen not as policy but as positioning, an attempt to gain praise from “centrist” pundits.

No, the real policy action at this point is in the states, where the question is, How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?

I’m referring, of course, to the question of how many Republican governors will reject the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of Obamacare. What does that have to do with freedom? In reality, nothing. But when it comes to politics, it’s a different story.

It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.

Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.

There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the “greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.” And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it’s pretty much all the right has.

As I’ve already suggested, the old trick of blaming the needy for their need doesn’t seem to play the way it used to, and especially not on health care: perhaps because the experience of losing insurance is so common, Medicaid enjoys remarkably strong public support. And now that health reform is the law of the land, the economic and fiscal case for individual states to accept Medicaid expansion is overwhelming. That’s why business interests strongly support expansion just about everywhere — even in Texas. But such practical concerns can be set aside if you can successfully argue that insurance is slavery.

Of course, it isn’t. In fact, it’s hard to think of a proposition that has been more thoroughly refuted by history than the notion that social insurance undermines a free society. Almost 70 years have passed since Friedrich Hayek predicted (or at any rate was understood by his admirers to predict) that Britain’s welfare state would put the nation on the slippery slope to Stalinism; 46 years have passed since Medicare went into effect; as far as most of us can tell, freedom hasn’t died on either side of the Atlantic.

In fact, the real, lived experience of Obamacare is likely to be one of significantly increased individual freedom. For all our talk of being the land of liberty, those holding one of the dwindling number of jobs that carry decent health benefits often feel anything but free, knowing that if they leave or lose their job, for whatever reason, they may not be able to regain the coverage they need. Over time, as people come to realize that affordable coverage is now guaranteed, it will have a powerful liberating effect.

But what we still don’t know is how many Americans will be denied that kind of liberation — a denial all the crueler because it will be imposed in the name of freedom.

Keller and Krugman

In “States Gone Wild” Mr. Keller has a question:  Is our indivisible nation coming apart at the seams?  Prof. Krugman, in “Hot Money Blues,” looks at dealing with love-’em-and-leave-’em investors.  Here’s Mr. Keller:

No sooner had Arkansas adopted the country’s most regressive abortion law earlier this month — a ban after about 12 weeks of pregnancy — than North Dakota lowered its limit to as early as six weeks. Both measures are expected to be ruled unconstitutional, but here’s my question: Is North Dakota that much more conservative than, say, South Dakota, where abortions are permitted up to 24 weeks?

Colorado has now decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Is Colorado really more libertarian than neighboring Wyoming, where possession can still get you a year in prison?

Pennsylvania allows same-sex couples to adopt children. Are Pennsylvanians so much more enlightened than the citizens of Ohio, where gay parents have hardly any rights?

Maryland has just decided to repeal the death penalty. Good for Maryland. But why not Delaware, next door, where the 17 inmates on death row are still biding time until their lethal injections?

And don’t get me started on gun laws. South Dakota is currently leading the race to the bottom by arming teachers in their classrooms, but just wait; the pandering to the gun lobby is ferociously competitive.

There is nothing especially new about states going their own way. We fought a civil war, after all. And we have become accustomed to categorizing states as red or blue, based on their electoral choices. But it feels as if every news cycle brings another seemingly random example of a state veering off the mainstream, especially on these issues of personal liberty. What’s up with that?

In recent years our disjointed political system has gotten considerable attention from journalists and academics seeking to explain why our supposedly indivisible nation seems so intractably divided. At the level of Congress, the diagnosis is pretty well understood: gerrymandering of Congressional districts makes incumbents safe in general elections but vulnerable in party primaries, where the most passionate voters decide the outcome. So the incumbents (these days, especially the Republicans) avoid any sign of reasonableness that could be used against them in a primary. The same thing is happening to some extent at the state level, but none of this fully explains the wild disparities.

Bill Bishop’s 2008 book “The Big Sort” attracted high-profile attention (Bill Clinton touted it) with its hypothesis that like-minded Americans were clustering in communities where they reinforced one another’s prejudices. According to this theory, Americans choose neighborhoods they find compatible: “pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”

Bishop’s book was provocative, and was pummeled by some political scientists for relying too much on data from presidential elections. Because they offer voters a stark either-or choice, presidential elections overstate the partisan divide. When you look at voter registration or opinion polling, the fastest-growing political allegiance is not red or blue but “independent.” And while there are anecdotal accounts of, for example, gay couples choosing homes in communities that respect their rights, there’s not much evidence that deliberate ideological self-segregation is a widespread phenomenon.

Dante Chinni and James Gimpel, in a 2010 book called “Our Patchwork Nation,” subdivided America into a dozen categories, with special emphasis on the urban-rural divide, to explain why different places go in such different directions. Gimpel, who teaches at the University of Maryland, told me that rural and small-town residents feel belittled by “what they perceive as the cultural imperialism of big cities.” They hunker around their Fox News, which feeds their resentment.

He is surely right about rural alienation, but, as Gimpel acknowledges, America is increasingly neither urban nor rural; it is suburban, or urban-ish. The Patchwork formula doesn’t fully explain why Iowa, one of our least urbanized states, has accepted same-sex marriage, or why voters in the most urbanized state, California, voted to reject it.

