Education, Inequality, and Race

American blacks are much better educated than they were a generation ago:

In 1968, just 54 percent of young black adults had a high school diploma. Today, 92 percent do. In 1968, about 9 percent of young African-American adults had completed college. Today, roughly 23 percent have.

However, their incomes have not gone up by as much as this might predict: 

The median income for a white head of household with a college degree is $106,600. The median income for a comparable black college graduate is only $82,300.

As David Brooks says,

It turns out that increasing educational opportunities does not by itself reduce income disparities. 

I think this is one of the most important discoveries of the past 30 years: that investing in education has little effect on inequality, and that while educated people still make more money than others, we have entered the realm of diminishing returns in terms of education's economic payoff. There are only so many good slots in the system, and creating more college graduates than there are good slots just leads to credentials creep and falling wages.

I think this is highly relevant to the current political climate. If the stagnating incomes of working class people are driving protests worldwide, as I think they are, then it could be that the failure of African American incomes to rise might be one of the reasons for the restlessness and anger we are seeing all around us. The system tells you that all you have to do is get education or training and get a job and work hard and you will be ok – which to us means security and a middle class lifestyle – and many people clearly feel that they have been lied to, that billionaires keep rising while they keep being kicked down. I do think police violence is a big problem in America, but I also think that rising incomes and a sense of a shared national fate are great tonics for reducing violence of all sorts.

In this sense I absolutely agree with angry people on the left that the system isn't working as it should.

But while I think are some things we could do to make life better for working people, black and white (remember that American police shoot more white people than black people, almost all of them from the working class), I do not think we have even a faint notion of what sort of system would solve these problems and get us back on the path to a middle class life for everyone rather than Gilded Age extremes.

If you listen to what people are saying in Seattle's "autonomous zone" about how they are going to live without capitalism, it's laughable.

I think some cities ought to abolish the police forces they have and start over, as Camden did, but I think it's just silly to believe that a modern society can survive without a police force.

The system we have is violent, heartless and unfair, but the ideas for radical change I have seen are pathetic. I just don't see any viable path but to keep struggling along within the system we have to make life better one small measure at a time.

Time, Capitalism, and Philosophy

In America the great battle cry of the anti-capitalists is, "I want my time back." Whenever some young person says, "capitalism sucks," the underlying meaning seems to be a struggle over time: capitalism sucks because it requires people to work long hours to have any kind of decent life. A desire to control our time is at the root of the push for Universal Basic Income, summed up by a squatter I once met as, "Rent is just stealing. You shouldn't have to pay to live." If people had their basic needs met, most would probably choose to work for something better, but that would be their choice; nobody would have to work.

This desire to break the hold of work over our time goes back at least to Karl Marx, who thought the future workers' paradise would feature more leisure and much less work. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes wrote a famous article arguing that by 2020 we should only have to work about 15 hours a week to maintain a middle class standard of living. In 2013 I wrote here about a book by two contemporary economists called How Much is Enough?, arguing that if we could just get off the treadmill of wanting ever more we could focus more on the things that actually make for a good life.

Last year Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale and was vaguely connected to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, wrote a book called This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom that makes the struggle over our time the central concern of philosophy. Hägglund shares the belief of all the young anarchists that capitalism is bad because it forces us to spend our time on things we hate, which spiritually destroys us.

Hägglund starts from the question of what it means to value something:

Whether I hold something to be of small, great, or inestimable value, I must be committed to caring for it in some form. . . . is a question of devoting my own lifetime to what I value. To value something, I have to be prepared to give it at least a fraction of my time.… Finite lifetime is the originary measure of value. The more I value something, the more of my lifetime I am willing to spend on it.

Hägglund extends this argument into both religion and politics. Hägglund is an atheist who accepts the old existentialist argument that belief in god strips our lives of meaning. If we are really going to live forever, then it doesn't matter what we spend our time on, and therefore it is impossible for us to really value anything. It is the finitude of our lives that gives our choices meaning. Therefore, positing anything eternal – god, heaven, life – demeans us rather than exalting us.

What I do with my time can matter to me only because I grasp my life as finite. If I believed that I had an infinite time to live, the urgency of doing anything would be unintelligible and no normative obligation could have any grip on me.

