Yes, I think those concepts are related. Heritage used a flawed study and suggested a conclusion even more flawed than that. But the concept (how poverty is defined has changed with the advance of technology and time) is worthy of consideration.
For the record, I do not subscribe to the idea that "there are no poor people in the USA," especially not if your evidence for that is a proliferation of refrigerators. Nor am I willing to subscribe to the idea that being poor does not suck all that much because there is an air-conditioning unit in the slummy apartment you rent, so as to keep your cockroach roomates cool in the summertime.
But I am willing to consider the idea that what it means to be poor in 2011 in terms of the fulfillment of material needs is different than what it was to be poor in 1911.
Kim doesn't that conflate two different ideas of "objective"? A utilitarian definition of "the good" is at least theoretically susceptible of being quantified, but in the realm of morality we're usually more often using that word to refer to an inflexible, qualitative metric concerning an act, its effect, and its intent. These things are admittedly not susceptible of quantification but that doesn't mean they are not susceptible of principled evaluation.
Two days the thread has been up; eight uses of the "r-word" in the comments.
Is that all that fantasy books are about? Was Tolkein somehow deficient in establishing that the Nazgul were evil by not having the Witch King violently force himself upon Arwen?
A significant issue that ought to be thrown in to the mix is the constitutional mandate of state spending on education. The Serrano case goes even further than Prop. 98 and mandates that the spending come in a particular way, Prop. 13 eliminates a significant source of that spending, and the state is losing the ability to enter into long-term debt financing to bridge those gaps.
Another issue is that California has two kinds of cities and diffuse taxation authority. Most of California's small cities are effectively political subdivisions of the state the same way the counties are. While charter cities have greater flexibility in spending and moderately greater ability to impose taxes independent of the state, the bulk of revenue generated at all levels and from all sources is run through Sacramento at some point. But more and more local governments are asked to assume more and more responsibility for providing services, with less money coming from Sacramento as the state government both services larger amounts of old debt, takes on new projects mandated by voter initiatives (some of which, while theoretically good ideas, are Constitutional amendments themselves and therefore beyond the ability of the Legislature to meaningfully modify in the face of changing fiscal and economic realities), there are legacy debts like pensions and health insurance programs to fund, and the disability entitlement system for state employees is expensively in need of reform.
The resolution of necessity will have to include a blend of decreased overall spending, including on education, and increased sales, excise, and income taxes. We will pay more, and get less. I have grave doubts that increased local control will produce good results, looking at the susceptability of local governments to corruption. But I also have grave doubts about the statewide government's ability to handle the matter, considering the smoke and mirrors that the pros in Sacramento ">used to address the last round of financial problems.
In a general sense, I think it's too easy to amend the Constitution and spending decisions should be left to the elected officials and not the voters, who exercise too much sovereignty for their own good. (An opinion I maintain despite my deep distrust of the current and likely future crops of elected officials.) But I despair of the prospects of successfully changing the state's Constitution in a manner that will address these problems in a meaningful way.
Maybe we're just going to have to ride the slope all the way to rock bottom and then burn the whole governmental apparatus to the ground before we can build a state government from the ground up, one that makes fiscal and public policy sense.
This is an example of what I mean when I complain about the subject being too politicized for one to become educated. Sober analysis seems like it would be possible but there's so much shouting, on both sides of the issue, that I find it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
There would be dry summers in the southwest no matter what because so much of the southwest is already a desert due to rain shadows from mountains, prevailing weather and elevation issues, etc. There would be, and are, forest fires and brush fires everywhere. I can buy the idea that no particular event can be pointed to and credited to global warming. I can also buy the idea that a series of events, taken as a whole, are properly credited to global warming. I can even buy the idea that cooler, wetter weather in particular areas is also creditable to climate change that is, more globally speaking, the result of an increase rather than a decrease in temperature.
On the other hand, a wet, cold winter seems at least superficially inconsistent with the idea of global warming, and given that no particular event is really attributable to this phenomenon, it's very difficult to fix a cause-and-effect relationship to anything tangible.
The shouting makes it hard to believe anything, entertaining one explanation or the other is interpreted by people as "taking sides," and the real science is too complex for someone with other responsibilities and fields of expertise to delve into. So I intellectualy despair, because the usual sorts of signals that tell me when it is or is not reasonable to trust what experts say have been so thoroughly obscured.
Experience. I used to work for a political fearmonger. I've appealed to both fear and greed when I've gotten good results out of juries; when I try to focus on other things, I've found that my results are less satisfactory. And I notice that both political parties have abandoned any pretense of making appeals to voters' better angels and instead now aim directly at one of those two targets in every advertisement, every rumor float, and every talking point. "Hope and change" were about fear (of the status quo, which in 2008 sucked) and greed (things sucked in 2008 so change was bound to make people less poor). My only question is, when was the last time that some emotional appeal other than these was made to voters in a way that resonated?
