walk on

a lot of christians don't care about poor people

2012-02-12T13:29:00.000-06:00

What I hear from evangelicals a lot is that it is the church's job, not the government's, to care for the poor. I would dispute the either/or proposition contained in that argument (after all, the laws God gave Israel included government mandated redistribution of wealth) but for our purposes, let's accept the premise. It is the church's job, period.

But here's the thing...many of our evangelical churches don't like poor people. We look down on them. We assume irresponsible behavior is the cause of their condition. We stand in judgment over them, determining who is and who is not "deserving" of help. We get excited about political candidates who scapegoat poor people (especially dark skinned poor people) as the cause of many of our problems. Worthy poor people live in places like Bangladesh and Mozambique. Here in America we just have lazy people.

We say it is the church's job to care for the poor, yet attend churches that don't help people pay their rent or buy groceries. It is the church's job and yet the pastoral leadership has not told the business owners in our congregation that the hiring of ex-felons should prioritized. It is the church's job and yet we don't offer affordable child care during the week so single moms can go earn a living. It is the church's job but the kids at the poorly performing public school will have to go somewhere else to find tutoring and mentoring. It is the church's job but you can't expect us to take care of all the medical bills you can't afford. It is the church's job but if you have an addiction you're on your own, especially since you might be dangerous and steal from us.

It is the church's job to care for the poor, but this does not imply that a church, or any of its members, should actually live anywhere near a neighborhood with lots of poor people. It is the church's job, but willingly exposing ourselves to the same challenges the poor face should obviously not be expected. It is the church's job to care for the poor, but the safety and comfort of middle-class church members must, of course, take precedence.

Obviously, since there's so much pain and suffering and unmet need at the present time, despite billions of dollars of government funds, if those governmental efforts were stopped the church would immediately step in and things would get much better.

the way forward for states' rights

2012-02-11T06:00:00.000-06:00

Alicia and I were talking yesterday about our view of "states' rights." Among conservatives there has been a resurgence of interest in recent years about returning to a more states-centric approach to governance and making the tenth amendment a stronger part of our constitutional system. That's all well and good. The problem, as I see it, is the false pretenses under which states' rights proponents usually argue.

The tenor of such advocacy tends to be, "we need to return, go back, restore," and so on. Go back to a time when we were more free. Return to the principles of the founders. Restore the power of the states to do as they see fit and get the federal government out of the way. The implication is that this approach has worked before in securing freedom.

It has not worked. Those who believe it has are, necessarily, thinking from a white supremacist perspective. We tried a weak, unobtrusive federal government combined with strong local governments. That period of our history coincided with slavery, then debt peonage, unequal schooling, de facto police states, unfree labor markets, segregation, and so on. People could not necessarily live where they wished, or pursue the career they desired, or marry the person they loved. All of these things got better as the power of the federal government grew.

I actually think those wishing for more power to be devolved to the states in the future have a good argument to make. I think such a course may be good for the country going forward. But they have to make that case based on what has actually happened. Instead of pretending that it has worked before and we simply need to go back to it, states' rights proponents must explain why American society has changed so much that even though it never worked before, states' rights will work now. Again, I actually am sympathetic to that argument. But I'm not sympathetic to arguments that ignore our history and call evil good.

legacies of vietnam

2012-02-10T15:31:00.000-06:00

I know next to nothing about this topic, so I'm throwing out some questions. If you lived through Vietnam, or have read a lot about it, please give me your insight. Specifically, I'm confused about how it came to be that Republicans are more trusted on foreign policy and Democrats are seen as being soft. My sense is that this is a legacy of Vietnam. Is that correct, or does it also have a lot to do with the apparent impotence of the Carter administration?

If we go with the presumption that the Democrats' lack of credibility on foreign policy is a legacy of Vietnam, it makes sense for the following reason: the Democratic Party, under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, got us embroiled in Vietnam, under false pretenses, and it was a Republican administration that finally got us out. That much makes sense.

But here's where I get confused because my understanding is that the GOP has had the upper hand on issues of war in the past few decades not because Democrats got us into Vietnam, but because they became the party of the anti-war movement. But the anti-war movement was right! It was an immoral colonial war. It was against the will of the people of Vietnam. The U.S. government was lying to us from the start. The United States was responsible for millions of pointless deaths.

So in my mind, the Democrats should have been discredited for getting us into such a mess. But they occupy a weird space as both the party that created the problem and the one that first tried to stop it (the McGovern campaign of 1972). But they seem to have taken more flack for the latter stance, which was correct, than the former, which was horrendously wrong.

I would really like to study this era a lot more and get a better sense of what the fallout has been. How do Americans remember Vietnam now? It seems that the remembrance of it remains quite splintered. Some see it as a war that should have been won, but was undermined by domestic critics. Others see it as a war that should never have been fought. Obviously I'm in the latter camp.

I recently had a conversation with someone who was a teenager during the height of the Vietnam War. This individual spoke in passing of the anti-war demonstrators as if they were the dregs of humanity, the worst of the worst. On the contrary, once we remove the blinders of patriotism and learn a little about Vietnam's history I think we all would hope to have had the courage to burn our draft cards and choose imprisonment over service in such a horrible war.

obama's record, foreign policy

2012-02-09T20:43:00.000-06:00

I'm really looking forward to the general election and, especially, the presidential debates. On foreign policy, what will the GOP nominee (probably Romney) be able to say that will be at all believable to independent voters? Right now, Romney and others have a few attack lines that bring reliable applause from partisan audiences, but they will only make themselves look silly if they persist in these critiques in the general election.

