The Liberal Conviction

Marty Peretz and the Intent/Effect Principle

2010-09-30T17:56:00.001-04:00

Crossposted from the HPRgument.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 raison d’etre of this University.

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.

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?

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.

To help, I suggest a simple principle: speech that hurts people in effect is different from speech that hurts people by intent. 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 effect of hurting people, but the intent 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.

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.

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.

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.

How Not To Write About Policy (a response to Dylan Matthews)

2010-09-17T11:03:00.000-04:00

Crossposted from the HPRgument.

Dylan Matthews* has a post up on his blog called “How Not To Write About Policy” — it’s a takedown of an essay by Mark Greif entitled Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution, 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 only one right way 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.

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….”

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.

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 N+1, a small, leftist, lit journal, Greif is not playing the wonk game at all?

Luckily, we don’t have to guess. In fact, Greif explains exactly why he made an absurd proposal…at the very beginning of his essay:

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 Mother Jones and Z and American Spectator in the back row, or with the Nation and Weekly Standard and the American Prospect 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…

To shoot back indignantly, as Dylan does, that “He’s not doing what the American Prospect is doing!” is thus to merely repeat what Greif himself has stipulated. N+1 is not the American Prospect! Which it’s not. Which Greif tells us. In fact, he even has an explanation:

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.

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.

“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. 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.

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 once wrote: ”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 the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn to once again pose them.”

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.”).

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.

Geek Power

2010-09-05T22:43:00.004-04:00

Crossposted from the HPRgument

Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer hacking:

If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “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.”

And apparently Gates isn’t kidding around. From the New York Times:

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.
“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.”

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 “meaningful stuff that matters.” Websites are easy. Changing the world is hard. And sorry, but Foursquare and Farmville don’t cut it.

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, while the world around them spins. Zuckerberg has spoken eloquently about a “more open world“; 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.

The really ambitious web developers are the ones going out there and trying to fix American democracy or global warming or world poverty. 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.

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.

Heedless Irresponsibility

2010-09-05T02:40:00.000-04:00

Frank Rich on the Iraq War:

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 the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. 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.

For the New School Year

2010-09-04T01:41:00.000-04:00

Crossposted from the HPRgument

Here’s Teddy Roosevelt talking to some undergrads at the University of Paris in 1910:

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….
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.

Of course, when he returned to the States, Roosevelt went into that proverbial arena — 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 bellowed 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.”)

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 won through daring; 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.

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.”

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.

TR wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

An Effete Liberal Book List

2010-09-04T01:39:00.001-04:00

Some good books coming out this September / October:

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris
American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us by Robert Putnam
Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz
Listen to This by Alex Ross
Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert Reich
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Nature History of Innovation by Steven Berlin Johnson
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition by James Kloppenberg

America, Action

2010-08-31T05:25:00.010-04:00

These photos of the 1930s and 1940s America are pretty unbelievable: http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.html

...altogether unbelievable, I would say, how much has changed -- how much we've changed.

I've been reading a book called Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 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.

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 stuff; 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.

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 acting.

A More Inclusive Whole

2010-08-25T19:51:00.011-04:00

Michael Kazin includes a quote from Jurgen Habermas in the introduction to his book The Populist Persuasion: "We must realize that all traditions are ambivalent and that it is therefore necessary to be critical about all of them."

All traditions are ambivalent -- 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." 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.

So it goes. And so it is today, I think. Here's a paragraph from a New Yorker profile of the Tea Party movement:

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.

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).

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:

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. 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.

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.

An Astonishing Lack of Ambition

2010-08-20T21:08:00.000-04:00

This Umair Haque line 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:

Here's what the economic historians of the 23rd Century are going to say about the 20th.

"They built giant, 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."

The Rich and the Very, Very Rich

2010-08-20T00:48:00.014-04:00

James Surowiecki has a New Yorker article 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.

Our tax code should reflect that distinction. It doesn't.* Let's make it.

This is smart, I think. I'll add the obvious disclaimer that I'm not an authority on the economics of tax policy -- we cool, Dylan? -- 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.

Now, there is 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 has generated some data 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 two thirds of all income growth from 2002 to 2007 was contained in the top 1%; that top 1% saw their incomes grow more than ten times as fast as the bottom 90%. America is becoming a staggeringly unequal country; this inequality, unsurprisingly, benefits the very, very richest among us most substantially.

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 made. 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 his blog and you hear William Jennings Bryant singing:

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." - Cross of Gold

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." - Generation M Manifesto

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 ought to develop a vocabulary -- and then a tax code -- that reflects it.

--

* And yes, marginal tax rate is very different from effective tax rate. As my buddy Jon Levine explains, this line is grossly inaccurate: "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."
**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.

Notes on Fiorina's Paper

2010-08-14T21:48:00.004-04:00

Stanford Professor Morris Fiorina wrote a paper 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 channels 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.

Let me try to explain.

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.

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.

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.

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 only 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.

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.

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.

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 more civic engagement -- for true, widespread, representative engagement.

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.

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.

Are payday loans like unprotected sex?

2010-08-11T03:20:00.006-04:00

Sometimes you read a Tyler Cowen post and you think to yourself, simply: Did he really just say that? Here’s Cowen on payday loans and unprotected sex:

The unprotected sex is riskier and less prudent than borrowing money at an annualized rate of two hundred percent. Why prohibit one and not the other? 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.

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.

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.

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 feature of the larger system it exists within.

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.

Maybe the best way to end this is to just quote at length from Mark Greif’s piece On Repressive Sentimentalism, from N+1. (Harvard Magazine’s take on the journal here, 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?

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….
“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.

Weighing In: China and the Race to Green Tech

2010-08-11T03:19:00.002-04:00

Jeff Kalmus argues that the idea of a “race” between China and the United States over green tech (suggested by Will Rafey here) is misguided. Clean energy anywhere benefits everyone, everywhere. If there are no losers, then why call it a “race”?

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.

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.

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.

Yet the fact is I bristle when reading that China is beating the United States — 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.

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 good thing for America. 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’ words:

I can’t think of any major technical innovations occurring in Portugal since the 16th century. Nevertheless, Portugese people benefit 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 very good thing not only for the two billion people who live over there, but for the people who live everyplace else as well.

That said, there clearly are 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 key components of national economic growth. Place matters. Where 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.

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.

What's not to love?

2010-08-11T03:18:00.001-04:00

Theda Skocpol is not one to mince words. Here she is, in classic form, on fiscal austerity measures:

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.

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%) know that Obama lowered their taxes; journalists continue to report widespread confusion 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 “Obama’s Lost Year.”

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 here and Paul Krugman here). Keynes can be counterintuitive (re: why spend more during a depression, when you have less?) and economics is confusing. In this case, the message is blindingly simple — being forausterity means being against job creation and against economic growth.

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.

BP Speech: Our Storyteller in Chief?

2010-08-11T03:17:00.000-04:00

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 hopes for, Obama’s “JFK Speech” where he calls for total energy independence by the end of the decade?

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 why us? why now?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?

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 argued before) 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.

Not being a superhero who can, as Nick Kristof has helpfully suggested, 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 getting things done, an idea that Obama holds — to say that the president has few powers greater than his access to the American people.

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 NYTimes: “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 classic analysis, George Packer wrote, at the end of Obama’s Year One:

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.

Let’s see if Obama can change that tonight. Let’s see if he can tell the story of our moment.

Weighing In: The Big Short

2010-07-29T01:53:00.003-04:00

I just finished Michael Lewis' wonderful book The Big Short. In it, Lewis recasts the financial crisis as a tale of heroism, 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.

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 likes 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 wants the facts on the ground (like housing prices) to turn against him, so his trade volume increases. He can't get enough short sellers!

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.

Carrie Summer argues 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.

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.

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.

Taking Stock of the Spill

2010-07-29T01:35:00.004-04:00

Apparently, Obama's BP Oil Spill performance has been a total disaster. Just check the news. He's weak, aloof, unemotive, Maureen Down explains. "Mr. President, take command," David Gergen urges on CNN. James Carville exhorts: “This president needs to tell BP, "I’m your daddy." And Peggy Noonan, writes, simply, for WSJ: "I don't see how you politically survive this."

Count me among the people that regard politics as primarily the art of getting things done -- 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.

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.

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.

At the same time, this conception of politics as the material fact of getting goods to people in need helps give us perspective on the political back-and-forths of our moment. There's a brilliant article out in Slate subtitled "What if political scientists covered the news?" It reads:

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. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.

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.

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 explains, are most properly understood as "bullshit."

I think our pundit class would be a whole lot better if they acknowledged these simple truths: first, things happen to countries; 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.

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.

So let the guy be calm in crisis. That's why we elected him, right?

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* Adopt this perspective and you see why racism is best understood as what you choose to do not what you feel and claim. (Re: Rand Paul.)

Photo credit: U.S. Coast Guard

Weighing In: Manliness, A Bad Word for a Good Thing

2010-07-29T01:31:00.002-04:00

In his essay "What Makes A Life Significant," William James gives voice to the "manly virtues" that Wagley, in her "Defense of Manliness," seems to want to defend. I say "seems" because, like Sam, 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.

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 so unsatisfied.

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.

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."

I'm told that many students consider this essay one of the best things they've ever read. (Harvard had a wonderful panel in the essay's honor a few weeks ago.) Ultimately, Traveler James tells us that the significant life must require idealism wedded with struggle. 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 depth, if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character."

Did you catch that phrase, "manly virtue"? Yes, it's unfortunate. But James clearly thought that his ideal, this strenuousness 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.

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)?

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."

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?

Which gets us to the first lemma in the sentence quoted above, which is that we have "stripped manhood of its corresponding virtues" (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.

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 all 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!"

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.

Photocredit: Wikimedia

Judging Kagan, Judging Us

2010-07-29T01:27:00.003-04:00

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 hilarious) criticism 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 brilliant job of it. I love the guy.

Particularly brilliant, I think, is his piece on Elena Kagan:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. 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.

If they had any flaw, 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.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.

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.

Yet she also is apparently prudential, deliberate and cautious. 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, told The Times. “She is very effective at playing her cards in every setting I’ve seen.”

Tom Goldstein, the publisher of the highly influential SCOTUSblog, 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.”

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 case 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.

But I read Brooks' account of the meritocracy and I nod. I think: "What about us?" Not judges, not majority-makers, we don't 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 new power and thus new people -- is still trenchant. Just look at Ivy League universities today...

Thoughts?

Photo credit: NYTimes

Not Victims: Another Case Against the Clubs

2010-07-29T00:41:00.003-04:00

I want to comment on Sam's final club post, because I find it compelling but nevertheless insufficient. Here's why.

Sam gives us the standard-line "progressive critique” of the clubs – which has been made many times before, by the likes of April Yee here, Sabrina Lee here, and most recently by Daniel Herz-Roiphe, a club member, here – 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."

To me, this critique goes too far – and then again, not far enough.

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.

Do final clubs propagate certain race and class norms? Yes. That's important. 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.

My point isn't that final club culture is good -- far from it, in my opinion. Of course final clubs should let in women. Of course 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.

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 have no reason to. If that's our only argument, then we're always going to be shouting from the outside.

Second, more importantly: My problem with the progressive critique is that it lets the final clubs off the hook. 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).

I begin with the premise that while racism/elitism/sexism are necessary standards for anyone to be held against, they're definitely not sufficient 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 don't do good – 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.

In other words, final clubs don't break the rules of our community; they violate its spirit. 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.

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^th 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.

My case against final clubs, then, is not 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.

Photo Credit: Flickr stream of eileansiar

Half the Sky

2010-07-28T23:53:00.004-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Last week was slavery week on the HPRgument (apparently!). We talked about "intern slavery," twice, and then American slavery. 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 Half the Sky, the world's greatest moral tragedy and also it's greatest opportunity.

Half the Sky 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.

Consider a few of the facts that they bring up:

"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."

"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."

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

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”

I reviewed the book 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. Half The Sky 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 my review:

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:
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…

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.

Weighing In: The Great Tax Debate

2010-07-17T21:11:00.000-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

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, "Robin Hood Strikes Again" 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.

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."

But this is simply untrue -- and its untruth is telling and important. On April 15th, Americans pay Federal taxes and they also pay state and local taxes. While the federal tax bracket clearly tilts upwards, state taxes are not only less progressive, they're often outrightly regressive. Consider this chart:

(from Ezra Klein)

So we should actually be looking at what the CBO calls the "effective tax rate," which includes federal and state and local taxes. Considered in this way the tax distribution looks a hell of lot less progressive:

(from Citizens for Tax Justice, from the NYTimes)

Second, we have a confusion between share of taxes being paid and tax rate. 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 real lot of money -- then you're going to be paying a lot taxes 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's regardless of how the tax system is structured (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:

(from Ezra Klein)

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):

(from Ezra Klein)

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 not "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.

Here are tax rates from 2004 compared against 1960:

And here's income share for the rich over time:

(from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez)

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).

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 Cass Sunstein, 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.

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.

Are Interns Slaves?

2010-07-17T21:04:00.003-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

No -- that would be a tasteless joke. But they do perform a lot of work for free! As The New York Times explains in a piece that should have been, in retrospect, pretty obvious: Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say

“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.

Kathyrn Edwards, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of a new study on internships, told of a female intern who brought a sexual harassment complaint that was dismissed because the intern was not an employee.

“A serious problem surrounding unpaid interns is they are often not considered employees and therefore are not protected by employment discrimination laws,” she said.

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.

But on the other hand, creative, non-monetary economies are important. Consider, um, practically all of the internet: 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.

So the original question begs another one: if interns are slaves, then what about HPR bloggers? If so, is our world better for that?

Photo credit: The Institute of Politics

Politics Is About Doing Things

2010-07-17T21:00:00.002-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Matthew Yglesias has written an excellent analysis 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":

We should also, however, spare a thought for the unsung hero of comprehensive reform, McConnell and his GOP colleagues, who pushed their “no c

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. 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.

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.

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.

And guess what? That question -- the question of how we value things and how we deliver them, the question Republicans recused themselves from -- is what politics is all about. 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. 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.

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 the deliberation on the bill was itself the politics of the bill. 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.

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, then the bill is good politics. 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."

Rape Is Not Ambiguous

2010-07-17T20:56:00.002-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

NPR News has an excellent article up this week on the persistence of rape and sexual violence on college campuses. In honor of Women's Week and "Feminist Coming Out Day" here at Harvard, I thought I'd make a few comments:

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 this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so...

