I am, as some of you may remember, an identical twin. My non-unique genetic background gives me particular insight into the validity of all twin studies (are the twins who consent to participate in twin studies representative of all twins? I continue to wonder what survey bias is caused by the exemption of people who refuse to participate in surveys other than those that discover which Lord of the Rings character they are). So, it's with no uncertain suspicion---and the burden of proof on those who would allay my suspicions---that I approach this research suggesting that Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes.

Calculating how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes' influence on that attitude.

There are a lot of societal expectations for identical twins, number one that that you're capable of talking about how life as an identical twin differs from life as a singleton. Number two might be that you have created a language together. (We tried it, after getting the suggestion from others, in elementary school, but never got beyond a hundred words.) How do you tease out the factors that aren't caused by having a sister born the same day you were? I don't know. I would not be surprised to hear about a slightly different set of societal expectations for fraternal twins that also relates around "How different are you? How similar are you?" There are a lot of societal factors at play, and on the basis of one NYT article, I really can't tell how the 28 question form might have accounted for them.

Admittedly, I'm sympathetic to the research's conclusion. I've recently been rather pessimistic about the profits that can be gained from political discourse. It's not just people who talk through others whom I wish to avoid. I'm no longer interested in trying to change the fundamental way other people view the world. If a person admits that there is no realistically conceivable set of facts that will alter the basic policies driving his decisions, then I will try to duck most conversations aimed at doing the virtually impossible. If, however, a person is willing to contemplate whether a certain thing should be done or how a result is best achieved, then I'm open to discussing the pragmatics.

The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

That one's views on school prayer, property tax, and the Moral Majority are relatively heavily influenced by genes is surprising. I could concoct some story about how teacher-led prayers relate to the band of hunter-gatherers that engage the "religion centers" of their brains together, or life being nasty, brutish, and short, but my bedtime stories never were very plausible.

It would also likely be off-track, for behavioral scientists have been talking for 30 years about the role genes play in instinctive emotional responses: the differences in very young children and biological basis for some mental illnesses seems to reflect that in daily life.

This twin study suggests that that the polarization of politics may be partially rooted in the genetic differences of conservatives and progressives; the tendancy of to chose a mate who shares your general principles is predicted to further enhance the divide. Still, I remember studies from my course on U.S. Politics in Congress suggesting that partisanship on the Hill has increased noticably in the past decades: what is it about past politics that cloaked the genetic impulsives, or about current politics that brings them closer to the surface?

It's certainly intriguing, but I can't bring myself to find any moral imperative to reproduce more quickly than the conservative women do.

Ian Ayres links to this op-ed that he and Jennifer Brown recently wrote, arguing that heterosexual couples who marry ought to consider going to Massachusetts to do so in order to symbolize their support for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

I happen to think this is rather silly and tends to trivialize the values at stake, but leaving that aside, I was most appalled by this later suggestion in the article:

Even couples who marry at home in discriminating states have some decisions to make. Consider the wedding invitation itself. Even though most gay/bi/lesbian people would never think of raising the issue with their marrying heterosexual friends, they could quite reasonably harbor feelings of disquiet and pain that they are excluded from the very institution they are asked to celebrate. ... Perhaps a personal note could accompany invitations to gay and lesbian friends. A couple could apologize for marrying in a state or church where their friends cannot. An explanation, like concern for a sick parent who cannot travel to Massachusetts, might help.

Just yesterday I was making fun of the let's-sue-milk-class-action advertisements that I saw in the metro station, thinking (jokingly!) that the one nice side-effect of the old barratry laws was that they would put a stop to nonsense like this. Then, lo and behold, Matthew Yglesias comes out defending them, although he wisely stops short of endorsing the legal claim.

[Yglesias does have a good point about the shadiness of all of that pro-milk propaganda. As he may or may not realize, the generic pro-milk advertising is government-mandated and funded by special taxes on milk-producers, largely to promote large-quantity low-quality milk producers at the expense of small less politically-powerful ones. Until a month ago, this forced-speech scheme was highly dubious under First Amendment jurisprudence, although that may change given recent S.C. developments.]

But the underlying principle-- that things like milk ought to come with warning labels-- is just dangerous nonsense. I will probably sound silly if I start trotting out the parade of horribles to which this logic could extend, from coffee to cars to carrots to crossword puzzles, so I hope it will suffice to point out that, yes, milk does make some people sick, but so what?

