You may have heard about the Pornhub report that indicated that people in blue states watch more pornography than people in red states. To some extent, I think it didn’t get more attention because it goes along with people’s prejudices. Now if it had turned out that people in blue states were more into scatological porn, I would have been surprised because I assume (perhaps wrongly) that people in those states tend to be sexually repressed and so tend to get into what I think of as sick and twisted stuff. But the truth is that there is really no reason to think that porn consumption has anything to do with politics. There are various issues.

Jordan Ragusa addressed probably the most important issue in a brief post, Nickelback, Herpes, and Obama’s Vote Share in 2012. The issue is simply that meaningless correlations show up all the time. And that’s especially true when you are looking at a lot of different things. For example, imagine correlating first names with cancer rates. Because you would look at an enormous number of first names, some would—through random chance—be correlated with high cancer rates. The problem would be even worse if you subdivided the kinds of cancer. Being named Jerry makes you twice as likely to get testicular cancer! Um, no.

Seth Masket addresses the problem more directly in his post, Are Democrats Pervs? Some Problems with a State-Level Analysis of Individual-Level Behavior. He’s actually focused on an important issue that I doubt is at play here: the ecological inference problem. This is the problem that we are looking at aggregate data and trying to say something about individuals. In other words: maybe it’s the Republicans in the blue states who are consuming so much porn. Like I said: I don’t think that’s actually the problem here.

Masket doesn’t seem to think this is the problem either. As he wrote, “Chances are that even if there is an individual relationship here, it’s not a direct one.” That is to say that higher levels of porn consumption and Democratic voting patterns correlate to something else. What I original thought of was youth: people (okay: men) consume more pornography when they are young than when they are old. Blue states have younger populations. Social Security and Medicare are the main reasons why red states take more from the government than blue states. So I suspect that population age is most of the effect.

Consider the youngest state in the nation: Utah. It has far more porn consumption than would be indicated by its 2012 voting. On the other side, we have the oldest state: Maine. It has far less porn consumption than the model predicts. And if you go through all the data (Age and Sex Composition: 2010) you will see this pattern over and over. In fact, as far as I can tell, that is the only thing that we see in the data.

But Masket brings up a couple of other interesting possibilities. One is marriage levels. I’m sure that’s part of it. But I suspect that age and marriage are highly correlated, so I doubt this tells us much more than we already knew. He also mentioned poverty. I don’t exactly see how that works. Certainly unemployment could raise the rates of porn consumption. And he mentions high speed internet availability. That could certainly be a factor; you can’t watch porn if you can’t watch porn.

The main thing is simply that correlation is not causation. Age, marital status, and internet access all provide potential mechanisms. Liberalism really doesn’t provide a mechanism except in the sense of a caricature that social conservatives might have of the abortion-on-demand, sodomy-requiring liberal. And it doesn’t really get us anywhere. So when you hear that Democrats are more interested in pornography than Republicans, remember what that means: the Republican base is dying.

H/T: Jonathan Bernstein, Read Stuff, You Should

On this day 1707, the great novelist Henry Fielding was born. I think of him as the English Cervantes. Their first loves were the theater, they fell into writing novels almost by accident, and they lived much of their lives in and out of poverty. They also shared a very sharp wit. Of course, there are various important differences. Fielding was more successful in his own life, but died young. Cervantes really only found success at the end of his relatively long life.

Fielding was mostly a satirist and social critic. He was especially fond of attacking the government under Robert Walpole. In fact, it is speculated that the censorious Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 was enacted especially for Fielding. With little hope of getting his plays produced, Fielding went back to practicing law. Soon after, he started writing novels, initially just to lampoon the melodrama of the day.

This, of course, led to his masterpiece The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. It tells the story of Tom Jones, a bastard who is abandoned by his mother and taken in by a wealthy squire. In the end, it is revealed that Jones is actually the squire’s nephew. And there is much hilarity in the middle. You should really read it. That Penguin Classics edition I just linked to is free on the Kindle.

Fielding was also very liberal minded. Mostly because of his beating up on the Wings and the Jacobites, at the end of his life, he was made (along with his brother) London’s Chief Magistrate. And he did a very good job. He created what is probably the first police force there. But more important, he was responsible for reforming the judicial system and improving prison conditions. There are a lot of people in modern America who are distinctly disinclined to care about such matters.