The part of Hägglund's work that has gotten the most attention is his advocacy of socialism over capitalism. To him, having to work at things we do not value is death to our souls, and the very opposite of freedom. Jedediah Purdy summarizes:

To take free choice seriously, he argues, we need a conception of freedom that is not tied to selling our time and talents at the market rate just to go on living. We are in “the realm of freedom,” writes Hägglund, when we can act in keeping with our values. By contrast, we are in the “realm of necessity” when we adopt an alien set of priorities just to get by. A great many of the choices most people face under capitalism fall within the realm of necessity. How do you make a living in an economy that rewards predatory lending over teaching and nursing? Or how do you present yourself in a workplace that rewards competition and often embarrassing self-promotion?

Economic thought treats these choices as if they were just as “free” as Bill Gates’s next decision to channel his philanthropic spending to this group or that. Hägglund sees it differently: Our economy keeps its participants locked in the realm of necessity for much of their lives, draining away their time in unfree activity. In the realm of necessity there is very little opportunity to spend our lives on the things we care for, to devote ourselves to what we think most worthwhile. Economic life may be a tapestry of choices, but as long as it directs its participants toward goals they do not believe truly worthwhile, a life of such choice is a grotesque of freedom.

The market presses some people closer to the bone than others, but it drives everyone, because it is a system for determining the price of things, among them time itself, and substituting that price for any competing valuation. You cannot exempt yourself.

There is certainly a sense in which this is true; if there are things you have to do, you are not really free.

But how, exactly, is that the fault of capitalism? Even the hunter-gatherers we like to imagine living in a lazy utopia had to work. Lions have to hunt; chimpanzees have to search for fruit and fish for termites. I simply do not understand these socialists who think that under a change of regime we could avoid doing things we don't want to do. Does anybody like cleaning bathrooms or repairing tar roofs? Hägglund recognizes that this is a problem, but he waves it away in the maddening style of all anarchists. Under democratic socialism, he insists, we will deliberate about all these things democratically and learn to value each other's needs and end up wanting to do things like rebuild sewers and change bedpans. Even Purdy, who is something of a left-wing utopian himself, finds this dubious:

There is always some work that not all that many people really want to do, unwelcome but socially necessary labor. There is no way around emptying bedpans, caring for the severely demented, sorting recycled goods, providing day care for other people’s children, picking lettuce, cleaning up after concerts, and so forth. Hägglund writes that under democratic socialism “we will be intrinsically motivated to participate in social labor when we can recognize that the social production is for the sake of the common good and our own freedom to lead a life,” making such labor “inherently free.”

Readers who have these doubts, Hägglund writes, “should consider their lack of faith in our spiritual freedom.”

Well, I have considered it, and I find that my lack of faith in our spiritual freedom is entirely justified. It could well be that under a different system we might enjoy our jobs a little more, or dislike them a little less, but I think a world where people freely do all the work that an advanced civilization requires is a straight-up fantasy.

There is an alternative to our way of living, but I think it necessarily involves being materially poorer than we are. If we did not apply pressure to people to work harder, and relied on everyone's spiritual freedom, we would do less materially productive work and end up with less stuff. I think this is so obvious that I cannot fathom how so many anarchists dispute it. We could have a world with more free time and less pressure to to economically productive work, but that world would have to be less posh than this one.

And to me, this world where we have more freedom but less stuff is within our grasp. We could have it if we wanted to; in fact, plenty of people do have it. All over the world millions of people work less than they could and live materially poorer lives because of that choice. I know people who have opted out of the system, live in poor communities where housing is cheap, do just enough work to get by, and devote themselves to what they really enjoy. This is entirely possible for most Americans and Europeans without any change in the system at all.

The fact that most people do not choose to do this, but choose instead to chase more money or more prestige by investing tons of effort in their careers says to me that Marx and Hägglund and all the rest of them are simply wrong about human nature.

Capitalism is not forcing anybody to do anything. It is the basic rules of mammalian life that force us to labor for our livings, and our own ambition that drives to work harder than we have to for nicer stuff and a higher slot on the totem pole.

So to all the young people out there who want their time back I say this: make it happen. Move somewhere cheap, learn a skill that allows you to earn a sustenance in 20 hours a week, and live your dream. Nobody is stopping you, certainly not "capitalism." As for assertions that we could have a world that is as materially splendid as this one without surrendering our time to the capitalist monster, a world in which we could all be both rich and free, I say, baloney.

The Uprising Isn't On

Over the weekend my sons showed me video after video taken by young men running through fire-lit streets, yelling, "The Uprising is here! It's real!" It was like a post-apocalypse live-action roleplay, pumped-up kids larping their way to revolution.

