The Fed’s Dual Mandate
In her statement upon being nominated to be vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Janet Yellen mentioned the dual goals imposed by Congress on the Fed’s conduct of U.S. monetary policy. It is common to hear the Fed’s mandate described in terms of its “dual goals.” Here’s the actual statutory language:
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
I guess that language is just enough of a jumble that it doesn’t really matter that there are actually three goals: maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. Maybe the third gets lopped off because we think of the Fed’s control of interest rates more as a means than as an end. And because employment and inflation are the two recognized poles of monetary policy.
In more ways than one, though, it seems that the statutory language takes a back seat in directing Fed policy priorities. The word maximum in “maximum employment” is understood to be implicitly limited by the need to stave off inflation, though the need to escape high unemployment doesn’t seem to imply complementary limits to the pursuit of stable prices. Also, the statute’s more direct mandate has to do with long-run growth tied to increased production; the other two (or three) goals are almost afterthoughts.
I’m not especially knowledgeable about any of this, but I’d just note that this is a statutory provision which, however it was intended, seems tailor-made to supply obfuscatory justification of whatever direction Fed policy happens to take. There’s a little bit of everything in there, and the Fed Board and Federal Open Market Committee have immense discretion in their control of what is probably the government’s most consequential role in the economy. And that’s why these nominations matter so much.
Fed Nominations
A month and a half ago, the White House announced the names of three people the President would be nominating to fill the vacancies at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. And finally today those same three people were actually nominated.
My first thought is: By the time the sun starts burning out, we will totally have this nut cracked! And my second thought is: I hope these three nominees are committed to raising the employment level.
Well, Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Fed and the nominee for vice chair of the Board of Governors, made some promising noises right out of the box today:
I am strongly committed to pursuing the dual goals that Congress has assigned us: maximum employment and price stability and, if confirmed, I will work to ensure that policy promotes job creation and keeps inflation in check.
Sounds good, maybe, I think. You know, in that deeply ambiguous monetary policy kind of way. Via Matt Yglesias.
Les Mots Justes
Austin Frakt‘s mom, through back-channel comments, lays her finger on the only really practical way to treat the plural possessive of attorney general: avoid it at all cost.
My wife Nina agrees and further buttresses the strategic avoidance paradigm by pointing out that the phrase bogus arguments of the attorneys general follows the way the plural possessive is formed in French. That’s fitting, since it was the French-speaking Normans’ conquest of Britain in 1066 that got us into this fix in the first place. If we’re gonna follow the French rule for forming the plural, attorneys general, we might as well follow their rule for forming the plural possessive: of the attorneys general.
I also like the suggestion of switching into acronym mode, à la the AGs’ bogus arguments—as baseball fans do with RBIs for runs batted in—though I’m sure purists will have none of it. For them, just as you can end a season with one RBI or 190 RBI, you can file a bogus lawsuit with one AG or 50 AG. Because sticklers are like that.
Stay tuned for the denouement of this gripping series about plural possessives, in which we’ll visit the “in-laws” and learn whether I’m totally wrong about attorneys general’s.
In Praise of Naps
I enjoy a good nap. In fact, I basically live life perpetually on the brink of nap. (Until the sun goes down, that is, when I become weirdly awake.) And I’ve always thought napping, or sleeping in general, to be one of the most sensible ways of spending one’s time.
It was something of a revelation to me when I read, many years ago, that from the prospective of evolutionary biology, the important question about sleep is not why we do it, but why we do so little of it. What needs explaining is why we spend so much of our time awake, when we could be sleeping. (The answer, in a nutshell: sex.)
Health economist and nap aficionado Austin Frakt brings the science on napping. A recent paper (digested here) addresses the question of whether napping with your head on your desk is as restorative as lying-down napping. The verdict: no, but it’s better than not napping at all.
To my mind, the observation that any napping is better than no napping counts as a priori true. The fact that empirical research now confirms it can only be greeted with…a yawn.