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?"

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?"

About 1 in 16 men answered "yes" to these or similar questions....

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."

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. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

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.

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.

Stated most strongly, the "rape is a tough issue" argument says that anti-rape campaigns do not emphasize enough the sovereign choice of the female. 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.

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 know 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.

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 exonerate rapists all around world and all throughout history. For the vast majority of cases-- alcohol or no alcohol, peers or strangers -- rape is not ambiguous.

Reconciliation Is Not An "Abuse of Power"

2010-07-17T20:42:00.004-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

I hope everyone understands that when the Wall Street Journal calls Obama's "up or down" vote on health care reform an "abuse of power," they're lying through their teeth. To be clear: the bill on the floor has already passed a supermajority in the senate and a majority in the house and more -- it's gone through Max Baucus' bipartisan "Gang of Six," committees in both chambers, the Bipartisan Summit Spectacle, and a reconciled final package. Nothing has been rammed through in haste. Indeed, what we have here is a product of a decades-long national conversation about the future of health care reform, and an answer that looks a lot like the centrist bill that was passed by a certain republican governor in Massachusetts.

Furthermore, the reconciliation process is not some recondite partisan maneuver. It's been around since the 1970s. (See this NYTimes chart on the history of reconciliation.) It was used to pass Clinton's welfare reforms and Bush's tax cuts (which, by the way, cost 1.8 billion dollars/ten years, twice the size of the Health Care reform bill). And never before was this "controversial." Jamison Foseur from Media Matters did some leg work and found that when reconciliation was used for the Bush tax cuts "only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation" and "The Washington Post didn't run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words 'reconciliation' and senate.' Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent."

So when we get The Wall Street Journal calling reconciliation an "unprecedented act of partisan arrogance that would further mark Democrats as the party of liberal extremism" we know that this is nothing but partisan hackery of the stupidest and most mendacious kind.

But honestly, I'm fine with that. Most Americans don't care very much about senate procedures. Most Americans care about paying for their health care, about not seeing their wages stagnate and decline and about dealing with the federal deficit. If this "abuse of power" lie is the Republican's best case against health care reform at this stage, then it's pretty clear that it's a losing case. And that's a good thing for the Dems and a good thing for America.

At the eve of this bill's passing, I'll just say: shame on everyone in both parties who's made this process so replete with fear mongering, corruption and lies. And good for Obama for signaling that he's ready to get it done.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of TalkRadioNews

Online Privacy, Google and Facebook

2010-07-17T20:26:00.004-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Google's court case in Italy is a big deal. As everyone is saying, if Google can be held accountable for the content it syndicates on its site, that would change the way that information flows through the internet forever. It could close the whole thing down.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to throw out some loosely connected ideas on the subject of Google, privacy rights, etc. Maybe some of them will stick:

First, this case seems to be less about principled differences between Continental and American conceptions of privacy, and more about Berlusconi's media holdings. Italy has a pretty screwed up media environment; and its internet usage is among the lowest in Europe.

Second, more generally, I'm not really bullish on privacy rights mostly because I don't know exactly what that term means. As a lay person (not a lawyer), it's always struck me that most "privacy violations" are actually just other legal violations in disguise -- that posting a video of an autistic teenager being bulllied is actually an issue of harassment, libel and property theft, not "privacy" itself. Is it possible to understand privacy without these other constituent ideas? And if not, then how can we even try to create a coherent online privacy regime?

And further, as someone who thinks that American community is worth caring about, I'm struck that the problem of our country is not that we have too little privacy but that we demand too much. It's clear that in America at least our lives are more private than they ever were before -- our music is listened to privately, we commute in private vehicles, and the notion of a neighborhood, where people know each others' names and keep up on their lives, has all but vanished. Our private lives are very big -- filled with cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc -- and our public lives are increasingly small.

Third, the problem with data sharing on the internet to me is not that anyone can see the information I post (I can clearly, if imperfectly, decide these days what information I release and to whom); the problem is that the information never goes away. On Facebook -- unlike in real life -- everything sticks, nothing vanishes, my past is there forever. It's been said that the greatest feature of the human brain is its ability to forget. Otherwise, how could we deal with all the of data points of daily life? How could we create meaning or priorities? The under-discussed problem with the internet, to me, is not privacy, but total, unforgiving memory.

Fourth, given all of the above, it is true that Google/Facebook does do a lot of creep shit with our data, and we would be well served to be wary of that. Every college student should check out this interview with an anonymous (oh the irony!) Facebook employee. "Q: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?/ A: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are?"

Good question! Excerpts from the interview beneath the fold...

Photo attribution: Flickr stream of Aboca

John Dewey and Modern Economics

2010-07-17T20:08:00.003-04:00

The New Republic has reprinted a wonderful Depression-era essay by John Dewey about the collapse of what he calls the "romanticism of business":

But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires by an insight into just what is good for him, and that he is equipped with the sure foresight which will enable him to calculate ahead and get just what he is after. Nor did the imaginative flight pause with this conclusion. All the work of the world, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary, is presided over by this omnipresent deity of calculating reason, who through his uniform presence in each separate individual is summed up by integral calculus into a virtually omniscient mind. Through its beneficent and overruling power, self-interest becomes a social lubricant instead of a cause of friction, and the zeal of each one to get ahead of everybody else promotes the general welfare. If there are those who seem to be left out of its distribution, there is always the assurance that the ways of Providence are proverbially mysterious.

It is characteristic of romance, of the glamorous and imaginative projection of excited emotion, to remain outside the sphere of argument. One is either inside the romance or outside it. It is true and is the standard of truth, if you are inside; it is silly or insane, if you are outside. Thus, when one says that the present world crisis is merely the consequence of the general acceptance of the particular romance which has gone by the name of business, one speaks from the outside. It is commonly assumed that the explanation of the economic crisis must be itself economic. So it must—if one stays inside the business dream. Since it is part of the dream that cool, far-sighted intelligence controls the operation of the energies and instruments by which desires are satisfied, one within the dream must seek for a rational explanation. From outside the romance, that fact itself gives the key to the explanation; we cannot call gambling an exercise of cool and calm rationality without sooner or later tripping up.

It's a great essay. Like most of Dewey's work: highly recommended, and highly difficult to summarize -- so I'll stay a bit more general. Dewey says that the Great Depression was a refutation of the romance that is economics. I'd say that today we're in a similar position. The Financial Crisis made a mockery of the core institutions, people, and ideas that constitute the field of modern economics. It exposed the field as unable to do arguably its most important job as a descriptive social science -- predict social phenomena. And it proved it unable to perform arguably its most socially beneficial function as a policy tool -- prevent massive economic calamities.

It's clear that just as our national economies will be restructured in the wake of the Crisis, so too must the discipline of economics itself.

To use Dewey's word, modern economics is a" romance. "More than most social theories, it relies on an idealized picture of the world, one rife with bias, normative assumptions and "spiritual" depictions. More than just a set of tools, economics is, as New Yorker writer John Cassidy says, an "austere theory of human behavior." To economics, people are like black boxes. They have no psychologies, no values, no histories, no cultures. They buy and sell in marketplaces; they never get free lunches; and they act with perfect rationality and relentless greed. Assuming these things, we can explain everything. It's a fairly brutal idea -- the outwardness, the cool rationality, the greed -- but it's also inspiring. Like Marxism, it promises to endow man with the tools to conquer his world. But it does that only by dissolving the thick and complex social bases that constitute that world; it aspires to elevate man only by reducing him.

I don't want to get overly polemical here. (I'm sure I already have!) The fact is, I have a huge amount of respect for economics and the tools that it's given us. We couldn't live without those tools, of course. But the other fact is, economics is not sufficient. Not only do its prevailing theories fail to explain and predict our world, but the moral assumptions behind those theories often have the terrible effect of providing a glossy academic justification for a lot of what is gross in our world -- voracious human greed, inequality, the institutional monopoly of elites, etc. I'll state it in this way: by believing wholeheartedly in the romance that is "economic man," we'd lose too much -- too much experimentalism, too much creativity, and too much of the human daring and improbable striving that fail to fit in its models.

Added: Of course it's true that not all economic theories rely on absurd human behavior models that tend to legitimate opportunism and greed. But most of them do. Behavioral economics is a great counter-example and success story, and its rise supports the fundamental point that the field is going to be changing substantially in order to deliver correctives to its models. As I say in the comments: that's a good thing! Where economics will be ten, fifteen years from now we can only guess. But it will almost certainly be better. Economists and students that are using neuroscience and pyschology to correct the delusions of those models are indeed fighting the good fight, and they should be applauded.

Photo credit: Columbia Record

Harvard Thinks Big

2010-07-14T17:43:00.002-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Harvard Thinks Big was billed as an "important" event. Its Facebook page was ebullient. Expectations were high. "A dream team of 10 Harvard professors will each talk for 10 minutes about the 1 thing they're most passionate about...Inspired by TED Talks (Ted.com) and motivated by what makes Harvard great -- amazing professors, cutting-edge research, and breakthrough ideas..."

But somehow this doesn't go far enough. As I walked out of Sanders Theater tonight I thought: Harvard Thinks Big could change this university.

At 8:00pm fourteen hundred students were in line to attend the event. The first speaker, Daniel Gilbert, said that if gay sex was causing global warming "we'd be on the streets in a riot." Our brains are wired to care about sex and food. (Matthew Kaiser then rejoined, to begin the second presentation, "I'll just say: gay sex does cause global warming...But only if you do it right.") At one point, David Malan told us that a phone book four billion pages long could be ripped in half only 32 times. To end the night, Tim McCarthy called America a "protest nation."

The event was, in every way, exciting and Harvardian. The theater was buzzing and warm. As I sat there I thought (as I often do, but rarely as much as tonight) how lucky I am to go to a school where such an event could happen -- could be organized, could be executed, and could be attended, so well.

But at its core the event was subversive. It forced us to confront assumptions we make about the nature of knowledge itself. What makes an idea "big"? Must it compel us, be useful to us, must it matter? Who determines that? The existing practitioners in the discipline or the world? And who should listen? And why? What, Harvard Thinks Big ultimately asks us to grapple with, is the purpose of public discourse in our age and what does Harvard, the university, have to do with it?

Consider the way ideas change and add to other ideas. When Steven Pinker, a psychologist, presented on the decline of world violence over time, one thinks of an earlier presentation, Kaiser's "Killing the Boy," on the metaphorical violence embedded in our social notion of boyhood (the boy's value, he says, derives from his death). Growth Violence. These themes linked to Maria Tartar's discussion of childrens' literature, the Little Red Riding Hood, the child seductress, the fallen pray. Red Riding Hood comments, in an ironic way, on Andrew Berry's discussion of population genetics (growth, seduction, death); and "Killing the Boy" on Glenda Carpio's declamation on hip hop art (outsiders, violence, boyhood). When Tim McCarthy, the final speaker, called America a nation "obsessed with tomorrows" one thought back to Daniel Gilbert, the first speaker, who explained that our brains are physiologically unable to prepare for our tomorrows.

Violence. Sex. Growth. Hope. These are themes that no one department is equipped to handle alone. Harvard Thinks Big gave us the opportunity to experience knowledge in the round.

More than just a fun night, Harvard Thinks Big was a glimpse at what the university could be -- big ideas released from the confines of their disciplines, the biologist's big ideas mixed with the historian's, the lit professor's with the pyschologist's, theirs with ours, Harvard's big ideas with the world's. Louis Menand in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, argues that the academy has professionalized the production of knowledge and has turned each discipline into a system dedicated to its own perpetuation, a "self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields."

Harvard Thinks Big is an indication of what an alternative might be.

Weighing in: The Asian Ceiling

2010-07-14T16:01:00.004-04:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Check out Jon Yip's post, "The Asian Ceiling" for a review of a Kara Miller's Boston Globe editorial about Asian discrimination in the college admission process. Asians are the new Jews, Miller explains:

In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met – but who look somewhat like him – also work hard?

Now, Ms. Miller clearly has lots of opinions about what a "fair world" would look like, and what education is supposed to be all about. (Remember, this is the woman who wrote the Boston Globe editorial a few months ago called "My Lazy American Students.") She and I could probably quibble all day long about the "justicial," Kantian categorical importance of things like high GPAs, SATs and nice recommendation letters -- my view, for the record, is that these things are pretty non-predictive of the sort of achievement a just society should be promoting, things like creativity, critical thought and democratic experimentalism. And furthermore, GPAs and SATs are highly determined by sociological factors, like culture, affluence, familial support and, yes, ethnicity, which are distributed unfairly. A world where SATs and high GPAs matter less is not a world I'm prepared to protest against (or write Boston Globe articles about).

Yet that argument would be a big waste of time. Ms. Miller seems to think that certain achievements should "entitle" a person to admission, that people "deserve" or "earn" admission. In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. As Louis Menand has argued, certain admission "spots" (think of them as needs that the university wants to fulfill) create, as it were, the applicant's opportunity to fill them. There are no Platonic, unchanging qualifications for a spot at Harvard. Instead, as new needs come about, new spots open up, old ones close down, and an opportunity for admission shifts, erratically, from one student to the next. One year ivy league school X identifies a felt need for a flute player with a certain background and with certain aptitudes. The next year it doesn't. The real question is how fairness can even be said to apply in such a convoluted, unpredictable process.

The biggest change in college admission is an explosion of demand. In 1932, 1,330 people applied for admission to Yale, and seventy-two percent got in. Today, around 26,000 people apply to Yale, and about 7.5 percent get in. The instrumental value of the University is higher than ever before (see Peter Orszag's discussion of the "wage premium" of a college education) and, in turn, the demand for a university education is greater than ever before.

So we have a basic supply-side advantage to the universities: an excess of demand gives universities a lot of discretion in determining the make-up of their class. We might disagree with the things they choose to prioritize, but, ultimately, it's the university's prerogative to make those priorities. Why? Because, ultimately, it's the universities' diverse institutional needs that the admittees are being selected for to fulfill. Harvard "needs" future professors, lax players to fill the stadium and it needs students interested in launching themselves into careers of political power and economic excess. Harvard also "needs" to create expansive international networks and to make old alumni happy.

Harvard's diversity thus has nothing to do with "reverse discrimination" or "regular discrimination" or any of that. It's a function of the huge pool that Harvard has to select from and the slightly less huge number of needs that Harvard's looking to fulfill.

