Amendment 28

Following last week's suggestion, today I make a feeble first attempt to formulate an amendment to the Constitution, which simultaneously legalizes our current Social Security laws and reins in the federal government.

Proposed Amendment 28:


Section 1. In defining the powers of the Congress, the phrase 'general Welfare of the United States' in Article 1 Section 8 will be understood to grant no additional powers beyond those specifically enumerated either subsequently in Article 1 Section 8 or elsewhere in the Constitution. Instead, this phrase will be understood to prohibit the Congress from authorizing funds for purposes not benefitting all of the states.


Section 2. The Congress is authorized, but not required, to provide funds for the support of the aged.

Section 3. The Congress is authorized to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.

The second sentence of Section 1 returns 'general Welfare of the United States' to its original Madisonian meaning, and incidentally clarifies the unconstitutional nature of most earmarks. Last week I discussed the motivation for Section 2 of the amendment. Weaker, strictly political arguments might suggest changing 'the aged' to 'aged and the indigent' or 'aged and the infirm.' I added Section 3 in honor of the Tevatron and NASA. Such endeavors clearly do not lie in the domains of the individual states. I am sure the number of such (self serving) sections will grow rapidly if people seriously consider how much retrenchment of the federal government they truly desire. Ultimately, Article 1 Section 8 should probably be rewritten in its entirety. The primary goal of this exercise is to make constitutional those unconstitutional laws already enacted which neither party has the political will to repeal. Although this entrenches laws repugnant to most libertarians and many conservatives, the degradation of constitutional governance resulting from systematically ignoring constitutional violations (has been and) will be more detrimental to the long term health of our republic than any legitimization of the currently constituted welfare state.


I include below the text of Article 1 Section 8 for the convenience of the reader.

Article 1 Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and Post Roads ;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal , and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Constitutional Quick Sand and Social Security

The Tea Party has forcefully reminded the GOP of the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government; the Republican majority in the House has responded with promises to adhere more closely to its oath of allegiance to the Constitution. On the other hand, the electorate largely favors many New Deal and Great Society social welfare programs whose constitutional bases are hotly contested (most often by people not running for office) . This places our newly empowered constitutional conservatives in a weak position. When conservatives oppose legislation which violates the Tenth Amendment's stricture:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,"
the left can always respond that the same argument would apply to Social Security and challenge its opponents either to repudiate Social Security (and the sea of baby boomer voters with low net retirement savings) or to abandon their constitutional principles. Social Security sits as a massive counter example to most claims of strict adherence to the Constitution.

The constitutional conservative has two principled responses to the Social Security challenge. He can repudiate Social Security and hope that this does not lead to decades of governance by Obama clones. A politically powerful, albeit less fiscally responsible alternative, is to propose a constitutional amendment that simultaneously narrowly legalizes (constitutionalizes?) Social Security while further clarifying the limits of federal power. I have no yet formulated what form such an amendment should take (and welcome suggestions). Certainly such an amendment should at most permit a social security plan and not mandate one. In debating such an amendment, we would necessarily revisit the rationale for such a program, and likely redesign it. If we grant, for the sake of discussion, the desirability of offering government pensions, we may perhaps justify removing them from state control by the simple observation that the freedom to move between states would lead a rational citizen to spend his productive years in a low tax state and then move to a high benefit (and presumably therefore higher tax) state upon retirement.

My proposed amendment does not imply that the current Social Security program is an intelligent use of our limited resources. I have saved for my retirement and do not understand why less comfortable workers should augment my income when I retire in a few decades. At the very least, I think we should have some means test for Social Security, even though that will introduce new issues of moral hazard.
Nonetheless, the integrity of our Constitution requires us to legitimize the status quo, as we are exceedingly unlikely to repeal Social Security in the current political and demographic climate. The current willful avoidance of the issue simply encourages further erosion of respect for the Constitution and its restrictions on federal power.

