Linky Friday #89: The Tick Edition
Do you have a link you would like to share? Please feel free to email. Almost all links are used, though those that are not time-sensitive may be bumped a week, and inclusion of even timely links is not guaranteed if sent later than Wednesday night. Alternately, this is an open forum to include any links – well, excluding NSFW – you believe to be worthwhile.
Economics:
[E1] Shouldn’t The Economist know better than to pretend that job scarcity and falling wages in Japan are not paradoxical?
[E2] Clay Shirky is not particularly sympathetic to Amazon, but he’s not really sympathetic to the publishers, either. It’s been interesting watching lots and lots of people rally around an industry that very recently was found to have engaged in price collusion. More from PEG.
[E3] A peek into the sinister world of debt collection. It’s a very gripping story.
[E4] From Mad Rocket Scientist: I found the line, “It’s a given” to be true. I found it fascinating why women seem to not be getting the message.
Culture:
[Cu1] The Tick may be returning! I’m not sure about this darker and edgier business, though.
[Cu2] Tanya Basu writes about the gender politics of pockets (and smartphones). It does seem to me that a lot of women’s clothes are impractical. Then again, I’m the guy who wears a phone holster and thinks everybody should be wearing utility belts (or at least belts, for chrissakes).
[Cu3] The biggest thing holding back Google Fiber, apparently, is television and our reluctance to actually cut the cord. Will HBO’s and CBS’s decisions to offer Internet-only subscriptions change that?
[Cu4] The Saturday morning cartoon is finito. For those longing for a bit of nostalgia, here are the Saturday morning TV schedules in the eighties.
[Cu5] WB/DC is ramping up its movie-making to compete with Disney/Marvel. I look forward to some of it, but they should focus on TV, though. They’re good at TV.
[Cu6] Rugby is one of those sports I have long wanted to learn about. Boosters are looking to raise its profile in the United States.
[Cu7] ESPN has a neat feature on college football walk-ons.
Crime:
[Cr1] France is beseiged by evil clowns, giving rise to anti-clown vigilantes.
[Cr2] From Mad Rocket Scientist: Near me, an angry/hurt kid from a well-to-do family decides to shoot 5 kids (three girls & his two cousins). He then killed himself. This has all the hallmarks of media frenzy (shooting, at school, love triangle). Three innocent girls are dead & this is all over the media.
[Cr3] From Mad Rocket Scientist: In California, drunk guy mows down three girls with his car on Halloween, and the media frenzy is not so much. Certainly the calls for something to be done are muted. But dead is dead, no matter how you got that way.
[Cr4] It’s a good thing that barber shops are so tightly regulated, because it gives SWAT teams the opportunity to poke around in service of the War on Drugs.
[Cr5] A woman in Nashville fights a legal battle against charges that she neglected a child that she didn’t know.
[Cr6] From Mad Rocket Scientist: You mean I can kill two of my big issues at once? Stop putting everyone in jail for every little thing, and you’ll cut down on gun violence? Awesome!
Government:
[G1] I barely use flavoring, but attempts to ban flavored ecigarettes make me want to bang my head against the wall. if you’re worried about ecigarettes as a “gateway” (which I’m not, but if I were…) then why in tarnation do you want to insist that ecigarettes taste as much like real cigarettes as possible?
[G2] Nick Hanauer argued that wealth inequality was going to lead to pitchforks on the richers front lawns. John Aziz says that our institutions aren’t sufficiently corrupt.
[G3] I didn’t know this, but the IRS charges a penalty if you pay your taxes with cash. This created a problem for marijuana shops since the same government that created the circumstances that keep them unbanked.
[G4] Government corruption is good for infrastructure spending, bad for education and health care spending.
[G5] From Michael Cain: This week’s George Will column on things Republicans should do immediately includes opening the Yucca Flats spent-nuclear-fuel repository. I knew it would be coming, but I thought it would be a few months before conservatives, who normally are against the federal government imposing on states, started urging it: “Let’s move spent nuclear fuel thousands of miles, much of that across states with no reactors that don’t want it on their roads and rails, and store it in a repository in a state with no reactors that doesn’t want it.” In the middle of the one of the three US power grids where nuclear is disappearing the fastest. Yeah, I admit I’m bitter; if it’s so eff’ing safe, why don’t you keep it in *your* backyard?
[G6] Most of us didn’t know that we had Ebola drugs waiting in the wings the next time there was an outbreak. Turns out, we may have Dick Cheney to thank for that.
[G7] Without irony, MoveOn.org was spreading the word about a “little-known tool” Republicans will nefariously exploit if they win the Senate, called “reconciliation.”
Animals:
Rescued sea otter pup.
[A2] A panda in China figured out that it pays to fake being pregnant.
[A3] Crawfish are awesome. Unfortunately, they’re doing a number on Scotland (and their trout-fishing more specifically) right now.
[A4] There are ticks that make people allergic to meat, and they’re spreading. These creatures must be eradicated.
[A5] The heartwarming story of an Arizona dog that finds new purpose in a kitten shelter.
[A6] Why dogs kick when you scratch their belly.
Tick image copyright FOX, 2001, Otter image from the US Dept of Interior
taking the condition through chi town
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Cu4: Say What? On the live action side, Gotham is a happy accident, Constantine is very unproven, and the CW shows have all the terrible baggage of CW shows. On the animated side, they cancelled Young Justice and dropped the ball with their other animated programming. The way I figure it, neither Marvel nor DC has done a very good job with TV adaptations in recent years.Report
The problem with superhero TV shows is that they usually require a lot of special effects but even with CGI that could really kill your budget. Animaiton could solve the problem but getting a non-dead baby comedy animation on prime time is not easy in the American market.Report
A4: Ironically, the spread of these could have a huge benefit for the environment, since human consumption of meat is one of the leading negative environmental factors. (Not that I’m a vegetarian, either.)Report
Maybe this is the plot of the dark and gritty Tick reboot (the reboot that we deserve, but not the one that we need right now.)Report
[Cu4] Awwww… My son has never been a Saturday morning cartoon kid, because cartoons are available all the time now, not just for a couple hours after school and a few hours on Saturday morning. But it’s still kind of sad to think that yet another thing that was a big part of my childhood is gone.
