The Small Oppress the Great when the Great aren't that Great 

What worries me is not the prospect that a majority of white Americans will buy into theocratic racism or Randian libertarianism but the remarkable leverage that extremists can have even when they are in the minority so long as political elites lack courage and prudence. The crazies are always with us, and people are always susceptible to demagogic appeals. What gives them strength is the decadence of our political class, the unfortunate fact that our elites just aren't that elite.

Here's an uncomfortable parallel: I've been reading Eri Hotta’s book on Japanese politics in the run up to the Pearl Harbor. The majority of Japanese leaders were perfectly well aware that Japan would lose a war with America—even those who subscribed to mystical versions of Japanese exceptionalism were able to count—but they were cowed into an obviously stupid policy by their fear of a rather small number of fanatical army officers. Of course, the fanatics in Japan resorted to assassination to get their way, something that hasn't happened here yet; but the firebrands also imposed a kind of rhetorical terrorism that made it impossible for leaders to admit in public that Japan wasn't always in the right and wouldn't automatically prevail against any enemy because of the Yamato spirit. The prime minister, cabinet members, and high-level army and navy officers were too cowardly to face up to a rabid minority and ended up signing off on a suicidal war few of them believed in. The Germans and Italians made war at the command of strong, evil men. The Japanese made war because of the vacillation of weak, morally mediocre men. 


The majority of Republicans don't believe in democracy, but they aren't nuts. They are weak, however, and afraid of being labeled RINOs or worse by the true believers. Which is why they end up supporting ridiculously jingoistic and counterproductive foreign policies—assuming that bomb, bomb, bomb counts is a plan—as well as domestic policies that weaken the country economically and divide it socially. The Democrats have analogous fears, which is why, among other things, right wing terrorists and militia men are not suppressed and war crimes perpetrated by own brand of renegade Colonels go unpunished while whistleblowers rot in jail. 

 
Weakness is dangerous. Many people subscribe to the so-called great man theory of history; but as I read the record, the little men theory of history applies more often, especially when it comes to explaining the grand disasters. For example, for the last hundred years people have been trying to decide who are the villains responsible for the massive calamity that was World War I; but that's a question without an answer because the true cause was not a villain but the fact that the nations were governed by moral and intellectual midgets. I'm afraid that a similar explanation holds for our current political crisis. You can’t have a democracy or even a decent oligarchy without responsible leadership.

Ataraxia Nervosa

When cosmic insight
Has filled you with light,
When you’ve beaten the odds
And placated the Gods,
When you’re rested and sated
And recently mated,
When the belch and the fart
Have seen fit to depart,
When the pissing is past
And the shit has been shat,
And the who that was you is a guy with no why,
Nirvana’s a coma
For psyche and soma,
And you don’t even bother to die.

Two Problems in One

In the decadence of the Soviet system the saying was "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." Something like that may be happening in our country, though it's hard to quantify. I think the phenomenon is manifesting itself in the lousy morale of government workers and the corresponding mediocre performance by employees in the VA, IRS, and government labs. I've got to believe that the combination of years of wage freezes and non-stop public abuse of government workers—bureaucrats, teachers, scientists—is taking a toll. And why would you expect the people who clean houses and flip burgers to go on trying one iota more than they absolutely must if they have nothing whatsoever to look forward to and everybody keeps telling them that the only reason they haven't risen into prosperity is their own human worthlessness? 

Positive reinforcement works, but it isn't just millionaires who need it. Part of the problem with great inequality is that paying so much to the very top of the distribution leaves little left to reward the efforts of those below.

There are two problems we've got to deal with:

1. The distribution of incomes between bottom and top is too great

2. There is insufficient social mobility.

These are distinct problems, and confusing 'em messes up the debate. It's a good thing if burger flippers can go back to school and rise in the world, but not everybody is going to rise and those burgers still need to be flipped. Not every body is going to be a Horatio Alger hero. After all, the boss has only so many daughters. Considerations of fairness or decency aside, what’s the upside of leaving so many people in a state of wretchedness?

Time was people spoke about the dignity of work, not the dignity of work as a steppingstone to becoming a manager and owning 168 pizza restaurants, but the dignity of doing the job itself. In any case, if you expect people to do their jobs well year after year, you better figure out some way of rewarding them for their efforts instead of treating them with non-stop disrespect. The meritocratic ideology implies that the losers are dreck. Those of us who are doing OK may not notice the implication, but I'm pretty sure that much of the population is very well aware of it—no Protestant ethic without a large and populous hell.

The Garden of F****** Paths

The situation in the Middle East is so complex that it is impossible even to come up with a single adequate metaphor: Borromean rings? Russian dolls? the Chinese finger trap? Jenga? Pick up sticks? Evidently, an epic poem on these events will have to written in fractalic hexameter. But I will be told it’s all really very simple when you factor in: 

The energy crisis, fundamentalisms and other versions of reactionary modernism, the injured pride of Islamic nations, the unresolved stress of modernization, sexual politics, globalization, various ghosts of the 19th Century’s Great Game, the desire of the Persians to finally get even with the Arabs, the cyclic struggle of the nomads and the city dwellers (ibn Khaldun!), the mutual hatred of Sunnis and Shias, America’s quest for the mirage of ultimate safety, the forceful imposition of liberal democracy overseas sponsored by people who hate liberal democracy at home, climate change with accompanying drought and environmental degradation, the final collapse of the Sykes Picot agreement as part of the ongoing demise of the Westfalian system of international relations, the clash of civilizations, demographic trends (too many adolescent males), Facebook and Twitter, the covert alliance of the Saudis and the Israelis, the inability of states to control their intelligence apparatuses, irredentist nationalisms (Turks, Israelis, Kurds, and Syrians), the revived Cold War between Russia and U.S., the aspirations awakened during the Arab Spring, the persistence of archaic forms of government (sheiks and kings), the activities of irresponsible plutocrats, political paralysis in America, European disunity and economic stagnation, state breakdown in Pakistan, entrepreneurial terrorism, and whatever else I’m too lazy to write down.

