Also, from McCains WP article: "Meanwhile, in discussions over proposed U.S. action against Iraq, McCain was a strong supporter of the Bush administration's position.[164] He stated that Iraq was "a clear and present danger to the United States of America", and voted accordingly for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002."
While it is possible that McCain would have acted differently wrt Iraq as president, I would say the burden of proof is on Kc77 for this one.
I mean, it's not like he didn't give a speech on the topic, he thought that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan, that could lose us vital international support and create a failed state that would be occupied by more extremist forces
We can't be sure, but I think a lot of people would have stopped at one war, Afghanistan, rather than going for a second that didn't even have a good rationale.
I don't think that is remotely clear. Bush was more interested in it, but the MIC was driving that train and its not like Gore had some track record of opposing them.
I guess I'll add it started losing me in the opening paragraph, when it compared the process of building a single building to the process of building... a single building.
I really didn't like this one, personally. Fairly light on detail, for one, but mainly it was the final thing you mention; it started feeling like the author didn't realize (or perhaps just didn't care) that not everyone shares his/her exact political views — especially on ACX.
I dunno, most of the reviews here seem to manage not to irritate me this way, even when they are all grinding an axe occasionally, so to speak.
(I suppose, if I had to try to explain it: maybe I just didn't like the blithe assumption that "*of course* anyone reading this agrees with my view on this — after all, they're reading, and the other guys are too stupid for that, right?")
> It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote that “what’s good for GM is good for America.”
Point of order: McNamara didn't say that, and the person who did say that didn't say it either.
The origin of the quote is Charles Wilson, and what he said, when a Senator asked him about potential conflicts of interest between GM and the country, was "I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."
I'll also point out, though, that while Wilson didn't say the words, "what's good for GM is good for America," he believed it. "And vice versa," he said, and that's the vice versa.
Yes, that's the vice versa, but to me the significant part is the "and". He put the good of America first and believed that his company would profit thereby, which is kind of the opposite of the way this quote is usually deployed, as a cynical "trickle down"-esque claim that benefitting his company would end up benefitting the country.
Can you give a concrete example of what an individual profit-motivated request looks like (like... what does company A actually want to know, that government agency B presumably knows?)? The PDF there only talks about this in the abstract.
For those who aren’t going to dig through several pages of abstract and intro and dozens of pages of article, here is probably the most relevant section of the intro:
“ Part II delves deeply into how businesses, rather than the news media, are using FOIA. Drawing on original data obtained from six federal agencies, it first documents the extent to which commercial requesters—private entities that seek information as part of their profit-making enterprise—dominate the landscape at some agencies. Then, and perhaps most importantly, it explores the kinds of information businesses seek and exactly how some of the most frequent commercial requesters are actually using the records they obtain. This Part demonstrates that, across a variety of contexts, some of the highest-volume commercial requesters are essentially information-reselling businesses whose profit model depends on obtaining government records at low cost and reselling them, for a higher price, to interested parties. It further shows that the vast majority of all commercial FOIA requests are seeking the same types of routine records.
Part III uses these insights to describe the consequences of commercial FOIA practices, generally demonstrating a privatization of information access. It contends that FOIA’s fee structure essentially subsidizes commercial requesters’ access to records and does so in a way that is highly unlikely to provide the kind of public benefit that justifies the existence of subsidies.”
More to the point: I've gone through some of the details for the first six of the agencies, each agency has a section, starting on page 1383. Looking at the first listed example for each of those agencies, the high-volume FOIA requesters are indeed data reselling businesses. But none of them appear to be nefarious in the data they process, but rather examples of the conventional wisdom about business intelligence -- don't spy on others in your industry, but rather scrape together the publicly available information. Of course, assembling such intelligence is time-consuming, so it's not surprising that there are businesses that earn a living assembling it.
Depends on the purpose of FOIA. It was originally intended to be democracy enhancing, so the people could better interact with government. The profit-making is parasitical on the democracy enhancing function and squeezes it out--many agencies have significant backlogs of FOIA requests, because of these commercial uses.
I mean, at least arguably, don't the resellers provide a collation/summary/curation service to what is otherwise a stream of raw data? Even without any explicit analysis, retrieving vast amounts of government records and putting them in relevant order is worth something. Not to mention dealing with the back-and-forth of the FOIA process itself, as Sniffnoy suggests.
While you're clearly sincere, I'm afraid that you're laboring under a misapprehension. What do you imagine this "raw stream of data" to be? How do you believe it is created? How do you believe it is stored? How do you believe it is retrieved?
I'm not being silly or nit-picking here. You have some kind of model of each of these items, and it is incorrect. I'm asking you to articulate your model before I replay
Well, I'm confused about a different angle here. In what way do commercial FOIA requests prevent individual citizens' ones? Is it just because of backlogs? If so, wouldn't backlogs be worse if more individuals were using FOIA requests?
I worked for an insurance company and we paid third party vendors for their public rate fillings for regulatory and competitive analysis. One vendor was better than another, and getting the fillings from the state governments would have been ridiculously time consuming and user unfriendly.
Instead we got pdf versions and pretty good quality metadata to do analyses on.... I felt like the vendors provided a service in this case. Don't know if they used FOIA though.
How is profit making parasitical? How are people suddenly no longer participants in democracy the moment they get into the office? Seems like businesses wanting government records are a pretty reasonable and good use case for this, and it's only the left bias of academia that sees it otherwise?
Any data set collected by the government that could be released by FFOIA should just be posted for free by the government. They are not providing a service, they are charging rent for something they didn't create.
There is a service to be provided making the government information pretty and user friendly, for things like government contracts data for example. If you use US federal contracts data raw, for example, it's not as user friendly as if you pay a vendor,.... But you do pay a lot, to be fair.
If the government already posted the data why would anyone need FOIA? You can only use FOIA to ask for documents you know exist that are not public. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html
Noah was just writing about this topic, wasn't he? And he (or someone; maybe Matt Yglesias? It's all a blur) was quoting Gavin Newsom as saying "What happened to the California of the 1950s and 60s?" when stuff actually got done. And Smith's answer was "The 70s happened".
It's a real balancing act; stuff getting done often means steamrolling over a variety of individuals. My poor dad worked at Caltrans and got to tell people that the state was going to build a highway through their yard, sorry about that, here's some money, now pack up. It was a miserable job.
I'm intrigued by the section about nonprofits exploding in the 1970s and 10% of Americans being employed by nonprofits. Does the book spend any time on the transition between 1900s nonprofit activism and 1970s activism or does anyone in general know what happened in the nonprofit/volunteer world between these two points?
Because this book makes it sound like nonprofit work was dead in the 20s-60s period and then it just explodes under Nader, which does track with other things I've read, and we've all heard about large progressive reform groups in the 1870s-1920s, everything from child labor to Prohibition, but I don't really know how these two periods connect to each other. There are certainly modern nonprofits, from Sierra Club to the Catholic Church that must have been active between these two periods but does anyone have a good explanation or source for how the American nonprofit scene shifted from...kind of a bunch of housewives marching in the streets for temperance to highly elite groups of lawyers suing people?
And maybe the Catholic Worker Movement and some other very leftist organizations that began in the 1930s. I wonder where Jane Addams and Hull House fits in.
