tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-107119232024-03-07T01:30:10.330-05:00The Liberal ConvictionUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger177125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-69568422048697619922010-09-30T17:56:00.001-04:002010-10-01T01:26:13.113-04:00Marty Peretz and the Intent/Effect Principle<i><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/marty-peretz-and-the-intenteffect-principle/">Crossposted from the HPRgument.</a></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Harvard University is a private institution with a private set of needs, among them financial needs and the ever-present need to remain true to its institutional identity. If you’re interested in the question of whether the Social Studies Degree Committee should create a research grant in Marty Peretz’s honor, then that’s where you have to start, with the fact that all actions this university takes — whether hiring a professor, admitting a student, or giving out an honorific title to a former professor and controversial public intellectual — are actions made in reference to its perceived institutional needs.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Funding high quality undergraduate research is an important institutional need, obviously. Equally obvious is the fact that what Marty Peretz wrote (“Muslim life is cheap, most notably to muslims”) is grotesque and wrong. Those two points, at the very least, are utterly clear.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">What’s not clear, however, is the balance. Do the costs of Peretz’s words in terms of Harvard’s institutional character really outweigh the benefits of the grant itself?</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I fear the opposite: that denying him this grant would do damage to the very institutional aspirations we’re trying to protect — namely, to our commitment to intellectual diversity and the free and open exchange of legitimately different points of view.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">If we’re really committed to intellectual diversity, then we have to commit ourselves to its consequences. Diversity is not easy. People will get hurt. In fact, that’s what real, substantive diversity is all about, in a sense — it’s the condition of constant antagonism, of people of genuine difference coming together in expedient alliance because of some shared commitment to some higher end, whether that’s a workable American democracy or the “pursuit of veritas,” but struggling all the while. Learning to live in that condition, quite frankly, is one of the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">raison d’etre</em><em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"> </em>of this University.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Peretz’s ideas were grotesque and wrong. But they were, at the same time, manifestations of the sort of difference we embrace in our commitment to diversity. Words can make us angry — that’s a good thing. It means we’re learning. It means we’re getting somewhere.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">But surely — you argue — there are things that simply cannot be said in a community of learning, right? That ought to disqualify you unambiguously from any award?</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Yes, of course. But in the process of drawing that line, we need to practice intense skepticism of our own sensibilities; we need to make sure that in telling people not to say certain things, we’re not just enforcing the triumph of our biases.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">To help, I suggest a simple principle: speech that hurts people <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">in effect</em> is different from speech that hurts people <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">by intent.</em> The latter is never acceptable at a university. The former, meanwhile, is a direct consequence of diversity itself, of high contact struggles between people of genuine difference. Ideas of this sort — those that have the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">effect</em> of hurting people, but the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">intent</em> of being true — cannot be illegalized on a university campus. Indeed, it’s for the sake of those controversial ideas that the University exists at all.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">By all means, let’s disagree vigorously. Let’s call people out for being ignorant and bigoted when they’re being ignorant and bigoted. But the intent/effect principle says that we don’t take them away from the table until it’s utterly clear that they’re no longer intending to pursue truth, and have crossed over to the territory of “intending to hurt.” In the case of Martin Peretz — whose blog post was manifestly the product of a serious academic worldview, one based on premises and conclusions that can be argued, paradigms (such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis) and evidence that can be disputed; who has issued two apologies so far; and who has a lifetime of writing and teaching behind him — that line has clearly not been crossed.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The University is a peculiar place — it guarantees your safety from the people who might hurt you with words by intent (hate speech, discrimination, etc), but not against the people who might hurt you with words by effect. The University cannot guarantee anyone’s comfort. If it could, this would be Disney Land for People Just Like Me, not a University at all. Academics, by necessity, is a bloody vocation. The old genteel metaphor, “patricide,” the killing of your intellectual forefathers as you go forward on the frontier of knowledge, doesn’t even begin to describe it. Indeed, you’re killing yourself, your old self, every day, every hour, of real learning. No one interested in education’s offerings can be spared this blood loss. No one here at this University ought to feel entitled to be spared it — the unease of the new, the uncomfortable, the forbidden.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">That, among other things, is what this University is about. The shield on our seal symbolizes not the safety of truth, but its martial qualities.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-68563099235695827442010-09-17T11:03:00.000-04:002010-09-17T11:03:32.721-04:00How Not To Write About Policy (a response to Dylan Matthews)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><i><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/how-not-to-write-about-policy-a-response-to-dylan-matthews/">Crossposted from the HPRgument.</a> </i></div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Dylan Matthews* has a post up on his blog called <a href="http://minipundit.typepad.com/minipundit/2010/07/how-not-to-write-about-policy.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">“How Not To Write About Policy”</a> — it’s a takedown of an essay by Mark Greif entitled <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/gut-level-legislation-or-redistribution" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution</a>, and a sort of mini-lecture on how to write like a wonk. It’s a pretty entertaining post. But it’s also, in my estimate, pretty far off the mark — not just in mischaracterizing what Greif is trying to do (if it were only that, I probably wouldn’t comment) but also in suggesting, censoriously, that’s there’s <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">only one right way </em>to ”write about policy,” and that is to write about it as a wonky, prodigiously intelligent liberal blogger, which is to say, to write about it just like Dylan does.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Now, admittedly, Grief’s proposal is in fact rather absurd: he writes in his essay that the U.S. should, “Add a tax bracket of 100 percent to cut off individual income at a fixed ceiling, allowing any individual to bring home a maximum of $100,000 a year from all sources and no more.” Why that’s absurd should be apparent to anyone. You can’t blame Dylan for pouncing. He writes: “A tax bracket of 100 percent placed on income above $100,000 would effectively set that as a maximum wage. No business would pay a worker a dime over $100,000 knowing that it would all go to the government. Consequently, the bracket would raise no revenue, as it would have no tax base after businesses cut their top salaries to $100,000 in response….”</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The germane question, however, is not “Why is this policy wrong?” as Dylan asks, it’s “Why would Greif propose such a thing?” Dylan jumps to the conclusion that it’s because Greif has failed to “do [his] homework,” read the “relevant literature,” and consult the “relevant experts” – that he’s proposed this absurd proposal because he failed to “talk to Emmanuel Saez,” “call David Romer,” “contact to the Tax Policy Center,” and to run the appropriate microsimulation models.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Maybe not. Maybe Greif knows that the proposal is absurd. Maybe in proposing it he wants to underscore the fact that the rightness/wrongness of policy is not all that’s at stake when we legislate; that all policy is moral theory in disguise; that ethical rationales matter as much as potential material results? Maybe. Maybe writing for <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">N+1</em>, a small, leftist, lit journal, Greif is not playing the wonk game at all?</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Luckily, we don’t have to guess. In fact, Greif explains exactly why he made an absurd proposal…at the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">very beginning of his essay</em>:</div></div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How. Are you to be filed next to <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Mother Jones</em> and <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Z </em>and <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">American Spectator</em> in the back row, or with the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Nation</em> and <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Weekly Standard </em>and the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">American Prospect </em>up front? Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party? Within the party, a position? If not a position, an issue? The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious…</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">To shoot back indignantly, as Dylan does, that “He’s not doing what the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">American Prospec</em>t is doing!” is thus to merely repeat what Greif himself has stipulated. <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">N+1</em> is not the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">American Prospect</em>! Which it’s not. Which Greif tells us. In fact, he even has an explanation:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">These commentators who have no access to a legislative agenda and really no more exalted basis for political action than that of their ordinary citizenship (but they do not believe they are ordinary citizens) bleat and growl and put themselves on record for various initiatives of Congress over which they have no influence and upon which they will have no effect.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">By pretending to have influence in the game of political strategy, these writers, Greif says, hold onto a “fiction of power” and they give up, in turn, the real power they have: the power to present ethical arguments in favor of one better society over another.</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">“What do you stand for! What will you do!” Legislatively? Are you kidding? Well, there is something one can do, without succumbing to the pundits: for the day when the Congress rolls up to our doorsteps and asks for our legislative initiatives, maybe it is up to every citizen to know what is in his heart and have his true bills and resolutions ready. <strong style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Call it “political surrealism”—the practice of asking for what is at present impossible, in order to get at last, by indirection or implausible directness, the principles that would underlie the world we’d want rather than the one we have.</strong></div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Perhaps this “political surrealism” mode of writing, this “practice of asking for what is at present impossible” in order to get at “the principles that would underlie the world we’d want,” is a bad thing. Perhaps Dylan thinks it’s a bad thing — I don’t. The case for diversity of opinion and dialect is too strong. Not everything significant about policy can be captured in any single way, not exclusively by moral argument and not exclusively by numbers, graphs and rigorous “microsimulation models.” Indeed, if all we talk about is the numbers, as Dylan seems to want, we risk reducing the domain of politics to the narrowest questions of economics. And in doing that we lose a lot. As Tony Judt <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Fares-Land-Tony-Judt/dp/1594202761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284576041&sr=8-1" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">once wrote</a>: ”Is it fair? Is it just? Is it Right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">the</em> political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn to once again pose them.”</div></div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Daring to pose these questions, then, is the meta-polemic of Greif’s piece. He’s attempting to demonstrate another way of talking about taxes: by talking about the nature of freedom (“The essence of individualism is morally relevant inequality.”); the nature of wealth (“true property is that which is proper to you: what you mix your hands into (Locke)”); and what people should be doing with their time (“If there is anyone working a job who would stop doing that job should his income—and all his richest compatriots’ incomes—drop to $100,000 a year, he should not be doing that job.”).</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Being an intellectual means asking these sorts of questions. It means helping us ordinary people figure out what, in a morally heterodox world, is worth fighting for. This service is rendered in different ways, of course, but we always sorta know it when we see it. Lionel Trilling, Richard Rorty, Arthur Schlesinger, Maya Angelou, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fredric Jameson, Yochai Benkler – all of these folks are part of our varied leftist discursive tradition; they all write and speak about “policy” in the broadest sense, in the sense of “what society ought to be doing”; and they all sound very much different from Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein. To say that we can’t talk about policy without making our rounds to the think tankers of our day is to forget, among other things, that leftism wasn’t invented by the blogosphere in 2002. It’s to ignore something very profound about that American leftist tradition.</div><div><br />