Happy birthday Henry Fielding!

Susannah Locke over at Vox wrote a very interesting article, Watch Out—Monkeys Can Now Do Math. It’s about a recent study that showed that rhesus macaques do math symbolically. This isn’t combining one group of dots with another group of dots. The monkeys were taught number symbols. For example, they associated the numeral “5” with five banana slices. Then they started combining numbers. The monkeys were trained that they would get as much food as the numbers on the screen. So one screen displays 5 and 4 while the other displays 8. The monkeys chose the 5 and 4 because that gave them 9 instead of only 8 for the other screen.

Now you are probably thinking that that monkeys just memorized the symbols. That is: they didn’t know that 5 + 4 = 9; they just knew that the symbols “5” and “4” together gave them nine bits of food. So the researchers trained the monkeys to know a different set of symbols. So, for example, the “^” character might represent the number 6. As soon as the monkeys had learned the new symbols, they were able to do the math. There was no learning curve.

None of this surprises me. What does surprising me, and annoys me as well, is that scientists especially tend to be really skeptical about this. We run into the same thing with Koko, the gorilla master of sign language. Scientists always want to say that we just can’t know for sure and all this kind of stuff might be simple stimulus and response. Scientists have so internalized the danger of anthropomorphizing that they now make the same mistakes that creationists do: they think that humans are utterly different from other animals.

How could that be? It implies a discontinuity between other animals and us. Doesn’t it make more sense that there is a gradual process—that as our brains got bigger we simply built on things that already existed. After all, all animals communicate. There is nothing fundamentally different between a fish changing color to attract a mate and my writing this article right now. Similarly, Locke’s article mentions a study that showed that a particular species of fish could count up to four. Rhesus macaques are evolutionarily a lot closer to humans than to fish. I think if you drew a line representing mathematical ability between fish and us, the monkeys would come out somewhere around the “basic addition” level.

Another way to look at it is to think that it is stimulus and response for all animals, us included. I’m highly sympathetic to that way of looking at the world. But it still leaves us in the same place. We really aren’t that much different from our animal cousins. We are smarter, but we only value that because it is what makes our species so successful. I’m sure that cows would find our simplistic digestive system quite wanting. Don’t get me wrong: I like being a human and I greatly value my brain. I just don’t think being really smart makes us all that different from other animals.

Jonathan Bernstein addresses an interesting question with his usual keen insight, Why Reagan Is King of the Conservative Heap. It follows off an article by Jonathan Ladd, Why Are Conservatives Obsessed with Reagan? He Coincided with Ideological Party Takeover Like No Democratic President Did. Ladd’s argument is clear enough from that long headline. But Bernstein argues that it is both simpler and more complex.

In the simplest sense, the conservatives don’t have anyone else. Bush the Younger certainly doesn’t qualify and his father was a one term president who raised taxes. Then you have Nixon, who was not only chased out of office, but who had fairly liberal domestic policies. Even if it weren’t for Watergate, he would at best be the Republican LBJ. Ford hardly exists as a president. Other than that, there is Eisenhower who was no kind of ideologue. Then you have to go back to Herbert Hoover. So Reagan is pretty much the only candidate that the Republicans have who they can worship.

On the complex side of the equation, Bernstein mentions two other factors that have helped Reagan: he has had an industry dedicated to improving his reputation and his decade after office living with dementia made it so no one wanted to attack him. And on the Democratic side, there are lots of notable people—most especially Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton. Republicans could, of course, go all the way back to Lincoln. But the reason they don’t is not so much that he died a century and a half ago. It is more that since the 1950s, the conservative movement has come under the grip of John C Calhoun. And even if they may think that slavery was bad, they are now deeply uncomfortable with the very idea of the Civil War. (That’s the nicest reading of where they stand.)

I tend to think that the reason Republicans worship Reagan is simpler still. When he left office, the economy was roaring along. Now this had absolutely nothing to do with his policies. But that’s the way it is. Liberals and conservatives alike now admire Clinton for the same reason. And I don’t see any more reason to give Clinton credit than I do Reagan. So the modern love of both presidents has more than anything to do with the American cult of success.

