Richard Cohen wrote in today's Washington Post:

. . . I am forever coming across columns I've totally forgotten writing and I now, routinely, have to check to see if I have already staked out a position on some matter of importance -- and what, exactly, it may be. For this, there is The Post's own database, not to mention LexisNexis and Google and various competitors. These are where my life is catalogued. This is where I can retrieve my memory. I am digitized, therefore I am.

Obviously, this is a good thing. Less obviously, maybe, this is a bad thing. A man is entitled to his own view of himself. He is entitled to be who he says he is. He is the sum product of a gazillion memories, some of them shaved a bit, some of them totally renovated, some of them discarded and forgotten and replaced by dint of imagination and the urgent need to deny. Anyone who has led a full life needs denial. It is the Novocaine of life.

But now I am denied denial. I have been at this column business since 1976, writing most of the time three times a week, more recently just two. That comes to about 3,500 columns, my opinions on just about everything -- a huge memory dump straight from me to the printed page and thence, alas, to the dour computer that lacks remorse or romance and is nothing but rebuke: But you said in 1980. But you wrote in 1990. But . . . aw, shut up.

May nothing I've said here come back to haunt me.

I objected, in a discussion this weekend, to the idea of "genetic insurance."

If insurance companies are allowed to base rates on individuals' proclivity to disease, as evidenced by their DNA, then parents should be able to purchase insurance that would guard against the chance that their children would be born with unfavorable genes. I objected because, though this is all well and good for the children of parents with foresight and economic stability, the type who likely plan their children and start college savings accounts early (or, for brevity, "good" parents), children, of parents who don't take this precaution and whose choices in the genetic lottery turn out poorly, will suffer. It is a chief tenet of mine that policies not be enacted that cause children to suffer for the misfortune of their parents.

Under the genetic insurance scheme, children born with poor genes to good parents would find that their parents' characteristic prudence aids them even more than it would under today's health insurance system; parents also have an increased incentive to be good. But the children with poor genes born to unprepared parents would face prohibitive health care costs due to no action of the children's own that they could have take or prevented.

A government scheme to insure the children of bad parents would create a severe moral hazard; lowering the quality of the government's genetic insurance would be itself immoral. I would much rather see nationwide genetic insurance with an ability for citizens to opt-in when they become naturalized.

But these thoughts led me into others, of what sorts of advantages bestowed by luck and birth irk me and at which ones do I smile. An example of the latter comes from a former state senator with whom I had coffee not so long ago. She was telling of recent trip back to visit the old constituency. Forgetting just how low speed limits were and running a bit late to visit her son's parents-in-law, she was pulled over for doing 49 mph in a 35 mph zone. The cop pulled up, "License and registration, ma'am." He looked at them, and his tone changed immediately. "How's your son? What brought you to town and where are you heading?" Well, the son's a former police officer now residing in a former state, and the father-in-law was a long-serving police officer, now retired from the force.

Needless to say, he dismissed her with only an admonition. The pastoral candidate smiled at me as she noted what had got her through: "The brotherhood of the blue survives."

Doug Kendall and Elizabeth Bradley have a very sharp piece in The New Republic Online about the Court's federalism cases. They make the argument-- which I first heard from Ernest Young (The Rehnquist Court's Two Federalisms, 83 Tex. L. Rev. 1 (2004); Two Cheers for Process Federalism, 46 Vill. L. Rev. 1349 (2001); Federalism and the Double Standard of Judicial Review, 51 Duke L. J. 75 (2001); &c.)-- that so far as the actual workings of federalism go, robust Supreme Court enforcement of enumerated powers and federal constitutional provisions (like the takings clause) are not nearly as important as the federal statutory preemption cases that come day in and day out with little media attention. (And so far as I am aware, with no public interest litigation groups devoted to the issue at large).

I disagree with Kendall and Bradley about the merits of Raich and Kelo; I think the Court could (and should) have gone the other way in each one while still leaving plenty of room for "balance", and given the forcefulness of the Lopez and Morrison dissenters, I think there's a serious risk that today's balance will be tomorrow's total judicial abdication, but that remains to be seen.

[I also think there are plenty of more complicated questions here about the role of the judicial branch in creating its own theory of federalism, and whether and how that must be grounded in other sources of authority, but that is something for another day.]

The article is very smart, though, and the general point is a very good one, that should be emphasized more. This sort of day-in day-out work matters a lot, even if the New York Times and Dahlia Lithwick don't think it's very sexy.

Via Brian Leiter I come across this (PDF) article by my Torts professor, Peter Schuck. Professor Schuck suggests that too much civility in academic discourse can sometimes be a bad thing-- not always, but sometimes.

Despite my general (and not always successful) attempts to keep this blog on a rather even keel most of the time, I agree wholeheartedly. Much heated rhetoric can be used as a disguise for bad or empty argumentation, or represent a failure to faithfully listen to one's interlocutors, but certainly not all of it; and much civility can be used as a disguise for laziness and an academic's refusal to engage, which are probably more harmful on the whole.

Or, as Professor Andrew Abbott once put it (in a speech that I shall continue to dun for quotes until I am old and grey):

What about the President's claim that it is important to "think about our disagreements without scapegoating and accusations of moral bankruptcy"? Bullshit. What good is a university where people don't attack each other hammer and tongs? Where nobody is going to get hurt?