[Cu6] I watched the friendly with the All Blacks last weekend. It was… not pretty. The U.S. team is huge, but aside from Isles, who’s fast but that’s about it, they are slow and were seriously overmatched. As with soccer, I think the gap in the quality of play between the U.S. and more rugby-centric countries like New Zealand will probably end up being the biggest barrier to raising its profile here. I mean I love soccer, and I keep trying to get into the MLS, but after you watch three or four Serie A or La Liga games (beIN Sports, I love you), MLS is just not very fun to watch. Rugby’s going to face a similar hurdle, particularly since the people likely to get into it can watch overseas rugby fairly easily.Report
[A3] I volunteer to go to Scotland with a bunch of hot sauce and rid them of as many crawdads as I can.Report
Too late, there are no crawdads to be found, you’ll have to eat sand.Report
How does that taste with hot sauce?Report
Better than it does without.Report
Pretty much like a comic book movie reboot: gritty and dark.Report
We will send you to save the citizens of Scotland from the plague of crawfish with other Gulf States residents. You have to agree to parachute out of a plane to awesome theme music in order to save the day though.Report
Blaring zydeco as we fly in attack formation?Report
Yes, blazing zydeco.Report
G6,
yeah, and we have the government shutdown to thank for us not being another 6 months ahead on the drugs. It really hurts to think that we may have been six months to a year out from having something reasonably large-scale functional.Report
G3 You know, I was told by someone that bills were legal tender for all debts, public and private.
When the government fails to acknowledge this, it really starts making the sovereigns start sounding a lot less crazy.Report
Jay,
please, this is the freaking IRS. I’m pretty certain the 10% charge is because they need staff to count the damn money. Is it somewhat unfair that the dealers are being penalized without recourse? Hell yeah. IMNSHO, Joe Public ought to assume the cost for the dealers, or fix the damn law already.Report
It strikes me as perfectly reasonable that the IRS should be forced to count money.
If we’re not talking about someone paying in pennies, and we’re not, we’re in crazy town when we start discussing the difficulty of counting mother freakin money at the mother freakin IRS.
BUY A MOTHER FREAKIN COIN MACHINE AND A MOTHER FREAKING BILL COUNTER.Report
If everyone quit paying we wouldn’t have this problem.Report
What @jaybird said exactly – stores don’t charge extra when you pay in cash. You can discharge any debt, no matter how large, in cash. That’s what cash is for.Report
Count de MonetReport
Link Cr4 has nothing to do with barber shops.Report
Thanks. Fixed.Report
The new link gives a 404 error.Report
Dammit. There! Fixed! For real this time.Report
A few thoughts:
–Cu2: This is a pretty good example of the standard SJW recipe. Pose a supposedly puzzling dilemma that is not really particularly puzzling at all.
Answer: it doesn’t. Then immediately answer your own rhetorical question with whatever -ism you are going after:
Offer a bunch of conflicting evidence for and against the assertion that you have already made. So, you have a piece that contains statements like this:
right along with ones like this:
and with downright bizarre claims like this:
Make no attempt to square these conflicting statements with one another (you don’t have to, because you had your answer before you started). Rather, simply toss it all together in a word salad of jargon, unproven assertions and phony aphorisms. Serve warm and move on to the next dish.
G2: No, we are nowhere near the pitchfork stage. That is partly because of the corruption issue, but its mostly because the poor and working class just don’t care as much about income or wealth inequality as the chattering classes do. People care a lot more about their own objective well-being than they do about what is going on at the very top of the income/wealth distribution.
G4: When I read the headline, “Government corruption encourages more state spending on infrastructure, but takes away resources from schools, public health,” I immediately think of the Washington, DC monora… I mean street cars. And this makes sense as infrastructure is a boon to a variety of sectors that no a thing or two about corruption: real estate, construction, labor, finance, etc.Report
G4,
yeah, apparently BRT is a third the price, even if you have exclusive lanes for busses only.
That’s what Pittsburgh’s doing, at any rate.Report
No, we are nowhere near the pitchfork stage. That is partly because of the corruption issue, but its mostly because the poor and working class just don’t care as much about income or wealth inequality as the chattering classes do. People care a lot more about their own objective well-being than they do about what is going on at the very top of the income/wealth distribution.
I don’t think this is quite right. First, I think most of the lower-income people I know are so exhausted by the constant economic worries they have that they’re overwhelmed and don’t know how to express their concerns constructively. (There is plenty of research that shows living on the economic edge takes a large mental/emotional toll on one’s life.) Second, I don’t think most people really understand economic inequality; they look at the people who are in the lower end of the top 10% of earners as the ‘wealthy,’ but that’s not where the inequality really exists. the difference between the Senior VP earning $350,000 and the CEO earning $35,000,000 is difficult to discern when you’re trying to support your family in $35,000.Report
Not sure with what you are disagreeing. This is exactly my point. Income inequality is mostly a concern of the chattering classes. People lower down the SES distribution care much more about their objective well-being than they care about what is going in within the top five or ten percent of the distribution.Report
To add too zic’s point, there’s a video out there showing what people _think_ should be the ideal distribution of wealth (spoiler alert – it’s pretty even), what people _think_ the _current_ distribution of wealth is (bad, but not too bad), and what the _actual_ distribution of wealth is.
Bluntly, people are too busy trying to live their own lives to actually know just how bad inequality currently is.Report
There is a calculated threshold that keeps the pitchforks in the shed. Alot has been done to maintain airs. Propaganda has only given the mental ease. A failure in physical ease or perpetual affliction will most likely be a trigger.Report
My takeaway from that video was that the average person has no idea what realistic wealth distribution looks like and are poor spitballers. (If we’re talking about the same video.) if I recall, a similar thing couldn’t even provide a good model for wealth inequality, and so had to do a sleight of hand with income inequality in Sweden.Report
Income inequality is mostly a concern of the chattering classes. People lower down the SES distribution care much more about their objective well-being than they care about what is going in within the top five or ten percent of the distribution.
