I'm intrigued by Tyler Cowen's line of argument against social security personal accounts. The argument, as far as I can see goes something like this:

(1) Even if you have a program of personal accounts/forced savings, political reality will still lead to a secondary safety net for the elderly.

(2) A program of forced savings plus a redistributive safety net (welfare program) is worse than just a safety net.

So, (3) Let's make social security into a welfare program for old people who need it, and just forget about the personal accounts/forced savings.

Tyler's argument turns on his claim that there is simply no way to get around the fact that we're going to have some form of redistribution to the poor among the elderly. I am, however, not certain why Tyler is so positive that we're stuck with some kind of welfare for the old.

It seems to me that the underlying assumption of Tyler's argument is that it is impossible for the state to credibly commit to a scheme where individuals are responsible for their own long-term welfare. Perhaps if the state could so commit, and people really expected that they would sink if they refused to swim, then they wouldn't take out huge loans against their personal lockbox accounts, and they wouldn't upon retirement open their lockbox, burn the money, and expect to get bailed out. But the state can't so commit, and so we're going to get a moral hazard problem anyway.

In other words: If people think they'll get welfare, they'll act irresponsibly. But if you try to tell them that they won't get welfare, they won't believe you, and they'll still act irresponsibly. Because they've acted irresponsibly, they'll need welfare, and because they need it, they will get it.

I wonder if Tyler would agree that this is the underlying structure of his argument?

Now, I'm not sure what to think of the inevitability argument. I'm pretty sure it's good rational choice reasoning, but that certainly doesn't make it true. I have some conjectural thoughts on why it may not be true, which I will share soon.

Pejman Yousefzadeh proposes a Solomonic compromise to bridge the miscommunication about first-date kisses. [Amber Taylor, Brock Sides, PG, and Dan Moore champion them; I am all in favor of kisses, but wish to make clear that the error costs are high, so shy folks sometimes err on the side of caution]

Anyway: Pejman's proposed solution is for the gentleman to take the lady's hand at the close of the evening and kiss it. He suggests this is an etiquette violation (hands should be offered, not grabbed) but this isn't the species of hand-kiss etiquette recognizes anyway. The kiss-on-the-hand recognized by etiquette is not supposed to be a half-strength substitute for a kiss on the lips. It's a form of non-romantic greeting from European gentleman to married lady (and the hand isn't actually kissed; that's an optical illusion).

The romantic hand-kiss is a creature of spontaneity, and isn't a solution here. If a romantic kiss is unwanted, it is unwanted, and moving it from lip to hand to elbow will hardly make it better. Indeed, it smacks too much of the bad-- but too tempting-- tactic of making physical contact by a series of slow, carefully plotted, and seemingly unintentional degrees. (He places his hand on her shoulder whenever he laughs, he brushes against her too frequently, etc.)

I am all for circumspection, but if one is going to work up the wherewithal to make the first romantic kiss, there is no point in the half-measure. It is no less invasive.

(More Levywatch)

Jacob Levy discusses theories and crackpots in the comments at Crooked Timber.

I'm pleased to announce a new feature this week, which I've un-inventively titled "What I'm Reading [about food] this week". My goal, you see, is to eventually have the largest private food library in the world, which I've decided to accomplish by adding a book or so to my collection each week through Ebay. Sure, it'll take me a millenia or so to get there, but what's a thousand years between friends?

In any case, the book for this week is Eating in America, by Waverly Root & Richard de Rochemont. I bought it mostly on the basis of the former's reputation for French cookery - for those interested, I'll be discussing Root's contribution to that subject next week. But I also needed a general history of American cooking - I have the odd European tome, but nothing covering home, and I hoped this would fit the bill. Unfortunately, I haven't got much good to say about this piece. Compared to Calvin Trillin's bright, dancing prose in The Tummy Trilogy, a contemporary of Eating in America, Root's work is turgid and uninteresting, progressing in series through an inevitable paean to Native American cooking and the usual denounciations of The Jungle era meatpacking before settling into a repetitive screed against American cooking in the mid-seventies. The entire work, to my mind, is a terrible warning to those contemplating co-authored books, and I was sorely disappointed.