People search for the basic cause of every great historical catastrophe, but the true explanation of such explosions is precisely the absence of a single basic cause. The French Revolution, the outbreak of World War I, the current impasse in the Middle East are crises made out of crises, knots of imbricated contradictions too intricate to unravel except with a sword. Unfortunately, there are always many would-be Alexanders around who are likely to lose patience at the same time. Hence the otherwise inexplicable suicidal stupidities that characterize such conjunctions, mostly committed by leaders trying to be statesmen when the situation calls out for politicians.

Spell Pneumonia 

I’ve been anticipating the counterattack for some time. The media success of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century guaranteed that the defenders of the oligarchic order of our times would come up with a more effective defense than the purely reflexive preliminary spasms, which pretty well came down to a combination of “He’s a Marxist!” and “Our shit does not stink!” I note that after a series of brainstorming sessions that probably played like a scene from the twenty-third season of Mad Men, the consultants decided to fall back on the same denialist script that had proven so successful in service to the Book of Genesis, tobacco, and fossil fuels. In law, the technique is known as pettyfogging. In war, it is pretty much the strategy used in another bad cause by Kesselring in the Italian campaign. The basic idea is to exhaust the opponent or at least delay defeat by making the contest a series of bitter struggles about trifling technical details or meaningless hilltops. The Creationists claim that evolution is in doubt because there is an overturned stratum in Wyoming. The tobacco lobby points to a misplaced decimal point in a government study. “It’s snowing!” So now we’re going to be treated to a campaign of nitpicking about the statistics in Piketty’s book. The aim is to create the impression that there is some genuine dispute about whether wealth and income inequality is increasing.

That there are errors in Piketty’s tome is quite inevitable. A big book is a big evil, as Callimachus opined a couple of millennia ago and I can assure you is true having served as the editor of a three-semester calculus textbook. Specific errors are of less moment in a work drawing general conclusions from history than in proving a theorem. Unlike many other economists, Piketty’s preferred style of argument is inductive, which is why his book is more reminiscent of The Origin of Species than Das Kapital. Like Darwin, Piketty piled up corroborating data in enormous heaps, an approach whose validity depends on the balance of evidence, not the accuracy of any given data point. In contrast, the patented denialist PR methodology appeals to a Popperian or perhaps pop Popperian epistemology, that is, it depends on the thesis that only negative results really matter in science because of the logic of conditional sentences. If p implies q, q doesn’t imply p. Not q, however, does imply not p. Which would be decisive indeed in a piece of deductive reasoning. The logic doesn’t really apply to empirical work; but for polemic purposes, the focus on falsification is convenient because it means that the critic doesn’t have to worry about the mass of positive evidence. It’s not an accident that creationists don’t know much geology, biogeography, or biology. If all you want to do is cast doubt, all that’s needed is a counter example or two. Why fill your precious mind with irrelevances?

Evidence does matter, and Piketty will have to address any errors discovered in the vast databases that underlie Capital in the Twenty First Century. That’s the normal process of research conducted in good faith. Unlike many other economists, notably Reinhart and Rogoff whose influential paper really did have meaningful errors, Piketty shows his work so as to facilitate both criticism and improvement. Everything has always been available either in the text itself or on the net. Meanwhile, the op/ed writers at WSJ will leap on any imperfection as definitive proof that there’s nothing to the general conclusions of this ongoing work and that we can safely ignore the multiple strands of evidence for a powerful worldwide trend because of technical issues about the proper way to construe a single English time series. Meanwhile, the evidence for a new Gilded Age was overwhelming before Piketty and remains so.

Old joke: a black guy dies and shows up at the Pearly Gates where he finds he’s third in line. St. Peter explains to the first man in line, who's white, that everything seems to be in order but there is the formality of one last test. “Spell ‘cat.’” Same drill with the next person, a white lady, “Spell ‘dog.’” Well, you see where this is going. In economics, it’s slightly different. If you’re furthering the approved politics, demonstration consists of drawing two intersecting straight lines in a rectangle and triumphantly asserting “See!” If, like Piketty, you’ve made an elaborate case for the proposition that everything doesn’t work out for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that there is no working thermostat that automatically prevents the runaway concentration of wealth and incomes, it’s time to spell pneumonia.

Publishing News

In an attempt to widen the appeal of the best seller to conservatives, Belknap Press has made a deal with Regency Publishing to jointly publish an alternative edition of Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. The new version will retain all the charts, graphs, and data from the old book but will feature a long forward by Paul Ryan that puts the growth of inequality in a different light. Writes Ryan, “It may be true that capitalism has an in-built tendency to redistribute wealth upward, but that doesn’t mean that human effort wasn’t needed. It would be unfair not to recognize the contributions of the Republican party to the process.”  The new version is slated to appear in October of this year. Tentative title: The Victory Lap.