Thus do the forces of change undercut themselves again.

It's isn't real; there will be no Uprising; in days or weeks it will all calm back down again and we will be stuck with the same problems and the same sordid politics we had last month and last year and last decade. And in the ordinary course of American politics, one thing you can count on is that voters hate riots.

It was riots, as much as anything else, that brought an end to the great wave of Civil Rights progress in the early 1960s:

The battle over civil rights did accelerate the regional realignment of the parties; racial backlash did help the G.O.P. make gains in the once-Democratic South. But what ultimately doomed the old liberal majority wasn’t just support for civil rights; that was on the ballot in 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the heart of the old Confederacy but Lyndon Johnson won everywhere else. Rather, liberalism unraveled amid the subsequent nationwide wave of crime, unrest and disorder, which liberal mandarins and liberal machine politicians alike were unable to successfully manage or contain.

The riots of the ’60s, from Watts to Washington, D.C., were only part of this story; the wider surge of murder, battery and theft probably mattered as much to realignment. But there is a striking pattern of evidence, teased out in the research of the Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, showing how peaceful civil rights protests helped Democrats win white votes, and then violence pushed white voters toward Republicans.

Looking at data from the civil rights era, Wasow argues that “proximity to black-led nonviolent protests increased white Democratic vote-share whereas proximity to black-led violent protests caused substantively important declines” — enough to tip the 1968 election from Hubert Humphrey to Nixon. More broadly, in news coverage and public opinion from those years, nonviolent protests (especially in the face of segregationist violence) increased support for civil rights, while violent protests tipped public opinion away from the protesters, and toward a stronger desire for what Nixon called law and order, and Wasow calls “social control.”

If you're a conspiracy theorist you probably think that this is all plotted by the Illuminati. The powers that be get worried about progress for poor folks or black folks and send some agents provocateurs out dressed as cops to beat up or shoot unarmed people until a protest starts, then get the police to harass the protesters and block their marches until what started peacefully descends into violence. Then, presto, they can then pose as defenders of order and civilization. Hell, there might even be something to this. From what I've seen it really looks like some cops are trying to provoke a battle.

The thing is, it works, reliably. Trump's approval rating is up three points in a week. If he were as clever and ruthless as Nixon, he could ride this all the way to re-election.

Every brick thrown at police and every fire set is a vote to keep conservatives in power forever.

It isn't that I don't understand why people riot; I understand it perfectly. But it is still a disaster for the cause of a liberal world. It doesn't matter what the police did; peaceful protesters should still not fight back. Nothing helped the passage of the Civil Rights Act more than television footage of southern cops brutally attacking people who refused to offer them violence in return. King was right. Gandhi was right. Violence is the tool of oppressors, and more violence always begets more oppression.

At the hard edge they want to "heighten the contradictions." The communists and the fascists love riots. They want everyone to believe that ordinary democratic politics can never make things better, that violence is the only real choice.

But in America there is another choice: the slow boring of the hard boards of democracy.

A Major Reboot for the National Science Foundation?

Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer has re-introduced a bill that has been kicking around Congress in various versions for years, called this time the Endless Frontiers Act.  The basic idea is to dramatically expand the NSF but to refocus its efforts on potentially commercial technology. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) would get a sweeping remake—including a new name, a huge infusion of cash, and responsibility for maintaining U.S. global leadership in innovation—under bipartisan bills that have just been introduced in both houses of Congress. 

 

Many scientific leaders are thrilled that the bills call for giving NSF an additional $100 billion over 5 years to carry out its new duties. But some worry the legislation, if enacted, could compromise NSF’s historical mission to explore the frontiers of knowledge without regard to possible commercial applications. 

 

The Endless Frontiers Act (S. 3832) proposes a major reorganization of NSF, creating a technology directorate that, within 4 years, would grow to more than four times the size of the entire agency’s existing $8 billion budget. NSF would be renamed the National Science and Technology Foundation, and both the science and technology arms would be led by a deputy reporting to the NSF director. 

Since this is the American Congress, you knew there had to be elements of the plan aimed at spreading the wealth around the country:

The bill calls for directing the biggest slice of the additional $100 billion that NSF would get to an unspecified number of university-based technology centers pursuing fundamental research in 10 key areas. The centers would work to develop prototypes of high-tech products and processes that companies could eventually bring to market. 