If you want to criticize universities, then, criticize them not for discriminating against anyone, but for turning the admission process into an essentially random crapshoot, a high-stakes contest where applicants have no good way of knowing the roles they are being selected for to play or the rules by which that selection is made. Few people know or can know why one student ultimately gets in and another ten do not. And Ms. Miller is no help in making any of this clearer.

Photo credit: Sarah Ross' flickr stream

One Summit at a Time

2010-02-09T11:37:00.001-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Leiter gives us an overview of Obama's "bipartisan summit" strategy and asks, in effect, will it work? Some smart people whom I respect say that this is capitulation and error (see Yglesias' "doomed strategy" post). That viewpoint conforms nicely with the basic stance on the left since Scott Brown's election, which has been that either (a) healthcare reform is dead on the floor, or (b) RAHM EMANUEL HAS TO GO BREAK SOME GODDAMN HEADS!!! Those are our choices: procedural hardball or effective defeat. Obama is demurring from both. Here's my theory about why.

Congress is a broken. As Lawrence Lessig has said, it's lost its sense of shame. Max Baucus, head of healthcare reform in the senate, can take 3.3 million dollars from healthcare industries without anyone blinking an eye. The Republicans can make unprecedented procedural moves to paralyze the functioning of government, like filibustering every single bill on the floor. Just this week Richard Shelby, Republican senator from Alabama, put a "hold" on every single one of President Obama's outstanding appointees -- shutting down, effectively, the confirmation process -- in order to fast-track earmark process for his own state (he wants an airbase built). This is either farce or high level tragedy. The place is corrupted at the most basic level. It's caught in a sort of drifting institutional nihilism that threatens to ruin this country.

Americans, I believe, feel this. They're angry and confused. If you follow politics you'd know that it's the Republicans specifically, more than anyone, who have exploited the pathologies of the system to their own political advantage. But if you don't follow politics, if you're more interested in long term problems, in the cost of health care coverage, say, or the amount of money your family has to pay for groceries, then you're inclined to see in Washington the money, the partisanship, the obstructionism, and write off the whole damn system. You don't make a distinction between "Republicans in Washington" and "Washington." Health care looks less like a reflection of the problem and more like a part of the problem itself. People hear that Obama is "negotiating behind closed doors" and "cutting deals" with folks like Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, and that he's "ramming the bill through the congress" and they wonder, where is all that "change" we heard about?

Cynicism and disillusionment are the moods roiling through our country, threatening to take down everything in their paths, Obama included. The Scott Brown election, in the end, is a ominous reflection of this intense disillusionment with the system itself.

The bipartisan summit thing is Obama's response to this fact. The goal is to shed sunlight on the swamp of the system. It's a chance for Obama to say to the American people, "Look, I'm not part of the problem!" And it's a chance to say to those who are, those deliberately working to cripple the government, "there will be electoral costs, people will be watching." This is transparency at it's best: informing people about the shit their government is doing, about the dynamics of dysfunction, and then giving them the electoral tools to fix it. This is Obama responding to a moment of great cynicism -- Brown's election -- with a bid for empowerment. That's smart politics, and it's very Obama-esque -- the old-school Obama, the one who fought to change the system, the one who fought to engage our country again.

Will this get us healthcare? We'll see.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of JMTimages

Postcards from Nixonland

2010-02-04T16:12:00.003-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

For Obama’s first-year anniversary the New York Times rounded up some White House veterans to write about their respective presidents’ first years. This one, especially, surprised me:

It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a huge expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts and began the processes that led to the desegregation of public schools in the South and a historic reform of the government’s policy toward American Indians. He announced the “Nixon doctrine,” providing aid — but not military forces — to our anticommunist Asian allies. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Nixon was a pretty abominable guy. He brought this country to the biggest political and constitutional crisis it’s faced since the Civil War, and he did this riding on the back of racial politicking and fear-mongering, the effects of which still reverberate through our politics today. On the other hand, he did manage do so some good things to advance the causes of American liberalism. He expanded social security benefits, he created the EPA, and he poured a lot of money into our national park system. He also introduced a bill for universal health care, which, according to some historians, he might actually have had the political capital pass.

Now, I personally don’t buy the meme that Obama’s first year has been some sort of unmitigated calamity for American liberalism. But it definitely could have better. There are a lot of issues our country needs to tackle — primary among them is the need to save the middle class, to fix our banking industry, to fix our energy economy, and (yes) to fix our health care system — and the prospect that we’re going to be able to do these things does indeed seem much smaller than did a year ago. Yet that’s less Obama’s fault than it is the fault of the system, than it is a signal of the sclerosis of our governing apparatus. We’re entering into the fourth decade where our country has failed to take on a major domestic project and succeed at fixing it.

Looking back, it’s a scary thing when a conservative a-hole like Dick Nixon can deliver on change, while a guy like Obama, whose mandate is much larger and whose integrity is much, much deeper, has to struggle so hard. The lesson to draw from that, to my mind, is that our current problems — our current inability to solve problems — is less about Obama than it is about us, our country, how we conceives of our national community and how we legislates on our own behalf. Self government involves a great deal more than the nature of the man on top.

Money, Politics, and Citizens United

2010-02-04T15:53:00.004-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

I spent this past week complaining about government dysfunction -- so I'd be remiss not to mention the Citizens United ruling. Of the many bad things that happened last week Citizens United is probably the most significant. The ruling will make our government worse. How much worse? It's not clear -- some argue that risk-averse corporations won't be inclined to amp up political contributions, wasting share-holder money and damaging their brands; some say that the barriers between government and corporations are already so permeable that this ruling amounts to little -- yet the point is, it will make things worse. The gap between legislators and their constituents (and the country they serve) will only widen, and the connection between corporations and the law will tighten.

Who can deny that? That an increase in corporate money means a decrease in legislator independence, in rational legislation, and in citizen trust in the system?

Specifically, I'd say there are two things we're going to see more of: the rich buying elections, i.e. influencing who gets into congress through the link between corporate campaign contributions and voters' opinions, and the rich buying votes, i.e. influencing what those congressmen do once they're there through the link between campaign contributions and the politicians who benefit from receiving them.

Money of course should never be able to buy these things. Money is for buying cars and hotel tickets and (sure) prostitutes -- but it cannot be for buying political power. The two spheres must be separate. That's what equality demands: that a proclivity for making money does not translate into the power to make laws (just like the power to make laws doesn't translate into the power to make money). Yet the merger of these two spheres, the economic and political, is already real. Consider the remarkable graph below, from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels. He associates the votes of senators with the political opinions of their constituents, separated by income level:

This is a big subject. There are a whole lot of graphs to show and statistics to cite, but the point is commonsensical. There's too much money in politics. It makes our laws worse, it's inimical to justice, and it will, in the long run, undermine the institutional integrity of our legislative branch. Who knows what Citizens United will bring? But like I said: it will only make things worse.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of David Paul Ohmer

Scott Brown Endorses Health Care Reform

2010-02-04T15:52:00.002-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Coakley's loss was a lot of things -- but a repudiation of Obama's health care reform it was not. Massachusetts is an odd state to be signing the death sentence for Obama's health care reform because Massachusetts actually enjoys a universal health care program that's very similar to the one in congress today. And Scott Brown's an odd angel of death here because he actually doesn't reject the plan. No, Scott Brown, like his state, strongly supports universal health care -- but he supports it only at the state level. His campaign line was simple: Why support federal legislation when you're already covered by the state? In other words: Massachusetts already has Obamacare. Why pay for everyone else's?

From the Washington Post:

"We have insurance here in Massachusetts," he said in a campaign debate. "I'm not going to be subsidizing for the next three, five years, pick a number, subsidizing what other states have failed to do."

In a news conference Wednesday, he said, "There are some very good things in the national plan that's being proposed, but if you look at -- and really almost in a parochial manner -- we need to look out for Massachusetts first. . . . The thing I'm hearing all throughout the state is, 'What about us?' "

There's an interesting, wonky point here, which is that any federal entitlement program will always benefit some states more than others. Massachusetts is on the giving end of this entitlements wealth transfer, and some voters clearly didn't like that.* But the irony is bitter. The first state to pass Obamacare ends up dooming it at the federal level precisely because it works so well at the state level. Ted Kennedy, I know it's hard, but try to rest in peace.

How much any of this played a part in the Massachusetts special election we'll never know of course. (Some evidence says: not much.) But clearly this election wasn't a "mandate" against health care. To the extent that it had anything to do with health care at all, the election was more about who already has health care reform and is content with it, than anything else. Massachusetts has theirs. But that alone shouldn't be enough to stop the rest of us from getting ours. We'll see.

*As a side note, can anyone tell me why, on the flipside of Massachusetts, the states with high levels of uninsured citizens don't support the benefits of comprehensive health care reform? Conservative states have the most to gain from health care reform, yet they're the least likely to endorse it. Why is this? Why are so many people so uninterested in fixing an obviously broken health care system...to their own advantage? That's a question that needs a serious answer. Have we lost the ability to govern ourselves?

The Sociology of Mankiw

2010-02-04T15:50:00.001-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

The notion that economics can explain everything about everything (re: Freakonomics) is something that I’ve always regarded as silly and kinda gross. The basic economic model — the super-rational individual relentlessly seeking out his own material self-interest — is almost embarrassingly inadequate. If you want to deal with something like the Global Financial Crisis then, yes, you do have to start by grappling with the discipline of economics. But that’s not enough. Economics as a discipline fails to paint the picture that sociology, history, science and literature, in concert, can about the world generally. And explaining the Financial Crisis specifically is no different. We need more than economics.

What I’d be interested in reading is something on the sociology of the economics discipline. How did people come to believe the cluster of ideas that that got us into the Financial Crisis? That’s an historical and sociological inquiry. What are the social factors that got a whole group of people to believe fraudulent economics? I like John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece “After the Blowup” (gated, Harvard LexisNexis) because he seems to want to start the process of answering this:

In the course of a few days, I talked to economists from various branches of the subject. The over-all reaction I encountered put me in mind of what happened to cosmology after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, in 1929, discovered that the universe was expanding, and was much larger than scientists had believed. The profession fell into turmoil. Some physicists stuck to the existing theories, which posited a stable universe. Others, Albert Einstein included, tried to adapt the old models to Hubble’s data. Still others attempted to come up with a new account of how the galaxies formed; it was this effort that ultimately produced the theory of the big bang.

There’s a whole corpus of zombieconomics out there — ideas like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Great Moderation — that needs to be slayed. But old ideas are hard to kill. And the secret is: killing ideas is a social process, with power struggles and true-believers, as much as it’s an academic process.

Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago that the problem with the economics discipline is that it “mistook beauty for truth” — i.e., it used neat mathematical models to explain extremely complex and irrational stuff. That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. People value things because people and institution around them value those things. So start looking into peer review boards and tenure committees in the academy. How did one generation, through institutions, protect its own? And start looking at the umbilical connection between mathematical modeling and the financial service sector. Our own Larry Summers made about $100,000 a day doing consulting work for D.E. Shaw. Beautiful math isn’t just attractive — it’s also damn profitable. And in a profession that considers money to be the all-important talisman for predicting of human behavior, do connected and well-paid scholars get more academic attention?

There’s a whole field called the history of science that deals with ideas as social facts, as power struggles and generational battles. Are we going to be seeing a paradigm shift in the field of economics? Who’s going to be leading this shift? And where are they bringing us?

My last question is: should some enterprising students be writing their theses on the sociology of Mankiw?

Martha Coakley and the Politics of Despair

2010-01-20T13:30:00.005-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Here’s the deal: if Martha Coakley loses tonight it’s good news for Lloyd Blankfein, who’s worried about financial regulation reform, for the super rich, whose taxes will remain low, and for everyone generally interested in preventing Obama from governing this country. On the other hand, her loss is bad news for those of us who care about adequate health care coverage for all Americans and for those around the world whose cities will be wiped out by the effects of global warming. Coakley’s loss is bad news, basically, for any of us who believe that our country’s problems should be tackled head one. Not because she’s so great, but because she’s pivotal for the system to work. In my last post, “The Pathos of Helplessness,” I wrote about the need to re-assert the prerogative of governing ourselves as country — the need to open up the avenues for making effective policy decisions and for creating a culture of collective self-sacrifice. Scott Brown’s election would be a monumental strike against this.

If you want to understand what the “pathos of helplessness” is all about then look at any given video clip from the 9/12 rallies. See a fearful and angry people. Or review the obstructionism of congressional Republicans. See a group utterly determined to prevent legislative reform. Yet there’s also another side to this, and it comes in the form of despair. Here Andrew Sullivan gives us a beautifully depressing example:

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama’s failure! That’s how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.

Yes, I’m gloomy. Not because I was so wedded to this bill, although I think it’s a decent enough start. But because if America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America’s problems are too great for Americans to tackle.

And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country. And one of the major parties is ecstatic about it.

Andrew Sullivan is one of our very best intellectuals. (His work on gay marriage, torture, and Iran, and his writings on Obama and Palin and the state of American conservatism, really are high points of internet discourse.) He’s not, in other words, a tea partier. Yet, honestly, his position of despair is exactly theirs. If you really believe in governing, in fixing our problems rather than drifting through them, then you have to believe in fixing the government and revivifying our civic culture. You don’t fix our country without starting there. And you certainly don’t fix it by telling us that the whole thing is helpless and corrupt and cannot be saved. The pathos of helplessness is two-fold: it’s the people who don’t believe in governing and it’s the people who don’t believe that we can if we tried. Both are, to use Sullivan’s word, “nihilism.” And both are part of the problem.

The Pathos of Helplessness

2010-01-20T13:27:00.006-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

James Fallows makes a lot of good points in his long Atlantic article, “How American Can Rise Again.” I’ll highlight just one. Let’s call it “the pathos of helplessness”:

The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case. Take jobs, as a very important for-instance: the loss of middle-class jobs is America’s worst economic problem. But that would be so even if China were still as closed as under Mao. According to prevailing economic theory, a country’s job structure and income distribution are determined more by its own domestic policies—education, investment, taxes—plus shifts in technology than by anything its competitors do. That’s especially true of a large economy like America’s. Those policies are ours to change.