</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-65451779358297838232010-09-05T22:43:00.004-04:002010-09-17T11:17:45.521-04:00Geek Power<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><i><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/geek-power/">Crossposted from the HPRgument</a></i></div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer <a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_hackers/all/1" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">hacking</a>:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">If he were a teenager today, he says, <strong style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">he’d be hacking biology</strong>. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naivete that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.”</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">And apparently Gates isn’t kidding around. From <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/business/05venter.html?hp=&pagewanted=all" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">the New York Times</a>:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Now Dr. Venter is turning from reading the genetic code to an even more audacious goal: writing it. At Synthetic Genomics, he wants to create living creatures — bacteria, algae or even plants — that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.”</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">On an only-slightly-related note, I have this whole rant about how internet technology production has become sufficiently easy, so that new test of ambitious product development is not whether your technology performs a neat function — or even, whether it turns a profit — but rather, whether it helps do something materially important for the world. That that the new standard is “<a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/07/today_in_capitalism_20_1.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">meaningful stuff that matters</a>.” Websites are easy. Changing the world is hard. And sorry, but Foursquare and Farmville don’t cut it.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Silicon valley (so the rant goes) is rapidly becoming the pre-burst financial sector of the tech world: an industry predicated on the production of profitable, socially destructive crap. Thousands of the smartest people spend their time producing web gadgets designed to aggregate digital ephemera, <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">while the world around them spins</em>. Zuckerberg has spoken eloquently about a “<a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">more open world</a>“; but what about a more meaningful one? Where it’s not openness for its own sake — open to learn about status updates and see old hook-ups’ photos — but openness in service of empowerment and progress.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The really ambitious web developers are the ones going out there and trying to <a href="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804367" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">fix American democracy</a> or <a href="http://www.350.org/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">global warming</a> or <a href="http://apps4africa.org/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">world poverty</a>. It’s a brave new world we live in, where you have Bill Gates saying that if he were a kid he’d be “hacking biology,” not creating websites, and now he’s off setting up malaria nets in Africa.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Such the rant goes. But I’ll spare you that rant. Let’s all just revel in the awesomeness of these articles. And then get to work being the ambitious Harvard students or HPRgument readers that we are.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-63847321889810013472010-09-05T02:40:00.000-04:002010-09-05T02:40:51.735-04:00Heedless IrresponsibilityFrank Rich on the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=all">Iraq War</a>:<br />
<blockquote>We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html?scp=1&sq=Wolfowitz%20October%205,%202003&st=cse" title="A 2003 Times article about Paul Wolfowitz’s claim that Iraq’s oil wealth would largely pay for rebuilding Iraq."><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;">the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills</span></span></a>. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-52179568814561115742010-09-04T01:41:00.000-04:002010-09-04T01:41:23.629-04:00For the New School Year<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><i><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/for-the-new-school-year/">Crossposted from the HPRgument</a></i></div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Here’s Teddy Roosevelt <a href="http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">talking to some undergrads</a> at the University of Paris in 1910:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their- your- chances of useful service are at an end. Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer….</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Of course, when he returned to the States, Roosevelt <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">went into that proverbial arena</em> — proceeding to challenge incumbent Taft for the Republican nomination, on a platform of popular democracy that historian George Mowry has called “one of the most radical ever made by a major American political figure”; founding the Progressive Party; and taking part in the four-way presidential campaign of 1912, widely regarded as a turning point in American politics. (Roosevelt <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/EDIS-SRP-0014-17" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">bellowed</a> at the time: ”The great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.”)</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I highlight this University of Paris quote because it sums up a dispensation that we Harvard students — we to whom “much has been given” — might be wise to take to heart: simply, that what’s worth having is <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">won through daring</em>; won by the men and women “in the arena,” who act without certainty of success, “marred by dust and sweat and blood”; that failing is better, finally, then not trying at all.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">You think this is retrograde? Perhaps it is — but wouldn’t that be sad? “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.”</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">So here’s to hoping, once again, that the arena’s real and that the struggle matters. To a year of striving and failure — to a year of fearlessness.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">TR wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-29125327183071825942010-09-04T01:39:00.001-04:002010-09-04T01:52:59.315-04:00An Effete Liberal Book ListSome good books coming out this September / October:<br />
<div><div><ol><li><i>The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values</i> by Sam Harris</li>
<li><i>American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us</i> by Robert Putnam</li>
<li><i>Bob Dylan in America</i> by Sean Wilentz</li>
<li><i>Listen to This</i> by Alex Ross</li>
<li><i>Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future</i> by Robert Reich</li>
<li><i>What Technology Wants</i> by Kevin Kelly</li>
<li><i>Valences of the Dialectic</i> by Fredric Jameson</li>
<li><i>Where Good Ideas Come From: The Nature History of Innovation</i> by Steven Berlin Johnson</li>
<li><i>Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition</i> by James Kloppenberg</li>
</ol></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-66360601171453180742010-08-31T05:25:00.010-04:002010-09-04T02:09:46.726-04:00America, Action<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtnXFKljlJl-Swe-wsSM7hrpl8bNaRksBINIePX1hjAs7qSfc82ReRHEenFBLQoTEhZVAj6j6yCRIhrxx24Sy1c4X8YHNaVqaH_LqchBKOcJOfjeAsTPyAQZGHtxFjUxNTOI3f/s1600/color033.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.sJPG.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtnXFKljlJl-Swe-wsSM7hrpl8bNaRksBINIePX1hjAs7qSfc82ReRHEenFBLQoTEhZVAj6j6yCRIhrxx24Sy1c4X8YHNaVqaH_LqchBKOcJOfjeAsTPyAQZGHtxFjUxNTOI3f/s400/color033.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.sJPG.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">These photos of the 1930s and 1940s America are pretty unbelievable: <a href="http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.html">http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.html</a></div><div><br />
</div><div>...altogether unbelievable, I would say, <i>how much has changed</i> -- how much <i>we've</i> changed.<br />
<br />
I've been reading a book called <i>Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism</i> by Frederick Jameson. The text is an inquiry into postmodernism as a cultural/historical "period," as product and feature of "postindustrial capitalism" rather than simply an artistic or intellectual "movement." "I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis..." Jameson writes. It's an audacious method, in a sense: it's predicated on the claim that historical periods can be said to exist at all; that we can say that this set of historically real things and that set of historically real things are, in some essential way, totally insoluble with each other. That what it means to be human has fundamentally changed.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I think about this when I look at these photos -- I think about how different it was to be alive back then; and then I think (as the Marxist would) that this quasi-metaphysical change in the experience of living -- whatever it entails -- was wrought mostly by the making of <i>stuff<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">; </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">that this whole synchronic universe of commodities whirling around us -- the buying and selling, gift-giving and creating -- can't help but touch the lives of everyone and everything for years to come.</span></span></i></div><div><br />
</div><div>What follows is a strong case for persistent engagement with the world -- ie, a case (and I think we all ought to have one) to get out of bed in the morning. If our world is ultimately material in its character, then the shift from the America of these old photos to the America of today happened because people chose to act, to think, to make. That fact alone is pretty extraordinary, if you think about it in the right way: we pulled ourselves up and out in history, from there to here, by <i>acting</i>. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-79148484041986245582010-08-25T19:51:00.011-04:002010-09-04T02:10:32.483-04:00A More Inclusive Whole<div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Michael Kazin includes a quote from Jurgen Habermas in the introduction to his book <i>The Populist Persuasion</i>: "We must realize that all traditions are ambivalent and that it is therefore necessary to be critical about all of them."<br />
<br />
<i>All traditions are ambivalent --</i> that could be a fitting title for just about any book on American politics, but it's especially fitting for one about the American populist tradition -- a tradition that is both profoundly strong, as Kazin demonstrates, and profoundly ambivalent; the populists in his book are always lurching, at every stage and every incantation, between leftist sympathy for the marginalized, and an embittered and defensive rightism, full of fear and bigotry. William Jennings Bryan and John L. Lewis commingle with Andrew Jackson and Senator McCarthy. Father Charles Coughlin begins his career as a radio priest broadcasting Catholic social gospel and fighting for the poor against the moneyed class; he ends it lambasting FDR as a communist, fervidly defending Hitler, and serializing the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion<i>." </i>The prohibitionist progressives of the 1910s set the stage for the KKK revival of the 1920s. That beautiful, American idea -- the "common man" -- becomes, in time, the idyl of white-hooded bigots.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So it goes. And so it is today, I think. Here's a paragraph from a New Yorker <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_mcgrath">profile</a> of the Tea Party movement:<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><blockquote>If there was a central theme to the proceedings, it was probably best expressed in the refrain “Can you hear us now?,” conveying a long-standing grievance that the political class in Washington is unresponsive to the needs and worries of ordinary Americans. Republicans and Democrats alike were targets of derision. “Their constituency is George Soros,” one man grumbled, and I was reminded of the dangerous terrain where populism slides into a kind of nativist paranoia—the subject of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay linking anti-Masonic sentiment in the eighteen-twenties with McCarthyism and with the John Birch Society founder Robert Welch’s contention that Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” The name Soros, understood in the context of this recurring strain—the “paranoid style in American politics,” Hofstadter called it—is synonymous, like Rockefeller or Rothschild, with a New World Order.</blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What to make of populism, then? To me, it comes down to a distinction between the "populist persuasion" (Kazin's phrase) and the "populist principle" (my own): as a "persuasion," populism is nothing more than a mode of feeling and talking; it's a stock set of discursive images and expressions that tap into our collective hopes. This persuasion can be used by anyone, for good or evil (or both, time and again). </div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">As a principle, however, populism is something rather more specific.The surest expression of the populist principle I know is voiced in the essay "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" by William James. James writes:<br />