The legislation also specifies additional investments in education and training activities, facilities to test out all manner of new technologies, and boosting the budgets of other NSF directorates carrying out basic research that would enhance development of those technologies, including a better understanding of their social and ethical implications. Another section of the bill would authorize the Department of Commerce to spend $10 billion on 10 to 15 regional technology hubs. Those hubs are designed to foster innovation in areas outside the country’s current tech hot spots.

One aim of the plan is to make the NSF more like DARPA, the Defense Department agency that has gotten much praise over the years for turning wild ideas into functioning technology. 

Passage of the legislation could significantly alter how NSF operates. In particular, agency officials would have the authority to adopt some of the management practices used by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) within the Department of Defense, known for its agility and focus on tangible, deadline-driven results. “The new [technology] directorate can run like DARPA if NSF wants it to,” says one university lobbyist familiar with Schumer’s thinking.

The politicians who have signed onto this plan talk about China all the time – the challenge of China, the Chinese threat, etc. – so this seems like a return to Cold War thinking about science. But, hey, that got us to the moon. At least a few Republicans are on board, so maybe this new Cold War will get some bipartisan action out of Congress like the old one did.

It also strikes me that this is a product of our collective decision to not care at all about budget deficits any more. I guess some people in Congress have thought, well, as long as we are going to throw billions around like there is no tomorrow, we might as well throw some of it at the technological future.

The Minecraft Uncensored Library

The Uncensored Library is a Minecraft creation that holds thousands of banned books and articles, accessible from anywhere you can play Minecraft. Which includes, for now, most of the world's oppressive countries. What a delightful idea.

The Coronavirus Partisan Divide

Thomas Edsall has a roundup of thoughts about the politics of Covid-19 in the Times. This is from sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox:

Progressives have grown more likely to embrace a culture of “safetyism” in recent years. This safetyism seeks to protect them and those who are deemed the most vulnerable members of our society from threats to their emotional and physical well-being. . . . progressives are willing to embrace the maximal measures to protect themselves, the public, and the most vulnerable among us from this threat. . . . [In contrast} many conservatives are most concerned about protecting the American way of life, a way of life they see as integrally bound up with liberty and the free market.

Edsall:

Because many on the political right see the lockdowns as impinging “on their liberty, the free market’s workings, and their financial well-being,” he continued, “many conservatives want the lockdowns ended as quickly as possible.”

In addition, Wilcox noted, “some (especially male) conservatives see the lockdowns and mask wearing as expressions of cowardice that they reject as unmanly.” . . .

Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote me that "there is good evidence of sex differences in responses to the coronavirus; women are more likely to report favoring and practicing social distance measures than are men."

This, in turn, fits with “the general sense that liberals are the more ‘feminine’ of the two parties,” Ditto argues, which results in the following pattern: "While liberals adopt their nurturant role, bemoaning the climbing infection and death rates and are willing to accept economic carnage in favor of minimizing the loss of human life, conservatives are more likely to, in effect, tell the American people to “walk it off,” increasingly staking out the position that some loss of life must be endured for the greater economic good."

I think much of the tone of 21st-century politics, if not necessarily the content, can be explained by this dichotomy between a masculine/tough/aggressive conservatism and a feminine/care-taking/safety-first liberalism. Many American conservatives love Trump, not because of his policies (which are all over the place) but because he embodies a tough, aggressive, masculine approach to life and politics, with clear winners and no coddling of whiners.

Add in the demographic facts that liberals are more likely to live in crowded cities and use public transit, and conservatives are more likely to live in less crowded areas and drive, and you can see why this was inevitably going to become a partisan issue once the first jolt of fear over the soaring exponential curve of infections was past.

George Packer on the State of America

He thinks it is bad, of course; his whole career has been built on investigating our troubles and decrying their effects. But is he onto something important?

Covid-19 is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist. . . .

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

Tyler Cowen Interviews John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a linguist and African American who briefly became a famous culture warrior for attacking the whole notion of Ebonics. When he sat down to be interviewed by Tyler Cowen, he obviously expected to be asked about his views on race politics, because that's all interviewers ever ask him about. But Tyler Cowen is a different sort of interviewer, interested in a world of things outside politics. The interview starts like this:

TYLER COWEN: Let’s start with linguistics. I’ve read that the Estonian language has 14 case endings, eight dialects, 117 subdialects, and the core population of speakers is only a bit over a million. Now, why is Estonian so complicated?

JOHN MCWHORTER: What a wonderful opening question.

