On this day in 1908, Jane Bolin was born. She was a remarkable woman, remembered today primarily for being the first African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School. Like President Obama, it is hard to call her black when she was half white and half black, in as much as those terms mean anything. But it always brings to my mind the pernicious history of eugenics. The idea is that “white” as a race is pure. So mixing it with any other race pollutes it. Thus: half black is black; quarter black is black; eighth black is black. It’s also just ridiculous scientifically. There is no such thing as the white race. We are all of us mongrels.

But given all our prejudices and focus on meaningless distinction, Bolin’s accomplishments are amazing. She was born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father was a lawyer (and the first African-American to graduate from Williams College), and her English mother died when Bolin was just eight years old. So it isn’t surprising that she followed in her father’s footsteps. After high school, she went to Wellesley College, one of only two black students. She graduated in the top 20 of her class. This led to her (against advice) going to Yale Law School, where she graduated at the age of 23. She practiced for a while with her father before going to work with the New York City where she was eventually made a judge in the Family Court. She held that position for 40 years.

She lived almost 30 years after retirement, and spent that time working as an activist for children’s rights and education. She lived the kind of life that makes me feel I’ve totally let the species down. But it is wonderful that people like her didn’t.

Happy birthday Jane Bolin!

I have to admit: I’m confused. This week, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it didn’t happen fifty years ago this week. Johnson signed it into law on 2 July 1964. But 46 years ago today, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed, exactly a week after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. So it is, I suppose, a good week for remembrance, I’m just unclear about the timing.

During this week, I have heard a lot of chatter among liberals as to whether the law could be passed today. But I’ve found people surprisingly mute in their comments. No one wants to come right out and say what they know to be true. For their part, conservatives say of course they would pass it today. That’s the great thing about conservatives: they are always big supporters of long settled law. But when it comes to any new law that expands the rights of the weak (that is: anyone not already rich and powerful), they are against it.

So let me be clear. With all due respect to Jonathan Chait, the Republican Party’s electoral power is almost entirely dependent upon racism. If the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came up for a vote today, it would be filibustered by the Senate Republicans. And John Boehner would not give it a vote in the House. But I’ll go further. The modern Republican Party would find reasons for not supporting the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1875, 1957, and 1960. (At least Rand Paul will admit to being against the Civil Rights Act of 1875.)

The point here is not that modern Republicans are truly vile. It is that the conservative information system has caused Republican politics to become racist. This is because people who only ever talk to other conservatives eventually get around to thinking, “Hey, the real oppressed are straight white males!” So any policy that tries to address mistreatment of minority groups is unacceptable. For these conservatives, the issue is not about the minority groups but about the great hardship that is being placed on the white man. To them, doing nothing at all would be wrong; doing something for minorities is exactly the opposite of what we ought to be doing.

This is why the last few years have seen a big rise in the quasi-libertarian conservatives. These are people who pick and choose their libertarianism. They aren’t for marriage equality or drug legalization, but they are very much concerned about despotic governments that tax the rich. Thus, they have a plausible sounding argument to make against healthcare reform that has to do with not taxing the rich, even though the actual reason such ideology flies electorally is that it feeds the “oppressed white man and undeserving dark man” narrative.

So let’s not sit on our hands and pretend that Republicans of today would vote for what Republicans of the past did vote for. Racial resentment is the only tool the Republican Party has left. And they will continue to use it until we stop them.

The whole Brendan Eich affair is not very interesting to me. As you probably know, he recently became CEO of Mozilla Corporation. And almost right away, he resigned over his support of the anti-gay Proposition 8 in California in 2008. But after I saw that racist war mongering idiot Andrew Sullivan on The Colbert Report, I figured I should write something about it. So let me look at the two sides.

On the anti-Eich side, there were people who never wanted him to be CEO. His contribution to Prop 8 was known back 2012. So they wanted to get rid of him, and I understand that. I don’t especially agree. Being a bigot should not stop a person from having gainful employment. But these people are absolutely justified in acting as they did, because clearly they think more strongly about this issue than I do.

Regardless, it is wrong to say that these people forced Eich to resign. They simply applied political pressure on the company. And let’s not forget that a large part of Mozilla’s brand is that they aren’t Microsoft and they aren’t Google. They are the Good Guys. And having an anti-gay CEO harms that brand. I’m not completely clear, but I haven’t seen any comments from Eich to the effect of, “I was wrong and I no longer hold those beliefs.” I suspect that would have gone a long way.

On the pro-Eich side, it’s mostly just nonsense. Conservatives everywhere are claiming that Eich’s free speech rights have been violated. Most of the liberal bloggers I personally know write anonymously because they are afraid that their employers will find out. I am basically unemployable because of books I’ve written. This is not a free speech issue. We are all free to say pretty much whatever we want. And other people are free to not like it. Sadly, in America, you do not have a right to a job.

On Colbert, Sullivan gave his usual song-and-dance about how this was intolerance. He is under the mistaken impression that he is currently married to another man just because they have had the better of the argument and not because of any hardball political tactics. Given his business, he has no excuse for being so very ignorant of the centuries old gay rights struggle.

Conservatives like Sullivan want to make this out to be all about tolerance. But it isn’t. Tolerance of intolerance is just chaos. In Across the Pond, Terry Eagleton provides a proper definition of tolerance:

What I especially hate about this is that conservatives understand this in all cases where the boycott is conservative on liberal. In fact, conservatives are the true experts when it comes to boycotting. And when Christians boycott whatever it is they are boycotting this week, Fox News is there to say (properly) that they are just expressing their views in the market. But when companies boycott advertising on Rush Limbaugh or people boycott Firefox, well, then Limbaugh’s and Eich’s free speech is being deprived. It’s all so silly and transparent.

