The Tax Code's Merger Ratchet Drives Harmful Economic Decisions

Corporate tax law students, but very few other people, spend vast amounts of their time learning how to understand the Internal Revenue Code's corporate reorganization provisions. Being tax law, this task leaves you knee deep in detail and you can lose the forest for the trees. But, in the big picture, the corporate reorganization provisions of the tax code may do more to encourage our economy's tendency to create systemically risky too big to fail businesses that interfere with consumer friendly competition than our antitrust laws do to discourage them.

Simply put, there are lots of relatively easy, safe harbor ways under the tax code to merge a business with predictable, favorable tax consequences. There are "A" reorganizations (statutory mergers), there are "B" reorganizations (stock for stock purchases of companies), there are triangular "B" reorganizations (stock for stock acquisitions by a parent company that merge the acquired company directly into one of its subsidiaries), there are "C" reorganizations (stock for asset purchases of companies), there are triangular "C" reorganizations (stock for asset acquisitions by a parent company that merge the acquired company directly into one of its subsidiaries), and there are acquisitive "D" reorganizations (another flavor of stock for asset purchases of companies). (Reorganizations are usually classified by the lettered subsection of Internal Revenue Code Section 368 that authorize them). There are also some lesser known back door ways to merge companies, such as via a contribution to capital of a sister corporation by its shareholders.

In contrast, obtaining the same kind of favorable tax treatment for divisive reorganizations (also called "D" reorganizations), which can be structured as spin-offs, split-offs, or split-ups, are fraught with tax risk and uncertainty. The IRS and tax lawyers have to pay close attention to regulations that have detailed facts and circumstances driven analysis, and a great deal of audit and pre-approval efforts to making sure that tax code requirements regarding which assets can go in which surviving corporation are met.

In a divisive tax free reorganization, like a tax free merger, nobody leaves either kind of transaction with untaxed cash at closing (although for publicly held companies the difference between stock and cash may not be all that material since anyone who wants to can readily sell their stock for full fair market value at a moment's notice and tax free, hard money margin loans are widely available if the stock is not sold), in an effort to prevent potential leaks in the regime of double taxation of corporate profits that is criticized by big business executives and liberal academics alike under our tax code.

But, our tax code discourages publicly held companies from splitting by with the frequently deal busting risk of unexpected premature taxation of all of a successor company's assets. Divisive reorganizations will often prove unworkable from a tax perspective unless the groundwork for the move is laid years in advance and even then, the freedom of businesses to split themselves up into units that make the most economic sense can be materially limited by the need of lawyers and accountants involved in the deal to control tax risk.

As a result, mergers of publicly held corporations are relatively common place, while divisive reorganizations, like the one announced by Kraft today that breaks its business into an internationally oriented snack food business and a domestically oriented grocery store product business, or the recently announced deal to unwind the merger of Wendy's and Arbys restaurants, are the much more rare and notable exceptions.

This little known bias in the tax code, at the macroeconomic level, gives us too many conglomerates, in which it is hard for stock market price discipline to hold management accountable and which create systemic risk in our economy that flows from too big to fail entities (like AIG), while discouraging the financial markets from crafting firms in a way that disaggregates separate businesses from each other to the full extent that their underlying lack of economic interdependence permits.

The merger bias in the tax code also harms the economy by reducing transparency in financial disclosures. The SEC has exacting rules on financial reporting for publicly held companies, but one of the big shortcomings of those rules, that prevents the financial markets from efficiently allocating capital to profitable businesses, while denying further resources to businesses with poor profits, is that the financial accounting rules do little to require the divisional and line of business breakdowns of corporate profits, losses, assets and liabilities necessary to do the managerial accounting analysis necessary to determine if corporate restructurings make sense.

Instead, the combination of weak subunit reporting requirements from the SEC, corporate reorganization taxation biases against divisive reorganizations, and a double taxation of corporate profits regime that encourage businesses to retain earnings from equity to reinvest in their own company even when the average stock market investor would agree that the funds would be more profitably reinvested in some other segment of the economy, all conspire to increase systemic risk in our economy, reduce transparency in our financial markets, and inefficiently allocate financially investments to business divisions that are suboptimal uses of available capital.

Indeed, the bias towards reinvestment of corporate earnings, coupled with the bias against divisive reorganizations, creates an incentive that is strongest for the least well managed businesses to acquire better run businesses that throw off cash for the primary purpose of obscuring their weak performance and diverting the cash from the successful businesses towards reinvestment in poorly run businesses.



Our economy relies on the threat of hostile takeovers by businesses who can profit by identifying mismanaged companies, buying them, jettisoning the bad management or reversing bad decisions, and improving the bottom line as a result to hold corporate executives accountable and to give them an incentive to manage their companies effectively. But, conglomerates with many units purchases to provide internal access to retained earnings that lack meaningful public disclosure of unit performance that would be available if the divisions were separate publicly held firms, discourage this kind of market discipline, as do management friendly rulings of the Delaware courts that allow publicly held corporations to discourage market efforts to hold them accountable with golden parachutes that international financial experts have widely condemned as encouraging systemic risk by rewarding senior executive mismanagement, and other poison pills to discourage shareholder and financial market identification of and intervention to end mismanagement of big businesses.

In theory, antitrust laws should prevent anticompetitive mergers that harm the public interest, but in practice, they are a toothless tiger than looks impressive but has little practical impact. Most of the harm from a bias towards mergers and against holding separate functional business units accountable flows from the collective effect of little incremental decisions whose public impacts are not obvious. By the time that antitrust regulators can truly prove that the merger of the last few oligarchic firms in an industry will harm competition, the damage has already been done, and nothing gives antitrust authorities the power to limit the formation of conglomerates that don't have monopoly power in any one industry, despite the fact that this was one of the concerns that led to the passage of these laws in the first place.

Collectively, these incentives and corporate and antitrust law flaws have not only negative economic efficiency consequences, but negative consequences for the appropriate distribution of wealth and income in society and the allocation of political power. While economically unreasonably large firms may not necessarily have unreasonable market monopolies in given industries, their sheer size does unreasonably concentrate wealth in a self-dealing economic elite of senior managers and the top professional advisers in investment banks, law firms and accounting firms (for example), and similarly, unreasonably concentrates political power in these unaccountable elites, while providing a means by which businesses have an incentive to fight for the interests of this economic elite as a social class, rather than being disaggregated into the conflicting factions of smaller firms with more particular political interests that the founders envisioned in the Federalist papers that are more easily subjected to the diffuse interests of the majority. In a nutshell, conglomerates encourage logrolling and mutual backscratching not just by politicians themselves but by the monied interests that are developing political coalitions that work to the detriment of the public interest.

Is this a lot to lay at the foot of Internal Revenue Code 368, corporate double taxation, and regulations promulgated by the IRS and SEC? Surely it is. But, the obscure pieces of our regulatory framework conspire to drive the unreasonable concentration of economic power, wealth and income, while simultaneously making our economy less competitive. They may not be flashy, but their day after day, broad systemic impact on the way that decisions are made in the dominant sector of our economy have a cumulative impact that is easily underestimated.

READ MORE - The Tax Code's Merger Ratchet Drives Harmful Economic Decisions

Turkey's Invisible Democratic Revolution

Since Attaturk, the Turkish military has served a the defender of a secular constitution in a country that was dominantly Muslim at the expense of majoritarian democracy. But, it appears that this role has now ended for good as the senior military leadership has been purged by the combination of dozens of arrests of senior military officials by civilian law enforcement authorities and the mass resignation of the remaining top military officers. It isn't entirely clear from half the world away to what extent the charges that have led to the arrests of military officers are valid and to what extent they are cover for a political purge.

It also isn't clear what made it possible for the arrests to be successfully carried out this time when in the past civilian authorities have seemed unable to carry out these kinds of arrests, although the generalized influences of the Arab Spring in the region could be a factor.

Turkey's days of military supremacy over civilian rule has ended, bringing it out of the classic newly emerging democracy phase of development. But, it isn't yet clear if the civilians who now have unquestioned supremacy will be able to avoid the temptations to engage in unconstitutional conduct or establish a religion in governmental affairs, which could be worse.

The example is a worthwhile one for American political scientists to examine because a similar strategy of civilian arrests of military leaders is essentially the only recourse in the U.S. Constitution should there ever be a threat of a coup in the United States and a coup is by far the most plausible end of regime scenario for the American system of government.

READ MORE - Turkey's Invisible Democratic Revolution

Do Governments Matter In Economic Development?

Does government policy drive economic development? Or, does ethnic culture matter more (in a Protestant work-ethic sense)?

A new study with a clever methodology favors ethnic culture over government policy as a driver of economic development in Africa (emphasis added).

Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa

Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou

NBER Working Paper No. 17184 Issued in June 2011

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization and regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite light density at night. We exploit the fact that political boundaries across the African landscape partitioned ethnic groups in different countries subjecting identical cultures to different country-level institutions. Our regression discontinuity estimates reveal that differences in countrywide institutional arrangements across the border do not explain differences in economic performance within ethnic groups. In contrast, we document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic institutional traits and contemporary regional development. While this correlation does not necessarily identify a causal relationship, this result obtains conditional on country fixed-effects, controlling for other ethnic traits and when we focus on pairs of contiguous ethnic homelands.

READ MORE - Do Governments Matter In Economic Development?

Probate Law and 9-11

Osama bin Laden is dead. Why care? Because it opens the door to probate claim litigation in his estate for 9-11 victims.

Osama bin Laden evaded civil liability for 9-11 and other terrorist attacks prior to his death because no process server could find him.

Bin Laden’s death could open the door to civil litigation targeted directly at him if new assets are uncovered, said Bill Wheeler of Mississippi’s Wheeler and Franks. The firm is pursuing a civil suit pending in Washington federal court stemming from the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa.

If an estate is discovered abroad, said Wheeler's co-counsel, James Franks, “that would be much easier than trying to get service on bin Laden [when he was alive].” But the ability to access those assets would depend on the probate laws in that country, he added.

Of course, the probate issues in these kinds of cases are non-trivial. Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian national and at the time of his death was domiciled in Pakistan, both jurisdictions that use Islamic law as determined in Shari'ah courts to determine the inheritance rights in the estates of Muslim decedents like Bin Laden. In rem jurisdiction would also be present, under general Anglo-American and civil law principles, in jurisdictions where Osama bin Laden owned property. My understanding is that he was disinherited by his family, so none of the substantial inheritance to which he would otherwise have been entitled would be available to him or to his creditors.

Testamentary freedom is limited in the Islamic law regime, with only one-third of an individuals estate distributable to a non-designated heir, and I am not familiar with how it handles claims arising from the acts of decedents. Western legal systems typically provide some priority in an estate for spouses and children of a decedent over the claims of tort creditors. Also, it is likely that Bin Laden dedicated a significant share of his wealth to religious organizations which he controlled, rather than personally owning that wealth.

Shari'ah law does provide for the payment of "blood money" (diyah) when one causes the wrongful death of another, a remedy that parallels that of a civil suit, but there is not consensus among scholars of Islamic law over whether the 9-11 terrorist event was wrongful. Some Islamic law scholars have issued proclamations stating that the attack was wrongful under Islamic law, but Bin Laden likely had conferred with an Islamic law scholar, or had the authority as an Islamic law scholar himself, to determine that the attacks were conducted pursuant to a valid Jihad.

Not surprisingly, the Quran, which is the primary source of authority in Islamic law, is particularly sparse in resolving issues of jurisdiction, venue and collateral estoppel in a system of Shari'ah law courts that has no one central organization and was mostly not in place at the time that the Quaran was written.

Indeed, from a formal structural perspective, a large share of all the schisms and conflicting interpretations of Shari'ah within Islam that divide it into religious sects and national polities have this lack of clear canon law jurisdictional rules at their root. The problem is somewhat less acute in Shi'ite Islam, where there is or was for a long period depending on the sect, a living person to adjudicate these disputes, than for Sunni Islam, but in Shi'ite Islam, disputes over the legitimate order of succession among Imams (itself a quasi-probate issue) produced similar schisms.

READ MORE - Probate Law and 9-11

Denver's Election Results

In Tuesday's non-partisan election, Denver voters re-elected their incumbent auditor, chose two city council members for "at large" seats, and elected eight of eleven city council people from single member districts (five in uncontested elections). Turnout was 38% of the ballots distributed, with ballots going out to all active registered voters in the City, slightly below the norm in the last couple of municipal elections, but not horrible either.

There will be runoffs between the top two finishers in the first round in City Council Districts 1, 5 and 8, and in the races for Mayor and Clerk and Recorder. All of the races with runoffs happen, not coincidentally, to be open seats. As my own city council district race was uncontested, the ballot that I will receive and return by June 7 will have only four names for two offices on it, and I've given those names at least some consideratioon already in the first round.

The Case For Non-Instant Runoffs

Proponents of a system once called the "single transferable vote" and now called "instant runoff voting" would favor a system where you get to vote a first and second and perhaps higher order choice, allowing the election to be decided all in one go, even when no candidate receives a majority.

The case for considering the preferences of voters who didn't vote for the plurality candidate when no candidate receives a majority is a good one. Denver voters, for example, have not infrequently backed a runner up in a runoff election, suggesting that a combination of more information and the preferences of candidates who supported someone who was not one of the two finalists don't, as a reliable general rule, strongly favor the plurality winnner in this kind of non-partisan race.

I prefer the system used by Denver, Louisiana and France, where there is a runoff election, because it allows me as a voter to have more time to research viable candidates and consider my options before making a decision in the second round, even when the candidate that I favored in the first round is not eliminated. Any decision that causes decisions upon which there is not a clear popular preference to be made based on more information and deliberation than would otherwise be devoted to the decision is probably a good thing.

I also have little confidence that my fellow citizens would make second choice decisions that are as good if they didn't have this extra time. I've written wills and trusts for people for a decade and a half, and most of my clients, even when they are well educated, find it a strain to think about "what if" hypotheticals beyond the situation that would exist if they died today. Most people are better at making decisions in a "what now" context than in a "what if" context. Frequently, I have to spend a long time talking people through the ideas by telling little stories at length "what if you and your partner and your children all died in a car crash today, the people you've mentioned who are still alive are . . . . who would you want to inherit from you now?"

There is also more of an incentive to do good media coverage of a runoff election between two candidates proven to be viable and reasonably close in electoral strength which may reveal new critical data than there is in the waning days of a nine or more way race.

In an election with many candidates there is a tendency to engage in satisficing decision making, i.e. researching until you find an acceptable choice rather than trying to research carefully enough to find the best choice. If most people make their decisions that way, and no one candidate receives a majority of the vote, the likelihood that the first round winner was not the optimal choice is pretty good. So, the chances that additional information before the runoff election is held will improve the quality of the decision making process is pretty good.

This is particularly true in a case like City Council District 8, which was entirely a write in election due to the death of incumbent Carla Madison shoertly before the election. The very short schedule for that race meant that there was very little time for the thirty-nine candidates in the race to run full fledged campaigns that could have afforded the general public the information they needed to make an optimizing decision. About 28% of voters in that district didn't cast a vote for the office at all, and each of the candidates that made the runoff from the 5,361 write in votes cast captured only about 1/7th of the votes cast. Eleven candidates received at least one hundred votes (including the two candidates making it to the runoff), and five candidates received more than three hundred votes (the number of signatures needed to petition onto the ballot in ordinary circumstances).

The Benefits Of Ballot Access

It is also a good moment to observe the benefits that accrue to being on the ballot, even in an election like this one, where voters could complete their ballot at their leisure "open book" at their kitchen table, rather than without access to pertinent information in a voting booth under time pressures, a relatively ideal environment for write in candidates.

The practical ability of voters to cast a write in vote if they are determiend to do so is illustrated by the fact that in City Council District 8 almost four-fifths of voters managed to cast a valid write in ballot. Also, no city council race in the city, with or without names on the ballot had an undervote of less than 5% and the average undervote was considerably higher. Thus, no more than 18% of voters were discouraged by the all write in character of the race from casting a vote, and the average undervote percentage in contested city council races was closer to 10%, suggesting that perhaps only one in seven voters was discouraged by the write in character of the District 8 vote from casting a vote.

In the Mayoral race, every candidate who appeared on the ballot received at least 0.46% of the vote (519 votes). Marcus Giavanni, the most successful of the three write in candidates for Mayor, who mounted an active campaign with at least as many signs up around town as some of the other candidates whose names appeared on the ballot, nonetheless garnered just 21 votes. The cutoff to make the second round in the Mayoral race based on the unofficial results was 30,314 votes (27% of the total). The third place candidate in the Mayoral race, after conferring with campaign legal counsel, has announced that he will not challenge the unofficial vote count. None of the races in the first round were close enough to trigger an automatic recount.

In the Council Member At Large race, in which the one of the five candidates appearing on the ballot with the least votes received 8,437 votes (6% of the total cast in a race where each voter could vote for up to two candidates), none of the three write in candidates received more than 121 votes. The cutoff to win a seat, according to the unofficial results, was 31,603 votes (22% of the total number of votes cast in a race where each voter may vote up to two times).