I just disagree that it’s only a concern for the chattering class; I think they’re both examples of concern about the problems of economic inequality. Suggesting that it’s not a concern for lower-income workers is belied by the numbers of minimum-wage hikes passed in the election.Report
“People lower down the SES distribution care much more about their objective well-being than they care about what is going in within the top five or ten percent of the distribution.”
Of course, some people think these two things are connected.Report
Just to put us on the same page, this is the video, @jesse-ewiak and @will-truman ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsMReport
Didn’t socialism provide much of the leverage/regulation to the 1% to capture the markets and create this clusterfish?Report
@citizen if the wealth distribution change at the top from 1976 compared to 2009 is correct (9% vs. 24%), I wouldn’t blame socialism, but the rolling back of socialism beginning with the election of St. Ronnie.Report
Yes, that’s the video. It also does a bit of sleight of mouth with regard to income vs wealth.Report
Working class people, or people advocating for working class people, wanting a higher minimum wage is exactly what you would expect from people more concerned with objective well-being than with what is going on at the top end of the income distribution. There is a reason that there is a large grassroots movement for higher wages at the bottom and not for drastically increasing taxes at the top.
They are connected, but they are not connected in the way that you think they are connected.Report
@will-truman income vs. wealth is one of my economic pet peeves. They are both terms with precise meanings, but they are also spoken of as general terms for concepts, and this leads to tremendous confusion. Living in a rural area, I also think there are related kinds of confusion between owning assets and liquidity that complicate the discussion.
Another economic-talk pet peeve is comparing household income over time as a measure of wealth instead of hours-worked income over time. Since the 1970’s, household income has increased slightly, but hours worked has increased significantly, the gently-sloping line of household income is based on two wage earners, not one.Report
@zic @j-r @will-truman
Another issue is on Krugman’s thesis that the 1 percent are really hidden from view:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/opinion/paul-krugman-our-invisible-rich.html?_r=0
“The latest piece of evidence to that effect is a survey asking people in various countries how much they thought top executives of major companies make relative to unskilled workers. In the United States the median respondent believed that chief executives make about 30 times as much as their employees, which was roughly true in the 1960s — but since then the gap has soared, so that today chief executives earn something like 300 times as much as ordinary workers.
So Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid, a finding very much in line with evidence that Americans vastly underestimate the concentration of wealth at the top.”
“So how can people be unaware of this development, or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds.
The exceptions are celebrities, who live their lives in public. And defenses of extreme inequality almost always invoke the examples of movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata. For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.”Report
@saul-degraw I pretty much agree with Krugman there. Additionally, I think that the 1% (who own about half of investments) has purchased cover from the mass of people who are invested in stocks through retirement plans, etc. If you’ve been working hard all your life and investing in a retirement account, it would be irrational to support things that might ding that account; and those policies align with the interests of the handful of people who own the other half.Report
Yeah, that is the truly pernicious thing about capitalism. It is a system that subverts the true allegiances of the proletariat by bribing them with an ownership stake.
By the way, this whole thread demonstrates what I am talking about when it comes to income inequality. It is an exercise in question begging. Why is income inequality bad? Because it harms the poor and working class. How does it harm the poor and working class? By making the rich richer? Then why don’t the poor and working class care more about how they are being harmed by the rich getting richer? Because they don’t know how much they are being harmed by the rich getting richer, but if they did…
This goes on and on with no one actually spelling out a credibly mechanism by which the top 1 percent pulling away from the top 10 percent and the top 0.1 percent pulling away from the top 1 percent actually harms the poor and working class.Report
@j-r Were you around when we had the symposium?Report
This goes on and on with no one actually spelling out a credibly mechanism by which the top 1 percent pulling away from the top 10 percent and the top 0.1 percent pulling away from the top 1 percent actually harms the poor and working class.
I gave examples upthread: household income over time vs. hours worked over time. You don’t think that hurts the working class — that their household income has remained flat while their hours worked has increased significantly?
Or that we talk about income (and so income taxes) instead of wealth (and so capital gains taxes)?
The language itself used to hold these conversations typically obscures meanings in such a way as to favor the very wealthy.Report
@will-truman
The Google machine tells me that was in June 2012, which was before my time here.
By the way, I am aware of some of the specific arguments made against inequality. I’ve never found them convincing, though. I think just about every bit of evidence, and common sense, tells us that we ought to be much more concerned with people’s objective well-being than with inequality.Report
People care a lot more about their own objective well-being than they do about what is going on at the very top of the income/wealth distribution.
Markets don’t follow people, they follow money. When nearly all the money is concentrated among the top few, affordable products for those near the bottom can become such an economically marginal thing that they stop being made.Report
How is that caused by income inequality? What is the specific mechanism?
You want to raise capitail gains tax? Go for it. Just please explain how it helps the middle class to make them take a bigger hit whenever they sell their homes or shares in a mutual fund.
Right. I guess that explains the existence of Walmart.Report
Dammit! Can someone fix that bolding? I only meant to bold “caused.”Report
How is that caused by income inequality? What is the specific mechanism?
You’re looking for a specific mechanism to a fractal problem.
But: if household income is flat while time worked has grown by at least 1.5%, than people are being paid less for their time working. Working itself engenders costs (particularly in households with children), including daycare/after-school care. It means there are fewer resources to take care of household tasks and less volunteerism in the community and a host of other things.
And we haven’t even begun to discuss education; access to, quality of, etc. or limitations on social safety nets, infrastructure-burden declines, or the shift of the cost of employment training from employers to workers.
These mechanisms have been explored in depth. Many of them are discussed as ‘women’s issues.’Report
I don’t know how many different ways to say this.
I care about the objective well being of the poor and middle class. Full stop. That, however, is not about inequality; it’s about objective well being. If there was someway to make the poor and middle class better off by making the wealthy worse off, then I might be very well for it. The problem is that every scheme I hear that portends to do that is deeply flawed and not likely to work very well. Therefore, it’s better to stop thinking about how much the rich have and, instead, focus directly on figuring out what the causes of middle class stagnation are, and how to mitigate against them.Report
that is the truly pernicious thing about capitalism. It is a system that subverts the true allegiances of the proletariat by bribing them with an ownership stake.
I doubt there’ll be a better line written on the internet today.