<blockquote>For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The philosopher, then, qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men what the question always is-‑not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but of the two total universes with which these goods respectively belong. <b>He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter to complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole</b>.</blockquote><div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So we have a test: "the more inclusive whole." Lincoln, John L. Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. would pass this test, and so would Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou and Barack Obama. These are the populists in James' sense. It is not hard to figure out who doesn't pass this test -- to figure out for whom populism is a persuasion not a principle.</div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-31041242867408679632010-08-20T21:08:00.000-04:002010-08-20T21:08:26.601-04:00An Astonishing Lack of Ambition<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This Umair Haque <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/01/the_scale_every_business_needs.html">line</a> sums up a lot of what what I believe re: business, business ethics, and what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><blockquote>Here's what the economic historians of the 23rd Century are going to say about the 20th.</blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><blockquote>"They built <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/performers/companies/by_employees/index.html" style="outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;">giant</span></span></a>, globe-spanning organizations, that employed tens of thousands of people working around the clock, to produce... sugar water, fast food, disposable razors, and gas guzzlers. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the paradigm of 20th Century capitalism was its astonishing lack ofambition. Rarely in history has such a void, a poverty of imagination been so deeply woven into the fabric of humankind's economic systems." </blockquote></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-400565496128424752010-08-20T00:48:00.014-04:002010-08-20T20:56:40.249-04:00The Rich and the Very, Very Rich<div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">James Surowiecki has a New Yorker <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/08/16/100816ta_talk_surowiecki">article</a> out that makes a very reasonable point -- namely, that there's a big difference between being a doctor or a lawyer or an entrepreneur or, say, a prominent journalist at the New Yorker, and being a millionaire.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Our tax code should reflect that distinction. It doesn't.* Let's make it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">This is smart, I think. I'll add the obvious disclaimer that I'm not an authority on the economics of tax policy -- <a href="http://minipundit.typepad.com/minipundit/2010/07/how-not-to-write-about-policy.html">we cool, Dylan?</a> -- and then proceed to say that, nevertheless, at some point, all talk of tax policy has to lead to questions of a larger scale: What sort of society do I want to live in? Whom am I prepared to work for? Does the immiseration of the poor matter, and how much? Deep questions like that. Tough questions. The economics flows from those answers.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Now, there <i>is</i> a big difference between the rich and the very richest. For one, in economic terms, the very richest have done much better for themselves in recent years. Economist Emmanuel Saez <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2908">has generated some data</a> that indicate that the very, very richest -- those in the top 0.1 percentile who make about 2m+ a year -- have seen seen their incomes grow 95% from 2002 to 2007, while the other richest -- call them the "lower-upper class," the nine percent of Americans making 110k to 400k -- saw their incomes grow only 13%. Indeed, a full <i>two thirds of all income growth</i> from 2002 to 2007 was contained in the top 1%; that top 1% saw their incomes grow more <i>than ten times as fast as the bottom 90%</i>. America is becoming a staggeringly unequal country; this inequality, unsurprisingly, benefits the very, very richest among us most substantially.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Unpack these numbers and I suspect we find some fairly profound cultural difference too -- between the doctors and lawyer and journalists in the "lower-upper class" and the very, very rich. The Populists of the 1890s drew a distinction between "producers" and "parasites": the "people," they said, the true heirs to the American creed, were "producers -- they <i>made</i>. The "elites" were "parasites" -- they depended on the wealth of others.** Today, the social contribution of the very, very rich has been called into question by folks like Umair Haque using populist 2.0 terms like "thin value," "bean counting,""income not outcomes," and so on. Go to <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/">his blog</a> and you hear William Jennings Bryant singing:<br />
<blockquote>Jennings: "Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." - <a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/">Cross of Gold</a></blockquote><blockquote>Haque: "every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity." - <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/07/today_in_capitalism_20_1.html">Generation M Manifesto</a></blockquote></div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In short, the rich versus the very rich: this distinction matters. It explains a lot -- about the nature of class in America, and about the nature of our economy. We o</span>ught to develop a vocabulary -- and then a tax code -- that reflects it.<br />
<br />
--</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">* And yes, marginal tax rate is very different from effective tax rate. As my buddy Jon Levine explains, this line is grossly inacc<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">urate: "</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This means that someone making two hundred thousand dollars a year and someone making two hundred million dollars a year pay at similar tax rates. LeBron James and LeBron James’s dentist: same difference."</span></span><br />
**It's interesting to note that these categories were used by the People's Party of the 1890s in explicit contrast to the language of the Marxists. Populism was a sort of uniquely American theory of class relations.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-83709852583296710752010-08-14T21:48:00.004-04:002010-08-20T21:12:21.058-04:00Notes on Fiorina's Paper<div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Stanford Professor Morris Fiorina wrote a <a href="http://www.citeulike.org/group/108/article/106913">paper</a> in 2000 called "Extreme Voices: A Dark Side of Civic Engagement." A friend recently sent me this article as "counter argument" to my own work (work on CommonPlace, etc). After reading it, I'm here to say: totally I disagree. In fact, there's no incompatability between the Fiorina's claim that there's a "dark side" to opening more <i>channels</i> for engagement, and my own claim (the claim at the center of CommonPlace, and at the center of the work of the thinkers that I care about, from John Dewey to Roberto Unger to Michael Sandel) that more engagement as citizens in the communities we inhabit -- in the communities that shape our lives -- is at the center of our rights and our responsibilities are free people. In other words, we should be working towards engagement. Almost always. In fact, the "dark side" of civic engagement identified by Fiorina and the "not enough civic engagement" identified by Putnam et al., are just two sides of the same coin.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Let me try to explain.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Fiorina claims that for over 50 years new participatory channels have opened up our political system at every level ("the political system today is far more exposed to popular pressures than was the case at midcentury") -- elections are more candidate-centric, less machine oriented; congress is more transparent; we have more direct legislator-constituent exchange media; we have more single-issue advocacy groups, etc. We've gone from an elitist, "vital center" democracy, of the 1950s, to a more, more "change we can believe in" democracy of 2008.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">This is true enough (and let's just leave it at that for now). And yet, as Fiorina rightly observes, despite these new channels for engagement, more Americans are distrustful of their government and cynical about the process. The paradox at hand is that more influence on the government coincides with more distrust of its workings.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The paper suggests three reasons. Two are presented as standard theories, and the third is the core of his argument: first, "overload" -- people become overwhelmed by competition between ideological voices, as the arena explodes open to new views, and so they disengage; two, "seeing the sausage being made" -- people don't like seeing how government works, "in all its messiness."They like to believe in the myth of disinterested statement. More influence of the process means more messiness to be seen.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Fiorina suggests a new causal mechanism. What if the problem is with the "opening up of channels" in the first place? Fiorina suggests that opening up channels has the effect of empowering <i>only</i> those people who are interested in using them; the more open our democracy is, the more partisan and extremist it becomes. Ironically then, more representation gives more voice to non-representative actors.</div><blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What is going on here? The answer is clear enough. Ordinary people are by and large moderate in their views -- relatively unconcered and uninformed about politics most of the time and comforatble with the language of compromsie, trade-ofs, and exceptions to the rule. Meanwhile, political and governmental processes are polarized, the participants self-righteous and intolerant, their rhetoric emotion and excessive. The moderate center is not well represented in contemporary national politics -- and often not in state and local politics either.</div></blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">It's hard not to notice, however, that there's a bit of question-begging to this whole analysis. His case isn't against the dream of civic engagement generally -- it's against an unskeptical acceptance that civic engagement will always result from "more opportunities to engage" institutionally. That caution is certainly healthy. In economics, the term is "adverse selection": just creating channels does not guarantee that they'll be used, and when they are used it doesn't guarantee that they'll eventuate the desired goal whatever that is, in politics, in business, or otherwise.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But if having a small, non-representative class of partisans engaging with our political process is bad, then that's hardly a case against civic engagement; indeed, it's a case for <i>more</i> civic engagement -- for true, widespread, representative engagement.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Fiorina's argument, if we accept it as true, helps us to accept the simple fact that we don't get engagement simply by lowering the barriers to engagement. We need some concomitant shift in the norms that govern our desire to participate -- ie, we need to re-adopt as a culture a language of collective responsibility -- so that we might actually want to walk through the doors of our civic rights when they're their open and hard-won in front of us. And we also need to re-examine what engagement itself means. Democracy is a way of life, not just a political process. Democracy is a way of looking at the world; it's captured in the belief that everything is up for grabs; that everything is politics; that everything is the product of collective decision-making by the community, from the food we eat, to the streets we live on.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Morris is a congressional scholar, so I can sympathise with the bias in his analysis. But the truth is, the channels to participate in our democracy our everywhere -- they're everywhere that people congregate and that the products of people are being forged. To say that "open channels without engagement" is bad is to say nothing except that "non-engagement is bad." I agree. Everyone has the opportunity to participate. The question at hand is whether we take it or we don't -- and how we might get a large swath of the population to chose the former not the latter more often.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-49452841239345845902010-08-11T03:20:00.006-04:002010-09-04T01:55:46.793-04:00Are payday loans like unprotected sex?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Sometimes you read a Tyler Cowen <a href="http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/interest-rates-of-two-hundred-percent-a-year.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">post</a> and you think to yourself, simply: Did he <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">really</em> just say that? Here’s Cowen on payday loans and unprotected sex:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The unprotected sex is riskier and less prudent than borrowing money at an annualized rate of two hundred percent. <strong style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Why prohibit one and not the other? </strong>Many of the borrowers are being fooled, but others have legitimate reasons to seek the money, such as wanting to buy a birthday present for a visit to one’s child, living with a separated spouse.