What Homer Called Stealing in the Mind

There really isn’t a debate going on about the meaning of the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the economic effects of the ACA. There’s a spinning contest, though a one-sided one so far. For right wing types, the strategy is to ignore the bulk of the report, which basically concludes that Obamacare won’t hurt the budget and is succeeding in insuring millions of the formerly insured, in order to claim that it will cost a couple of million jobs.  The report doesn’t actually say that. It projects that Obamacare will reduce the number of hours that people will chose to work. To quote the report itself:   

The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses' demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).

When called on their misrepresentation of the facts, the Conservatives switch to a slightly different line. One of them argued to me “in the macro fewer folks choosing to work means lower output and living standards.” Ignoring the obvious dishonesty involved in changing your story when you get caught in a lie, this argument, which sounds like it comes from the 40s—the 1840s—has an interesting implication. Any universal health care system whatsoever has the effect of reducing the need for some people to work and thus the number of hours worked. Of course, the eight-hour working day, restrictions on child labor, and social security have exactly the same tendency, except to a vastly greater extent, which no doubt explains why the U.S. experienced a marked decline in output and living standards in the years after the introduction of these well-meaning but economically naïve measures. They all have the effect of reducing the desperation that is the only effective means of getting the slackers to move off their ass, at least in the view of the latest generation of Manchester mill owners.

One of the ironies here is that the probable net effect of measures like Obamacare is to increase employment because we’re obviously in a period of depressed demand and the ACA transfers wealth to people who will spend it—the Congressional Budget Office report makes that point, too, not that we’ll be able to read about it in the Wall Street Journal. That we don’t have a problem of lower output caused by insufficient factors of supply is pretty obvious when you consider the piles of cash that so many corporations are currently sitting on and the armies of people clamoring for work. The genuine objection to the ACA is not that it reduces living standards but that it doesn't increase the living standards of the right kind of people, that, and it doesn’t properly chastise the slackers.

Well, what’s going on here is not really a debate about economic theories but much more a matter of values or rather, what’s going on in economics is a debate about values. Behind the Neo-Scroogian economics of the plutocrats is a sort of upside down version of an argument of John Rawls. For liberals, inequality is defensible if a system with different rewards leads to an improvement in everyone’s condition of life. For conservatives, a lower level of general prosperity is defensible if that’s what’s required to maintain an appropriate level of inequality. The problem with measures to reduce inequality is that they reduce inequality, not that they harm the economy.

Not Merely a Theoretical Deduction

Libertarians wish to limit the role of the state to specific, sharply circumscribed tasks, among which the protection of property rights is by far the most important. It is therefore not correct to assume that libertarians are calling for a smaller state since the imperative need to protect property calls for any means necessary and that often includes a much larger state. No doubt Libertarians would prefer a tiny state, indeed one small enough to drown in the bathtub, but that’s a utopian goal impractical for the foreseeable future for existing Libertarianism, aka Libertarianism in one country. In fact, under contemporary circumstances, the Libertarian program is a recipe for a greatly enlarged state. That’s because the greater the degree of inequality in a society, the more pressing the need for a powerful government to protect the possessors of great wealth by maintaining an enormous military, by hiring additional police and giving them a freer hand, by making the justice system more punitive and arbitrary, by building more prisons and filling them up, by instituting comprehensive surveillance systems, and by infiltrating possible dissident groups with spies and provocateurs. Of course, one could hope—one could have hoped—that inequality would not grow to the point that all this would be necessary; but here’s the problem. While libertarianism is keen on the state’s police power, it insists that government has no business doing anything that would effectively lessen inequality. Unfortunately, the existing economic system has a built-in tendency to increase disparities of wealth and income if only because the best way to acquire money is to already possess it. This built-in positive feedback loop has profoundly destabilizing effects, which is why all the developed nations have developed mechanisms of income and wealth redistribution, not to destroy capitalism, but precisely to allow it to continue. Libertarianism maintains that all of these mechanisms—progressive income and inheritance taxes, welfare, public education, social insurance schemes, universal health insurance—are illegitimate. In the absence of effective redistribution, the only option is greater state power to protect the haves from the have nots. Libertarianism, for all its advertised hostility to government, promotes a larger state much as the Bolsheviks created a totalitarian state in the name of a philosophy that called for the withering away of the state.

Because I Say So

Religions commonly make obviously false assertions—resurrection, transubstantiation, personal immortality—because it wouldn't be enough of a test of loyalty to ask believers to believe in something that was likely or even possible. I think the tenacity with which police and courts cling to outlawing pot has a similar rationale. How would it demonstrate the unquestionable power of the state to outlaw behavior that everybody, including criminals, knows to be wrong? You might as well have a plausible religion. What fun would that be? Which is why the more evidence accumulates for the relative harmlessness or even medical value of marijuana, the more the authorities will resist legalizing it. Of course they may eventually lose that fight. If so, I predict they’ll find some other practice of equivalent triviality and outlaw that, particularly if it is associated with minorities since the other great function of unreasonable laws is to provide a pretext for keeping the nigras down.

Cenotaph

Though a musty venue for embrace
The tomb’s just not a private place.
To be alone, there can’t be many,
But it doesn’t count if there aren’t any.
We’re all like Christ, at least in this,
Although less likely to be missed
And we have to harrow hell before
The hour when we are no more:
Whether we sin or we behave,
We’ll leave behind an empty grave.

