Friday, February 13, 2009

33 Minutes

The Heritage Foundation is producing a documentary promoting missile defense. The trailer can be viewed here. I've been strongly in favor of developing missile defense systems for a long time, and wrote about the issue back in November.
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11 comments:

  1. Alon LevyFebruary 13, 2009 at 2:51 PM

    The Heritage Foundation

    That's the organization that has Charles Murray as an expert on intelligence and the guy who wrote Dow 36,000 as an expert on economics, right?

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  2. UNRRFebruary 13, 2009 at 4:18 PM

    Not really relevant to missile defense.

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  3. Alon LevyFebruary 13, 2009 at 4:47 PM

    No, but relevant to the credibility of the Heritage Foundation. Most insights are common enough that you can find non-shoddy organizations supporting them. (Here shoddy refers not just to the AEI and Heritage Foundation, but also Brookings, CEPR, and other houses of ill repute.)

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  4. UNRRFebruary 13, 2009 at 8:14 PM

    I'm not sure what you have against think-tanks. They have many people associated with them, so good, some not so good. Reflexively dismissing all work of entire organizations because you might disagree with certain research of theirs is pretty unreasonable. That's like saying we can't trust anything coming out of Harvard because they have some crackpot professors.

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  5. PatFebruary 13, 2009 at 10:19 PM

    Missile defense is an important issue and becoming more so as the Obama admin is about to make a big decision regarding a MSD in eastern Europe. Obama has been critical of MSD because of their lack of a successful track record, for good reason, but many programs in the past struggled mightily at first and are know major assets, nuclear weapons anyone? Even more important is the possible backing out of a deal made with the Czech and Polish governments, which would not only hurt our standing in the region, but also hand Moscow a victory that they may want to push further. But it's early and nothing has been decided on yet, just that the 'reset' button may be pushed. I discussed this on my foreign policy blog, www.greatpowerpolitics.com, which this site cited once.
    http://greatpowerpolitics.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=868

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  6. UNRRFebruary 13, 2009 at 11:06 PM

    Pat,

    I have your site blogrolled and I read your posts regularly. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Eastern European missile defense situation. I think that will be a significant indicator of the direction of Obama's foreign policy. Regardless of what happens with those deployments, I hope missile defense as a whole isn't put on the back burner for the next 4-8 years, although I'm afraid it will be.

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  7. Alon LevyFebruary 14, 2009 at 2:29 PM

    I'm not sure what you have against think-tanks.

    The same thing I have against studies funded by tobacco companies saying that cigarette smoking isn't addictive. Research ought to be about expanding knowledge, not about promoting the interests of whoever has the money to pay for it.

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  8. UNRRFebruary 14, 2009 at 2:53 PM

    You can make that same argument about most academic studies. They don't fund themselves. Research stands on its own merits. Funding sources, backing, political orientation, and other potential bias factors should obviously be kept in mind, but they don't invalidate research. Nothing is truly objective.

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  9. Alon LevyFebruary 14, 2009 at 4:48 PM

    But some things are objective. We know evolution is true, for instance. We'll still know it even if Ken Ham manages to find the money to fund creationist studies, because these studies will only be reviewed by other creationists. I contend that the only difference between AEI and Brookings and Ken Ham is that AEI and Brookings have had more money to advance their ridiculous ideas.

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  10. UNRRFebruary 14, 2009 at 10:57 PM

    AEI and Brookings aren't one-issue organizations, so I'm not sure how that analogy makes sense. Many of their issues have what I consider to be obvious merit, even if I might disagree with their arguments. Ken Ham is a crackpot with a single issue based on a religious denial of science.

    I just went to the front page of Brookings. One of their lead stories is "Delivering Metropolitan Stimulus." It's a legit issue and they are giving their perspective. How does that in any way compare to Ken Ham talking about dinosaurs and humans roaming the earth together?

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  11. Alon LevyFebruary 16, 2009 at 2:37 AM

    It's a legit issue, on which Brookings' views consist of unreflective boosterism and misleading statistics. For example, they have a ranking of US metro area by per capita CO2 emissions; they only count residential and highway emissions, which consist of about 20% of the national average. Their writings about cities are heavy on things like "Cities generate X% of our GDP" and light on problems facing major US cities. If I want that kind of boosterism, I can read Thomas Friedman; there's no need for expensive studies about it.

    And Nicholas Kristof just linked to a major Brookings paper about teacher quality that completely ignores experience. This isn't a small thing; one of the main criticisms of the test-and-fire approach the paper proposes is that teachers get better over time. Almost as badly, the paper draws broad conclusions about K-12 education from one study involving grades 3-5.

    If the question is whether an issue is legit, then you should replace Ken Ham in my analogy with Charles Murray. Murray's issue, the innateness of intelligence, is legitimate, and often supported by real research. It's just that real research doesn't support his racist conclusions. Just like Brookings has turned serious discussion of urbanism into boosterism, AEI and Heritage have turned serious discussion of IQ into racist screeds.

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