One interesting factor is direct mail and databases (!) which helped nonprofits build up huge bases of individual donors, allowing them to increase their budgets quite a lot. They then figured out a lot of ways to find the people who would be most interested in supporting a particular cause, and often making those people feel a sense of urgency and potential impact by donating.
Another thing that isn't super-widely known is cy pres awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy-pr%C3%A8s_doctrine#Class_actions) where a large portion of a class action settlement may be awarded to a nonprofit working in a related area, when it's considered infeasible to compensate individual victims. Apparently this practice has existed since 1986.
This review states that most of the workers in such organizations were volunteers. I suspect that a lot of them were middle-class to upper-class wives who could hire domestic help. I remember noting that Bill Gates's mother has a long resume including president of the regional United Way and trustee of Univ. of Washington, but given the importance of her husband, I doubt she was doing it for the money.
"10% of the private sector workforce" is pretty significantly different from 10% of Americans. Only a bit over 50% of the population was employed at all, and I would expect a good percentage of them would be working for the government.
I also wonder if people that work for non-profit health care systems or non-profit universities count in that 10% as well. Thats a lot of people doing work for a non-profit that doesn't look like non-profit work as most people probably think of it. It's an interesting stat but needs more explanation to be fully useful.
Want your mind blown? Go on YouTube and watch the documentary on the Kaiser Shipyards. Basically a government contractor with no particular shipbuilding experience constructs five shipyards which crank out ocean-going cargo ships by the hundreds, built mostly by people who had never seen a ship up close. And all the surrounding infrastructure, electricity, housing, hospitals, parking, rail yards, etc..
Amazing to see thousands of people running around like mrówki, building a ship from start to launch in a little over 4 days.
This was really great - both as a persuasive article on a topic of contemporary relevance, and as a bit of a review of the book from which much of this content was extracted.
> Make it easy for individual citizens, or the groups representing them, to sue, and the legal process will handle the rest. It was like Nader and his team had discovered a cheat code to punch way above their weight class. Litigation, said the Environmental Defense Fund, produced results “faster than by lobby, ballot box, or protest.”
I used to work for a nonprofit that did impact litigation, and this was widely recognized as absolutely true. I remember one nonprofit lawyer telling me that "in Congress I'm not on a level playing field because I'm not donating tons of money to campaigns, but in the courts it's just me and the other lawyer, and the judge has to let us both talk and make our cases". (Or something very similar to that.) Litigation is pretty expensive, but you can get very, very strong remedies, in theory sometimes just by making persuasive arguments.
The catch, of course, is that while politicians as a class are subject to certain non-democratic influences (rich, powerful lobbyists), lawyers and judges are subject to non-democratic influences as well (class interests, cultural assumptions, donor preferences)--and lack the counterbalancing effect of depending on voters for their jobs. That 10% of all employment is funded by people wealthy and educated enough to work this particularly effective lever of political power, with zero political accountability, is not at all healthy for democracy, IMO.
Very well done. Not sure about "The war on terror caused far more death and destruction than Nader’s seatbelt mandates ever prevented". If we had still the same death toll on our roads as in 1970, those would add up to around 500k+ killed in Germany alone (we had 20k roadkills in 1970, 3 k nowadays). During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads. Of course, "seatbelts" are just one part, and civilian Iraqi victims since 2003 are many (150k +). Wikipedia: "Estimating war-related deaths poses many challenges" - But then, 9/11 would have happened anyway (though not Iraq). - Otoh, other countries got their roads safer without a Nader gang.
It's not clear that he was bad for Iraq either, since we don't know what the alternative looks like. Saddam Hussein was already a one-man disaster, his sons probably would have been worse, and whatever civil war eventually got rid of the Husseins would have been pretty bloody too. Oh, and whoever deposed him probably would have been some kind of Shia Islamist movement.
On the other other hand it's certainly not clear he can take any nonzero amount of credit for the increase in global life expectancy from 2001-09. (Certainly it's almost entirely due to non-US-President factors
Presumably safety regulations in one place tend to influence design worldwide, so if Nader's efforts caused significant improvements in one place, consumers elsewhere probably got a lot of safety improvement too, just by buying from the same manufacturer.
Presumably yes. But then Germans never bought much US-cars. ;) Mercedes invented the airbag. And Germany reduced it's deaths per 100k by much more than the US. While you still can hardly sue VW for anything in German courts. That said, building new stuff here is pretty tough, too. Even (or esp.) for the government.
The other big unknown, of course, is how much (if any) death and destruction the War on Terror prevented. It was messy but in the end it seems to have actually worked; Islamist terrorism hasn't bothered us for years. In a world where Al Gore responded to 9/11 with a presumably-weaker version of the WoT, would the same result have been achieved?
It's very annoying that we can never, from a utilitarian point of view, know whether the Iraq War was the right move or not. This was actually one of the main things that convinced me not to be a utilitarian, because if we can't decide whether decisions are right or not even with the benefit of hindsight then how the heck are we supposed to do it in advance?
An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures.
The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region, it led to the creation of ISIS, probably contributed significantly to the Syrian Civil War (at least hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees), it was probably illegal and hurt America's image in the world. The result was much worse than anyone mentioned it could be in 2003. Hardly anyone defends it anymore. So we know it was the wrong move. (unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler)
A lot of these points of currently accepted wisdom are really annoying me.
"An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures."
I have to say, I am utterly amazed at how many people make the argument that whatever happened in history was inevitable, and would still have happened even if initial factors had been different. How can you possibly know this? Isn't this likely motivated reasoning? Doesn't it go against all common sense to say that after policy x is implemented to achieve result y, and y then happens, that y would have happened anyway (regardless of x)?
"The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region,"
How much of that was poor handling of the war by those in charge, rather than an inevitable result of the war? I wish these things weren't lumped together.
"it led to the creation of ISIS,"
How much of that was Obama withdrawing too early to meet an election promise?
"it was probably illegal"
If you mean under "international law", so was basically everything Saddam's government ever did, not to mention half the governments in the world today. Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators. What kind of law deserves respect that makes any real attempt to actually enforce the law itself illegal?
"unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler"
Actually, yes. Saddam had already committed genocide twice, against Shias and against Kurds. What might have been next? Not to mention sending a credible message to potential violent dictators for decades to come that they are not secure, and that even being suspected of arming themselves with WMDs is taking their lives in their hands, whether they actually are or not. The potential benifits of the invasion are immense, long-lasting, and largely invisible. We'll never know what atrocities it has prevented.
None of this is to unquestionably defend the war, but to point out all the factors that people for some reason forget: the difference between the justice of the war and the competence with which it was waged, the effect of withdrawing all troops prematurely, and the question of how many deaths would have happened if Saddam had stayed in power.
And unlike Vietnam and Afghanistan, this war was actually won. Saddam was overthrown and executed, Iraq is a (flawed) democracy now.
Well, yes, it is true I can't know it would have been a one-off. But there wasn't a pattern of major terrorist attacks by foreign actors in the US before the War on Terror, so to give the WoT credit for preventing them doesn't make a lot of sense. (I am not claiming that parts of the WoT weren't effective.)
Some major terror attacks elsewhere, like the train bombings in London and Spain, were probably retaliation for the Iraq War. And it is not as though Islamic terrorism has gone away as a global issue.
To say the Iraq War would have been good if they had made all the right decisions is pointless. Obama wouldn't have had to make the decision to withdraw the troops if there had never been a war. Also, I never heard that the American commanders were incompetent. The problem is that the war started a chaotic series of events that no one could control.