I heard a more satisfying if somewhat depressing explanation for the seemingly random eruptions of political idiosyncrasy from Samuel Abrams, who teaches politics at Sarah Lawrence and Stanford. Abrams, who has spent the last decade or so researching our political habits, begins with the evidence that most Americans are simply not engaged in local politics, except perhaps on pocketbook issues. In the absence of public attention, motivated, well-financed and sometimes extreme elites have captured the lawmaking process in many state capitals. Legislatures are vulnerable to (and often populated by) the most ardent believers in a cause, the ones who care enough to take the time, raise the money, turn out on Election Day and lobby relentlessly.

“People who participate in state and local government tend not to be representative of the masses at all,” Abrams told me. “They tend to be highly engaged political elites — 15 percent of the population who think they’re fighting this culture war. They’ll see an opening. They’ll see a judge, they’ll see a legislature that looks amenable to something, and they’ll try to push it through and build a groundswell around that.”

This dynamic applies to both liberals and conservatives, by the way, although a variety of studies show Republicans have pulled much further to the right than Democrats have to the left.

To this mix of public indifference and activist opportunism, people who study our odd political folkways add several other contributing factors:

Bill Bishop of “Big Sort” fame pointed out to me that there are fewer divided state legislatures — one house Republican, one house Democratic — than at any time in decades. State legislatures are increasingly partisan monocultures, given to herd-like behavior. “Mixed company moderates,” he said. (Except when, as in today’s Washington, it paralyzes.)

Morris Fiorina of Stanford says that state legislatures change hands more often than they used to, so lawmakers “believe that they may have one shot to accomplish their policy goals before they lose power. They go for it.”

Michael Dimock of Pew Research adds that the drastic downsizing of statehouse news coverage means state lawmakers operate with less accountability.

So in Arkansas the amendment outlawing abortion at 12 weeks was not the product of a popular groundswell, but largely the triumph of a single, entrepreneurial Tea Party state senator, who whisked the measure through a newly Republican, mostly inexperienced Legislature with virtually no debate. As Jay Barth, a politics professor at Hendrix College in Arkansas, notes, thanks to strict term limits the Legislature in Little Rock doesn’t develop strong leadership and discipline; it is susceptible to populist charisma — from right and left, but these days mostly right.

Of course, it helps if those with an agenda have money behind them. In Colorado, liberals like billionaire Peter Lewis sensed an opportunity, outspent opponents 10 to 1, and got an amendment to legalize marijuana.

Sometimes, as in the growing momentum for gay marriage, states catch a changing national tide. Sometimes, as in Arizona’s reactionary anti-immigrant laws, states seem to be gasping the last gasp of a waning trend.

When we disapprove of the outcome — in my case, those extremist anti-abortion laws — we call it opportunism or special-interest politics. When legislatures bypass public opinion and do something we admire — in my case, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s successful push to abolish the death penalty in Maryland, where 60 percent of voters favor executions — we call it leadership.

Does all of this make for a healthy democracy? If 80 percent of the electorate is sitting on the sidelines, that’s a recipe for demagogy and cynicism. But maybe what we’re seeing is states performing a useful role as laboratories of policy. These experiments may produce smart ideas that deserve to be replicated at the national level: the Massachusetts health care law, for example, which inspired Obamacare. Or the state labs may cook up poisons — Arizona’s anti-immigrant statutes, or those new, restrictive abortion laws — and you pray that Congress or the courts will find an antidote.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Whatever the final outcome in the Cyprus crisis — we know it’s going to be ugly; we just don’t know exactly what form the ugliness will take — one thing seems certain: for the time being, and probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country. In fact, controls may well be in place by the time you read this. And that’s not all: Depending on exactly how this plays out, Cypriot capital controls may well have the blessing of the International Monetary Fund, which has already supported such controls in Iceland.

That’s quite a remarkable development. It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked. But it may also mark at least the beginning of the end for something much bigger: the era when unrestricted movement of capital was taken as a desirable norm around the world.

It wasn’t always thus. In the first couple of decades after World War II, limits on cross-border money flows were widely considered good policy; they were more or less universal in poorer nations, and present in a majority of richer countries too. Britain, for example, limited overseas investments by its residents until 1979; other advanced countries maintained restrictions into the 1980s. Even the United States briefly limited capital outflows during the 1960s.

Over time, however, these restrictions fell out of fashion. To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology, the assumption that if financial markets want to move money across borders, there must be a good reason, and bureaucrats shouldn’t stand in their way.

As a result, countries that did step in to limit capital flows — like Malaysia, which imposed what amounted to a curfew on capital flight in 1998 — were treated almost as pariahs. Surely they would be punished for defying the gods of the market!

But the truth, hard as it may be for ideologues to accept, is that unrestricted movement of capital is looking more and more like a failed experiment.

It’s hard to imagine now, but for more than three decades after World War II financial crises of the kind we’ve lately become so familiar with hardly ever happened. Since 1980, however, the roster has been impressive: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 1982. Sweden and Finland in 1991. Mexico again in 1995. Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea in 1998. Argentina again in 2002. And, of course, the more recent run of disasters: Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Cyprus.