This is very interesting. Because I believe this, I’ve long thought that Obama was delusional. Carter’s time in office was actually rather good. He accomplished big things, including the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. Yet the economy was doing poorly at the end of his term. This had nothing to do with him. Paul Volcker had raised interest rates at the Federal Reserve in order to fight inflation. So the reason that Carter is held in low opinion is the exact same reason that Reagan is held in high opinion. Obama has accomplished remarkable things in his term. And he’d like to accomplish more. But regardless of what he accomplishes, people are not going to worship him. Unless, of course, the economy suddenly starts roaring.

I think we all have to accept that we do not have good reasons for revering the presidents we do. Clinton and Reagan were just president at the right time. Carter and Bush the Younger were presidents at the wrong time. This isn’t to say that Bush the Younger wasn’t a horrible president. But if instead of the financial crisis, the economy had kept growing through 2008, Bush would likely be the object of much adulation among conservatives. There’s nothing surprising or meaningful here.

I used to work with this young engineer. I remember him primarily because he was an annoying conservative who listened to Michael Savage every day. But he was an okay engineer, nothing special but competent. Since that time, he stopped working as an engineer and went into sales. Why? Because he could make a lot of money. In his case, that’s probably fine. But it does speak to a very big problem in our economy: people are given incentives to leave socially important but relatively low paying jobs like teaching and engineering. And they are incentivized to go into less socially useful fields like law or sales.

A good example of the problem comes to me via the great book, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. Imagine that we enacted a law that said that no one with an IQ over 70 could be a lawyer. The society would be no different. That’s because lawyers battle other lawyers. It is a zero sum game. On the other hand, if we made such a law concerning engineers, our society would be destroyed: our cars wouldn’t run, our computers would malfunction, our clocks would be right only two times a day.

So we really ought to construct a society in which great computer programers create great things that make our lives better. It is a major market malfunction that software engineers are taken away from productive work to create high frequency trading systems, which cannot by definition help society. Even if you think that high frequency trading helps the markets, the people in the markets don’t need to be our best and brightest. Again: if there was a 70 IQ point maximum for traders, nothing would change.

What can we do about this? Matt Yglesias offered up an excellent idea, Tax Hikes Could Grow the Economy. It is based upon an economic paper “Taxation and the Allocation of Talent,” by Benjamin Lockwood, Charles Nathanson, and Glen Weyl. Without getting into details, the thesis is very simple. By taxing high incomes aggressively, we provide incentives for people to go into socially useful but relatively low paying jobs. The authors suggest that a top marginal tax rate of 70% to 90% would be optimal for a better distribution of talent.

Yglesias cautioned about reading too much into the results, however. First he noted that the finance industry does important work in the economy. Second, he observed that just because someone is a great hedge fund manager doesn’t mean he will be a great school teacher. I don’t buy either of these complaints. We are only talking about disincentivizing these highly paid positions. They would still pay a lot of money and attract a lot of talent. On the second point specifically, I think it proves the need for high taxes. Great hedge fund managers almost certainly would not be great school teachers or engineers. So we are paying them a great deal of money to do something of (at best) limited social value. And if financial speculation is all they are really good at, then they’ll go into that field regardless because no one will hire them for anything else.

I am constantly amazed that we have a political economy set up a certain way. There is absolutely nothing natural about it. We got it almost randomly. Yet the power elite have convinced themselves (and mostly everyone else too) that this is some God given system and if we changed it there would be catastrophe. But the truth is that we aren’t doing as well as many other countries that at least have somewhat different systems. Just look at taxes. Based upon the following graph via David Atkins at Hullabaloo, the OECD countries pay 42% (10 percentage points) more in taxes than the United States does:

Matt Yglesias wrote another great article today, No, Inequality Doesn’t Help the Economy Grow. It pushes back against this widely held belief that “there are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.” As he notes, there are grains of truth to this and in the kind of perfect economies that fresh water economists like to model, this is true. But the real world is such that: (1) much wealth is inherited; (2) what people earn is not correlated with their effort; and (3) people are not paid according to their social value. Given this, there is little reason to believe that we need inequality for good economic growth.