At best, these people are vultures; at worst, they are nuts.

UPDATE: A reader asks: "Are the deliberately parasitic a better class of people than the addle-brained, or more easily-suffered?"

At the risk of taking the question too seriously, I don't particularly mean to compare all parasitic or confused people as a class-- surely there exist some particularly bad and some particularly innocuous members of each group. So, to move back from generalities to the specific-- at the best these people are opportunistic lawyers who recognize the possibility of a legal claim and are hoping to extort it; at worst they actually believe in the evils of milk and might substantively reduce the ability of people to consume substances they enjoy.

I tend to think of the former as an inevitable and unfortunate incident to our system of private law, the latter would be an actual threat to freedom.

I have been woefully lax about blogging what I've been reading lately, so forgive the monster entry.

#11 The Fourth Queen, Debbie Taylor

Fans of fictional hunchbacks and dwarves may appreciate this story about a Scottish woman kidnapped by pirates and sold into the Sultan of Morocco's harem. It's a reasonably engaging, reasonably well told, and I enjoyed reading it, but the resolution of the central dilemma of the story--will the girl choose the man who is a handsome, wealthy, powerful jerk, or the one who loves her for who she really is--feels rather unpleasantly arbitrary.

#12 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Lots of people have already spoken about the wondefulness of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I shall simply add my voice to the chorus. I'm torn between hoping that there will be a sequal, and fearing that more story would ruin what has already been written. The melancholy ambiguity of the ending, and the sense that there were real consequences for the magicians in exercising the power that they exercised is part of what made the book so effective.

#13 Shostokovich and Stalin, Solomon Volkov

This is, at its heart, an extremely interesting portrait of how totalitarianism affects those under its rule. However, it is fatally marred by the author's extreme hero-worship of Dmitri Shostakovich. Though the author does a an exceptional job of portraying the ambivalence with which the artistic world regarded Stalin and Stalinism, every action of Shostakovich is given a (sometimes stretched) anti-Stalin slant. Though the author seems to believe that when it came to Stalin, one was either for him or against him and Shostakovich was against him, the picture that emerges in spite of his intentions is of a more nuanced world in which one could be neither an enthusiastic party hack nor a committed anti-Stalinist.

#14 Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I'd already become familiar, secondhand, with most of the principles underlying Steven Levitt's work before I read the book, but I still found it highly enjoyable. As an aside, Leavitt mentions a pair of twins with the improbable names of OrangeJello and LemonJello in his chapter on baby names. I, however, had already encountered reports of the pair from one of their teachers. They are apparently doing as well as one would expect children named after jiggly fruit desserts to do.

I have nothing substantive to add to the discussion about this strange Washington Post article on buying coffee (see, e.g., David Adesnik, Kaimi Wenger, &c.) except to note that the savings in making one's own coffee every day instead of buying it pale (for most people) in comparison to the savings from making one's lunch and taking it to campus rather than buying something there. (Indeed, if one's demands for coffee are time-sensitive, and one's demands for a particular type of coffee drink are inelastic, it can be almost impossible to make and take your own; a cappucino does not sit well in a thermos.)

No, I just wanted to focus on the article's focus on "borrowed money" and the claim that spending $4000 a year on coffee makes less sense on "borrowed money" than on some other kind of money. I do not see why this should be so. Given that most of the people involved are going to be making huge scads of money later in life, Milton Friedman's Permanent Income model suggests that they should start living at least semi-luxuriously now to smooth consumption over time. And those students whose schools have very generous loan-repayment programs also have an incentive to live it up. If, for example, you go to Yale Law School and anticipate a life of poverty, COAP will pay off all of your loans, so why not take out the maximum amount you can, even if it's for wasteful consumption? (Or, perhaps, you could cheat and use your living expenses to buy durable goods-- pearl-encrusted pens or whatever).

This isn't to dispute that there are strong reasons to try to keep one's expenditures down even when one is or expects to be wealthy. But given the incredibly generous interest rates on many student loans, there's no particular reason that one should be so reluctant to spend borrowed-money. Not-borrowed-money, after all, could be invested at some non-trivial rate of return if it were saved.