My problem with the “America is in decline” narrative is that it’s usually made to imply that China and India’s rise has some of direct barring on America’s problems. When people talk about America’s problems, they’re using talking about things like: a declining middle class, an absurdly inefficient healthcare system, an oil dependency, run-away debt — issues that have only a highly-abstracted relationship to our relative geopolitical power vis a vis China, and a more clear relationship with things like domestic policy decisions and public-private investment choices. Our problems are, quite literally, ours to change.

But you wouldn’t believe it by looking at Congress today. We’ve got one political party that officially refuses to take responsibility for solving these problems, and then we have an antiquated and dysfunctional political system that empowers them. We can solve our own problems — China has little to do with it one way or the other — but, probably, patently, we won’t. It’s remarkable and depressing. Fallows:

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

To me, fixing our government is the issue that needs to be tackled. Unless we fix our government, we can’t fix ourselves. Larry Lessig, who founded Change Congress and came over to the Harvard law school last year to start the Center for Institutional Corruption, uses the analogy of an alcoholic: his job’s in jeopardy, his home life is in shambles, his liver is failing; his drinking, clearly, isn’t his biggest problem, but it is his first problem, the one that precedes all the rest, the one that, until fixed, will continue to enable and exacerbate all the rest.

The positive news to come out of our healthcare reform debates is that all the dysfunction of our political system got brought to the fore in a very big way: the relentless obstructionism, the corrosive influence of money, the absurdly unequal concentrations of political power, the acrid partisanship, and, reflective of all this, the general loss of trust in the governing process writ large.

This isn’t simply an institutional failing. We have a political party that’s taken this generalized sense of political helplessness and turned it into a system of belief. And we’ve had thirty years of theory and politics attempting to legitimize anti-communitarian selfishness and greed. I think it’s fair to say that this is nothing less than a loss of confidence in the American system of self-government — in our specific institutions and also in the idea of a polity that not only goes on and gets on, but one that actively saves itself again and again, and that distributes the responsibility for doing that into the hands of the people. If there’s any truth to the “America is in decline” narrative then it’s in this: this loss of confidence in our own ability to govern ourselves. It has nothing to do with China and it’s up to us to change.

Is Matt Taibbi the Gustave Courbet of Assholes?

2010-01-13T20:55:00.006-05:00

Someone needs to curate these gems. I suppose I'll start:

I’m always afraid to write about David Brooks, because I worry that my attitude toward this guy is colored by certain strong feelings I have about his appearance — he just looks like a professional groveler/ass-kisser, and every time I see him in public I have to fight off visions of him home at night in his Versace jammies, feverishly jacking off with one hand while caressing in the other an official invitation to, say, a White House event, or a Harvard Club luncheon.

Brooks is the kind of character who has thrived everywhere he’s lived throughout human history; it’s incredibly easy to imagine the nebbishy, hairy-kneed Gaius Domitus Brooksius strolling through Rome and swelling with pride over his new appointment to the post of Senior Licker of the Caligulan butt crack.

When will white people stop writing articles like this?

2010-01-09T19:04:00.002-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism. She writes:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

To me, this is a bit too clever. Let’s remember that Avatar, at its heart, is a story about resisting white cultural dominance. That’s a good story to tell, and from the perspective of the liberal multiculturalist, the fact that we’re telling it shows that at least as a culture we’ve grown up from a time when we were actually, you know, proud of colonialist domination and the marginalization of the other. So in this core sense, Avatar is a victory (not a failure) of cultural liberalism.
Newitz asks us to stop telling stories about white people. But if you take the theoretical grounds of her analysis seriously then it becomes clear that that’s precisely what can’t be done — white people tell the stories they do precisely because they are white. That whiteness, the argument goes, is pervasive. There is no vocabulary outside of our own; there is no vantage point from beyond the world we stand on. And this is why we value ethnic and gender diversity in the first place: not because white, privileged directors like James Cameron refuse to tell racially unbiased stories, but because they can’t. White people are going to be making white movies because, well, they’re white.
And if you look at the story that’s clearly what the “avatar” device is meant to evoke. It’s a tool of transcendence. It’s the white man’s means of peering over the epistemological divide and seeing what the war is to the colonized indigenous. The avatar idea is cool precisely because it is so damn hard for white people to understand what it means not to be white.
So where does that leave us? To my mind, Newitz’s piece tells tells us as much about Avatar as it does about ourselves, or at least about the state of multiculturalist discourse. One of the most remarkable things about the Avatar backlash is that it has transcended ideological divides. On the right we have writers like Reiham Salam coming out with full-throated defenses of American-style capitalism. And on the left we have critics like Annalee Newitz charging racism. But both agree on one thing: let’s just leave the Na’vi marginalized people alone. In other words, both agree, but for entirely different reasons, that we should continue to ignore the ignored, continue to marginalize the marginalized. This convergence, I suggest, is actually typical of the confused leftist position that any attempt by white people to protect or reify marginalized cultures is necessarily an unjust imposition of “white values”: it has this awkward tendency to converge with the rightist position that other cultures have less intrinsic value than our own. Both counsel nonintervention.
In my opinion, we we need to be more willing (not less willing) to tell Avatar-like allegories about the marginalized defending their cultural property. Understand that these stories are limited, sure, but then don’t take those limitations too seriously — or at least not seriously enough to stop telling the stories in the first place. Because otherwise the voices wouldn’t get heard at all. And that would be a shame.

Wall Street, Rhodes Scholars, and the Soul of the University

2009-12-05T01:20:00.001-05:00

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Last Saturday the 2010 Rhodes scholars were announced and a full five Harvard students were among them (along with two Yale students and one Princeton student...but, really, who's counting?)

On the same day, Elliot Gerson, the American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, published an op-ed in the Washington Post, pointing out that more and more Rhodes scholars are pursuing careers in business, specifically in finance. He writes:

Only three American Rhodes scholars in the 1970s (out of 320) went directly into business from Oxford; by the late 1980s the number grew to that many in a year. Recently, more than twice as many went into business in just one year than did in the entire 1970s.

While scholars used to overwhelmingly choose to go into "scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law" and so on, now, with increasing frequency, they are choosing to get rich. His theory: financial sector jobs in the past thirty years have become so well-paying that their monetary advantages begins to outweigh the prestige-based rewards that come from being a top professor or doctor or scientist.

Yes, all true. Yet if we zoom out a bit we see that the problem clearly isn't the Rhodes scholars or the pay gap, as such. The problem here is the massive shift in the distribution of talent in this country -- a shift away from everything else and towards Wall Street. Consider Harvard. According to a study published by economists Claudia Gloria and Lawrence Katz, the number of Harvard graduates pursing MBAs has expanded threefold from 1970 to 1990 (from 5% to 15%). And according to the Crimson, last year, a full 39% of Harvard students reported that they were entering to the financial service sector upon graduation, as bankers or consultants -- down from a full 47% of graduate before the crash.

We can speculate about the effects of this talent redistribution all we want: it means more talent going into fields that contribute relatively less social good to the world; it means rapidly rising economic inequality that's underwritten (rather than resolved) by our higher-education system; and it means -- in an odd twist -- a less stable, more bubble-prone financial industry.

Yet it's the universities themselves that are subject to lose the most. It means that elite education is increasingly regarded instrumentally, as a means to an economic ends, rather than a good unto itself. In a editorial she published in the Times in September, Present Drew Faust called this "The University's Crisis of Purpose." Faust writes:

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees. Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with twice as many bachelor’s degrees awarded in this area than in any other field of study. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify.

As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

I'm with President Faust -- my concern here is for the soul of the university. If the main job of the university becomes selecting for and training future bankers -- and I'll reiterate: almost one in two Harvard students went into the financial service sector in 2007 -- then what happens to the the university's other roles as (say) a bastion for dissent and/or as a guardian of art and culture and/or as a training grounds for future world leaders? Do the demands and temptations of one sector crowd out the needs and hopes of all the others?

I'll just say to the 2010 Rhodes scholars: best of luck. But then again, you'll probably need a whole lot more than that!

E Pluribus Pluribus

2009-11-09T15:15:00.003-05:00

Public discourse in the age of the Internet. Published in the Harvard Political Review.

Republic.com 2.0
by Cass Sunstein
Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp.

Create Your Own Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp.

Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total."It is some time in the future," he writes. "Technology has greatly increased people's ability to ‘filter' what they want to read, see, and hear." His vision continues:

You are able to design your own newspapers and magazines. You can choose your own programming, with movies, game shows, sports, shopping and news of your choice... You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less...

Of course, this world is already approximated today by the Internet. From the consumer's perspective, the Internet represents the fullest triumph yet of free, individual choice in the marketplace of ideas -- never before, we are so often reminded, have the barriers to getting information been so low, and the choices about where to get it so many. Sunstein's unsettling proposition in Republic.com 2.0 is that this choice might not necessarily be a good thing.

Consider the fact that every choice requires negation -- that every time you say "yes" to one option you are reflexively saying "no" to all the others; that the more choices we have the more stuff we end up having to reject. On the Internet, this is brought to its logical extreme: every time you choose to read one article, you are saying "no," implicitly, to the hundreds of thousands of others available only one click away. Choosing one site -- one blog, one review, one photo -- you reject the vast majority of human knowledge ever produced. It's a heady proposition, to be sure, and it seems to suggest that making choices well about what information we consume is one of our highest responsibilities as individuals. In an infinite marketplace, the individual is solely responsible for his own salvation. And in the infinite library of the Internet, the question of ignorance is not whether the information exists -- it does -- but whether we'll choose to access it. To Cass Sunstein, this is unsettling. Sunstein is a constitutional law professor who believes that individuals have obligations to their communities, and who also believes than a citizenry exposed to the right information is essential to the survival of a republic. To him, the very fact of having these choices about what information we consume means that we cannot, in fact, be prepared to make them well.

Sunstein makes two major arguments in his book. The first argument is a constitutional one: he claims that a republic needs a citizenry that is first, "exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance," and, second, "share a range of common experiences." This is the case, he argues, because a self-governing republic requires a citizenry committed to the process of deliberating on issues of public concern. Without their being exposed to a diverse amount of information, and without having a common basis on which to discourse, the very idea of a "sovereign people" begins to break down. Beyond its ability to satisfy our individual interests, Sunstein says, information exists as the glue that holds our republic together. Sunstein's key contention, then, is that free expression in a republic requires not just freedom but also responsibility -- that each citizen not only can but must access diverse information and deliberate on it critically and respectfully. The very act of flipping through a newspaper, then, is an exercise in civic virtue.

Sunstein's second argument is, in effect, that the Internet is undermining all of this. Because it allows us to filter out materials that we do not want to be exposed to, Sunstein argues, the web creates what he calls "personal information cocoons." As our ability to choose becomes greater, the number and precision of these personal information cocoons proliferates, until each person can live in his own little informational world customized to mirror all his prejudices. In this state, of course, people can't find common ground; they don't operate with the same facts. By avoiding material that unsettles their worldviews, they become radicalized and intolerant.

The problem with choice, for Sunstein, is that it runs contrary to our positive responsibilities as citizens in a republic. Choice isolates us. It dislocates us from the collective. And the problem with the Internet, for Sunstein, is that it is the ultimate choice machine. It's paradoxical, to be sure: the very diversity of information available leads directly to our insularity; its abundance leads to our ignorance. It's our freedom to choose that undermines systematically our freedom to self-govern.

Sunstein's argument is insightful; yet is strikes me as only half-right. The fragmentation of our culture is a vitally important concern, and it's unequivocally real. Sociologists show that American community has been in decline for over fifty years. People are less connected to their fellow citizens; they are less likely to feel trust or affection toward their elected officials; and they are less likely to join organization and more likely to -- as famously put by sociologist Robert Putnam -- "bowl alone." Yet one wonders, can a trend that has been proceeding for nearly fifty years have anything to do with the Internet?

Consider this summer's healthcare debates. Few things in recent cultural memory have epitomized as clearly what it means to be "uncivic" in a self-governing republic. Numerous much-touted town hall meetings approached open violence. And rallies were filled with apoplectic, openly-racist sloganeering. It's easy to see in these events exactly the sort of fragmentation that Sunstein warns about: our culture fracturing into information cocoons, where lies like "death panels" gain wide currency; a citizenry that can't enter into a space of public discourse without, quite literally, bringing its guns; the impossibility of legislating in these conditions of self-government. All this was brought to bear as Sunstein predicted. Yet the Internet seems not to have been the cause at all. The causes of a radicalized right wing are many. They are sociological: questions of ethnicity, income, and religion all come into play. And there's a case to be made that there are relevant wider cultural phenomena as well: a general drift, pervasive in all aspects of American society, away from priority of community and civic virtue generally.

Yet whatever the causes of the splenetic right wing, the Internet is not among them. To paraphrase a review of the first addition of Sunstein's book: you could un-invent the Internet and you'd still have each and every picketer on the national mall with a swastika painted onto President Obama's forehead. If the Internet's to be blamed at all, then, it's for reflecting cultural predispositions, not creating them. The question we have to ask ourselves is not where the Internet went wrong -- but where did we?

Depending on your point of view, however, maybe even that judgment is premature. While Sunstein fears for the break down of the collective, there are some who openly embrace it. Fragmentation, they say, is another word for individualization, and individualism is the essence of freedom. In Create Your Own Economy, libertarian economist Tyler Cowen proceeds from just this perspective, and ends with conclusions stunning in their contrast to Sunstein's. Cowen hails the Internet on the exactly the grounds that Sunstein fears it: the power that it gives the individual to construct his own informational world. "The notion of ‘ordering information' may sound a little dry," Cowen writes, "but it is a joy in our everyday lives."

We are entering a world where the collection and ordering of information has reached baroque, extravagant extremes, and this is (mostly) good thing. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating our own economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.

The "path to prosperity in a disordered world," as the subtitle of the book reads, is nothing less, Cowen says, than learning to actively create our own consciousness through the Internet. "At its core it is all about you," he writes. "Now, more than ever, you can assemble and manipulate bits of information from the outside world and relate them back to your personal concerns." Cowen takes this notion alarmingly far. About a third of the book is dedicated to reconceiving "autism" as a virtue in a world that demands consciousness-creating: "In essence we are using tools and capital goods-computers and the web-to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics." At another point, he tells the individual to step into Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine," saying that our problems are not an over-willingness to delude ourselves but an under-willingness. "Isn't our general tendency to clutch at the thought of reality just one more instance of the illusion that we are always in control? I say let's put down our polemic against living in our heads and let's put down our bias against interiority."