When nearly all the money is concentrated among the top few, affordable products for those near the bottom can become such an economically marginal thing that they stop being made.
This is one of those lines that at initial blush sounds logical. But it’s belied by the evidence. J-R mentions Wal Mart, but there’s also K Mart, Meijer, Dollar General, Family Dollar, the Dollar Tree, and god only knows how many other stores are out there.
I go to Lowes to buy a drill, and I find them in all price ranges, from a sweet $150 drill that I could use to bore a hole to the center of the earth to a $20 drill that’s probably ideal for the person who uses one about twice a year. With three kids I needed a place for them to store all their shoes, so I went to the store and for a few tens of bucks I bought some shelves that stand by our front door for them to put all their shoes on.
I can buy my kids shoes, down at Payless shoes, where they’re priced for working class schlubs. If I needed new pots and pans for my kitchen, I could go to any of no less than 6 or 7 stores in my town of just 20,000 to buy some at a reasonable price.
Near the end of summer I saw window air conditioners on sale for $40. I don’t actually need another one, but I almost bought one anyway just because I have one that’s getting old and a bit noisy.
I bought a new ceiling fan for my kitchen last summer at Menards. When I first went, it was all of $40 and the light kit was $20. That’s already cheap, but when I went back after thinking about it, they were on sale for $20 and $10. Menards has ceiling fans that sell for $300, more than I like to spend, but they also have ones priced at a point where I almost want to buy several, just to stock up on them. (I didn’t; I’m not quite that stupid.)
Televisions are cheaper now than they were in the 1970s. Radio alarm clocks can be bought for about one hour of minimum wage work, so you can be sure to get to work on time.
Empirically, I just don’t see the evidence that producers aren’t making things for people at the lower ends of the economic scale.Report
jr,
of course it explains Walmarts FUTURE business strategy. In case you haven’t noticed, rural America is Imploding.
You obviously don’t know many rich people. How about we stop the bearhunting in Detroit? I know who’s getting rich there, and it ain’t the fucking people who lived through Detroit going into the dump. Rampant “speculation” caused by counterparty capture, same as Wisconsin.Report
You’re looking for a specific mechanism to a fractal problem.
That’s such an elegant phrase that one is tempted to think it actually means something. But alas, beauty is not truth.Report
James,
it’s not in production it’s in supply (Vlasic vs Walmart). Like abortion clinics, it’s quite possible for the supply of something to be minimal, even if its still in production.Report
Kim,
Please don’t talk to me.Report
one is tempted to think it actually means something
Tempted to think also suggests one didn’t bother to think.Report
Oh, zic, I’m all ears to hear you explain what you mean by a “fractal problem,” and why a “fractal problem” can’t be caused by specific mechanisms.
(And if there are no specific mechanisms, then how can we target policy to fix the problem?)Report
@j-r raises a valid question- how does widening inequality harm the bottom 99%?
Especially if one considers rising (or even stagnating) wages.
I think the error here is in viewing things again through purely an econometric lens- as if the lives lived by the 1% and 99% have no connection or interaction.
When the top 1% lives a life so widely separated from us, it harms our ability to work together as a nation, to solve problems to mutual benefit, to see our fortunes intertwined.
The permanent war machine, the rentseeking and welfarization of the banking sector- these things are directly tied to the vast unregulated fortunes of the 1% and 0.1%. The fact that our government exists primarily to serve the rich directly harms everyone.Report
“K Mart, Meijer, Dollar General, Family Dollar, the Dollar Tree”
It’s a little bit disturbing that half of the businesses on your list are dollar stores, given the way that the dollar store business model is 33% selling other people’s trash and 33% selling 90-cent goods at a premium and hoping shoppers don’t notice. Those stores don’t really make the case that businesses can thrive by meeting the needs of low-income shoppers.
As someone who spent years working at a low-price grocery store, I can say that at least for our business, the rich-but-thrifty played a big part in keeping us above water. They bought more things, and more expensive things, and their checks didn’t bounce.
As soon as it becomes cheaper and more convenient for those people to buy groceries over the internet, we’re going to see a lot of low-price businesses fold, and the cash-only segment of society might start sharpening those pitchforks.Report
@lwa
I don’t think that econometric means what you think it means. Econometrics is simply an applied statistical method of analysis. If the connections and mechanisms that you claim exist, then they ought to show up in statistical analysis.
Of course, you are right that it is difficult to apply econometric analysis to the following proposition:
But that’s because you haven’t actually said anything that is falsifiable. You’ve just given us an opinion about “intertwined fortunes,” whatever that means. Other parts of what you said are testable, but I doubt that those tests work out in your favor.
When was this mythical time, when the 1 percent lived arm in and arm with the common people and the American government never sent people off to war?Report
Don’t disagree on big finance, but the permanent war machine redistributes a lot of income to the middle class (both blue collar and white collar). US Defense spending is about 700 billion, of which 150B goes directly to military personnel (who are working or middle class by salary level). So assuming the remaining 550B goes to contractors (which is generous, considering there’s 700K civilian employees that also have to be paid), the operating profit of the defense industry (per Forbes) is somewhere between 10%-20% over the last few years.
So of that top line 700B number, only 50-100B is going directly to the 1% (to the extent that pension funds are not invested in the defense industry), and we haven’t even got to the remaining budget items that pay veteran’s benefits and other quirky things like energy projects. The majority of which also go to middle class working people.Report
@j-r are you saying that work like this hasn’t been done, or that it’s wrong? That could be; I don’t have the skills to access its quality. But this didn’t take long to find; and there’s a lot of other work out there like it; all mapping the harm you don’t think exists, and doing so using econometrics.Report
I think @will-truman is on track here. Americans think that 1 in 4 teenaged girls get pregnant and that one in three people are unemployed.Report
Yes, Walmart still exists.
But also, depending where you live, a glut of overpriced granite-counter-topped generic luxury housing, and a shortage of rental accommodations priced for the working class exists. If builders can make more money with less effort by housing one rich family in 7000 square feet than by housing 14 working class families in 500 square feet each, that’s what they’ll do.Report
@zic
I’m not saying either. I’m saying that @lwa’s comment is fuzzy and unfalsifiable.