The most persistent charge is that President Obama has "apologized" for America. All the candidates except Ron Paul make this claim. It is particularly galling because it is completely invented. Repeating it over and over for three years doesn't make it true. But I'm missing the point, aren't I? It's not really meant to be a factual claim. It's a statement of how conservative voters feel. They cannot point to anything the President has said or done that can be accurately labeled apologizing, but when they look at him they do not see a proud defender of American greatness. Instead of the moral clarity of a John Wayne or Ronald Reagan, they see a parsing, equivocal college professor.

The related criticism is that President Obama has been weak, has led from behind, and so on. This the Republicans simply lapsed into as a matter of course, since it's what all Democratic presidential candidates have been accused of for several decades. Again, partisan Republicans don't care that it doesn't describe reality, but general election voters will notice.

I think that if people were not so partisan, almost all conservatives would be hearty defenders of Obama's foreign policy, and most liberals would hate it. As it is, the situation is reversed because people are determined to support their team. By any reasonable measure, President Obama has prosecuted the war on terror in a far more focused and aggressive manner than the Bush Administration ever did. He just doesn't talk so loud about it. And incredibly, many conservatives appear to be more concerned with what we call the war than in how it is conducted. Equally bizarre, liberals who railed against every little thing President Bush did can hardly be heard from now that President Obama has blatantly violated the constitution in his anti-terror policies. Partisans of both sides content themselves with symbolism, while caring little about who gets killed overseas in the never-ending attempt to keep Americans 100% safe (it's like we're a set of rare china or something).

In any case, that was a rabbit trail. The point is that the Republican Party does not have good grounds for attacking President Obama on foreign policy precisely because Obama has been so aggressive. Now, it seems to me they should attack him for using drones to kill American citizens without any due process, but it turns out that would not be a political winner. Most Americans have no problem with raining missiles on fellow Americans, as long as it happens in a far off place and the government assures us that the victim was a terrorist.

The problem, then, is that the most cogent critiques of President Obama's foreign policy are, in today's political environment, from what is considered the left. Thus Republicans can't really use those critiques. Republicans will probably try nonetheless to use their traditional strategy for Democratic Presidents, painting him as weak and indecisive. But the average middle of the road voter is just going say, "Huh? What are you talking about? This guy is tough!"

the crises of the 1890s

2012-02-08T11:31:00.000-06:00

The following is a draft I prepared for an upcoming exam. It is basically just a recounting of the arguments of Thomas Schoonover in his book about the 1890s. The broad outlines of his argument makes sense to me but I don't know nearly enough about the era to formulate a strong opinion of my own. It does seem clear to me, though, that in this as in other eras, U.S. policy was far more calculating than our high-minded rhetoric implied. I've long thought, too, that our atrocious and indefensible war in the Philippines should receive more attention, and Schoonover gives it its due.

Thelatter part of the 19^thcentury was a difficult time for the American economy. From therecession of 1873, prices and wages trended downward for the next twodecades, culminating in the severe depression of 1893. This deflationexerted significant pressure on the American capitalist economicmodel and social system. In the depression of the 1890s, unemploymentshot above 20% and strikes and boycotts were rampant. Some politicaland business elites fretted about the problem of "overproduction,"believing that the economy was producing too many good and services.This excess production, many believed, would have to be exported tooverseas markets. Schoonover contends that the problem ofoverproduction was actually an instance of "underconsumption."It was indeed the case that factories could churn out more productsthan ever before, more than American consumers could buy. But thishad more to do with a misallocation of resources than increasedproductivity, Schoonover argues. While America as a whole was one ofthe wealthiest societies in history, many Americans lacked even basicnecessities such as sufficient food and shelter. If wealth wasdistributed more evenly, workers would have the ability to purchasethe products they made and class tensions threatening to rip Americansociety apart would be lessened.

Butrather than seriously altering the distribution of economicresources, American elites sought to "export the social problemand the unemployment," a process Schoonover calls socialimperialism. In an 1898 memo, the State Department noted that "everyyear we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus ofmanufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operativesand artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargementof foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshopshas, therefore, become a serious problem..." Thus as early as1898 the United States government recognized that much was riding onits ability to get foreigners to buy ever-more American products. Sothe United States began to seek more markets in periphery states, onterms favorable to itself though not necessarily beneficial to theperiphery states. By extending its influence into foreign markets,gaining access to cheap raw materials and selling more productsoverseas, the American domestic economy would be strengthened,reducing unemployment and social friction. This necessarily calledfor a more aggressive, outward looking stance in foreign policy.

But to where could the United States export its products and socialproblems? It just so happened that the second crisis of the decadewas occurring in the largest of the periphery states, China. Thegreat European powers and Japan were carving China up into spheres ofinfluence, making a mockery of its sovereignty. By the end of thecentury there was little of strategic or economic value in China thatwas not in some way under the thumb of a foreign power, and soon theexploitation would provoke the Boxer Rebellion and open warfare. TheUnited States, too, participated in the effort to exploit the Chinesemarket, but rather than outright colonization of the huge country,with spheres of interest cut off to American products, the UnitedStates sought an "open door" in which, in Secretary ofState John Hay's words, each country would have "fair field andno favor." Each country, that is, except China. Many Americanofficials had high hopes that Asia, with its huge population, wouldbe a boon to American prosperity. In 1898 the U.S. Ambassador toChina rhapsodized that "The Pacific Ocean is destined to bear onits bosom a larger commerce than the Atlantic." Thus theAmerican domestic crisis was tied to the Chinese crisis. By involvingitself on favorable terms in the latter, the United States couldperhaps solve the former.