[laughter]

MCWHORTER: It’s 16 cases actually, and the reason is that Estonia is like the size of New Jersey. It might be the size of Trenton. So, it’s a very small group of people, and very few people have ever had any reason — I can’t believe this is the first question — to learn Estonian as a second language. If you try, you fail.

As a result, it gets more and more complicated, more and more ingrown. Whereas, Finnish, which is a sister language to Estonian, is actually kind of easy. It’s easy Estonian. So Estonian is a small language that’s almost never learned by adults and therefore almost never screwed up. That is why it is so complicated.

They go on to discuss language in a wonderful way for twenty minutes or so, then move on to music, and only get to politics toward the end, and that part is also a lot more interesting than most American conversations about race politics. Highly recommended.

One more  bit:

COWEN: What is interesting about the language Saramaccan?

MCWHORTER: [laughs] This is delightful.

[laughter]

MCWHORTER: The sorts of things I’m usually asked — this is great. Saramaccan — okay, here’s what happens. Let’s say that you’re in South America. You’re up on the northern edge, and it’s 1660 something, and it is an English plantation colony. You bring in Africans to work there. They speak two languages. For whatever it’s worth, they’re called Fongbe and Kikongo. Some others, but they don’t really play much of a part. So you have slaves speaking those.

The English leave the place, and the Dutch come in. There’s a trade, and so New Amsterdam becomes New York. Suriname goes from the English to the Dutch. We here don’t care about the Suriname part, but that was the trade. Now the Dutch are running it. You’ve got English and Dutch. Then some Portuguese-Jewish slave owners come in from Brazil. That’s this whole other story of wandering Jews. They probably bring slaves with them.

So 350 years later, what is spoken by the slaves there who were lucky enough to escape into the rainforest and were never caught? That is what Saramaccan is. So they have their own language, and it’s been studied by many people, I am one of a great many. But it’s fascinating because it’s a mixture of all these languages. Then it’s got other stuff that it does all by itself and it’s tonal, so it’s absolutely fascinating.

A Note for People who Think Trump Wants to be Dictator

The Times headline at 6:00 PM:

Trump Tells Governors to ‘Call Your Own Shots’ on When to Reopen

President Backs Down From Confrontation

Presented with a genuine crisis and with it a perfect opportunity to seize power, Trump punts. He wants to avoid responsibility, not rule.

What Flattened the Curve?

Well, social distancing did. But why did people comply with social distancing orders? Jonah Goldberg comments on the debate raging on the right over whether the initial estimates of many million deaths were deliberate lies:

It’s almost surely the case that the models were wrong to one degree or another for the simple reason that any model is only as good as the data fed into it. With imperfect information — partly thanks to the outrageous dishonesty of the Chinese government and the grave missteps of the World Health Organization — it was inevitable that the models would never be more than best guesses. We’re far from out of the woods, but the fact that “only” some 60,000 Americans may die instead of 240,000 seems like something to celebrate, not an excuse to scapegoat officials who scrambled to save lives.

Still, there’s an interesting assumption common to both sides of the debate: that the government is responsible for all of this. Both defenders and the critics start from the premise that government diktats are the only variable here. . . .

Information doesn’t just come from governments. The death tolls in Italy and New York probably did more to change behavior on the ground than all of Trump’s press conferences or Dr. Anthony Fauci’s TV appearances.

And this raises another complication for those who think the government can just “re-open” the economy with the flick of a switch. Trump and all of the governors could lift the stay-at-home orders and federal advisories tomorrow. That wouldn’t necessarily fill the restaurants, airplanes, or stadiums. People would still need to be convinced it’s safe. Such persuasion comes via clear, believable information, not orders from on high.

And that’s how it should be in a free society.

I don't entirely agree; there are people who listen to Trump, or to the doctors they put on CNN.  But the news filtering out about star athletes still holding parties and so on shows that if people wanted the flout stay at home orders, they could. If they are not, it's because they have been persuaded that this is a good idea.

What People Want

A worldwide comparative study finds that government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality, and absence of corruption are correlated with happiness, but democracy is not.

I used to think people loved democracy. Now I think that is a minority sentiment, and what most people want is 1) good government, 2) to feel free, and 3) to feel like someone with power cares about them. When people feel harassed or let down by democracy, or feel that they are ruled by people who despise them, they are perfectly willing to try something else.

Of course the advantage of democracy is that if we dislike the people in power we can vote them out, but if people feel that not just the people in power but the whole system is bad, they will support an authoritarian alternative. They may find out soon enough that the authoritarians are no better, leading to an alternation of democracy with dictatorship like we have seen in Latin America for generations.