Yes, there is a whole literature that attempts to link income inequality directly to this or that negative affect. And those papers cover the range from trite to insightful. The thing about academic literature, is that it tends to be focused on very narrow questions. And when you try to take a very narrow finding and apply it across the board to ideological questions, you lose the meaning of the original finding.
It may well be that over time, I am proven wrong by a robust body of literature that shows that inequality itself, aside from the question of objective well-being, is bad. When that happens, I will admit that I am wrong.Report
@j-r
I raise the issue of intertwined fortunes, because they are recognized in our founding documents, the intent to create brotherhood and greater unity among our nation.
Maybe you prefer to shrug it off as something mysterious without definition, but societal unity is pretty much the basis for patriotism. That sense that we are united as a society is very important to me and many others who criticize wealth inequality.
So your attempts to find some statistical model for harm is just ignoring what is really bothering most of the critics. No, we aren’t pissed because Jamie Dimon has a yacht; we’re pissed because he owns our government, and turns it to purposes we don’t like.Report
societal unity is pretty much the basis for patriotism.
Eh, that’s a pretty strong condemnation for societal unity in my book. People parrot the need for patriotism without ever taking time to really think about why, or about the dangers it leads to. When something is the last refuge of a scoundrel, we ought to wonder why it remains when all other refuge is gone.Report
I raise the issue of intertwined fortunes, because they are recognized in our founding documents, the intent to create brotherhood and greater unity among our nation.
You mean like Federalist 10, where Madison frets that the masses might take away the gentry’s property?
Or the Declaration of Independence where the Continental Congress carefully excised Jefferson’s criticism of slavery?
Or the Constitution that explicitly allowed for continued slavery, and that didn’t ensure the rights of either women or unpropertied men to vote?Report
G2- I agree with you that the revolution isn’t going to happen but not for the reason you think. I actually think that a lot of people on the lower end of income distribution do care about income inequality in that they care about their struggle to survive. The might not take about income inequality in the same way that the chattering class does but they are concerned about it.
The reason why the revolution isn’t coming is that the American working class has always been divided over a variety of issues. Large numbers of Americans in poverty have long accepted the logic of capitalism, especially among the Anglo-Protestant poor. Other American workers, especially among the Jewish/Catholic working class, people of color, or Anglo-Protestant miners in coal country did not. This division still exists today. The American working class was always more divided than its counterparts in other countries.Report
Maybe that is because capitalism allowed them to improve their objective well-being.Report
Maybe the social safety net/regulations/liberal policies have allowed people to improve their objective standard of living.Report
I’m not sure if you meant to offer that as a rebuttal to my statement, but it’s not.
To the extent that the social safety net/regulations/liberal policies allow people to improve their well being, I support them. To the extent that these policies are poorly implemented or have unintended consequences that actually harm people, I do not support them.
This is the radical freedom of not playing for either the red team or the blue team. I care about what works, not what passes ideological litmus tests.Report
Actually i reject polices that harm people and am for policies that help people also. Everybody if for polices they think will work and help people however differently we may define them. But itself those statements dont’ really say all that much. I think the liberal assertion is that many of our policies have a negative effect on poor and middle class people leading their economic situation to stagnate.Report
Jr, capitalism affected the working class the same way in the 19th century United States as it did in Europe. It had the same positive and negatives. However, more Americans accepted the logic of capitalism than Europeans or people elsewhere. There has to be cultural reasons behind that.Report
@j-r To the extent that these policies are poorly implemented or have unintended consequences that actually harm people, I do not support them.
How do we know that the policies are poorly implemented or have unintended consequences beforehand? Much of the problem of government implementation is underfunding for the burden of work. (See social work, for instance; or classroom teachers with inordinate numbers of students in their classes.)
Poor implementation can have a lot of complex reasons, from poorly-thought out policy to poor assessment of the cost to implement it a policy properly, to unanticipated problems that the implementation actually reveals, to policy that’s too limited to actually address the problems they’re supposed to address.
Some unintended consequences can be anticipated and planned for in implementation, but many are purely that — unintended. They are not revealed until a policy is implemented. The impact of carbon on the atmosphere, for instance, was revealed after we began burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, not before.
In both cases, some of the problems you object to — poor implementation and unintended consequences — are only revealed after the fact.
So are you objecting to change because it might be poorly implemented (this is where I get behind state’s rights; it offers a variety of implementation options to test which work best, and so develop best management practices)? Do you object to change because their might be unintended consequences? Because I’d presume there are always going to be unintended consequences — humans are a creative lot at looking for some personal advantage; we’re rent seekers by nature, and that the better course here might sometimes be to stay focused and aware on that potential, and if it’s a net positive or negative; paralysis because we fear unintended consequences has its own set of unintended consequences.
Doing nothing is also an action.Report
I should add that I think there’s a lot of stuff that’s called ‘an unintended consequence’ that’s actually easily anticipated; I see people here anticipating this stuff all the time. It’s not unintended; it’s politically difficult, so we just skip planning for it, and we let the cards fall where they may.Report
@greginak
I am not a liberal, at least not in the way that you are using the word, and I agree with that statement. Apologies, if you are looking for more a fight than I am putting up, but I honestly don’t know what your objection is.
@leeesq
Sure, but in that sentence, the phrase “cultural reasons” doesn’t mean a whole lot. There are certainly historical, economic, geographic and other reasons why people in the United States might be more amenable to free enterprise and people in Europe more comfortable with various communitarian and protectionist measures. At the end of the day, however, you’ve got to make the best decision based on what works best in the particular context in which you are in.
@zic
I assure you that I absolutely do not object to change.Report
@greginak
Maybe the social safety net/regulations/liberal policies have allowed people to improve their objective standard of living.
Not to argue against those things, but even Marx admitted that capitalism had improved people’s well-being in England, long before they had much, if anything, in the way of safety nets, regulations, and other liberal policies to help out those on the bottom end .Report
@james-hanley Way to go all Marxist on us. But nobody is promoting socialism in any way that the word makes sense. We’re all capitalists. Sure there are people more leery of the Big C and is some loopy ways. But even the far out really big corp hating people love their little shops and locally owned stores. Capitalism works and has won. The question is how to make it work for as many people as possible and how to limit the parts that don’t’ work well.