If we want to understand our own cultural fragmentation then we might be served well by reflecting not only on these arguments, but on the assumptions that underpin them. Cowen not only speaks about the positive effects of fragmentation; he also, in his way, symbolizes their cause. His entire argument depends on his readers accepting that individualism is the highest goal of freedom, and that the problem with our society is that we're not willing enough to work only for ourselves as we assemble the information around us. This idea, of course, is nothing new. Since at least the 19th century in America -- which witnessed the advent of the "Darwinian" rationale for industrial competition and the expansion of the frontier out west -- the myth of the self-creating individual has been a mainstay in our cultural discourse. And by all accounts, this myth has only gained in stature in the wake of the Reagan-Goldwater conservative movement. Cowen's argument is novel, then, because he applies the ideas of consumer sovereignty to the Internet space. His ideal of an "autistic mental type," who weaves stories for himself from the tidbits he glean from the blogs in his RSS reader, and of whom nothing is asked other than to "create his own economy" -- this is the cowboy individualist of the technological world. Cowen's book thus serves as a double indicator for the fragmentation of our culture: not only does he explain the fragmentation potentials of the Internet, he applauds them. Not only does his book tell us about the effects of the Internet on the fragmentation of our culture, but it also serves to symbolize the intellectual movement that seeks to sustain and legitimize that fragmentation.

Both of these books, then, are tracts of unlikely cultural warfare. The rift between them is between two notions of freedom and citizenship. Yet if both books are, in effect, cultural polemics, then neither of them admits it. And thus both miss the point: this is not about the Internet. The question of what it means to be a free citizen in a republic cannot be contained in an analysis of a tool, no matter how powerful or catalyzing. The Internet, after all, is only a framework for gathering existing cultural assumptions and social values. Whether choices exist is not nearly as important as both Sunstein and Cowen believe; the real question is how as citizens we make these choices, what we feel our responsibilities are, and what we feel entitled to. In short: unless we as a culture re-adopt a vocabulary of civic virtuousness -- and can ask of ourselves to think less like consumers and more like citizens -- than it doesn't matter one bit whether it's from the Internet or the newspaper that we're getting our news.

In 1996, the writer Jonathan Franzen published an essay Harper's Magazine entitled Perchance to Dream. In one line he captured this feeling of cultural anomie: "Human existence," he wrote, "is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe." Market capitalism, he argued, has thus been successful precisely because it compounded the delusion that we are, each of us, at the center of the universe. The problem with the Internet, then, is that it takes this delusion one step forward. The traditional role of reading, Franzen claims in his essay, was to help us overcome the limitations of ourselves: it forces us to experience other's thoughts; to enter into dialogue with another's consciousness; to deliberate on issues of public importance. The essence of reading, in some sense, is that we don't have a choice about the thoughts to which we are exposed, or about the nature of the cultural dialogue we enter. To the extent that the Internet places individual choice at the center of its paradigm, it undermines the traditional role that information plays in teaching us to think beyond ourselves. It reinforces the delusion that our own individual choice and our own immediate gratification are the central matters of a well-lived life.

Yet to say that the Internet created this delusion is disingenuous and wrong. The problem is deeper. The problem of the Internet, in fact, is that it is just one more step, on more tax -- like the car over the bus; like the suburb over the city; like the iPod over the concert hall -- on our abilities as citizens to relate to one another in a self-governing community. To blame the Internet alone is beside the point. It's like blaming the mirror for its reflection of ourselves.

Hertzberg on Bloomberg

2009-11-03T17:24:00.004-05:00

Hendrik Hertzeberg's column on Bloomberg's third term is exceptionally good. Hertzberg is a master of the form --

In broad outline, New Yorkers know all this. We know that we’re bought and paid for. We know that there is something unseemly, even humiliating, about submitting ourselves to be ruled by the richest man in town. We know that the muscling aside of term limits, whatever the law’s merits, was a travesty. We know that the Mayor’s campaign this time has been puzzlingly, pettily negative. Yet we will, most of us, troop to the polls on Tuesday and pull the lever for Mayor Mike. The truth is that Michael Bloomberg has been a very good mayor. The record is mixed, of course, but the mixture is largely positive....

The Mayor has ruled us well, but he has infantilized us. We are a little too much like the passive Romans of Crassus’ day, when the institutions of the old republic were giving way to a despotic (and competent) imperium. “People got used to the idea of them,” Edith Hamilton wrote of Crassus and his fellow-triumvirs, Pompey and Caesar, “and when four years later their powerful organization was completed and they began to act openly, honored and honorable patriots could find excellent reasons for acquiescing in their running the city. Indeed, it seemed exceedingly probable that if they did not do so there would be nobody to run it.” If Bloomberg had been satisfied with two terms, he would be leaving office a beloved legend, a municipal god. He’ll get his third, but we’ll give it to him sullenly, knowing that while it probably won’t measure up to his first two—times are hard, huge budget gaps are at hand—it’ll probably be good enough. The Pax Bloombergiana will endure a while longer. But then what? Will we have forgotten how to govern ourselves?

The Greek Tragedy point is well taken. A lot of New York politics has those undertones -- there's hubris and justice; the king and the polis; the chorus and the audience. But it's the New Yorkers themselves who in this election are facing the tragic dilemma: they want a new Major, yet it's Bloomberg who's the best man for the job.

Slave/Master Paradox

2009-08-19T00:42:00.017-04:00

This from Robert Kagan, Introduction to Ancient Greek History:

I remember my old colleague who taught history of American slavery and so on, John Blassingame, said to me at one point, he said when the emancipation came, the slaves were freed and so were the masters...

He explains: as long as there were slaves in the antebellum South, there would also be riots and homicides, and no master could ever live entirely without fear of revolt. So owning slaves was like living in a tinder box. It was the sort of contingent life -- though you have something now, at any moment it could be taken away -- that characterizes slavery in the first place.

According to Kagan, this paradox helps us to understand the city-state of Sparta --that for Sparta, colonialism had the ironic effect of creating more fear, not less. As they conquered and enslaved the Mycenaeans to the West, they spread their military thin and at the same time multiplied their points of vulnerability. They internalized their enemy. So acute was their fear of Mycenaean revolt, Kagan says, that had to transform their society into a control apparatus, until it finally became the Rousseauian totalitariat we know Sparta as today. I'm sure there's a lot more here, but the point is this: their security apparatus, designed to enslave the Mycenaeans, was so total that they ended up enslaving themselves.

So the parable goes. I'll venture to say that I think something similar happens whenever we buy things or otherwise take control of material objects: a transaction of control happens, where we gain a lot of control, but forfeit some of it too. A petty example is my cellphone, which allows me to make calls when and where I want, but at the same time "tells me" when to charge it and "makes me" put in my pocket every morning and of course takes up a bit of space on my nightstand. This isn't existential stuff (it's the not Mycenaeans descending from the hills!), but it's a modern analogue. When we buy things, we're still in some way accepting the unfreedom of their proper stewardship. And these myriad forfeits of control, I think, ultimately speak to the persistent difficulties of life despite material abundance (speak to the fact that that perhaps it's not "despite" but "because of" abundance that some people drown).

A Value Prop for the Music Industry

2009-08-16T01:08:00.024-04:00

Comment: "Oy Tenenbaum! RIAA wins $675,000, or $22,500 per song" by Ben Shefner at Ars Technica; "The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard" by Umair Haque at Bubble Generation; "New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI" by Tech Dirt

I'll start with a paradox: while the costs of distributing information are dropping, asymptotically, to zero, the value embedded within the information (its "meaning") persists.¹

This paradox of low costs and high value plays a large and unstated role in our debates about music piracy. Sure, data distribution costs have dropped so low that we might as well round down to zero -- and economic theory predicts that prices will drop to marginal cost -- but has the "value" of music dropped that low (to zero), and if not, why shouldn't we be paying for it? While it might cost us almost nothing today to store and transmit the data stuff of (say) the Don Giovanni opera, the value that the opera inflicts on our soul has not changed much, if at all, for nearly two hundred years.²

So pricing is difficult. It's definitely true that distribution costs affects the value of music -- but it's not clear in which direction, up or down. As the digital shelf space reaches towards infinity, the supply of music available to us increases. This of course lowers, marginally, the value of any one song relative to all the others. Yet at the same time, as the self space expands, so does the chances that you'll find music that you really like. And so does the chances that the market will compete upward and outward, improving quality. Thus with increased supply, the value of each song declines, but the value of the set of available songs itself rises. And, further down the line, I'd argue, the more access to music we have, the more we can produce it, for information is both an output and an input: more music means more creativity, creative resynthesis, mushups, GirlTalk and DangerMouse. Value rises.

My point is that it's not altogether clear that the easy distribution of music lowers its value to us, and for that reason, I see no clear economic or "market morality" case for why we should all be getting our music for free, even if we can. To the contrary, I'd say there are a lot of good reasons why we should be paying for music. We need to create "incentives" for music production, sure; But more than that, I'd like to live in a society that values art -- the creation of art -- at least as much as it does trading derivatives or other forms of bean counting.

Most everyone seems to understand this intuitively. Americans are very used to exchanging money for value, and to suspend that enterprise when it comes to music feels odd, and immoral.

But if we accept this premise, then we've got to look at piracy as something other than just a breach of the law -- we've got to think of it as an economic transaction, as exchanging costs -- costs of our time, of risk to our computers, of ristk to our consciences -- for value. Apparently, a large amount of people are more willing to bear those costs and the prices assigned by the recording industy. And this is my point: Piracy is an essential statement about the value of the music.

To understand this, think about the music industry according to Haque's contract theory: listeners (the principles) contract out the the function of finding good artists and producing good music (the product) to the recording industry (the agents) for the purpose of performing a function that they cannot perform. In exchange for this service, the industry charges a premium on top of the retail price of the music

The crux of the piracy issue, I believe, is that the recording industry has failed in its function as an agent between listener and music. People don't want to pay for services unrendered.

As the music market has gotten more competitive -- with new bands getting new access to fans -- the recording industry has failed to compete. I has buckled down with a business model based on fixing prices and pumping out generically commercial music. By doing this, the industry has prevented the sort of rich, dynamic feedback on price and quality that's necessary to compete in lively markets.

Piracy has to be understood as a response to an industy that has neglected its core business function of creating value for its consumers. The industy has been too busy pumping out hot dog music -- "thick, pink, synthetic, inert" -- and suing its consumers (!) to bother with finding and creating art.

These are my opinions. Apparently, the RIAA is totally unaware that Joel Tenebaum's actions might be directly related to their own actions. And furthermore, they seems totally unaware that in an age of unlimited shelf space, of social media and of instantaneous search, their monopoly on the function of agent between musician and listener may soon break down -- that we'll see music distribution models that cut the recording industry out of the loop entirely. And that a growing group of good musicians already have.

So yes, we should pay artists for the music they create. But not more than we actually value it. And the money should go to those who are creating the value, not subtracting from it.

--

[1] The famous Stewart Brand about information "wanting to be free" actually has two parts. "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." back

[2] It really is a mystery why music affects us the way it does, why certain tones arrayed in certain ways, elicit so much joy. I'll note tangentially that I heard Steve Pinker describe our affinity for music as a product of our language capacities; he said that so long as we can talk and think in word syllables, we cannot help but be "supernormally stimulated" by music...this suggest that the "value" of music is more a biological fact than an economic one. back

2009-08-02T19:55:00.008-04:00

"I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions" - Lolita (where else?)

"After the 1850s, thanks in part to Franklin's influence, American became the land of ingenuity" - Maria Kalman, in her excellent And In Pursuit of Happiness

"The proper use of entertainment and education has become the most fundamental social enterprise" - Tyler Cowen in Create Your Own Economy

Chomsky's New Socialism

2009-07-30T00:59:00.014-04:00

Just to make this clear, I didn't mean for my last post to turn into an encomium for "Chomsky's American sensibilities." In fact, I find a lot of his foreign policy writing to be distasteful, and for exactly the opposite reasons I was praising him for below. I find that his is a basically simplistic worldview: Everything that the U.S. does is necessarily expansionistic; nothing that those who are "oppressed" by our policies themselves do has a baring on their status as the categorically oppressed. And his written tone, in contrast to the 1971 debate, is usually embittered, caustic, meandering and belittling to those who disagree. So if you were to confront my previous post and say his foreign policy work undermined his authority as a "pragmatist" in the sense described below, I'd say "well, maybe that's the what you've got to do as a dissenter. Maybe pragmatism is an untenable position to take as an advocate." And I'd also say, "Yeah, unfortunately, you're probably right."

That said, I did want to point to this gem from the debate, which I didn't have a chance to bring up in the last post. This, at least, he got exactly right:

As to the idea, which was perhaps lurking in your question anyway-it's an idea that's often expressed-that there is some technical imperative, some property of advanced technological society that requires centralised power and decision-making-and a lot of people say that, from Robert McNamara on down-as far as I can see it's perfect nonsense, I've never seen any argument in favour of it.

It seems to me that modern technology, like the technology of data-processing, or communication and so on, has precisely the opposite implications. It implies that relevant information and relevant understanding can be brought to everyone quickly. It doesn't have to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making. So technology, I think, can be liberating, it has the property of being possibly liberating; it's converted, like everything else, like the system of justice, into an instrument of oppression because of the fact that power is badly distributed.

The question posed to him was whether socialism demanded centralized power, and, if it did, how this could be reconciled with his belief in the priority of individual freedom. His choice of answers, really, was remarkably prescient. Information technology, in fact, has distributed a great deal of power from the hands of "a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making" -- and that Chomsky could predict this, while framing it as an affront to traditional notions of socialism, is goddamn impressive for a debate in 1971. And it's even more impressive because guys like Kevin Kelly are today publishing articles in Wired Magazine saying the very same thing:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Chomsky's Pragmatism

2009-07-27T23:06:00.018-04:00

Review: Chomsky-Foucault Debate "Human Nature: Justice versus Power"

The Chomsky-Foucault debate "Human Nature: Justice versus Power" (original) is a supremely interesting exchange, definitely worthwhile on its merits. But what's particularly interesting to me is hearing Chomsky discuss questions that are conceptually prior to those I normally hear him lecture one -- rather than linguistics or politics per se, you get serious reflection on the enterprise of being a scholar and activist...how thinking occurs and why we ought to do it, according to a young Chomsky at the height of the Vietnam War.