Politics and Party Purity

In one nonpartisan state race this year, my county GOP endorsed a Republican candidate with a criminal record. I fought against this choice and lost. All my arguments fell on deaf ears. My opponents on this issue (essentially everyone else in the county party) cited only the candidate's greater experience in his favor. I objected that endorsing this candidate would taint our recommendations in other races with stronger candidates. The race is now over. There is no evidence that our endorsement tainted our other recommendations. In a large field, the flawed Republican candidate edged out a Democratic candidate by a few thousand votes. If our county GOP had endorsed my preferred candidate, the Democrat probably would have won. I prefer a flawed Republican to a liberal Democrat; should I therefore be glad that I was unable to sway my colleagues? I am still unsure what lesson this experience teaches. Contending lessons include:
(i) My political intuition is much poorer than my colleagues.
(ii) When my colleagues say 'experience', they really mean 'electable.'
(iii) My colleagues' political sensibilities are much closer to the general electorate's than mine are.

I was not upset this election cycle to see the GOP risk losing a few races nationally by discarding some experienced candidates who were all but indistinguishable from liberal Democrats. I think the long term health of the party is better served when it represents strong principles rather than a desire for power. Unfortunately, the line between supporting party principles and pursuing self defeating ideological purity, is not well marked on any map. In my nonpartisan state race, my objections were to a character flaw rather than a disagreement over principles; hence, I doubt the GOP (and therefore the public) would have been better served by a liberal Democratic win. On the other hand, my Republican colleagues now tell me that the losing Democrat is not particularly liberal and may, in fact, have been better qualified for the nonpartisan position in question.

As politics moves from the national to the local level, issues and the meaning of party labels become much fuzzier.

Overproduction of Ph.Ds

The Economist has another article on the overproduction of Ph.Ds. There is no question that many students who enroll in graduate school would be better served pursuing other career paths. The Economist, however, minimizes and dismisses the passion that leads so many mathematicians and other scientists to gamble years of their lives on the wager that they will be the successful researchers who ultimately capture a tenured position. Most mathematicians I have known love mathematics. The Economist says that
"Academics tend to regard asking whether a Ph.D. is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world." This assertion does not ring true to me. To most passionate mathematicians, their love of mathematics is more important than any abstract notion of whether or not there is too much mathematics in the world. In order for an outsider to understand the mindset, imagine the budding mathematician as a close relative of the aspiring musician, athlete, writer, or actor. Each of these knows that only a small fraction of their number will become famous artists or athletes, etc.; yet their love of their craft (or their thirst for fame) drives them to risk years of their lives in pursuit of their dreams. Graduate students in the sciences face far better odds of success than the aspiring actresses and writers who bus tables while waiting for their big break. Moreover, their education buys graduate students an excellent insurance policy. Should they fail to secure a tenured position, many employers are happy to hire these highly educated, driven, and tenacious workers .

In my pretenure days I viewed the academic job market as a meat market. Departments blithely terminated the appointments of anyone whose research did not sufficiently advance the departments' reputations. Criteria for 'sufficiently' were strongly influenced by a department's view of how readily they could hire a better researcher on the open market. My comrades in graduate school all knew the cut throat market we faced, and we each believed (or hoped, depending on personality) that we would be the ones to succeed. Fewer than a quarter of us ended up as research mathematicians. Those who changed career paths included some who seemed to be extremely intellectually gifted, but their personalities or intellectual strengths were not compatible with a career as a mathematician.

As in athletics, the excess of strivers over available positions works to ensure the high quality of the resulting research community. I do not understand how economists and numerous conservative bloggers can understand the virtues of competition (and creative destruction) in business but yet be so appalled by its manifestations in science. I suspect, however, that one constributor to their cloudy vision is that they do not appreciate the sheer joy of doing mathematics and science. It is difficult to monetize joy, especially as this particular joy requires hours of effort incompatible with holding a more remunerative but nonscientific 8AM-6PM job. Conservatives and libertarians object to the intrusion of government into our lives, in part because most big government programs require the noxious implicit assumption that we all (should?) have the same values and priorities as our federal overseers. It ill behooves these same conservatives and libertarians to be distressed by individuals who are willing to make economic sacrifices in order to pursue goals more prized by them than by the staff of the Economist. Let's leave the worship of uniformity in the hands of statists where it belongs.

