Social Security was created based on the premise that people of certain ages are unable to support themselves due to poor and declining health. Yet Aubrey de Grey has made a fairly strong argument that this bad health can be cured (see Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), so that the elderly will be as healthy as the young.
Since it’s probably inevitable that the government will end up paying for the initial round of anti-aging treatments, why not make government payments for such treatments conditional on the beneficiary leaving the Social Security system? This would probably save the government enough that it would be worthwhile for it to speed the research up by offering a few billion dollars in prizes for people who complete milestones such as extending the lifespans of lab animals.
There’s a good deal of doubt as to how many decades it will take to produce a good enough cure (and some ambiguity as to how good a cure would need to be to qualify). But the a combination of Aubrey de Grey’s arguments and those of Rob Freitas and Eric Drexler suggest that there’s a very good chance that it can be done before Social Security is expected to collapse. And anyone who thinks Congress might turn Social Security into a system that is certain to remain solvent is drastically overestimating the reliability of demographic forecasts and/or the far-sightedness of Congress.
U.S. Politics
Secretary of State Rice said on yesterday’s Face the Nation:
I’m quite certain that all Iraqis want to defeat this insurgency and get on with building a democratic Iraq.
I’m curious as to who she wants us to think make up this “insurgency”, if it isn’t Muslim jihadists, many of whom happen to be Iraqis. If they were all coming from outside Iraq’s borders, wouldn’t the administration be putting more effort into sealing the borders than in fighting them in cities?
In today’s press conference, someone asked Bush about how the turnout in the Iraqi elections would affect their legitimacy. The questioner seemed think that a very high turnout (such as elections in the Soviet Union produced) would make the results legitimate, but low turnout (such as typical local elections here in Silicon Valley produce?) would raise questions about the election’s legitimacy. Why do suggestions such as that not produce ridicule? Is it due to a preference for easily quantified criteria?
A few minutes later, Bush took great care to avoid supporting free speech for Muslims who hate the U.S (he was asked about Jordan, but could easily have talked about other parts of the mideast). This hints at a willingness to prevent jihadists who seem to have support from a nontrivial fraction of the Iraqi population from campaigning, which might lend some plausibility to their boycott of the elections.
Another issue that is important in determining whether the elections are legitimate is whether there is any reason for one part of Iraq to be subject to the ideology of the majority within Iraq. Iraq is hardly a nation in the normal sense of that word – it contains several cultures, not fond of the idea of nation-states, who were made into a country by British decree.
If I had somehow become U.S. president around the time that Saddam was captured, I would have dispensed with recreating a national Iraqi government, and simply held hasty elections for ruling councils in each town/city, then I would have withdrawn U.S. troops.
Book review: Imperial Hubris : Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, by Anonymous
This disturbing book whose author has now identified himself as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, claims that bin Laden is being effective at persuading Muslims to wage a defensive jihad against the U.S. by making straightforward arguments based on scripture and descriptions of U.S. actions toward Muslims that are close enough to the truth to convince many Muslims that it would be sinful not to fight the U.S. He is succeeding because he ignores such U.S. offenses as alcohol, gay rights, man-made law and nation-states, and focuses on U.S. meddling in the Mideast.
The stock market rose in reaction to Bush’s victory, which wasn’t much of a surprise. What was moderately unusual was that the dollar sank relative to many other currencies and relative to gold, and a steady sinking trend seems to be continuing. In fact, measuring the S&P 500 relative to gold, it went down the day after the election and is a tiny bit lower now than before the election. I doubt that this indicates any belief that Kerry would have been better than the typical Democrat at reducing inflation. It seems to imply that the Bush (or the Republicans in general) have abandoned the fiscal responsibility that we used to associate with Republicans.
The decline of the dollar seems to be overwhelming the Chinese attempts to prop up the dollar to the extent that it is stable relative to the yuan. It seems strange that government officials think they can manage a gradual and widely anticipated change in the exchange rate. If interest rates on dollar-denominated holdings was higher than yuan-denominated holdings, people might expect the two to be equally good investments. But dollar interest rates seem to be a good deal lower, which makes it obvious to anyone who believes the official hints that yuan holdings are a better investment. And there are reports that China has bought increasing amounts of dollars from people who realize this. This suggests to me that a sudden collapse in the dollar relative to the yuan is not too far off when the Chinese government realizes a slow decline is expensive.