Looking for the Right Problem

It's interesting to compare our experience with the Soviet Union's. Like us, the Soviets were handicapped because their leaders bought into a disfunctional ideology and tried to make up for its shortcomings through education. For a while, that worked reasonably well for the Reds because literacy and technical training compensated for the inefficiency of the demand economy—the Soviet economy grew enormously before the 60s. Even in a lousy system, people who could read and write are vastly more productive than illiterate peasants. Our problem is that we already have mass literacy and a fairly high level of technical education. Incremental improvements are unlikely to have more than incremental benefits. Better education probably can't bail out Neoliberalism the way it bailed out Communism, even assuming that the current war on teachers and test mania are actually going to improve schools, a dubious supposition.

Getting back to a sensible mixed economy with lower levels of wealth and income inequality is a better bet than the endless pursuit of some magic formula for wonderful schools. Education isn't the right problem.

Destructive Interference

Health care reform is complicated enough without getting confused about the reasons we need to change things:

1.     We ought to care about ensuring adequate health care for everybody because we’re decent human beings.  

2.     We ought to lower the cost of health care to everyone because it’s in our self interest to do so and we’re not damned fools.

Either motive should be sufficient in itself to motivate reform, but appealing to both of them at the same time in the usual muddled way weakens what should be an irresistible case.

He Who Wills the End

Since even the CNN talking heads are coming around to the realization that the current level of inequality is politically and socially intolerable, it's kinda odd that so many people still get upset about "redistribution" as if it were a dirty word. If you think we should do something about inequality, you've already opted for redistribution of some kind, though I'm not denying it makes a big difference how it is accomplished.* Changing the tax laws in incremental ways, raising the minimum wage, and actually enforcing existing labor laws are better than a frontal assault on the gated communities, though, admittedly, they don’t make for exciting television. The central fact is that however you do it, you are going to have make certain people less rich and they are going to object to that. So will the talking heads, for that matter, when they finally realize the implications of the new meme for entertainers with seven figure incomes. That may take a while, since for these folks, it’s a long, long way from premises to conclusion. They will end up objecting to each and every concrete step towards improving the distribution of wealth while at the same time repeating that something must be done.

* I'm reminded of the punch line of an old joke: "We've already settled that. Now we're haggling about the price."

Two More Limericks for Very Select Audiences

An ingenious shrink named Elise

Trained a troop of medicinal fleas.
Their bites were quite itchy,
But the gloomy and twitchy
Found scratching a welcome release.

There once was a maid of Iraq
Who had a magnificent rack,
But unlike the ass
Of the maid of Madras,
Her boobs were a literal fact.*

* Explaining jokes has some of the same futility as attempting to recall a fart, but I have discovered that there actually are people who don't know the following limerick.

There once was a maid of Madras
Who had a magnificent ass,
Not rounded and pink
As you probably think.
It was brown, had long ears, and ate grass. 

Knowledge of the classics is at an all-time low.

Composition Class

There are intelligent conservatives who know better, but most of ‘em seem to be unaware that it's a logical fallacy to argue from what's good for an individual to what's good for everyone. If I stand on a footstool, I'll be able to see the parade better; but that doesn't mean if everybody stands on a footstool, they'll all see the parade better. 

Give a man a fish and he won't be hungry for a day. Teach him to fish and he won't ever have to be hungry. Yep, and teach everybody to fish and there won't be any goddamn fish left. 

The Walmart version of the same thing: it's OK that a giant outfit doesn't pay its workers a living wage because, after all, any one of them may become a manager and make oodles. Look at every right-winger's favorite token negro: he shows what they all ought to do. Succeed and become the owner of 168 pizza restaurants. Why can't they all be like that?

Was heisst Denken?

I rented the biopic Hannah Arendt from Netflix the other day. The movie occasioned a couple of thoughts:

1. Arendt’s book about the Eichmann trial created an enormous controversy, in part because many, especially many Jews, felt that she somehow diminished the evil the Germans did by portraying one of its perpetrators as an insipid nonentity incapable of genuine thought, a scarecrow whose head was stuffed with clichés in lieu of straw. The usual take on the banality of evil, however, rather glamorizes Eichmann’s ordinariness as if it were different in some essential way from our ordinary ordinariness, which, after all, doesn’t automatically result in a holocaust, though it does, for example, currently yawn at torturing people in hellish prisons. What’s alarming about Arendt wasn’t that she didn’t blame Eichmann enough or even that she blamed the Jewish authorities too much, but that her version of Eichmann matched too many of her—and our—contemporaries.

2. The movie had a welcome thematic balance. It wasn’t just about the dangers of thoughtlessness. It was also about the dangers of thoughtfulness. There were several ways of participating in Nazism; and one of them, exemplified by Arendt’s former mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger, was rooted in a terrible, ruthless* commitment to thought—the movie includes a scene where Heidegger lectures his students on the philosopher’s unconditional obligation to think. Arendt blamed Heidegger for political naïveté; but that was as much of a dodge for her as it was for Heidegger, who had certainly known what he was doing all along.  Philosophical intensity or arrogance, to use the word that keeps coming up in the movie, is problematic in itself and not just when it has bad real-world implications. It is not merely irritating to the passers by. Since the philosopher puts himself or, in this case, herself, above the feelings and wishes of the community or nation, philosophy is always akin to crime. No society is or ever will be tolerant of free thought as the tame philosophers kept on the payroll in universities rediscover when they say the wrong thing too publicly.  We also keep tigers in zoos because it pleases us to look at dangerous beasts from a safe distance. When the tigers escape, we shoot them. 

* I’ve been told that the Nazis had rücksichtslos redefined as a virtue in the official dictionaries. I don’t know if that’s true, but ruthlessness comes pretty close to what Heidegger calls resoluteness (Entschlossenheit).