Unbundling Health Insurance

Last month I read Mark Pauly's Health Reform without Side Effects, a short book analyzing our health care system. As a recipient of generous employer provided health insurance for most of my adult life, I found Pauly's discussion of the inefficiencies of the individual insurance market the most illuminating section of the book. The treatment of coverage for high risk individuals was also careful, but it led me to realize that health insurance policies contain a hidden component which I have not yet seen analyzed and did not include in my prior post on health insurance. In addition to claims administration, benefit coupons, and insurance against catastrophic illness, insurers are required to include, as part of their insurance plans, an option for the insured to purchase insurance at a later date at a (strike) price that does not take into account the individual's health history subsequent to acquisition of the option. It would be interesting to see how this option would be priced if it were unbundled from the rest of the health care plan.

If I buy healthcare insurance while I am in good health, and then have a heart attack, I feel betrayed if my insurance premiums rise precipitously the subsequent year. Thus I expect my yearly insurance premium to pay both for protection against any catastrophic illness in the policy year and for an option to purchase insurance in subsequent years at rates set for healthy adults of my age. If this option feature of insurance were made explicit, more carefully defined, and separated from the rest of the policy, people could decide exactly what such an option is worth. Insurers might then offer `points' on insurance like bankers do on mortgages. Paying a certain number of points in advance, one can lower the nominal interest rate on a mortgage. Insurers could sell points that allowed one to buy insurance at rates set for lower risk individuals. What purpose could such points serve since insurers would have no incentive to sell points at a lower cost than the difference between the premiums for the buyer's actual risk level and the desired lower risk level? Points introduce the possibility that an entity other than the insurer could sell the option contracts. Options would essentially become options to purchase points. Assuming competition kept point costs fairly uniform, sellers could offer `universal' options which could be exercised at many large insurers. An immediate benefit of such an unbundled system would be increased portability of insurance. If an employer's insurance plan provided an explicit option, then a high risk employee who wished to leave his job need not worry about a subsequent dramatic increase in insurance costs. He would simply exercise his option at his new place of employment (or in the less efficient individual insurance market).

Unbundling of options might lower their cost. If you wish to purchase an option today which cannot be exercised for ten years, then the seller of the option will factor in ten years of returns on investing the option premium when pricing the option. (Of course you must also consider your loss of use of the funds for ten years in valuing the purchase.) In buying insurance, we know we should rationally only purchase insurance for catastrophic events unless our insurance is subsidized. If you can afford to pay 2 years of the higher insurance premium charged to high risk individuals, perhaps you would only wish to purchase options which cannot be exercised until three years after the date of purchase, decreasing their cost further.

None of the potential savings consequent to the decoupling of options from insurance plans is large enough to offset the price inflation associated with third party payment of basic medical services, but the concept introduces numerous ways to decrease cost and increase flexibility.

Leroux and Global Warming

For a change of pace I have added Marcel Leroux's Global Warming - Myth Or Reality? to my bedtime reading. I don't recall why I chose this particular climate book from the shelf, but it is published by Springer, a publishing house respected by most mathematicians. In general it is difficult for an outsider to establish the reliability of a putative expert in a distant field. In fields in which I have some expertise, I frequently see the media promote extremely marginal scientists as expert spokesmen. Given the extent to which climatology appears to foster charlatanism, I am wary of all authors in the field.

I was especially eager to read Leroux's treatment of climate modelling. I have already written on why mathematicians are wary of the computer simulations responsible for the alarmist gloom and doom scenarios which lead so many people to advocate wrecking the world economy, abandoning democracy if necessary, in order to limit CO_2 output. My post on this subject dealt only with those universal features of the simulations that one could address without delving into the details of the models. I hope Leroux will shed more light on the nuts and bolts of the models.

Leroux's treatment of models (Chapter 7 of his book) is tinged with an antipathy to models qua models, which I consider misplaced. My objections are simply to the abuse of models. Leroux does provide us with more information about the models and their defects, although I assume that details such as grid sizes change monthly or yearly. I will rephrase and repackage Leroux's more coherent criticisms into a more mathematical framework.