It was all well and good to speak of American goods flooding a vastAsian market, bringing prosperity to American workers, but China wasa long way away. Reliable routes of trade had to be established aswell as the means to permanently protect those routes from theinterference of hostile powers. The United States envisioned anetwork of harbors, bases, and coaling stations to tie together itscommerce in the Pacific. As early as 1838 the United States hadidentified three great Pacific harbors, at Pago Pago, Pearl Harbor,and Manila. By the end of the century the United States was inpossession of all three. But the usefulness of these bases and,indeed, the entire Pacific trade, was predicated on the building of aCaribbean canal that would bind east to west, ensuring quick andreliable transit of American commercial and military vessels betweenAtlantic and Pacific.

Thus for American policymakers seeking to relieve domestic turmoilthrough international action, the third crisis, war with Spain in1898, was a godsend. Belying its traditional rhetoric about freedomand high-minded ideals, the United States' conduct of the war wasacquisitive and opportunistic, as it took advantage of the chance togain long-standing objectives such as Manila Harbor and Cuba. As longas Spain remained in possession of Cuba and other Caribbean islands,the United States would not feel secure in its possession of a canal.During the war of 1898 the United States asserted itself as theCaribbean hegemon by seizing Spain's remaining possessions andremoving the last serious obstacle to an American canal. TheCaribbean was now an American lake, clearing the way to turn it intothe pathway to the riches of the Pacific.

Meanwhile American policymakers lost no time in furtherstrengthening the United States' position, at Spain's expense, in thePacific. Though the popular imagination, both then and since, wasmuch absorbed by the action in the Caribbean and the romanticism ofthe Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill, much of the real activitywas occurring elsewhere. The United States seized Manila and Guambefore engaging Spanish forces in the Caribbean. Meanwhileagitation for the annexation of Hawaii finally bore fruit, as someAmericans began to dream of turning the Pacific into “an Americanlake” aided by the possession of the Philippines and Hawaii. Evenanti-imperialists were swept up in the tide, as Senator George Hoarof Massachusetts admitted an exception would have to be made foracquiring Hawaii because it was, of course, necessary “in order tohelp us get our share of China.” Throughout the conflict there wasmuch talk of bearing the white man's burden and spreading freedom,civilization, and Christianity, but the rhetoric did not square withreality. Far from being disinterested or the product of happenstance,U.S. territorial gains during the war of 1898 were highly strategicand correlated to its long-term domestic and Pacific-region economicgoals.

Perhaps nothing better demonstrated the self-interested nature ofAmerican policy than in how it dealt with Cuba and the Philippinesafter acquiring them. Both islands were home to indigenousindependence movements that were ready and eager to govern themselvesas independent countries. But this simply did not fit with Americansocial imperialist goals. The importance U.S. policymakers placed onexpanding Pacific trade was revealed by the extraordinary efforts andresources expended to put down Philippine independence fighters. Tensof thousands of Philippinos were forced into concentration camps andhundreds of thousands were killed. Two years after war with Spain wasover, two-thirds of the U.S. Army was bogged down in the Philippines,at a cost equal to well over 30 billion in today's dollars, at a timewhen such a sum represented a much larger share of GDP than today.Similarly, when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China, the UnitedStates joined the international coalition of troops that attacked,pillaged, and subdued the Chinese state, forcing it to accept evenmore onerous restrictions on its sovereignty. Clearly, the UnitedStates was now unequivocally committed to the maintenance andexpansion of its foreign trade on terms favorable to itself andunfavorable to periphery states.

Were American statesmen correct in seeing the three crises ofeconomic depression, partitioning of China, and war with Spain asinterconnected? Whether they were or were not, it was to some degreea self-fulfilling prophecy. As economic distress deepened, theconviction grew that the Pacific would provide a safety valve. Butthat implied gaining hegemony in the Caribbean, the gateway to thePacific. That in turn implied conflict with Spain, and when it camein 1898 the United States quickly took action to gain crucialadvantages in all three crises.

In the following decade, American leaders had reason to think theircourse had been a wise one. Pacific and Caribbean trade did indeedgrow, with the value of imports from the Pacific going from sixmillion to forty million in a single year. The larger volume of cheapimports alleviated some of the pressure on average workers bydampening the cost of living. An isthmian canal would finally bebuilt, and it would be an American canal securely under Americancontrol. In the end, the response to the three crises of the 1890sdid much to shape subsequent American policy. As the currentadministration's reorienting toward Asia shows, the idea that thefuture of the American economy is intimately tied to the Pacific isas fresh and vital today as it was at the end of the 19^thcentury.

obama's record, continued

2012-02-07T17:22:00.000-06:00

Most people would probably be surprised to know that we actually have decent ways of measuring how radical a present is compared to past presidents. Political scientists have developed ways of measuring political ideology over time. Suffice it to say that it's rather complicated and people a lot smarter than me spend their lives working on this stuff.