Second, if you need to get people to change the way they would vote if left to their own devices -- indeed, if you need to control their behavior in any way at all -- you have to scare them. LBJ's "Daisy" advertisement is still the zenith of political fearmongering.
I don't mean to suggest that voters in 1964 voted against their economic interests in picking Johnson over Goldwater, or that the 1980 election was free from fearmongering. What I do mean to suggest is that democratic decision-making is ultimately the product of tension between greed and fear.
I've not made mac and cheese from the box for years now. It's immensely better to use a bechamel base (midwesterners call it 'gravy' and it's just milk and flour) with real cheese and a bit of salt stirred in as the sauce for a pound of macaroni, kept warm in a slow cooker. I add in some chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, or sometimes some garlic, or sometimes some truffle oil. Deli meats can be added after the whole thing is cooked -- try it with mozzarella cheese and julienned sandwich pepperoni for pizza mac and cheese.
Your point about the ready availability of slave labor is well-taken. As a quibble, I'm not sure that it's accurate that the Romans understood fossil fuels to be a reasonable fuel for either heat or work; so far as I know they weaponized oil in the form of pitch for ballistae (and later, Greek Fire) and might have burned some for light, but since they didn't really have the ability to refine the stuff all that well, it wasn't that useful to them.
I bet their metalsmiths could have put together an internal combustion engine, though, if they could have come up with a spark plug or its equivalent. They had watermills that ran on camshafts, and once you can figure out how to make the pistons go boom when you want them to, the camshaft is all you need to turn the boom into work.
Interesting to think about what could have happened if they'd figured out how to refine the oil and get flints small enough to be useful.
I'm hardly surprised at the suppression of dissenting opinion on a sports site; the presumption is, "why would a Yankees fan want to make a post in a Red Sox site other than to troll?" When the Yankees fan makes a point, particularly a critical one, it's easy to interpret it as trolling.
Think first, blog later. A lesson hard learned and quickly forgotten, by me as well as everyone else. But a good rule of thumb to follow whenever possible.
The arguments are the tradition. They are, indeed, the Constitution itself.
It dovetails into something I raised in a different forum not too long ago -- in response to the notion that the Constitution was purportedly written in layman's language for laymen to understand. It was not; it was written by elites, a great many of whom were lawyers, in language that deliberately glossed over profound differences of opinion so as to enable agreement on particular language.
If interpreting and applying that language were easy to do, we would not need a robust judiciary of co-equal power with the President and Congress; nor the tradition of English common law as a foundational guide into how that judiciary should function. We do have both, though, and that is all for the good, characterizations of the judges who play critical roles in advancing that debate as "mandarins" notwithstanding.
If you're looking for a picture that says racism in relation to crime in the wake of a hurricane, it isn't that hard to find the picture of the Katrina survivor carrying a case of beer through thigh-deep water. You know the one.
The guy in your picture doesn't look like that at all.
It seems to me to be a meditation on the cost of war. In that sense, it might be called a soap opera, but I'd distinguish the two. A soap opera presents emotional drama for its own sake; Martin is presenting emotional drama for the sake of illustrating why war is indeed as awful as it is. Any work about the awfulness of war is, to some extent, a plea for peace; this also seems to be to be a plea for understanding and sympathy and healing for those who pay these awful prices. The multiple points of view, from combatants on different sides of the conflict, underlines to me that everyone -- rich and poor, enemy and ally, on the battle front or on the home front -- must pay their share of the price.
Democratic caucus' pizza order: 2 large veggie supremes, 1 large gruyere cheese with roasted pine nuts and wilted spinach, 1 medium vegan tofu de-lite with gluten-free crust.
Republican caucus' pizza order: 3 large Red Meat Specials. Five 2-liter bottles of iced tea.
If you got all 52 members of California's House delegation in a room together, they still couldn't agree on anything. I doubt that they could form a consensus to order pizza.
On “Beyond Capitalism”
Yes, I think those concepts are related. Heritage used a flawed study and suggested a conclusion even more flawed than that. But the concept (how poverty is defined has changed with the advance of technology and time) is worthy of consideration.
For the record, I do not subscribe to the idea that "there are no poor people in the USA," especially not if your evidence for that is a proliferation of refrigerators. Nor am I willing to subscribe to the idea that being poor does not suck all that much because there is an air-conditioning unit in the slummy apartment you rent, so as to keep your cockroach roomates cool in the summertime.
But I am willing to consider the idea that what it means to be poor in 2011 in terms of the fulfillment of material needs is different than what it was to be poor in 1911.
On “At the Intersection of Science and Faith”
Utilitarian calculus.
Categorical imperative.
Both get you surprisingly far and you can argue plausibly that either can get you all the way.