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">On a prima facie level, I think it’s fairly obvious that making love to a woman (or a man) is not quite like taking out a high interest loan from a payday loan boutique. There are a lot of ways I can think that sex differs from 200% APR loans…but the way that counts here is basically a category issue. In short: loving making is not a market transaction.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">For one, you shouldn’t assume that your consensual partner is pursuing a profit or pleasure maximizing strategy. Some partners might be, but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. For the most part, lovers are couple-regarding: they’re interested in maximizing the pleasure of both parties, not themselves alone, and especially not one at the expense of another.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">That’s obviously not true of payday lenders, whose very business model depends on the suffering of their clients. They exploit information asymmetries and pray on the people least able to make good decisions, in order to maximize their revenue. With sex, risk is a byproduct of something otherwise wholesome and demonstrably positive sum; with payday lending, one party’s suffering is a core <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">feature</em> of the larger system it exists within.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">This whole rather ridiculous debate speaks to a larger issue with economics as an analytical tool. The fact is, transaction models are not the appropriate metaphor for love, or love-making, or friendship, or any of that. No matter how many books Cowen writes, that still will be true. The very fact that danger incurred by one partner in unprotected sex is shared by the danger incurred by the other, in a roughly symmetrical way, indicates the larger point that sex between men and women / men and men / women and women is consensual and other-regarding in a way that buying something from a firm can never be. To capture the essence of that non-utility maximizing connectivity — that Oneness, as some might call it — you need to get very far away from economics, towards something like art or religion.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Maybe the best way to end this is to just quote at length from Mark Greif’s piece <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/repressive-sentimentalism" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">On Repressive Sentimentalism</a>, from N+1. (Harvard Magazine’s take on the journal <a href="http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/01/harvard-founders-of-n1-literary-magazine" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>, if you’re unfamiliar). To me, this piece is deeply flawed in a number of ways, but he’s dead right when he says the following. Note, this gets us very far away from payday loans…but that’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it?</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies. Production comes back in with pregnancy and “labor”—that’s why contraception means so much. Competition can come back in with the conquest of partners, and a brutality or technical objectivity in lovemaking that allows men to remake cooperation as if it were struggle—hence utopians’ funny, sentimental insistence on love in the act. Sexual cooperation is the other side of our basic human nature, and matches and disarms economic competition….</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.</div></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-45159575862535838912010-08-11T03:19:00.002-04:002010-08-11T03:19:19.345-04:00Weighing In: China and the Race to Green Tech<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Jeff Kalmus <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/weighing-in-china-in-the-lead/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">argues</a> that the idea of a “race” between China and the United States over green tech (suggested by Will Rafey <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/weighing-in-china-in-the-lead/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>) is misguided. Clean energy anywhere benefits everyone, everywhere. If there are no losers, then why call it a “race”?</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The “race” is just another manifestation of the phenomenon Will described in his fall article, an attempt by environmentalists to argue for action on climate change in terms they expect to be better received than the fundamental environmental justifications, but terms which are ultimately unconvincing.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">There’s a lot of truth to this. When people tell me that “China, moving rapidly into the void left by U.S. inaction, is poised to leap beyond the U.S. and seize control of the emerging clean energy economy” my response is simple: I get mad. I get worried. Some of my reasons are pure, no doubt — I worry about the effects of CO2 admissions, and the benefits that a proactive government would deliver; I worry about resource dependency; and I know that directed investment in growth industries is good for a struggling economy. But all those are legitimate concerns regardless of what China does or fails to do with clean energy.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The “race” construct itself is designed to flatter my less-pure motives — my competitive nationalism. The idea of a “race” obscures the central fact that, as a citizen of the world (not just of the United States) I benefit as we all do from a greener China.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Yet the fact is <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I bristle when reading that China is beating the United States</em> — and that’s a good thing. It’s good to get people mad about issues worth getting mad about, even for the wrong reasons. Will’s post is thus good on its face.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">But that doesn’t exactly answer the question: Is the “race” construct “unconvincing”? Does it matter if China takes the lead? Smart people like Fareed Zarkaria and Matthew Ygelsias are quick to point out that, in a networked world, the “rise of the rest” is a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2008/05/03/the-rise-of-the-rest.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">good thing for America</a>. This is true of politics — where we want strong, effecitve, well-run states to collaborate to mitigate the dangers of nonstate, networked enemies — and it’s true of economics: progress is inherently positive sum. In Matthew Yglesias’ <a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/research-is-positive-sum/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+matthewyglesias+(Matthew+Yglesias)" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">words</a>:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I can’t think of any major technical innovations occurring in Portugal since the 16th century. Nevertheless, Portugese people <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">benefit</em> from technical advances that occur elsewhere in the world. New products find customers and spinoffs and useful imitators all around the one. The growing extent to which China and India are places where research and development activities can take place is a <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">very good thing</em> not only for the two billion people who live over there, but for the people who live everyplace else as well.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">That said, there clearly <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">are </em>advantages to acting first. America is a much richer nation than Portugal, after all, and this is due in no small part to its relentless innovation; economists have long argued that national R&D investments (and education investments) are <a href="http://www.icsb.org/documents/New_High_Tech_Firms.pdf" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">key components</a> of national economic growth. Place matters. <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Where</em> research is happening determines the flow of talent, of capital, and, more subtly, it structures the dynamic effect of institutional clustering, agglomeration, all the things that makes NYC and Silicon Valley so extremely productive. America reaped huge rewards from being the first to move into, say, the auto market in the early 20th century or the Internet boom at the turn of the century, both directly tied to government investments; in those industries, the race mattered, and the same, one assumes, is true of the green tech industry today.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">You could imagine a case where we’d have to choose: increase total innovation, or increase our innovation level relative to others (while reducing total innovation). That’s interesting to think about, but inapplicable to the problem at hand. The point stands: the race matters.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-88055366063359864152010-08-11T03:18:00.001-04:002010-08-11T03:18:40.411-04:00What's not to love?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Theda Skocpol is not one to mince words. Here she is, in classic form, on <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/24/republicans_are_undercutting_national_economic_rec/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">fiscal austerity measures</a>:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The President, Congressional leaders, and Democrats of all stripes should be yelling day in, day out, that REPUBLICANS ARE SABOTAGING NATIONAL ECONOMIC RECOVERY AND PREVENTING JOB GROWTH, JUST FOR POLITICAL ADVANTAGE. That should be the message all the time, led by the President. Stop the murky compromises and the whining about “helping the unemployed.” Stop pretending this is about the deficit — nothing will hurt the deficit more than delayed economic growth. Say what [is] happening in terms of the national interest.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">By my lights, Obama’s failure to effectively explain the Recovery Act to the American people back in 2009 will go down as one of the biggest PR blunders of the decade. The Recovery Act was, of course, the largest middle class tax cut and jobs creation program in American history — yet most Americans don’t know that. Only 12% (of 95%) <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/12/only-12-of-americans-thin_n_460559.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">know</a> that Obama lowered their taxes; journalists continue to report <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/stimulusbailout-confusion/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">widespread confusion</a> between the righteous “stimulus package” and the devil’s bargain bailouts; and even in districts that benefited hugely from the bill, Obama is widely blamed for the downturn, as George Packer reports in his classic <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/15/100315fa_fact_packer" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">“Obama’s Lost Year.”</a></div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">And here we go again, with the so-called “deficit hawks.” I’m with Professor Skocpol: enough with the carefully-wrought explanations of Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy (as, for example, Larry Summers gives us <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/spend_now_save_later_20100614/?ln" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">here</a> and Paul Krugman <a href="http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/krugman-spend-now-save-later/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>). Keynes can be counterintuitive (re: why spend <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">more</em> during a depression, when you have <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">less</em>?) and economics is confusing. In this case, the message is blindingly simple — being <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">for</em>austerity means being <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">against</em> job creation and <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">against</em> economic growth.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Whether this president, who’s failed again and again to effectively communicate his policy goals to the American people, let alone give us some sort of positive progressive vision for this country, can deliver that message — that’s another question entirely.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-40373434060771940252010-08-11T03:17:00.000-04:002010-08-11T03:17:55.204-04:00BP Speech: Our Storyteller in Chief?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">In one hour, Obama addresses the nation about the BP Oil Spill. My question about the speech is simple: “How big will he go?” A commitment to energy sector regulation reform? Or something bigger — like a firm commitment to pass comprehensive carbon pricing by the end of the year? Is this going to be, as Joe Scarborough <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/14/beyond-left-and-right-sca_n_611179.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">hopes for</a>, Obama’s “JFK Speech” where he calls for total energy independence by the end of the decade?</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">At this point, I honestly wonder what he — Obama himself — is capable of. Again and again, he’s failed to tell the story of our moment, to give us the <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">why us? why now?</em>vocabulary that structures and clarifies the task at hand, gives us a sense of place, impels us to action. That’s what the best stories do. That’s what the best leaders do. Sometimes, frankly, it doesn’t even seem like he’s trying. I was waiting all year for him to tell the story of the stimulus package, of health care reform, of financial regulation; we got the facts, but never the narrative. Can anyone remember a single metaphor, or even a single phrase, that Obama used in over a year and a half to describe his reforms?