To the Winter Palace

“No more ads! No more ads!” Slogan of the revolution I led in a dream the other night. I had an elaborate theory that explained why forbidding advertisements would, all by itself, suffice to bring the millennium. No redistribution; no direct democracy; no revolutionary vanguard; no brown, black, or red shirts; no dictatorship of the proletariat; no new socialist man or even new capitalist man, no John Galt or Karl Marx, just Marketing verboten! Every stage could be skipped so long as no one could any more sell any thing to any one over the mass media. The people would no longer be bribed into bemusement by the poisoned bait of supposedly free entertainment and news or impoverished in a vain attempt to acquire the goods they had been hypnotized into craving. I insisted that the truly soul-destroying welfare of our age is dispensed by corporations, not government agencies. “Pay for it yourself, damn it” was the motto of the utopia to come. “Why do you think Mad magazine used to be so good?”

In the dream, in which I looked rather like Trotsky and dressed in 1920 era clothes, I was self-assured to the point of insanity and just knew that the time had come to move from theory to practice. When the authorities tried to raise objections, I shut them down, Ayn Rand style, with arguments that were absolutely unanswerable because I didn’t give the other guys any good lines—it was my dream, after all. Unfortunately, I can’t remember many of these arguments. I do recall that the establishment politicians accused me of hypocrisy because the brilliant political posters my followers had plastered all over the city were themselves advertisements. I laughed that off, though some of the posters really were pretty alarming, if not so different or more morally dubious than the latest TV spots for Call of Duty. Especially perverse were the parodies of fast food ads that promoted cannibalism, the goofs on cosmetic ads that glorified pederasty, and the take offs on car ads that made serial murder gleam like chrome. “You have woven the rope that will strangle you,” I cackled, thoroughly enjoying the role I was playing. Eventually the officials gave up on reason and tried to arrest me, but they had to flee when the cops switched sides and an enraged multitude surged up the escalators to seize the seat of power, which look remarkably like the top floor of the local Macys. It was glorious. Talk about getting off at the Finland station!

For a while after I woke up, I had to remind myself that I hadn’t really figured anything out at all. I even spent a few minutes thinking of something good to say about advertising. Wasn’t that easy.

A Foreign Policy Suggestion that Will Go Nowhere

Why is Iran our perpetual enemy? Is it because we once subverted their democracy and installed a dictatorial government in its place? Is it because we've waged economic war on them for decades and previously encouraged their neighbor to wage real war on them to the tune of a million dead? Is it because they somehow made us shoot down one of their airliners? I know it's human nature to find it hard to forgive someone for the sins you've committed against them, but maybe we could try just this once.

A thought experiment: what if, instead of endlessly proposing ways to fence in Iran, we made our goal a real normalization of relations? Instead of suggesting that some sort of uneasy truce could be maintained by slightly lessening sanctions, we looked forward to an era when there weren't any sanctions at all? So long as we treat Iran as our version of the Great Satan, we don't have very much leverage for serious diplomacy. If a genuine peace were in prospect, Tehran might be much more amenable to a deal about its relationship with Hezbollah, for example, if it didn't need to hang on to Hezbollah as a bargaining chip in an endless cold war—the idea that the Iranians have some tremendous interest in the Palestinian issue is very dubious to me. Of course they don't like Israel's policies—almost the entire planet doesn't like Israel's policies—but I've yet to meet a Persian who really gave a damn about what was going on a couple of countries away. So long as the Israelis keep threatening to nuke 'em, however, they have to be interested. 

Of course any prospect of peace will require keeping the Israelis under control. Netanyahu, et. al. are never going to stop banging the war drum because the ongoing artificial crisis provides essential cover for the de facto annexation of the West Bank, a process that will take many years to complete. We don't need Israel to sign on, though. We just need them not to panic and push the button—coming up on one hundred years after the outbreak of World War I, we need to remember what mischief minor powers can cause by vanity and miscalculation.

I have little love and less trust for the current Iranian regime, but Iranian internal affairs are just that. Meanwhile, the notion that Iran is pursuing an aggressive foreign policy that would justify making their business our business is not something any one ever bothers to provide evidence for. It’s an assumption, a default, a prior, even an axiom, and has to be something of that sort since what you can’t argue to, you have to argue from. The historical record, which is publicly available after all, is a story of an Iran endlessly on the defensive against the machinations of the Russians, the Brits, the Americans, the Iraqis, the Israelis, and the Sunnis.

Stubborn Facts

Gene Sperling, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, got in some hot water over the weekend for suggesting that entitlement cuts were on the table in a budget deal. He’s walked back his remarks since and, to be fair, it’s always hard to figure out what Sperling means. On the other hand, for several years his boss has snuck plugs for cutting benefits into any number of speeches, even Convention stem winders where they never fail to break the rhetorical momentum. It’s hardly unreasonable to assume that the administration not only buys into Centrist commonsense on this issue, but thinks that it’s worth alienating the Democratic base to try to act on it. If that’s true, Obama and his people have a lot of company, much of it not on the right. The necessity of reigning in Social Security and Medicare is always treated as something all reasonable people agree about by the reporters and talking heads of CNN and the Washington Post and other moderate media outlets.

If economics were a science like physics or astronomy or biology, it could be that the imperative need to cut entitlements was a natural fact like heliocentrism or the evolution of living things that only schizophrenics, hayseeds, and religious fanatics still dispute. Economics, however, has an irreducible normative component. You can’t define good policy without stating, or more often, implying but carefully not saying, for whom the policy is good. It is this issue upon which the desirability of entitlement cuts depends, not some fact of nature or mathematical theorem. The arithmetic becomes relevant on the other side of the political question of who matters. So what does seem to be true is this: we can't maintain and increase the current high levels of income and wealth inequality without cutting entitlement benefits. If the government of the United States were conducted on the basis of promoting the general good, on the other hand, one would come to very different conclusions about entitlements. There is no serious problem with Social Security—nobody should have to live on cat food because of Alan Simpson’s innumeracy— and what gets featured as a problem with Medicare is really a problem with an absurd health care system that costs far more than it has to.

(    )

Like parentheses, errors come in pairs. The Soviets just knew that a command economy would outperform any market economy and drove their regime into the ground trying to prove it. We've bought the opposite error of thinking that markets automatically outperform government agencies even in areas like pensions, health care, and education where experience has long shown they don't and that bureaucracies are more efficient—very few companies have ever been run half as smoothly (or cheaply) as the Social Security Administration. Thus there's a certain symmetry between Brezhnev and Ted Cruz...

Unfortunately, it isn't just the Republicans or the Conservatives who are still trying to make markets do what they can't do. It’s also commonsense for the technocrats who dominate the Democratic party; and just as the would-be reformers of the Soviet economy thought they could tweak the system without challenging the faulty assumptions upon which it was built, the administration and its technocrats are mostly just compassionate Reaganites for whom the market is magic. Of course part of the reason the ACA is so complex is the dysfunctional character of American politics, but it’s a dodge to blame it on the Heritage Foundation. Obama and his cohorts may have different ethical priorities, but the New Democrats, like New Labor in the United Kingdom, have the same economic theology as the Republicans and that’s a big part of the problem.   

Francis Spufford wrote a wonderful novel, Red Plenty, about the decline and fall of the Soviet economy. It tells the story of how well meaning and intelligent people failed to make water run uphill and overcome the fundamental weakness of demand economies. One of these days, somebody will have to write a novel about how our society suffered because the economic dogmas of Neoliberalism just couldn’t be made to work.   

A Memorable Fancy

Content analyzers, the statistical computer programs the NSA and Amazon use to identify terrorists and customers, can’t actually read, which is why bemused dentists from Cleveland wind up on the no-fly list and I get peppered with ads for books on Biblical exegesis. The ways that such substitutes for human intelligence fall short shouldn’t keep us from recognizing the ways in which they also exceed human intelligence. Insight is more glamorous than method; but where being right is more important than being clever, in medical diagnosis, for example, it’s often second best. There’s an irony in the triumph of big data over consciousness because it echoes an earlier episode in which consciousness first demonstrated its advantages over instinct. Just as understanding things wins many battles against mindless number crunching, hunches and feel often outperformed and continue to outperform reasoning, at least in the moment. Still, John Henry and Kasparov eventually lose. I actually had a dream about all this last night, but in the dream there was one further wrinkle. I conjured a cognitive power that emerged on the far side of brute AI and exceeded its reach as far as it will eventually exceed ours. Of course such a thing would be perfectly incomprehensible to us—you might as well hope that an especially intelligent bowling ball would get a joke—but it was somehow consoling to imagine we’ll have a better successor than Watson or Sky Net. Maybe it’s like Westerns. There’s always a faster gunslinger out there.

Capital Accumulation

Noam Chomsky argued that the rapidity with which children learn language proves that an important part of our language ability is innate. Particular languages are culture specific, but we learn them quickly thanks to an in-built language acquisition device, often abbreviated as LAD in the trade. There are plenty of reasons to think there is something to this idea of language learning even though it probably goes too far and not even Chomsky retails the original version these days. What interests me about Chomsky’s idea here, however, is not its ultimate validity but the way it was received. Back in the day, as I recall, it seemed revelatory and also rather obvious to people of my age. I wonder now if it seemed so obvious to older folks, especially those who had actually raised children; for even if kids do learn language with remarkable rapidity, parents do spend a great deal of time teaching them. Parents are rather less likely than 22-year old grad students to forget about the hundreds of hours of conversations, of reading out loud, of answering endless questions that go into child care in middle class American households. It’s easy to think that people learn things without being taught them if you don’t have to do the teaching. But callow grad students aren’t the only ones who need to learn this lesson.

Some revelation: you don’t know things that you haven’t found out about. Sounds more impressive in Latin: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. Well, one man’s cliché is another’s axiom; and, to judge from what I often read or rather don’t read in political speeches, this home truth is still news to many—I guess nobody told ‘em. I’m not just talking about all those articles about how ignorant kids or people in general are about geography or history, the ones that imply that we all ought to be born with information about the location of France and who fought whom in World War I. The more consequential examples are those in which people blame whole populations of people for what they don’t know even though they come from groups that have been systematically prevented or discouraged from learning. Centuries of effort were required to achieve what we take for granted as the intellectual patrimony of middle-class people as if it were something in the genes. That comparable work must be done to achieve the same results for those who were left out on purpose is somehow scandalous or at least surprising.

Angels have no memory; but neither do many people, at least when it comes to forgetting the secret of their own advantage. The essence of conservatism, despite its official respect for tradition, is a general amnesia, one that allows conservatives to think that the results of history, often rather recent history at that, are eternal facts. About cultural capital, it turns out most of us are conservatives. We may laugh at millionaire politicians who were born on third base and believe they hit a triple, and yet forget that we ourselves inherited a great many words if not a great many bucks.

The classic study of the issue, done back in 1995, found that the children of professional people heard an average of 45 million words in their first four years while the children of working class people heard 26 million and the children of welfare recipients heard 13 million. The lesson often taken from this result is that parents should be encouraged to talk more to their kids, read to them, encourage their questions, and so forth. There’s surely nothing wrong with this moral, but aside from expecting an awful lot from people who are often living close to the edge, it ignores the fact that a large part of the reason the parents don’t give enough words to their offspring is that they don’t have that many words themselves. Almost everybody learns the full grammar of the language they are born into, even if the dialect they acquire may not be the official version. The full possession of the resources of a language, however, is a heritage that grows over generations and requires sustained and costly efforts to foster and preserve.

Experience is a great substitute for brains, and culture is a great substitute for experience. Maybe that accounts in part for the observed fact that so many members of long-standing elites aren’t particularly bright as individuals. They don’t need to be.

Contradiction #4

We are constantly told that society works because everybody pursues their own interests; but we’re surprised when people conclude from this endlessly repeated lesson that it is virtuous to be as selfish as possible because the more selfish everybody is, the wealthier and happier we will all be. 

Footnote

Whenever Obama does something we don’t like, proposing to cut Social Security benefits in exchange for larger tax revenues, for example, liberals like me debate whether he’s selling us out or engaging in political jujitsu, hence the perpetual question about whether the President is playing 11-dimensional chess.  This question is based on a fundamental misconception. You don’t get to pick the game. It isn’t dealer’s choice. Politics is always vastly more complicated than the cartoon version we run in our heads, where all the villains line up on one side and all the heroes on the other and the interests, prejudices, and principles of the two parties are internally coherent if only you look at them from the correct perspective. In fact, there are a great many animals in the tide pool and even the minority of them that have backbones exhibit only provisional loyalties to alliances which, in the nature of things, are always temporary. Is Obama playing 11-dimensional chess? Of course he is. The question is whether he’s playing it very well.

Golem/Faustian Bargain/Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Your choice)

Since conservatism is the defense of privilege, it depends upon political arrangements that give minorities leverage over majorities. The risk with this strategy is that it’s hard to ensure that the same mechanisms you create to game the system won’t be used later by the wrong minorities to defend the wrong privileges. That’s what’s happening now as the ideological right uses techniques like political blackmail to promote causes irrelevant or harmful to monied interests. The old guard of the Republican party is horrified by the government shutdown, but they have no one to blame for themselves. Having created and armed the monster that is the right-wing base, they find that they do not control it.

Dreaming of a Plan to Feed Myself on Batter, Possibly Plan 9

Hiding out from a crew of Mexican roofers, I spent the morning at the Bazaar Café working out the script for a burlesque review based on William Empson’s famous book. Tentative title: 7 Types of Ambiguity, Count ‘em 7. The idea is that the audience can never quite decide whether they can see anything or not. After that, inspired or perhaps maddened by the Mariachi music still reverberating in my ears, I came up with a project with even fewer commercial possibilities, a script idea for a SciFi channel Saturday night movie. Here’s the pitch:

A literal-minded but brilliant physicist decides to settle an old theoretical question by actually performing the Schrodinger’s cat experiment. In the set up, the inevitable other scientist, older and wiser, tries to explain that the experiment won’t settle anything whatever happens. You’ll just have a dead cat or a live cat on your hands. The younger man is contemptuous, implying that you can’t make omelets without breaking paradigms. Unfortunately a PETA activist catches wind of the project and attempts to forestall it by breaking into the lab. He gets past the security system successfully but drops the vial with the cat poison as he attempts to destroy the experimental set up. Dying in anguish in the arms of the scientist, who has rushed in a desperate attempt to save him, the zealot curses the experimenter and seals his doom by giving him the evil eye with an extremely evil looking eye, at once frosted over and bloodshot, presumably from the effects of the poison.

Of course the incident sets off a huge public debate about the ethics of the experiment, and the university where the scientist works forbids him to continue. The scandal only makes him more determined to proceed, though it eventually costs him his job. Since he doesn’t happen to own a castle, he rents a room in a seedy motel and enlists the help of an affirmative action student, a white kid from Atlanta named Floyd, who captures a mangy stray cat to serve as the experimental subject. The cat, by the way, is not a black cat but a gray Manx—no clichés here. There follows some business about the scientist’s fiancée, who is a law professor but for some reason always wears fuck-me shoes like every lady lawyer on television, none of whom have any fear of hammertoes.  

After the statutory minimum of heterosexual subplot, the fateful night arrives. In lieu of thunder and lightening, the scene is accompanied by the usual urban noises: police sirens, guys mansplaining something or other to their date or spouse in the adjoining rooms, gunshots that are probably from a TV show, etc. The unfortunate cat is put in the chamber along with a fresh vial (saucer?) of poison and a tiny sample of radioactive material connected to a switch so that there is a 50-50 chance that the cat will be poisoned. At this point, faithful to tradition, the lights dim even though the set up only requires a couple of AA batteries. After the appropriate interval, the doctor opens the apparatus, which the audience has realized by now is an old microwave oven in heavy makeup. You can’t see what the Doc sees, but his unhealthy excitement is obvious as he shrieks, “It’s alive? It’s alive?” while Floyd looks on with an uncomprehending smirk. Alive or not, which of course is the question of the day, the cat is certainly not quiet. It utters an unearthly scream, rather as if it were in heat, and leaps out of the device, badly scratching the scientist’s face as it bounds past him and out the door, but not before bouncing around the makeshift lab and trashing the place like a rock musician. The two rush outside to recapture the cat, but it’s made a clean get away. Good time for a commercial.

The next morning, the doctor wakes in the wrecked motel room like a guy with a hangover. His face is bandaged on one side; and you can see, although maybe he doesn’t realize it himself, that blood or some more dubious fluid has soaked through the dressing. He’s not doing so hot, and it doesn’t help when somebody starts pounding on the door. He’s almost relieved, if only for a moment, that it’s the cops and not the motel owner. It seems that the body of a hooker had been discovered in a nearby alley. The cops don’t think the scientist was involved—they’re just doing a routine canvass of the neighborhood—but looking over his shoulder at the lab equipment, they jump to the conclusion that they’ve stumbled across a meth lab. 

That afternoon, the action resumes at the police station where the fiancée is picking up the scientist after what we can only assume was a day of long and difficult explanations. The explanations aren’t over with, either, since the woman, who, incidentally, is still wearing high heels, is steamed. Her man keeps insisting that he made a great discovery, that the danger and embarrassment was worthwhile because, you see, it turns out that the quantum wave function can actually collapse half way. It isn’t just that the cat is both dead and alive while the experiment is in progress. It’s both dead and alive afterwards. Which, apparently, also accounts for its extremely bad mood. While the guy rambles on about all this, giving us an extended example of cable-channel physics, he’s getting more and more excited and also keeps pawing at his bandaged face. She’s not buying what he’s saying, but her anger is mixed with concern since it’s obvious he just isn’t right. She suggests he needs to forget about the cat and go to the hospital immediately. As she reaches over to touch him and he shrinks back, you realize that he’s pulled off the bandage. She recoils in horror from the ravaged eye which, naturally, is clouded over and bloodshot. The scientist collapses.

At the hospital, the doctors can’t decide what’s the matter with their patient. Some of them think it’s a rare form of cat scratch fever. Some of the assume that it’s the result of exposure to the poison meant for the cat. One older doctor even suspects classic hysteria, but that diagnosis is rejected since time travel is even less likely than quantum indeterminacy. The fiancée tries to explain the experiment, but they surely aren’t going to buy that story. Of course, it doesn’t help when they admit that whatever it is, it’s very serious and that their patient is hovering between life and death. They can’t spend too much time on this one case, though, because the city is in the midst of a sudden crime wave. Bodies are turning up all over the place, each shredded to ribbons; and street people, still alive but badly clawed, are staggering into the emergency room raving about a demon cat. 

The fiancée calls the scientists senior colleague begging for help. He’s the same sober old man who tried to warn him off doing the experiment in the first place. He agrees to look over the lab notes; and, in a brief interval of comic relief, interrogates Floyd, who obviously never understood what was going on, having only been accepted to a PhD program in the first place because there were so few white STEM students. Despite Floyd’s dubious help, he believes he has figured things out and goes to see the physicist in the hospital. The patient is now completely gorked out, or so it appears, so the conversation is actually a soliloquy featuring yet more SciFi explanations. “I was wrong about your theory. Too bad you can’t hear me confess how closed minded I was, etc.” While this is going on, the camera, but not the older man, notices that the patient, though hooked up to various drips and wires, is actually beginning to twitch. In fact, while the distinguished professor faces the other way and continues his lecture, his young colleague sits up in bed, tears off the leads and tubes, and very quietly rises up behind him. We don’t actually see what happens next. The camera pans down the deserted hallway outside while we hear ferocious mewing coming from behind the closed door.

The fiancée has been doing her own investigation and eventually returns to the motel room—apparently it was paid up for the whole week. She realizes somebody is there already and assumes it was the assistant. “Claude! Claude!” she calls out, having somehow gotten confused about Floyd’s name. No one answers; but she hears a scrabbling noise, which sounds like some one were pawing at sand. When she enters the room, she finds what’s left of Floyd lying around the room and turns towards the bathroom. We see by a convenient clock that it’s half past midnight, and then the shadow of an enormous cat looms up. The lady screams. Just then some one else enters the room. It’s the physicist, though in his undead state he’s a little hard to recognize. “Branes! Branes!” he cries, and that gets the attention of the cat, which springs on him from the darkness as the lady falls back in a swoon. Depending on the CGI budget, one is treated to a more or less memorable but definitely desperate battle as the adversaries wallow this way and tumble that employing every tooth and claw in the awfullest way you ever saw.

In the last scene, a dog-faced police lieutenant is trying to debrief the fiancée, but not getting very far with the almost catatonic woman. He tells his partner that the scientist was probably abducted by gang members in revenge for the trouble he had caused what with the cops all over the neighborhood investigating tales of cat attacks. “Either that or the two cats ate each other up, heh, heh.”   

I’m not sure if there’s enough here for a theatrical movie, but it’s not my fault if the cat didn’t have a long tale.

The Quest for the Historical Scrooge

In the Gospel according to Charles, Scrooge has a change of heart after he is visited by a ghost and three spirits. Recent research by the Ebenezer project indicates that he actually left the party because of political pressure. His Conservative critics pointed out that his famous questions—“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”—though intended as an expression of right thinking, actually implied the wealthy did in fact have responsibilities towards the poor. If he was going to support liberal programs like the Poor Laws, he was no better than a frog-loving Chartist and deserved to be primaried. Threatened with mid-term defeat, Scrooge made a strategic retreat into sentimentality and superstition.