Unless no one is who appears on the ballot is running for an office, it is almost impossible to win a write in campaign, in an ordinary electoral environment where the barriers to ballot access for credible candidates who have their acts together is not overwhelming. But, this isn't necessarily deeply troubling from a democratic perspective, because the practical reality is that the candidates who did not receive access to the ballot probably had a very dim chance of winning office even if they had been granted access to the ballot. No write in candidate outside Council District 8, which had no candidate on the ballot, received more than 121 write in votes in an election where three hundred signatures on a petition are required to gain access to the ballot - a requirement that is less than 1% of the votes that were actually required to win or advance to a second round in a citywide race this year.

No candidate outside Council District 8 in a city council race received more than 70 write in votes, less than 1% of the votes received by the winner in that city council district, an otherwise uncontested incumbent.

An Expensive Mayoral Race

Campaign spending in this election was considerable.

Romer, through last Thursday, spent about $1.4 million on his successful campaign, which turns out to be about $43 a vote. Hancock spent about $711,489, which equals about $23 per vote.

Theresa Spahn spent $108,288 but got only 3,332 votes, roughly $32.50 a vote. Councilman Doug Linkhart had spent $152,199 through last Thursday on his campaign that received a total of 10,557 votes, about $14.41 per vote. Viewed this way, the biggest winner was probably Thomas Wolf, who dubbed himself the "free candidate" because he accepted no money and spent only $250. He got 2,106 votes, about 12 cents a vote.

Running the election, of course, also wasn't free, although the city of Denver, as is typical in mail in elections in Colorado, didn't provide postage to voters, which cost voters who didn't hand deliver their ballots 61 cents each, a barrier that probably had a measurable effect on turnout.

READ MORE - Denver's Election Results

Canadian election produces sea change in partisan landscape

Election results from the 2011 election in Canada for its 308 seat federal parliament dramatically changed the partisan landscape there.

Voters in ridings previously held by the Bloc Québécois defected en masse to the New Democratic Party, while about half the seats previously held by the Liberal party were split between the Conservative Party and the NDP.

The Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper increased its number of seats from 143 to 167, giving its a majority (which required 155 seats) with a certain amount of cushion against intraparty dissent. In the most recent parliament, the Conservative party has led parliament with a minority government in the absence of a firm multi-party coalition after both the 2006 and 2008 elections, and has been forced to seek support from other parties for legislation on a case by case basis. It won 39.6% of the popular vote. It picked up 26 seats from Liberal MPs, 2 from NDP MPs and one from an independent MP. The Conservative Party is dominant in the Prairie provinces of Alberta (27/28 seats), Saskatchewan (13/14 seats) and Manitoba (11/14 seats) where it commanded popular vote majorities. It also won 73/106 seats in Ontario, 21/36 seats in British Columbia, and 8/10 seats in New Brunswick, as well as the only seat for the Yukon and the only seat for Nunavut.

The modern Conservative Party in Canada is the product of a merger of the Canadian Alliance (formerly the Reform Party), which was stronger in the West, and Progressive Conservative party, which was stronger in the East, in 2003. While the Conservative Party is the farthest political party to the political right in Canada, and favors favours lower taxes, smaller government, more decentralization of federal government powers to the provinces, a tougher stand on "law and order" issues, and a more active role in foreign military operations than the other parties, it is still considerably more socially liberal than the American Republican party, for example, supporting civil unions for same sex couples, even though it does not support gay marriage. It might be compared to New England's Republicans in the American political spectrum.

The New Democrat party led by Jack Layton, a party of the left that previously held just 36 seats in parliament, became the leading opposition party with 102 seats and 30.6% of the popular vote. The NDP surrender two seats to the Conservative Party, while picking up six seats from the Conservative Party and one from an independent MP. Before the election, the center of mass in the NDP was in Ontario, now it is Francophone with a majority of its MPs hailing from Quebec. The NDP is a social-democratic successor to the Labour party in Canada and roughly corresponds in its political views to that of the progressive caucus of the Democratic Party in the United States.

The Liberal party led by Michael Ignatieff (who was defeated in his riding and resigned as party leader), a center-left party that has either governed (for 69 years of the 20th century) or been the leading opposition party in Canada for as long as anyone can remember went from holding 77 seats as the second largest political party to just 34, garnering 18.9% of the popular vote. Twenty-three of the seats it lost were picked up by the Conservative Party, while 17 were picked up by the New Democrats. Politically, the Liberal party roughly corresponds to the Democratic Party in the United States without its progressive caucus. Generally speaking, the Liberals are stronger relative to the NDP in the Maritimes, while the NDP is stronger relative to the Liverals in the West, and the two are evenly matched in Ontario.

The New Democrats and Liberals put forward a candidate in every seat, and the Conservative put forward a candidate in all but one of the ridings.

The nationalist Bloc Québécois under the leadership of Gilles Duceppe (who was defeated in his riding and resigned as party leader) was crushed, going from holding 49 seats following the 2008 election to holding just 4 seats (it contested 75 seats) and winning 6.0% of the popular vote (and less than a quarter of the popular vote in Quebec). At least 44 of the seats lost by the Bloc were picked up by the New Democrats. Quebec is now represented in Canada's federal parliament by 58 NDP representatives, 7 Liberals, 6 Conservatives, and 4 Bloc members (who no longer hold official party status). Historically, the Bloc has been a big tent on the liberal-conservative spectrum within the general boundaries of mainstream political stances in Canada. It isn't clear from where I stand if the mass defection of Bloc voters to the NDP is a one time blip over some recent political misstep, or a long run death knell for the federal wing of the Quebec nationalist movement.

The Green Party, whose party leader is Elizabeth May, which held no seats after the 2008 election (or in any prior one) won one seat in parliament (Elizabeth May in the riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands, in British Columbia) and garnered 3.9% of the popular vote (a decline from 6.8% in 2008). The Green Party contested all but four of the seats. The seat won by the Green Party was previously held by a Conservative Party MP. It's agenda is similar to that of the American Green Party.

Independents and unaffiliated candiates held two seats after the 2008 election, but won none in 2011. Sixty-one independent and unaffiliated candidates and thirteen minor parties also sought seats in the Canadian federal parliament without success. None of the minor parties won more than 0.1% of the popular vote.

Canada is to the left politically of the United States. About sixty percent of Canadians vote for political parties to the left of the Canadian Conservative Party, despite is majority victory due to the partisan divisions on the Canadian left, and it is itself to the left of the American Republican party. The median MP in the Canadian parliament is roughly comparable in politics to a Blue Dog Democrat.

Note that while parties of the left and center-left won a majority of the popular vote, that the conservative party was able to win a majority of the seats in parliament, because the political left split the vote among multiple candidates while the political right did not to nearly the same extent. This was particularly a factor in Ontario where the NDP and Liberal Party received almost equal shares of the popular vote, and combined received a majority of the popular vote, but received only about a quarter of the total number of MP seats contested in the election.

After many decades of having multiple viable political parties, the 2011 election seems to portend a shift to what might become a two party system in Canada, similar to that of the United States with a similar electoral system. The NDP and Liberal party will be under strong pressure in the wake of the 2011 to follow the lead of the parties of the right in Canada in 2003 and merge. A merged NDP and Liberal party would have easily won a majority of the seats in parliament in the 2011 election.

READ MORE - Canadian election produces sea change in partisan landscape

Monarchies and Theocracies

There are only ten self-styled monarchies in the world that are national, hereditary, and have genuine political power. There are seventeen more monarchs who are national hereditary monarchs, who have an overwhelmingly symbolic role with real power vested in a democratic government. The Pope, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and one of the co-princes of Andorra arguably fit the model of theocracy. The only women in this group are Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Many of the places with monarchies, with or without genuine power, and two of the three arguable theocracies, are mere city-states or postage stamp countries with little more territory that a decent sized U.S. county, small populations, and dependent relationships on nearby sovereign states.

All but one of the monarchies where the monarch has genuine political power, and Iran, the only significant sized theocracy, are Islamic. Most of these monarchies rely on oil wealth to maintain their supremacy. Swaziland is the only non-Islamic monarchy with genuine political power.

The shrinkage is notable, given the fact that less than two hundred years ago monarchs with genuine political power were the modal for of government in the world, and less than five hundred years ago you could count the number of democracies in the world on your fingers.

Yet, there is a case to be made that nations with constitutional monarchies have fared better than purely republican governments, by providing a unifying symbol and smoothing over moments of constitutional crisis. It is notable that none of the absolutist regimes to fall in North Africa and the Middle East in the last few months have been monarchies, which suggests that the legitimacy conferred by a monarchy may have practical value to a regime. Some of these monarchies, such as Jordan's King, have, however, taken steps to liberalize democratic components of their regimes. The West has pushed for decades, mostly to deaf ears, for the few remaining monarchies in which a monarch has genuine political power to cede more power to democratic forces via constitutional monarchy. There are other non-democratic governments in the world, of course, but most of pure dictators.