Anyway, what does such data show about President Obama? After all, if he is the radical socialist of the right-wing imagination, we ought to see it in the political science literature. Instead, President Obama's record looks like this:

What this graph shows is that by this measure President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since World War 2 (presumably since Woodrow Wilson, considering FDR was the only other one). Among political scientists it is common knowledge that the Republican Party has moved dramatically to the right in the past few decades, but the average voter doesn't realize that. Thus the standard for what is considered liberal has moved to the right as well.

odds and ends

2012-02-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

Every once in a while you read something that blows your mind in reminding you how short American history is. Take this story from Politico. It turns out that President John Tyler, our 10th President (1841-1845) has two living grandsons! That's not a typo. Granted, this required both Tyler and his son to father children late in their lives, but it remains no less remarkable. I wonder how many people living today have grandparents from the same era? I suppose demographers could give us a rough estimate. How many elderly black Americans are the grandchildren of slaves? It's fascinating to think about and a reminder that this American experiment really hasn't been going on long at all.

In other news, a few days ago I saw a car with a bumper sticker on it reading "I am John Galt," a reference to the protagonist of Ayn Rand's anti-Christian, pro-selfishness Objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged. The other bumper sticker on the car? "Redeemer Christian Schools." I saw another John Galt bumper sticker on a car in a church parking lot several months ago. Ayn Rand's ideas about society and moral behavior were some of the most repugnant I've ever been exposed to, but they do appeal to our innate selfishness and the pull of American materialism and the American dream. So much so that, I guess, some people try to reconcile them with Christianity.

I have no idea if this has merit, but Francis Fukayama (he of the famous "end of history" thesis) has a really interesting idea about why American government is not more effective:

Conversely, I would argue that the quality of governance in the U.S. tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The U.S. is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

Even if this is true, it seems to me that the fact that democracy came before an elitist bureaucracy brings with it a variety of important advantages of its own.

Last, Jeffrey Goldberg had an excellent and slightly humorous column last week about how the Republican field of candidates really is trafficking in racial dog-whistling to win white conservative voters:

The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. Itwould be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh torun for public office, given his record of fairlystraightforward race-baiting...But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enoughthat Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, atleast during the largely white Republican primaries.

[Harvard Law's Randall] Kennedy, who studies the role of race in nationalelections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measurewhether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: Ifit takes more than two sentences for a critic to explainwhy a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins.Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despitecriticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.

So true. Even most of the people whose prejudices are being appealed to don't realize what's going on!

tea party painter

2012-02-05T06:00:00.000-06:00

I hear his prints are quite popular these days. Doesn't he realize how overwrought this appears? The symbolism is remarkable. The President is not just a normal political opponent with whom he disagrees; he is an anti-American tyrant forging chains around the innocent, good-hearted American people.

Of course, it's tone deaf too. See, we have had presidents who sought to increase the number of Americans in chains. And I can assure you, those Americans were not white, as most are in this picture.

The most popular conservatives continue to claim that any criticism of the President is labeled racism. This is not the case. I regularly read several conservative blogs with which I often agree and I find no racial animus in their strong criticisms of the President. But the most popular conservative voices are not at all like David Frum or Reihan Salam.

The most popular conservatives are not content to disagree with President Obama's policies. They insist on portraying him as unusual, out of the American mainstream, socialist, and so on. The fact that he so clearly isn't any of those things compels those of us who haven't drunk the kool-aid to to search for an explanation for this hysteria. And yes, racism is probably the best explanation. The data, after all, consistently show that Republican voters, as a group, have higher levels of racial prejudice. And the sad fact is that most Republicans who don't share that prejudice are making excuses for their party instead of cleaning it up.

obama's record

2012-02-04T06:00:00.000-06:00

I know it's an article of faith among many Republicans that President Obama doesn't have a record to run on in November. They assume he will run an extremely negative campaign to draw attention from his own dismal performance in office. Unfortunately for the GOP, the President actually has a remarkably impressive record to build a campaign on, if only he and his advisers can begin to defend it boldly.

Start with jobs. From the time the recession began in December 2007 through the month President Bush left office, the economy lost 4.3 million jobs. Keep that in mind. Republicans don't want people to know that over 4 million jobs were lost before Obama even assumed the Presidency. During Obama's first year in office, through January 2010, another 4.3 million jobs were lost. In the two years since, the economy has added private sector jobs every single month, and gained a total of 3.1 million jobs, including 3.4 million private sector jobs (the difference reflects cuts in government jobs). You can see the monthly data here.

So for Obama's entire Presidency, we have a deficit of about 1.2 million jobs. But there are 8 more employment reports between now and the election. If the average of these reports is similar to this month's report, in the month before the election Obama will be able to campaign on a net gain of 800,000 jobs during his first term, including over 5 million new jobs within the last three years.

I think if you had told anyone of either party during the winter of 2008-09 while we were losing 800,000 jobs per month that we would have job gains during this term, they would have been thrilled. Obama will be able to say, without any exaggeration or untruth, that in the past few years we've gone through the worst employment situation since the Great Depression, and that the 5 million new jobs added after his policies were enacted are a strong endorsement for a second term.

