What's not to love?

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?

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

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

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?

-

* 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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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.