Saddam was a threat before the Gulf War; afterwards he was basically contained.
By international law, I mean the rules that are supposed to govern relationships between states. I don't think most governments are in major violation of that. When the US invades countries on weak premises, it encourages others, like Russia, to do the same thing (or at least it gives them the opportunity to say, "we're just doing what the US did").
No doubt the Iraq War was won militarily, but I don't think the consensus is that it was strategic victory.
Really? 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war except in the propagandized heads of Americans. If we were teaching the world a lesson it was that the US does not act rationally on the world stage, has no problem invading countries under false pretences, committing war crimes, and paying just about anyone for tips on who might be a terrorist and using that as the sole bases for torturing them and keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives with no trial. You want to know why most of the global south doesn't support us in Ukraine? Well Iraq had a lot to do with it, that and we did everything possible to prevent peace. https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us
>Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators
It's possible to take military action against dictators that is legal under international law. GWI was legal. GWII could have been if WMDs had been found.
"International law" is a fantasy. It's a good sound bite for a lawyer to get on TV.
The problem is that a law requires an enforcement mechanism to be something other than wishful thinking. An "international law" has no enforcement mechanism. There may be a court in a particular nation that considers an act to be both against an "international law" and also for it to be in their jurisdiction, but the likely theory behind that is that it violates a law of that country (like how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws), and the violator is charged under that.
>how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws
That's an arrangement unique to The US. In reallity, the UN can mandate military actions, there is an international. court of justice that has tried various dictators and war crimjnals, etc.
Certain elements in the US don't like that sort of thing , but it exists.
I don't see how its legality depends on the actual existence or discovery of WMDs, rather than on the reasonableness of the belief that they existed. Hussein was pretty clearly trying to head-fake his neighbors into believing he could still nerve-gas them if he was backed into a corner, and it wasn't just the US intelligence apparatus that was fooled by that.
I'd say it would have been a one-off even if there were no official policy changes whatsoever. The people onboard the planes realized they were being used as KEW rather than hostages, and started fighting back accordingly, before the attack was even over. Somebody trying the same thing again would've been dogpiled before they got a chance to take control of the plane... unless they managed to recruit enough martyrs to actually win a mostly-unarmed infantry battle against the other passengers and crew. Not just in a last-man-standing sense, but breach a crowded choke point before the pilot finds a safer place to land, or the air force sends an interceptor to shoot them down. Stewardesses can use the drink carts as battering rams, and if it looks like the hijackers are starting to come out on top, reckless aerobatics could literally tilt the field, or shake it like a snowglobe. Building up resources sufficient to overcome such a challenge would make them much easier for existing intelligence agencies to spot and intercept before anything gets off the ground. It was only possible that once thanks to an element of surprise from so thoroughly betraying the "I might kill you if you make trouble, but keep your head down and you'll probably get to go home safe, whether by ransom or rescue" contract between hijacker and hostage.
Besides, for fight-winning numbers they'd be buying enough tickets to cover most of the cost of fueling and operating a whole plane, so it's probably more bang for the buck to just purchase a fuel tanker truck or 40' shipping container full of mining explosives, remove the hazmat labels, drive it to the target and set it off the old fashioned way.
Exactly. It's not like the Bush administration didn't know that Al Qaeda is a threat; it's just that there wasn't much anyone could do about it without invading Afghanistan. Which I do not think Al Gore would have done prior to 9/11.
> There was a bit of a principled disagreement during the Clinton-Bush transition as to whether the Clinton administration’s focus on non-state security threats was correct, and it seems the Bush team decided to somewhat deprioritize the Clinton-era focus on al-Qaeda relative to state actors and great power conflicts.
>
> A Gore administration would probably not have made that choice, and it’s at least possible that a more consistent top-down focus on al-Qaeda and counterterrorism issues would have led to the unraveling of the plot.
In what way was this intelligence specifically actionable? The protagonists in the Politico version seem to have wanted the US to launch an actual military attack against Afghanistan, which seems a bit much (and which would have had the Politico staff et al declaring POTUS an Evil Warmonger for the unprovoked attack). Otherwise, I don't see how that intelligence was specific enough to call for doing anything that the FBI etc don't already do as a matter of course.
Eight years as vice-president and nothing was done. But Bush gets the stick for not paying sufficient attention for the six months he had as president.
I wasn't sure, either. I'm also not convinced that a President Gore wouldn't have launched a similar "war on terror" or that he wouldn't have done an Iraq war. (I'm not trying to say that Iraq was legitimately a part of the war on terror. I'm only saying that the US and Iraq were on a collision course since the first Gulf War and it's not impossible that something like a regime-changing war would've happened even with Gore at the helm.)
> During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads.
During every year, by quite a way.
The total US troops killed as a result of Vietnam (even including still MIAs) is about 60K, and the highest year was <17K in 1968, in which year the automobile fatality level was 52K. The lowest auto deaths in the 1956-1975 period was 35K for just that year, 1958. (Obviously, non-US-troop deaths were much worse in Vietnam.)
Not via the courts, but in countries with low or no democracy you just straight up ignore the laws. If enough people break laws, the effort it would take to actually catch and discipline them becomes astronomical, and could kick off a death spiral in which people notice that laws aren't being enforced and go on to keep breaking more important laws.
This is an incentive for authoritarian regimes to actually do a bit of propaganda legwork to convince people of the benefits of following the law. If it's very obviously against a huge number of people's self interest, people will notice other people doing it and not getting caught and start doing it too.
Examples of very strict laws which heavily depended on public goodwill to actually pull off - pandemic restrictions in China and Australia, in 2020 (situation changed post vaccine). In 2020, watching massive death tolls in the US and Europe, most Chinese and Australian citizens did in fact concur that it is in our best interest to stay at home - enough that actually enforcing the law against the minority that broke it became doable. You notice that China did eventually drop their restrictions because the enforcement effort became impossible as public opinion shifted. I know Aus is a democracy but we used an authoritarian emergency response measure to impose the laws, so I'd still count it as an authoritarian law in this instance (not that it's bad, but there is still a lever where citizens can limit what an authoritarian state does to their freedoms).
This is my favorite review of the series-to-date. Although, when I read "Nader’s philosophy was one of justice by lawsuit.", I did wonder what Njal would have thought.
Intriguing. Though a different kind of lawsuit. Post the Burning, Mord's lawsuit failed and the ensuing battle was horrific until the Njal party had to stop for fear that they would be bankrupted by all their killing.
The feud stops when Kari simply walks into Flosi's hall and sits down to dinner. He later marries Flosi's daughter, the widow of a man murdered by the Njalssons. As I said, Njals Saga is deceptively complicated.
Really? I hate it. It's much more explicitly one-sided than most, and not even in a cool self-aware way but like a smug and oblivious "doesn't everyone already agree with me anyway (except for maybe some stupid hicks pfft lol)?"- way.
Yeah, there's a lot of the author assuming consensus among their readers, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Maybe it's just a contrarian streak, but this style of writing where the author just sort of assumes I'm part of the cool in-crowd who shares their values implicitly immediately triggers my "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" response.
> Its first leader, displaying the lack of modesty that was characteristic of the era, described the agency’s work by saying, “What God had made one, man was to develop as one.”
The quote itself here went over my head, especially the first half. Is the leader just saying "we're united"?