What can Romney say in response to that? He will have to hedge and obfuscate and distort. He will continue to claim the President has made things worse, but if jobs continue to grow at this clip the American people are not going to believe him. Nor should they. The dirty little secret that a lot of average voters on both sides of the political spectrum don't want to acknowledge is that the three main recovery policies, all of them unpopular, worked. The bank bailout, begun by Bush and continued by Obama, worked. The auto bailout, begun by Bush and continued by Obama, worked. The stimulus, an entirely democratic project, worked.

We need only look to Europe, which has followed Republican policies of tight money and budget cutting, to see that these three American recovery policies worked. In Europe, unemployment is going up. A second recession is beginning. And their budgets are hardly better off.

Thank God we've had a "reckless, socialist, big-spending, Muslim, liberal, Kenyan, religion-attacking, dependency-creating" president these past few years. If the people complaining had got their way, I'm quite sure many of them would be unemployed. I wish they could live in the world they would unwittingly create, if only for a week or two. Then they might finally give the President some of the credit he deserves.

cause for optimism

2012-02-03T10:34:00.000-06:00

The unemployment report released today shows more robust job growth than we've experienced in quite a while, with 243,000 jobs added and the unemployment rate dropping to 8.3%. With all the macroeconomic talk and political implications for November, it is easy to forget that these reports represent real people. Last month, there were 250,000 more Americans who gained jobs than lost them. I personally know of at least one of those people, and what a difference having a job makes.

But back to the macro: I think we have reason to be quite optimistic about the recovery over the next few years. We're now in the 5th year of recession/crisis/recovery. I think we tend to forget how long this has been going on. When this recession began, I was not married, for example. Kids that were in high school are now getting ready to graduate from college in a few months. It's been a really long time. But by the broadest measures (GDP and employment) the bleeding was already stopped two to three years ago and we've been very slowly recovering since then.

What's encouraging is that the pace of the recovery appears to be picking up even as the sectors of the economy that traditionally lead recoveries remain moribund. Housing and construction usually drive our recoveries, but they both remain mired at unprecedentedly poor levels. But here's the thing: if we're plodding along, slowly adding millions of jobs while housing is such a drag on the economy, what will happen when it finally rebounds?

Before long, perhaps a year or two, we're going to wake up and realize we have a housing shortage. In recent years new housing construction has been at levels not seen since the 1940s and 50s, when the country was half the size it is now. This works for a while because the housing boom produced a glut of houses and, since the bad economy has discouraged household formation, more people live with each other or with their parents.

But eventually, perhaps sooner than we think, as the labor market continues to improve these people are going to want to find their own place. College grads will finally move out of their parents house; couples will finally tie the knot and buy that first house. Thus housing and construction will revive, spurring employment, which will in turn cause more household formation, further stimulating construction, in a virtuous cycle.

Right now it's like we've got one hand tied behind our back and we're still recovering at a decent clip. But sooner or later that other hand will be untied and this recovery will really take off.

the contraception controversy

2012-02-02T20:47:00.000-06:00

Does anyone understand what the big fuss is over the Obama administration's recent decision to require large religious organizations like Catholic hospitals and colleges to include contraceptive coverage in the health care packages they provide their employees?

I understand that a bunch of old men in the church hierarchy are going to be upset. Some of these guys, like the current pope, appear to be much more concerned about maintaining all kinds of unbiblical rules around sex than in preventing the rape of little boys. So you knew they would throw a fit. But I've heard from numerous sources that this is a big deal and it may turn Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party. Some evangelicals are piling on, citing it as the latest evidence of the administration's "war on religion."

I find this quite puzzling. Are there still American Catholics in any significant number who believe and follow the church's teaching on contraception? Are unfounded rumors about abortion coverage getting mixed in to the story to inflame people's opposition? It seems bizarre that there would be such a big backlash over something that almost everyone openly defies the church on anyway. What's the rationale? "I will live in disobedience to the Catholic church on my own--how dare you help me pay for it!"

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. But wouldn't it be nice if the bishops showed as much energy and outrage over, you know, actual moral evils? Perhaps ones perpetrated by their own institution?

the banality of love

2012-02-01T06:00:00.000-06:00

On Sunday our pastor said something that stuck with me (for three days at least). As Christians we believe in a God who will save us and take us to heaven when we die, but we don't even believe he can change our neighborhood. It seems easier to believe in heaven than in the hope that, say, Chicago will have 100 murders this year instead of the usual 400-500. Isn't that messed up?

Jesus said to pray for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. But as our pastor said, it's a bit disingenuous for us to pray for things we're not willing to do our part to see come about. Recently he and other pastors met to discuss the violence in Akron. He said that he would like to pray for the number of murders this year to be less than 10, but he wasn't sure he was willing to do anything about it. Because that might mean going to the bars on Saturday night, visiting the crack houses, and so on. How easy it is to pray.

As Alicia and I attempt to become more loving people, I'm struck by how boring it is. Everyone but sociopaths can be motivated to love and get all emotional about how they're going to help the world. But then opportunities to actually do stuff come up and it usually feels trivial and really mundane. But if you only show up for the big stuff, you're missing most of the game.

ron paul, extremist

2012-01-31T06:00:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post last week reported that Ron Paul appears to have been more involved in the publication of his racist newsletters than he has let on. It seems that he and his associates thought using explicitly racist language would be a good way to expand the popularity of their libertarian message in the early 90s. The picture that emerges is of Paul as a calculating businessman using racism for material gain.