Yglesias goes further to argue that inequality is bad for growth:

Unfortunately, we come back to the same reality: the United States really isn’t a democracy. The system we have is not only bad for the vast majority of our citizens, it is bad for the country as a whole. But it is great for the oligarchs. So we change nothing.

Before we get to the birthdays, I have to share something I wrote last year on this day. James Dobson is a very vile conservative Christian who founded Focus on the Family. To give you some idea of the man, he once said, “It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” So last year, I wrote what I think is a wonderful bit of snark, “Since I mentioned Hitler’s birthday yesterday, I guess I have to mention that James Dobson is 77 day.”

The great comedian Elaine May is 82 today. She is a brilliant screenwriter, and not just of funny material. For example, she wrote the screenplay for Primary Colors, which is a really fine film. But comedy is her thing. She wrote one of the funniest screenplays ever, The Birdcage, which really is far better than the original (which is still excellent). And she wrote and directed Ishtar. It’s actually a very good, very funny movie. It seems it got a bad rap because of its budget. Big budgets are fine for action films but not for comedies. But most of all, it is an example of studio infighting. It seems that David Puttnam came in as head of production towards the end of the film, and as is standard, he wanted to kill it because it wasn’t his film. So he put out as much negative stuff on the film as he could. If you haven’t seen the film, you should.

But Elaine May is mostly known as one half of Nichols and May, her short-lived but hugely popular comedy act with Mike Nichols (who also directed The Birdcage and Primary Colors). Here is their classic “Mother and Son” skit:

Happy birthday Elaine May!

It occurred to me that I haven’t written anything to spoil Easter. The truth is that I don’t hate Easter so much. It’s on a Sunday, and things are always crummy on Sunday anyway. And it is mostly just a morning holiday, so it doesn’t get in the way of the little life there is normally on Sunday. And perhaps most of all, even though it is the hardest core of the hard core Christian holidays, mostly Christians just celebrate it amongst themselves without bothering the rest of us.

Really, where is the outrage about the “war on Easter”? No one seems to care that we secularists don’t understand the “reason for the season.” I don’t suppose it is much of a mystery why we don’t get this. Easter is basically a zombie story. Jesus is crucified on Friday where he suffered a whole six hours for all the sins of humanity. Then he was entombed. Then his body rose from the dead and a few people saw him, but not all recognized him.

You know, that’s an interesting thing. The story from Luke is that a couple of Jesus’ followers meet up with a man. They chat, they eat, he vanishes. Then they think, “Hey, I’ll bet that was Jesus!” This is typical of the reaction of believers to failed prophecies. After the prophecy fails, they justify how it actually did happen, it’s just that it happened differently that they had thought it would. So a guy comes around and they don’t know him. But after he’s left they convince themselves that he was Jesus. Not that I’m suggesting that the story is true.

Anyway, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ after three days in the desert sounds like something out of a horror movie. When he appears to the women, he tells them not to be afraid. You can understand why: his rotting flesh hanging from his bones. In addition to everything else, the smell must have been incredible.

But apart from the religion of the day and all the cute bunny rabbits and eggs, the nature of today being a holiday did, in fact, really screw me up! I was coming back from San Francisco on the bus. Had it been late, I would have ridden the bus all the way to the Golden Gate Transit base. That would then give me about a two mile walk home—nothing too bad. But since it was early, I got off downtown, figuring I would take the city bus straight to my place. I really had to go to the bathroom anyway, but as I got off the bus, I noticed that the place was strangely vacant. When I went to the bathroom, I found it locked. Then I realized it was Easter and none of the city buses were running. So I went over to the mall. It was closed! Anyway, I managed to finally get a ride home. But it made me resent Easter in a whole new way.

Now, had Jesus pulled up in a car and given me a lift home, I’d have to rethink my entire theology.

Wow, David Brooks wrote a really smart column. No, I’m just kidding! If ever there were one man who demonstrated the lie of “meritocracy,” it is David Brooks. On Friday, he wrote, When the Circus Descends. And I should be clear: by Brooks’ standards, it is not bad because it is not utterly and completely evil. Instead, it’s boring. He is lamenting that some people are complaining about the Common Core Standards, even though they’ve been approved in 45 states.