I don't get it either (and still don't). All it made me think of was "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:6) which is about marriage.
I think he's saying they aren't going to listen to any of the smaller local governments inside the valley. It has to be developed as one valley, we're in charge of that, and we don't care what people with a narrower perspective say.
Right, the quote wasn't particularly immodest in general, instead it was in regard to a particular constitutional issue of the time involving the novel creation of a supra-state organization by the federal government.
FDR was fascinated by water, and he felt that watersheds, such as the Tennessee River Valley, were more natural than old political units, such as states. I can recall reading in Michael Barone's history "Our Country" that at one point FDR mused over throwing out the 48 states and starting over by dividing the USA up into seven watersheds for administrative purposes. (But I've never seen that confirmed elsewhere, so maybe I'm remembering it wrong.)
George Clooney's soliloquy at the end of the Coen Brothers' "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" as the reservoir waters rise is a good epitome of the New Deal philosophy behind the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The second one, with regard to comment periods and how they may favor the industries being regulated (that file more comments), has this to say:
> Collectively, the studies suggest that more comments correlate with more influence. But why? The empirical picture is puzzling because the informational value of comments has nothing to do with their volume. In theory, a single comment from a public-interest group should be at least as persuasive as a deluge of thousands of duplicative comments from industry.
> It doesn’t tend to work like that in practice. Although the courts only require agencies to respond to “vital” comments, agencies can’t reliably predict which comments a judge might someday find vital. Risk-averse agencies therefore have little choice but to respond, often in punitive length and detail, to all the substantive comments they receive. At the same time, the law places no filter on the information that commentators can submit to agencies. Recognizing as much, industry swamps agencies with hundreds of comments containing thousands of pages of unstructured, highly technical information, typically pertaining to regulatory costs.
Industry tends to organize and coordinate responses to government action. They hire people who follow what the government is doing and can alert their bosses to upcoming or proposed changes. It's obvious that they would do this, and not nefarious. I don't think there's any reason to assume that there's some kind of concerted effort to bog down regulatory agencies as you've described.
There's nothing deceptive or manipulative in a group of companies from related industries all having an interest in responding. If they are saying similar things (like "this rule will cost us billions and may destroy our industry") then it makes sense for the government to respond differently than if fewer companies were writing them - even if all of them say the same thing. And the government should care that their rules may harm industries.
Neither may public interest groups. Honestly the nonprofit advocacy group I worked at for 4 years lied jsut as systematically and regularly as the energy company and they were better at it and it is a was a larger portion of their operations.
The idea that "West Texas Housing Coalition" (or whatever) is more committed to truth but than "West Texas Oil Company" is kind of one of the big lies of modern America/leftism.
They are both organizations selling something and don't really give two fucks about the truth.
> Just kidding—when GM’s women invited him back to their apartment, ostensibly to “discuss foreign relations,” he suspected entrapment and declined. But he did later tell a reporter, in one of his rare attempts at humor, that “normally I would have obliged.”
What exactly was the scandal supposed to be here? How were they going to "entrap" him? He wasn't married or anything... I guess extramarital sex was considered scandalous back in 1966?? Huh...
"The book became an immediate bestseller, but also prompted a vicious backlash from General Motors (GM) who attempted to discredit Nader by tapping his phone in an attempt to uncover salacious information and, when that failed, hiring prostitutes in an attempt to catch him in a compromising situation.[17][18] Nader, by then working as an unpaid consultant to United States Senator Abe Ribicoff, reported to the senator that he suspected he was being followed. Ribicoff convened an inquiry that called GM CEO James Roche who admitted, when placed under oath, that the company had hired a private detective agency to investigate Nader. Nader sued GM for invasion of privacy, settling the case for $425,000 and using the proceeds to found the activist organization known as the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.[9]"
But it seems to just be a claim by Nader that is now accepted as fact, because someone wrote it down in a book.
Sex outside of marriage was a lot more scandalous in the early '60s. Not that it wasn't widely practiced, and my suspicion is that prostitution was a larger industry then. But you really, really didn't want anyone to present public evidence that you were involved in it.
Before even finishing, I just have to jump in and say I'm onboard with hating Ralph Nader, although my personal reason is that my first car was a Chevy Corvair; the vehicle Ralph Nader murdered to become famous. It was a great car and should have become a classic, except for his utter hit job of a book "Unsafe at any speed".
This guy should be paid by all of us. How do we do this? Nader and Government regulation in general is a huge topic, but the reviewer here gives us a wonderfully clear sense of the issues.
The Corvair case was already obsolete. GM first included an antiroll bar in 64, by 65 had gone to full independent rear suspension and created Anerica's only sporty compact. Didn't matter. Perhaps Ralph's most baleful influence was creating the notion that advocacy implies the existence ofreasonable evidence.
The reviewer's mention of the reduction in vehicle fatalities underestimates, I think, the true improvement. Far more cars on the road, creating an exponentially higher probability of collision caribus paribus and being driven more miles. When I consider this generally unreported success I fear I might become an optimist and so banned from public writing.
Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. Hell, McCain wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.
I'm not so sure of that. A _lot_ of the government was champing at the bit to go invade Iraq and had been for many years.
Yes, plenty of democrats were on board with Iraq:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#United_States_House_of_Representatives
Also, from McCains WP article: "Meanwhile, in discussions over proposed U.S. action against Iraq, McCain was a strong supporter of the Bush administration's position.[164] He stated that Iraq was "a clear and present danger to the United States of America", and voted accordingly for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002."
While it is possible that McCain would have acted differently wrt Iraq as president, I would say the burden of proof is on Kc77 for this one.
I mean, it's not like he didn't give a speech on the topic, he thought that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan, that could lose us vital international support and create a failed state that would be occupied by more extremist forces
http://www.acronym.org.uk/old/archive/docs/0209/doc14.htm
We can't be sure, but I think a lot of people would have stopped at one war, Afghanistan, rather than going for a second that didn't even have a good rationale.
I don't think that is remotely clear. Bush was more interested in it, but the MIC was driving that train and its not like Gore had some track record of opposing them.
I guess I'll add it started losing me in the opening paragraph, when it compared the process of building a single building to the process of building... a single building.
I really didn't like this one, personally. Fairly light on detail, for one, but mainly it was the final thing you mention; it started feeling like the author didn't realize (or perhaps just didn't care) that not everyone shares his/her exact political views — especially on ACX.
I dunno, most of the reviews here seem to manage not to irritate me this way, even when they are all grinding an axe occasionally, so to speak.
(I suppose, if I had to try to explain it: maybe I just didn't like the blithe assumption that "*of course* anyone reading this agrees with my view on this — after all, they're reading, and the other guys are too stupid for that, right?")
> It was the era of Robert McNamara’s famous quote that “what’s good for GM is good for America.”
Point of order: McNamara didn't say that, and the person who did say that didn't say it either.
The origin of the quote is Charles Wilson, and what he said, when a Senator asked him about potential conflicts of interest between GM and the country, was "I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."
Exactly right.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I'll also point out, though, that while Wilson didn't say the words, "what's good for GM is good for America," he believed it. "And vice versa," he said, and that's the vice versa.
Yes, that's the vice versa, but to me the significant part is the "and". He put the good of America first and believed that his company would profit thereby, which is kind of the opposite of the way this quote is usually deployed, as a cynical "trickle down"-esque claim that benefitting his company would end up benefitting the country.