What’s the common theme in these episodes? Conventional wisdom blames fiscal profligacy — but in this whole list, that story fits only one country, Greece. Runaway bankers are a better story; they played a role in a number of these crises, from Chile to Sweden to Cyprus. But the best predictor of crisis is large inflows of foreign money: in all but a couple of the cases I just mentioned, the foundation for crisis was laid by a rush of foreign investors into a country, followed by a sudden rush out.

I am, of course, not the first person to notice the correlation between the freeing up of global capital and the proliferation of financial crises; Harvard’s Dani Rodrik began banging this drum back in the 1990s. Until recently, however, it was possible to argue that the crisis problem was restricted to poorer nations, that wealthy economies were somehow immune to being whipsawed by love-’em-and-leave-’em global investors. That was a comforting thought — but Europe’s travails demonstrate that it was wishful thinking.

And it’s not just Europe. In the last decade America, too, experienced a huge housing bubble fed by foreign money, followed by a nasty hangover after the bubble burst. The damage was mitigated by the fact that we borrowed in our own currency, but it’s still our worst crisis since the 1930s.

Now what? I don’t expect to see a wholesale, sudden rejection of the idea that money should be free to go wherever it wants, whenever it wants. There may well, however, be a process of erosion, as governments intervene to limit both the pace at which money comes in and the rate at which it goes out. Global capitalism is, arguably, on track to become substantially less global.

And that’s O.K. Right now, the bad old days when it wasn’t that easy to move lots of money across borders are looking pretty good.

The Pasty Little Putz, Keller, Friedman and Bruni

MoDo is off today, so I guess that’s why we get Keller today instead of Monday…  The Pasty Little Putz has decided to tell us “What the Church Needs Now.”  He says renewal from below depends on moral credibility at the top.  Mr. Keller, in “Smart Drones,” says coming soon: weapons that have minds of their own.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “It’s Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win,” says a carbon tax would be a better budget solution than the foolish sequester.  In “Beyond the Bedroom” Mr. Bruni says the Catholic Church is more persuasive on economic justice than on sexual morality. The new pope should put his focus there.  Here’s the Putz:

The man who was transformed last week from Jorge Mario Bergoglio into the first Pope Francis faces a long list of challenges, each seemingly more daunting than the last. There’s the immediate need to reform a Vatican bureaucracy whose dysfunction helped sabotage his predecessor’s reign. There’s the larger challenge of lifting the shadow of the sex abuse crisis from the Western church. And then comes the task of making Catholic Christianity seem vital and appealing in cultures where the new pope’s church is widely regarded as archaic, irrelevant, or malign.

But in a sense all of these challenges have one solution, or at least one place where any solution has to start. Francis’s reign will be a success if it begins to restore the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy and clergy, and it will be a failure if it does not.

Catholics believe that their church is designed to survive the lapses of its leaders. The Mass is the Mass even if the priest is a sinner. Bishops do not need to be holy to preserve the teachings of the faith. The litany of the saints includes countless figures — from Joan of Arc to the newly canonized Mary MacKillop, an Australian nun involved in the reporting of child abuse by a priest — who suffered injustices from church authorities in their lifetimes.

But it’s one thing for Catholics in a Catholic culture, possessed of shared premises and shared moral ideals, to accept a certain amount of “do as I say, not as I do” from their pastors and preachers.

It’s quite another to ask a culture that doesn’t accept Catholic moral ideals to respect an institution whose leaders can’t seem to live out the virtues that they urge on others.

In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.

Such worldliness should not be confused with atheism. Our age is still religious; it’s just made its peace with human appetites and all the varied ways they intertwine. From the sermons of Joel Osteen to the epiphanies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” our spiritual oracles still urge us to seek the supernatural, the numinous, the divine. They just dismiss the idea that the divine could possibly want anything for us except for what we already want for ourselves.

Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people are less likely to form families. Absent ideals of solidarity, more people live and age and die alone. The social landscape that we take for granted is one that many earlier generations would have regarded as dystopian: sex and reproduction have both been ruthlessly commodified, adult freedoms are enjoyed at the expense of children’s interests, fewer children grow up with both a mother and a father, and fewer and fewer children are even born at all.

So there are shadows on our liberated society, doubts that creep in around the edges, moments when scolds and moralists and even popes almost seem to have a point. Which helps explain, perhaps, the strange, self-contradictory defensiveness that greets the Catholic Church’s persistent refusal to simply bless every new development and call it progress. (Nobody cares what the pope thinks — and I demand that he think exactly as I do!)

It explains, too, why the appropriate moral outrage with which the secular press has covered scandals in the church has often included a subtext of vindication and relief. (They stand in judgment on the rest of us, but their own “ideals” just lead to repression and perversion. They claim to be above materialism, but they’re obviously in it for the same things as everyone else …)

If Catholicism has a future in the Western world as something more than a foil, an Other and a symbol of the Benighted Past We Have Safely Left Behind, it needs its leaders to set an example that proves these voices wrong. Before anything else, that requires a generation of priests and bishops who hold themselves to a higher standard — higher than their immediate predecessors, and higher than the world.