It’s sort of like a good burger and fries. We all agree its a great meal ( well at least all right thinking people do) but we still argue about what the best toppings are and what to put on the fries.Report
I’m tempted here to point out that the objective well being of the lives of Soviet citizens improved from 1917-1989 if only to illustrate how poor a measure that is.Report
@j-r I assure you that I absolutely do not object to change.
Thank you, that actually helps. I am working hard here; so perhaps you’ll help me out. What would help people thrive better than they now do? What change would you promote, beyond the obvious such as limited power to imprison?
Because that’s what we’re talking about; how people thrive.Report
@greginak
Hope this isn’t too pedantic, but actually, it isn’t “capitalism” that has won, but a mixed economy that blends markets with socialized infrastructure and a social safety net.
Its only important because the current round of thinking in the conservative world is that if fettered capitalism is good, unfettered capitalism must be terrific.Report
@lwa Can anybody ever really be to pedantic? I think a mixed economy is the bee’s knees. But that rests on a structure of capitalism with a bunch of stuff to make it work well. I know what the conservative ideologues say but i don’t think its a good move to define what i think based on economic puritans.Report
Anybody calculate how many pounds of government would have to be removed to rid it of rent seeking?Report
Greg, I was only pointing out that capitalism has an independent and positive effect on wealth. No other message intended.
LWA, I assume you’re not counting the 20 million or do who starved to death during forced collectivization of agriculture, and the threat of being sent to gulags that were objectively far worse than the Tsar’s prison camps. But, sure, the Soviets did a decent job of industrializing by adopting the technology developed by British, German and American capitalists.Report
I think you mean too pedantic.Report
meh, no points taken off for spelling or grammar errorsReport
@greginak and @lwa
I think there’s that regulatory certainty matters, though my term could use a good luntzing for somethin’ catchy. Investors depend on government to regulate well; it protects their investments. Companies that blow up oil rigs are not a good investment; companies that are regulated to prevent blowing up oil rigs are a profitable and safe investment.
Good regulation that’s well enforced, which doesn’t always have to be antagonistic, creates more certainty for the money you invest in your 401K for retirement. It’s essential to good capitalism.Report
@citizen so you’re saying I was being too pedantic?Report
Whatever happened to the commenter known as “Infuriating Pedant”? I thought that was the best internet handle since “The Fifth Dentist.”Report
CR1 – Hey, I linked to that last week! No love Will?Report
“France besieged by evil clowns, sometimes known as Parisians.”
No?Report
I went to look for the evil clowns, and there they were, gone.Report
Did they take Baby with them?Report
Sorry @aaron-david , I think this link was already in the queue and I missed your having brought it up.Report
Sorry, that came off a lot less funny than I thought it would @will-truman . Chalk it up to tension before an important doctors visit.Report
Cu1-A darker and ediger the Tick is not the Tick. The Tick’s innocent personality and the general tone of the show does not work in a darker and edgier environment. The Tick like Adam West’s Batman needs light and absurdity to thrive.
Cu2-One of the serious design flaws of cell-phones is that nobody seems to have thought about how people are going to carry them around when not holding them in their hands. If you put a cell-phone in the pocket, it looks like you have a bulge. In a bag of some sort and you won’t hear it unless it you have it really loud. Suits actually work well with cell phones because you can put them in one of the inner pockets.Report
What we need is collapsable smartphones.Report
Cellphones work fine in breast pockets. who cares about a bulge there?Report
The market has spoken! What the market really needs to do is reconcile them to the obvious and straightforward solution to this problem.Report
E4 — I’m not sure I agree with this; or agree that lack of financial/business acumen is the reason so much as lack of signaling acumen.
One theory I hold here is that this signaling is not so much a part of the public sector (for men or women,) for a variety of reasons; one being that the public sector shifts on electoral/legislative variations and a second being that we’re often unwilling to invest in that kind of long-term strategic thinking for governments; so the whole meta-realm of financial/business acumen is not as built in to models of success. This matters in terms of gender because my assumption (which could be wrong) is that much of the leadership role-modeling for women is based, in part, on higher levels of achievement in public sector enterprises. But this is only an off-the-cuff guess; feel free to pick it apart and prove it wrong.Report
[Cu2] – Fledermaus has a really awesome utility belt from this fellow – https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/EarthNynjaLeather?section_id=6037157
Shortly after she got that belt, she got a phone that was huge by three-years-ago standards, and would be only slightly large by current ones. With its Otterbox case, her phone doesn’t quite fit in the largest pocket on the belt…Report
E2: A counter view to Matt Y’s rah rah neo-liberal cheerleaderism:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias-doesnt-understand-about-book-publishing
‘The publishing scenario that Yglesias is advocating is a world without health insurance. (Ironic, I know.) In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die. “So what?” Yglesias might say, because that’s the kind of ruthless neoliberal thinker he is. “If people didn’t buy the book, that’s just proof of its worthlessness.”’
G2: America is also a really big and polarized country on socio-cultural lines so I imagine that a lot of other things would need to happen for there to be a true revolution. There is also the chance that Americans are just not very revolutionary anymore. See Steinbeck’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” The IWW did not succeed as a labor movement because they misread what most of labor wanted probably.Report
Someone wrote that with a straight face?
I guess if you are not a “ruthless neoliberal thinker,” then you think that value of a book doesn’t come from the number of people who want to read it, but from whether or not a bunch of elite gatekeepers at publishing houses think that the book is worth buying, publishing and marketing and whether another bunch of elite gatekeepers think that it is worth writing about and sharing in their respective media outlets.
I have absolutely no dog in the Amazon vs. publishers fight, but this has to be the least convincing argument that I have ever heard.Report
people who are likely hepped up (rightfully!) about voter intimidation and various attempts at stymying turnout find more direct forms of democratic expression in other areas to be, uh, distasteful.Report
My more hippie friends have been reposting this story from back in April today:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy
While I consider myself further to the left than neo-liberals, I don’t like what I consider to be kindergarten liberalism either which is the “Why can’t we just eat cookies and have nap time and hugs?” school of liberalism. This is the liberalism that upworhthy tries to attach for dollars.Report
@saul-degraw
E2 – If the publishers are actually providing value, then they should be just fine and should be able to continue to promote works. If the cost-added doesn’t justify the value-added, then there’s a problem that isn’t Amazon’s fault.