Not to mention that McNamara, famously, had been the first president of Ford outside the Ford family.
That's Charlie Wilson to you, bub. And which Charlie Wilson, eh? <b><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Electric+Charlie+Wilson">Electric Charlie Wilson</a></b> or <b><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Engine+Charlie+Wilson">Engine Charlie Wilson</a></b>?
How do businesses use the FOIA to increase profits?
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3846&context=dlj#page=21
I work in FOIA, part of the time. That article looks like an excellent diagnosis. I'm not sure about the prescriptions, though.
Can you give a concrete example of what an individual profit-motivated request looks like (like... what does company A actually want to know, that government agency B presumably knows?)? The PDF there only talks about this in the abstract.
One obvious one is if you do any federal contracting work you will have your info resold to a bunch of people who then solicit you for various scams.
For those who aren’t going to dig through several pages of abstract and intro and dozens of pages of article, here is probably the most relevant section of the intro:
“ Part II delves deeply into how businesses, rather than the news media, are using FOIA. Drawing on original data obtained from six federal agencies, it first documents the extent to which commercial requesters—private entities that seek information as part of their profit-making enterprise—dominate the landscape at some agencies. Then, and perhaps most importantly, it explores the kinds of information businesses seek and exactly how some of the most frequent commercial requesters are actually using the records they obtain. This Part demonstrates that, across a variety of contexts, some of the highest-volume commercial requesters are essentially information-reselling businesses whose profit model depends on obtaining government records at low cost and reselling them, for a higher price, to interested parties. It further shows that the vast majority of all commercial FOIA requests are seeking the same types of routine records.
Part III uses these insights to describe the consequences of commercial FOIA practices, generally demonstrating a privatization of information access. It contends that FOIA’s fee structure essentially subsidizes commercial requesters’ access to records and does so in a way that is highly unlikely to provide the kind of public benefit that justifies the existence of subsidies.”
More to the point: I've gone through some of the details for the first six of the agencies, each agency has a section, starting on page 1383. Looking at the first listed example for each of those agencies, the high-volume FOIA requesters are indeed data reselling businesses. But none of them appear to be nefarious in the data they process, but rather examples of the conventional wisdom about business intelligence -- don't spy on others in your industry, but rather scrape together the publicly available information. Of course, assembling such intelligence is time-consuming, so it's not surprising that there are businesses that earn a living assembling it.
Hm, isn't this a good thing though? They're making money by doing the valuable work of dealing with the FOIA process so others don't have to!
Depends on the purpose of FOIA. It was originally intended to be democracy enhancing, so the people could better interact with government. The profit-making is parasitical on the democracy enhancing function and squeezes it out--many agencies have significant backlogs of FOIA requests, because of these commercial uses.
I mean, at least arguably, don't the resellers provide a collation/summary/curation service to what is otherwise a stream of raw data? Even without any explicit analysis, retrieving vast amounts of government records and putting them in relevant order is worth something. Not to mention dealing with the back-and-forth of the FOIA process itself, as Sniffnoy suggests.
While you're clearly sincere, I'm afraid that you're laboring under a misapprehension. What do you imagine this "raw stream of data" to be? How do you believe it is created? How do you believe it is stored? How do you believe it is retrieved?
I'm not being silly or nit-picking here. You have some kind of model of each of these items, and it is incorrect. I'm asking you to articulate your model before I replay
Well, I'm confused about a different angle here. In what way do commercial FOIA requests prevent individual citizens' ones? Is it just because of backlogs? If so, wouldn't backlogs be worse if more individuals were using FOIA requests?
I worked for an insurance company and we paid third party vendors for their public rate fillings for regulatory and competitive analysis. One vendor was better than another, and getting the fillings from the state governments would have been ridiculously time consuming and user unfriendly.
Instead we got pdf versions and pretty good quality metadata to do analyses on.... I felt like the vendors provided a service in this case. Don't know if they used FOIA though.
How is profit making parasitical? How are people suddenly no longer participants in democracy the moment they get into the office? Seems like businesses wanting government records are a pretty reasonable and good use case for this, and it's only the left bias of academia that sees it otherwise?
Any data set collected by the government that could be released by FFOIA should just be posted for free by the government. They are not providing a service, they are charging rent for something they didn't create.
There is a service to be provided making the government information pretty and user friendly, for things like government contracts data for example. If you use US federal contracts data raw, for example, it's not as user friendly as if you pay a vendor,.... But you do pay a lot, to be fair.
That I don't have a problem with as long as the raw data is available for free. If the government paid for it we all should have access to it.
1. They often do that.
2. That's like maybe .01 percent of requests to the federal government.
If the government already posted the data why would anyone need FOIA? You can only use FOIA to ask for documents you know exist that are not public. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html
thought i was reading a noahpinion piece until i got to the bottom, good job!
Noah was just writing about this topic, wasn't he? And he (or someone; maybe Matt Yglesias? It's all a blur) was quoting Gavin Newsom as saying "What happened to the California of the 1950s and 60s?" when stuff actually got done. And Smith's answer was "The 70s happened".
It's a real balancing act; stuff getting done often means steamrolling over a variety of individuals. My poor dad worked at Caltrans and got to tell people that the state was going to build a highway through their yard, sorry about that, here's some money, now pack up. It was a miserable job.
Matt Yglesias: https://www.slowboring.com/p/community-meetings-arent-democracy
Thanks!
I'm intrigued by the section about nonprofits exploding in the 1970s and 10% of Americans being employed by nonprofits. Does the book spend any time on the transition between 1900s nonprofit activism and 1970s activism or does anyone in general know what happened in the nonprofit/volunteer world between these two points?
Because this book makes it sound like nonprofit work was dead in the 20s-60s period and then it just explodes under Nader, which does track with other things I've read, and we've all heard about large progressive reform groups in the 1870s-1920s, everything from child labor to Prohibition, but I don't really know how these two periods connect to each other. There are certainly modern nonprofits, from Sierra Club to the Catholic Church that must have been active between these two periods but does anyone have a good explanation or source for how the American nonprofit scene shifted from...kind of a bunch of housewives marching in the streets for temperance to highly elite groups of lawyers suing people?
And maybe the Catholic Worker Movement and some other very leftist organizations that began in the 1930s. I wonder where Jane Addams and Hull House fits in.
One interesting factor is direct mail and databases (!) which helped nonprofits build up huge bases of individual donors, allowing them to increase their budgets quite a lot. They then figured out a lot of ways to find the people who would be most interested in supporting a particular cause, and often making those people feel a sense of urgency and potential impact by donating.
Another thing that isn't super-widely known is cy pres awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy-pr%C3%A8s_doctrine#Class_actions) where a large portion of a class action settlement may be awarded to a nonprofit working in a related area, when it's considered infeasible to compensate individual victims. Apparently this practice has existed since 1986.
This review states that most of the workers in such organizations were volunteers. I suspect that a lot of them were middle-class to upper-class wives who could hire domestic help. I remember noting that Bill Gates's mother has a long resume including president of the regional United Way and trustee of Univ. of Washington, but given the importance of her husband, I doubt she was doing it for the money.
"10% of the private sector workforce" is pretty significantly different from 10% of Americans. Only a bit over 50% of the population was employed at all, and I would expect a good percentage of them would be working for the government.
