Speaking of spam, are there any protesters outside this guy's house? (More info here.) Maybe Dave Barry could publish his phone numbers, as he did the telemarketing association's.

On this post, I also link to the Easterbrook book, but I'll admit to wavering. I've been a big fan of Easterbrook's policy analysis in the past, particularly this TNR essay that's a key component of the new book. Last week, however, I made the mistake of linking to an Easterbrook post about the environment when it turned out he'd screwed up an important fact (he has yet to correct it). In this case, however, he appears to be standing on the shoulders of other researchers, so I go with it.

Prompted by Dan's skepticism (and my own disappointment with Easterbrook's book, about which more later), I checked the two sources Easterbrook cites on the relevant page of his book: this study by Steven Camarota, director of research at the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, and this study by Federal reserve economists Ana M. Aizcorbe, Arthur B. Kennickell, and Kevin B. Moore.

Based on a superficial reading, I have no quarrel with either study's factual conclusions. I also find Easterbrook's claim that "Factor out immigration, and the rise in American inequality disappears" both politically appealing and factually plausible. But the studies he cites don't say this. They don't contradict that conclusion, but neither do they back it. They don't even talk about equality.

The CIS study is about poverty rates (and, in fact, Easterbrook cites it only on that subject). The Fed study, which appears from the footnotes to be Easterbrook's source, looks at household income and wealth figures and does not break out separate data for immigrants. The positive trends for African Americans come from the Fed study, but those trends measure absolute levels, not inequality. In short, it would take more data and more careful econometrics to demonstrate Easterbrook's bold conclusion.

Perhaps Easterbrook has done a lot of calculations he doesn't include in the book, though I have no reason to think he has the necessary technical skills. (Neither do I.) Perhaps he is jumping to a logical, but unsupported, conclusion.

Or perhaps he good-heartedly does not understand the difference between "equality" and "income levels." Poor people can get a lot richer while inequality increases if the affluent get richer even faster. (Indeed, tables in the Fed study show the mean income of people in the top 10 percent of households pulling away from the median from 1995 to 2001, which suggests that the very, very richest people are getting much richer; in other income categories, the medians and means roughly track each other.) When everyone gets richer but the top 1% get rich fastest, everyone enjoys a higher standard of living. But Paul Krugman can still write articles about the horrible increase in inequality.

This is a crock. I just met a deadline for one newspaper and have another one tomorrow for a second. In both cases, editors were there to receive phone calls and copy. Plus, without newspapers, most bloggers have nothing to write about. Andrew Sullivan is vacationing, but Dan Drezner's excellent guest blogging is full of comments on fresh newspaper articles.

As unintended consequences go, the spectacular rise of Payless in Latin America must be counted among the least foreseen: As inner-city U.S. barrios swelled with Latin American refugees throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a no-frills retailer based in Topeka, Kan., quickly blossomed into a household brand for these new Americans. When they started going back, they took Payless shoes with them.

In 2000, Payless opened five stores in Costa Rica, its Central American staging area; then in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Just three years later, Payless has almost 200 stores in the tropics, adding Honduras, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Ecuador, Chile and Peru to its roster.

Cannibalizing sales doesn't appear to be a problem: Ms. Orellana's Sonsonate store is one of 24 Payless outlets in El Salvador, where a new store opens almost every month. Company officials say that in the countries where they operate, there is room for at least 300 more outlets -- and many more, should Payless enter Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.

Nor is Payless unique. U.S. chains, from rival footwear vendor Stride Rite Corp. to Home Depot Inc. to hoteliers like Marriott Corp. and Hilton Corp., are discovering that Latinos, as well as being great customers in the U.S., are among the leading disseminators of brand loyalty to countrymen back home.

Home Depot has grown quickly in Mexico, deploying Spanish-speaking veterans of its U.S. stores to recruit and train a local staff. Stride Rite entered eight countries ringing the Caribbean basin -- including the hemisphere's poorest, Haiti -- by leveraging its strong brand recognition with status-conscious expatriates in U.S. cities.

...

Brand acceptance is certainly apparent at Ms. Orellana's store, where traffic is steady from the moment she opens until she closes at 8 p.m. And why not? Prior to Payless's arrival, Salvadorans bought shoes mainly in street markets, where cheap synthetics dangle from hooks strung over piles of used clothing or baskets of fresh produce. Nowadays, an air-conditioned Payless store offers heretofore unheard-of luxury. "They have all the sizes in order," marvels Zulema Aragon, 29, as she scans displays of pumps, work boots and dress sandals, priced from about $5 to $40. An older woman, Luisa Hernandez, chimes in, "They have styles no one else has."

