It has become a tradition for me to watch the Academy Awards with my mom each year, so I’ve heard my share of acceptance speeches. This year, George Clooney started the night off right with the best one I can recall. A winner in the best supporting actor category for Syriana, Clooney was almost preternaturally calm, with none of the usual Oscar-winner discombobulation. At turns self-deprecating, witty, and humble, Clooney managed to be poignant without gushing, and made a thoughtful political point with subtlety and heart.

Alluding to charges that Hollywood is out of touch with America, Clooney noted that maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The movies have often been on the vanguard of important social movements, and artists—including film producers, directors, and actors—have served as a canary-in-the-mine for threats to freedom of expression. Clooney’s other nominated movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, deals squarely with this last issue, and Clooney mentioned two other examples—breaking the AIDS taboo and recognizing a black actress way back in 1939—where the Academy was ahead of the curve.

Hollywood politics embodies some of the worst traits of limousine liberalism, with blind party loyalty, utterly naïve economics, and at times shocking hypocrisy. (For example, Martin Sheen, a millionaire many times over—and, incidentally, one of my favorite actors—has openly attacked “the rich” with a straight face.) Nevertheless, when it comes to coaxing a sometimes unwilling world into modernity—with its cosmopolitan attitudes, tolerance of differences, and shades-of-gray ambivalence—the film industry does a great service.

Bravo, George, for sounding such an elegant and thoughtful note on a night more often associated with blubbering thank-you lists and smug self-congratulation.

Update: Clooney’s speech is now available online. (I looked for it at the time of the original post, but I couldn’t find it then.) Thanks to Ranjit Mathoda for the link. P.S. Gotta love the Chinese subtitles!

Do you own a home? If you do, you may be surprised to learn that you don’t own all of it.* Outside your home is a box, which you own, but inside the box there is space, which you don’t—that space is owned by the United States Postal Service. Reflect for a moment on how bizarre this is. This strange legal situation is the source of the Postal Service’s monopoly on first-class and standard (third-class) mail. I’m sure that FedEx would love to deliver your letters, but US law forbids it.

*If you don’t own a home, put yourself in the place of your building’s owner.

Fortunately, the simplicity of the USPS’s monopoly suggests a way to break it with the stroke of a pen. All it would take is a tiny change in the law: henceforth, property owners own the space inside their mailboxes. This would free homeowners up to make contracts with Federal Express, UPS, and any of a large number of current and potential competitors to the USPS. It would put people in control of their mail.

What does this matter, when it only costs 37¢ 39¢ to mail a letter? Historically, black-market postal services typically undercut USPS prices by at least a factor of 2–3. According their website, the USPS takes in approximately $70 billion in annual revenue, so opening the postal market to competition could save consumers $35–$45 billion a year—hardly an amount to sneeze at. Not only would it cost you less to mail your Christmas cards, you can bet your Netflix would get cheaper, too.

In addition to these obvious savings, breaking the USPS monopoly would expose a hidden cost to high postage rates, one which makes the $35–$45 billion estimate conservative and even a little misleading: current prices may very well prevent entirely new businesses from forming. A price factor of 2–3 in the other direction—$1.20, say, for a first-class letter—could very well wipe out operations such as Netflix. Who knows what sorts of innovative services might become feasible if you could mail a letter for 13¢?

The announcement last week that Larry Summers, the President of Harvard University, would resign his post took few people completely by surprise. He cited the continuing rift with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, highlighted last year by an unprecedented vote of no confidence in the wake of his remarks on women in science. Those familiar with Harvard politics knew that the controversial speech was largely an excuse for the disgruntled faculty to vent their spleen—their dissatisfaction with his brusque style long predated the row over women in science—but that doesn’t explain the international media brouhaha, with headlines to the effect that “Harvard President Says Women No Good at Science”. Why all the fuss?

Part of the answer is that “equality”—ill-defined, but nevertheless vitally important—is a deeply held article of faith, going far beyond the politically correct academic Left that dominates Harvard’s faculty. With the possible exception of “equality of the races”, no subject stirs quite as much emotion as a challenge to the “equality of the sexes”. Even to raise the issue is oddly taboo, and that’s precisely the maelstrom Larry Summers sailed into. As a long-time supporter of President Summers, my frustration wasn’t that he raised the issue, but that he apologized afterward. He had nothing to apologize for.

That there is a disparity between men and women in the sciences is evident to anyone with any experience in academic science. As a physics concentrator at Harvard College, I became accustomed to classes that were 80–90% male. When I entered graduate school in physics at Caltech, I was one of 31 incoming physics students; 30 were men. (Poor Samantha couldn’t cut class without her absence being duly noted by the professor.) According to the faith that Larry Summers challenged, this disparity is purely the result of socialization (“women can’t be scientists”) and discrimination. This article of faith is wrong.

There are problems in the world. Hard problems. Who should solve them? Government should.

Well, maybe not. Most advocates of government action to fix Problem A with Policy X make three key assumptions:

1. Policy X will fix Problem A.

2. The government, if empowered to do X, will in fact do X, and will keep doing X (only) as long as Problem A remains a problem.

3. The benefit due to fixing Problem A is worth the cost of Policy X.

In my view, many government policies fail #1, and those that don’t almost invariably fail #2. The few policies that seem both well-conceived and well-executed either fail #3 outright or provide insufficient evidence of passing a cost-benefit analysis. The set of policies that unambiguously clear all three hurdles is minuscule.

I’d like to lay a foundation for future posts by stating the animating principle of my political philosophy. I don’t offer it as a normative principle; it is simply an opinion, a general predisposition:

I believe in the full flourishing of humanity.

What exactly I mean by full flourishing will become clearer as this blog fills up with posts.

I agree with self-described (American) liberals that civil liberties, a healthy environment, and economic opportunity contribute to the flourishing of humanity. And while I sympathize with their preferred method for achieving these goals—namely, “Good Government”—for the most part I simply don’t trust government to produce the outcomes liberals hope for. I also don’t support the liberal obsession with “equality”, an ill-defined concept about which many liberals nevertheless care very deeply. Culturally, I am cut from liberal cloth—a Harvard-educated intellectual with an ignorance of guns, an aversion to church, and a penchant for classical music and Cabernet. Unfortunately, I find that there is much truth to the caricature of liberals as generally well-meaning but hopelessly naive at best, and smugly self-righteous at worst.