"
Kim doesn't that conflate two different ideas of "objective"? A utilitarian definition of "the good" is at least theoretically susceptible of being quantified, but in the realm of morality we're usually more often using that word to refer to an inflexible, qualitative metric concerning an act, its effect, and its intent. These things are admittedly not susceptible of quantification but that doesn't mean they are not susceptible of principled evaluation.
On “The Magician King Open Thread”
Two days the thread has been up; eight uses of the "r-word" in the comments.
Is that all that fantasy books are about? Was Tolkein somehow deficient in establishing that the Nazgul were evil by not having the Witch King violently force himself upon Arwen?
On “Prop 13 Is for Lovers…of Property Taxes!”
Yeah, it was a bummer of a note to end the comment on.
Maybe Governor Kowal will come up with a way to save California before it crashes and burns. I'm looking forward to 2014!
"
Another outstanding piece, Tim.
A significant issue that ought to be thrown in to the mix is the constitutional mandate of state spending on education. The Serrano case goes even further than Prop. 98 and mandates that the spending come in a particular way, Prop. 13 eliminates a significant source of that spending, and the state is losing the ability to enter into long-term debt financing to bridge those gaps.
Another issue is that California has two kinds of cities and diffuse taxation authority. Most of California's small cities are effectively political subdivisions of the state the same way the counties are. While charter cities have greater flexibility in spending and moderately greater ability to impose taxes independent of the state, the bulk of revenue generated at all levels and from all sources is run through Sacramento at some point. But more and more local governments are asked to assume more and more responsibility for providing services, with less money coming from Sacramento as the state government both services larger amounts of old debt, takes on new projects mandated by voter initiatives (some of which, while theoretically good ideas, are Constitutional amendments themselves and therefore beyond the ability of the Legislature to meaningfully modify in the face of changing fiscal and economic realities), there are legacy debts like pensions and health insurance programs to fund, and the disability entitlement system for state employees is expensively in need of reform.
Already, cities have gone bankrupt and school districts have been placed in state receivership because the problems are too great for weaker local governments to solve on their own.
The resolution of necessity will have to include a blend of decreased overall spending, including on education, and increased sales, excise, and income taxes. We will pay more, and get less. I have grave doubts that increased local control will produce good results, looking at the susceptability of local governments to corruption. But I also have grave doubts about the statewide government's ability to handle the matter, considering the smoke and mirrors that the pros in Sacramento ">used to address the last round of financial problems.
In a general sense, I think it's too easy to amend the Constitution and spending decisions should be left to the elected officials and not the voters, who exercise too much sovereignty for their own good. (An opinion I maintain despite my deep distrust of the current and likely future crops of elected officials.) But I despair of the prospects of successfully changing the state's Constitution in a manner that will address these problems in a meaningful way.
Maybe we're just going to have to ride the slope all the way to rock bottom and then burn the whole governmental apparatus to the ground before we can build a state government from the ground up, one that makes fiscal and public policy sense.
On “Heating Up”
This is an example of what I mean when I complain about the subject being too politicized for one to become educated. Sober analysis seems like it would be possible but there's so much shouting, on both sides of the issue, that I find it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
There would be dry summers in the southwest no matter what because so much of the southwest is already a desert due to rain shadows from mountains, prevailing weather and elevation issues, etc. There would be, and are, forest fires and brush fires everywhere. I can buy the idea that no particular event can be pointed to and credited to global warming. I can also buy the idea that a series of events, taken as a whole, are properly credited to global warming. I can even buy the idea that cooler, wetter weather in particular areas is also creditable to climate change that is, more globally speaking, the result of an increase rather than a decrease in temperature.
On the other hand, a wet, cold winter seems at least superficially inconsistent with the idea of global warming, and given that no particular event is really attributable to this phenomenon, it's very difficult to fix a cause-and-effect relationship to anything tangible.
The shouting makes it hard to believe anything, entertaining one explanation or the other is interpreted by people as "taking sides," and the real science is too complex for someone with other responsibilities and fields of expertise to delve into. So I intellectualy despair, because the usual sorts of signals that tell me when it is or is not reasonable to trust what experts say have been so thoroughly obscured.
On “What’s Your “Go-To” Lesson in Politics?”
Good one.
"
Experience. I used to work for a political fearmonger. I've appealed to both fear and greed when I've gotten good results out of juries; when I try to focus on other things, I've found that my results are less satisfactory. And I notice that both political parties have abandoned any pretense of making appeals to voters' better angels and instead now aim directly at one of those two targets in every advertisement, every rumor float, and every talking point. "Hope and change" were about fear (of the status quo, which in 2008 sucked) and greed (things sucked in 2008 so change was bound to make people less poor). My only question is, when was the last time that some emotional appeal other than these was made to voters in a way that resonated?
"
As for the real question, I point to two things.