Hereditary Constitutional Monarchs

There are seventeen purely symbolic constitutional monarchs who a monarchs of thirty-two countries and their dependent territories, excluding the three countries discussed under theocracy in this post, and excluding some subnational constitutional monarchs of Africa and Asia (these exist or have existed in relatively recent times, in parts of Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa). There were also, in recent history, territorial leaders who amounted to monarchs in parts of Northwestern Pakistan who are not considered.

Queen Elizabeth II, whose second in line to the throne grandson William is scheduled to marry Kate Middleton this Friday is the constitutional monarch of sixteen different countries, some outside Europe, an almost entirely symbolic role. The nine other almost purely symbolic constitutional monarchs of Europe are King Albert II of Belgium, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein (population 34,761; 62 square miles), Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg (population 491,775; 998 square miles), Prince Albert II of Monaco (population 32,965; 1 square mile), Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (population 16,715,999; 16,033 square miles), King Harald of Norway, King Juan Carlos I of Spain (population 40,525,002; 194,897 square miles), and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

These monarchs have a presence in the Americas in Canada, Greenland, Belize, and a number of Caribbean island dependencies of European countries.

There are six Asian symbolic constitutional monarchs: King Jigme Khesar Namgyel of Bhutan, King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia, Emperor Akihito of Japan, King Mizan Zainal Abidin of Malyasia (elected for a limited term as premier king out of pool of regional hereditary monarchies of Malaysia), King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand (population 65,905,410; 198,457 square miles) and King Siaosi Tupou V of Tonga (population 120,898; 289 square miles).

There is one African symbolic constitutional monarch, King Letsie III of Lesotho (population 2,130,819; 1,720 square miles), a small landlocked state surrounded entirely by South Africa.

In practice, all of the symbolic constitutional monarchies are republics with elected officials who hold real political power. In each of these, the elected government, if supported by a popular referendum, could in practice, become monarchies in a bloodless or near bloodless change of form of government.

Genuine Monarchs

There are ten monarchs in the world (excluding six subnational monarchs in these monarchies) with genuine political power, many of which rule only tiny states.

There are two African monarchs with genuine political power: King Mswati III of Swaziland (population 1,123,913; 6,704 square miles) carved out of South Africa on its border with Mozambique, and King Mohammed VI of Morocco (population 34,859,364; 172,414 square miles).

There is one East Asian monarch with genuine political power: Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei, a tiny nation that is basically a city-state (population 388,190; 2,228 square miles) on the island of Borneo that is entirely surround by Malaysia and also shares the island with Indonesia.

The remaining seven monarchs with genuine political power are found on the Arabian Pennisula: King Hamad ibn Isa of Bahrain (population 727,785; 257 square miles), King Abdullah II of Jordan (population 6,342,948; 35,637 square miles), Emir Sabah al-Ahmad of Kuwait (population 2,691,158; 6,880 square miles), Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman (population 3,418,085; 82,031 square miles), Emir Hamad bin Khalifa of Qatar (population 833,285; 4416 square miels), King Abdullah bin Abdul‘aziz of Saudi Arabia (population 28,686,633; area 830,000 square miles), and President Khalifa bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates (population 4,798,491; 32,278 square miles). The United Arab Emirates also has six other subnational Emirs, but the post of leading Emir does not rotate as it does the premier kingship in Malaysia.

The territory ruled by these seven Arabian monarchs in contiguous. Saudi Arabia, is by far the largest geographically, has by far the largest population of this group, has the most powerful military of the group, has shown that at least one of the others (Bahrain) is dependent upon it by militarily propping it up earlier this year, has the most aggregate wealth, and is home to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Collectively, they control all of the Arabian Pennisula except Yemen. Sucession in Saudi Arabia is not strictly hereditary - a monarch is chosen by the royal family collectively from a group of men closely related to the King, rather than by automatic succession to a particular individual. This may be the case in some of the other monarchies of the region.

All of the monarchs with genuine political power are men.

In addition, North Korea, by virtue of an imminent second successive father to son transfer of power as an absolute dictatorship, comes close to being a monarchy where the monarch has genuine political power in practice, despite the fact that this has not been how the regime has chosen to characterize itself so far.

Theocracies

Vatican City (population 826, 0.17 square miles) under the rule of Pope Benedict XVI, and Iran under Shi'ite cleric and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, are the only theocracies in the world, defined as states in which significant sovereign temporal power resides in a non-hereditary religious leadership. Both of them are men.

The Pope has absolute power when living although he is expected to stay within the boundaries of a nearly two thousand year old religious tradition and under a collective church leadership between the death of one Pope and the election of another by a college of Cardinals. The Pope's authority over Vatican City is a minor part of his overall responsibilities as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, and Vatican City, in practice, exists only with the consent and cooperation of the government of the Italian Republic that surrounds it.

Iran has an elected unicameral legislature and an elected President and parliament, selected in elections that are not free and fair, and are subject to significant religious and political interference through limitations on those who are eligible to be candidates, restrictions on speech and debate, and tampering with election results. But, Iran's elections are also not those of an absolutely dictatorial state in which there is only a single choice that is a foregone conclusion for every political office. The Supreme Leader controls the military, the police, the judiciary, the state owned media, war and peace level foreign affairs, and half of a Council of Guardians that controls ballot access and acts of a constitutional court with a constitution that incorporates Islamic law. The Supreme Leader also appoints an Assembly of Experts made up of clerics who theoretically are a check on the Supreme Leaders authority with the power to remove him from office and direct his decisions, and in fact are little more than a Shi'ite College of Cardinals or a corporate board of directors. Arguably, Iran's Supreme Leader who has held power since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that deposed the Shah is simply a dictator or elective monarch in the mold of a President for Life who has devolved some political power. The Supreme Leader does not clearly seem to have a hereditary successor in mind.

There are other states with established religions that have significant power, but in all of the others there is a secular leadership with far more predominant power than in Vatican City and Iran.

Arguably Andorra (population 83,888; 181 square miles) which is ruled in name by Archbishop Joan Enric Vives Sicília and French President Nicolas Sarkozy as Co-Princes, neither hereditary and symbolically only, fits the bill of a theocracy as well, but it is really a unique arrangement, that is closest to a constitutional monarchy in practice.

Other Non-Democratically Ruled Areas

There are many dictators in the world, some of whom are relatives of the prior dictators, who do not claim monarch status and are not as close to a de facto monarchy as North Korea.

There are also many countries which formally have some form of Republic that are neither entirely democratic with free and fair elections and a secure rule of law, nor entirely dicatorial and authoritarian. These flawed democracies rule much of the world's territory and population. Some like China, are one party states where power is not totally concentrated in a supreme leader and there is non-hereditary succession, but there are strong restrictions on political activity. Others are democracies acting in the shadow of military authority that poses a genuine check and influence on the elected officials who formally rule, countries in the process of transitioning to new democratic regimes (e.g. South Sudan and Egypt), and countries organized on a republican basis with elections but not free and fair ones.

There are also many colonies and dependencies and territories of otherwise democratic regimes that lack democratic self-government or full democratic self-government.

Finally, there are a few pockets of the world, such as parts of Somolia today, and parts of Afghanistan prior to 2002, that are effectively stateless, because no governmental arrangement, other than illegitimate petty warlords, has authority in a particular area.

READ MORE - Monarchies and Theocracies

Maoism in India Linked To Neo-Feudalism

In parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned by individuals, much as it is in most of the United States. In parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned communally by villages in what amounts to a localized form of communism. In yet other parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned the landlords with large land holdings that is worked by landless peasants, in what amounts to a neo-feudal system.

While territorial boundary tensions in the general vicinity of Kashmir, and religous/ethnic conflicts between Hindus and Muslims capture most of the press about political violence in India, a third major source of political violence in India is an ongoing insurgency by Naxalites, who are usually described as Maoist are highly concentrated in parts of India that have historically had neo-feudal land tenure.

Thus, what seems from abroad to be revolution in support of discredited communist ideology, looks locally like an economic struggle that had already been largely resolved in Europe when Adam Smith and Karl Marx were defining the boundaries of the political economy debate there. Maoists in India are addressing legitimate grievances that the developed world is so far removed from that it is has largely forgotten them.

The United States experienced a similar struggle, but we didn't conceptualize it as an issue of land reform. We called the effort to dismantle a system largely build around ownership of large farms worked by landless workers abolition and dealt with it by ending slavery rather than with government sponsored land reform. Emancipation happened; 40 acres and a mule did not. A wave of reconstruction era bank foreclosures did a little to disaggregate plantation land holdings, but mostly the mechanization of agriculture and rise of an industrial economy made land ownership less economically relevant than it had been.