</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">One of the more lamentable aspects of the the press’ BP Oil Spill coverage has been the repeated conflation of “looking like a leader” and “talking to the American people.” The first (as I’ve <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/taking-stock-of-the-spill/" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">argued before</a>) is rightly understood as “bullshit” (in the precise meaning of that phrase); the second, however, is an absolutely essential aspect of the president’s job. Obama disdains the former and forgets the latter.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Not being a superhero who can, as Nick Kristof has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/opinion/10kristof.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">helpfully suggested</a>, swim down to the oil leak with skivvies on and a knife in his mouth and punch out the hole, Obama is left with more pedestrian means. It’s well within the “material conception” of politics — the idea that politics is primarily about <em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">getting things done</em>, an idea that Obama holds — to say that the president has few powers greater than his access to the American people.</div><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Yet the Administration has massively underutilized this power. The Administration is openly dismissive of the press’ demand for theater politics, and rightly so (Axelrod to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/politics/07axelrod.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">NYTimes</a>: “I don’t give a ‘flying’ expletive ‘about what the peanut gallery thinks’”); yet in dismissing the media, they often dismiss its role as a conduit to the American people. Almost every reporter whose been given access to the Administration comments on how hermetic it is, how few people Obama talks to in the course of a day, how businesslike and technocratic it is, even at the cost of its link to outside world. In his <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/01/one-year-obama-pays-the-price.html" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #004276; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">classic analysis</a>, George Packer wrote, at the end of Obama’s Year One:</div><blockquote style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-top: 15px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Part of Obama’s weakness has been this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately, which would let Americans know that he is on their side. Reagan knew how to do it, which meant that, even when his popularity was sinking at a similar point in his presidency (remember 1982?), the public still knew where he stood, not necessarily on the details of policy, but on a few core principles that he could at least pretend never to sacrifice.</div></blockquote><div style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Let’s see if Obama can change that tonight. Let’s see if he can tell the story of our moment.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-29385016932190697252010-07-29T01:53:00.003-04:002010-07-29T01:56:53.555-04:00Weighing In: The Big Short<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2TxWhHxLbl-pbRT4EQ5vUlDyrThPVrtsd82GBU_iwONPys5PuUh-zPmPjPUbEFkSnOzBLL_GAZt-J9cobr6Z7fnty7h-CPdjNeyf-da6_vRdIrr29_84Y6rYOtHkWuyMAo6B/s1600/41rWIVW06yL.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2TxWhHxLbl-pbRT4EQ5vUlDyrThPVrtsd82GBU_iwONPys5PuUh-zPmPjPUbEFkSnOzBLL_GAZt-J9cobr6Z7fnty7h-CPdjNeyf-da6_vRdIrr29_84Y6rYOtHkWuyMAo6B/s320/41rWIVW06yL.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499202741077738370" /></a>I just finished Michael Lewis' wonderful book <em>The Big Short</em>. In it, Lewis recasts the financial crisis as a <em>tale of heroism</em>, where three rogue investors peer through the fog of moral recklessness and embarrassing incompetence that was the financial service sector circa 2008, and decide to short the market. They were right, of course, and they make away with a killing.<br /><br />One of the most unnerving scenes in the book was a dialogue between one of the short selling "heroes" and an under-qualified "CDO manager" (a truly bizarre job!) named Wing Chau, whose portfolio was extremely long on the subprime bond market. Over dinner, Wing Chau precedes to argue that he actually<em> likes</em> it when people short his CDOs, and that, in fact, his worst nightmare is that they'll stop. He gets paid on volume, he explains, and he needs the short sellers to create the liquidity to keep his bets going. He actually <em>wants</em> the facts on the ground (like housing prices) to turn against him, so his trade volume increases. He can't get enough short sellers!<br /><br />It's pretty crazy stuff. Yet there he is, Wing Chau, positioned with the rest of the sector to lose tens of billions of dollars and destroy the entire financial system...hoping for more risk and fatter returns.<br /><br />Carrie Summer <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/does-buying-gold-make-you-a-bad-person-markets-overview/">argues</a> in her last post that short sellers are in a morally ambiguous position because their payout depends on the suffering of others. She's not wrong. They bet on disaster. But the thing is: sometimes they're right. Indeed, sometimes the morally responsible position is to bet against the greed and stupidity of those propping up a world that really is too good to be true, with the belief that it'll all come crashing down -- which it was and which it did. The short sellers were realists in a world gone mad.<br /><br />Meanwhile, it was the "investors [who] want things to go well," investors like Wing Chau, who poured trillions of dollars into a socially valueless asset (subprime mortgages), inflated the asset bubble, and, ultimately, created the conditions that made the short sellers position so attractive, and the losses for everyone so very great.<br /><br />So you'll have to excuse me if I can't muster too much anger against the short sellers, who were the only people to get this thing right, in a long line of dunces, from the bankers, to the investors, to the mortgage providers, to the rating agencies, to the Fed -- at least this time. Next time it'll be different, perhaps. But you know, I wouldn't bet on it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-74439024829138386242010-07-29T01:35:00.004-04:002010-07-29T01:53:20.711-04:00Taking Stock of the Spill<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT6cI__1znI9UT7TAS3kF7eOVjq0VgqYR3PL1ReYyKyts2uZe8ZF1bQd6a4ml9zk01f80j7Aqcm811pb01wDJBIA3g0PfOglFuCNIeFWOwmLNri5gKp1zLGf_6yCpwtW6UpQn4/s1600/burning-oil-rig-explosion-fire-photo11+(1).jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT6cI__1znI9UT7TAS3kF7eOVjq0VgqYR3PL1ReYyKyts2uZe8ZF1bQd6a4ml9zk01f80j7Aqcm811pb01wDJBIA3g0PfOglFuCNIeFWOwmLNri5gKp1zLGf_6yCpwtW6UpQn4/s320/burning-oil-rig-explosion-fire-photo11+(1).jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499201929382652930" /></a>Apparently, Obama's BP Oil Spill performance has been a total disaster. Just check the news. He's weak, aloof, unemotive, Maureen Down <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30dowd.html">explains</a>. "Mr. President, take command," David Gergen <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/30/gergen.oil.spill/index.html">urges</a> on CNN. James Carville exhorts: “This president needs to tell BP, "I’m your daddy." And Peggy Noonan, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704269204575270950789108846.html">writes</a>, simply, for WSJ: "I don't see how you politically survive this."<br /><br />Count <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/politics-is-about-doing-things/">me among</a> the people that regard politics as primarily the art of <em>getting things done -- </em>of deliberating on and then distributing out public goods to people, and trying to do this at the lowest costs possible, in the appropriate time horizons, with the greatest impact, and so on. Politics is not poll numbers; it's not, ultimately, about feelings or even theories. Politics is about doing things.<br /><br />Adopt this perspective, and the media-wide consensus that Obama has been "weak" on the BP Spill starts to look rather absurd:* the standard for success is a strictly material one; Obama should be judged, in the final analysis, by whether he succeeds at mitigating the effects of this crisis to the fullest extent possible -- by whether he helps us plug that (goddamn) hole and then, afterwards, whether he goes to changing the material conditions that allowed the hole to burst open in the first place, the corrupt MMS regulatory regime and our insatiable appetite for crude oil. That is the standard we judge him by.<br /><br />Theoretically, to judge Obama's success by the standard of "is he getting it done" you'd need to create "counterfactuals," where you test his choices against all other conceivable ones. (Note: not stopping the spill doesn't mean failure; if we had counterfactuals, we might find out that even the best course of action conceivable wouldn't have allowed the president to stop the spill sooner than he has.) But in practice, the fact of theoretical unknowability doesn't mean we say "screw it" and decide, instead, to report on people's perceptions of reality, on feelings or moods or zeitgeist or whatever it is Maureen Dowd is doing. No, it means we work a little harder, investigate the administration's actions, use our analytical skills to make arguments (with evidence!) for or against them, and then draw conclusions. As it happens, I've seen embarrassingly little of that coming out of our press corps.<br /><br />At the same time, this conception of politics as <em>the material fact of getting goods to people in need</em> helps give us perspective on the political back-and-forths of our moment. There's a brilliant <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2256068/">article </a>out in Slate subtitled "What if political scientists covered the news?" It reads:<br /><blockquote>Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. <strong>But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.</strong><br /><br />Chief among the criticisms of Obama was his response to the spill. Pundits argued that he needed to show more emotion. Their analysis, however, should be viewed in light of the economic pressures on the journalism industry combined with a 24-hour news environment and a lack of new information about the spill itself.</blockquote><br />Recast Obama's popularity as a function of the structural forces at play at any given moment -- as the result of the slumping economy, the progress of his agenda through Congress, and the fact that a blowout preventer a few thousand feet under the water has been spewing oil for a month -- and you start to realize that the narratives about his "feelings" and "leadership" and "tone" are just ex post facto rationalizations. You realize that these narratives, as Jon Chait <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75317/political-analysis-and-bullshit">explains</a>, are most properly understood as "bullshit."<br /><br />I think our pundit class would be a whole lot better if they acknowledged these simple truths: first, things <em>happen to countries</em>; then, presidents respond to those things that happen; those responses are bounded by the nature of those things that are happening (say, how much expertise the federal government has on offshore drilling), and, moreover, by the conditions of the world we live in. While the president steers the ship of state, he can't be held responsible for the conditions of the water.<br /><br />After all, isn't this perspective what drew us to Obama in the first place? At the center of his campaign was a promise: to move us beyond the theatrics of politics -- beyond the cynical new left/new right vocabulary of our parents, and beyond the erratic "suspend my campaign to fix the financial crisis!!" cowboy politics of his opponent -- and towards a politics of reason, deliberation and decency, even when that doesn't play so well in the media. Towards the politics of getting things done. That was the "change you can believe in" and it is perhaps the man's deepest conviction: that we can be responsible and civic even in times of great urgency.<br /><br />So let the guy be calm in crisis. That's why we elected him, right?<br /><br />-<br /><br />* Adopt this perspective and you see why racism is best understood as <em>what you choose to do</em> not what you <em>feel and claim</em>. (Re: <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/couple-more-thoughts-on-rand-paul/">Rand Paul</a>.)<br /><br /><em>Photo credit: U.S. Coast Guard</em>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-64135522476658942262010-07-29T01:31:00.002-04:002010-07-29T01:34:21.040-04:00Weighing In: Manliness, A Bad Word for a Good Thing<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTANR4Gzxqux19dKvW50DhVodunEVUipVD2lKqjV1GTfXV4xh-5fDAlhfRuIZppdW15dztHlWlmd-wwdVRqa8VmkW1jZozJdKB02e7AhrtPByxduc3tTN0PVeyAxX65L2eCBXF/s1600/william-james-3-sized+(1).jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTANR4Gzxqux19dKvW50DhVodunEVUipVD2lKqjV1GTfXV4xh-5fDAlhfRuIZppdW15dztHlWlmd-wwdVRqa8VmkW1jZozJdKB02e7AhrtPByxduc3tTN0PVeyAxX65L2eCBXF/s320/william-james-3-sized+(1).jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499197247499800930" /></a>In his essay "<a href="http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jsignificant.html">What Makes A Life Significant</a>," William James gives voice to the "manly virtues" that Wagley, in her "<a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/5/10/men-kimmel-manliness-women/">Defense of Manliness</a>," seems to want to defend. I say "seems" because, <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/an-assault-on-the-defense-of-manliness/">like Sam</a>, I'm not exactly sure what her article is advocating for. If it's anything like what James wanted when he called for a life of "precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger" then I'm all for her program. But if it's something that only men can do or be....well, then we have a problem.<br /><br />James's essay takes the form of a search. He wants to find out why his blissful little vacation at a place called the Chautaqua Lake Assembly Grounds left him feeling <em>so unsatisfied</em>.<br /><blockquote>I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.<br /><br />And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,-I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."