First, people vote their pocketbooks unless you give them a damn good reason not to. The default question is are you better off than you were four years ago?
Second, if you need to get people to change the way they would vote if left to their own devices -- indeed, if you need to control their behavior in any way at all -- you have to scare them. LBJ's "Daisy" advertisement is still the zenith of political fearmongering.
I don't mean to suggest that voters in 1964 voted against their economic interests in picking Johnson over Goldwater, or that the 1980 election was free from fearmongering. What I do mean to suggest is that democratic decision-making is ultimately the product of tension between greed and fear.
"
I've not made mac and cheese from the box for years now. It's immensely better to use a bechamel base (midwesterners call it 'gravy' and it's just milk and flour) with real cheese and a bit of salt stirred in as the sauce for a pound of macaroni, kept warm in a slow cooker. I add in some chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, or sometimes some garlic, or sometimes some truffle oil. Deli meats can be added after the whole thing is cooked -- try it with mozzarella cheese and julienned sandwich pepperoni for pizza mac and cheese.
On “Peak Growth?”
Your point about the ready availability of slave labor is well-taken. As a quibble, I'm not sure that it's accurate that the Romans understood fossil fuels to be a reasonable fuel for either heat or work; so far as I know they weaponized oil in the form of pitch for ballistae (and later, Greek Fire) and might have burned some for light, but since they didn't really have the ability to refine the stuff all that well, it wasn't that useful to them.
I bet their metalsmiths could have put together an internal combustion engine, though, if they could have come up with a spark plug or its equivalent. They had watermills that ran on camshafts, and once you can figure out how to make the pistons go boom when you want them to, the camshaft is all you need to turn the boom into work.
Interesting to think about what could have happened if they'd figured out how to refine the oil and get flints small enough to be useful.
On “A bit more about racism and Daily Kos”
Dude. This.
On “Alyssa Rosenberg on ‘A Game of Thrones’ and that Sady Doyle piece”
Feudalism? Or warrior culture?
On “The joys of blogging”
TVD wins this thread.
On “After the dust settles”
I'm hardly surprised at the suppression of dissenting opinion on a sports site; the presumption is, "why would a Yankees fan want to make a post in a Red Sox site other than to troll?" When the Yankees fan makes a point, particularly a critical one, it's easy to interpret it as trolling.
"
Think first, blog later. A lesson hard learned and quickly forgotten, by me as well as everyone else. But a good rule of thumb to follow whenever possible.
On “The Polis in Post-Modernity III: Constitutions Written and Oral, Living and Dead”
I'm nicely charmed by this notion:
It dovetails into something I raised in a different forum not too long ago -- in response to the notion that the Constitution was purportedly written in layman's language for laymen to understand. It was not; it was written by elites, a great many of whom were lawyers, in language that deliberately glossed over profound differences of opinion so as to enable agreement on particular language.
If interpreting and applying that language were easy to do, we would not need a robust judiciary of co-equal power with the President and Congress; nor the tradition of English common law as a foundational guide into how that judiciary should function. We do have both, though, and that is all for the good, characterizations of the judges who play critical roles in advancing that debate as "mandarins" notwithstanding.
On “A bit more about racism and Daily Kos”
If you're looking for a picture that says racism in relation to crime in the wake of a hurricane, it isn't that hard to find the picture of the Katrina survivor carrying a case of beer through thigh-deep water. You know the one.
The guy in your picture doesn't look like that at all.
On “Alyssa Rosenberg on ‘A Game of Thrones’ and that Sady Doyle piece”
Heterodoxy is an old magazine published by David Horowitz back when his outfit was called the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
"
Chuck Norris read Strunk and White and came up with the grammar of ass-kicking.
"
It seems to me to be a meditation on the cost of war. In that sense, it might be called a soap opera, but I'd distinguish the two. A soap opera presents emotional drama for its own sake; Martin is presenting emotional drama for the sake of illustrating why war is indeed as awful as it is. Any work about the awfulness of war is, to some extent, a plea for peace; this also seems to be to be a plea for understanding and sympathy and healing for those who pay these awful prices. The multiple points of view, from combatants on different sides of the conflict, underlines to me that everyone -- rich and poor, enemy and ally, on the battle front or on the home front -- must pay their share of the price.
On “The Constitution is Old”
Democratic caucus' pizza order: 2 large veggie supremes, 1 large gruyere cheese with roasted pine nuts and wilted spinach, 1 medium vegan tofu de-lite with gluten-free crust.
Republican caucus' pizza order: 3 large Red Meat Specials. Five 2-liter bottles of iced tea.
"
You have foolish clients. In the movies, the money stays on the nightstand in plain view of both parties until the deed is done.
"
If you got all 52 members of California's House delegation in a room together, they still couldn't agree on anything. I doubt that they could form a consensus to order pizza.