The Short Game
Matt Yglesias shares this, about what we should look for in the next Supreme Court Justice:
I was speaking to some progressive lawyers with experience in the relevant fields, and they emphasized to me that the key aspect in this regard isn’t exactly “persuasion” since federal judges are usually strong-minded and strong-willed people. It’s mastering a certain brand of legal craftsmanship where you can put together a written opinion that people who don’t necessarily share your overarching philosophy can sign on to. On a divided Supreme Court, that kind of skill is very important.
The other week I made a similar point about how the Justices probably don’t really persuade each other all that much. The relevant skill is more like accommodation than persuasion. Fine-grained argumentative craftsmanship is the key. And my bet is that anyone in serious consideration will have that trait, or will learn it right quick. Because if she doesn’t, she won’t get the other Justices to sign on to her opinions, and her opinions will not become the Opinions of the Court.
But that’s just the “short game.” There’s a long game on the Court, too, and I still think persuasiveness and cogency are important for reasons that go beyond the Court itself.
Weekend Wordery: Attorneys’ General or Attorney Generals’?
As purists and snoots never tire of pointing out, the plural of attorney general is attorneys general, not attorney generals. But if that’s right, how do you form the plural possessive? Is it possible (a) to clearly convey the idea of possession by attorneys general, and simultaneously (b) to avoid sounding dumb?
Law professor Mark Hall takes a stab at it (in the title of an otherwise commendable piece about the bogus legal claims of the states challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act) with the ill-considered phrase Attorneys General’s.
Now, I’m inclined to think there’s not a right answer here and that there are a few ways you could go. I just don’t see how Attorneys General’s could be one of those ways. I suppose it satisfies the first criterion—it may even be, in some twisted way, correct. But, to my ears, it sure sounds dumb. So let’s explore some alternatives.
Imagine hearing someone utter the following sounds:
The attorneys general argument was bogus.
Hearing that, you’d probably think the speaker was referring to the general argument of one attorney: the attorney’s general argument. Or, depending on context, you might hear attorneys’ general argument. But even in a conversational context that was very clearly about an argument made by a group of state Attorneys General, you probably just wouldn’t hear it as the Attorneys’ General argument. That phrase just doesn’t come across in spoken English.
Part of the problem is that attorney general is not a phrase of English origin in the first place. Like many other legal phrases, it came into English from the French following the Norman invasion. The general part was originally an adjective modifying attorney. (In French, the adjective can come after the noun.) An attorney general might just as well have been called a general attorney. Think of it as meaning something like top attorney. We would have no problem talking about top attorneys or top attorneys’ arguments, but we would stumble all over attorneys top.
Another part of the problem is that possessive forms of title phrases are often clumsy. When the President of the United States has a plan, it’s the President’s plan—not the President’s of the United States plan, or the President of the United States’s plan. But the latter might not sound so silly in some contexts. Say, at a global summit, where there are lots of presidents. Or think governors. It doesn’t really sound weird at all to talk about the Governor of Georgia’s plan.
And for that matter, common usage includes phrases like the Attorney General’s orders and the Surgeon General’s warning. Aren’t these usages inconsistent with the way we form the plurals of these terms?
What seems to be going on here is that there are two different ways of parsing the grammatical logic of attorney general, and we’re applying them both at the same time. Steven Pinker writes, in his Words and Rules (excerpt here):
[T]he mind analyzes every stretch of language as some mixture of memorized chunks and rule-governed assemblies. How people pluralize an expression depends on how they tacitly analyze it: as a word or as a phrase.
Sometimes we parse attorney general as a phrase, with a noun (attorney) and a trailing adjective (general). Sometimes we parse it as a single morphological unit—like a compound word.
We parse it as a phrase when we make the plural attorneys general, and as a word when we make the possessive attorney general’s. This explains the Attorneys General’s mess—if you apply both parsing rules (first pluralize attorney; then make the whole thing possessive), it’s what you get.
The phrase-parsing plural (attorneys general) is the province of purists, those who still hear attorney modified by general. The word-parsing plural (attorney generals) evinces more of the common touch. But my guess is that we’re really all in the latter camp at this point. It’s just that attorneys general has congealed (among the highly educated) as a special plural—kind of like an irregular verb. Having accepted attorneys general, though, it’s not really clear how to apply other morphological rules, like the rule for forming possessives.