It also requires more from the new pope than an evocative name and a humble posture. Catholicism needs someone like Pius V, the 16th-century pontiff at whose tomb Francis prayed on the day after his elevation — a disciplinarian whose housecleaning helped further the Counter-Reformation. The Vatican needs purgation at the top, to enable real renewal from below. And the church as a whole needs to offer and embody proof — in Rome, the local parish and everywhere in between — that the alternative Catholicism preaches can actually be lived.

And now cometh Mr. Keller and the dystopian future:

If you find the use of remotely piloted warrior drones troubling, imagine that the decision to kill a suspected enemy is not made by an operator in a distant control room, but by the machine itself. Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger.

Welcome to the future of warfare. While Americans are debating the president’s power to order assassination by drone, powerful momentum — scientific, military and commercial — is propelling us toward the day when we cede the same lethal authority to software.

Next month, several human rights and arms control organizations are meeting in London to introduce a campaign to ban killer robots before they leap from the drawing boards. Proponents of a ban include many of the same people who succeeded in building a civilized-world consensus against the use of crippling and indiscriminate land mines. This time they are taking on what may be the trickiest problem arms control has ever faced.

The arguments against developing fully autonomous weapons, as they are called, range from moral (“they are evil”) to technical (“they will never be that smart”) to visceral (“they are creepy”).

“This is something people seem to feel at a very gut level is wrong,” says Stephen Goose, director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, which has assumed a leading role in challenging the dehumanizing of warfare. “The ugh factor comes through really strong.”

Some robotics experts doubt that a computer will ever be able to reliably distinguish between an enemy and an innocent, let alone judge whether a load of explosives is the right, or proportional, response. What if the potential target is already wounded, or trying to surrender? And even if artificial intelligence achieves or surpasses a human level of competence, the critics point out, it will never be able to summon compassion.

Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield and chairman of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, tells the story of an American patrol in Iraq that came upon a group of insurgents, leveled their rifles, then realized the men were carrying a coffin off to a funeral. Killing mourners could turn a whole village against the United States. The Americans lowered their weapons. Could a robot ever make that kind of situational judgment?

Then there is the matter of accountability. If a robot bombs a school, who gets the blame: the soldier who sent the machine into the field? His commander? The manufacturer? The inventor?

At senior levels of the military there are misgivings about weapons with minds of their own. Last November the Defense Department issued what amounts to a 10-year moratorium on developing them while it discusses the ethical implications and possible safeguards. It’s a squishy directive, likely to be cast aside in a minute if we learn that China has sold autonomous weapons to Iran, but it is reassuring that the military is not roaring down this road without giving it some serious thought.

Compared with earlier heroic efforts to outlaw land mines and curb nuclear proliferation, the campaign against licensed-to-kill robots faces some altogether new obstacles.

For one thing, it’s not at all clear where to draw the line. While the Terminator scenario of cyborg soldiers is decades in the future, if not a complete fantasy, the militaries of the world are already moving along a spectrum of autonomy, increasing, bit by bit, the authority of machines in combat.

The military already lets machines make critical decisions when things are moving too fast for deliberate human intervention. The United States has long had Aegis-class warships with automated antimissile defenses that can identify, track and shoot down incoming threats in seconds. And the role of machinery is expanding toward the point where that final human decision to kill will be largely predetermined by machine-generated intelligence.

“Is it the finger on the trigger that’s the problem?” asks Peter W. Singer, a specialist in the future of war at the Brookings Institution. “Or is it the part that tells me ‘that’s a bad guy’?”

Israel is the first country to make and deploy (and sell, to China, India, South Korea and others) a weapon that can attack pre-emptively without a human in charge. The hovering drone called the Harpy is programmed to recognize and automatically divebomb any radar signal that is not in its database of “friendlies.” No reported misfires so far, but suppose an adversary installs its antiaircraft radar on the roof of a hospital?

Professor Sharkey points to the Harpy as a weapon that has already crossed a worrisome threshold and probably can’t be called back. Other systems are close, like the Navy’s X-47B, a pilotless, semi-independent, carrier-based combat plane that is in the testing stage. For now, it is unarmed but it is built with two weapons bays. We are already ankle-deep in the future.

For military commanders the appeal of autonomous weapons is almost irresistible and not quite like any previous technological advance. Robots are cheaper than piloted systems, or even drones, which require scores of technicians backing up the remote pilot. These systems do not put troops at risk of death, injury or mental trauma. They don’t get tired or frightened. A weapon that is not tethered to commands from home base can continue to fight after an enemy jams your communications, which is increasingly likely in the age of electromagnetic pulse and cyberattacks.

And no military strategist wants to cede an advantage to a potential adversary. More than 70 countries currently have drones, and some of them are hard at work on the technology to let those drones off their virtual leashes.

“Even if you had a ban, how would you enforce it?” asks Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist and director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Tech. “It’s just software.”

The military — and the merchants of war — are not the only ones invested in this technology. Robotics is a hyperactive scientific frontier that runs from the most sophisticated artificial intelligence labs down to middle-school computer science programs. Worldwide, organized robotics competitions engage a quarter of a million school kids. (My 10-year-old daughter is one of them.) And the science of building killer robots is not so easily separated from the science of making self-driving cars or computers that excel at “Jeopardy.”

Professor Arkin argues that automation can also make war more humane. Robots may lack compassion, but they also lack the emotions that lead to calamitous mistakes, atrocities and genocides: vengefulness, panic, tribal animosity.