</blockquote><br />I'm told that many students consider this essay one of the best things they've ever read. (Harvard had <a href="http://www.faculty.harvard.edu/about-office/events/741/what-makes-life-significant">a wonderful panel</a> in the essay's honor a few weeks ago.) Ultimately, Traveler James tells us that the significant life must require idealism <em>wedded with struggle</em><em>. </em>We have to "back up" our "ideal visions" he says, "with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have <em>depth, </em>if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character."<br /><br />Did you catch that phrase, "manly virtue"? Yes, it's unfortunate. But James <em>clearly</em> thought that his ideal, this <em>strenuousness</em> of life, was a universal good (and in fact, that's central to one of his points, that "progress" through time, from one culture to another, doesn't necessarily make our lives more meaningful. Struggle is a universal fact of a significant life.) And furthermore, James was writing in the at the turn of century, when the word "manly" wasn't yet an embarrassingly outmoded word. So we forgive him; his essay is universalist and sympathetic, and it's beautiful.<br /><br />You can't say the same about Wagley's "Defense of Manliness." At a basic level, here's an extremely frustrating read. One wonders in vain when reading her piece: Is manliness reserved for men? Is being a man a sufficient condition for manliness? A necessary condition? And what does it have to do with modern American society (and Risk and mandolins and all the rest)?<br /><br />Consider Wagley's thesis: "Our culture emasculates men by stripping manhood of its corresponding virtues and reducing manliness to predatory sexuality. " We have two lemmas here: first, that we have "stripped manhood of its corresponding virtues"; and second, that we have "reduced manliness to predatory sexuality."<br /><br />I think the second point is patently wrong. The fact that James still resonates with us is indication that the life of strenuousness and courage has not fallen out of favor. This seems plainly right. Senators authorize wars in order to not seem "weak"; firefighters run into collapsing buildings to save their fellow Americans. Who says we don't lionize strength in America?<br /><br />Which gets us to the first lemma in the sentence quoted above, which is that we have "stripped manhood of <em>its corresponding virtues</em>" (emphasis mine). This is unseemly. Wagley maintains that manliness "corresponds" with manhood. That only men can be manly. How else are we supposed to read sentences like these: "Denigrating manhood harms society because when we assault manliness, we devalue men." Here "men," "manhood" and "manliness" are one in the same; we "denigrate" one and thus we "devalue" the other.<br /><br />This is sexism plain and simple -- and it's also, one notes, a massive contradiction. If we value courage, bravery, endurance etc -- as James does -- than shouldn't we want <em>all</em> people to exude these traits? Shouldn't we want to extend them to women as well as men, to old people as well as young people, to everyone? So Wagley backtracks. She writes in response to Sam's post: "I certainly hope that if nothing else, people might say I have some “manly” qualities myself!"<br /><br />You read this and you think, Is she just totally confused about what the problem is? The problem is not the ideal; the problem is the word. "Manly" is an old-fashion and misogynistic word that undermines the very point that one might rightly be trying to make. It excludes and denigrates the very people one is trying to convince; it's sexist and a waste of time and I simply wouldn't recommend we keep using it. If Wagley has some idea of "nobility" in mind, then I suggest she reframe it in a way that all of us can benefit from hearing. I suggest she look to James as a model.<br /><br /><em>Photocredit: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wm_james.jpg">Wikimedia</a></em>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-51437878000056139102010-07-29T01:27:00.003-04:002010-07-29T01:30:53.572-04:00Judging Kagan, Judging Us<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimvVLKpXV5P5MhJ2ZWdoDtd8URpVHiW1JY7bzYMzjes6kRq8pUZkKXq7JwfwKdCXE1b-G6VTw6W_n0MZAyD-MgsnveKu12G_JoRRQzfkJ6ui9IarX-LusRGT2YwkNkvi-ms4s8/s1600/ts-brooks-1901.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimvVLKpXV5P5MhJ2ZWdoDtd8URpVHiW1JY7bzYMzjes6kRq8pUZkKXq7JwfwKdCXE1b-G6VTw6W_n0MZAyD-MgsnveKu12G_JoRRQzfkJ6ui9IarX-LusRGT2YwkNkvi-ms4s8/s320/ts-brooks-1901.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499196074745970130" /></a>I like to think of David Brooks as The New York Times' "Chronicler of the Powerful and Rich." He's gotten some pretty extravagant (and <em>hilarious</em>) <a href="http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/10/brooks-let-them-eat-work/">criticism</a> for his work as the Chronicler of the P&R -- work which should basically be read as a twice-weekly "What Should I Think?" guide for Upper East Side Manhattanites -- but for the most part, honestly, he does a really <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=5R6Bx3LRBuEC&dq=bobos+in+paradise&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=MZ3pS7D7GIH58Abq9bznDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false">brilliant job</a> of it. I love the guy.<br /><br />Particularly brilliant, I think, is his piece on Elena Kagan:<br /><blockquote>About a decade ago, one began to notice a <strong>profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses</strong>. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.<br /><br />If they had any flaw,<strong> it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.</strong><br /><br />If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.<br /><br />Kagan has many friends along the Acela corridor, thanks to her time at Hunter College High School, Princeton, Harvard and in Democratic administrations. So far, I haven’t met anybody who is not an admirer. She is apparently smart, deft and friendly. She was a superb teacher. She has the ability to process many points of view and to mediate between different factions.<br /><br />Yet she also is<strong> apparently prudential, deliberate and cautious.</strong> She does not seem to be one who leaps into a fray when the consequences might be unpredictable. “She was one of the most strategic people I’ve ever met, and that’s true across lots of aspects of her life,” John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10kagan.html?ref=politics">told The Times</a>. “She is very effective at playing her cards in every setting I’ve seen.”<br /><br />Tom Goldstein, the publisher of the highly influential <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/">SCOTUSblog</a>, has described Kagan as “extraordinarily — almost artistically — careful. I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.”</blockquote><br />Kagan seems like a lot of kids I've known: perfectly reasonable and perfectly well-liked; highly strategic and highly effective; and totally, utterly averse to risk (and its rewards). I buy Lawrence Lessig's <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/a-case-for-kagan_b_551511.html">case</a> that this is what our conservative Court needs most: not a "great dissenter," but a great "majority maker" for liberals. And I also get that Kagan is nominated to be judge, and that reasonableness and carefulness go with the territory.<br /><br />But I read Brooks' account of the meritocracy and I nod. I think: "What about us?" Not judges, not majority-makers, we <em>don't</em> have to be perfectly reasonable, perfectly well-liked. In fact, I think there's a lot to be said for that George Bernard Shaw line that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man [or woman]"; that progress depends on people who aren't afraid of trouble; on those who believe in life as a playing out of Beckett's injunction to "try again, fail again, fail better." I don't think Kagan (at least not by reports) would agree that this is how life unfolds, and that's fine. Neither would the Organization Kids, definitionally, and that's fine too. But that doesn't mean Brooks is wrong; his critique -- that the meritocracy creates <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19brooks.html">new power</a> and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-kid/2164/">thus new people</a> -- is still trenchant. Just look at Ivy League universities today...<br /><br />Thoughts?<br /><br /><em>Photo credit: </em><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html"><em>NYTimes</em></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-71713803549760848432010-07-29T00:41:00.003-04:002010-07-29T01:26:55.509-04:00Not Victims: Another Case Against the Clubs<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7KlCqs8c6KWN2dF6d0ouSGPO8x4ZkhjpGzaMWsmmcBpPKpu3HXesDhNHlzuMhz86gFsq17625w-GSWLs47fXTh67rRQ8tk_2nwh1e0D5IOdQ5VaPjVKYrv5NZ1p6WhIA1_vsr/s1600/finalclub.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7KlCqs8c6KWN2dF6d0ouSGPO8x4ZkhjpGzaMWsmmcBpPKpu3HXesDhNHlzuMhz86gFsq17625w-GSWLs47fXTh67rRQ8tk_2nwh1e0D5IOdQ5VaPjVKYrv5NZ1p6WhIA1_vsr/s320/finalclub.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499193114909721938" /></a>I want to comment on Sam's <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/final-clubs-and-gender-relations/">final club post</a>, because I find it compelling but nevertheless insufficient. Here's why.<br /><br />Sam gives us the standard-line "progressive critique” of the clubs – which has been made many times before, by the likes of April Yee <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/11/4/cutting-final-clubs-out-of-the/">here</a>, Sabrina Lee <a href="http://www.perspy.com/?p=198">here</a>, and most recently by Daniel Herz-Roiphe, a club member, <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/4/15/clubs-social-final-club/">here</a> – and more or less says the following: final clubs are bad because they perpetuate racism, elitism, and sexism (in some form or another) and because they glorify a crude caricature of masculinity, a throwback traditionalism, a groupthink, and so on. Sabrina Lee writes that, "Final clubs, as inherently exclusive institutions, foster a homosocial environment that creates a whole host of social problems, including intensified notions of male superiority, heightened sexual aggression, heteronormativity, and the inability to ethically evaluate one’s own actions."<br /><br />To me, this critique goes too far – and then again, not far enough.<br /><br />First, I suspect that the argument, on its merits, is weaker than some believe. All evidence points to the fact that the clubs are more racially and economically diverse than ever before. They might not be “diverse” in a substantive sense (I’ll get to that in a second) but it's true that the progressive critique is getting progressively weaker. I haven’t done any fieldwork, but I do have final club friends. The final clubbers that I know are not elitist, or racist, or homophobic. Not even close.<br /><br />Do final clubs propagate certain race and class norms? <a href="http://www.ivygateblog.com/2007/09/an-extremely-douchey-craigslist-posting/">Yes. That's important.</a> But it’s hardly damning. Final clubs can, literally, do what they want (within the bounds of the law). And institutionally, they're perfectly right in selecting for and preserving their own self-image – which institutions, after all, do not? The Crimson? The Hasty Pudding Theatricals? The Advocate? The IOP? Any sociology of the Harvard extracurricular scene would reveal that there is a multiplicity of sub-cultures here, each erecting hierarchies predicated on subtle judgment, explicit exclusion, implicit control, etc. Do final clubs restrict women? Yes. But so do frats.<br /><br />My point isn't that final club culture is good -- far from it, in my opinion. <em>Of course </em>final clubs should let in women. <em>Of course </em>they should be more open, more tolerant of diversity, less “homosocial,” less repressive – I’ll get to all that. My point, instead, is that the progressive critique goes about arguing for the right thing in the wrong way. By postulating the existence of final club “victims” -- of people on the receiving ends of final clubs’ deprivation – the progressive critique makes the case against the clubs litigious. My impulse is to say: Harvard students aren't victims! Don't pretend that they are. That’s a low view of your peers -- of the final club males, who aren’t criminals, of the folks that show up to the parties (who really do go voluntarily...and look so pretty and have such a nice time) and of the vast majority of people that don’t care about the clubs one way or another. As a court case, the progressive critique is a laughing stock.<br /><br />The progressive critique is too easy to dismiss; it overplays its hand; it’s impossibly adversarial. No one is going to admit that they’re a sexist pig or a racist pig or a pig pig. And most Harvard students <em>have no reason</em> <em>to. </em>If that's our only argument, then we're always going to be shouting from the outside.<br /><br />Second, more importantly: My problem with the progressive critique is that it <em>lets the final clubs off the hook</em>. I know this from experience. When my final club friends hear the argument that the clubs are racist/elitist/sexist, they invariably tune out. They agree on substance that being a chauvinist pig is bad, but they look at their own record (non-white, not rich, loving long-term partner, liberal, whatever) and they assume they're in the clear. But they're not. Supporting final clubs is still wrong, and we need a vocabulary to express that, even to the hard cases (especially to the hard cases, for they -- not the rapists proper -- are the ones we might hope to convince).<br /><br />I begin with the premise that while racism/elitism/sexism are<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "> necessary</span> standards for anyone to be held against, they're definitely not<span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" mce_fixed="1" style="font-style: italic; "> sufficient </span>standards. “Not raping girls" is not the sine qua non of your responsibilities to this community; being a Harvard student means so much more. My case is that final clubs are bad because they <span mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">don't do good</span> – because they exist in this community and yet never give back to it; because they have resources and yet work only for themselves; because they don’t try to make this school (or this world) a better place.