Incidentally this is why I think it is important for each major political faction to hold power every once in a while, so the voters who support that view don't turn against the whole democratic project.

Crisis Socialism

From the Trump Administration, a really great idea:

The Trump administration will use a federal stimulus package to pay hospitals that treat uninsured people with the new coronavirus as long as they agree not to bill the patients or issue unexpected charges.

….A 1918-like pandemic would cause U.S. hospitals to absorb a net loss of $3.9 billion, or an average $784,592 per hospital, according to a 2007 report in the Journal of Health Care Finance that called on policy makers to consider contingencies to ensure hospitals don’t become insolvent as a result of a severe pandemic.

Here we have, in a crisis, the germ of a national health care system: the government paying hospitals a fixed price for services and requiring them to jettison all the tricks they use to raise revenue. This is absolutely essential for any national health care scheme; lots of countries have private insurance, but almost all have prices fixed by the government. And usually those prices are not detailed at the level of so much for a test or an aspirin but a simple flat fee for treatment of a disease, or for days in a hospital. Another key thing in getting people to support such schemes is that they are easy for the patient, just like this will be.

All it took to get the US there was a pandemic that may kill a million people.

What is the Scandinavian Model?

Tom Friedman takes Bernie Sanders to task for something I have written about: he claims to admire the Scandinavian countries but doesn't understand how they really work:

Senator Sanders, do you believe the free enterprise system is the best means for growing jobs, the economy and opportunity — or do you believe in more socialist central planning? I ask because I have often heard you praise Scandinavian countries, like Denmark, as exemplars of democratic socialism. Have you ever been to Denmark? It’s democratic but not socialist.

Denmark is actually a hypercompetitive, wide-open, market economy devoted to free trade and expanding globalization, since trade — exports and imports — makes up roughly half of Denmark’s G.D.P.

Indeed, Denmark’s 5.8 million people have produced some of the most globally competitive multinationals in the world, by the names of A.P. Moller-Maersk, Danske Bank, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg Group, Vestas, Coloplast, the Lego Group and Novozymes. These are the very giant multinationals Sanders constantly rails against.

As the former Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen once remarked in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to those who might not fully grasp the Danish model: “I would like to make one thing clear, Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state, which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”

Actually Bernie Sanders is very smart and he may understand this perfectly well. He seems to believe, though, that the existing American system can never be made to produce those goods because of the conservative forces that oppose them. He thinks we have to smash those forces, and the way to do so is by mobilizing voters, especially young votes, with talk of revolution.

But "revolution," as I said here before and Friedman also emphasizes, is antithetical to the Nordic way:

The less obvious, but more important, feature of Denmark’s success is the high-trust social compact among its business community, labor unions, social entrepreneurs and government.

The Nordic model involves getting everybody together in a room to talk things out rationally, and mainstream politicians there shun the sort of rhetoric that would make those agreements difficult. America is of course very different politically, and maybe Sanders thinks that since the American right refuses to be rational and polite, he'll be damned if he will. About that, maybe he is right. But if you ask me the underlying reason that Americans won't agree to the sort of high-tax, high safety, lots of free services model they have in Denmark is that we hate each other too much. Whatever else Sanders is doing, he is not helping overcome that problem.

If only some candidate would do it my way!

What surprised pundits most about Biden's Super Tuesday surge was that he won 60 percent of new voters. Ezra Klein explains:

Lurking beneath the theory that high turnout would disadvantage Joe Biden is what we might call the “disappointed nonvoter thesis.” Scratch a political devotee and you’ll almost always find the same theory of turnout underpinning their plans: If only a candidate would say what I already think but louder. This reflects the disappointment that the very engaged have with their leaders: Practicing politicians have to appeal to mixed constituencies to win reelection or pass anything in Congress, and so they compromise their beliefs, sand down their edges, trim their ambitions.

The politically engaged perennially argue that the way to mobilize the nonvoters is to offer a clearer choice, rather than a muddled echo. Under this theory, Bernie Sanders is the clear turnout candidate, as his sharper and more ambitious agenda can mobilize nonvoters who don’t think either party speaks for them. Conversely, Biden is the business-as-usual choice.

In general, this strategy disappoints. The most famous “choice, not an echo” candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost in a landslide. And he’s the rule, not the exception. Political scientists have long found that more ideologically extreme candidates face an electoral penalty.