This is the last straw for me. I like Ron Paul. But it's time to face the fact that my positive response to him is almost entirely emotional rather than being based in facts. Here's what I like about him: he's not a normal politician, he doesn't pander, he's sincere. He wants to end the war on drugs and have a less aggressive foreign policy. Of all the candidates, including Obama, he has talked most openly about the racism in our justice system and the need to reform our drug laws. All of that is so refreshing and so out of the mainstream that it makes me and many others almost ignore everything else. But there's too much to ignore:

The newsletter scandal indicates that, during the 1990s, Paul's small government message was more important to him than basic decency. He has not convincingly denied or explained this. Furthermore, to this day he argues that Lincoln was a bad president who trampled on constitutional rights, and that the Civil War was unnecessary because compensated emancipation would have worked. Apparently he's never read a book about the Civil War. Similarly, he believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unnecessary, essentially taking the Goldwater position that earned the support of millions of white supremacist Democrats that year. His understanding of such basic moments in American history is completely wrong.

I think what we need to understand about Paul is that everything gets filtered through his libertarian ideology. That's why he can have such ridiculous ideas about American history. Everything simply has to fit in his framework, so he'll change the facts to suit him. We love him for his sincerity, but what good is it to be sincerely wrong?

And then there's the economics. I would be fascinated to hear Ron Paul's explanation of, say, the depression of the 1890s. At a time when there was no federal reserve, no government entity setting interest rates, no national paper currency, no welfare state, why did unemployment go above 20%? Why were the two decades between 1873 and 1893 so disastrous? Why did prices and wages trend downward for 20 years? If there's one thing economists have a consensus on, it's that deflation is a really horrible thing. We endured it for decades before the Federal Reserve, but not since. Why have our economic downturns been less severe since the establishment of the modern welfare state? Why has the business cycle been less volatile and economic hardship been reduced?

I have not heard Ron Paul give an explanation for these things. If his views on the civil war and civil rights are any indication, I doubt he has a coherent one. He promises to cut spending and taxes more dramatically than any other candidate. People like the sound of that. But Paul proposes to do it so quickly that it would produce an economic depression much deeper than anything we've experienced in our lifetimes. I don't think any economists would argue with that. If that's not problematic enough, I think that even conservatives would soon find that they appreciate basic welfare supports like medicare and social security. All of these young people cheering Paul on might change their minds when their parents medical bills start falling to them instead of medicare.

Anyway, this isn't some kind of hit piece on Ron Paul. I genuinely like the guy. But at a certain point I have to let my reason assert itself. He's an extremist, and most of his policy proposals are absurd. I can't let his good points outweigh that basic fact.

criminals deserve justice and dignity too

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-06:00

Following up on yesterday's post, it seems to me that our attitudes toward criminals is one of the clearest examples of a devastating lack of empathy in our society. It's very difficult to get people to care about the injustice of mass incarceration because, presumably, if you're in prison you broke the law. And once you've broken the law many people put you into a different category. Whether or not you're treated with justice and dignity assumes much less importance because you are a law breaker.

Thus unduly harsh sentences, tens of thousands of prison rapes, racial discrimination, felony disenfranchisement, and so on are not seen as vital problems because the victims of these injustices have, it is thought, brought it upon themselves by their bad choices.

I have a hard time understanding the indifference. Do most people live much better lives than me, and are thus less able to imagine making mistakes? I don't find it a stretch at all to imagine myself in prison, or a drug addict, or homeless. The fact that I am not any of those things is due to a complex mixture of influences, many of which have nothing to do with my own character or decision making.

But it seems that most people who feel successful ascribe a ridiculously high proportion of that success to their own effort. Psychologists have long noted that we tend to attribute our failures to outside circumstances and take all the credit for our successes, while inverting the equation for everyone else. In other words, our failures can be explained, other people's are due to character deficiency. Likewise our successes our all our own; someone else may get lucky, but not us. It's discouraging to see people so oblivious to this dynamic.

When I was robbed and had a gun held to me head it seemed obvious to me that those guys were normal people who had faced more challenges than I ever had and had taken some wrong turns. It didn't take much imagination to see myself holding the gun. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I feel like a lot of Americans have a very different reaction to such events.

one small step to ending mass incarceration

2012-01-29T06:00:00.000-06:00

In the latest edition of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an excellent article on the state of our mass incarceration approach to crime. While most countries imprison somewhere around 100 of every 100,000 citizens, we imprison 731 per 100,000, the highest rate in the world. I recently wrote that we incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than any country on earth save a few totalitarian dictatorships like North Korea. I was wrong. We imprison more than any country.

Worse, to a significant extent we have privatized incarceration. It is difficult to imagine a more boneheaded, absurd policy. States pay private companies to house prisoners. The companies make profits by getting a contract from a state and then housing as many prisoners as possible as cheaply as possible. These companies spend millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers to enact policies that will cause more people to be jailed. As the Corrections Corporation of America advised its investors in 2005:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities...The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

In other words, the growth and profit of a whole industry is dependent on more Americans being imprisoned. No doubt the people running these companies are considerably less conscientious than most of the inmates they house. No doubt, too, that their infantile moral imaginations allow them to enjoy their bloody profits without qualms.