What's striking in this debate is something that's rarely commented on: how pragmatic Noam Chomsky is. The question of why and how to think naturally lend itself to dogmatism. But here you see Chomsky extremely articulate about the limitations of his own mind, yet also steady about his need to move it forward. It's a remarkable posture. When I call it "pragmatic" I don't mean in the everyday sense (ie, someone whose ideas are "viable") but rather in the philosophical sense. The habits of mind that commit oneself to a certain method of truth, and yet aware of the intrinsic limitations of this method.

(Reading the debate, one's even reminded a little of Obama, who once said: "Part of it is psychological...I'm still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren't. There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.")

For example, look at Chomsky's argument for the existence of human nature (it's so elegant that it's worth quoting in full):

Now, the person who has acquired this intricate and highly articulated and organised collection of abilities-the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language-has been exposed to a certain experience; he has been presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language.

We can investigate the data that's available to this person; having done so, in principle, we're faced with a reasonably clear and well-delineated scientific problem, namely that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, that's presented to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organised resulting knowledge that he somehow derives from these data.

Furthermore we notice that varying individuals with very varied experience in a particular language nevertheless arrive at systems which are very much congruent to one another. The systems that two speakers of English arrive at on the basis of their very different experiences are congruent in the sense that, over an overwhelming range, what one of them says, the other can understand.

Furthermore, even more remarkable, we notice that in a wide range of languages, in fact all that have been studied seriously, there are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge from the very different kinds of experiences to which people are exposed.

There is only one possible explanation, which I have to give in a rather schematic fashion, for this remarkable phenomenon, namely the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal, an overwhelming part in fact, of the general schematic structure and perhaps even of the specific content of the knowledge that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience...

I would claim then that this instinctive knowledge, if you like, this schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data, is one fundamental constituent of human nature. In this case I think a fundamental constituent because of the role that language plays, not merely in communication, but also in expression of thought and interaction between persons; and I assume that in other domains of human intelligence, in other domains of human cognition and behaviour, something of the same sort must be true. Well, this collection, this mass of schematisms, innate organising principles, which guides our social and intellectual and individual behaviour, that's what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.

He's purporting to have discovered a "fundamental constituent of human nature." But his method for doing so was strictly empirical. And the discovery is itself highly contained. We have a human nature, but for what use is it? Where does it steer us? If human nature exists then, conceivably, so too does the Good Society. But Chomsky's statements about human nature was too conservative for an answer about what that would look like: just because human nature is there, doesn't mean we can claim any privileged access to it, and it especially doesn't mean that we can assert by fiat moral judgments on its basis (or ask people to sacrifice on its behalf).

Foucault is a great foil for Chomsky on this point. For him, the uncertainty inherent in the value "justice" renders the whole process of social change invalid. If we cannot establish justice for certain, than we cannot dignify our attempts to make change as anything but power plays. These are his premises: Justice itself is not objectively existent. Rather, like other social notions, it is a construct. And constructs are formulated by those who control institutions of power and by those who are victims of them. All of our mental life (including concepts like "justice" "science" "insanity") fit within the "grille" of cultural rules at play. This set of rules is contingent and changeable.

And contrary to what you think, you can't prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realisation of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilisation, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should-and shall in principle--overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification. That's the point.

I'm actually pretty sympathetic to Foucault's point about the ways that individuals fit within the totality of the social rules that govern them. But it's not clear how seriously we can take this -- life, after all, would hardly be worth living if we had to ditch all the things that were contingent/constructed. Too much of the stuff of living would be rendered unusable: our identities are products of chance, so those are constructs, and so are our conceptions of "love" and "suffering," our families we've been born into, not to mention any conception of a good society towards which we could struggle. The great irony of the postmodernist's project is that as they've attempted to reject socially constructed "systems of knowledge," they've managed to create there own system -- and one just as untenable as any its replacing. But in some ways worse. Foucault's thought denies the very act of thinking.

Where does Chomsky stand on this? Well, he affirms that justice may not exist, but we still must progress according to the believe that it does. If social change cannot ever have a demonstrative, absolute moral basis (and I think it cannot), then we can either deny the act of progress all together, or retain that notion and attempt to guide ourselves by our moral intuitions alone. Social changes would then revolve on the empirical process of finding the conditions that tend to make people thrive, and that reduce their oppression, a process that concedes from the beginning that the idealism is bracketed by epistemological uncertainty.

For example, to be quite concrete, a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War, and some of my own energy goes into civil disobedience. Well, civil disobedience in the U.S. is an action undertaken in the face of considerable uncertainties about its effects. For example, it threatens the social order in ways which might, one might argue, bring about fascism; and that would be a very bad thing for America, for Vietnam, for Holland and for everyone else. You know, if a great Leviathan like the United States were really to become fascist, a lot of problems would result; so that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act.

On the other hand there is a great danger in not undertaking it, namely, if you don't undertake it, the society of Indo-China will be torn to shreds by American power. In the face of these uncertainties one has to choose a course of action.

Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it's partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist. Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we're very far off the mark.

I really admire this mixture of uncertainty and progress. I think it's the correct posture intellecutally and, also, that it's a particularly American one. (See Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club for a review of the American invention of philosophical pragmatism during the reconstruction of the Union after the Civil War). I imagine Chomsky would disagree with this -- but maybe not. After all, Chomsky is one of Foucault's exceptions, someone who's militated against the contingencies of his culture (he was born into a country that he's spent his career criticizing; he was born as a Jew, and has become one of Israel's greatest critic), yet owes much of his life to the freedoms and institutions of American society. So maybe it's this: American sensibilities. But with reservations.

A Few Comments About the New Site

2009-07-13T16:01:00.033-04:00

Welcome to the new site. I'll say: notice the larger text, the simple, black-and-white color scheme, and the data streams on the sidebar. This is what's called Progress. To understand this, you'd probably have to have been following The Conviction since my sophomore year of High School -- we've been a long time since then. The site has changed a lot, and now, once again, it's time to tighten the slack and rethink the sort of stuff that this site tries to do. So if you'll indulge me, the following post is basically some thoughts on that question of making this space matter again, and some other stuff too.

In one sense certainty, it's an academic project. My aim with this site is to develop a system for the thoughtful management of information, a system to deal with the mass of data I encounter day-to-day. The rss streams on the sidebar are a part of this. The posts, once they come, are going to be part of this as well. My idea is to somehow post "abstracted/raw data" from the articles I'm reading and from the ideas I'm playing with. I want to focus on the act of writing (of producing) as an act of editing. Writing as parsing and winnowing. Writing as a quantum of information, but also as a vector (as DFW once wrote).

That's my goal -- and, frankly, I think that few projects are more important. Information abundance is characteristic of our time, of my own life, and one of the thing that we've learned for sure is that information alone does not mean truth or knowledge. In fact, it's vividly clear that the opposite can be true. Abundance can breed its own forms of unknowledge, its own forms of exclusion and control, its own new, special forms of helplessness. We can drawn out totally. And if we're not drawing, we're defecting: defering control of our information flow upwards, or cowering into dogmas, or otherwise resigning to being hopelessly ignorant, totally abject. These are the pathologies of information abundance. They are the pathologies that result from the condition of having too much and too many, of abundance unmatched by an ability to reckon with it. I think I can go further and say that so long as we continue to deal immaturely with information, then we'll continue to be fucked in the special ways of the recent past. Look at the financial crisis and the role information asymmetry played in creating moral hazard; or look at the Iraq War.

For those of us who want to make some decently accurate choices about what to believe, whom to trust, what to do, then the process begins with making serious choices about what information we consume and how we do it. I'm not there -- not even close. But I'm trying, and this blog is small part of that.

So that's the first point: information control. But I'll admit that there's more. If you stop reading here, it's fine, because the rest of this post, I'm afraid, might start to unravel. (This I suspect is going to be a characteristic overplaying of my intellectual hand. Usually I regret it.) This project, like a lot of blogs out there, is not just about providing content for the reader, but about providing content for the writer. I'm asking my readers to participate in my own self-help.

The gist is this: if I want to grow then I've got to be willing to fail. That's my main point. If I want to write and think better, then I've got to write and think more; if I want to succeed, then I've got to go through the very unsexy process of attempting, of confronting my assumptions and bringing them to bear and then ripping them down; of writing again and again until one piece -- finally -- succeeds, after a hundred -- ultimately -- have failed.

It's paradoxical, sure, but I'd argue that there's dignity to failure. To fail is to try, and to try -- in an age that has surrogated "physical fear" (fear for one's actual life) for "social fear" (fear for one's social life) -- is to be fearless. Failure is a willingness to fuck up and embarrass oneself for the purposes of making art or doing good. And that's meaningful. In an age that has redefined fear, failure is one of the closest things we've got for proof-positive evidence of personal bravery.

Maybe there's more. Maybe it's not just that we fear for our "social lives" but also that we fear the sort of truth that failure gives us. When people say that "you learn from your mistakes" they don't say anything about exactly how you learn. It's truth that hits hard. Anyone who's ever failed -- I mean, really failed -- knows what it means to get truth like a blow to the face. It's truth that burns in your eyes; to fail is to sit on your bed in midday and look at your placid hands and to look at the shadows on the wall and to feel that moment of violence come down on you; it's to forget yourself, your ambivalent, postmodern self. And at the same time it's to remember yourself, to remember that at least you have a self, that you've lived through darkness, that you'll be here tomorrow. Maybe people are afraid of failure because they're afraid of truth, or at least that very special, very place-putting kind of truth-as-blow-to-the-head that failure gives us. A life without failure means a life where this sort of special bravery and special truth -- I think the term is "wisdom" -- would be very far off indeed.

So these are roughly my intentions. To try, to write a lot, to fail a lot, and thus to grow. I take Becket's line in Westward, Ho! as my guide here: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That's what I want this site to be about.

I'll say, in closing, that the process I've attempted to describe is not just a personal-self-help thing. The whole failure-based model, unillusioned as it is about the messiness of progress or the priority of empirical experience over theory, yet still committed as it is to beating forward, to progress despite the fear, to engaging in the project of being better no matter how ultimately unperfectable man is -- this is the model of an American cautiousness, of an ad hoc hopefulness, and it probably has a lot to do with what "the liberal conviction" can means to us in this day and age, in the first place. So, once again, I'll say, "welcome to the site."

N.B. I haven't figured out how I want to archive my old posts. So until then, I'll just throw up a few indicative pieces, from an earlier age...

Cameron's Culture (Dec. 2006)

Two Years Old Today (Feb. 2007)

I feel silly now, that in my trepidation, I overlooked the fact that no one ever said free speech was supposed to be clean and grammatical. It should be boisterous, unruly and unapologetic, and the Internet is just that. In one fitful stroke it empowers both brilliance and bigotry, pitting one post's flaws against another's, dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, hoping that truth rises to the top of the labyrinthine pile of incoherency and inaccuracy. Sure, the Internet is not authoritative, but, in all of its blemishes, obscenities, inanity, and openness, it is the ultimate free marketplace of ideas. Blogs don't claim to be correct, only curious.

"Censorship at John Jay's Open Mic Night" (March 2007)

From what I gathered, the intent of the students' reading – an excerpt from the award-winning play "The Vagina Monologues," a play I saw just one week ago – was to celebrate femininity, what for so long has been seen as frail and inferior, or lascivious and sinful. The students uttered the word not as an admission but as a declaration: no longer should a word so natural and important be shrouded in a mist of ignorance and irrationality.

It is the height of irony that by censoring this word, and by punishing those who said it, the administration has compounded the mist of ignorance and irrationality that the word set out to dispel in the first place.

Start the Dialogue (March 2007)

The real issue is that as a school, John Jay has the educational imperative for diversity. Importantly, adamantly, is this: just because someone feels uncomfortable by the sexual politics of the Monologue, it does not mean that he is entitled to censor it. Because that would mean the end of education. How would I know what I believe, if I were not exposed to that which I did not believe? How would I know the bounds of my own civility, if I were never made to feel uncomfortable.

Caramoor (May 2007)

The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incas who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.

Farewell Speech to Campus Congress (June 2007)

I am saying this, quite simply, because representation is not always easy. When we act there are going to be costs. But I believe, and I believe this from my heart, that if there are costs when we take action, then the costs for inaction are far greater. To ask a question our school district asked itself this year: What harm can come of words? Perhaps words can cause harm. Perhaps that is true. But ask yourself: What is the harm of no words at all? How can we understand who we are, the bounds of our own civility and our own ignorance, if we cannot hear aloud what others think? Of all the values a society, or a school system like this, can have, the willingness for open discussion is our most important. If we cannot meet and talk freely about our own stupidity and our own potential, then we might as well be going to class to learn fairytales each day.

Graduation Speech: The Man Without a Hamlet (June 2007)

The roads that he travels – that we on the stage have traveled to get here – are different, of course (in the textbook, on the turf, at Cameron's Deli) but all roads towards anything are, in a sense, very much the same. They wind far onto the horizon, so that the Man Without a Hamlet can only see what is directly in front of his eyes.

A Very Short Love Letter to America (Oct. 2007)

This small collection of pictures spans a time period from the beginning of the summer -- to me known as the Summer of Love -- to the end of my travels in the West. Though this period is rather short, I will remember it as endlessly long. How long is the moment that a ball tossed in the air stops and sits before it travels down again? There is a moment that the ball does not move. This is the moment of transition, of reflection; the ball is at once traveling up and traveling down; this is the moment that glances at infinity, that is outside of time, has no beginning, no end and is infinitely short. Therefore the moment is forever. For me, that is the feeling of this period in my life.

Herzog Review (Feb. 2008)

Thus, we begin with a vision of what it means to be human: freed from type. Freed from the predictable. Too diverse for ideology, too beautiful to be any one thing.

Watching Ayacucho (April 2008)

Max! he scolded, get to the point. But what is the point? The point is knowledge and love and human suffering. That is the point. The trains that Kerouac jumped existed because of collective man and radical hopes and the slouching and trembling brotherhood I call progress. What a fool to revolt against the very society that permits your existence. Kerouacs glowing on the margins – we cannot have that, in this struggle to survive. The real kind: people are dying.

Crossing Borders (May 2008)

Eventually they just looked at each other. She asked him what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about flowers and clouds and then he leaned in towards her lips. She turned her head. She looked at the wall for a moment. Max tried again, leaning against her body. He tried again to kiss her lips, and then she turned once more, this time, moving close to his ear. She was all seriousness now. She said, too loudly for a whisper: Not all Colombian girls are what you think.