But in as much as he has something to complain about, it is still really vile in the way that we have come to expect from him. Because according to him, he knows the truth: Common Core is a great thing. Anyone just looking at the facts (Anyone like David Brooks!) would just see that it’s great. After all, the business community is clamoring for it. And if the business community isn’t selfless, then who is? But the only group he actually quotes for how great Common Core is, is the Thomas B Fordham Institute. And who are they? Just a conservative think take with an ideological ax to grind. See: its the best practical approach to education reform because an ideological group is in favor of it!

I don’t especially have an opinion about Common Core. I don’t mind educational standards. But I expect this will all mean in practice more cookie-cutter teaching, with lots of incentives based upon a lot of tests. My philosophy of education is liberal: train people to love learning and they will educate themselves. Too much, our educational system trains people to know very limited facts and skills, with the added disadvantage of coming to hate education. But there is nothing wrong with having goals. (Although note: it is hard to look at some of the new testing and think it is anything but a joke.)

Brooks would also have us believe that there are crazies on both sides that just can’t get past their ideology. Again: that places him in the mythical center that is beyond ideology. But the two sides in this fight are hardly equivalent. On the right, you really do have loons. Although it is rarely stated, the real fear is that if the government can dictate that kids learn basic math, it can also dictate that they learn evolution. There is no doubt that the concern is about the idea that there might be some objective reality that conflicts with their religious beliefs. They can cloak it all they like in concern for local control, it’s all about religion.

On the left are actually very few people. If it weren’t for those on the right who are making a whole lot of noise, there would be no debate. These are the states not adopting the standards: Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska and Indiana. They are all red states, except for Virginia, which is a purple state. It isn’t the teachers’ unions who have stopped Common Core from making it into law. But even as much as it is an issue on the left, the people are against it because of its effect on education. It isn’t that they don’t think there should be no standards outside the Bible. They just disagree about what should be expected of the children.

But it’s interesting. After Brooks complains about the teachers’ unions being against the Common Core Standards, he writes, “A large survey in Kentucky revealed that 77 percent of teachers are enthusiastic about the challenge of implementing the standards in their classrooms.” But that’s typical of conservative thinking. No one wants to appear to be against teachers, because all of us remember that at least some teachers were really important in our lives. So he pretends that teachers’ unions are something other than groups of teachers.

I know that David Brooks thinks that unlike other pundits, he just looks at the facts. You can see this if you ever watch him on The News Hour. But as I’m fond of noting: modern conservatism is an ideology in a way that modern liberalism just isn’t. A good example of this is Dean Baker. He’s a liberal. Yet no one—at least, no conservative one—is as dedicated to using the free market for the benefit of society. David Brooks is just a conservative ideologue who talks nice. And occasionally, he pays tribute to “centrism” by comparing school teachers to Glenn Beck and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

Everyone around here knows where I stand on politics. I am a liberal on social as well as economic issues. But I don’t think much about the social issues. Without a decent amount of economic equality, how ever we go about accomplishing that, the social issues are of limited importance. Regardless, as long as we live in an oligarchy, we don’t have the ability to affect social policy anyway. As the Princeton study pointed out: poor people occasionally get the policies they want because they just happen to agree with the policies that rich people want. It’s coincidence, not power.

It was in this context that I heard last week that Michael Bloomberg was planning to spend $50 million to start a group to counter the NRA. This was not exactly news, because Bloomberg started a political campaign after Sandy Hook. And I noted at that time that he was going after some good economic liberals. I’m not keen on the NRA. But I would much rather a representative be beholden to them than to be beholden to Wall Street—as most politicians are. So I figured it made sense for Bloomberg to spend that kind of money on this cause. He is, after all, a one-issue guy. He can offer some crumbs to liberal mindedness, as long as no one gets in the way of his money.

It seems there are very few issues that I disagree much with Thomas Frank, but today I felt like he read my mind when he wrote about Bloomberg’s new venture, “I’m a strong supporter of gun control, so hooray, I guess.” It’s part of a larger argument, Straight into the Fox News Buzzsaw: Why Elite, Billionaire Liberalism Always Backfires. After taking a scalpel to Bloomberg, he gets to his main point: we can’t depend upon rich liberals because their interests are not our own.