But all of this misses the point, you might say. After all, our incarceration rates shot up after our crime rate exploded, and such high rates of imprisonment have in fact succeeded in dramatically reducing the crime rate. I've read a variety of things on this and the only sure takeaway I have is that single issue explanations for the drop in the crime rate are very inadequate. Most likely it was a complex confluence of factors, much of it beyond our control. Indeed one study estimated that mass incarceration only contributed 10-15% of the drop in crime rates.

Perhaps the fatal flaw in the case for mass incarceration is that while our crime rate dropped, rates were also dropping across the developed world. And no one else was pursuing mass incarceration policies. So it seems something bigger was going on.

Now, New York is a special case, as its rate plummeted to an unusual degree. According to Gopnik, there's a new book by a criminologist named Franklin Zimring that does a good job of explaining what happened. The credit does not go to the famous "broken windows" theory but rather to New York's troubling but effective stop and frisk strategy:

Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. "The poor pay more and get more" is Zimring's way of putting it. He believes a "light" program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor kids in prison for long stretches.

I frankly don't like to hear anything nice said about stop and frisk, but this makes sense to me. And here's the other piece that's really devastating to the proponents of mass incarceration: while New York City's drop in crime has been much more dramatic than the rest of the country, it has been imprisoning less people. New York pursued aggressive policing but didn't bother locking people up. Is it a fluke that it had more success in reducing crime?

In my mind, this all leads to the conclusion that it is absurd to lock people away for years simply because they were in possession of a substance the government has deemed illegal. You can literally go to prison for years without doing anything remotely violent or harmful to another person. So here's the important part:

[T]he ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring's work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets--to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana posession. When the New York City police department stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now...The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

We really need to find ways to put pressure on our leaders on this subject. President Obama has been extremely cowardly on this front. I have never smoked pot, have no desire to smoke it, think its dumb to smoke it, and would gladly engage in civil disobedience to see it decriminalized.

secondary racism

2012-01-28T06:00:00.000-06:00

Earlier this week World Have Your Say on the BBC had an interesting discussion about anti-semitism in Europe. One study recently found that 1 in 5 Germans harbor "latent anti-semitism" while percentages are even higher in some other European countries. I didn't catch all of the discussion so I'm not even sure what latent anti-semitism is supposed to mean, but that's beside the point. One of the experts noted that traditional anti-semitism of the kind dating back centuries has been superseded by what he called "secondary anti-semitism." In Germany this takes the form of people feeling resentful toward Jews and holding attitudes like "Hasn't Germany paid enough? Haven't there been enough reparations and trials? Haven't we spent enough time owning up to our history? Aren't we allowed to take pride in our heritage?" And so on, to the point that it becomes a kind of twisted resentment of Jews for wrecking German history, rather than blaming the German perpetrators.

All of that is fascinating in itself, despite my knowing nothing of modern German society. But my interest is in the obvious parallels to American culture. The idea of secondary racism is, I think, extremely useful in thinking about how racial attitudes change and yet retain some similarity to earlier forms. As with traditional anti-semitism in Germany, here in America traditional racism of the kind that would see black people as inferiors worthy of enslavement has been cast to the outer fringes of society. But as with Germany, this explicit racism has been replaced with a widespread resentment, a secondary racism that has its roots in the first. Thus I think we see that racial attitudes are malleable rather than brittle. The old racism did not shatter and die; it slowly changed into something less obvious and violent, while retaining capacity to inflict significant harm.

You see the resentment every year around this time when Black History Month comes around and people seem upset about being made to remember certain things about our history that conflict with their self-image or their sense of national pride. You see it in the way people get more angry about governmental efforts to redress wrongs than the initial wrongdoing. You see it in the way people have a visceral, emotional opposition to reparations even though they rarely have any coherent arguments against it. You see it in the way people constantly demonize race-neutral programs by pretending they're just handouts to minorities.

And though there's nothing wrong with a principled opposition to affirmative action based on reasoned arguments and data, you see it here too, in the way people feel deep anger about it and don't appear to have the greater indignation that our government's much more extensive history of white affirmative action calls for. Nor do you hear such anger directed against the widespread affirmative action known as "legacy admissions" that mostly benefits rich white children. You see it in the way people think efforts to study the history of all Americans and teach it accurately is somehow "liberal" or "multiculturalism" or "unamerican." You see it in the way people people pretend we have an "equal opportunity society" while opposing almost all efforts to actually create one.

You see it in the way people cannot imagine taking responsibility for themselves and their culture. America's crime-ridden and poor neighborhoods can't possibly have anything to do with them. It's always because minorities don't value hard work enough, or their culture is deficient, and so on. It is incredibly difficult for white Americans to be honest with themselves about this 400 year old cancer.

apple's unethical business practices

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday the New York Times had a really good hard-hitting piece on Apple's businesses practices. Apple manufactures all those gadgets we love to buy through Chinese companies it contracts with. And though Apple has a supplier code of conduct regarding work and safety standards, its suppliers don't do a very good job meeting it:

[A]udits have found consistent violations of Apple’s code of conduct, according to summaries published by the company. In 2007, for instance, Apple conducted over three dozen audits, two-thirds of which indicated that employees regularly worked more than 60 hours a week. In addition, there were six “core violations,” the most serious kind, including hiring 15-year-olds as well as falsifying records.
Over the next three years, Apple conducted 312 audits, and every year, about half or more showed evidence of large numbers of employees laboring more than six days a week as well as working extended overtime. Some workers received less than minimum wage or had pay withheld as punishment. Apple found 70 core violations over that period, including cases of involuntary labor, under-age workers, record falsifications, improper disposal of hazardous waste and over a hundred workers injured by toxic chemical exposures.