“My friends who served in Vietnam told me that they fired — when they were in a free-fire zone — at anything that moved,” he said. “I think we can design intelligent, lethal, autonomous systems that can potentially do better than that.”

Arkin argues that autonomous weapons need to be constrained, but not by abruptly curtailing research. He advocates a moratorium on deployment and a full-blown discussion of ways to keep humans in charge.

Peter Singer of Brookings is also wary of a weapons ban: “I’m supportive of the intent, to draw attention to the slippery slope we’re going down. But we have a history that doesn’t make me all that optimistic.”

Like Singer, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for an enforceable ban on death-dealing robots, but I’d love to be proved wrong. If war is made to seem impersonal and safe, about as morally consequential as a video game, I worry that autonomous weapons deplete our humanity. As unsettling as the idea of robots’ becoming more like humans is the prospect that, in the process, we become more like robots.

And next up is The Moustache of Wisdom who seems to have forgotten that the Republicans will refuse to consider any new taxes:

One of my favorite quotes about the state of U.S. politics was offered a couple years ago by Gerald Seib, a Wall Street Journal columnist, when he observed that “America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so. A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.” That’s us today — our entire political system is guilty of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for ourselves.

I raise this now because it strikes me as crazy that one of the obvious solutions to our budget, energy and environmental problems — the one that would be the least painful and have the best long-term impact (a carbon tax) — is off the table. Meanwhile, the solution that is as dumb as the day is long — a budget sequester that slashes spending indiscriminately — is on the table.

Shrinking the tax deduction for charity is on the table. Shrinking Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the poor are on the table. But a carbon tax that could close the deficit and clean the air, weaken petro-dictators, strengthen the dollar, drive clean-tech innovation and still leave some money to lower corporate and income taxes is off the table. So the solutions that are lose-lose and divisive are on the table, while the solution that is win-win-win-win-win — and has both liberal and conservative supporters — is off the table.

Writing in this newspaper in support of a carbon tax back in 2007, N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist, who was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush and to Mitt Romney, argued that “the idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them ‘Pigovian taxes.’ Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. … Those vying for elected office, however, are reluctant to sign on to this agenda. Their political consultants are no fans of taxes, Pigovian or otherwise. Republican consultants advise using the word ‘tax’ only if followed immediately by the word ‘cut.’ Democratic consultants recommend the word ‘tax’ be followed by ‘on the rich.’ ”

Yes, to win passage of any carbon tax, Republicans would insist that it be revenue neutral — to be offset entirely by cuts in corporate taxes and taxes on personal income. But maybe they could be persuaded otherwise. In an ideal world, you would have 45 percent go to pay down the deficit so that we don’t have to cut entitlements as much — appealing to liberals and greens — and have 45 percent go to reducing corporate and income taxes — to encourage work and investment and appeal to conservatives. The remaining 10 percent could be rebated to low-income households for whom such a tax would be a burden.

According to the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at the nonpartisan Resources for the Future, a tax of $25 per ton of carbon-dioxide emitted — through the combustion of fossil fuels used in electricity production, commercial and residential heating and transportation — “would raise approximately $125 billion annually.” This $125 billion “could allow federal personal income tax reductions of about 15 percent or corporate income tax reductions of about 70 percent, if all carbon tax revenues were used to replace current tax revenues. Alternatively, the federal deficit could be reduced by approximately $1.25 trillion over 10 years” — roughly what we are trying to do through the foolish sequester. Such a tax would add about 21 cents per gallon of gasoline and about 1.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity. It could be phased in gradually as the economy improves.

Experts believe that the mere signal of a carbon tax would get companies to become more energy efficient. And that’s the point. As part of any grand bargain — which will have to include spending cuts and tax increases — introducing a carbon tax into the mix makes all kinds of options easier and smarter.

Alas, right now both sides are trying to inflict maximum pain on the other, rather than framing the debate as: “Here’s the world we’re living in; here’s what we need to thrive; and, if we cut and tax here, we can invest in these 21st-century growth engines over here.” Our goal is not to balance the budget. It’s to make America great.

So how come the best ideas are off the table? (Blessedly, Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California, is now working to get some kind of carbon tax on the table.) Several reasons, argues Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest and author of a smart new e-book, “Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What to Do About It.”

First, because our democracy today is perverted more than ever by deep-pocketed lobbies and oligopolies. So, “in order to get and stay elected today, you have to raise huge sums of money from corporations, wealthy individuals and dues-laden unions,” Garfinkle notes, and all that money leads to “twisted decision-making at the high-politics level” and “regulatory capture” at the bureaucratic-administrative level. The fossil fuel, auto and power companies have bought a lot of politicians to block a carbon tax.

The only way around them, argues Garfinkle, would be for leaders to galvanize the public, but that requires building “governing coalitions” in the center rather than “political coalitions” that can get you elected but little else after that. Obama is belatedly trying to do that; the Republican Party hasn’t even tried. “This is what real leaders do,” said Garfinkle. “They change the conversation.” They don’t just read the polls; they shape the polls.