I also wonder if people that work for non-profit health care systems or non-profit universities count in that 10% as well. Thats a lot of people doing work for a non-profit that doesn't look like non-profit work as most people probably think of it. It's an interesting stat but needs more explanation to be fully useful.
Yeah that's a very good point.
You write well.
Want your mind blown? Go on YouTube and watch the documentary on the Kaiser Shipyards. Basically a government contractor with no particular shipbuilding experience constructs five shipyards which crank out ocean-going cargo ships by the hundreds, built mostly by people who had never seen a ship up close. And all the surrounding infrastructure, electricity, housing, hospitals, parking, rail yards, etc..
Amazing to see thousands of people running around like mrówki, building a ship from start to launch in a little over 4 days.
Plus, the owner ended up becoming responsible for about 12 million Americans' health care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente
Henry J. Kaiser could be argued to have invented the State of California.
Those were Liberty ships. Nader could have gone to town on them, unsafe at the any speed, even though 12 knot limit. They did win the War though.
>mrówki
Ants, for those who don't speak Polish.
Sorry 'bout that. I am friends with a colony of mrówki immigrated from Poland.
This was really great - both as a persuasive article on a topic of contemporary relevance, and as a bit of a review of the book from which much of this content was extracted.
> Make it easy for individual citizens, or the groups representing them, to sue, and the legal process will handle the rest. It was like Nader and his team had discovered a cheat code to punch way above their weight class. Litigation, said the Environmental Defense Fund, produced results “faster than by lobby, ballot box, or protest.”
I used to work for a nonprofit that did impact litigation, and this was widely recognized as absolutely true. I remember one nonprofit lawyer telling me that "in Congress I'm not on a level playing field because I'm not donating tons of money to campaigns, but in the courts it's just me and the other lawyer, and the judge has to let us both talk and make our cases". (Or something very similar to that.) Litigation is pretty expensive, but you can get very, very strong remedies, in theory sometimes just by making persuasive arguments.
The catch, of course, is that while politicians as a class are subject to certain non-democratic influences (rich, powerful lobbyists), lawyers and judges are subject to non-democratic influences as well (class interests, cultural assumptions, donor preferences)--and lack the counterbalancing effect of depending on voters for their jobs. That 10% of all employment is funded by people wealthy and educated enough to work this particularly effective lever of political power, with zero political accountability, is not at all healthy for democracy, IMO.
Incidentally, this kind of thing seems like it would be a pretty reasonable target for critics of "billionaire philanthropy".
Very well done. Not sure about "The war on terror caused far more death and destruction than Nader’s seatbelt mandates ever prevented". If we had still the same death toll on our roads as in 1970, those would add up to around 500k+ killed in Germany alone (we had 20k roadkills in 1970, 3 k nowadays). During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads. Of course, "seatbelts" are just one part, and civilian Iraqi victims since 2003 are many (150k +). Wikipedia: "Estimating war-related deaths poses many challenges" - But then, 9/11 would have happened anyway (though not Iraq). - Otoh, other countries got their roads safer without a Nader gang.
It's not clear that he was bad for Iraq either, since we don't know what the alternative looks like. Saddam Hussein was already a one-man disaster, his sons probably would have been worse, and whatever civil war eventually got rid of the Husseins would have been pretty bloody too. Oh, and whoever deposed him probably would have been some kind of Shia Islamist movement.
On the other other hand it's certainly not clear he can take any nonzero amount of credit for the increase in global life expectancy from 2001-09. (Certainly it's almost entirely due to non-US-President factors
Presumably safety regulations in one place tend to influence design worldwide, so if Nader's efforts caused significant improvements in one place, consumers elsewhere probably got a lot of safety improvement too, just by buying from the same manufacturer.
Presumably yes. But then Germans never bought much US-cars. ;) Mercedes invented the airbag. And Germany reduced it's deaths per 100k by much more than the US. While you still can hardly sue VW for anything in German courts. That said, building new stuff here is pretty tough, too. Even (or esp.) for the government.
The other big unknown, of course, is how much (if any) death and destruction the War on Terror prevented. It was messy but in the end it seems to have actually worked; Islamist terrorism hasn't bothered us for years. In a world where Al Gore responded to 9/11 with a presumably-weaker version of the WoT, would the same result have been achieved?
It's very annoying that we can never, from a utilitarian point of view, know whether the Iraq War was the right move or not. This was actually one of the main things that convinced me not to be a utilitarian, because if we can't decide whether decisions are right or not even with the benefit of hindsight then how the heck are we supposed to do it in advance?
"in the end it seems to have actually worked"
An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures.
The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region, it led to the creation of ISIS, probably contributed significantly to the Syrian Civil War (at least hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees), it was probably illegal and hurt America's image in the world. The result was much worse than anyone mentioned it could be in 2003. Hardly anyone defends it anymore. So we know it was the wrong move. (unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler)
A lot of these points of currently accepted wisdom are really annoying me.
"An terrorist attack on the level of 9/11 in the US would probably have been a one-off even if the US had done nothing but strengthen airline security measures."
I have to say, I am utterly amazed at how many people make the argument that whatever happened in history was inevitable, and would still have happened even if initial factors had been different. How can you possibly know this? Isn't this likely motivated reasoning? Doesn't it go against all common sense to say that after policy x is implemented to achieve result y, and y then happens, that y would have happened anyway (regardless of x)?
"The Iraq War was hugely expensive, it killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, it destabilized the region,"
How much of that was poor handling of the war by those in charge, rather than an inevitable result of the war? I wish these things weren't lumped together.
"it led to the creation of ISIS,"
How much of that was Obama withdrawing too early to meet an election promise?
"it was probably illegal"
If you mean under "international law", so was basically everything Saddam's government ever did, not to mention half the governments in the world today. Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators. What kind of law deserves respect that makes any real attempt to actually enforce the law itself illegal?
"unless you theorize something completely speculative like, well it might have killed someone who was going to be the new Hitler"
Actually, yes. Saddam had already committed genocide twice, against Shias and against Kurds. What might have been next? Not to mention sending a credible message to potential violent dictators for decades to come that they are not secure, and that even being suspected of arming themselves with WMDs is taking their lives in their hands, whether they actually are or not. The potential benifits of the invasion are immense, long-lasting, and largely invisible. We'll never know what atrocities it has prevented.
None of this is to unquestionably defend the war, but to point out all the factors that people for some reason forget: the difference between the justice of the war and the competence with which it was waged, the effect of withdrawing all troops prematurely, and the question of how many deaths would have happened if Saddam had stayed in power.
And unlike Vietnam and Afghanistan, this war was actually won. Saddam was overthrown and executed, Iraq is a (flawed) democracy now.
Well, yes, it is true I can't know it would have been a one-off. But there wasn't a pattern of major terrorist attacks by foreign actors in the US before the War on Terror, so to give the WoT credit for preventing them doesn't make a lot of sense. (I am not claiming that parts of the WoT weren't effective.)
Some major terror attacks elsewhere, like the train bombings in London and Spain, were probably retaliation for the Iraq War. And it is not as though Islamic terrorism has gone away as a global issue.
To say the Iraq War would have been good if they had made all the right decisions is pointless. Obama wouldn't have had to make the decision to withdraw the troops if there had never been a war. Also, I never heard that the American commanders were incompetent. The problem is that the war started a chaotic series of events that no one could control.
