As I perused various different articles this morning, it struck me that many of those that caught my interest had something in common: they all illustrated actions that had unforeseen secondary effects. For example, here’s an article about the worldwide hysterical reaction to swine flu:
As the swine flu virus appeared in new locations as far apart as Peru and Switzerland on Thursday, Mexicans braced for a national shutdown of offices, restaurants, schools and even the stands of soccer stadiums in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease.
In nationally televised speech Wednesday night, Mexican President Felipe Calderón said that, as of Friday, many public services would be closed through Tuesday, encompassing a long holiday weekend. Most government offices and many private businesses will be ordered closed, restaurants, schools and museums will remain shuttered, and spectators will be barred from all professional soccer matches.
Churches are expected to be nearly empty on Sunday.
The unforeseen secondary effect in Mexico will be a slowing of economic activity and, consequently, government revenue when more government services and revenue will be needed to deal with whatever health situation is developing there. The estimate I’ve heard is that Mexico City is losing $54 million a day.
This article, on the other hand, notes that the release of the so-called “torture memos” will have a chilling effect on U. S. counter-terrorism efforts:
Politics and moral arguments aside, the end effect of the memos’ release is that people who have put their lives on the line in U.S. counterterrorism efforts are now uncertain of whether they should be making that sacrifice. Many of these people are now questioning whether the administration that happens to be in power at any given time will recognize the fact that they were carrying out lawful orders under a previous administration. It is hard to retain officers and attract quality recruits in this kind of environment. It has become safer to work in programs other than counterterrorism.
The memos’ release will not have a catastrophic effect on U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Indeed, most of the information in the memos was leaked to the press years ago and has long been public knowledge. However, when the release of the memos is examined in a wider context, and combined with a few other dynamics, it appears that the U.S. counterterrorism community is quietly slipping back into an atmosphere of risk-aversion and malaise — an atmosphere not dissimilar to that described by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) as a contributing factor to the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks.
I honestly think that the Obama Administration bungled this. Don’t get me wrong. I am morally opposed to torture. Full stop. However, I don’t believe the official release of the memos has served any good purpose and I think the Administration thought they’d score a few quick points and the matter would blow over quickly (it won’t). There were other ways the matter could have been dealt with. They could also have decided to prosecute those involve. They also could have issued official pardons to those involved and taken the hit. Either one of those would have been the conscientious thing to do. Otherwise handle the matter privately.
This article points out something that was pretty evident to me from the get-go, namely that the rate at which the federal government would be able to spend the money in the stimulus package wasn’t nearly fast enough to have the stimulus effect they were hoping for:
Based on some back-of-the-envelop arithmetic, this chart makes it look like stimulus funds are becoming available at a rate of about $1.27 billion per day, and being spent at a rate of $0.26 billion per day. So the pool of available funds is growing about five times faster than the pool of total spending. By the look of the graph above, the rate doesn’t appear to be getting any faster.
Of course, since the pool of total funds is fixed — $787 billion dollars — the rate of spending is all that really matters. But this rate of spending is not fast enough to satisfy the administration’s own standard — namely, that 75% of the stimulus be spent in the first 18 months. 75% of $787 billion dollars is a tad over $590 billion. If $0.26 billion dollars are spent every day, it’ll take more than six years to spend 75% of the stimulus money.
Of course, a good chunk of the stimulus money — $116.2 billion — is supposed to be distributed through the Making Work Pay tax credit, which almost by definition will take effect in the next 18 months. But even if you subtract the MWP tax credit — even if you subtract every tax provision from the stimulus bill — the current rate of spending isn’t fast enough to pay out 75% in the next 18 months.
I’ll further predict that the unforeseen secondary effect of the stimulus package as it was passed will be to depress economic activity. That, presumably, wasn’t the intention.
Every action has unforeseen consequences, unforeseen secondary effects, and we shouldn’t be surprised at that. What should concern us is when the unforeseen secondary effects overwhelm the primary effects and I think that’s going to happen in all of these cases.