He smiled and kissed her on the cheek and got up from the bed. It was late. Yes, he said, and not all American boys are what you think.

Persistence of Difference in Marilyn Diptych (Feb. 2009)

The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.

Review of Unequal Democracy (May 2009)

His book, a collection of previously published papers, traces the socially mediated processes that transform economic disparities into political inequality. He creates a model for understanding democracy that (given recent political and economic events) is utterly relevant, even urgent so.

Welcome to the Conviction

2009-07-11T02:01:00.002-04:00

The site is going through a redesign. Come back tomorrow.

Content, More Content!

2009-05-10T20:39:00.006-04:00

Content, more content! he said. Streams of it, mountains of it! Content everywhere!

Stop, said the woman on the rue. Oh, please make it stop.

Up to the moon! he replied. Piles up to the moon! The bizerk ego, he implored. Spinning in self-creation! He was hysterical.

Please, she said to him, looking away. You’ve gone mad.

The ego has got to burst, he replied. Oh, piles, of it. Glimmering, schmaltzy and bad! Yes! You need too much, too many of everything!

He looked at the dainty woman. He said in a low voice: then I’ll burn it all down.

What? she asked, looking up.

Then I’ll burn the pile down. And leave.

Power Play

2009-05-08T19:49:00.009-04:00

How economic inequality threatens the nature of an equal democracy

Larry Bartels Unequal Democracy. Princeton University Press. 2008.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are very different from you and me.” To this, Ernest Hemingway famously replied: “Yes, they have more money.”

This exchange occurred in 1926, a time in America that was very good for the very rich – rivaled only by today. Hemingway’s rebuke is comforting. If it’s true that being rich simply means having more money, having a bigger house and a fancier car, than that might be the just rewards for market success.

But it’s also wrong. Larry Bartels’ book Unequal Democracy is a sophisticated, data-driven study of the myriad ways that the very rich have more than just more money. His book, a collection of previously published papers, traces the socially mediated processes that transform economic disparities into political inequality. He creates a model for understanding democracy that (given recent political and economic events) is utterly relevant, even urgent so.

The Political Economy

From the mid-1970s until today, economic inequality has risen precipitously in America – the average income of the richest Americans has grown six times faster than that of the poorest and the share of the income pie going to the rich has more than doubled.

The key, provocative insight of Bartels’ book is that this is not inevitable. The conventional notion that inequality is due only to “market forces,” to the impersonal economic trends that hum along absent of any governmental policies, is vigorously refuted by Bartels. His central claim is that rising inequality is an artifact of partisan political choice. “The most important single influence on the changing U.S. income distribution,” he writes, “[is] the contrasting policy choices of Democratic and Republican presidents.” To state this more provocatively: Republicans cause rising inequality. And his data here are very compelling. Controlling for macroeconomic factors, Bartels demonstrates that on average, since WWII, Republicans have grown income much faster for the rich than for the middle- and lower-classes, while Democrats have grown income equally between percentiles and faster than Republicans for everyone (including the top 95th percentile).

Unresponsive Democracy

His findings strike me as remarkable, but incomplete. The reader is never told exactly how such a substantial change in income distribution can occur. While he briefly suggests Republican principles of inflationary control over expansion and their vocal support for regressive taxation and spending, he admits that it would take a “small army of economists” to fully account for the connection. However, even without a causal mechanism, the implication is clear. The tides of inequality can be turned back, but only if we so choose.

The obvious question that follows is: if these data are true (and income growth is indeed faster and more equal under Democrats) then why do Republicans keep getting voted into office? Bartels dismisses the notion that low-income voters have been “seduced” into voting for cultural issues against their economic interests. Instead, he suggests that voter “myopia” – such as the peculiar sensitivities of the poor to the income growth of the rich and the tendency of the electorate to judge an incumbent on election-year economic growth – has greatly advantaged Republicans. He also points to widespread misinformation and a general unresponsiveness of political representatives to their poor constituents. Taken together, these effects lead to the break down of a democratic feedback loop that keeps politicians accountable for their inegalitarian policies.

Breaking the Cycle

Some of this might seem commonsensical – of course Democrats are better for the poor! and of course politicians rarely listen to the marginalized! But Bartels’ book, taken as a whole, puts forward a provocative and compelling model of democratic change. Income inequality in the economic sphere challenges the basic premise of democratic equality in the political sphere. One wonders at times whether Bartels is too cautious to state forcefully the nature of this relationship: the very rich are “very different from you and me.” They, whose political representation is greatest, have the power to affect the very policy changes necessary to perpetuate their own advantages.

But there’s a way out. Simply: politics matters. If it is elites that run our country, there is still a difference in the nature of those elites. And these differences matter; the choice at the ballot box is utterly consequential for the landscape of social justice. For those who doubt Bartels’ conclusions, the 2008 election provides a case study. We ought to pay close attention to its aftermath.

Connecting Liberty and Equality

2009-04-30T22:10:00.006-04:00

A flurry of debate erupted on the HPR Blog, when Daniel Barbero said this about Sam Barr's the "purpose of marriage" post:

There are a couple things I'd like to point out in response to the post below, first being the grotesque confusion of liberty and equality that occurs in calling the lack of a State imprimatur on your relationship "antithetical to liberty."

Sam responds:

Daniel thinks it is ridiculous to claim that "the lack of a State imprimatur on your relationship" is "antithetical to liberty." Now, if everyone's relationship lacked the state's seal of approval, I would certainly agree that nobody's liberty was being violated. But to grant some people a civil right and then deny it to others is antithetical to equality, yes, but also to liberty. By granting it to some people, the state creates a relative need; it opens a door to some, and closes it to others, and does so (we assume for the sake of argument) for no good reason.

Daniel's libertarian assumption must be (correct me if I'm wrong) that the state cannot create liberty. There is some pre-existing set of natural liberties, and all the state can do is put limits on those. To me, that is a perverse understanding of what it means to be free.

Then Dan responds:

I think the disagreement here does stem from that idea that various state provisions are a liberty/civil right/thing of justice/commandment, and thus we must be brook no opposition! I blame the really religious language this takes on Rawls, but that's neither here nor there.

Then Sam responds:

And yes, liberty does come out of planning committees. Liberty can, in fact, be increased by state action.

Then I respond, saying that "Sam Barr's equation of liberty and equally is pretty well-founded empirically." The rest here:

Think about the history of America. Think about the struggle to integrate non-land-owners, Catholics, Jews, women, blacks and now gays. Surely, as Sam notes, all this expanded both liberty and equality at once.

One way to understand the relationship between liberty and equality is to acknowledge that while the state doesn't have to sanction anything (to, in Daniel's words, grant "imprimatur on your relationship"), it does have to protect people's free pursuit of social goods, marriage included among these. And if the state denies that protection to some but not others than that's both an issue of liberty and an issue equality.

That's the basic point of this post: my contention that even if we accept a minimalist state and the libertarian premise that nothing that comes out of a committee is, in itself, a "liberty/civil right/thing of justice/commandment" we can still understand the connection between liberty and equality to be something other than grotesquely confused, and we can still understand why the state should protect access to marriage for all.

First, note that I said "protect access" to marriage, not just "provide for marriage." It only happens to be the case that marriage is actually provided by the state; it could also, conceivably, be simply protected by the state. So for our purposes, it's easier to think of marriage of as just another social good -- like money or happiness or health.

We can probably all agree that people are entitled to pursue these social goods as they see fit -- that people are, in other words, free to "pursue their own ends." That is natural rights theory; it's a belief that our own freedom is embedded, somehow, in our humanness, in our having Selves. And if we agree on this, we can probably also agree that the state, at the very least, must protect this right; according to libertarians, in fact, that's its raison d'etre: the state keeps us safe, protects our property, protects our transactions, and, otherwise, leaves us free to do what we please (so long as we don't impinge on others' ability to do the same).

If we're all born with Selves that have rights, we are also born (we can probably agree) with certain identities on top of those fundamental Selves -- we have a race, a gender, a nationality, a socioeconomic status, a sexual orientation and so on -- and that our membership in these groups is both arbitrary and non-transferable: I, Max Novendstern, alas, am not free to be a female or a WASP; I am a member of two groups that are decidedly neither!

So the question is: what if those latter identities threaten the freedoms of my prior Self? That's a big problem! What if my inherited membership into one group translates, because of the tendencies of my society, into the systematic deprivation of my access to social goods? Well, now the innocuous unfreedom of my identity (its arbitrariness) becomes a much graver, fundamental unfreedom of restricted access (my inability to freely pursue my own ends).

None of this is idle speculation. In America, at least, this is often the nature of unfreedom: the coupling of identity with access.

The result, of course, is inequality. Some have identities that are tagged as "deserving" social domination and radical deprivation, and others don't. And if I inherited an identity and that identity causes my persecution (ie my restricted access to pursue social goods which is my definitional freedom as an individual) then not only is that just too bad for me, but it has little to do with the freedom of other's who don't have my identity. Persecution is distributed unevenly.

That's how libety and equality are logically connected. Discrimination, which is persecution based on unevenly distributed identities, is ispso facto an affront to both liberty and equality at once.

Please note too that in the course of this entire argument I've said nothing about the distinction between "rights" and "privileges". The privilege/rights debate is something of canard. Whether voting or drinking at a water fountain or marriage is a "right" or a "privilege" is not the issue here. What is the issue is my established human right to pursue social goods freely. This is, after all, what classical liberal "market freedom" is all about: not the "state's imprimatur" on my "right" to a nicer car, but the state's protection of my right to freely attempt to make my preferences for said car effective. The case of marriage is no different. I'm surprised that libertarians regularly miss this point. When the state intervenes, it is not to "establish a freedom" to but to correct, as it were, an imperfectly distributed zone of free action.

We don't, in other words, have to ask the state to grant approval of any ends; we only need to affirm a prior right to pursue them; and this right should be distributed evenly, regardless of identity.

(But Max, can this occur in practice? Can the state protect our prior freedoms to pursue ends without "establishing" those ends as public morality? Perhaps not, but this is the libertarian's problem not my own: if they can't create a state that can protect their own conception of freedom without undermining it...well, maybe they should rethink things.)

To conclude, I'll just point out that I also the think the state's role in this is not the operative question. Of course the state needs to protect access, but, in reality, much of the struggle against discrimination (the struggle for liberty and equality) is negotiated outside the sphere of direct state power. The Civil Rights Movements did not begin in Washington, DC -- it began in the basements of Baptist Churches -- and it did not end their either. Marriage, likewise, is only one aspect of a larger fight, the longer war against the pathologies of identity politics (racism, sexism, homophobia); a war that has little to do with the state, and one that has much to do with the strength of our own civil association.

And that is something, if you think about it, that libertarians should applaud.

{Crossposted from the HPR Blog ; Photocredit http://www.flickr.com/photos/shifzr/413869636/}

Negotiating With Iran (What It's Not)

2009-04-17T01:23:00.008-04:00

I agree with the Zoey's points about Iran's incentives to accept American diplomatic outreach. But I would take her conclusion further. It wasn't just Bush's failure to be "attuned to geopolitical realities" that prevented this sort of progress; it was his failure, on a deeper level, to respect or conceptualize properly the purpose of diplomacy generally.

It's a fitting occasion to remember Bush's remarks to the Israeli parliament last spring:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That would be foolish! But of course that's not the purpose of diplomacy. I'm sure that others have articulated this better than I can, but it bears repeating. Negotiation is not about contriving an "ingenious argument" that will "persuade" our foes to put down their weapons. Negotiation is about advancing national goals by aligning them with the incentive structures of the other negotiating partner.

Here's a thought experiment. Say Iran's desire for nuclear capabilities is a product of (1) wanting to deterring an American attack and (2) wanting to assert greater regional leadership. On the other hand, America's fear is a product of our strong interests in (1) halting Iran's nuclear program and (2) ending its hostility towards Israel.

In this scenario, both nations' interests are aligned. One bargain would be that Iran ceases its enrichment program and commits to a policy of neutrality towards Israel; and in exchange, the United States provides security guarantees and recognizes Iran's regional leadership, including working to get it admitted into the WTO. Both nations' interests, initially aligned, are now relatively satisfied.

Negotiation, in this sense, is a form of commerce. Two parties exchange goods (money, security, land, guarantees or other things) and both perceive that the transaction is to its benefit, the result being positive sum. That's the proper purpose of negotiaton: not to use words like bludgeons or to invent persuasive arguments; it's about finding overlapping interests, and pursuing them agressively.

Of course this is all rather simplified and abstract; whether an agreement with Iran can be nailed down will depend on finding an intersection between the perceived interests of multiple regional players, each with varying leverage, stakes, political limitations and so on.

But it's not a "foolish delusion" to think that such an agreement can be reached. And if can be -- let this be said clearly -- the benefits would be greater and more permanent than those gained by military action, and the costs would be infinitely lower. Commerce benefits both parties. Diplomats, like other merchants exchanging goods, desire peace.

{Crossposted from the HPR Blog; photocredit younggrobv}

Integrate Cuba, Don't Hate

2009-04-14T21:40:00.013-04:00

America's policies towards Cuba have been total, unmitigated failures, so it's really good to see Obama making some important changes. The entire premise of our embargo -- that isolation will weaken the regime, which in turn will trigger an overthrow -- is based on a major fallacy. In reality, isolation strengthens authoritarian regimes. It shields them from international forces of democratization, while weakening the position of their opposition. Our policies towards Cuba have been successful only at making the Cuban people poorer, less exposed to international development and less connected to NGOs, businesses and governments around the world that have interests in free, open societies.

My Gov. 20 professor Steven Levitsky wrote a paper (pdf) on this subject, in which he argued that the strenght of authoritarian regimes after the Cold War was negatively correlated with how "linked" their countries were socially, economically and politically to the United States or Europe. Integrated countries in Latin America and Central Europe, for example, have democratized, while isolated countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and East Asian have remained more authoritain.

And extremely isolated countries like Cuba and North Korea haven't budged an inch.

The fact that Obama has emphasized easing travel restrictions and allowing telecommunication contracts into Cuba is important. These are the stuff of integration. And that -- I think -- should be the general thrust of America's foreign policy, not just with Cuba but generally.

{Crossposted from the HPR blog ; photo attribution Rudi Heim}

What if Sergey Brin Were Denied a Visa?