The implication of this fact, of course, is that the solution to the long running Maoist insurgencies in India may be to address the land tenure concerns that a fueling those insurgencies, and for outsider forces in India's policy environment to not so easily conflate an anti-feudal movement with anti-capitalist sentiment. This understanding of the movement helps makes sense of otherwise mysterious phenomena like the large contigent of pro-business Maoists in nearby Nepal's recent democratic elections.

In the words of a 1972 speech by Pope Paul VI, "If you want peace, work for justice."

READ MORE - Maoism in India Linked To Neo-Feudalism

Libya As A Blood Sport

Gaddafi and the rebels are gladiators in a blood contest confined to a Libyan arena whose terms are controlled by the international community. In this contest Gaddafi has already received the thumbs down from a modern Casear.

Four months ago, Gaddafi was the unquestioned absolute ruler of his country, as he had been for forty years, and there was not even an organized political opposition. Now, the writing is on the wall.

With that kind of reality to face, perhaps it isn't surprising that most of the assertions that Gaddafi's regime have been lies so bald faced that they appear delusional.

The inevitabilty of the outcome boils down to one key fact: Libya is not a viable autarky.

Libya runs on oil wealth (with imports make up more than 28% of its domestic consumption) and without export revenues, mostly oil, it would swiftly collapse. It is not food self-sufficient. It does not have a significant domestic arms industry. It can't make its own cars or medicines, and certainly can't do so with domestic materials. It can only use its $60 billion in international financial reserves and 4.62 million troy ounces of gold reserves if the international financial community recognizes the authority of someone to use those resources, which Gaddafi's regime is not at the moment. A brief NATO intervention has already rendered its air force, its navy, its tanks and its heavy artillery useless.

Until now, the international community has respect Gaddafi's legitimacy and Libya's sovereignty, allowing the nation to keep oil wealth that the outside world was perfectly capable of taking by force. With international recognition of his legitimate authority as head of state lost, his days are numbered.

Libya has already lost the support of the international community. The UN authorized international coalitions to impose a no-fly zone, embargo it from arms, and freeze the nations assets (and the assets of Gaddafi and his inner circle). New regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are no longer allies. Convoys of resources brought across the Sahara from Algeria, Niger, Chad or Sudan would be obvious to spy satellites and reconnaisance aircraft, and could be stopped by NATO airplanes if they wished.

Chad is not friend, it had to drive out Libya forces in an international war that just ended in 1987. Italy, whose prime minister Berlusconi had pleaded $5 billion in aid a reparations for Italy's 32 years of colonial rule in 2008 is not going to honor its promise through a Gaddafi lead regime. Sudan has its own discontented masses, international sanctions (including a war crimes indictment for its sitting head of state), the loss of its Southern provinces in an independence referrendum, and ongoing insurgency in Darfur, and more to worry about. Niger's totalitarian dictator has to worry about escaping the North African revolutionary trend, is one of the poorest nations in the world, and has a Tuareg insurgency (one that probably draws considerable succor from Libyan benefactors as Saharan tribal groups are at the heart of the Libyan state apparatus) to try to keep from reinvigorating itself. Gaddafi has always bought himself friends in the past, but the only country still willing to stick its neck out for him now is Uganda, which is ill suited to be a capable ally. Moreover, strong reliance on predominantly Christian Ugandan support would turn Islamist forces against Gaddafi in a way that might impair his own coalition.

Most of Libya's oil comes from oil fields in the East and leaves via ports near rebel controlled Benghazi, and the international community has a special military interest in preventing Gaddafi from gaining control of those resources.

International forces aren't getting their hands dirty by putting troops on the ground in Libya, where rebels and forces loyal to Gaddafi fight each other. But, Libya is so dependent upon resources that they control and is so weak itself, that NATO can control the terms of the battle. If NATO decides that it is unhappy with the way that the battle is playing out in this arena, it has the power to change the rules.

Realistically, there is no easy to visualize face saving way that the international community could restore access to the resources they control to Gaddafi in the absence of a treaty concluded with the rebels. Gaddafi direct role in the Locherbie, Scotland aircraft bombing has been established by defectors. He will likely be linked to other terorist acts against Western interests by defectors. His conduct of the civil war and his delusional statements during it have forever proven him to be a violent madman. If he managed to crush the rebels militarily, despite NATO involvement, he would be viewed in the international community as an illegitimate butcher and denied access to international trade, military resources and the country's foreign assets apart from some sort of oil for food arrangement.

Without a treaty and if he fails to crush the rebel regime based in Benghazi, the rebels will probably be granted exclusive use of the oil resources they control and Libya's sovereign wealth, the arms embargo and no-fly zone and NATO coalition efforts to stop the use of heavy weapons by Gaddafi will continue, foreign oil companies will not send workers back to Gaddafi controlled oil fields and pipelines, rebels will manage to destroy the pipelines necessary to bring that oil to market, and Libya-Tripoli will lose a war of attrition. The mercenaries loyal to Gaddafi critical to keeping him in power will mutiny sooner or later when it becomes clear that they will not be paid. The standard of living will collapse. The oasis farmers and herders who are loyal to Gaddafi won't be able to produce enough food to feed the Eastern part of the country without outside support. Western rebels, even if forced to go underground, will fester as a resistance force striking whenever the Gaddafi regime can't catch them. Gaddafi has lost the option of transitioning to a constitutional regime that democratizes and liberalizes while leaving him a role as head of state in some capacity.

The exact way that the end game will play out isn't clear, so the spectators can still watch with baited breath. Will the rebels rally and seize the rest of the country? Will international forces increase their involvement and end it? Will covert CIA and other international covert assistance give the rebels a decisive edge? Will Egypt or Tunisia or France intervene more directly to topple Gaddafi? Will Gaddafi's mercenaries, loyal military officers and inner circle stage a coup or defect? Will a stable stalemate be reached and produce a treaty or armistice or enduring cease fire that splits Libya into two or three different countries? Will Gaddafi be killed or die or flee leaving his forces leaderless to surrender? Will Gaddafi crush the rebels and control the entire country, but hold onto only an internationally isolated shambles of a nation until he dies in a prolonged seige? Will pretenders to a monarchy mobilize the rebels with the promise of a constitutional monarchy regime?

In an age where targeted killing is U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the global war on terror, can we doubt that CIA operatives in Libya are authorized to assassinate Gaddafi and his top aides?

The civil war in Libya is still young. The ability of internationally supported forces in Ivory Coast to forcibly remove the incumbent president who lost the Presidential election with French military support offers hope that this struggle need not be a long one. Libya is not a huge country. Gaddafi controls no more than 4 million or so of the country's 6.3 million people, and only a fraction of the 76,000 soldiers the nation had before the civil war began. While Libya's territory is vast, almost of the people the combatants are fighting for control over live close to the coast. There isn't any obvious way that the Gaddafi regime will be decisively ended, but there is no obvious way that it can restore its prior tranquility, wealth and international stature either.

The lesson of post-Cold War conflicts in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbajain, Bahrain, Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Moldova, and now Libya has been that in a post-Cold War world, international powers often can and will intervene decisively to determine the outcome of military conflicts according to their interests and international norms, and that Third World dictators can't count on not facing consequences for their actions. A new generation of leaders watched Star War I and decided that real world Naboos don't deserve to suffer in the face of international indifference. The world order that the League of Nations tried to bring into being after World War I, and that the United Nations tried to bring into being after World War II has finally arrived.

We aren't all of the way there yet. Letting local forces engage in blood sports to determine who will win control while providing decisively outside influence, as the United States did when it intervened on behalf of the Northern Coalition that was losing a war for control of Afghanistan with the Taliban in 2001 has become a model, while the model of the Iraq War, in which foreign forces occupy and rule a country with their own troops to effect regime change, viewed through the lens of previous failure in Vietnam, has been determined in hindsight to be a model not to be repeated if at all possible. Decisive large scale military intervention not limited in scope would probably end the fighting sooner, but the widespread fear is that local forces who aren't capable of securing territory on the ground by themselves won't be capable of holding onto it either. So, the international community has decided that it can manage to set the rules of engagement, but not to fight the battles within the arena itself.

Western powers aren't the only superpowers in these cases. Bahrain has established that small Arab monarchies can't survive an uprising without ceding power to the masses or relying on Saudi Arabian military support. The Saudi military could put up a fight with the military resources that the United States has provided it for year after year in the arrangements designed to earn Arab acceptance of Israel reached in the Camp David Accords, but Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman would be finished without Saudi Arabian support in the face of foreign or domestic military opposition. Yemen, which as a no monarchy has ceded Saudi backing has proved that to be the case. Morocco and Jordan, while still absolute monarchies, have learned that they must heed public opinion if their regimes wants to remain in power. The King of Swaziland must know that a serious offense to either South Africa or other international parties that make his regime possible could snuff out his regime in a matter of days without serious repurcussions if a genuine domestic uprising took hold. Lesotho's regime is similarly situated.

