Here's a segment of an important paragraph in today's installment of the New York Times' three-part series on indigent defense. "Low pay discourages experienced appeals lawyers from taking cases, leaving the work to younger, less qualified lawyers, Mr. Carrigan said. 'A lot of newly admitted attorneys who work from their homes, who are raising families, take appeals cases as a convenient second income for the family,' he said. 'It's not a good situation.'"
Talk about your retrograde anti-family attitudes. If a corporate executive spoke like this, the New York Times would be after him for expressing age bias (what's wrong with "younger"?), for expressing sex bias (what's wrong with "raising families"? And whose income counts as the "second"?), and for expressing opposition to enlightened policies like flex-time and tele-commuting (what's wrong with working from home?). But instead of a corporate executive, the speaker in this case is a lawyer who handles criminal appeals cases for indigent defendants. And instead of criticizing him, the Times uses his arguments as the centerpiece of its own argument in its news article. He's the first expert quoted giving context in today's installment of the series.
If the Times wants to make these sort of Neanderthal arguments, it should at least go all the way and provide some details to back them up. But it doesn't. In the example the newspaper gives later in the article of a case that "illustrates the range of hurdles an indigent defendant can encounter under New York City's system for providing appellate lawyers for the poor," the Times never tells readers about the age or family status of the lawyers for the indigent defendant. The Times also never tells readers whether the lawyer's income is the family's "second." That could be because the Times made the intelligent judgment that such information was irrelevant to the core question: the quality of the representation provided by the lawyer. Why not apply the same judgment to judiciously trim the quote from the lawyer tsk-tsk-ing about how "It's not a good situation"? The series is already thousands of words long, so long that it is broken up into three parts, so long that after the first expert lawyer quoted to give context in today's article there are two other experts who also bemoan the quality of indigent defense work at the appellate level. So what would be lost by trimming the first expert's unsupported suggestions about the connections between the age and family status of lawyers and their qualifications?
Supply-Side Silliness: An attempt by the New York Times business section this morning to write about supply-side economics falters when it comes to defining the topic. Here's one example: "At its heart, supply-side economics -- also often known as neo-classical economics -- holds that decisions made by individuals and businesses should not be distorted by regulations and taxes." For one thing, supply-side economics is not "often known as neo-classical economics." They are two different things, and the universe of neo-classical economists is a lot larger than the universe of those who would describe themselves as supply-siders. Martin Feldstein, for example, is a neo-classical economist who sometimes annoys the supply-side purists because he is a bit of a deficit hawk. The Times definition also blurs economics and politics. "Should" is a value judgment, the stuff of politics; what economics can do is help politicians assess the effects that their policies will have on economic growth. Most supply-siders would say that taxes and regulations tend to distort the decisions made by individuals, and that a society with fewer distortions would tend to have greater economic growth. But that's different from saying there should be no distortions at all, ever.