I don’t think there’s much distance, on the whole, between the highly educated and the highly affluent — certainly not in politics.
The affluent tend to be better-educated than the financially distressed, it is true; and in politics, power does seem to coincide with affluence. I suspect that a correlation-causation confusion is very easy to make given only those facts. Education does not necessarily lead to affluence or power -- part of the frustration that seems to fuel #OWS.
Speaking for myself, I'm well-educated, as I hold a graduate degree. But while I'm financially comfortable, I'm hardly part of "the 1%." If I am, no one's been inviting me to the meetings. I suspect that's true for a lot of people here, both the credentialed and the autodidacts.
Re: the list being selective -- of course it is, that's sort of the point. Reagan did plenty of rather conservative things too: built up the military, nominated Robert Bork to SCOTUS, fired PATCO, used "welfare queens" as political whipping boys, etc. But Reagan could also sit down and trade horses with Tip O'Neill and Teddy K without losing face with his right wing or giving away the farm to the other team.
Re: whose myth is it? Everyone's, kind of. The right looks to Reagan as an avatar of conservatism; the left looks to Reagan as the personification of the Bad Old Days. Neither legend is accurate. Reagan was a President, a politician, and a human being. Not the devil, not an archangel.
I think saying Reagan governed towards the center despite his rhetoric is at least defensible.
Abortion rights were approximately the same in 1989 as they were in 1980, despite all the sound and fury.
Chrysler was bailed out on Reagan's watch primarily to save the jobs of UAW workers.
Reagan approved of amnesty for illegal aliens.
Took half a loaf on the 1981 tax cuts and less than half a loaf on the 1986 tax reform.
Signed health insurance portability and taxes on substandard employer health plans into law.
WARN act approved of by Reagan.
Gave reparations to Japanese-Americans interned during WWII (thus "apologizing for America").
Reauthorized the Voting Rights Act of 1965 despite pressure from his right wing not to do so.
Pushed for the first multi-program Federal welfare program aimed at assisting the homeless in a meaningful way.
Of three Justices to the Supreme Court he wound up nominated, two (O'Connor and Kennedy) were then and even more so now are seen as moderates.
I'm hardly going to say the man was a progressive. But by today's standards -- and even by the standards of the day -- I think it's fair to say that the legend is further to the right than the historical reality.
Of course what you like will be different than what I like, and it seems that your tastes are quite different from mine. That is one of the reasons why the experiential education is a task which cannot be delegated to another. No one can taste the wine for you. Especially if you are in the world of dessert wines and ports, which can become quite expensive quite quickly, acquiring an education about where you money will be best spent to maximize your pleasure is an important part of moving from "Someone who drinks wine every once in a while" to "Someone who knows a thing or two about wine."
Of course. Vegas is about the easiest place to access, and the easiest place in which to find accomodations. Come to think of it, I have some Vegas.com cards saved up. I'll suggest we meet for dinner at Border Grill in the Mandalay Bay.
The best selling wine in America is, I think, Berenger white zinfandel from California. If you ask me, this is alcoholic Kool-Aid, but people drink lots of it. You can get this for $6 a bottle without much effort. I have plenty of friends who seem to want their wines as sweet as they can get them. If all you actually care about is sweetness (regardless of what you claim to care about), then there is no reason to ever pay more than $7 a bottle pretty much anywhere you go, including hyper-expensive metro areas like NYC, DC, and SF.
But if the question is, why pay more than $10 a bottle, I think that the answer is, to educate yourself. The quality goes up when sweetness is set aside in favor of tannins, and the maker stops having to appeal to such a broad audience. Smaller labels, often ones whose only marketing is their tasting rooms, offer a lot of different options. To get there, though, you need to tolerate the price point rises to around $25 a bottle, you start finding some really interesting stuff, the spectrum of the different varieties and styles opens up enough to educate you, and it ought not to take too long before you start finding labels and makers that you like.
Once you've educated yourself you can start searching the lower tier of prices for something similar to what you've enjoyed during your time in the middle tiers -- and you can feel at least reasonably comfortable when you are out at a nice place and are confronted with both restaraunt markups (2-3 times what you'd pay retail) and specimens from the higher tiers of pricing.
My assumption is that if it's a book-on-demand site, we (meaning the editor, presumptively meaning Erik) could add or take away from its contents as we liked. I'm not 100% clear on the nuts and bolts of that sort of thing, though.