READ MORE - Libya As A Blood Sport

Interesting Studies

* A new study predicts the extinction of religion in nine countries using models similar to those to predict language extinction. (See also here on language extinction: 6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population. The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population. 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.) "The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland." The key constant in their model in all of the studied countries was a best fit to a value that would lead to completely secular beliefs in the long run.

Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, Richard J. Wiener, "A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation."

The model looks at the proportion of people who are religious, the proportion of people who are non-religious, and assumes that conversion rates in each direction are a function of the proportion of the population that belongs to that group and a constant called "u" for the perceived utility of membership in that group. This probability they put in the form: "c(x^a)(u), where c and a are constants that scale time and determine the relative importance of x and u in attracting converts, respectively." Using 85 sets of long term census data they found that the best fit to "a" was 1, that c is also succeptible to global fits, and that u varies from place to place. When they solve the equations on this basis they find:

The behavior of the model can be understood analytically for a = 1, in which case we have dx/dt=cx(1-x)(2u-1): logistic growth. An analysis of the fixed points of this equation tells us that religion will disappear if its perceived utility is less than that of non-affiliation [i.e. u is greater than 0.5], regardless of how large a fraction initially adheres to a religion. However, if a is less than but close to one, a small social group can indefinitely coexist with a large social group.

The study estimated the constant "u" from census of religion data for "(a) the autonomous Aland islands region of Finland, (b) Schwyz Canton in Switzerland, (c) Vienna Province in Austria, (d) the Netherlands. . . . Relative utilities for the religiously unaffiliated populations as determined by model . . . were u = 0:63; 0:70; 0:58; 0:56."

No estimate of the key constant was made for the United States, which is far less secular than the countries studied, but has a growing non-religious population. There is also good reason to wonder if the either or model used in the study (in which religious or non-religious were the only categories) makes sense in a nation without a tradition of an established or locally dominant religion as found in most of the studied areas.

The general empirical trend in the study of American religious affiliation has been a candle burning at both ends result, with both more demanding religious faiths and secular beliefs growing at the expensive of mainline moderate religious belief. Similarly, in Latin America, the trend has been to see a growth in both Pentacostal faiths and secularism at the expensive the Roman Catholicism which is the dominant established church. In sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been for conversion from animism to Christianity, with a minor growth factor (partially demic and partially from conversion) for Islam, while secular views have not been particularly notable as a share of the population.

Put another way, there is a lot to be said for a logistic model to explain trendlines in religious affiliation, but the model does nothing to explain what drives changes in the key constant "u" that drives these trends. By analogy, is is compable to looking at politics at an electoral level without really examining the movement politics that cause political views to change in the general population over time.

This model is a good antidote, however, to purely population genetic models that start from the assumption that children will share the faith of their parents, rather than attempting to quantify propensities to convert from one faith to another in a meaningful fashion. To some extent, by deriving empirical constants in the model from data, it glosses over these theoretical objections in a robust way. The constant "u" effectively subsumes both conversion propensities and reproduction rates. But, near the extremes, it becomes more and more important to recognize the relevance of subgroup membership, subgroup coherence, and reproduction rates, although its constant "a" can help mediate that result.

For example, in the sample "a" equals 1 model, it can't explain the persistence, and even growth, of faiths that Judaism and the Amish, in the face over overwhelming minority status for thousands of years and hundreds of years respectively. More generally, a more realistic model would assume a hetrogeneous propensity to convert which might very well have a hereditary component (due to psychological tendencies to take certain approaches to tradition and authority selected for heavily through religious endogamy when a religion is in the minority).

In more complex models, some religious populations and some personality types might be slow to convert, while others might convert more rapidly, and if the populations slow to convert also have more children and have children younger, you might end up with a bimodal outcome with a stable, fertile religious segment and a stable less fertile non-religious segment. It isn't hard to imagine the United States and Latin America evolving into this kind of equalibrium. And, while Turkey is nominally 99% Muslim, its division into different varieties of Islam arguably reflects this kind of balance.

* In a decidely participant-ethnographic investigation, New York City dezinens have discovered that godless people who get together in clubs are happier.

* A parasitic factor in mental illness may have been located:

Toxoplasma gondii infects approximately 25 percent of the human population. The protozoan parasite is noted for altering the behavior of infected hosts. . . .

"It is noteworthy that we found vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2 (VIPR2) was upregulated by all three Toxoplasma strains," says Xiao. VIPR2 "is linked to schizophrenia in some recent publications. Since the tropism of Toxoplasma for brain has been linked with specific behavioral changes and psychosis in humans, this finding will have some fundamental significance for understanding the correlation between Toxoplasma and psychosis."

The report based on the study by J. Xiao, L. Jones-Brando, C. C. Talbot, R. H. Yolken. "Differential Effects of Three Canonical Toxoplasma Strains on Gene Expression in Human Neuroepithelial Cells." Infection and Immunity, 2010; 79 (3): 1363 DOI: 10.1128/IAI.00947-10 suggests from a mouse model that there may be an important subclass of mental health conditions with a parasitic infectious agent as a cause or trigger.

* There may be a quick and easy vaccine cure for a complication of dust mite allergies:

Monash University researchers are working on a vaccine that could completely cure asthma brought on by house dust mite allergies. If successful, the vaccine would have the potential to cure sufferers in two to three doses. . . . Professor O'Hehir has also made significant gains in developing a vaccine for people with peanut allergies. Currently there is no specific treatment for peanut allergy with avoidance and emergency treatment of anaphylaxis with adrenaline as the only options. Allergen immunotherapy is available for selected patients with house dust mite allergy but typically injections need to be given regularly for three to five years.

I've never been diagnosed with asthma, but do have a dust mite allergy and have had subclinical asthma-like symptoms, so this is naturally of great interest to me.

* Native Americans had big influences on the environment of the Americas beyond a megafauna extinction, in the Everglades:

Tree islands are patches of relatively high and dry ground that dot the marshes of the Everglades. Typically a meter (3.3 feet) or so high, many of them are elevated enough to allow trees to grow. They provide a nesting site for alligators and a refuge for birds, panthers, and other wildlife.

Scientists have thought for many years that the so-called fixed tree islands (a larger type of tree island frequently found in the Everglades' main channel, Shark River Slough) developed on protrusions from the rocky layer of a mineral called carbonate that sits beneath the marsh. Now, new research indicates that the real trigger for island development might have been middens, or trash piles left behind from human settlements that date to about 5,000 years ago.

These middens, a mixture of bones, food discards, charcoal, and human artifacts (such as clay pots and shell tools), would have provided an elevated area, drier than the surrounding marsh, allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Bones also leaked phosphorus, a nutrient for plants that is otherwise scarce in the Everglades.

And, in the Eastern United States where "prehistoric people decreased forest cover to reorient their settlements and intensify corn production. They also contributed to increased sedimentation in valley bottoms about 700 to 1,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The findings suggest that prehistoric land use was the initial cause of increased sedimentation in the valley bottoms, and sedimentation was later amplified by wetter and stormier conditions."

* Unimpressive social science discovery of the week: Subjects in psychology experiments distinguish between real human beings and mere video recordings of human beings.

* Traits that cause organisms to disperse rapidly in space lead to selective evolution without regard to other measures of biological fitness.

* We know more about the apes of Europe and Asia tens of millions of years ago than we used to know:

Extant apes (Primates: Hominoidea) are the relics of a group that was much more diverse in the past. They originated in Africa around the Oligocene/Miocene boundary, but by the beginning of the Middle Miocene they expanded their range into Eurasia, where they experienced a far-reaching evolutionary radiation. . . Here we provide an updated chronology that incorporates recently discovered Iberian taxa and further reevaluates the age of many previously known sites on the basis of local biostratigraphic scales and magnetostratigraphic data. Our results show that identifiable Eurasian kenyapithecins (Griphopithecus and Kenyapithecus) are much younger than previously thought (ca. 14 Ma instead of 16 Ma), which casts serious doubts on the attribution of the hominoid tooth from Engelswies (16.3–16.5 Ma) to cf. Griphopithecus.

READ MORE - Interesting Studies

Bullies

Earlier this week, I went to my son's elementary school play. It was a series of skits put together by groups of several kids each in the drama class as part of the bullying prevention program at the school (with vocal and instrumental renditions of "Stand by me" as an intermezzo between each one).

A pattern illustrating the operational lesson that the children had learned from the program quickly emerged. A kid ("the target"), usually alone, gets bullied, sometimes by a bully alone, and sometimes by a ring leader and some henchmen. While alone, that kid can't win. But, another kid or group of kids intervenes on behalf of the kid being bullied and prevail - sometimes by force of numbers and sometimes combined with an appeal to authority (the principal or in a particularly overwhelming situation, a cell phone call to the cops).