G2 – I think this is true. People (particularly on the left) lament it, but what social issues are they willing to give up so that the Proletariat Will Rise?
Re: No longer a democracy – I’ve seen it resurfacing as well, which along with “We shouldn’t even be having these elections” is an expected response to a poor election result.
I think there’s actually a lot of truth to it, though not a lot to be done about it.Report
@will-truman
Re: The Left and Revolution.
I think there is a small group of leftists that want revolution but many do not. See the failures of Big Bill Hayward and the IWW, they wanted revolutions, the workers just wanted better pay and conditions and dignity and decency/autonomy.
Most people on the left think that revolution will bring nothing but misery and believe that wide-spread change is possible through the Democratic Process. See Labor’s sweep in the 1945 UK General Election. See the New Deal.
I sort of agree with the Princeton study as well.Report
Now I am regretting what I said about the TNR study above, because this might be the least convincing argument about anything that I’ve ever read.
I am having a hard time fathoming the sort of complete a-historical, fuzzy-headed nostalgia that one has to have to even think that statement, much less print it where someone else might read it.
When was this supposed golden age of American democracy?
For the first several decades, this country was an actual oligarchy. Nobody but white men could vote until 1865. Nobody but men could vote until 1920. 1960 was the first year that presidential nominations were decided by primaries as opposed to backroom party deals.
But a few guys from Princeton compared answers to random survey questions and that’s enough to prove that we actually have an oligarchy…Report
1960 was the first year that presidential nominations were decided by primaries as opposed to backroom party deals.
I wouldn’t make that date so definitive.
In 1956, Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic nomination via primary, and in 1968 HHH won the Democratic nomination despite not entering any primaries.
It was the 1968 DNC that was really the impetus to go to a primary system in 1972.Report
This type of hippie liberalism always pissed me off to because it assumes that everybody is a secret liberal and just doesn’t know it. Its also a very illiberal belief in many ways because one of the principle ideas around philosophical liberalism is that people are always going to have differences of opinion about the good life. Hippie liberalism assumes that there is one sort of good life that everybody should aspire to.Report
Maybe. But the same could be said of religious conservatism, too.Report
@zic
Is religious conservatism really something you want to emulate?Report
@james-k who said anything about emulating? I certainly didn’t. I just pointed out that ‘I know the right path for others’ is a pretty common phenomena, hippies have no particular ownership of the franchise.Report
Zic, yes it is. “Everybody will be happy if they live my way” is a very common thought. Religious conservatives, hippie liberals, the polyamorous, vegans and many more groups have advocated this.Report
@zic
Fair enough, I do agree that “everyone should live like this” is a depressingly common sentiment across the political spectrum.Report
The co-founder of Sun Microsystems thinks that the new technological revolution will drive abundance AND income disparity:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2014/11/06/the-next-technology-revolution-will-drive-abundance-and-income-disparity/Report
As long as the abundance is abundant enough for those receiving the smallest amount of it then the income disparity “problem” will likely remain a bugabo of the left that gets very little traction.Report
Linky goodness: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/one-small-but-important-effort-to-make-twitter-safe-for-women/382484/?single_page=true
Twitter has given a non-profit some moderating superpowers to escalate harassment reports to twitter’s moderators. This means that two people working at a non-profit will review harassment reports filed with them, and direct twitter’s moderators to review them if deemed necessary. Twitter is not paying for this service; the two employees time is paid for by the non-profit. But at least they’ve agreed that there’s actually a concern. Or something.
Free speech =/= harassing speech.Report
For certain values of “harassing”.Report
Certain values of ‘harassing’ are more prevalent than others; and because of their prevalence, more prone to suppressing the ability of some people to access the public spheres were they get to express free speech.
But I think even you get that calling someone sexual slurs and threatening their lives is wrong; and while they might have a free-speech defense of their actions, those actions should are not consequence free, and the burden of that consequence should be on them, not on the people they abuse.Report
@zic
I concede that threatening someone’s life, either via Twitter or any other way, isn’t a matter of free speech.
Dropping a c-bomb is though. Twitter has a “block” feature for just that reason.Report
@zic
I concede that threatening someone’s life, either via Twitter or any other way, isn’t a matter of free speech.
Dropping a c-bomb is though. Twitter has a “block” feature for just that reason.Report
I have been thinking about the occasional c-bomb.
Trying to come up with some slur of equal vulgarity that’s regularly used to refer to men. Prick is he closets; but it’s nowhere near as vulgar. Most of the others are intended to insult men by comparing them to women; pussy, weak. One of the worst — mother fucker — insults the man’s mother in the process. Bastard doesn’t carry the sting it used to, but it was more an insult to his mother, as well.
So I do believe that the occasional c-bomb holds more harm than you perhaps read into it. That is not to say I think it should be outlawed, either; I’m not into outlawing words. But it does strike me as hilarious how emotional men must get to need to demonstrate their power and control by insulting women in ways pretty much certain to make most women ignore them.Report
@zic
Trying to come up with some slur of equal vulgarity that’s regularly used to refer to men
The insult that I use for men but not women is a-hole.
So I do believe that the occasional c-bomb holds more harm than you perhaps read into it.
This might be an example of the straw breaking the camel’s back. Each individual c-word might not be all that harmful, but it might be harmful in the aggregate. Which isn’t to say the word should be banned from Twitter.Report
The Atlantic on the rise and rapid fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/houston-mark-driscoll-megachurch-meltdown/382487/
I gotta say that the phrase Executive Pastor turns me off. I can see joining a shul that had a chief rabbi or head rabbi and assistant rabbis (many to most shuls are not large enough for this to be feasible but some of the big city ones are) but I’d say no thanks to a shul that had an Executive Rabbi. Shuls have lay volunteers to handle the fiance type stuff like Temple President and finance committees.
