Other pre-commitment devices that didn’t work on Congress

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 2 Comments
Should not have eaten all that turtle food.

Should not have eaten all those minnows

It’s semi-official: sequestration has failed. The actual mechanism is going to function just fine; come tomorrow, $85 billion in domestic and military spending cuts that nobody likes will automatically go into place, because Congress could not obey their own pre-commitment device. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Sequestration was supposed to be so awful that it would force Democrats and Republicans to agree on alternative deficit reduction strategies. Instead, after months of arguing and temporizing, our legislators have set themselves to the hard work of accepting that sequestration isn’t so bad after all. Congress is like a man who ties a string around his finger to remember to buy insulin and, after several months, loses circulation and has his finger amputated. Here are some other pre-commitment devices that didn’t work on Congress.

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Precommitment devices, Eva Longoria, Sartre

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

You could have done worse, Tony Parker.

Slate runs three kinds of articles: (1) timely analyses of news items that appeared on Gawker four days ago, (2) Would This Statement Attract More Readers As a Question?, and (3) essays on subjects that the author happens to have just published a book about. For my money, category (3) is the most interesting, since if there’s one thing I like more than reading a book, it’s talking about a book I haven’t read. I was therefore thrilled to encounter Daniel Akst’s report/essay/plug about precommitment devices—not because it’s tremendously insightful or fun, but because it draws attention to two important issues facing society: Jean-Paul Sartre’s construction of vertigo and Eva Longoria.

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