But we can’t put this all on lobbyists. It’s also our generation. “We’re the most self-indulgent generation in American history,” argues Garfinkle, always demanding more services than we’re ready to pay for. “Too many of us want to be unbound by broader social obligations, but the network of those obligations creates the moral ballast that makes good governance possible.”

As Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen note in their insightful book, “Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way Between West and East,” we prefer a “Diet Coke culture — sweetness without calories, consumption without savings and safety nets without taxes.” No wonder anything hard or smart is off the table. We pushed it there.

And last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

It was too much to hope that after the white smoke rose and the TV anchors began nervously filling time and the cameras lingered for what seemed an eternity on that balcony over St. Peter’s Square, the man who stepped onto it would be someone open to revisiting the most archaic, obsolete matters of Roman Catholic doctrine. The group electing him was assembled by the last two popes, both conservatives. Its choice was bound to be more carbon copy than new page.

But it’s not too much to hope that the man who did appear there — and who has lived a willfully humble material existence until now, and took the name of the poor’s patron saint — will change the church’s emphasis. That’s the great opportunity before Pope Francis, whose biography and style make him an ideal candidate to point the church toward a new conversation and a better focus for its spiritual energies. To have it dwell less in the bedroom, more in the soup kitchen.

It’s time for the church to stop talking so much about sex. It’s the perfect time, in fact.

It’s on matters of sexual morality that the church has lost much of its authority. And it’s on matters of sexual morality that it largely wastes its breath. By insisting on mandatory celibacy for a priesthood winnowed and sometimes warped by that, by opposing the use of contraceptives for birth control, by casting judgment on homosexuals and by decrying divorce while running something of an annulment mill, the church’s leaders have enraged and alienated Catholics whose common sense and whose experience of the real world tell them that none of that is wise, kind or necessary.

The church’s leaders have also set themselves up to be dismissed as hypocrites, unable to uphold the very virtues they promulgate. Just weeks before the conclave, the most senior Catholic prelate in Britain, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, resigned his post, forgoing a trip to Rome and a vote on the next pope, because he’d been accused of, and admitted to, sexual misconduct. His case suggested the potential loneliness of a Catholic clergyman’s circumstances, and those circumstances, in the eyes of many Catholics, cast priests as odd, flawed messengers and counselors on the subject of a person’s intimate life.

The new pope’s own story includes a bold lesson on Catholics’ estrangement from, and defiance of, church edicts in this regard. More than 90 percent of Argentines identify themselves as Catholic, and in 2010, as the country’s politicians debated the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage, Pope Francis — who was then a cardinal, and arguably the most prominent church official in the country — lobbied vociferously, even venomously, against that proposed law. He called it nothing less than a “plan of the devil.” It nonetheless passed, with some observers speculating that the stridency of his opposition worked in its favor. Argentina is now one of 11 countries that have legalized gay marriage. Two of the others, Spain and Portugal, also have populations that are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, at least nominally.

The child sexual abuse crisis, of course, has factored mightily into the church’s eroded credibility on sexual morality. And the media’s sustained examination of that crisis has made it difficult for church leaders to redirect attention toward the church’s concern for economic justice, its ministry to the needy and the extraordinary work that many of the church’s servants perform on those fronts.

But new cases and new revelations are ebbing or certain to ebb. Fewer cardinals and bishops now indulge the kind of denial that protected molesters and abetted cover-ups. And there’s not a watchful parent anywhere who would unquestioningly let a son or daughter go off with Father Bruce for long periods of time. Years ago, such permission aggravated the problem: priests — men of God — were trusted in situations where no other adult with an unusually intense interest in children would be. That epoch is over, that innocence lost.

POPE Francis comes along at an opportune juncture. There’s a growing consciousness and worry about inequities of wealth in a world in which the estimated 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty, with an income of $1.25 a day or less, outnumber the roughly 1.2 billion Catholics.

That desperation is fertile territory for the church, whose voice is most persuasive and essential on the landscapes of hunger, homelessness, sickness, war. To many Catholics, active and lapsed, the beauty of the faith and the essence of Jesus Christ reside in a big-hearted compassion that has been eclipsed and often contradicted by church leaders’ excursions into the culture wars.

Pope Francis could pull back on those excursions. He’d be wise to, and he’s well positioned to. In Argentina he was known in part for his rejection of material wealth and his concern for those without it. He opted for a simple apartment over a baronial residence. Did his own cooking. Rode the bus. Advised supporters not to travel all the way to Rome for the ceremony in which he became a cardinal.

The money necessary for the trip, he told them, was better donated to a good cause.

And during his first 48 hours as pope, he clung to that sort of humility, riding with other cardinals in a minivan rather than alone in a papal chariot. The vigor with which fellow cardinals and Vatican spokesmen heralded this suggested their eagerness for a new image for the church and their understanding that the pivot from Benedict XVI to Francis — from furs to frugality — might provide it.

It’s a gilded enclave that Francis is entering, one of grand rooms, majestic artwork, regal costumes. From my time on the papal plane a decade ago, I remember sumptuous meals wheeled up to the first-class section where Vatican officials sat. They ate well.

And that has turned off many Catholics: the perception that these officials are coddled, arrogant and out of touch. Francis could challenge that and, in doing so, have a real impact.