Most notoriously, there were a bunch of suicides in recent years at Apple's biggest supplier, Foxtron. In theory, Apple terminates relationships with such companies. In practice, they rarely do. Meanwhile, they push their suppliers to the breaking point to save costs:

Every month, officials at companies from around the world trek to Cupertino or invite Apple executives to visit their foreign factories, all in pursuit of a goal: becoming a supplier.
When news arrives that Apple is interested in a particular product or service, small celebrations often erupt. Whiskey is drunk. Karaoke is sung.
Then, Apple’s requests start.
Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits.
So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies.
“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

So you have a situation where Apple's profit incentive is opposed to its code of conduct. They have a little division dedicated to enforcing that code, but it doesn't take much imagination to know that such priorities will continue to get steamrolled by the larger business interests of the company.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

The picture that emerges is not pretty:

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

The article notes that many other technology companies do a much better job on these issues. Perhaps not coincidentally, Apple recently released its quarterly numbers, showing that it earned a record profit of 13 billion dollars. Its profit margin on the latest iphone is something like 44%. It seems fairly obvious that Apple could enforce its safety and responsibility code with relative ease if it merely accepted profit margins of say, 40% instead of 44%.

This is a good example of why I have never had any interest in a career in the corporate world. Even a company like Apple that provides wonderful goods to millions of people does so by cutting ethical corners and behaving in an immoral manner. At a certain point, it is up to us, the consumers, to demand more social responsibility of our businesses.

is china really catching up to us?

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-06:00

I've written before about my presumption of relative U.S. decline in the coming decades in relation to China and other rising powers. Given China's huge population and fast growing economy, I thought that was pretty straightforward. And maybe that still will be the story of the coming decades. But Michael Beckley does an excellent job of arguing that China is not catching up with us at all. He goes beyond GDP numbers to show a lot of dimensions in which China is struggling to keep pace with America. But perhaps the most devastating piece of data has to do with the demography of the two countries in the coming decades:

Within twenty years, China will have 300 million pensioners, causing the
ratio of workers per retiree to plummet from 8 to 1 today to 2 to 1 by 2040. The fiscal cost of this swing in dependency ratios may exceed 80 to 100 percent of China’s GDP. The United States, by contrast, “can be said to be a young and even a developing country.” Its working age population will grow by 17 percent over the next forty years while that of all the other major powers (except India) will decline.

In short, China is about to get hit with the demographic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, while we have a healthier demographic future than any other wealthy country.

As things stand now, it would be a good thing if we remain the world's dominant power rather than China. In such discussions, it is important to discard chest-thumping nationalism, while retaining the ability to make some basic moral distinctions. The basic distinction that ought to be made is that there is every reason to believe that the United States is a more benevolent hegemon than China, in its current form, would be. We bully countries all the time and are perpetually hypocritical, even invade countries and cause tens of thousands of deaths for no good reason, but China is still about the practice of shooting down protesters within its own borders and disregarding the basic rights of its citizens in countless other ways. One does not wish to imagine what it might do if given the power over world affairs that the United States currently possesses. Oh, and there's also the little matter of murdering tens of millions of its own citizens just half a century ago. Despite the United States' long history of unjustified wars of aggression, it has simply never killed on that kind of scale, much less its own citizens.

the state of the union

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-06:00

I think I've learned not to expect much from state of the union speeches, but President Obama's speech last night was still pretty pathetic. It's a reminder that running for president almost always makes you look worse than actually being president. While the Republicans have been busy pandering and saying silly things, Obama has been governing. But last night's speech was pretty close to full pander mode.

He spoke about a bunch of things that sounds really good to the vaunted independent voter, but don't actually work very well in practice. Why, for instance, does he want to add more tax credits and loopholes to the tax code at a time when we should be simplifying it? It doesn't really matter if these particular loopholes are for industries currently considered worthwhile. Today's up and coming industry is tomorrow's sclerotic beneficiary of entrenched governmental favors. I completely agree that we should get rid of the subsidies to the oil industry. But I don't know that we should in turn give those subsidies to other industries.

It seems to me that the compliance cost and market distortions of the tax code are caused by its innumerable special exemptions and subsidies. That could all be cleaned out while making the code more progressive at the same time. A greater number of marginal tax rate levels wouldn't really complicate things. It's all the special stuff that causes problems. But instead of calling for fundamental reform that will simplify the code and make the wealthy pay more, Obama proposed adding more confusion to it.

One place he wants to continue to subsidize is the clean energy industry. It's frustrating because no one who studies these things actually thinks crafting policy through the tax code is a good way to go about it. But Americans tend to be more accepting of government policy if it is hidden in the tax system rather than out in the open. Instead of adding more subsidies to the tax code we should do a few simple things: eliminate all subsidies to oil and gas so there's a level playing field; raise the gas tax; continue to raise mpg standards, and tax carbon. These are all simple, out in the open taxes that would then allow the market to go to work in a stable cost environment. As far as I know there is a consensus among economists that this would be far better than our current way of doing things. Wading through the current system of exemptions and loopholes and subsidies leads to all sorts of distortions and bad outcomes.