In terms of the legalities, that depends on the terms of the license agreement, but we've got a few lawyers here who could probably whip up something appropriate. I'd be happy to help out with that, in my copious free time.
Sure, that's one way to look at it; the economist each all of us will labor to find a way to quantify morality and in some contexts I think that is a useful calculus. It's not the only way to go, though; quantifying everything eliminates the possibility of a moral dealbreaker -- something that the economist would quantify as of infinite value. As you've framed it, maybe $225K is an acceptable opportunity cost for not vivisecting puppies, but perhaps $500K is not (meaning you'd do it for $525K a year). Or $1M or $2.5M or whatever -- we're in a moral auction at this point, and it's not clear to me that everything is subject to a moral auction.
Having to vivisect puppies would be a dealbreaker for me and I suspect for most of us; confronted with the reality of actually doing it, the money and other incentives would stop mattering at all and the quantification melts away. If you could see yourself doing it for a particular quantity of money, then there is still surely something else that you can concieve of, which you would not bargain away for any amount of money.
While I don't feel this way, mabye Murali and/or JHG finds the idea of working for "a corporation" (whatever that means) to be the moral equivalent of vivisecting puppies. You and I might not make that moral choice but it's not for us to tell either of them what they're morally comfortable with doing. So if that's the case, then $250K in exchange for working for "a corporation" is simply not an option.
A self-publishing, book-on-demand site would probably be best. The product would wind up looking nice, and the product could remain available whenver someone cared to purchase it (no inventory for anyone to sit on).
There are copyright issues, as I understand that each of the authors maintains copyright in the writing, with a license given to the blog for use here. I have no problem licensing anything I've written to Erik or Mark or whomever for purposes of the Journal of the Ordinary Gentlemen, provided that the proceeds are then used in an appropriate fashion.
On that note, I suggest the proceeds go to defraying the costs of maintaining the blog. Anything in excess of that should go to a charity of some kind. I'm not insistent on that, but it seems like a logical thing to do.
When people are engaging in debate about public policy they have stepped into the public arena, and when you do so you have voluntarily made yourself a public actor and can no longer claim the mantle of being private.
Changing minds is qualitatively different than changing laws. One is persuasion; the other compulsion. My ideas are valid regardless of my identity; the law demands obedience. Different standards appropriately apply in different arenas.
I think about a half dozen LOOG bloggers and sub-bloggers know my real identity anyway despite the tissue of my pseudonym. On a cheekier level and intended in fun, what's a "Kolohe" anyway?
All other things being equal, making more money is better than making less. All other things may not be equal, though.
If your choices come down to making $250K a year vivisecting puppies and $25K a year rescuing stray puppies to save them from vivisection, morality may trump money. The real world is not nearly so binary as this. There are always a multiplicity of options.
"Working for a corporation" is not ispo facto a bad moral choice. Nor is it ipso facto a more financially rewarding option. The more sobriety you bring to your decision, the better decision you will make. Ideology defeats sobriety.
I don't see Tod letting Clinton off the hook for the perjury. I see him saying that the basic issue was ruthless abuse of power for the basest of motives.
Nor do I see Tod claiming to know Cain is a liar, so much as he's saying that the multiplicity of accusations hints at a propensity similar to Clinton's to ruthlessly abuse power.
Ah, the things I miss by not Twittering. So the poll reflects not only the commentariat plus the lurkertariat, but also the twittertariat. And who knows, maybe even the facebookegeoisie too.
Here, I can feel safer generalizing: a signifcant number of people who come here are generally looking for us specifically. An appreciable number of them are looking for Freddie.
As I post this comment, I count 24 named people who voted "nay" to 17 who voted "aye." Let's call that roughly equal, with the edge going to "nay."
But the anonymous survey is running 70-30 in favor of "aye."
I hesitate to draw any more conclusions from that. First, I do not think we can safely exclude the possibility that the voting system is being somehow gamed -- if you can change your IP address, you can vote more than once. Second, this only tells us that lurkers are more pro-PPACA than the roughly evenly-divided commentariat; I don't know that it's necessarily safe to even characterize them as "more liberal" based on this single data point.
On “An Aspirational Quiz”
Wow. I go over to a friend's house to watch one game of football and look what happens.
On “The Technocrat’s Burden”
The affluent tend to be better-educated than the financially distressed, it is true; and in politics, power does seem to coincide with affluence. I suspect that a correlation-causation confusion is very easy to make given only those facts. Education does not necessarily lead to affluence or power -- part of the frustration that seems to fuel #OWS.