Computer simulations of climate phenomena require dividing the atmosphere into a collection of volumes known as cells and assigning numerical data to each cell representing 'average' climate data for that cell for some time interval. At the time Leroux was writing, typical cell size ranged from hundreds to tens of thousands of cubic kilometers. He does not mention the typical time interval involved. Obviously, the smaller the cell and time step, the more reasonable is approximation of the climate within by some average. Ever increasing computer power is the only inherent limit on the number and therefore the size of the cells. Ideally, we would like to start with some initial approximate climate state, and compute the approximate evolution of the system by numerically approximating the solutions to the complex nonlinear fluid dynamics and other equations governing the system. Any phenomena which take place at smaller time or space scales than the time intervals or cells of our simulation cannot be modelled. Of course one can model such phenomena with a simulation adapted to the given phenomenon. Thus one could not use a simulation designed to model a century of global climate evolution to model the path of a hurricane. Instead, one uses a model adapted to the time and space scale of the hurricane, and corrects the simulation with new information several times a day.

In addition to errors arising from cell size and absence of real world initial data, climate evolution includes too many interactions to include in a realistic deterministic model. For example, the quantity of the main greenhouse gas, water vapor, depends on temperature, pressure, particulate matter, surface water, plant respiration, etc. These do not all admit simple modelling with numerical partial differential equations. Those features which are too complex for current deterministic models are ignored (the most honest path) or added into simulations by ad hoc mechanisms. These latter admit fine tuning to reach any desired conclusion.

Another source of error in simulations is the fact that the earth is not a closed system. Time varying solar radiation is the fundamental driver of our climate, but I am unaware of the existence of climate models that include realistic simulations of the complex dynamics of the sun's nuclear reactions.

Leroux appears to be bothered by the deterministic attitude of the climate modellers, a concern which I do not share. It seems reasonable to me that the extremely complex large scale dynamics of our climate stem result from small scale fundamental physical and chemical processes. Nonetheless, it is clear that since current climate models that are adapted to short time predictions are only crudely accurate for a few days, long term predictions have no value.

The more of Leroux I read, the less reliable he appears. His logic is generally quite poor. He frequently points out some weakness in the arguments of proponents of anthropogenic global warming, and then immediately concludes that CO_2 does not cause global warming, when, in fact, he has only countered an argument in support not actually presented an argument against. He also has a worrisome single factor explanation for most features of our climate. All phenomena of interest can be explained (according to Leroux) by his contribution to climatology: mobile polar highs. I have checked out a few books on atmospheric physics to make myself somewhat better able to analyze his claims. From my currently inexpert position, many of his assertions seem to be the atmospheric equivalent to the assertion that water runs down a mountain into a valley because the mountain is higher than the valley, and not because the valley is lower than the mountain. Such a distinction makes no sense to me; so, I need to learn more. Fortunately climate books are much lighter reading than math books, and hence can be read before bed without stimulating the brain enough to interfere with sleep.

Liberal Outpost

Well, we won nationally but were thumped locally. After the election returns were in, I remembered one of the reasons I had been inactive in local politics in previous years: it is hard to feel like you can make a difference in such an extremely Democratic district. There did not seem to be much return on months of canvassing. We did, however, do better than we have in any year since 1994. It will be interesting to see if the bump outlasts the Obama presidency. If the Democrats stay this far to the left, then perhaps the local GOP can win some elections.

This is the first canvass free/conference free weekend in months. It feels great. I will have my week's lectures written by Sunday evening. I expect a pop in math output too. Clearly politics do not mix brilliantly with research - too distracting.

Amazingly I have heard nothing about the election in the faculty lounge for months. Perhaps my colleagues simply preferred not to think about the approaching wave. Wednesday I heard exactly zero comments about the election at work.

In one last attempt to help the candidates, I volunteered to electioneer for 4 hours on Tuesday, after my various University commitments were fulfilled. I was sent to pass out GOP literature at a polling site uncomfortably close to campus. I saw one overt Republican all evening. I arrived hours before the evening rush, too early for electioneering. I was not joined by other electioneers for over an hour. All the others represented liberal groups. Most were pleasant, and perhaps amused at my quixotic efforts. One lady, however, responded to my pleasantries with the revealing question: ''How can someone be a Republican?" I told her that it was difficult for anyone who understood economics or who objected to the government dictating the minutiae of his life to to be otherwise. She then launched on 'the Party of No' and castigated the GOP for opposing the healthcare bill. The discussion reminded me of grad school days. When I pointed to specific features of the bill I found objectionable (although I am opposed in principle to more or less the whole package) she would more often than not deny the existence of the offending feature. Clearly ignorance and denial are essential features for maintaining the liberal belief system.

Unfortunately, her belief system triumphed over mine in the local elections that night.