<br /><br />In other words, final clubs don't break the <em>rules</em> of our community; they violate its <em>spirit</em>. To quote from the student handbook: "By accepting membership in the University, an individual joins a community ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change." Final clubs disgrace the premise of Harvard community. They reject the our togetherness: their resources are spent helping themselves or aggressively excluding others. And they reject some of our most basic values as an educational institution – values like openness, merit, diversity and public-spiritedness.<br /><br />It’s not the students who are backwards, it's the institutions. They exist like old, malignant growths lodged between a University that’s democratizing and a world that’s more meritocratic and diverse than ever before. So I speak not as an activist but as a consultant. I’d say to the clubs, if given the chance: in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, power might have come from exclusion and traditionalism pastiche and etiquette. But the world is changing. You need another strategy. In today's world, power comes from inclusion, from networks, from creativity and heterodoxy and awesomeness. So long as the clubs reject these principles, they represent retarding forces on the progress of our moral and intellectual sensibilities as a community. They slow us down.<br /><br />My case against final clubs, then, is<em> not</em> that they’re bad because they hurt some of us. They're bad because they're not good. In situating themselves in opposition to our community they hurt themselves and, in that way, they hurt all of us.<br /><br />Photo Credit: Flickr stream of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eileansiar/3294360635/">eileansiar</a><br /><b><br /></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-41419712611834489672010-07-28T23:53:00.004-04:002010-07-29T00:33:55.404-04:00Half the Sky<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; "><span style="font-style: italic; ">Crossposted from the Harvard Political Revi</span><span><i>ew <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/half-the-sky/">blog</a>:</i></span></span></div><div><br /></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4PveqRS4KYBTPE4PjStOzmli2DEE1c6fd-dE57HjvR4tBaFKONCgHrhLTSHZMVQ6Xe4KKzy1vCxLuKFc2p82kT-V8brDZjXf4KXBp4iSFbOzVEfF5UayHAsg-9qcUnoEjYSsR/s320/Half-the-Sky.jpg" style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 100px; height: 100px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499181435134775074" /><div>Last week was slavery week on the HPRgument (apparently!). We talked about "<a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/are-interns-slaves/">intern slavery</a>," <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/weighing-in-are-interns-slaves/">twice</a>, and then <a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/the-doublespeak-of-governor-bob-mcdonnell/">American slavery</a>. But what about today? Slavery of course is still a very real problem; in absolute terms, by every estimate, there are more slaves today than there ever were in history, and the trade of human lives is more active and more hazardous than before. At the heart of this trade is women. Gender-based crimes, like sex slavery, rape, human trafficking and medical/social neglect persist with astonishing pervasiveness -- and represent, according to Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their excellent new book <em>Half the Sky</em>, the world's greatest moral tragedy and also it's greatest opportunity.</div><div><br /><em>Half the Sky</em> is an extraordinary book. I recently read it and for anyone that cares about development, human rights or the future of the world, I would recommend the same. The authors' thesis is that while the central moral challenge of the 19th century was chattel slavery, and of 20th century was totalitarianism - a form of mental, societal slavery - the "paramount moral challenge of this century" will be the "struggle for gender equality around the world," the struggle for the emancipation of women. They hope that their book represents something of a founding text for a new international social movement.<br /><br />Consider a few of the facts that they bring up:<br /><p style="padding-left: 30px;">"More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because thye were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of hte twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine 'gendercide' in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century."</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">"All told, girls in India from one to five are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes."</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">There are one million to two million women currently enslaved as prostitutes in India alone -- women who are raped for hours on end, living in cells, for no pay</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">Women aged fifteen to forty-four worldwide “are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined”</p><br />I <a id="mg:q" title="reviewed the book" href="http://www.perspy.com/?p=585">reviewed the book</a> in full for The Perspective Magazine, the campus' liberal monthly. My central argument was that the authors managed to re-write the vocabulary of worldwide female oppression, transitioning it away from the language of feminism and "critical gender studies" and towards a new language grounded in moral struggle and humanitarianism. <em>Half The Sky</em> is in this way an exemplar of the genre coined by John Stauffer and Tim McCarthy: "protest literature." It deploys its measured prose style for the sake of moral advocacy. A rare and tough thing to pull off. From <a id="xiok" title="my review" href="http://www.perspy.com/?p=585">my review</a>:<br /><blockquote>The authors pay no heed to these cautions – to these debates about agency, stylization, and discursive embeddedness (or to the older debates about the patriarchy, the sisterhood and the creation of “the other”). They ignore these debates at their peril, but also to their credit. Critical gender theory – I’m not the first to suggest – has the paradoxical effect of impeding the very social change that it advocates. For example, how can one seek to emancipate women without consensus even on what is meant by “woman”? How can one pledge support to the cause of the marginalized and oppressed worldwide, while denying one’s own prerogative to transcend one’s culture and fight for the other? In the authors’ words:<br /><blockquote>So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize footbinding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures…</blockquote><br />Kristof and WuDunn decide to bowdlerize the complexity of gender studies for the sake of their movement. In other words, they ignore gender studies for the sake of the women themselves.</blockquote></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-4531979902921357142010-07-17T21:11:00.000-04:002010-07-17T21:12:20.544-04:00Weighing In: The Great Tax Debate<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; "><span style="font-style: italic; ">Crossposted from the Harvard Political Revi</span><span><i>ew </i></span><i><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/weighing-in-the-great-tax-debate/">blog</a></i><span><i>:</i></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>The Great Tax Debate begins every year in the blogosphere around April 15th. On the line are normative claims, like whether and to what extent we should be distributing resources communally. But the facts are easy to get wrong too. So today I thought I'd lay out some factual correctives to Peyton's exemplar of the Great Tax Debate form, "<a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/robin-hood-strikes-again/">Robin Hood Strikes Again</a>" before engaging in my own argument about whether, in fact, taxes are the eevvviiilll, un-American thing that they're often made out to be. My claim: tax day should be a national holiday.<br /><br />First, Peyton points out that "47 percent of Americans will pay no federal income taxes for FY2009, either because their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions, and exemptions to eliminate their liability." And from this he concludes that "for nearly half of American households this year, April 15 will be no different from any other day."<br /><br />But this is simply untrue -- and its untruth is telling and important. On April 15th, Americans pay Federal taxes and they <em>also pay state and local taxes</em>. While the federal tax bracket clearly tilts upwards, state taxes are not only less progressive, they're often outrightly regressive. Consider this chart:<br /><br /><a href="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/state-and-local-taxes1.jpg"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><img class="size-full wp-image-2995 alignnone" title="state and local taxes" src="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/state-and-local-taxes1.jpg" alt="" width="435" height="301" /></span></span></a><br /><br />(from <a id="fzg:" title="Ezra Klein" href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2009&base_name=why_do_state_and_local_taxes_h">Ezra Klein</a>)<br /><br />So we should actually be looking at what the CBO calls the "<a id="ao_v" title="effective tax rate" href="http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=226">effective tax rate</a>," which includes federal <em>and</em> state and local taxes. Considered in this way the tax distribution looks a hell of lot less progressive:<br /><br /><a href="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/taxrates2.jpg"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2997" title="taxrates2" src="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/taxrates2.jpg" alt="" width="533" height="405" /></span></span></a><br /><br />(from Citizens for Tax Justice, from <a id="r2bf" title="the NYTimes" href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/just-how-progressive-is-the-tax-system/">the NYTimes</a>)<br /><br />Second, we have a confusion between <em>share</em> of taxes being paid and tax <em>rate</em>. Peyton points out that the top 10% of income earners pay 73% of the total share of income taxes. That seems unfair! But wait a second...if you make a lot of money -- I mean, a <em>real</em> lot of money -- then you're <em>going to be paying a lot taxes</em> no matter what the tax structure looks like. Thus the fact that the top 10% pay 73% of the taxes could just as easily be an illustration of how unequal our society is as an illustration of how progressive (Robin Hood-like) our tax code is. In a world where (for example) there are only five people, if one person makes $1000 dollars and the rest make $10-$100, that first person's share of the tax burden is going to be much higher than anyone else<em>'s </em><em>regardless of how the tax system is structured</em> (indeed even if it is regressive). And so it is in America, where the share of income inequality dwarfs tax rate inequality. As Ezra Klein writes: "Indeed, it's only because the sheer levels of income inequality in this country are frankly unintuitive that [conservatives] can even write this sort of dreck. People hear that the top 20 percent pay almost 70 percent of the country's income taxes and nod their head. That's unfair! But it mainly seems unfair because people don't know the top 20 percent accounts for almost 60 percent of the national income." His chart comparing income share to tax rate is informative:<br /><br /><a href="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/taxbyquintiles.jpg"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2998" title="taxbyquintiles" src="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/taxbyquintiles.jpg" alt="" width="429" height="307" /></span></span></a><br /><br />(from <a id="wchu" title="Ezra Klein" href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2009&base_name=the_tyranny_of_the_income_tax">Ezra Klein</a>)<br /><br />Taken all together, what you have is people paying total taxes pretty commensurate to the amount that they are actually earning (despite Petyon's deceptive numbers):<br /><div><br /><br /><a href="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/share-of-total-taxes-1.jpg"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2999" title="share of total taxes-1" src="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/share-of-total-taxes-1.jpg" alt="" width="505" height="320" /></span></span></a><br /><br />(from <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2009&base_name=why_do_state_and_local_taxes_h#comments">Ezra Klein</a>)<br /><br />Thus, the conservative argument that the rich pay too much in taxes, and that the poor don't pay their fair share, is quite simply a misrepresentation of the facts. Our tax code is <em>not</em> "extremely" redistributionist in any commensensical way, where the wealthy give more than they take. In fact, the defining trend of the past forty years has been the explosive growth of pre-tax income for the rich and at the same time the systematic dismantling of their effective tax burdens. We've seen inequality expand, and the tools to counteract it diminish.<br /><br />Here are tax rates from 2004 compared against 1960:<br /><br /></div><br /><a href="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screen-shot-2010-04-11-at-3.54.18-PM.png"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3000" title="Screen shot 2010-04-11 at 3.54.18 PM" src="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screen-shot-2010-04-11-at-3.54.18-PM.png" alt="" width="485" height="299" /></span></span></a><br /><br />And here's income share for the rich over time:<br /><br /><a href="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screen-shot-2010-04-11-at-3.55.24-PM.png"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3001" title="Screen shot 2010-04-11 at 3.55.24 PM" src="http://hpronline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screen-shot-2010-04-11-at-3.55.24-PM.png" alt="" width="488" height="382" /></span></span></a><br /><br />(from <a href="http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezJEP07taxprog.pdf">Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez</a>)<br /><br />Peyton asks in his post: "What is the endgame?" In other words: How far does Obama want to go to "spread the wealth around"? The answer for the progressive is simply to note that America is today among the most unequal developed countries in the world (with a Geni coefficient about the same as China's). Since the 1979, the amount of pretax income controled by the top 1% has nearly doubled, to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. This wasn't caused by the tax bracket, and it's definitely not -- and should definitely not -- be solved by it, but the fact is the rich are taking in more than what they are giving back (relative to before) and that this is inimical to many of our country's strongest values, like democracy (which depends on cross-cutting similarities between people), and freedom (which depends on economic independence) and steady economic progress (which, historically, comes from long term investments in the welfare of people).