Saddam was a threat before the Gulf War; afterwards he was basically contained.
By international law, I mean the rules that are supposed to govern relationships between states. I don't think most governments are in major violation of that. When the US invades countries on weak premises, it encourages others, like Russia, to do the same thing (or at least it gives them the opportunity to say, "we're just doing what the US did").
No doubt the Iraq War was won militarily, but I don't think the consensus is that it was strategic victory.
Really? 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war except in the propagandized heads of Americans. If we were teaching the world a lesson it was that the US does not act rationally on the world stage, has no problem invading countries under false pretences, committing war crimes, and paying just about anyone for tips on who might be a terrorist and using that as the sole bases for torturing them and keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives with no trial. You want to know why most of the global south doesn't support us in Ukraine? Well Iraq had a lot to do with it, that and we did everything possible to prevent peace. https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us
If you want to know why 9/11 happened, you can have it straight from the horses' mouth. https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article131466809.ece/binary/ksmlettertoobama.pdf
Honestly, I can't say there is much I disagree with in it. It is factually accurate. No, war does not create peace.
>Another argument I can't for the life of me understand: despite international law being in all respects a fantasy that is unenforcable and is routinely ignored by dictators on a daily basis with zero consequences, democracies should rigidly observe it even to the point of constraining military action against said dictators
It's possible to take military action against dictators that is legal under international law. GWI was legal. GWII could have been if WMDs had been found.
"International law" is a fantasy. It's a good sound bite for a lawyer to get on TV.
The problem is that a law requires an enforcement mechanism to be something other than wishful thinking. An "international law" has no enforcement mechanism. There may be a court in a particular nation that considers an act to be both against an "international law" and also for it to be in their jurisdiction, but the likely theory behind that is that it violates a law of that country (like how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws), and the violator is charged under that.
>how treaties signed and ratified by the US are considered part of their laws
That's an arrangement unique to The US. In reallity, the UN can mandate military actions, there is an international. court of justice that has tried various dictators and war crimjnals, etc.
Certain elements in the US don't like that sort of thing , but it exists.
I don't see how its legality depends on the actual existence or discovery of WMDs, rather than on the reasonableness of the belief that they existed. Hussein was pretty clearly trying to head-fake his neighbors into believing he could still nerve-gas them if he was backed into a corner, and it wasn't just the US intelligence apparatus that was fooled by that.
I'd say it would have been a one-off even if there were no official policy changes whatsoever. The people onboard the planes realized they were being used as KEW rather than hostages, and started fighting back accordingly, before the attack was even over. Somebody trying the same thing again would've been dogpiled before they got a chance to take control of the plane... unless they managed to recruit enough martyrs to actually win a mostly-unarmed infantry battle against the other passengers and crew. Not just in a last-man-standing sense, but breach a crowded choke point before the pilot finds a safer place to land, or the air force sends an interceptor to shoot them down. Stewardesses can use the drink carts as battering rams, and if it looks like the hijackers are starting to come out on top, reckless aerobatics could literally tilt the field, or shake it like a snowglobe. Building up resources sufficient to overcome such a challenge would make them much easier for existing intelligence agencies to spot and intercept before anything gets off the ground. It was only possible that once thanks to an element of surprise from so thoroughly betraying the "I might kill you if you make trouble, but keep your head down and you'll probably get to go home safe, whether by ransom or rescue" contract between hijacker and hostage.
Besides, for fight-winning numbers they'd be buying enough tickets to cover most of the cost of fueling and operating a whole plane, so it's probably more bang for the buck to just purchase a fuel tanker truck or 40' shipping container full of mining explosives, remove the hazmat labels, drive it to the target and set it off the old fashioned way.
Al Gore might not have ignored the Clinton-era intelligence on Al Qaeda, which could have stopped 9/11 completely.
If it was so easy then why didn't the Clinton administration manage to stop 9/11?
Exactly. It's not like the Bush administration didn't know that Al Qaeda is a threat; it's just that there wasn't much anyone could do about it without invading Afghanistan. Which I do not think Al Gore would have done prior to 9/11.
There is a broad consensus that the Bush administration ignored intelligence. See e.g. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353/ or read/watch The Looming Tower. Noted alt history enthusiast Matt Yglesias also considers this a possibility: https://www.slowboring.com/p/bad-incentives-and-the-politics-of.
> There was a bit of a principled disagreement during the Clinton-Bush transition as to whether the Clinton administration’s focus on non-state security threats was correct, and it seems the Bush team decided to somewhat deprioritize the Clinton-era focus on al-Qaeda relative to state actors and great power conflicts.
>
> A Gore administration would probably not have made that choice, and it’s at least possible that a more consistent top-down focus on al-Qaeda and counterterrorism issues would have led to the unraveling of the plot.
In what way was this intelligence specifically actionable? The protagonists in the Politico version seem to have wanted the US to launch an actual military attack against Afghanistan, which seems a bit much (and which would have had the Politico staff et al declaring POTUS an Evil Warmonger for the unprovoked attack). Otherwise, I don't see how that intelligence was specific enough to call for doing anything that the FBI etc don't already do as a matter of course.
The Clinton administration ended on January 20, 2001.
Eight years as vice-president and nothing was done. But Bush gets the stick for not paying sufficient attention for the six months he had as president.
I think this is not highly probable.
Gathering and assessing intelligence is doing something. Timing matters for stopping attacks. Well-informed people disagree with your probability assessment, see sibling comment https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-citizens/comment/17722207.
(Tangent) one response to your concerns with utilitarianism: maybe utilitarianism does accurately describe what we should ideally do, even though utilitarian calculations are not the best way to practically make decisions. A bit more on this: https://utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism/#multi-level-utilitarianism-versus-single-level-utilitarianism
I wasn't sure, either. I'm also not convinced that a President Gore wouldn't have launched a similar "war on terror" or that he wouldn't have done an Iraq war. (I'm not trying to say that Iraq was legitimately a part of the war on terror. I'm only saying that the US and Iraq were on a collision course since the first Gulf War and it's not impossible that something like a regime-changing war would've happened even with Gore at the helm.)
> During most years of the Vietnam war there were less US-troops killed-in-action then people on US-roads.
During every year, by quite a way.
The total US troops killed as a result of Vietnam (even including still MIAs) is about 60K, and the highest year was <17K in 1968, in which year the automobile fatality level was 52K. The lowest auto deaths in the 1956-1975 period was 35K for just that year, 1958. (Obviously, non-US-troop deaths were much worse in Vietnam.)
Very interesting, I wonder how citizens from authoritarian countries exploit in similar ways
They don't. Courts in those are a formality, entirely subordinate to the regime. What influence people can exert is almost always informal.
Not via the courts, but in countries with low or no democracy you just straight up ignore the laws. If enough people break laws, the effort it would take to actually catch and discipline them becomes astronomical, and could kick off a death spiral in which people notice that laws aren't being enforced and go on to keep breaking more important laws.
This is an incentive for authoritarian regimes to actually do a bit of propaganda legwork to convince people of the benefits of following the law. If it's very obviously against a huge number of people's self interest, people will notice other people doing it and not getting caught and start doing it too.