Think about Milton Hershey, who was one of the most beneficent plutocrats ever. There was nothing that he wouldn’t do for his workers. But when they wanted to start a union, he fought them with everything he had. It was all fine as long as he was the great patriarch who showered his employees with living wages. But when the workers demanded independence, that was just too much. And Hershey was far greater than plutocrats then, and light-years ahead of plutocrats now.[1] Frank sums up the plutocratic as only he can:

Unusually, Frank’s article actually ends on an upbeat note. And I agree with him that as individuals we really do have power if we work together. I have long thought that the key to saving our country is unionization. But at this point, the only way that’s going to happen is if we all get out there and vote, because for the last 60 years our rights to organize as workers have been steadily destroyed.

Unfortunately, I am not upbeat nor am I very hopeful. And the reason I’m not is the current state of the Democratic Party. It has become primarily a socially liberal party. In terms of economic policy, the Democrats are now far more conservative than any Republican could have ever hoped for in the late 1960s. And voters seem to have largely accepted this. I don’t think it is a knowledgeable acceptance. I think most people—young people especially—have come to believe that having no real choice on economic policy is not only the way things are, but the way they should be.

What hope I have is found in the recent Democratic Party embrace of raising the minimum wage. But we have to look at this clear-eyed. Getting a (still too low) minimum wage pegged to the inflation rate will only happen with a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control of both branches of Congress. And even then, it wouldn’t surprise me that a Democratic president would veto a minimum wage increase—if that Democrat was someone like Andrew Cuomo, who claims to be for it but always finds a way not to support it in practice. What’s more, I’m sure there are at least three people on the Supreme Court that would love to find the minimum wage unconstitutional.

But whatever hope I have is dependent upon all of us. We can’t depend upon rich benefactors. We have to do it ourselves. We have to vote. We have to organize. And above all else, we have to stop believing this nonsense that the laudable improvements in gay rights make up for ever increasing poverty and an ever shrinking middle class. We mustn’t mistake our own issues that just happen to overlap with those of the plutocrats as any indication that they are on our side. They aren’t. We are alone in this struggle.

[1] I’m not an expert, but I’ve read quite a lot about that period. In general, the plutocrats of the Gilded Age were concerned about wealth inequality. It was mostly only because they didn’t want to look like jerks to other plutocrats. But largely because of Ayn Rand, today we have this philosophy that just being rich is doing good works. That is what’s behind the “job creator” myth and it is why the myth is so damaging to society. Anyway, this is why I think today’s plutocrats are worse than they were a hundred years ago.

Friday in the fashion section, The New York Times published, Including the Young and the Rich. The nature of the article is clear from its first sentence, “On a crisp morning in late March, an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes filed into a cozy auditorium at the White House.” But the United States doesn’t have social classes, right?

The article gets worse. It goes on to talk about, “Patrick Gage, a 19-year-old heir to the multibillion-dollar Carlson hotel and hospitality fortune.” He presented a talk about human trafficking. Here is an actual quote from the young billionaire-to-be, “The person two seats away from me was a Marriott. And when I told her about trafficking, right away she was like, ‘Uh, yeah, I want to do that.'” Of course she wanted to do that; all the hip young billionaires are doing it!

But what most struck me in the article was who wrote it: Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. We all know Mr. Johnson because of his dreadful little documentary The One Percent, which I discussed in Rich Kid Guilt. His whole career is based upon the fact that that he is rich. He has become a representative of the rich who think maybe they should be taxed a bit more.

The problem is that there is no recognition in any of Johnson’s work that his privilege is manifested in far more ways than his money. He is an intellectual and creative mediocrity. There is no way that anyone would invite him to appear on MSNBC or write for The New York Times if it weren’t for his inherited wealth and position. He isn’t around to report on the super rich; he is around to represent them.

The article contained the following disclosure:

So much for the pretense of exposing the super rich, which we saw in his movie. I suspect that after the rich saw his film, they figured he was safe. This is not a guy who is going to rock the boat. And so when all the future billionaires got together, they didn’t want any reports around. But Jamie Johnson was just fine. The New York Times should be ashamed.