I got really sick of this in 2009-2010 when all the left-wing pundits were arguing that if Obama just jettisoned the moderates and came out "boldly" for a bigger stimulus and a more radical health care plan the power to do these things would somehow have materialized. But magic doesn't work, and it still takes 51 senators to pass a bill.

And nonvoters, study after study shows, are less radical than political obsessives, not more so.

One of the most important lessons of politics is that other people do not secretly agree with you.

Bernie Sanders and the Establishment

There's this thing about Bernie Sanders and his supporters that I find very strange. They set themselves up as rebels against the establishment, which they call a cabal or worse and promise to "destroy," and then get indignant when the establishment fights back. They are, for example, constantly complaining that the media ignores Bernie and finds ways to downplay his successes. One of my sons told me about the color-coding switch above. That and the post below come from r/bernieblindness," documenting the intentional media blackout of Bernie Sanders and his campaign." A typical post:

During the time biden was far ahead in the delegate count before california, when googling primary results, you got a bar graph of the delegates. as soon as cali came in, they changed to a list without a graphic. Posted byu/sarcasticallyabusive

There are lot of amusing miscues on the site, but the people who count mentions on the tv news and column-inches in newspapers say it isn't true, and Sanders' media coverage has roughly matched his poll numbers. It certainly seems to me that Sanders got a lot of coverage between Iowa and Super Tuesday when he was in the lead. And even if Bernie's complaints were true, why would you think the "corporate media" would cover you fairly after you spent all day savaging them?

Today we have been treated to a lot of this:

If Biden wins the nomination, it will be a real lesson in how power works. Bernie was on track to win, Biden had no campaign, and they all knew it. So a few phone calls were made behind the scenes to Amy, Pete, Beto. Several million was put into a pro-Warren Super PAC. Voila!

Um, no, it isn't that easy. But, you know, there are reasons why so many Democratic Party leaders have endorsed Biden: first, they like him. Second, Biden has been playing the party insider game for forty years: attending other candidates' fund raisers, sharing his donor lists, endorsing their campaigns, helping them get riders added to bills, etc. So when he called on them for favors, they said yes. Is this puzzling? As Ezra Klein pointed out, persuading people like Amy Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg to support you is exactly what a Democratic president has to do to get anything done, and Sanders has so far been completely unable to do it:

Sanders’s supporters have been furious, for weeks, that Warren hasn’t dropped out and endorsed Sanders. What they haven’t done is ask why Sanders hasn’t been able to convince her — or any of the major Democrats who have already dropped out — to endorse him. Whatever case Biden is making or deals he’s offering, Sanders isn’t matching him. Or perhaps the well has been poisoned by Sanders supporters filling Twitter with tweets calling Warren a snake and the Democratic establishment a cabal.

Ok, so you want a revolution. For that, you need an outsider candidate like Sanders. I understand that. But if you're going to attempt a revolution, shouldn't you assume that the people in power are going to oppose you? Did you think the establishment was going to meekly roll over and let you win?

If you want a revolution, you should stop complaining that the establishment treats you unfairly and beat them. If you can't, if you're stuck fighting to make the world better one election and one spending bill at a time, don't despair. Change comes with maddening slowness, but if we fight for it it will come.

If Ex-Felons Got the Ballot, How Would They Vote?

Enfranchising felons who have served their sentences is a highly partisan issue in America, because people assume that they would vote Democratic. The head of Alabama's Republican party once said, "As frank as I can be, we’re opposed to [restoring voting rights] because felons don’t tend to vote Republican."

But is that true?

According to Traci Burch, it is not. She minutely studied the 2000 Bush-Gore election in Florida and concluded that Bush would have won the felon's vote.

Remember, first of all, that a majority of American felons are white, and most of them are male. White men tend to vote Republican.

Remember also that in some places felons can vote after a period of time, and that in others certain felons (thieves, minor drug dealers) can vote very quickly. So they can be studied. The data show that, first of all, felons are not great voters; roughly 10% turn out in Presidential election years, even in states that make an effort to tell them they are eligible. Not very invested in the system, I guess. But to the extent that they do vote, they are not noticeably different from other men of their race, class, and age.

So this whole partisan wrangle about felons' voting rights is based on a mistake.

Personally I support voting rights for everyone, whether they vote for my side or not, because I just like for people to vote. But I confess I was surprised by this finding, and that always makes me wonder what other things I am getting wrong.