It seems to me that adherence to medieval phrase-parsing has become something of a liability here. Perhaps it’s time to let loose and say what comes naturally anyway: one attorney general, two attorney generals; and one attorney general’s bogus arguments, two attorney generals’ bogus arguments.
But does attorney generals’ pass the test? I think so. (a) It’s as clear as s’ words ever are (and it helps distinguish general arguments made by attorneys from arguments made by more than one Attorney General); and (b) reasonable, non-hypocritical people will not think you sound dumb—and that’s the best you can really hope for.
Weekend Birdery: The Chicken and the Brown Thrasher
The state bird of Georgia is the Brown Thrasher, Toxostoma rufum, a member of the mimid family. Like mockingbirds, also in the mimid family, Brown Thrashers are proficient in vocal mimicry. According to the whatbird.com field guide, “Brown Thrashers have the largest repertoire of songs of all the North American birds and are able to vocalize 3000 distinct songs.”
A month or so ago Brown Thrashers were in the news when it was reported that there was a movement to dethrone the thrasher as Georgia’s state bird and replace it with the “Cornish chicken.” It seems the “movement” was more of a publicity stunt—and a transparent one I’d say, now that I’ve seen the videos produced for the “Flip the Birds” campaign website. They’re pretty hilarious, actually.
Of course, that didn’t stop Georgia Conservancy from launching a response campaign to save the Brown Thrasher from Big Chicken. But that’s pretty obviously a joke, too. I can’t help but wonder if both sides—poultry industry and wildlife conservationists—were in cahoots, drumming up attention for each other. Everyone, especially the local media, seems to have treated the whole story as an elaborate vehicle for stupid puns. We at weekend birdery, however, would not dream of ducking so low.
Visualizing Ideology
Via the Monkey Cage, a graph of the ideologies of Supreme Court Justices for your viewing pleasure:
Pale Blue Dot Day
Kangaroo (Hat) Court for Health Reform
Seasoned conservative jurist, Harvard law professor, and Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried told Fox News this week that he would eat a hat made of kangaroo skin if the Supreme Court strikes down the new health reform law. (H/t Igor Volsky). Fried repeatedly invoked the Court’s 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich (holding that the feds were authorized under the commerce clause to regulate intrastate activity, even non-economic activity, if necessary and proper to a comprehensive scheme of regulating interstate commerce), as the controlling precedent. Fried suggested that, because health insurance is an $854 billion industry, it is commerce and can be regulated.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m skeptical that the commerce clause really provides a sound constitutional basis for the new law. Obviously insurance is commerce and, in general, can be regulated. But the legal question here—about the constitutionality of the individual mandate—is much narrower than that. The question is whether Congress may impose a tax penalty on people for failure to obtain health insurance. The size of the health insurance industry is not relevant to that question. What is relevant is whether the individual mandate is necessary and proper to the general scheme of federal regulation of insurance. The answer to that is certainly yes.
Even more narrowly, though, the Court should only have to decide whether Congress has a rational basis upon which to determine that the mandate is necessary to the overall scheme—not whether the mandate is in fact necessary to the scheme. And the answer to that should be, even more certainly and emphatically, yes.
But that doesn’t exhaust the issue. To be subject to regulation under the commerce clause, in my view, you must engage in some positive activity that is meaningfully related to the regulated commerce. And, as I see it, lacking insurance is not an activity; it’s a status. So the question, whether the commerce clause authorizes the individual mandate, is not really the slam dunk that it is often made out to be.
What is a slam dunk on the other hand, is the argument that Congress is authorized to impose the mandate under its taxing power. Just as your tax liability may vary according to whether you are married or not, have kids or not, rent a house or buy one, earn wages or capital gains, or whether you make early withdrawals from your 401(k) or wait till you retire, etc., under the ACA it will vary according to whether or not you are covered by adequate health insurance. Maybe that’s not exactly comparable to anything else in the tax code, but it doesn’t matter. The taxing power is not nearly as limited as the commerce power is. It is hardly limited at all. And that is what makes the case a slam dunk. And it is what makes the now 20-state challenge to the ACA an utterly frivolous exercise in political theater. And it is why Charles Fried will never have to eat his kangaroo-skin hat.