The lesson seemed to be that you can't stop a bully alone, and when you are being bullied are often in a poor position to help yourself without assistance. After all, you were singled out when you were alone precisely because you were perceived in the first place, often accurately, as vulnerable. But, the program argues, you as a member of the school community have a moral obligation to help out your fellow students when they are in this kind of bind, because the secret to overcoming a bully is to have allies. The key ingredient that the program seeks to internalize in the kids and drill into their consciousness by repetition is that there is a moral duty to intervene on behalf of kids who are being bullied. Kids need to stand by each other to stay safe.

While the scenes weren't very realistic, the basic strategy that was proposed is plausible and the virtue of seeing a solution to the problem in terms of social context and personal obligation to others in the community is a refreshing and useful lesson for the kids that can extend far beyond the school yard.

As a practical matter, resorting to authority without peer support is often not very effective, and the old standby of the last generation - learning to box or do karate, reinstated into the debate by a Chinese setting remake of the Karate Kid movie, also doesn't work that well in real life. But, peer support does work, and the intervention of someone else on your behalf can make all the difference and resolve the problem in a stable way.

Moreover, this kind of strategy doesn't have to be completely successful to its full extent to work. As long as a small minority of kids in stronger positions than the target of the bullying are induced to intervene when necessary, and a great majority are induced to be less inclined to encourage or support the bullies, the strategy will work. A community in which a significant minority of kids who are in reasonably secure social positions feel a moral obligation to stand by isolated vulnerable kids who are being bullied and are ready to act on it is a community in which bullying is likely to become an undesirable option for would be bullies.

Bullies and Foreign Affairs

A natural analog to this view is what I see as an emerging conventional wisdom in foreign policy and military affairs. The single most decisive factor in determining the outcome of wars is who each side has as allies are in the conflict, and who watches without getting involved. Similarly, cops almost always win in individual confrontations with criminals because they can resort to the resources of a much larger and more cohesive team. Only when criminals band together into gangs, or organized crime families or cartels do they pose a serious challenge to police authority.

The protesters in Egypt and Tunisia couldn't have prevailed if the armed forces in those countries hadn't refused to back the current dictator. Protesters in Bahrain look doomed to failure because Saudi Arabia and other little Gulf monarchies have sent in troops to back that regime.

Protesters in Libya had a harder go of it because Gaddafi was able to utilize family ties and mercenaries to secure greater loyalty from his troops. The willingness of the French to stick out their neck and recognize the rebels in Libya as the legitimate government of Libya, an international consensus to freeze sovereign wealth and leadership group wealth, and yesterday's UN Security Council vote to authorize military force against Gaddafi (with usually anti-interventionist permanent members of the Security Council abstaining rather than vetoing the action) supported by the Arab League, British and French and American military might, and Qatar has changed that game, forcing Gaddafi to reverse his course of action by declaring a cease fire and probably insuring victory for the rebels, at least in the Eastern Benghazi area.

The Taliban were swiftly removed from power because they too found no international allies in the wake of 9-11. Serbia, in contrast, was able to maintain its control over Kosovo for much longer, with Russian backing, and Russian backing has been key to determining who prevails and who does not in conflicts over control in the Caucasus republics. Iraq's lack of allies against broad international coalitions in both the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, led to its defeat in each. Kuwait's ability to secure allies allowed it to resurface despite the fact that it had been crushed militarily and occupied by Iraq.

Tibet fell because no one inside our outside the Chinese government intervened on its behalf against China in 1959. Hungarian reformers in the 1950s, Czech reformers in the wake of the Prague Spring, and Chinese protesters in Beijing were defeated for the same reasons. Outside support from France was important to the success of the Americans in the American revolution. In World War II, decision of the United States to stop sitting on the sidelines was pivotal to the resolution of the conflict.

Until a couple of generations ago, the basic public policy stance on domestic violence was that "what happens in the home is not anyone else's business." And, the basic public policy stance on foreign affairs was that sovereignty provided local political leaders absolute authority to run their domestic affairs as they saw fit.

The attitude towards domestic violence has changed. Now, we arrest people who beat their wives and kids, and people who know about it feel some moral responsibility to summon outside intervention.

The attitude towards sovereignty has changed too, albeit more slowly. The Holocaust, reinforced by examples like genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and Cambodia, and the rediscovery of the Armenian genocide in Anatolia, have helped shape that attitude. In U.S. history, something akin to this view (i.e. that the Civil War was justified because it freed the slaves) legitimatizes the U.S. Civil War. We no longer trust that those in political power will show enough restraint to prevent epic catastrophes in the absence of outside intervention. Increasingly, the international community feels that political leaders for show excessive brutality towards their own people forfeit their sovereign immunity from outside intervention. The international community increasingly feels a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of nations that are being bullied by their neighbors and domestic populations that are being bullied by their leaders.

Even Russia and China have reached a point where they are not going to object to international military intervention when a leader who has lost the support of half of his own military and many of his senior civil servants starts attacking his own people with jet fighters, and promising to slaughter whole cities that have risen up against him. And, even now, this support comes only with the implicit understanding that the international community is intervening only to the extent necessary to prevent mass slaughter of civilians and level the playing field.

Sovereignty still trumps a wide panoply of repressions. Apartheid was sanctioned, but direct intervention wasn't taken; the international community waited for it to collapse from within. Isolated unjustified killings of individuals aren't enough to forfeit it. Very repressive regimes, like those of Burma and North Korea are tolerated. Disregard for electoral outcomes or electoral fraud don't provoke international intervention, nor do illegal coups. But, we have at least reached the point where large scale killings of one's own people crosses a line, after which outside intervention is viewed as acceptable if anyone can be found to volunteer to take on the task.

The citizens of nation that is repressed can secure meaningful international intervention only by taking to the streets or taking up arms, and producing a response from the leaders of that nation that crosses the line.

Still, the international community has advanced from a situation where there truly wasn't any authority beyond the sovereign to one a bit like Medieval Iceland, which had courts to adjudicate when someone's misdeeds rose to the level that justified action, because executing that order, once rendered, was a private affair to be organized and financed by those who show an interest in taking action. Similarly, off the coast of Somalia, the international community has reached a consensus that Somali pirates are legitimate targets, but this determination is being enforced by a loose knit collection of national naval assets.

Excessive isolationism and respect for sovereignty sends a message that greater misconduct by national leaders will be tolerated; while an international community in which some kinds of domestic conduct is viewed as unacceptable and likely to provoke international intervention with real consequences discourages this kind of misconduct by national leaders.

READ MORE - Bullies

The Economics of Operatic Geography

Like Italy, Germany was a loose collection of independent fiefs until the middle of the 19th century. Music was a weapon in the aristocrats’ fierce competition for prestige, helping to account for the disproportionate number of Baroque operas from German and Italian composers as compared with France, which was more centralized.

From here.

The pre-industrial revolution investments made in a Baroque opera houses was shown in a recent study to continue to be a factor in attracting top talent to European cities.

Will the relatively unified United States, European Union, China and India suffer relatively to places like Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia and Latin America in terms of cultural innovation in the century to come for similar reasons?

READ MORE - The Economics of Operatic Geography

The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 - 1965)

Churchill's wisdom has much to be said for it, except that it doesn't do much to tell us which kind of democracy is to be preferred to the alternatives.

An important flaw of the American system, and some similar systems, is that it deeply and fundamentally entrenches a process that naturally produces an unstable equilibrium that is at always odds with voter desires in one direction or the other, rather than a stable process that consistently produces elected representatives who seek to maximize the popularity of the decisions made by the government.



Enik Rising (Seth Masket's blog) reports research that he and Hans Noel have done with a clever experimental design that establishes empirically and rigorously the empirical wisdom that:

There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district. . . .

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.

The study focused on California, but its conclusions almost surely hold for all but a couple of states in the United States (Nebraska and Louisiana may be exceptions).

Actual partisanship in legislative districts has a bell curve distribution. Elected legislators have a bimodal distribution, like a two humped camel. The political middle is systemically underpopulated by elected officials, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters are in the political middle between the typical elected Democrat and the typical elected Republican on the spectrum of ideology from the political left to the political right.

The study is focused, appropriately, on the facts, rather than the causes for those facts. But, political theory would suggest that this outcome is a very natural and direct consequence of our election laws and legislative process.

The Electoral Bias Against Moderation

Single member plurality district election system naturally gravitates towards having two dominant political parties in any one geographic area. In that system, adding a new credible candidate to the mix hurts that candidate's allies and helps that candidate's enemies. In order to mitigate mutually self-destructive behavior, we have entrenched, in the United States, a two party system in which the political left and the political right choose nominees in partisan primaries and then face off against each other.