Shiny gadgets with metal slides that let customers measure shoe sizes, and benches with mirrored panels to inspect shoed feet, also are new here. For returned émigrés, Payless is a reminder of their time north of the border. For those who only dreamed of emigrating, Payless is a taste of the glamorous life relatives are forever bragging about. "A lot of [expatriate] Salvadorans send Payless shoes home as Christmas gifts," Ms. Orellana says. "People here see the brand as special."

Millman, like me, is fascinated with the complex and unexpected interactions of immigration, trade, and business. But, unlike me (or me most of the time), he does the hard work of tracking down the details. If you liked the story about Cambodian doughnut shops in TFAIE, you can thank his reporting, which I cited in the footnotes.

Christian though he is, Lileks suggests that earthquakes don't reflect too well on God. I always think of the Yom Kippur prayer "that their houses not become their graves," originally said for a Middle Eastern region but quite resonant in California. You say it not because you think God will change the laws of nature and stop earthquakes but because you have particular sympathy with people who live with that danger.

Texas lagging in federal art grants

Bush Turnpike takes big lead over tollway

Come to Texas, where even highways want to be number one!

This combination of competitiveness (We're number one!) and grievance (We're getting screwed, dissed, etc.) is characteristic not just of Texas but of Jacksonian America more generally. It's both a spur to greatness and the source of various pathologies, from endless lawsuits to bar brawls and gunfights.

Looking "American" no longer means looking like Christie Brinkley or Michael Jordan. That thought that hit me in the mid-90s, when I looked across an L.A. nail salon at a man waiting for a customer and thought, "It's people like him who are driving those nativists crazy." He could have been Latino, or Persian, or Indian, or something else. What he wasn't was easily classified as black or white, as Americans were supposed to be.

As a social commentator, I'm all for the trend toward ethnic ambiguity. (I once got a nasty letter to the editor at Reason accusing me of "wanting everyone to be beige.) I'd like to see ethnicity, which is fluid and easily mixed over the generations, replace race, which is rigid and inescapable.

As a blue-eyed blonde with untannable skin, I'm more ambivalent. Benetton ads have no place for people like me, and I'd hate to see a new exclusionary world replace the old one.

Psychologists tell us that people recognize human beauty in every color; it's a matter of symmetry and other signs of health. Researchers also find that people look more attractive to other people the more their features trend toward the human average. (Exceptional beauties are, well, the exception to this rule.) Hence, perhaps, everyone in America does aspire to be beige--something that was as true in the black-and-white 1960s as it is in the beige '00s.

His brief entry in an NYT year-end "Ideas" wrapup wouldn't be surprising coming from someone like me. (Nor would the typical NYT reader take it seriously coming from someone like me.) But perhaps from Frank, a known critic of the pursuit of upward mobility, people will recognize what once would have been considered an obvious truth:

In conferences around the globe this year, psychologists reported that measures of human happiness scarcely change when national income grows. Citing this finding, many social critics now insist that income growth no longer promotes well-being.

Experience suggests otherwise. Years ago, when I was a graduate student with two children in diapers, my wife called in distress to report that our 10-year-old clothes dryer had died. That evening I scanned the classified ads, made numerous calls and the next day drove out to inspect several machines. After haggling with the owner of a five-year-old Kenmore, I wrote a check we could barely cover. I drove a friend's truck across town to pick it up, then drove 25 miles to take the old machine to the dump. Four days and numerous hardware store visits later, we again had a working dryer.

I now earn many times what I did then. Recently my wife called to say that another dryer had died. "Call Werninck's," I suggested. When I got home that evening, the old machine was gone and a new one already up and running. Money doesn't guarantee happiness. But having enough can make life a lot less stressful.

As Ben Stein often notes, the secret to connecting money and happiness is to live well within your means, but having greater means is still more fun than having less.

Tom Keller sends this blog link to a guide to lights in Palo Alto. It culminates with "1164 and 1168 Tangerine Way: Music and lights coordinated for the two homes; program including ''Dueling Banjos,'' more than 52,000 lights, handmade icicles, Santa, lawn reindeer. Nightly through Jan. 1."

In an important piece in today's WSJ, Robert Kaplan argues that the army has regressed to its bureaucratic ways in Afghanistan, with serious consequences.

Two years ago this month, fewer than 100 men of the Army's 5th Special Forces Group, based out of Fort Campbell, Ky. -- almost all of them non-commissioned officers -- essentially took down the Taliban regime on their own. Along with a handful of Air Force Special Ops embeds, they succeeded where the British and the Soviets before them in Afghanistan had failed, because they had been given no specific instructions. The bureaucratic layers between the U.S. forces and the secretary of defense were severed. They were told merely to link up with the "indigs" (indigenous Northern Alliance and friendly Pushtun elements) and make it happen.

The result was that they grew beards and rode horses from one redoubt to the next, even as their team sergeants called in air strikes without first seeking written approval. Because 5th Group was allowed to operate independently of the vertical, Industrial Age hierarchy of the Pentagon, and because it combined 19th-century warfare with 21st-century close air support (CAS), 5th Group achieved the very post-industrial military "transformation" that elites in Washington are incessantly talking about, but don't seem to understand -- because real transformation, which involves the dilution of central control, would make many of these elites themselves redundant.

But now, military transformation is receding behind us in Afghanistan. With Saddam Hussein in custody, the Pentagon is focusing on the capture of Osama bin Laden, who may be in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. Yet success against bin Laden means going back to what we did right two years ago.

Of the roughly 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, only a fraction of them are doing anything directly pivotal to the stabilization of the country. The rest are either part of a long support tail or part of newly-created layers of command at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, which micro-manage and complicate the work of a relatively small number of Army SF troops (Green Berets) located at various "fire bases."

Instead of powering-down to a flattened hierarchy of small, autonomous units dispersed over a wide area -- what the 1940 Marine "Small Wars Manual" recommends for fighting a guerrilla insurgency -- we have barricaded ourselves into a mammoth, Cold War-style base at Bagram that drains resources from the fire bases. It is ironic that just as the Pentagon is proposing a more light and lethal worldwide basing posture (with many smaller footprints rather than a few large ones in Korea and Europe), in Afghanistan, whose mountains and tribes make it the most unconventional of battlefields, we have reverted to such an antiquated arrangement.

Half of the U.S. soldiery in Afghanistan is garrisoned at Bagram, creating a footprint so large, so vulnerable, and so beside the point of why we are there in the first place, that terms like "Westmorelandization," "Sovietization" and the "self-licking ice cream cone" come to mind when describing the place and what it represents. I make these harsh statements after a month embedded at various SF fire bases in Afghanistan, speaking to dozens of non-commissioned and middle level officers, and drawing upon my own experience of covering the mujahideen insurgency against the Soviets in the 1980s.

Read the whole thing. This link should work for the next week, but I recommend buying the paper. (I have an extremely truncated piece on the same page.)

On a micro scale, Todd Seavey calls my attention to this depressing article:

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Fearing roadside bombs and sniper bullets, members of the Army Reserves' 428th Transportation Co. turned to a local steel fabricator to fashion extra armor for their 5-ton trucks and Humvees before beginning their journey to Iraq earlier this month.

But their armor might not make it into the war, because the soldiers didn't get Pentagon approval for their homemade protection.

The Army, which is still developing its own add-on armor kits for vehicles, doesn't typically allow any equipment that is not Army tested and approved, Maj. Gary Tallman, a Pentagon spokesman for Army weapons and technology issues, said Thursday.

"It's important that other units out there that are getting ready to mobilize understand that we are doing things" to protect them, Tallman said, "but there's policy you have to consider before you go out on your own and try to do something."

The possibility that soldiers could be denied extra protection because of an Army policy has outraged some of the friends and neighbors who tried to help the Missouri reserve unit.

"I think it's the stupidest thing I ever heard of," said Virgil Kirkweg, owner of a Jefferson City steel company, which rushed to meet the reserve unit's armor request. "I just hope the government is not dumb enough to make them go out there without something that's going to protect them somewhat."

Read the whole thing.

The Bioethics Council's report has been widely praised, at the symposium and elsewhere, for raising the critical issues and moving the debate forward. I do not see it that way. By concentrating on ends and ignoring means, the Council has ducked what I see as the most fundamental ethical issue of all, which is whether concerns over biotechnology scenarios warrant a worldwide totalitarian dictatorship. If, as I would argue, such a dictatorship would be more dystopian than any of the scenarios that technology might create, then the report is really a cop-out.

Some of the toughest issues in bioethics involve means as well as ends. Will we curb freedom at the level of research, the level of development and marketing, at the level of consumption, or at all three?

Under decentralized decision-making, we are going to continue in the direction of conscious genetic selection, new techniques for physical and mental enhancement, artificial mood creation, and greater health and longevity. We have been doing these things for thousands of years by cruder means, and we are not going to stop now in the absence of a complete social redesign. Such a social redesign strikes me as more frightening than the dangers that it proposes to avoid.

My guess is that people who live through the middle of this century will feel sharp pangs of sadness from the discontinuity that will develop between life as it is lived today and life as it is lived in future decades. This troubles me. However, as concerned as I am about where biotech is taking us, I would rather take my chances on muddling through those issues than endure the heavy-handed centralized control that I believe would be needed to slow the biotech revolution.

Read the whole thing.

Why should women have to get a physician’s permission to take the Pill? After all, if it really is a woman's body, a woman's right, why do they have to defer to a doctor?

"Too dangerous!" say most gynecologists, when taking a break from the rigorous schedule of 15-minute breast and pelvic exams that they require for a prescription. These exams can cost hundreds of dollars, effectively pricing many women out of the market. "Too dangerous!" say many on the left, who demonize pharmaceutical companies as outfits that would just as soon poison consumers as help them. "Too dangerous!" say many on the right, who are uncomfortable with female sexuality, especially when unshackled from "nature's" strictures.

To make sure I offend both major branches of Christianity, I'd suggest that Protestants consider the implications of their doctrines of moral equivalence--"we're all sinners," equally in need of salvation, equally offensive to God, equally incapable of righteousness--in the face of evil like Saddam's.

A few years later the Medicare Fee Schedule for physicians was introduced. It was a terribly elaborate scheme that was based on measures of the complexity, time and resources involved in physicians' services. Its advertised purpose was to establish a fair and scientific basis for Medicare payments to physicians. But ultimately it divorced doctors from their historical and customary fees.

As with hospitals, Medicare imposed a system of administered pricing on doctors. By this time, of course, many physicians were dependent on their Medicare patient base and simply couldn't afford to walk away from the program, despite the lower reimbursement rates.

Both Medicare hospital and physician payment regulation were supported by Republican presidents in the name of controlling federal spending. The Johnson administration generosity of the 1960s was replaced by the Republican restrictions of the 1980s. Fiscal exigency overwhelmed ideology.

Whether that's portent, precedent or an irrelevant bit of history is the question of the moment.

We now have a system in which the government pays hospitals and doctors what it thinks it can afford, subject to the usual lobbying to adjust prices. Not surprisingly, some of those lobbyists succeeded in getting aid for their clients in the Medicare drug legislation. But they didn't challenge the basic premise that the government pays what it chooses.

Perhaps drugs are a different case. Perhaps the pharmaceutical firms that are so skilled at creating miracle drugs can create a political miracle and preserve the pricing power as well.

But anticipated cost pressures -- which the drug bill will make worse -- make it unlikely that they'll be able to prevail over time. In short, they've made a deal with Medicare that looks very similar to that made earlier by other medical providers in the past -- a boost in business and profit in the short run that's subsequently replaced by tight price controls. If Medicare's history is a guide, the blank check for America's pharmaceutical industry will soon be canceled.

Conservative legislators of the past argued regularly against federal aid programs on the grounds that repugnant government controls would inevitably follow. While that argument was abandoned during the congressional debate about a Medicare drug benefit, it was true then, and it is true now.

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, Medicare reimbursement rates are in fact driving doctors to "walk away from the program." Some simply stop accepting new Medicare patients. One result is that in some areas, some of the sickest patients find it hard to get regular care.

More insidious is a pattern my brother and sister-in-law, a family practice physician and an anesthesiolgist, observe in their area. The best general surgeons are going into cosmetic surgery, and they're luring the best anesthesiolgists into at least part-time cosmetic work. The dermatologists are telling patients with rashes to go elsewhere. Patients expect to pay for cosmetic work themselves, at market prices. They expect someone else to pay for health-related treatments, at lower prices. The result is predictable: the degradation of health care even as cosmetic care improves.

Applied to pharmaceuticals, this pattern would give us more skin care and baldness drugs, fewer treatments for complex diseases. We'll be good looking but sick. I'm all for cosmetic improvements, but that's not a tradeoff most of us would choose.