2009-04-13T00:48:00.006-04:00

[Crossposted from the HPR blog]

The NYT came out with Part IV of its "Remade in America" series. It's a great series, full of the cool graphics that the NYT does so well. But the thesis of the piece, I suggest, is rather obvious (at least to anyone who's walked around Harvard's campus lately). Simply: immigration really, really helps America.

“Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’ ” he said.

“The people of America get it,” he added. “And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realize how dumb they’re being.”

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.

To be fair, we're talking about the easiest cases -- immigrants who have enter our skilled labor forces vis a vis Ivy League schools. But in some ways that's the point: these are easy cases.

America's ability to attract the brightest students from around the world remains one of its greatest advantages -- one that distinguishes it, finally, from other great powers at their senescence. Britain never had the same universalist appeal that America has. It couldn't. For Britain, an old and rich cultural-racial heritage made the assimilation of immigrants fraught with difficulties; it's complicated, but the bottom line was that the darker your skin, the less British you could ever be.

That's not the case in America. America was founded on virgin soil; there was no antecedently established culture (well, almost none...). So we were constituted on a set of ideas -- ones that, conceivably, anyone from any part of the world could aspire to. I think this aspirational quality is key. It means that our ability to attract diverse and talented students isn't just an artifact of our wealth; it's built into our source code, into the way that we were founded. It's because our national identity isn't predicated on a cultural heritage but on ideals. America is a framework not a race.

This is something that's often neglected both by the "United States is in decline" crowd and the "I'm a real American" crowd. Both groups misunderstand how the founding of our country makes us unique; and they both undervalue the material advantages this confers, Google Inc. as a great example.

Of course, you could ask, Should we be skimming off the most talented students from developing countries? Maybe not. But if they want to come, surely we should take them.

A Few Thoughts on SLAM from a Liberal Committed to Social Justice

2009-03-09T11:57:00.024-04:00

The following is a response to the Student Labor Action Movement and all the rallying we've recently seen (here, here). As far as I'm aware, the Crimson won't run my response. I don't know why, exactly -- either scheduling issues (?) or substantive ones -- but I am publishing it here.

If you're reading this and are interested, I'd love to discuss this issue further: mnovends@fas.harvard.edu.

- - -

A Few Thoughts on SLAM from a Liberal Committed to Social Justice

“We come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
- Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

Let’s assume that you are a liberal (I am) whose support for the American working class is deep – what are you to make of the Student Labor Action Movement?

The group, known by its onomatopoetic acronym SLAM, helped to organize Thursday’s labor rally, in which hundreds of students, workers and union representatives chanted outside of the Holyoke Center, and then marched to President Drew Faust’s office in the yard.

Picket line protesting of this sort is part of an important progressive tradition in America. It is based on a explicit, essential premise: the normal avenues of reform are too clogged or too bigoted for my lone voice to be heard. I must take to the streets.

To this effect, the Crimson quoted one of the leaders of the rally (to be fair, not directly affiliated with SLAM) as saying: “We are fighting for justice. We are making history. We can only rise together."

Protests demand enemies; yet, I am left to wonder, Whom, exactly, is SLAM fighting? The information is sketchy here. Is SLAM really suggesting that President Drew Faust is acting in bad faith or insidious intent to undermine Harvard’s most vulnerable?

If this is their point – insulting as it is to President Faust’s long career of service to the public good – then SLAM ought to say it outright. And then they need to give evidence.

Second, What exactly is SLAM fighting about? In a Crimson editorial, SLAM member Alyssa Aguilera says that there is “nothing responsible about the richest university in the world conducting massive layoffs that will only add to the already hurting economy.” But she only points to Harvard’s announcement to scale back an outsourcing contract to the effect of terminating “13 of 27 jobs contracted through American Cleaning Company at Harvard Medical School.”

The fact is: zero workers directly employed by Harvard have been laid off. And there is no evidence that they will be. President Drew Faust did indeed write that she would be “taking a hard look at hiring, staffing levels and compensation,” but the result seems to already have come to pass: a freeze on wages for most faculty and staff, and a voluntary early retirement option for 1600 workers.

I question the way SLAM has framed the debate – and I do so with all due respect for the organization and the principles that it is pursuing that SLAM has denied Drew Faust and Harvard University. Rhetoric like “massive layoffs” (not to mention the epithets and sloganeering) is more than just misleading – it is openly mendacious. SLAM, like any movement, ought to be wielding truth, not suppressing it. And to the extent that they need to fabricate enemies and conjure up phantoms, I cannot support their work.

I humbly suggest, instead, that SLAM is not a protest group, but a lobbyist. Their case, at its best, is one of costs against benefits: in this time of economic hailstorm – one that threatens hard decisions about practically every aspect of the University, from research to admissions to expansion – workers should be protected as primary.

They might be right. (In fact, I hope they are). But they should not pretend that it's an easy case to make, or that it’s morally unambiguous. Compensation accounts for fifty percent of University expenses, and with limited and drastically reduced resources there are a number of programs liberals might prioritize: What about the University’s mission to research for the public good? What about financial aid, so that no one is discriminated against because of economic standing?

Reasonable people – reasonable liberals – can disagree. And reasonable debate, I posit, should be conducted as such. They ought to get off the street and start typing briefs.

The tactics of SLAM, in the end, seem suited for a place and a time very much different from our own. While my peers are reenacting the civil strife of an older generation, the Obama Administration (a product in many ways of Harvard’s better sensibilities) is proceeding from pragmatism and consensus to win real victories for American liberalism.

Pragmatism. Consensus. Real victories. Such, I believe, are the demands of our age – and ones that we Harvard liberals are uniquely equipped to seize upon.

Protest, a tool of voice, is often wielded by those who do not have one. It seems as if the passionate students in SLAM, a group that exists at the very center of societal influence, want to wish their own considerable talents and access away. Apparently, they would prefer to leave the halls of power – where rational discussion can lead to rational solutions – so that they might bang loudly at their doors.

End of the Semester Essays

2009-02-28T01:50:00.004-05:00

I've finally gotten to it: here are some of the essays I put together in the waning days of first semester. Two of them are fairly large in scale, the Warhol essay perhaps my best non-fiction piece, the homelessness essay perhaps my most bizarre.

The Persistence of Difference in Warhol's Marilyn Diptych

The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.

In the Wake of Genocide: Designing A Constitution for Rwanda

The Hutu-Tutsi ethnic divide at the center of the Rwandan Genocide is old but not ancient. The two ethnic groups, ascriptively and culturally similar – sharing physical semblance, language, heritage and religion – provide a textbook example of how ethnic division can be made salient by institutional design, and then made violent by political opportunism. From the 1930s to 1961, Belgian colonizers created institutions that specifically allocated political power along ethnic lines: using a card-based identification system, they stripped Hutus of their land, created a shadow extraction government headed by the Tutsi aristocracy, and gave them exclusive rights to tax collection power and state-funded education. Then in 1960, at the eve of Independence, the Belgians held an election in which they endorsed the Hutu politician Dominique Mbonyumutwa, affecting a precipitous change in political power that uprooted the monarchy headed by Tutsi aristocracy (Lec. 8.1 Levitsky). It is the major intention of this report to consider ways to reverse the very institutional incentive for ethnic identification that helped to create and perpetuate the myth of ethnicity in the first place.

Warning Out: Then and Now

The most exhausting piece of writing I've ever attempted, begins in this way:

You might know what dispossession feels like if you’ve ever jumped into the Charles River at night. I felt something like that, I think, throughout the year of 2008, when I was living alone. And then again, having come back to my town but seeing nothing there. And then when I left again. September 8th, 2008 the first night I slept at Harvard University, I could have told you that dispossession feels something like black water, like drowning beneath the lights of a city in September, and like feeling totally alone.

I had met a girl named Joyce who was real shy. She said her father was a diplomat so she never stayed in one place for more than a few years and never had many friends. We walked together from the Yard to the River, the lights of Dunster Street glowing as if very wet and totally yellow, like they do. We stripped off our clothes on the dock – I remember feeling very cold – and danced a little – I spun her – and then we jumped into the water. Whooo ahhh I shouted. Someone else, a boy’s voice from the road beyond the grass, said Yeeeehaaaa. When we got out of the river, we folded on the grass and sat there, in total silence, with the air, light and brilliant – the air was very light that night – mixing with the lights of Boston beyond the river, and me, I remember thinking something like This, this is the day your slumber breaks…She asked me: Are you just going to forget about this? I smiled and she smiled too and I said: Nothing counts, you know – it’s Freshman Week.

That night, I guess, rounded something off for me. It was the first time that I wondered, real hard, whether I hadn’t just walked out the front door, when I could have walked out the back. It was that night, my looking at the city from that place on the banks, thinking about place, to be one thing and not another thing, thinking that I am a small part of something much bigger, more complex and totally indifferent, that I first began to think about homelessness. I can’t say that I know what dispossession feels like today, but I could tell you that night. Tramping back to the Yard in the soaking clothes, I thought Whooo ahhh Yeeehaaaa, what a thing it is to be here.

I go on to explore a set of laws about inhabitancy rights that early settlers brought from England:

With this came the first class of American untouchables. From the middle of the 18th century to its completion, more than nine thousand people were warned out of Boston, with more than two thousand people in the year 1791-1792 alone. These numbers not only reflect a propensity for warning out, but a need to do so in the first place, a reflection of a class of migrants that had emerged in America, traveling largely from the countryside to the cities in search of labor. When they entered a city and were warned to leave, many of them did. Forty percent of those warned out in Boston in 1780 were not there in 1790. Entire families were legally expelled from towns, left to wander in search of a fixed abode. Such a class has never left us.

The piece ends reflexively:

I feel like shit about it, but that alone does not mean I have failed. In fact, that’s the only success I’ve had in four months since I jumped into the Charles. I feel ashamed – good, piercing, shame.

Primal Scream

2009-01-15T10:24:00.002-05:00

Domna: You, you run yesterday. I saw you that you run yesterday.

Boy: *Smile, nod*

Domna: Yes, yes you run, you run.

Max: Wait, Domna's seen your penis?

Boy: *Silence*

Happy New Year after A Year of Travel

2009-01-06T00:06:00.007-05:00

2008 was a year of traveling. The images that are salient to me are of mountains, and of sitting on buses with my cheek against a window; I see myself third-person, looking at the dusty yellow road outside; I think of going home every day, walking up Giraldez in the dark, hearing dogs bark, a few internet cafes and yellow ice cream vats on the street; I think about all the nights I sat with Nilda, that beautiful girl who seemed very sad, just the two of us at the table, sipping soup; I think about waking up at dawn.

For me, thinking about 2008 is a lot like thinking about traveling. It is only a coincidence that this was also a year of travel for America. An odd coincidence: I've heard some people say that their lives are products of artistic design – I don’t think that is true. But is odd, as a point about narrative arc of some sort, that the two, my traveling and our country’s, come together that way – it is odd that I leave America at exactly the moment when so many people are rediscovering its meaning.

The history of our country is punctuated by moments when we have chosen to be better, to create a more perfect union, and it is my conviction that we are passing through one of those moments right now. And 2008, a year for me that has featured a long march in Peru and then the inundation of Harvard, a year of abyss in all the best ways, also constitutes a personal moment when I choose to be better than I have been.

Travel, though, only means something so long you stop. Why travel? I used to say: to understand your home. Well, we’ve traveled an awful lot. Let’s get to work.

Here’s to 2009. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Freshman Year Writing, Part 1

2008-11-18T06:33:00.005-05:00

Here are two essays that I've written. In the first, about a Emerson, I argue that the doctrine of "self-reliance" is a doctrine of obedience, rather than freedom. In the second essay, I look at the different ways that black protest writers used religion before and after Emancipation.

Obedience and Destiny in Emerson's Self-Reliance:

Emerson is calling for a total merger of a man with his Self, and thus a proximate a merger of man with God. All told, Emerson’s supposed doctrine of “defiance” quickly reveals itself to become a doctrine of obedience. Self-reliance might as well be God-reliance.

The Uses of Religion in Du Bois and Douglass:

To conclude: Du Bois, in his discussion of sorrow songs in the final essay and his juxtaposing of them with European hymns throughout, suggests an answer: integration through the self-assertion. He wants both Black and White elements of society to be at once productive and self-containing, to interact as “co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (Du Bois 5). These Sorrow Songs represent all that is important to Du Bois’ conception of religion; in them, there are all the gifts that Blacks brought to America, “the soft, stirring melody,” the “gift of sweat” and the “gift of Spirit” (Du Bois 214). Thus, religion encapsulates the divisions that not only threaten to paralyze blacks, but also the very divisions that make their identity so important. He asks: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” (Du Bois 215).

Bad Conversation Starters for Freshman Orientation Week

2008-09-13T16:57:00.007-04:00

#1 “Wow, the food really sucks here. It reminds me of that time I murdered a child.”

#2 “Hey, a lot of people say I look like John Harvard.”

#3 “Aw, the math placement exam was terrible. I thought they said to use a #2 Dildo. Boy was I wrong.”

#4 “Yeah, it’s fucking ridiculous. They have me living with like one roommate. Once he played music softly from his computer and then I told him that it was difficult for me to study while music is playing. Then he stopped. He insists on using a blue backpack. What a douche bag.”

#5 “Hey I’m Zach. I could not properly identify circles until I was eleven years old.”

#6 “Wow, you’re from Thayer Hall? I’m a homosexual too.”

#7 “Same. I thought the Lamont Library Open House provided a great deal of pertinent information too.”

#8 “You’re from Maryland? Wow. Absolutely fascinating.”

#9 “Truth be told, I have no respect for the janitorial staff. They are mostly uneducated.”

#10 “Hi, I’m Drew Faust.”

#11 “Once I held a young child’s mouth closed to keep him from making noise. After a while he suffocated to death. Hey, I’m from Canaday too!”

#12 “Cool. Same here. I was thinking of concentrating in either Premed or Expos.”

#13 “What’s interesting to me is that this conversation is compounding most of my racial prejudices.”

#14 “Do you happen to have directions to Anneberg?”

#15 “In retrospect, Community Conversations probably would have been more fun than masturbating alone in my dorm room.”

#16 “Hi, I’m Michael Sandal.”

#17 “Did you happen to notice that a large number of kids are using cellphones and other electronic devices to contact their friends and family?”

#18 “Jeeze, this blueberry pie tastes like human blood.”

#19 “Hey I’m Max. I think abortion is murder. What’s your name?”