The single member plurality district system doesn't necessarily have to create a two party system. It can support regional parties that have majority support in a particular area, like a Quebec Nationalist party or Irish Republican Party. It also doesn't require that the party of the right be the same everywhere, or that the party of the left be the same everywhere. Canadians have one party of the right to the West of Ontario, and another one, the Tory's to the East. One U.S. States have a Democrat-Farm-Labor Party rather than a Democratic party. The U.S. historically used to have, de facto, Dixiecrats in some parts of the country, and Democrats in other partys of the country, both against a common Republican party.

But, for distinct regional parties to emerge, something has to give that region a strong identity. The more homogeneous a region is politically, the less prone it is to develop a distinct political party.

A Majority Requirement As a Weak Fix

A weak solution to this problem is to use French style elections, which have been adopted in Louisiana, Denver and in a less pure form, in a handful of states, where the winner of the election needs to get a majority of the votes cast to win in the first round, with the top two vote getters facing off in a second round.

While this isn't immune to the pathology that similar candidates tend to undermine each other, it eliminates the requirement that a candidate wanting to make it into the second round must have a plurality coalition made up entirely of partisan voters on the right, or partisan voters on the left. A coalition of unaffiliated and bipartisan moderate voters can also secure a candidate a second round slot.

More generally, in its pure form, it is more more neutral towards the number of political parties competing in the district than a traditional two party system. Not surprisingly, Louisiana has historically been the source of moderate candidates in both the Democratic and Republican political parties.

Proportional Representation As A Strong Fix

A stronger solution to this problem would be a true proportional representation system that doesn't penalize two political parties for having similar views without not actually merging. In a system where each voter picks on political party and that party gets a number of seats proportional to the share of the vote received by that political party, the sensible thing for a voter to do is the pick the party most closely aligned with their views and a political party doesn't face a penalty for being small unless its market share approaches the treshold minimum percentage necessary to secure representation in the legislature (typically in the low single digit percentages). A proportional representation system also allows representation of parties that have a majority in no particular district.

This kind of true multi-party system, which naturally gravitated towards roughly four to eight major political parties, leads to unequal sized clusters of voters with much more homogeneous views.

The Legislative Bias Against Moderation

When Are Coalitions Made? How Stable Must They Be?

In an idealized two party system, coalitions need to be assembled before the election. In an idealized multi-party system, coalitions are made after the election.

In a parliamentary system, a governing coalition forming a legislative majority, need to hold together on all major issues for the political system to function. The legislative leader becomes the head of government (i.e. the Prime Minister) who runs government on a day to day basis. If the coalition that put the Prime Minister in place fails to secure majority support for any major proposal, the Prime Minister will typicall then lose a "no confidence" vote in short order, and new elections will typically be held.

Somewhat complicating the matter of coalition building is that American legislative coalitions don't need to be very stable across all or most issues. Since we have a strong President whose tenure doesn't hinge upon maintaining a legislative majority (indeed our current President doesn't have one), the executive branch can continue to function and carry out the business of government even when one coalition of legislators may prevail on one set on issues, and another coalition of legislators may prevail on a different set of issues.

Historically, for example, the U.S. had a de facto "two and a half" party system at the national Congressional level. One domestic economic issues Democrats generally united against Republicans. But, on matters of national defense and social issues like race, Southern Democrats often allied themselves with Republicans against Northern Democrats. The Democratic Presidential nomination race reflected the vacillation between these two factions.

This three party system allowed the party that was moderate on any issue where there was no consensus among the three parties to prevail, moderating the process as a whole to some extent.

Today, after a process called "realignment" that has largely run its course, this isn't the case any more. There are few notable blocks of "moderates" in either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in Congress who deviate from their party in a systematic way on a particular way. The Blue Dog faction in the Democratic Party has withered, as has the faction of Northeastern social moderate Republicans. We have a relatively pure party of the political left and a relatively pure party of the political right, and they are quite evenly matched on the national political scene.

The Majoritarian Legislative Process Has A Hidden Bias Against Moderation

Of course, some of the partisanship we see at the legislative level is a product not just of a two party electoral system, but is inherent in the legislative process itself. Legislative decision making generally involved for or against voting on politically controversial issues. Partisans get the results most to their liking when they favor proposals the secure majorities, but only the narrowest majorities possible. It is natural, in this context, for legislators to informally rank themselves from the political left to the political right, and for proposals that require legislators to form an allegiance with one side or the other to be common.

Thus, even in multi-party proportional representation system, governing coalitions that are clearly right leaning, or clearly left leaning are the norm. Governing coalitions like the Penteparti system of Italy, in which five mainstream parties formed repeated unstable and short lived coalitions in the political center in a calculated effort to exclude old school communists on the left, and old school fascists on the right, ar the exception, except in times of national peril from an outside force like the unity governments of the United Kingdom during World War II.

Moderates are more favored in a place like the U.S. Senate, that is not strictly majoritarian, with most proposals from the left or the right requiring supermajority support, than in the U.S. House, where majority rule prevails.

In order to favor the kind of moderate policies that voters in the political center favor, you need not only an electoral system that doesn't naturally generate a bimodal distribution of legislators, but also a legislative process that has stronger incentives to find supermajority, rather than mere majority support for legislation.

Supermajority Requirements Come At The Risk of Deadlock

Favoring supermajorities, however, comes at a cost. Any requirement that there be more than majority support for a measure in a single legislative body with ultimate say over the matter creates a risk that the system will be overconstrained and fail to produce action in situations where there is no acceptable status quo.

In the United States, recess appointment power and a strong Presidency prevent the status quo of all important positions in the government going unfilled for lack of a resolution to deadlocks between a nominating executive and a ratifying Senate. But, at both the state and at the federal level, it remains possible for a lack of an ability to reach consensus in a deterministic way on a budget bill to produce a government shutdown, something that House Republicans on one side, and Senate Democrats and the President on the other, have been dancing with in the lame duck session of the 2010 Congress and the current Congress.

Probably the most notable recent example of an overconstrained set of legislative rules in recent memory is that of the Iraqi Constitution, which requires supermajority support to choose a President and Prime Minister, at a time when there is stark disagreement between well defined factions that individually lack that supermajority (whose moderate unanimity the constitution attempted to coax). The result has been many months of government deadlock due to a lack of the required consensus. Afghanistan's constitution, notably, in contrast, was carefully crafted to allow the President to impose a budget and appointees in the absence of constructive disagreement by a legislative majority on an alternative (despite the fact that Afghanistan has less well defined factions in any case).

Supermajority Processes In Practice

The best examples of supermajority incentives in the legislative process are probably the adminsitrative law notice and comment process, and the Quaker meeting process, each of which hinges on having a "honest third party" receive input and try to formulate from the input a maximally popular (in the case of administrative rule making) or maximal consensus (in the case of Quaker meeting decision making) stance, by taking into account the details of the concerns expressed.

Monarchs, because they are well positioned to be that honest third party, can, if they are not politically tone deaf, secure support in the fact of partisan elected bodies, precisely by favoring the middle against partisan majorities, and favoring solutions that would secure supermajority support over those that would secure mere majority support.

I think that the Founders probably hoped (largely in vain) for that kind of dynamic to play out in the American political system, something that failed largely because the Presidential election system got locked into the two party dichotomy. It isn't implausible to think that if the Presidential election process could be redesigned to decouple it from partisan politics and instead have this office elected in a way that favored moderates, that a similar dynamic could be established, even without reform at the legislative level, through the veto power.

Indeed, I think it is a fair hypothesis that Governor Ritter's experience with consensus oriented politics as the norm from his days as a special interest advocate for Colorado's District Attorneys' Association may help explain a great deal of his approach to dealing with the Colorado General Assembly, in which he frequently cited process rather than substance oriented objections to legislation in veto messages.

Good legislators in the existing legislative process frequently try to craft such agreements in "smoke filled room" negotiations involving interested parties with a goal of reaching "kumbaya" (i.e. a consensus of the interested parties to support a bill). But, this kind of deal making and mutal accomodation reaching is ill suited to the formal legislative process.

Consensus or supermajority oriented politics are actually much more common than most people would think, indeed, it is the norm. This is because partisan caucuses and special interest groups much each reach consensus or something close to it in order to move boldly on legislative proposals. They tend to stay silent and refrain from acting in the absence of consensus.

Conclusion

In the absence of divided government (something that both the U.S. Congress and Colorado General Assembly are experiencing right now), there is little incentive to stretch beyond a majority supported compromise.

So, in American politics, voters are left between insisting that government function with deals negotiated between the left and right in exchange for a risk a damaging deadlock, within divided government, and government by a right of center, or left of center consensus with little to encourage it to be inclusive.

READ MORE - The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect