The Prophet Procrastinates

By the time you hear about the latest thing, it’s usually too late. That’s true of fashion trends and intellectual developments, all of which have a finite velocity of propagation. The news travels at various speeds and arrives at different places at different times, and you’re probably not in the right place. On the other hand, if you happen to travel faster than a fad, you’re doomed to déjà vu since relativistic time travel, though exotic or impractical in physics, is merely banal in culture. I experienced this kind of jet lag when I moved from California to Connecticut in 1967 and lived through the Summer of Love twice, once in the Summer in San Francisco and once in the Fall in New Haven. A year later I experienced a third repetition in Jonesboro, Arkansas where the locals thought they were the cat’s pajamas because they’d just discovered tie-dye. No reason to feel superior about this sort of thing, though. Nietzsche made fun of people who were inordinately proud of themselves for being fifteen minutes ahead of the Zeitgeist. To modify a once trendy expression, we are always already hicks.

Brokers make automatic profits by exploiting infinitesimal time delays in the reporting of stock prices. The authors of popular nonfiction books practice a similar but much more leisurely form of arbitrage as they retail as novelties merchandize that has been available for a long time at a much cheaper price on the wholesale market. If you read a serious journal like SCIENCE you experience a more or less perpetual reverb as what you read about in January shows up as hot news on CNN in August.

Predicting what has already taken place isn’t magic, but it’s a living. The various warnings we’re been hearing lately about the menace of renegade computer programs are a case in point. Of course the idea of a takeover by artificial intelligences has been around for a long time. Before Skynet, there was the Forbin project and who knows how many Twilight Zone episodes. Harlan Elison’s story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, is an especially memorable variation on the theme. More recently, the menace of machine intelligence has become a concern of credible people like Bill Joy, Stephen Hawkins, and Nick Bostrom. I don’t discount these worries, but it seems to me that they are already out of date. The inhuman system that has gone rogue is not a giant server farm in Utah but the capitalist economy, and that happened quite a while ago.

The good thing about markets is that they automatically take care of distribution and supply problems that would defeat the computational capabilities of a central planning agency. In that respect they are like optimization techniques. In fact, Leonid Kantorovich, one of the inventors of linear programming, was looking for a way to rationalize the Russian economy without resorting to profits and supply and demand pricing—the British writer Francis Spufford wrote a fascinating novel about the episode, Red Plenty. Even with the help of modern computers, however, the maximization problem blows up, which is why even most of the Left in Europe and North America now buys into von Hayek’s insight into that the economy functions as a dispersed form of intelligence, “the result of human action but not of human design.” Folks who want to bring back Gosplan are notably thin on the ground these days. What has concerned me for decades, however, is the other side of the Hayekian notion; for if the economy manages to aggregate the decisions of millions of human beings and thereby find a maximum, it is far from clear just what it maximizes. Why it would maximize my welfare or the welfare of everybody or even the welfare of a chosen class is unclear. Apparently one can only trust the invisible maker, the materialist Holy Ghost, and have faith that a process beyond the control of individuals or even communities will be for the best. And, as with the old fashion kind of faith, it’s easier to believe in the goodness of God if you’re one of the elect than if you’re one of the preterite.

It would be a form of animism to attribute a purpose to the economy just as it is a form of superstition to think that evolution has a purpose. Nevertheless, both commerce and nature act as if they were up to something, though presumably that something is something better defined thermodynamically than theologically. Living things are bags of enzymes, organic catalysts that accelerate the rate of chemical change without altering its direction. We dissipate energy for a living; indeed, from an inhuman perspective, living just is the dissipation of energy and my body is a contrivance devised by natural selection to efficiently turn perfectly good food into shit. I’m no Hayek scholar, but I gather that he saw the economy as a subsystem or elaboration of evolution. If there’s something to that, perhaps what the market system does is just the continuation of the entropic vocation of life, only in business suits this time. 