How much harm can it do to ensure that governments are taking the proper steps in case of a serious worldwide pandemic or to publicize wrongdoing or to stimulate the economy? Pretty clearly a lot more than the exponents of the actions realized and I think that the unforeseen secondary effects of its policies will begin to weigh on the Obama Administration in time.
Update
More unforeseen secondary effects. The Egyptian government has seized on the hysteria surrounding the swine flu outbreak to abuse the Coptic Christian minority there:
Egyptian leaders ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs today to help protect against swine flu, prompting angry protests from the poor Christian farmers who feed their animals with a country’s food scraps. The decision was also criticised as a “real mistake” by a senior UN food expert.
The Arab world’s most populous nation has been been badly hit by the H5N1 bird flu virus in recent years and the move to cull up to 400,000 pigs – seen by Muslims as unclean animals – was designed to calm fears of an impending pandemic.
But it left Egypt’s large Coptic Christian minority up in arms, especially the slum-dwelling “Zebaleen” rubbish collectors who rely on the hogs for their livelihood. Scores of them blocked the streets and stoned the vehicles of Health Ministry workers as they arrived to carry out the government’s order at pig farms on the outskirts of Cario this afternoon.
Not only will this further impoverish the poor who subsist by feeding their pigs on garbage, it will cause a further accumulation of the garbage in Egypt. Again, this is ignorance, hysteria, and, possibly, bigotry, not science. There isn’t a single case of the H1N1 swine flu anywhere that’s been blamed on Egyptian pigs.
And another. Joe Biden’s advice to stay off the subway over concerns about contracting swine flu:
Vice president Joe Biden said today he would tell his family members not to use subways in the U.S. and implied schools should be shuttered as the swine flu outbreak spread to 11 states and forced school closures amid confirmation of the first U.S. death.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said when asked whether he would advise family members to use public transportation.
Biden made his comments during a brief interview on NBC’s “Today” show during an interview with Matt Lauer.
“I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now. It’s not that it’s going to Mexico, it’s you’re in a confined aircraft when one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That’s me. I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation suggesting they ride the subway. ”
is bound to have unforeseen secondary effects, if heeded. If people don’t ride the subway, they’ll drive their cars. That will result in increased traffic, increased gasoline consumption, and increased air pollution. Maybe not flying will offset that. Not flying will result in reduced economic activity.
Has any of the confirmed cases of swine flu been contracted as a result of riding on the subway?
They think they’re smart, that may be part of the problem. They don’t question their own ideas and impulses deeply enough. Typical intellectuals’ problem, infatuated with their own reasoning.
Dave… about the counter-terrorism stuff. Yes, it will chill behaviors that cross ethical and legal lines. But there is precious little evidence that such behaviors actually contribute to counter-terrorism successes. Virtually every example of great intelligence produced by unlawful acts is quickly debunked. Not that there might not be some benefits somewhere… but there are hard to find.
Furthermore, as you know, there is good reason to question whether our counter-terrorism policies have worked at all. Attacks by Islamist groups are way UP. Now, might they be higher still without our counter-terrorism program? Maybe. But there is also a decent chance attacks would be lower — virtually every expert out there agrees that our excesses — Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, etc. — have been tremendously powerful recruiting tool for jihadist groups. And these are not just the assessments of outside critics, but are the position of the U.S. intelligence community as well.
What’s more… the memos did not actually provide much new information. They just gave some minor additional details. So, it is not as if any new sources and methods were released.
In short, the only chilling is chilling of unlawful conduct that has probably not contributed one whit to our national security. And yes, it might hurt morale. But guess what? Torturing also hurt morale. No one wants to talk about that part of it, but you don’t have to scratch far beneath the surface to find many, many people involved in the CT programs who express anxiety and embarrassment over their affiliation with it even if they were not personally complicit in any misbehavior.