Still, I do like a good gluttony scene, and Eating serves up several memorable ones. My favorite demonstrates what happens when religious leaders stick to the letter rather than spirit of their spiritual admonitions. As most people know, Catholics are meant to eat no meat on Fridays during Lent. The fast is supposed to be particularly strict on Ash Wednesday. But when Cardinal Mercier of Belgium visited New York at the start of Lent in 1919, the Waldorf Astoria served the following meal - I'm not quite sure this is what the Church fathers had in mind:

. . . fish and vegetable hors d'oeuvre, canteloupe filled with fruit salad, potato soup, lobster Thermidor, salmon steaks with mousseline sauce, potato balls, hearts-of-lettuce salad, Port Salut cheese, peach Melba, and petits fours".

As to the my menu for the week, I have to admit to being little inspired this week. Thankfully, there was a large loaf of good bread slowly going stale on my counter, so following my own advice a while back I decided to base my meal around that.

Breakfast:

Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal (the texture differs considerably from the usual Quaker Oats) with Canadian maple syrup.

Lunch:

Cheese & Spinach Triangles x2 - I had some cheese mixture and filo dough left over from last week's cooking, so the obvious answer was to stuff the dough with the cheese and spinach, brush the pastries with olive oil, and let them loose in the oven.

Taboulleh x 3 - I've noticed that people in America make this middle eastern salad with far more bourgul wheat than parsley. That's entirely wrong - taboulleh is a parsley salad, and even if you're making it as a main dish, as here, the bright green herb should still dominate the wheat, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemon.

4 pm snack:

I've been on a blueberry kick recently, perhaps out of nostalgia for the summer, so I made 6 blueberry muffins. Unfortunately, as happens sometimes, I, umm, ate them. As self-punishment I went to the gym for a 3 mile jog, skipped my traditional Sunday night pizza slice, and bought a box of Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bars for snacks the rest of the week. The last is by far the worst indignity.

Dinner:

Grey sole with breadcrumbs x 2 - delightful, light, fish topped with a crust of breadcrumbs, pecorino romano, and butter to bind. Served with leftover lentil and spinach soup from last week.

French Toast x 2 - what better use for stale bread than this eggy, syrupy treat?

Pasta with breadcrumbs x 1 - ground breadcrumbs fried in olive oil, enriched by pancetta, and tossed with linguine and more olive oil. Odd as it sounds, breadcrumbs have always been the traditional poor man's substitute for parmesan in Italy, and I think they work rather well.

While I have access to a blog with a rather higher readership than my own I may as well make the most of it and point out that my review of Nicholson Baker's novella Checkpoint has just appeared over at the America's Future Foundation webzine Brainwash.

Here is a sample:

Bush's re-election may drive Nicholson Baker to put his head through a wall, but it's the best thing that could happen to his sales. Checkpoint has sold poorly so far because it's a mediocre book, which is a big disappointment, because Baker is one of the best writers of his generation, celebrated for his crystalline exaltations of the mundane and his pioneering exploration of neglected masturbatory possibilities. Although it is, by Baker's usual standards, a middling production, Checkpoint did occasion something of a second-order news event as critics and commentators from across the notional left-right spectrum rose to condemn it for immorality, bad taste, or both. Checkpoint is centrally occupied with volcanic outrage over the Iraq war and the crazed desire to murder George W. Bush, and therefore makes up in controversy what it lacks in quality.

Unlike Crescat, Brainwash allows comments on their articles. Do not, I implore you, become intoxicated by your commenting freedom.

[UPDATE: If you follow the link to my review and you notice it's not there, well that's because it's not there. It was pulled by the editors of Brainwash. I'm waiting to find out what the full story is.]