<br /><br />I use charts and figures here so as to keep the debate on the level of facts. But this debate is more than that. I personally think, with <a id="sygm" title="Cass Sunstein" href="http://home.uchicago.edu/~csunstei/celebrate.html">Cass Sunstein</a>, that tax day should be a national holiday -- a time to celebrate the fact that we have access to all these private goods only because they are backed up by this collective, communal good, the American government. Without taxes we wouldn't have police departments, fire departments, or roads; we couldn't know who owns what and we couldn't protect it if we did; our free speech wouldn't mean anything and our right to assemble, like the Tea Partiers' rights, couldn't be guaranteed. Peyton implies that taxes divide us; in fact, they do they opposite -- they affirm our commitment to the American communal project, to the American national idea.<br /><br />Thus it seems to me that the conservatives' insistence on bemoaning April 15th every year is the very opposite of the patriotism that it pretends to be.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-33807050732134297402010-07-17T21:04:00.003-04:002010-07-17T21:10:32.697-04:00Are Interns Slaves?<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; "><span style="font-style: italic; ">Crossposted from the Harvard Political Revi</span><span><i>ew </i></span><i><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/are-interns-slaves/">blog</a></i><span><i>:</i></span></span></div><br /><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe2nxLXvJKF784f78mh0VjJtM16ZRGonlCZ1vThc4NoIxj8j7NK48zcKcG4neONP2l59eZtdyzgpkeSCER7HF1vxhzKefaTpU0PYW9VUtUGfJQQFYN9zHmqbUSD8mzew1t8v28/s320/National-College-Conference-for-Political-Engagement_slideshow-300x187.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495047151642640114" />No -- that would be a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=SBQaVwsVmu4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=free+the+slaves&source=bl&ots=LKcho1Rzsa&sig=BkUT53jL6edPwv80gre039quR58&hl=en&ei=U6i2S6KiMIyg8AT-vt3qAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=&f=false">tasteless joke</a>. But they <i>do</i> perform a lot of work for free! As The New York Times explains in a piece that should have been, in retrospect, pretty obvious: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss">Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say</a><br /><blockquote>“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.</blockquote><blockquote>Kathyrn Edwards, a researcher at the <a title="More articles about the Economic Policy Institute." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/economic_policy_institute/index.html?inline=nyt-org">Economic Policy Institute</a> and co-author of a <a title="Edwards’s study" href="http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/pm160/">new study</a> on internships, told of a female intern who brought a sexual harassment complaint that was dismissed because the intern was not an employee.<br /><br />“A serious problem surrounding unpaid interns is they are often not considered employees and therefore are not protected by employment discrimination laws,” she said.</blockquote><br />I'm divided on this. On the one hand, the unpaid internship is pretty unseemly. You've got a system that (a) inflates the premium on pre-job work experience, increasing the opportunity costs for students pursuing other (potentially much more useful) things during their free time; that (b) regressively benefits rich students, or students with access to rich grant programs; and (c) tends to reduce available work for paid workers. The evasion of payment creates an effective subsidy for the inefficient, plantation-like company.<br /><br />But on the other hand, creative, non-monetary economies are important. Consider, um, <em>practically all of the internet</em>: Wikipedia/Flickr/Blogspot/Twitter/Facebook. These are sites that tap into some mysterious mix of human urges -- the need to express oneself, to gain status, to be less lonely -- creating free culture and making our world a better place. Not all free labor is slavery; indeed, it's opposite: it's liberating.<br /><br />So the original question begs another one: if interns are slaves, then what about HPR bloggers? If so, is our world better for that?<br /><br /><em>Photo credit: </em><a href="http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Multimedia-Center/All-Slideshows/National-College-Conference-for-Political-Engagement-2008/(image)/12"><em>The Institute of Politics</em></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-70966374667199984942010-07-17T21:00:00.002-04:002010-07-17T21:03:41.231-04:00Politics Is About Doing Things<span style="font-style: italic;">Crossposted from the Harvard Political Revi</span><span><i>ew </i></span><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/politics-is-about-doing-things/"><i>blog</i></a><span><i>:</i></span><br /><br /><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYbiYIYMcn9sJ2r-SNAmBSUT3HyznsKH2xIhZjo5k6o1HcCuAS4a7d_lWtEWMZxBgrsCfuL418DxlXWwBIuxQMZEWiV-ZeJfL4q6YG0KEMwjTCNkrfQaLpBVlY6jVa8JJP_lm5/s320/barack-obama-rally-north-carolina-1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495045449894819394" />Matthew Yglesias has written <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-21/how-the-gop-made-it-happen/">an excellent analysis</a> of the relationship between Republican obstructionism and the size and scope of the health care reform bill. He calls Mitch McConnell the "unsung hero of comprehensive reform":<br /><blockquote>We should also, however, spare a thought for the unsung hero of comprehensive reform, McConnell and his GOP colleagues, who pushed their “no c<br /><br />ompromise” strategy to the breaking point and beyond. The theory was that non-cooperation would stress the Democratic coalition and cause the public to begin to question the enterprise. And it largely worked. But at crucial times when wavering Democrats were eager for a lifeline, the Republicans absolutely refused to throw one. <strong>White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other key players at various points wanted to scale aspirations down to a few regulatory tweaks and some expansion of health care for children. This idea had a lot of appeal to many in the party. But it always suffered from a fatal flaw—the Republicans’ attitude made it seem that a smaller bill was no more feasible than a big bill. Consequently, even though Scott Brown’s victory blew the Democrats off track, the basic logic of the situation pushed them back on course to universal health care.</strong></blockquote><br />This makes a lot of sense. If the Right signals uncompromising opposition, then the Left is not going to compromise. You can't clap with one hand, and you can't be bipartisan with one party. So while righteous, unyeilding opposition might make for good political theater -- and might whip your supporters behind you -- it has the depressing effect of necessarily removing your voice from the deliberation table, and of making the final result of reform (if it does manage to pass, as Health Care Reform did) unreflective of your thoughts or your imprimatur.<br /><br />That's bad politics for the Right. Notice the time horizons of this strategy: while relentless obstructionism and mendacity helped Republicans boost their numbers for a few months during 2009-10, and it might help them win a midterm cycle in November, it also ensured that their ideas would have almost no impact on the question of how to we value health insurance as a country and how we should deliver it.<br /><br />And guess what? That question -- the question of how we value things and how we deliver them, the question Republicans recused themselves from -- <em>is what politics is all about</em>. Politics is about delivering goods to people. It's about deliberating on the value of goods and then bringing them to the public -- goods like economic growth, domestic security, education opportunities, environmental health and so on.<em> <span style="font-style: normal;">Health care is one of the goods that politics concerns itself with. And thus the question of whether the Health Care Reform will prove to be smart politics will be answered on the basis of if -- and only if -- it effectively delivers more and better health care to more people (at tolerable costs). I think that it will. Some people probably disagree. The purpose of the senate's slow deliberative process is so that these different views will clash together to shape a better bill -- one that delivers more goods to more Americans. </span></em><br /><br /><em><span style="font-style: normal;">The absurdity of the Republican's position is that they chose to ignore this basic fact of what politics is about. They acted as if<em> the deliberation</em> on the bill was itself<em> the politics</em><em> of the bill</em>. They acted as if politics were not about helping people's lives but, instead, about a kabuki warfare of lies and messaging in the realm of ideas and rightwing talk radio shows.</span></em><br /><br />No, the politics of the Health Care Reform begins right now. If Health Care Reform helps the middle class get better health care, if it makes it easier for people to go out and start businesses, and makes sure they don't get denied coverage for pre-existing conditions; if it helps to lower the federal deficit and lower the number of deaths in this country from insufficient coverage, <em>then the bill is good politics</em>. If it achieves these things -- and I believe it will -- and Americans are aware that it's doing these things -- and that's a matter of messaging -- then the Democrats have won the political contest. And the Republicans have lost. And they've lost mostly because they didn't try. Politics is about doing things; they chose to just say "no."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10711923.post-81880291111001221862010-07-17T20:56:00.002-04:002010-07-17T20:59:37.317-04:00Rape Is Not Ambiguous<span style="font-style: italic;">Crossposted from the Harvard Political Rev</span><span><i>iew </i></span><a href="http://hpronline.org/hprgument/rape-is-not-ambiguous/"><i>blog</i></a><span><i>:</i></span><div><span></span><i><br /></i><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0MfthuwVmMjYlH83bku4S7974_jq3kGrrBD2UQgE6voqWnY2Dg4FAkLWCnz7F9N7soI946KfWYZINQtK5KO4DxTUjgpoi78v9dAmcONFb9So7wUHTsLkLm6LG8eGO_KZ-wIfI/s320/dancingpsd-1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495044441785591586" /><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124272157">NPR News</a> has an excellent article up this week on the persistence of rape and sexual violence on college campuses. In honor of <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/3/8/womens-week-harvard-women/">Women's Week</a> and "Feminist Coming Out Day" here at Harvard, I thought I'd make a few comments:<br /><blockquote>There's a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says <strong>this assumption is wrong</strong> —-and dangerously so...</blockquote><br /><blockquote>He found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?"<br /><br />Or: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?"<br /><br /><strong>About 1 in 16 men answered "yes" to these or similar questions</strong>....<br /><br />It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it's not. "They are very forthcoming," he says. "In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They're quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag."<br /><br />What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. <strong>On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.</strong><br /><br />And these offenders on campuses — just like men in prison for rape — look for the most vulnerable women. Lisak says that on a college campus, the women most likely to be sexually assaulted are freshmen.</blockquote><br />Some people seem to believe that campus rape is an "unclear" or "difficult" issue. They say that alcohol sufficiently complicates our judgments, and that, for this reason, the term "rape" is often not appropriate. This article utterly destroys that case.<br /><br />Stated most strongly, the "rape is a tough issue" argument says that anti-rape campaigns do not emphasize enough <em>the sovereign choice of the female. </em>Women need to be clear about their sexual choices. Sex -- like all matters of the human heart -- is naturally mixed-up and full of indecision, and part of what it means to believe in the equality of the sexes is to believe that both women and men are strong enough to make their desires decisively clear. They argue that "yes, maybe, I don't know" cases, infused with alcohol, are not rape. They say we shouldn't be labeling rapists retrospectively.<br /><br />But the fact is, we're not! As this article explains, the vast majority of rape cases are, in fact, pellucidly clear. They involve repeat offenders who <em>know</em> the sexual choices of their victims, and they in turn know that they're violating those choices. The face of campus rape is not the drunk girl and guy who do something that they kinda sorta regret. The face of campus rape is the man who subdues and violates his victim.<br /><br />To my mind, the arguments about the "confounding" effects of alcohol are more than just canards -- they're close cousins to the blame-the-victim arguments that have been trotted out to <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8515592.stm">exonerate rapists</a> all around world and all throughout history. For the vast majority of cases-- alcohol or no alcohol, peers or strangers -- rape is not ambiguous.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0