Speaking for myself, I'm well-educated, as I hold a graduate degree. But while I'm financially comfortable, I'm hardly part of "the 1%." If I am, no one's been inviting me to the meetings. I suspect that's true for a lot of people here, both the credentialed and the autodidacts.
On “Will Mitt Romney be the first Tea Party President?”
Re: the list being selective -- of course it is, that's sort of the point. Reagan did plenty of rather conservative things too: built up the military, nominated Robert Bork to SCOTUS, fired PATCO, used "welfare queens" as political whipping boys, etc. But Reagan could also sit down and trade horses with Tip O'Neill and Teddy K without losing face with his right wing or giving away the farm to the other team.
Re: whose myth is it? Everyone's, kind of. The right looks to Reagan as an avatar of conservatism; the left looks to Reagan as the personification of the Bad Old Days. Neither legend is accurate. Reagan was a President, a politician, and a human being. Not the devil, not an archangel.
"
I think saying Reagan governed towards the center despite his rhetoric is at least defensible.
I'm hardly going to say the man was a progressive. But by today's standards -- and even by the standards of the day -- I think it's fair to say that the legend is further to the right than the historical reality.
On “College is a Consumption Good”
Oh yeah? Well, how do you explain the different avatars, then? Huh, Mr. Rufus F.? If that is your real name...
(Burt Likko, of course, is not my real name. Oh, and I've been drinking so don't take me too seriously here. Really, that was a pretty good response.)
On “Cheap Wine, Expensive Wine, and Good Wine”
Of course what you like will be different than what I like, and it seems that your tastes are quite different from mine. That is one of the reasons why the experiential education is a task which cannot be delegated to another. No one can taste the wine for you. Especially if you are in the world of dessert wines and ports, which can become quite expensive quite quickly, acquiring an education about where you money will be best spent to maximize your pleasure is an important part of moving from "Someone who drinks wine every once in a while" to "Someone who knows a thing or two about wine."
On “Census II : Map Graph!”
Even if we did, I'd still be in California.
"
Of course. Vegas is about the easiest place to access, and the easiest place in which to find accomodations. Come to think of it, I have some Vegas.com cards saved up. I'll suggest we meet for dinner at Border Grill in the Mandalay Bay.
On “Cheap Wine, Expensive Wine, and Good Wine”
The best selling wine in America is, I think, Berenger white zinfandel from California. If you ask me, this is alcoholic Kool-Aid, but people drink lots of it. You can get this for $6 a bottle without much effort. I have plenty of friends who seem to want their wines as sweet as they can get them. If all you actually care about is sweetness (regardless of what you claim to care about), then there is no reason to ever pay more than $7 a bottle pretty much anywhere you go, including hyper-expensive metro areas like NYC, DC, and SF.
But if the question is, why pay more than $10 a bottle, I think that the answer is, to educate yourself. The quality goes up when sweetness is set aside in favor of tannins, and the maker stops having to appeal to such a broad audience. Smaller labels, often ones whose only marketing is their tasting rooms, offer a lot of different options. To get there, though, you need to tolerate the price point rises to around $25 a bottle, you start finding some really interesting stuff, the spectrum of the different varieties and styles opens up enough to educate you, and it ought not to take too long before you start finding labels and makers that you like.
Once you've educated yourself you can start searching the lower tier of prices for something similar to what you've enjoyed during your time in the middle tiers -- and you can feel at least reasonably comfortable when you are out at a nice place and are confronted with both restaraunt markups (2-3 times what you'd pay retail) and specimens from the higher tiers of pricing.
On “The Journal of Ordinary Gentlemen”
My assumption is that if it's a book-on-demand site, we (meaning the editor, presumptively meaning Erik) could add or take away from its contents as we liked. I'm not 100% clear on the nuts and bolts of that sort of thing, though.
In terms of the legalities, that depends on the terms of the license agreement, but we've got a few lawyers here who could probably whip up something appropriate. I'd be happy to help out with that, in my copious free time.
On “Bad choices (Or Where I come off as a judgemental jerk)”
Sure, that's one way to look at it; the economist each all of us will labor to find a way to quantify morality and in some contexts I think that is a useful calculus. It's not the only way to go, though; quantifying everything eliminates the possibility of a moral dealbreaker -- something that the economist would quantify as of infinite value. As you've framed it, maybe $225K is an acceptable opportunity cost for not vivisecting puppies, but perhaps $500K is not (meaning you'd do it for $525K a year). Or $1M or $2.5M or whatever -- we're in a moral auction at this point, and it's not clear to me that everything is subject to a moral auction.