Once again, I feel somewhat humbled for underestimating the accuracy of presidential election markets. At least I was cautious enough to mainly bet against Bush winning states where he appeared to be behind, and against him winning 400 electoral votes, which made up for what I lost betting that Kerry would win the election and popular vote.
Assuming the preliminary results are accurately indicating the final results, Tradesports did quite well at predicting the elections (except for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon when it mistakenly reacted to exit polls). It’s Monday evening prices correctly indicated which presidential candidate would win each state. And it did a good job of indicating which states were closest (saying Iowa and Ohio were the least certain).
In spite of reports that poll workers in Santa Clara county may have been told not to inform voters about the option of a paper ballot instead of electronic, they were asking everyone when I voted in Mountain View. But after having the first worker record my choice of a paper ballot, I still waited a minute or two in a line for the electronic booth before getting the attention of the person who was supposed to have handed me the ballot. There was a line for electronic voting but essentially no line for paper voting, partly because one electronic machine had a problem due to what sounded like a voter trying to go back and change a vote, but had reached a point where it appeared to be too late to change it. It looked like between 10 and 20 percent of voters were using paper ballots. The paper ballot seemed simpler to use than what I recall of the electronic ballot 2 years ago. See PaperOrPlastic2004.org for info about California voting choices.
The Tradesports contracts showed Bush’s chances at just below 50% within the past hour, after having stated mostly in the 50s for the past few weeks.
Voters in Oregon and the Dakotas should remember what their Senators said about the DARPA project to create a futures market designed to provide information about terrorism. Ask yourself whether our presidential election would be decided more intelligently if we had a futures contract that predicted how many people would die in terrorist attacks over the next four year if Bush stays, and a similar one for a Kerry presidency. Many press reports that describe the reactions of Ron Wyden (Oregon), Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), and Tom Daschle (South Dakota) to the DARPA project are available here.
Alex Tabarrok writes about the apparent attempts to manipulate the Bush re-elected contract at Tradesports.com (which just dropped to exactly 50!), and CNBC has mentioned the same report today (with a denial from George Soros that he is responsible).
I want to warn people not to treat the failure of this manipulation as strong evidence that manipulation won’t have much effect on the reliability of the prices. If an experienced trader such as Soros tried to engage in this kind of manipulation, he would use a much more patient and cost-effective strategy than quickly driving the price down from 55 to 10.
To estimate the harm done by manipulation, we need to look at careful studies of how accurate markets have been, plus experiments such as the one Robin Hanson arranged. Note also that Robin’s attempt at a theoretical argument on this subject is unconvincing because it unrealistically assumes that traders aren’t risk-averse.
Wally Olson’s speeches in the Yale Political Union 30 years ago did more to make me comfortable with Libertarianism than any other single factor, so I’m disappointed to see him describe the Libertarian presidential candidate (Badnarik) as a "barking moonbat". I’m not entirely clear what that phrase means, but it seems to imply that the Libertarian Party ought to be rebuked for selecting him.
Badnarik does have some weird ideas and a general lack of brilliance that, in an ideal world, would mean that we should have expected better of the LP. But given the LP’s recent history, it deserves some modest rewards for selecting a candidate who does such basic things as buying advertising to spread Libertarian ideas. According to R.W. Bradford in Liberty Magazine (who may have been the first to publicize Badnarik’s strange ideas), Badnarik had spent 20 percent of the money he raised to buy ads as of mid-September. By comparison, Browne spent much less than 1 percent of his 1996 budget on buying ads. And as far as I can tell, Badnarik has enough sense to downplay his stranger ideas when campaigning.
Badnarik may be goofy and mediocre, but we’re stuck in a situation where that looks clearly better than what we should expect if we reject him.
I saw a great bumper sticker recently which (perhaps unintentionally) suggests the appropriate way to think about this election: Frodo failed – Bush got the ring. Tolkien wouldn’t want us to think that giving the ring to a Gollum or a Gandalf would be sufficient to solve the problem. Giving the ring to the least power-hungry person available is better than giving it to the smartest.