Nudging Down Sodium Consumption
The Washington Post reports that the FDA is planning a long-term effort to reduce the sodium content of processed foods. (Though FDA has issued a statement to make clear that it is not currently working on any such regulations, saying: “FDA is not currently working on regulations nor has it made a decision to regulate sodium content in foods at this time.”)
Salt excess is pervasive in America. According to this CDC fact sheet (pdf), most American adults consume more than twice their recommended daily allowance of salt. The sodium content of processed foods and restaurant meals is so extreme that significant reductions can probably be achieved without anyone really noticing. And that seems to be exactly the idea. We can ratchet down sodium content in increments, gradually deconditioning our taste for it in such unhealthy quantities.1
Aside: Despite my long-held pseudo-belief that salt equals taste, I have often wondered how people can stand the thrombotic amounts of salt on most brands of chips, and why the Big Junk chip industrial complex thinks we want that much salt. Wouldn’t it be economically prudent of them to settle on the least proportion of each ingredient consistent with maximum sales? I assume they operate thus. But I for one could eat and buy more chips than I do, and I quite possibly would—if they weren’t so damn salty. Surely there’s livable middle ground between, for example, the peanut-flavored salt pebbles commonly branded as “low salt peanuts” and their distant unsalted relations.
Anyway, a move by the FDA to reduce sodium consumption would be smart policy on a number of levels. Obviously excessive sodium consumption contributes to major health risks for heart disease and stroke (the number one and number three leading causes of death in America), and any reasonable means of mitigating those risks is worthy of consideration. It would also be good for the official government line on the health risks of sodium to be a little more discriminating than the current “generally recognized as safe” category that salt falls under. And just by opening public discussion of a potential regulatory regime, the FDA will further encourage efforts already under way, such as the voluntary reductions that Big Junk leaders like Pepsico and Kraft have recently announced.
Hat tip to Kevin Drum, who seems particularly intrigued by the announcement that Pepsico, who owns Lay’s, is market testing a new designer salt which allegedly could cut sodium content in chips 25% or more without affecting taste.
- There’s no actual regulatory activity yet, and anyway it’s probably much too early in the process for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to be involved, but this whole scheme has more than a hint of “nudge” to it, and über-nudge theorist Cass Sunstein is the head of Obama’s OIRA. OIRA, part of the Office of Management and Budget, coordinates the regulatory efforts of all the executive branch agencies. [↩]
Patient Protection
Jonathan Cohn rediscovers the Ps in PPACA:
The full name of the health care law is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And there’s a reason for that “Patient Protection” part: The law also bolsters coverage for those people who have it. It eliminates cost-sharing for preventative services. It imposes a binding appeals process for people who think insurers wrongly denied treatments. It forces insurers to spend more on patient care and less on overhead –and that’s not to mention the many people who pay for insurance now, but will pay less starting in 2014, thanks to the tax credits.
Weekend Wordery: Nerdery
At last, from Great White Snark, a Venn diagram taxonomy of geekdom. Hat tip to Austin Frakt, who also earns his stripes by laying out the following preference hierarchy, in which I concur:
Since I prefer intelligence overall, think obsession has good, secondary value and find little to be recommended in social ineptitude but will accept it if required to support the first two, here’s the preference hierarchy, as I see it:
- Geek,
- Nerd,
- Dweeb,
- Dork.
Weekend Birdery: Great Tits
GrrlScientist couldn’t resist the pun in her recent post, “What Do Great Tits Reveal about the Genetics of Personality?”
The post reviews a study of four wild populations of Great Tits (pictured right) in Europe, examining whether certain gene sequences correlated with exploratory behavior. The study found that the potential correlation…well, there was no correlation really.
Oh well. That’s science. If not increasing the store of our knowledge, at least it offers up opportunities for the endless propagation of adolescent puns and intrigue that is weekend birdery.
Slip and Fall
Via Kevin Drum, Simon Johnson and James Kwak describe how global finance fell prey to the oldest metaphor in the book:
It was as if the government first repealed the laws against littering, eliminated all public sanitation services, and subsidized the consumption of bananas . . . and then the global economy slipped on a banana peel.
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