I know more than a few Catholics who, despite no other involvement in the church, make it a point to have their children christened. I always figured them to be superstitious. They’re hedging their bets.

But there’s more to it. On the far side of all the church scandals and all its misspent energy, these Catholics still see a fundamental set of values, a compass, that they don’t want to lose touch with or give up on. The church’s stubborn attachment to certain negotiable traditions and unenlightened positions has distanced them, but they’re not entirely gone. It’ll be interesting to see how, and if, Francis tries to bring them back.

Keller and Krugman

Mr. Keller has a question in “Private Manning’s Confidant:”  What if WikiLeaks’s source had given his secrets to The New York Times?  It’s a spectacularly self-serving piece.  Prof. Krugman, in “Dwindling Deficit Disorder,” says there is no need for America’s long-run fiscal concerns to drive its budget policy today.  Here’s Mr. Keller:

In early 2010, Pfc. Bradley Manning methodically uploaded a digital mother lode of classified United States military and diplomatic documents to the Internet insurgents of WikiLeaks. As everyone knows, WikiLeaks made these secret archives available to a few major news outlets, including this one. Many illuminating and troubling stories were published, and Washington has been gnashing its teeth ever since.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is, as far as we know, still hiding out in Ecuador’s embassy in London, afraid that he might be extradited for his part in this hemorrhage of secrets, though the only allegations outstanding against him involve accusations of sex crimes in Sweden. Meanwhile, Manning, a 25-year-old low-level intelligence geek, is in pretrial hearings at Fort Meade, Md. He has pleaded guilty to crimes carrying up to 20 years of prison time, and the government is piling on more charges, including Article 104 of the military code, “aiding the enemy,” which could get him life without parole.

In his statement to the military court, Manning said that before he fell in with the antisecrecy guerrillas at WikiLeaks, he tried to deliver his trove of stolen documents to The Washington Post and The New York Times. At The Post, he was put off when a reporter told him that before she could commit to anything she’d have to get a senior editor involved. At The Times, Manning said, he left a message on voice mail but never got a call back. It’s puzzling to me that a skilled techie capable of managing one of the most monumental leaks ever couldn’t figure out how to get an e-mail or phone message to an editor or a reporter at The Times, a feat scores of readers manage every day.

But what if he had? What if he had succeeded in delivering his pilfered documents to The Times? What would be different, for Manning and the rest of us?

First of all, I can say with some confidence that The Times would have done exactly what it did with the archive when it was supplied to us via WikiLeaks: assigned journalists to search for material of genuine public interest, taken pains to omit information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed, and published our reports with a flourish. The documents would have made news — big news.

But somewhat less of it. While in reality The Times and the public benefited from a collegial partnership with London’s Guardian and other papers that took part in the WikiLeaks fiesta, I’m pretty sure that if we had been the sole recipient we would not have shared Manning’s gift with other news organizations. That is partly for competitive reasons, but also because sharing a treasury of raw intelligence, especially with foreign news media, might have increased the legal jeopardy for The Times and for our source. So our exclusive would have been a coup for The Times, but something would have been lost. By sharing the database widely — including with a range of local news outlets that mined the material for stories of little interest to a global news operation — WikiLeaks got much more mileage out of the secret cables than we would have done.

If Manning had connected with The Times, we would have found ourselves in a relationship with a nervous, troubled, angry young Army private who was offering not so much documentation of a particular government outrage as a chance to fish in a sea of secrets. Having never met Manning (he was in custody by the time we got the WikiLeaks documents), I can only guess what that relationship would have been like. Complicated. Probably tense. We would, of course, have honored any agreement to protect his identity, though Manning was not so good at covering his own tracks. (He spilled the story of his leaking in long instant-messenger chats with an ex-hacker, who turned him in.) Once he was arrested, we’d surely have editorialized against the brutality of his solitary confinement — as The Times has already done — and perhaps protested the disturbing overkill of the “aiding the enemy” charge. (If Manning’s leak provided comfort to the enemy, then so does every news story about cuts in defense spending, or opposition to drone strikes, or setbacks in Afghanistan.) Beyond that, we’d have made sure Manning knew upfront that he was on his own, as we did with the last leaker of this magnitude, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame.

“When the government moved to prosecute Ellsberg, we felt no obligation to assist him,” Max Frankel, who was The Times’s Washington bureau chief at the time, recalled the other day. “He was committing an act of civil disobedience and presumably knew that required accepting the punishment. We were privately pleased that the prosecution overreached and failed, but we did not consider ourselves his partner in any way.”

The most important thing that would not be much different if The Times had been his outlet would be Manning’s legal liability. The law provides First Amendment protection for a free press, but not for those who take an oath to protect government secrets. This administration has a particular, chilling intolerance for leakers — and digital footprints make them easier to catch these days — but I can’t imagine that any administration would have hesitated to prosecute Manning.

But if Manning had been our direct source, the consequences might have been slightly mitigated. Although as a matter of law I believe WikiLeaks and The New York Times are equally protected by the First Amendment, it’s possible the court’s judgment of the leaker might be colored by the fact that he delivered the goods to a group of former hackers with an outlaw sensibility and an antipathy toward American interests. Will that cost Manning at sentencing time? I wonder. And it might explain the piling on of maximum charges. During pretrial, the judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked whether the prosecution would be pressing the same charges if Manning had leaked to The Times. “Yes, Ma’am,” was the reply. Maybe so. But I suspect the fact that Manning chose the anti-establishment WikiLeaks as his collaborator made the government more eager to add on that dubious charge of “aiding the enemy.”