People, especially guys on barstools, think that economy is organized for the benefit of the already wealthy and powerful; but from a wider point of view, that view may have things almost exactly backwards. Extreme inequality furthers the tendency of the system to endlessly increase material throughput. The system has its own very good reasons to produce tycoons. Billionaires are like the old couple from Iowa who really does win the jackpot at Reno. The Casino can’t bilk everybody; there have to be some winners to explain why the rest of us go playing a losing game. But the hyperwealthy do more than serve as the mechanical rabbit at the dog track. They can also be counted on to use their enormous financial resources to effectively defend the system from the human rationality that threatens to interfere with its intrinsic tendencies. It’s pretty hard to feel sorry for top one percent of the top one percent, though it must be truly horrible to wake up every morning and realize you’re Donald Trump and can’t do anything about it. Still, the richest of the rich are more dupes than masters. Secondary causes.

Natural selection ceaselessly tends to increase the inclusive fitness of organisms, but that doesn’t mean I have to take the inclusive fitness as the basis for my personal sense of values. In fact I don’t. My morality is quite self-consciously anti-natural, though I’m perfectly well aware that my private purposes exploit the order produced by the natural-selection machine and cannot defy it without obvious costs. Similarly, I recognize the reality and power of the economic calculating machine, but I don’t share its implied teleology. A humane political economics doesn’t identify with the aggressor. The old Jews used to have a legend that God slew the female leviathan, but saved her meat for the eventual messianic feast. I don’t think that’s feasible, but maybe we can parasitize the Great Beast.

Speaking of anachronism. These thoughts are pretty much a reflection on what Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation back in 1944 so it’s either allusion or plagiarism depending on how you look at it. Or maybe it’s a structural transformation of an old joke about Arkansas’ slowest train. The train stops unexpectedly and the passenger asks the conductor what happened. “There’s a cow on the tracks.” The train starts up, but stops after a little while. “Now what?” “We caught up with the cow again.”

The Romance of Statistical Mechanics

Driving around town a couple of weeks ago, I composed a little poem or rather, since I didn’t set out to compose anything, it simply occurred to me:

Molecule by molecule

The gale that felled the tree

Was not the mighty fist of Jove

But merely tendency.

Later on I gave the verse a title: Things and Events are the Public Relations of Atoms. And then I pretty much forgot about it until I had a dream the other day in which a duplicate me responded:

I really have to call a foul

On your ersatz Emily,

If ever Jove had had a fist

It was also tendency.

Charlie Hedbo

As mystics experience and philosophers deduce, God is a name for the superlative degree of nothingness, the abominable singularity that constantly threatens reason from within. Religion is the accretion disc that forms around the intolerable mystery, the scab that covers the wound that cannot heal. The sane believers renormalize the equations of theology to avoid absurd solutions and resort to idolatry and superstition to protect themselves from the murderous implications of the faith. Since only a suicidal fanaticism is fully consistent with monotheism, it’s literally true: you can’t look on Yahweh face-to-face and live.

Even atheism is not necessarily a perfect defense against this lethal nonsense. It depends on how you gloss the slogan “Nothing is sacred.” Which is why there is such an obvious affinity between the jihadis and the Red Brigade terrorists of the Nietzschean left. Or to make the same point in the other direction, you might say that the real Shahada of the Salafis is “There is no God, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Allah is the emptiness in the middle. There really isn’t anything in the Holy of Holies. That’s the obscene secret.

Perhaps the votaries of the Assassins were being redundant when they said “There is no God. Everything is permitted” since what they based their sect upon was the recognition that God was a way of referring to our terrible freedom. That everything is permitted is God. 

 

A Year and a Half Later

I certainly attempted not to care.

I studied indifference as if it were algebra.
It didn’t help. It was like drowning a beachball,
Picking a fight with the nature of things.
I still don’t think love is a good thing—
Though softly it arrives, it departs as grief—
But harder than steel, harder than diamonds
Is the heart’s will, something so inhuman
In our humanity, we don’t think it belongs to us.

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.

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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.