James Q Wilson and Arnold Kling are both rather curmudgeonly about Steven Levitt's hot-selling Freakonomics (which I've lauded here). Both of their reviews have roughly the same form: criticize one or two of Levitt's papers discussed in the book, suggesting an alternate hypothesis; acknowledge that Levitt is brilliant but complain that his book is incomplete, and suggest that his scholarly papers are better.

Well, yes, Freakonomics is pop-economics, and a consequence of being popular, i.e., intelligble to the average New York Times reader, is that one sacrifices a great deal of completeness and complexity. But Freakonomics is pop-economics written by an actual brilliant economist, with footnotes to that economists papers, which, as Wilson points out, are readily available on internets and in college libraries. (Republishing those papers instead of Freakonomics, as Wilson suggests, would be terminally silly; the audience for such a book would be vanishingly similar to those who already have access to those papers on their computers and in their libraries).

This is, in other words, an economics gateway drug, the sort of thing that can convince somebody that there are interesting things being discussed in economics but also gives the footnotes necessary to understanding how to move from pop-econ to real econ. Economists should be, not annoyed, but grateful, that a pop-econ book like this exists, rather than the sort of junk that gets marketed as pop-psych or even pop-science.

The major faults of Freakonomics should be addressed not by beating it but by joining it. If the problem is that the book implies that Levitt is the only "Freak" economist, or that it makes tendentious academic claims that might (gasp) be falsified, the solution is to publish similar stuff about other economists, and other economists who disagree. Or to keep the high-quality economics blogs coming (Like Becker's, Kling's and Caplan's, Cowen's and Tabarrok's, and so on) which do much the same job.

Tomorrow I head to the destination announced on my last two United airlines flights: Chicago (the previous flights actually landed in DC and Los Angeles). I'm flying in for the late-night Kazakh food fest that my friend is directing. I'll be bringing with me whatever appropriate goodies I can find at the local Russian store, and there'll be beshbarmak, the traditional dish of boiled meat (mutton or horse or camel), boiled noodles, and not enough boiled carrots; salads, some that I'll untraditionally reserve free of mayo; baursak, the traditional puffy fried dough if anyonecan get it to puff; and even camel's milk. I'm not sure if salads are traditional. They're just there. Camel's milk is, as is the vodka and tea that'll surely be served.

What an odd time. It will be my first visit back to Chicago since leaving it, but in the quite short time I'll be there, I doubt I'll even see Hyde Park, and perhaps will not even be able meet up with any friends from living there. Midway airport and the el might be the most familiar things I see. Maybe my destination in Chicago will be a place I know (an as-of-yet undetermined location that may or may not be in Logan Square), but there's no guarantee. And this brief trip may be my only one to Chicago between now and when I probably move there again in September a year from now. Dear lord, it's all so up in the air and I answer so many questions with "I don't know." Human Resources and the insurance company permitting, I'll be on a work trip to Almaty and Bishkek this time next month, but that, like so many other things, still needs to be determined. If you see someone on the Metro, hopefully studying an English::Azerbaijani/Kazakh/Kyrgyz/Tartar/Turkmen/Uighur/Uzbek dictionary, say hello.

When I was rather younger, as part of the misanthropic teen angst I suppose everyone experiences, I disapproved of fireworks displays on the 4th of july. Part of it was that I felt a bit of entirely wrongheaded elitist disdain for all those people watching the fireworks who didn't know the history. More of it was because the 4th of july meant that my entire family went to watch the display on a small hill in front of a dunkin' donuts in Fairfax, Virginia. At that age I could think of things I'd rather be doing. And finally, I had the terrible sense that our glorious ancestors would think us silly, wasting all this money and effort on some stupid celebrations.

Well, we all mature, of course, and I'm now a lot less disdainful of such mass celebratory displays. But what really turned the tide for me on the fireworks was a document I came across while writing my undergraduate dissertation on Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, the enigmatic Prussian officer who arrived in America in 1778 to train the American infantry in standard 18th century drill and practice. It's the general order issued by George Washington on July 3, in which our greatest President orders the camp for the next day, and gives this poignant command:

"Tomorrow, the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will be celebrated by the firing thirteen Pieces of Cannon and a feu de joie of the whole line; the Army will be formed on the Brunswick side of the Rariton at five o'Clock in the afternoon on the ground pointed out by the Quarter Master General. The Soldiers are to adorn their Hats with Green-Boughs and to make the best appearance possible. The disposition will be given in the orders of tomorrow. Double allowance of rum will be served out".

Tonight, standing on the border between Cambridge and Boston watching the fireworks, it wasn't July 4, 1776 in my mind, but July 4, 1778 - when our most important founding father ordered a fireworks display to shore up our rickety little army's morale in a dark and dangerous moment, early in a war against a seemingly invincible enemy. I thought about Washington, and those scared, untrained troops, and the double ration of rum, and realized how wrong and stupid a teenager I must have been. For there's nothing frivolous about recreating so touching a moment, and a lot of things churlish about making fun of people out celebrating the event.

Happy 4th.

UPDATE: It used to say misogynistic teen angst above. A reader points out that most women probably *don't* experience misogynistic teen angst. Neither did I. Alas, I meant misanthropic, and I've fixed it above.