"Generation That Has Only Known War" (on television)

I think it's a little off to refer to late-gen X & gen Y as a "Generation That Has Only Known War". The U.S. military is smaller and more culturally distinct from the rest of the country than it has been at almost any point in the past century. Most of us have experienced the "war on terror" only through news channels, political rallies, taking our shoes off at the airport, and perhaps a friend or friend of a friend who served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

This is part of what makes the national catharsis at the death of Osama bin Laden a bit more bizarre. If you lived through it on the Eastern seaboard, especially New York or DC, I think I get it. But for the rest of the country I'm not sure it has quite the same resonance.

How Close Are We To "Done?

The United States is withdrawing from Iraq. American operatives killed Osama bin Laden. Something faintly resembling universal health care will arrive in the next five years. Is it me, or is the big picture project of getting United States policy to suck less more complete than incomplete at this point?

Don't get me wrong; we're still doing a lot of awful, stupid things. Guantanamo Bay is still open. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed won't face a proper trial. We still have to take our shoes off at airports and can't put full-size bottles of shampoo in our carry-on equipment. We spend an awful lot of money on defense and homeland security spending that is of dubious value. Medicare part D is probably more expensive than it ought to be. The people who run Congress and the Fed seem more concerned about invisible bond vigilantes than they are about actual 9.5% unemployment. We haven't done bupkis about climate change. But if you look at where the USA was in, say, May of 2003, and compare it to where we are today, you'd have to feel pretty good about all that's been accomplished.

Osama Is Gone, Competence Has Returned

This is a strange emotion to feel at someone's death, but my overriding feeling about killing Osama Bin Laden is satisfaction at the return of operational competence to US foreign policy. I can't feel any sadness for Osama, especially when so many good people throughout the world die needless and tragic deaths, and when he planned and celebrated thousands of these deaths.

I'm really struck by the contrast with the clown show that was Bush administration foreign policy. We failed to get Osama when we had him pinned down at Tora Bora, and then we started a costly and bloody war with an irrelevant country. Years passed. Now, after 28 months of Obama as president, US intelligence sniffs out the cold trail of Osama Bin Laden and a Navy SEAL team kills him with no US casualties. I've created an image to represent one aspect of this situation visually:
If somebody kills thousands of American citizens, a Democratic president will kill him. A Republican president will kill thousands of unrelated people.

A lot of what matters for competent management of foreign policy, especially as far as intelligence issues are concerned, is just setting the right priorities from the top and caring about getting things right. If you let it be known to your intelligence services that you really just want to go to war and you're looking for some kind of justifying evidence, they're going to serve up evidence that supports your case whether it's misleading or false. But if you let them know that you really want accurate information that will help you make the right decision on some important issue, you have a decent chance of getting it.

Of course, what we're all hoping for now is a break with disastrous Bush administration strategies to go along with the increase in competence. Like everybody is saying, this would be a great time to get out of Afghanistan. Bernstein pointed me to this article in Slate, which suggests that Iraq withdrawal is moving forward pretty well, but it needs to be accelerated, and removing the last group of troops may require some pushing. Now and in the long run, I hope having Osama's head on their pike will help Democrats be a bit more assertive about ending pointless military endeavors.

Go Humans! Beat The Worms

I should begin by saying happy birthday to my former student Maia, who's turning 22 and asked her friends to celebrate the occasion by giving money to charitable causes. Happy birthday Maia! I just gave $8000 USD (a bit over $10K SGD under current exchange rates) to Deworm the World, which is tied for being the #1 most efficient charity in the world according to Giving What We Can.

What's so special about Deworm the World? The big thing is that they focus exclusively on treating neglected tropical diseases. These are tropical parasite infections that can be treated if you just give a kid one or two cheap worm pills a year. Not much money is going towards treating these diseases, so there are opportunities for a small amount of money to have a tremendous impact. Deworm the World works primarily in India and Kenya. In India they've managed to get costs really low by just distributing pills through the school system. While their initial goal was to get total costs of giving a kid a pill below 50 cents (and they've achieved it in lots of Africa), India's going at 12 cents each.

In addition to being disgusting, parasitic worms are a major economic problem. If a child has severe worm problems, the worms can basically eat up to 20% of the child's nutritional intake. So you're very cheaply feeding the hungry by doing this, by making sure that they get to actually digest their food. The educational benefits of deworming are pretty awesome too:

treating children for parasitic worm infections (also known as neglected tropical diseases) is the most cost-effective way of improving school attendance rates. Children are so often ill because of their infection with parasitic worms that treating this dramatically improves school attendance. Treatment costs only $0.02 per school day per person, or $3.27 per aggregate school year per person and in addition, it is one of the most cost-effective health interventions.

The people at Giving What We Can have a nifty chart to represent the impact of donating money to deal with neglected tropical diseases and other things. They count the impact of charitable contributions in terms of the Disability-Adjusted Life Years (basically, how many years of someone's life did you save? plus you get fractions of years for making people not go blind or something) per $1000 donated. By their calculations, $1000 donated towards giving people cheap worm-killing pills scores 200-300 DALYs. So I guess for $8000 I saved 2000 of those? Which if you break it down into individual lives to get a better handle on it -- let's assume that the people would've lived 50 more years each -- is basically saving 40 people's lives. I've been staying up late today sending off paper abstracts to four different conferences I want to go to after procrastinating way too much earlier in the weekend, and I'm kind of exhausted right now, so I can't mentally get a good grip on that. But it's kind of incredible.

I've been trying to put pictures of related stuff on the blog lately, but I really don't want to put up horrible parasitic worm pictures, so instead I'll go the opposite route and illustrate this post with sweet Canadian activist girls. Anyway, you can read more about Deworm the World here, and maybe send them money super-conveniently on Paypal if you like.

How We Made $6.3 Billion Off The 50 State Quarters

Your fact of the day, from the "seigniorage" article on Wikipedia:

The "50 State" series of quarters (25-cent coins) was launched in the U.S. in 1999. The U.S. government planned on a large number of people collecting each new quarter as it rolled out of the U.S. Mint, thus taking the pieces out of circulation. Each set of 50 quarters is worth $12.50. Since it costs the Mint about five cents for each 25-cent piece it produces, the government made a profit whenever someone "bought" a coin and chose not to spend it. The U.S. Treasury estimates that it has earned about US$6.3 billion in seigniorage from the quarters over the course of the entire program.