If Manning had delivered his material to The Times, WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein. In fact, you might not have heard of WikiLeaks. The group has had other middling scoops, but Manning put it on the map.

And, finally, if he had dealt with The Times, maybe we would better understand Bradley Manning. Lionized by WikiLeaks and his fan base as a whistle-blower and martyr, cast by his prosecutors as a villainous traitor, he has become dueling caricatures. Until the court proceedings, the only window into Manning’s psyche was the voluminous transcript of his online chats with the ex-hacker, Adrian Lamo, published by Wired magazine. It portrays a young man, in his own words, “emotionally fractured” — a gay man in an institution not hospitable to gays, fragile, lonely, a little pleased with his own cleverness, a little vague about his motives. His political views come across as inchoate. When asked, he has trouble recalling any specific outrages that needed exposing. His cause was “open diplomacy” or — perhaps in jest — “worldwide anarchy.”

At Fort Meade, Manning delivered a more coherent explanation of what drove him. Appalled by the human collateral damage of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, he says, he set out to “document the true cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Intrigued by his reading of State Department cables, he felt a need to let taxpayers in on the “backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity” that are the dark underside of diplomacy. Was this sense of mission there from the start, or was it shaped afterward by the expectations of the Free Bradley Manning enthusiasts? The answer would probably make no difference to the court. But it might help determine history’s verdict.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

For three years and more, policy debate in Washington has been dominated by warnings about the dangers of budget deficits. A few lonely economists have tried from the beginning to point out that this fixation is all wrong, that deficit spending is actually appropriate in a depressed economy. But even though the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far — where are the soaring interest rates we were promised? — protests that we are having the wrong conversation have consistently fallen on deaf ears.

What’s really remarkable at this point, however, is the persistence of the deficit fixation in the face of rapidly changing facts. People still talk as if the deficit were exploding, as if the United States budget were on an unsustainable path; in fact, the deficit is falling more rapidly than it has for generations, it is already down to sustainable levels, and it is too small given the state of the economy.

Start with the raw numbers. America’s budget deficit soared after the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that went with it, as revenue plunged and spending on unemployment benefits and other safety-net programs rose. And this rise in the deficit was a good thing! Federal spending helped sustain the economy at a time when the private sector was in panicked retreat; arguably, the stabilizing role of a large government was the main reason the Great Recession didn’t turn into a full replay of the Great Depression.

But after peaking in 2009 at $1.4 trillion, the deficit began coming down. The Congressional Budget Office expects the deficit for fiscal 2013 (which began in October and is almost half over) to be $845 billion. That may still sound like a big number, but given the state of the economy it really isn’t.

Bear in mind that the budget doesn’t have to be balanced to put us on a fiscally sustainable path; all we need is a deficit small enough that debt grows more slowly than the economy. To take the classic example, America never did pay off the debt from World War II — in fact, our debt doubled in the 30 years that followed the war. But debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell by three-quarters over the same period.

Right now, a sustainable deficit would be around $460 billion. The actual deficit is bigger than that. But according to new estimates by the budget office, half of our current deficit reflects the effects of a still-depressed economy. The “cyclically adjusted” deficit — what the deficit would be if we were near full employment — is only about $423 billion, which puts it in the sustainable range; next year the budget office expects that number to fall to just $172 billion. And that’s why budget office projections show the nation’s debt position more or less stable over the next decade.

So we do not, repeat do not, face any kind of deficit crisis either now or for years to come.

There are, of course, longer-term fiscal issues: rising health costs and an aging population will put the budget under growing pressure over the course of the 2020s. But I have yet to see any coherent explanation of why these longer-run concerns should determine budget policy right now. And as I said, given the needs of the economy, the deficit is currently too small.

Put it this way: Smart fiscal policy involves having the government spend when the private sector won’t, supporting the economy when it is weak and reducing debt only when it is strong. Yet the cyclically adjusted deficit as a share of G.D.P. is currently about what it was in 2006, at the height of the housing boom — and it is headed down.

Yes, we’ll want to reduce deficits once the economy recovers, and there are gratifying signs that a solid recovery is finally under way. But unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, is still unacceptably high. “The boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity,” John Maynard Keynes declared many years ago. He was right — all you have to do is look at Europe to see the disastrous effects of austerity on weak economies. And this is still nothing like a boom.

Now, I’m aware that the facts about our dwindling deficit are unwelcome in many quarters. Fiscal fearmongering is a major industry inside the Beltway, especially among those looking for excuses to do what they really want, namely dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. People whose careers are heavily invested in the deficit-scold industry don’t want to let evidence undermine their scare tactics; as the deficit dwindles, we’re sure to encounter a blizzard of bogus numbers purporting to show that we’re still in some kind of fiscal crisis.

But we aren’t. The deficit is indeed dwindling, and the case for making the deficit a central policy concern, which was never very strong given low borrowing costs and high unemployment, has now completely vanished.