There are always going to be secondary consequences. But you can’t just look at the negative ones. In this case, the positive secondary consequences might be just as powerful.
Bernard, to repeat. I oppose torture, define it pretty strictly, and always have. I don’t think we should do it whether it’s effective or not.
However, I don’t believe there will be any beneficial effects, primary or secondary, from the release of the documents. Far from clearing the air it will serve only to keep the ball up in it. Calls for prosecution here and abroad will intensify rather than abate.
And we won’t get any points for honesty from our enemies. They’ll always prefer to point out the mote in our eye rather than the beam in their own.
(1) We will get credit from our friends, which is also valuable. The amount of anger in places like Europe over torture is significant. We need their help on issues far and wide. Guess what… one reason it is so hard to get more NATO troops to Afghanistan is that it is a hard sell for most European leaders to make to their public given Gitmo, etc. Transparency is an important step in rebuilding trust.
(2) Our enemies are irrelevant. There is nothing we can do or say to placate people like bin Laden. The issue is whether it will make a difference to potential recruits, to public attitudes that create a climate that jihadist recruiting possible, etc. Again, this is not my argument. It is the considered judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that many of our actions have made it easier for our enemies to recruit. It has NOTHING to do with trying to win over people like bin Laden. And frankly, I am disappointed you would even raise that red herring as an issue.
(3) Will release lead to calls for prosecution? Maybe. So what? Do you really want to argue for keeping crimes committed by government official secret in order to avoid the potential political fights that will occur if they are charged. You are promoting, in effect, a doctrine of immunity for government officials acting in “good faith.” Have you thought through the consequences of that? It is a cliche, but true nonetheless, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You simply cannot believe that our democracy would benefit from adopting of such a doctrine. It would effectively turn our system from a republic to an elected monarchy with official granted kingly prerogatives between elections.
Not quite, Bernard. What I’m saying is that I believe that the tack that the Obama Administration, releasing the documents and saying they didn’t plan to prosecute was an error. My preferences would have been
a) releasing the documents and announcing that they planned to prosecute;
b) releasing the documents and offering pardons to those involved who acted with a good faith understanding that they were operating within the law;
or
c) not released them at all
in that order. What they’ve done just keeps the ball up in the air. If that’s scoring points with out friends, I don’t see it. Frankly, I’m skeptical that it really makes much different to the Europeans one way or another. I think they’ll cooperate with us on intelligence when it suits their purposes and not cooperate when it doesn’t.
BTW, “enemy” was perhaps a poor choice of words. What I was thinking of would better be described as “belligerent non-combatants” which IMO describes many of the countries’ in the world’s attitude towards us.
For many of these, particularly in the Middle East, I don’t believe that we’re going to influence opinion in them a great deal whatever we do. We simply can’t control the message adequately.
Additionally, I was thinking of states not organizations like Al Qaeda. I don’t believe we should have thought about using military force against Al Qaeda but rather against the states that actively or even passively harbor Al Qaeda and only then under highly constrained circumstances.
One of the secondary effects of releasing the documents, coupled with calls to prosecute the attorneys, is that it’s going to be even harder for government to get legal advise. The government already operates under impedents that business and not-for-profits don’t. Everybody except the government gets the space to consider their options. You particularly need that space when the subject is not merely legal, but has political, moral, technical and public policy aspects as well.
What ultimately is advanced is the Jamie Gorelick approach to law, which is fine if that lawyer is also charged with making policy. Most aren’t and shouldn’t be.
PD: “is that it’s going to be even harder for government to get legal advise”
Naw. There will always be idealistic lawyers who are drawn to public service. What will be lost is are hacks like John Yoo. Good riddance to that.
Dave: Ah, fair enough. It turns you we’re almost exactly on the same wave-length as far as the documents go… at least preferences 1 and 2. I put the current outcome as #3 personally, but I think reasonable people can disagree on that as well.