And, of course, The Substance of Style makes a marvelously versatile holiday gift--whether you're buying for someone with an interest in fashion and decor or business and economics.

I spoke with a senior administration official after the capture of Saddam, and the official confirmed that the Coalition's intelligence has been improving markedly. "People in Iraq tell us that cooperation has gone up in the last few weeks. So Saddam's capture fits a pattern. This is because of a variety of reasons. We've been getting better at making contact with locals. We've been getting better at coordination between intelligence and analysis. As a result, we have more actionable intelligence than before. But there's one other factor. Many Iraqis have been turned off by the insurgency. They don't want to live in this kind of country. And that's meant they've become more willing to talk."

FIRE defends academic freedom across the political spectrum. When you make your year-end contributions, please keep this vital organization in mind.

This isn't All About Me, honest. There's a broader point. Mickey Kaus's "Feiler Faster Thesis" applies only to the ephemera of political campaigns. The real work of the world--from finding fugitive dictators to recovering from recessions--gets done incrementally, bit by bit. The bits don't make good stories, assuming they're even public information. In a 24/7 news environment, the inevitable result is impatience. Nothing seems to be happening until suddenly there's a story. Congratulations, and thanks, to those who did the work.

Michael Weisskopf, a Washington-based senior correspondent for Time magazine, was seriously wounded in Baghdad late Wednesday when a grenade exploded in the U.S. Army Humvee in which he was a passenger. James Nachtwey, a Time contributing photographer, was also in the vehicle and was injured by the blast.

Weisskopf, 57, a former Washington Post reporter, likely saved the lives of his companions, including two U.S. soldiers, by attempting to toss the grenade from the vehicle before it exploded, said several people familiar with the incident.

The blast blew off Weisskopf's right hand, according to one account. He was taken to a military aid station in Baghdad and later to a hospital in the city, where he underwent surgery. A statement released by Time said he was in stable condition yesterday.

In case you're wondering how I've been spending my past few days, read down the D Magazine blog, linked above, to pick up some highly self-interested blog items. Mostly, however, I'm trying to return to my career as a writer, rather than a speaker and blogger.

Sitting in his office in downtown Washington, Gingrich searched on his computer for the Web site of the Coalition Provisional Authority, set up in Baghdad to oversee the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. “I’m told over there that CPA stands for ‘Can’t Produce Anything’,” says Gingrich. “Home page of the New Iraq,” he quotes. Then: “The opening quote is, of course, by [CPA chief Paul] Bremer. Next quote is by Bush. Next quote is by U.S. Ambassador Steve Mann.” He scrolls down. “Now this is a big breakthrough. They do have the new Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. On the front page. That is a breakthrough,” he repeats, adding, sotto voce, “I have been beating the crap out of them for two weeks on this.” His basic point: where are the Iraqi faces in the New Iraq? “Americans can’t win in Iraq,” he says. “Only Iraqis can win in Iraq.”
        Gingrich argues that the administration has been putting far too much emphasis on a military solution and slighting the political element. “The real key here is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow,” he says. “And that is a very important metric that they just don’t get.” He contends that the civilian-run CPA is fairly isolated and powerless, hunkered down inside its bunker in Baghdad. The military has the money and the daily contact with the locals. But it’s using the same tactics in a guerrilla struggle that led to defeat in Vietnam.

The Pentagon may not listen to InstaPundit's concerns about discretionary infrastructure bucks (see below), but it's supposed to listen to Newt.

If you're interested in finance, globalization, or economic liberalization, I highly recommend the book, which contains far more information and ideas than I could jam into 900 words.

It was only this week that we can truly say the exodus story is over, with the success of the Medicare reform bill. This week the G.O.P. behaved as a majority party in full. The Republicans used the powers of government to entrench their own dominance. They used their control of the federal budget to create a new entitlement, to woo new allies and service a key constituency group, the elderly.

The column, which deserves reading in full, leaves unanswered a rather important question: What's the point of Republican political power? Nothing more than job security for a different clique?

The New Deal coalition played hardball politics. But they didn't stay in power for decades without some general principles and policy goals. (The Republicans just achieved one of the latter, further socializing medical care.) They were for the "little guy," for a "fairer society," for "equal opportunity." Their platform wasn't coherent, but you could recognize a Democratic stand when you saw it. What do Frist Republicans stand for? Anything at all?