RIP Jack Welch

The Supreme Being decided today that former General Electric CEO Jack Welch had fallen into the bottom 10% of humanity by performance and terminated his life. Commentators said this was only fitting, since it was how Welch always treated his own employees:

Known for his focus on efficiency and streamlining management, he would regularly cull the lowest-performing 10% of staff each year. "The underperformers generally had to go," he wrote in one of his books.

To me Jack Welch and his General Electric always epitomized everything that was wrong with American business in the 1980s and 1990s. He had a maniacal focus on the bottom line that made stockholders rich while discarding employees like empty soda cans. Here are two evaluations:

Under him, GE’s market value grew from $12 billion to $410 billion, making Welch one of the most iconic corporate leaders of his era. . . .

The U.S. industrial belt is dotted with communities devastated by the downsizing of GE, which began under Welch and has continued in the years after. At its peak, for instance, GE employed 30,000 at a sprawling integrated industrial plant in Schenectady, New York, that now employs fewer than 3,000.

One of Welch's bizarre pronouncements was that every GE division had to be among the top two in the world for its sector; otherwise it would be closed or sold. This led to the company shedding profitable divisions because they didn't conform to his rigid mandate, a perfect case of arbitrary corporate policy harming actual human lives.

Not that Jack Welch ever showed any concern for actual human lives.

The most spectacular thing Welch did was to make GE a finance company, expanding its GE Capital arm until it became nearly half the company. Financially that made sense at the time, because in the 1980s and 1990s finance was where the money was. GE's manufacturing arms were being battered by Japanese and then Korean competition, but on Wall Street it was raking in the cash.

Not that it lasted; GE Capital crashed badly in 2008, requiring a Federal bailout and dragging the company down with it. The value of the corporation fell from $410 billion to $75 billion, and it is now valued at about $105 billion.

Jack Welch's GE is a perfect case study of what went wrong with America in the neoliberal era, and of why so many people on both the right and the left are angry about our direction.

Farewell Mayor Pete

Pete Buttigieg withdrew from the presidential race yesterday. I did not support him because he seemed to me like a bit of an ambitious empty suit, but I will remember him for moments of decency like this:

Buttigieg was the first major openly gay presidential candidate, and the wonder of that was how little it was talked about as his bid progressed. Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January, was more deviation than norm when he subsequently derided the possibility that Buttigieg, as the Democratic nominee, would be “kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump.”

And Buttigieg was in perfect form when asked during a CNN town hall to respond to that. “The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values, I mean, sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse,” he said. “They want to debate family values, let’s debate family values. I’m ready.”

Autistic Dissidents

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Masha Gessen:

COWEN: Why is it that so many dissidents came from the Soviet worlds of math and physics? There seems to be a correlation. What’s causing what?

GESSEN: I don’t know the answer. I can tell you my personal hypothesis. My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink. When we talk about this inclination now, I think we talk about people being spectrum-y or being neurologically different and, therefore, having difficulty with the illogical, irrational ways of life.

But I think we can retroactively diagnose a lot of dissonance with that because, basically, what we’re talking about is, there is the conditions of not just survival but of being reasonably comfortable while living in the Soviet Union were the conditions of doublethink. You had to be able to live inside untenable contradictions all the time. The opposite option was to confront those contradictions, but to basically be thrown out of society, to be in extreme discomfort.

Think about the type of person who would prefer the discomfort of being completely ostracized to the discomfort of living inside the tension. I think that that goes some way to explaining why so many people came from math and physics and the exact sciences.

These days, when I look at Greta Thunberg — I was actually, I’m pretty sure, the first American journalist to interview her — the now 16-year-old Swedish girl who went on school strike and has started this worldwide climate change movement.

She is diagnosed with autism, and she’s very, very clear about talking about how intolerable she finds life with the way that adults are not acting rationally in the face of climate change and how, for her, it is an absolute necessity to confront it. I really recognized that spirit of Soviet dissonance.

Russia Wants a Trump-Sanders Election

As I have written here before, elements of the Russian government want Americans to be divided against each other. I am not at all sure that they have had any success with this, since Americans already hate each other plenty, and even if it worked I am not sure how it would help them. But it does seem to be their aim.

In the light of this it makes perfect sense that Russian trolls and bots are throwing most of their weight behind Trump and Bernie Sanders. Surely a Trump-Sanders election would be one of the ugliest ever, and highly divisive. The two Americans have reacted differently to the news, Trump trying to deny it and Sanders accepting it; maybe that's partly because in a weird way it enhances Bernie's status by making him the most radical one.

Strange times.