Examples of very strict laws which heavily depended on public goodwill to actually pull off - pandemic restrictions in China and Australia, in 2020 (situation changed post vaccine). In 2020, watching massive death tolls in the US and Europe, most Chinese and Australian citizens did in fact concur that it is in our best interest to stay at home - enough that actually enforcing the law against the minority that broke it became doable. You notice that China did eventually drop their restrictions because the enforcement effort became impossible as public opinion shifted. I know Aus is a democracy but we used an authoritarian emergency response measure to impose the laws, so I'd still count it as an authoritarian law in this instance (not that it's bad, but there is still a lever where citizens can limit what an authoritarian state does to their freedoms).
This is my favorite review of the series-to-date. Although, when I read "Nader’s philosophy was one of justice by lawsuit.", I did wonder what Njal would have thought.
Intriguing. Though a different kind of lawsuit. Post the Burning, Mord's lawsuit failed and the ensuing battle was horrific until the Njal party had to stop for fear that they would be bankrupted by all their killing.
The feud stops when Kari simply walks into Flosi's hall and sits down to dinner. He later marries Flosi's daughter, the widow of a man murdered by the Njalssons. As I said, Njals Saga is deceptively complicated.
Really? I hate it. It's much more explicitly one-sided than most, and not even in a cool self-aware way but like a smug and oblivious "doesn't everyone already agree with me anyway (except for maybe some stupid hicks pfft lol)?"- way.
Yeah, there's a lot of the author assuming consensus among their readers, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Maybe it's just a contrarian streak, but this style of writing where the author just sort of assumes I'm part of the cool in-crowd who shares their values implicitly immediately triggers my "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" response.
> Its first leader, displaying the lack of modesty that was characteristic of the era, described the agency’s work by saying, “What God had made one, man was to develop as one.”
The quote itself here went over my head, especially the first half. Is the leader just saying "we're united"?
God made it as one valley, so it will be developed as one valley.
Makes sense, since the TVA operates in six states, but could operate across all of them as a unified organization.
I think it's something like "God left the job incomplete, so it's our job to finish (developing) what he couldn't."
I don't get it either (and still don't). All it made me think of was "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:6) which is about marriage.
I think he's saying they aren't going to listen to any of the smaller local governments inside the valley. It has to be developed as one valley, we're in charge of that, and we don't care what people with a narrower perspective say.
Right, the quote wasn't particularly immodest in general, instead it was in regard to a particular constitutional issue of the time involving the novel creation of a supra-state organization by the federal government.
FDR was fascinated by water, and he felt that watersheds, such as the Tennessee River Valley, were more natural than old political units, such as states. I can recall reading in Michael Barone's history "Our Country" that at one point FDR mused over throwing out the 48 states and starting over by dividing the USA up into seven watersheds for administrative purposes. (But I've never seen that confirmed elsewhere, so maybe I'm remembering it wrong.)
George Clooney's soliloquy at the end of the Coen Brothers' "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" as the reservoir waters rise is a good epitome of the New Deal philosophy behind the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Coincidentally, I just today read these two articles (https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/, https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/) with some interesting further detail on how proceduralism has gone wrong at government agencies.
The second one, with regard to comment periods and how they may favor the industries being regulated (that file more comments), has this to say:
> Collectively, the studies suggest that more comments correlate with more influence. But why? The empirical picture is puzzling because the informational value of comments has nothing to do with their volume. In theory, a single comment from a public-interest group should be at least as persuasive as a deluge of thousands of duplicative comments from industry.
> It doesn’t tend to work like that in practice. Although the courts only require agencies to respond to “vital” comments, agencies can’t reliably predict which comments a judge might someday find vital. Risk-averse agencies therefore have little choice but to respond, often in punitive length and detail, to all the substantive comments they receive. At the same time, the law places no filter on the information that commentators can submit to agencies. Recognizing as much, industry swamps agencies with hundreds of comments containing thousands of pages of unstructured, highly technical information, typically pertaining to regulatory costs.
Industry tends to organize and coordinate responses to government action. They hire people who follow what the government is doing and can alert their bosses to upcoming or proposed changes. It's obvious that they would do this, and not nefarious. I don't think there's any reason to assume that there's some kind of concerted effort to bog down regulatory agencies as you've described.
There's nothing deceptive or manipulative in a group of companies from related industries all having an interest in responding. If they are saying similar things (like "this rule will cost us billions and may destroy our industry") then it makes sense for the government to respond differently than if fewer companies were writing them - even if all of them say the same thing. And the government should care that their rules may harm industries.
" And the government should care that their rules may harm industries."
The point is that industry may not be truthful when it says that.
Neither may public interest groups. Honestly the nonprofit advocacy group I worked at for 4 years lied jsut as systematically and regularly as the energy company and they were better at it and it is a was a larger portion of their operations.
The idea that "West Texas Housing Coalition" (or whatever) is more committed to truth but than "West Texas Oil Company" is kind of one of the big lies of modern America/leftism.
They are both organizations selling something and don't really give two fucks about the truth.
I didn't say anything about nonprofits.
The point is “everyone lies” so worrying that the industry might not be truthful is silly. It’s lies from everyone.
That's a bizarre attitude to take.
> Just kidding—when GM’s women invited him back to their apartment, ostensibly to “discuss foreign relations,” he suspected entrapment and declined. But he did later tell a reporter, in one of his rare attempts at humor, that “normally I would have obliged.”
What exactly was the scandal supposed to be here? How were they going to "entrap" him? He wasn't married or anything... I guess extramarital sex was considered scandalous back in 1966?? Huh...
They could lie.
They were probably prostitutes?
The claim, per Wiki, is that they were:
"The book became an immediate bestseller, but also prompted a vicious backlash from General Motors (GM) who attempted to discredit Nader by tapping his phone in an attempt to uncover salacious information and, when that failed, hiring prostitutes in an attempt to catch him in a compromising situation.[17][18] Nader, by then working as an unpaid consultant to United States Senator Abe Ribicoff, reported to the senator that he suspected he was being followed. Ribicoff convened an inquiry that called GM CEO James Roche who admitted, when placed under oath, that the company had hired a private detective agency to investigate Nader. Nader sued GM for invasion of privacy, settling the case for $425,000 and using the proceeds to found the activist organization known as the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.[9]"
But it seems to just be a claim by Nader that is now accepted as fact, because someone wrote it down in a book.
Sex outside of marriage was a lot more scandalous in the early '60s. Not that it wasn't widely practiced, and my suspicion is that prostitution was a larger industry then. But you really, really didn't want anyone to present public evidence that you were involved in it.
Before even finishing, I just have to jump in and say I'm onboard with hating Ralph Nader, although my personal reason is that my first car was a Chevy Corvair; the vehicle Ralph Nader murdered to become famous. It was a great car and should have become a classic, except for his utter hit job of a book "Unsafe at any speed".
This guy should be paid by all of us. How do we do this? Nader and Government regulation in general is a huge topic, but the reviewer here gives us a wonderfully clear sense of the issues.
The Corvair case was already obsolete. GM first included an antiroll bar in 64, by 65 had gone to full independent rear suspension and created Anerica's only sporty compact. Didn't matter. Perhaps Ralph's most baleful influence was creating the notion that advocacy implies the existence ofreasonable evidence.
The reviewer's mention of the reduction in vehicle fatalities underestimates, I think, the true improvement. Far more cars on the road, creating an exponentially higher probability of collision caribus paribus and being driven more miles. When I consider this generally unreported success I fear I might become an optimist and so banned from public writing.