Minerals and the Resource Curse

You may have read the DoD's PR offensive in the New York Times, which didn't contain news of any study fresher than 2007. Beyond what Michael Cohen said, I would add that if there's actual stuff in the ground that's worth money, the world has an obvious choice; we can let Afghanistan turn into a libertarian paradise Wild West of mining operations, a la Angola, the Congo, etc., or we can help push the country in the direction of Botswana and Chile (pictured here). Of course at the moment I'm firmly of the notion that there's more heat than light to this story, but we'll have to see what happens from here.

Update: With all the Nirvana references, I forgot that Evanescence also has a song titled "Lithium":

The Most Important Contest Betwen England and America Since we Opened a Big Can Of Whoopass at Yorktown

Let's do this thing.

World Cup Open Thread

Oh it's on.

My typical MO during the World Cup is to root against Europe. UEFA views the World Cup as a Europe+Brazil+Argentina championship tournament to which they graciously invite a few of the sport's developing nations, though they'd prefer to just have more European sides. But really, what is the reason that third-tier European nations deserve a trip to the finals over second-tier Asian, South American, North American, and African countries? It's like inviting the 9th-best team in the Big East to take a #12 seed in the NCAA tournament.

I also usually root against Argentina, since they like to pretend that they're a European nation that just happens to be located in South America. But I'm a huge fan of Lionel Messi, pictured above. Argentina's struggles in the qualifying round (thanks, Maradona!) and Cristiano Ronaldo's outstanding play during the club season have led to Messi being eclipsed as a football wunderkind, but I suspect he will outperform expectations.

This is a world cup open thread.

The Victory Of Lincoln, Hammer Of The Banks

Somebody at the White House is dissing on union support of Bill Halter in his primary loss to Blanche Lincoln, saying that "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise." I think Brian Montopoli is right that Lincoln's close call still works to labor's advantage, just because it'll put some fear into Democrats in the future. I don't know if that was worth more or less than $10 million, but it's something.

We should also thank the Bill Halter coalition for scaring Lincoln into helping out on derivatives regulation. It's hard for me to see why she would've been so useful without a primary challenge from the left. I don't understand financial regulation well enough to know how much Lincoln's contributions are worth, but my guess is that organized labor just bought America a gift worth more than the price they paid.

A 3000-vote election result is a close one that admits of many explanations, and one of the stories you could tell about it is that Lincoln won the primary by taking on the banks. Derivatives regulation may be a fairly complicated issue, but the financial industry is not well liked among Democratic primary voters these days. It would've been pretty easy for Halter to attack an unhelpful attitude from Lincoln. Lincoln smartly moved left, and best of luck to her in the general election.

Policy Detail In Primaries: It's Good!

Matt on policy detail during campaigns: "I wrote blog posts comparing the details of the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards “plans” on health care and climate change and it turns out this was all totally irrelevant."

I draw exactly the opposite conclusion. The details of these plans ended up being extraordinarily relevant. What we got in the end was the Edwards-Clinton plan, except with regulated competition on the exchanges replacing the public option. When a plan shows up in a primary, gets adopted by a major centrist Senator (Max Baucus in his Jekyll aspect) and ends up one or two centrist-vote-buying compromises away from the eventual thing that passes Congress, it suggests that health care plans introduced in primaries are a big deal.

It's true that Obama won and the policy we got was farthest from his plan. But that's just because the pro-individual-mandate forces won the debate, even as their candidates lost the election for other reasons. One of the beautiful achievements of the interminable 2008 Democratic primary was that Democrats got together and figured out that an individual mandate was good policy. A mandate is exactly the sort of technocratically essential but superficially icky proposal that wonks dream of but nobody will swallow. But we chewed on it for a good long time, and in the end we realized that it was good. So when the legislative process started, the Democratic base was ready to support a plan with a mandate.

It makes me proud to be a Democrat. Where Republicans made ridiculous smears about death panels, we took time to learn about adverse selection death spirals. We talked out the wonky details and formed a consensus behind a strange but good idea. The guy who won had proposed the wrong idea (probably because he was being a bit timid on the issue during the primary), but given that a consensus had developed about the details of the plan, he and influential moderates could embrace the consensus and do the good thing! Well done, people.