Having to vivisect puppies would be a dealbreaker for me and I suspect for most of us; confronted with the reality of actually doing it, the money and other incentives would stop mattering at all and the quantification melts away. If you could see yourself doing it for a particular quantity of money, then there is still surely something else that you can concieve of, which you would not bargain away for any amount of money.
While I don't feel this way, mabye Murali and/or JHG finds the idea of working for "a corporation" (whatever that means) to be the moral equivalent of vivisecting puppies. You and I might not make that moral choice but it's not for us to tell either of them what they're morally comfortable with doing. So if that's the case, then $250K in exchange for working for "a corporation" is simply not an option.
On “The Journal of Ordinary Gentlemen”
A self-publishing, book-on-demand site would probably be best. The product would wind up looking nice, and the product could remain available whenver someone cared to purchase it (no inventory for anyone to sit on).
There are copyright issues, as I understand that each of the authors maintains copyright in the writing, with a license given to the blog for use here. I have no problem licensing anything I've written to Erik or Mark or whomever for purposes of the Journal of the Ordinary Gentlemen, provided that the proceeds are then used in an appropriate fashion.
On that note, I suggest the proceeds go to defraying the costs of maintaining the blog. Anything in excess of that should go to a charity of some kind. I'm not insistent on that, but it seems like a logical thing to do.
On “If You Don’t Want To Be Chilled Stay Out Of The Freezer”
So do you disagree with the distinction I drew above in response to Kolohe's question?
"
Changing minds is qualitatively different than changing laws. One is persuasion; the other compulsion. My ideas are valid regardless of my identity; the law demands obedience. Different standards appropriately apply in different arenas.
I think about a half dozen LOOG bloggers and sub-bloggers know my real identity anyway despite the tissue of my pseudonym. On a cheekier level and intended in fun, what's a "Kolohe" anyway?
On “Herman Cain, Bill Clinton, and the Myth of He Said/She Said”
I'd have said:
Different and, alas, more ambiguous.
"
The matter resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all parties is pretty much all I can tell you. Sorry.
"
Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding!
"
I had a very nice quid pro quo case going until just this week. Resolved. But yes, most cases are hostile environment.
On “Bad choices (Or Where I come off as a judgemental jerk)”
All other things being equal, making more money is better than making less. All other things may not be equal, though.
If your choices come down to making $250K a year vivisecting puppies and $25K a year rescuing stray puppies to save them from vivisection, morality may trump money. The real world is not nearly so binary as this. There are always a multiplicity of options.
"Working for a corporation" is not ispo facto a bad moral choice. Nor is it ipso facto a more financially rewarding option. The more sobriety you bring to your decision, the better decision you will make. Ideology defeats sobriety.
On “Herman Cain, Bill Clinton, and the Myth of He Said/She Said”
I don't see Tod letting Clinton off the hook for the perjury. I see him saying that the basic issue was ruthless abuse of power for the basest of motives.
Nor do I see Tod claiming to know Cain is a liar, so much as he's saying that the multiplicity of accusations hints at a propensity similar to Clinton's to ruthlessly abuse power.
On “Would you vote for Obamacare?”
Ah, the things I miss by not Twittering. So the poll reflects not only the commentariat plus the lurkertariat, but also the twittertariat. And who knows, maybe even the facebookegeoisie too.
On “For Greginak”
Here, I can feel safer generalizing: a signifcant number of people who come here are generally looking for us specifically. An appreciable number of them are looking for Freddie.
On “Would you vote for Obamacare?”
As I post this comment, I count 24 named people who voted "nay" to 17 who voted "aye." Let's call that roughly equal, with the edge going to "nay."
But the anonymous survey is running 70-30 in favor of "aye."
I hesitate to draw any more conclusions from that. First, I do not think we can safely exclude the possibility that the voting system is being somehow gamed -- if you can change your IP address, you can vote more than once. Second, this only tells us that lurkers are more pro-PPACA than the roughly evenly-divided commentariat; I don't know that it's necessarily safe to even characterize them as "more liberal" based on this single data point.
But I would call it a major discrepancy.
On “Sound Off”
How delicious to encapsulate the spectrum of differing Circuit opinions within a single commentariat!
No desire today to do a deep argument about Constitutionality; the question on the table is "for" or "against" and we're both against.
"
FIFY. Seemed most likely to me you wanted to leave the word "am" italicized.