There is something sociologically interesting to me about how evangelicals seem rather at home by combining business and spirituality (executive pastor represents this) as compared to mainline protestants, Jews, Catholics, the Orthodox, etc.Report
it’s just a name game though. The Roman Catholic Church is famously hierarchal and bureaucratic (and was combining religion and business way back when – it’s the subject of about a dozen of Luther’s famous theses) – but simply borrows its terminology from counterparts in Imperial Rome vice General Electric the way a modern megachurch corp does.Report
It might be just a name but Executive Pastor sounds wrong and inappropriate in a way that Archbishop or Chief Rabbi or Ayatollah does not. Marxists might argue that the Protestants are being honest about the entire purpose of religion though by adopting titles from the corporate hierarchy.Report
@leeesq Executive is a government role as well that corporations borrowed (see: the executive branch).Report
I have to admit, I’ve really wanted to pay more attention to this, but haven’t.Report
E2: I’m not that into ebooks, but…
What if you could construct an ebook out of a bunch of short stories? A publisher has an arbitrary set of novellas/short stories, you pay some kind of per-MB price and get that much ebook, composed of whatever stories you choose, with authors getting paid based on some function of the size of their contribution to what you purchased. (ie, if you write a big thing, you get more per-purchase, but if you write a small thing, more people will just slot it in to their purchase to maximize their value).
This sort of thing would make me buy ebooks.
Is there anyone doing bundling like this?Report
How is this not simply buying Analog online??
[In short: magazine publishers have been doing this for a loooong time.
And with them, you get the benefit of a “curated” set — all the articles/stories
hook together properly.]Report
My point is to avoid the “curated” aspect. Maybe I want to pick up three Stephen King stories because I’ve read a few of his and I’m starting to dip into horror, I’d like to get Gaiman’s followup to American Gods, and I want to see if I can find some classic SF I don’t hate, but I don’t want to buy 3+ collections. I can look at what’s in the “default” collections and by the stuff from them that looks interesting, and then later I can finish the ones that I liked.Report
Most likely they’d be selling them individually. One advantage of ebooks is that there is less constraint on length. I bought a short story for 99c, for example, which would be impractical in analog.Report
Depends. How much are you willing to pay for a two page story on Fermat’s last theorem?
Analog can bundle that with a quarter of a novella, and a few other things… creating something that, ideally, harmonizes.Report
My read of E1 is that the Economist is arguing the phenomenon is caused by compositional effects: Abe is driving firms to raise pay for a sub-class of workers (those with full-time jobs with effective life tenure), suppressing demand for that kind of worker. The demand is all in lower-paying sectors. So demand rises while average pay falls.Report
Down here.
Upthread, @greginak says (in response to @james-hanley)
I’d also point out most of America has the shopping-mall sameness, even those indychic capitals like San Francisco and Portland West have Coca-Cola and Bud Light readily available. There are (shocking, I know,) non-organic vegetables, Levi Jeans, and American-made cars. There’s tons of products, from pet foods to cleaning products, to food on the shelves that have been touched by Monsanto, Cargill, and General Electric. There’s a sameness to American culture that’s somewhat shocking given our purported differences and vast size. We all talk like we’re from Nebraska.
Celebrating the small business owner is totally American, too; not just the purview of gourmet coffee drinkers. It’s small farmers, small insurance agents, franchise owners. Convenience stores where you buy your gas and an occasional newspaper. For me, it’s the company that provides my internet connection. Part of the reason I’m challenging your description here is that I agree with your point; not even Bernie Sander’s is talking the kind of socialism that’s implied by these comments, and even he fully supports someone’s right to succeed at a small business within a responsible framework; not at somebody else’s expense, including your potential employees. So yes, we’ve totally bought into a capitalist framework. ACA is capitalist.
Yet liberals keep having to defend themselves against full-bored socialism, when that’s not what’s proposed. It’s a strawman argument; and one often made to divert the conversation. Friedersdorf’s been writing about how awful it would be to outlaw street harassment. There’s this built in assumption that outlawing equates to full felony and jail time; never consideration that it might be the misdemeanor speeding-ticket type violation, maybe a few days in sensitivity school learning good manners. That’s a similar strawman defense. Nobody wants to be North Korea.Report
I agree Zic. It is interesting how over such a huge and varied country we are very much the same in many ways. Certainly in terms of malls/chains/styles etc we are almost identical except of brand names. That some people go to Albertsons and others to Pathmark/ or In an out vs. McD’s only show how much the same our habits our in general.Report
Damn, where to even start.Report
@zic
Well to be fair, Levi’s are from San Francisco and so is the GAP. We should have them here.
Otherwise I agree with what you are saying. The genius of Capitalism is to co-opt everything. Levi’s went for the Indychic market with their upscale Levi’s Vintage Clothing line (new versions of shirts and jeans from the pre-WWII era) and Levi’s Made & Crafted line.Report
“There’s this built in assumption that outlawing equates to full felony and jail time; never consideration that it might be the misdemeanor speeding-ticket type violation, maybe a few days in sensitivity school learning good manners.”
But we know full well that if one is poor and/or minority (and esp both) the chances of supposed minor infractions against law and order escalating to life destroying events are greatly enhanced.Report
We also know that the women pay a price for those men serving jail time. It’s to their interest to have street harassment diminish without ruining the prospects of men.Report
Maybe we could have cops mention “don’t catcall” to the people that they stop and frisk.Report
@jaybird Honestly? I’m not interested in outlawing catcalling.
But if holding a discussion about outlawing catcalling gets some small percentage of people to stop making life miserable for others, that’s a very good thing, no?
Because maybe the people who fear the consequences of cat calling could come up with some other solutions, stuff like, you know, not cat calling in the first place?Report
Here’s a crime link for you: the story of whistle-blower Alayne Fleischmann’s adventures reporting bank fraud at Chase to DOJ as told byMatt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.Report
Your quasi-daily reminder that Democrat’s, at least on taxation are basically European conservatives.
https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/tax5.png
Basically, YouGov asked people in the UK & US whether people have a right to keep the money they earn or do they have a duty to contribute to public services. Labour members in the UK went 71% duty, UK Conservatives and American Democrat’s both went 55%-ish duty and of course, Republican’s went 70% it’s a right.Report