Update (11 April 2014 1:13 pm)

While I was writing this, Martin Longman wrote, The Principles Behind the Mozilla Controversy. He seems to agree with me completely. That’s especially true in his conclusion:

You’ve probably heard about Wednesday’s stabbing at the Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Alex Hribal, a tenth grader at the school, allegedly brought two large kitchen knives to school and started stabbing students as they prepared for class that morning. The whole thing took only five minutes, but in that time 20 students and one adult were stabbed, some of them very badly. Thankfully, no one died, but two students remain in critical, but stable, condition.

My colleague Carl at Simply Left Behind makes the important point, Imagine If He Had a Gun. I’m not especially interested in the reasons why a young man would do such a thing. From time to time, people are going to do bad things. We can try to help such people, and we certainly don’t do a good enough job of that. But there will always be people who fall through the cracks and it is best that when they do, we limit the harm they can do.

When it comes to international affairs, we as a society are obsessed with the idea that Iran might get a nuclear weapon. The idea is that we can’t allow an unstable actor to have such potentially catastrophic power. I don’t actually think that reasoning applies to Iran more than any other country (Iran is stable and rational), but the basic reasoning is valid. “Loose nukes” are very bad indeed. But in the United States, “loose guns”—the nuclear weapons of the streets—seem not to be a big issue.

If Hribal had had a gun, people would have died—probably many, including Hribal himself. We don’t know much about the case, so we can’t say for such why he chose to use knives. My guess is that a gun was not easily available to him. And that’s as it should be. It amazes me that in many homes, the Wii is locked up but kids can get at guns any time they want. But this goes against the idea that if someone tries hard enough they can get a gun. While that is undoubtedly true, kids especially tend to be more impulsive, and if guns aren’t around, they’ll use something else. (Sometimes with tragic consequences.)

I understand the gun rights advocates arguments, and I’m not totally opposed to them. But as in all of my politics, I’m a pragmatist. Serious people keep their guns locked up in safes, and they treat unloaded guns as if they were loaded, and they always keep their finger off the trigger until they are ready to shoot, and on and on. But most people aren’t serious when it comes to this stuff. They take no more care for their guns than they do for their kitchen knives. And that is a major problem that gun rights advocates should spend more time on. (Note: there are a lot of gun safety nuts who shout this stuff all the time. But the NRA isn’t spending most of its money lobbying for more gun safety courses.)

It would be a much better nation if it were a whole lot easier for unstable people to grab a couple of knives and hit the streets than to grab a gun and a box of ammo. And that is to take nothing away from the suffering of Wednesday’s stabbing victims. But you know the old saying, “Better in a hospital bed then dead.” I wish them all a speedy and full recovery.

In Paul Krugman’s rave review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, he brings up one issue where the the book is weak. Inequality in America is still more about wages than capital. Now, this is changing and within a couple of generations, we will be as ossified an oligarchy as anywhere—probably more. But right now, conservatives can plausibly argue that income inequality in America is all about really brilliant people getting rich because they add so much to our economy.

This is the so-called superstar theory of income inequality. Both Piketty and Krugman dismiss it, noting that entertainers and such are a very small part of the super rich. But I don’t think that flies because conservatives would just claim that CEOs and hedge fund managers are also superstars. And in their cases (as Krugman noted), it is much harder to say what their true value is. So let’s take a look at movie stars and assume whatever we say about them is at least as true of corporate CEOs.

Johnny Depp is one of the biggest stars in the world. If he is in a movie, it will open. It might still suck and make no money, but Depp’s star power means that it will at least get a viewing—a chance at the box office, even if the studio is trying to kill it for other reasons. That is worth a great deal to producers. But the question I keep coming back to is this: what is its marginal value?

If Johnny Depp had never been born, or had gone into plumbing instead, would the movie business be fundamentally different? Would fewer films get made? Would profits be lower? I think the answer to all of these questions is, “No.” I think that Depp is a very talented and charismatic actor. But there are lots of talented and charismatic actors who are barely getting by—who might be doing a whole let better if they were as well connected as he is. So the question is not, “How valuable is Johnny Depp?” It is, “How much more valuable is Johnny Depp than the actor who would replace him?”

Unfortunately, it is impossible to have a direct comparison. We can’t run the universe over again without Johnny Depp and see how things turn out. But we do know that what makes a star is ineffable. We only need to look at Danny DeVito or Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. So why would we think that Johnny Depp is worth a thousand times more than his character actor co-stars? I don’t think that we can. The same thing is easily as true of CEOs.

We have another problem: we allow our economy to be driven by technology. Johnny Depp is as rich as he is because of the invention of motion pictures and television. Had he lived two hundred years ago, he would have had to work harder for less because he would have been on the stage. Film technology is no longer patented. Its existence is in the public domain. But we forget that and allow its existence to distort the market. Conservatives are always on about how perfect the market is, but how can that be when the value of a product (for example, a performance) can be so different based upon the medium?

If we are going to allow such winner-take-all markets, we need to do something to level the playing field. It has long been the case that we have far too many people going into theater and music. But winner-take-all markets are increasingly the norm in all fields. And that just isn’t the way forward. It would bring about a stagnant economy with little innovation. What would be the point of innovation? Most people would be struggling just to get by and the rest wouldn’t have to do anything to get by.

Eventually, this all leads to the oligarchy that Piketty predicts. And at the moment, I don’t see any way out of it. The free market doctrine is too easy to understand and compelling in its simplicity. Talking about the marginal value of a worker is complex. What’s more, humans are very hopeful creatures. Everyone seems to think that good times are just over the horizon. We are all just one deal away, one job away, one interview away. We have all drunk the Horatio Alger Kool-Aid and we have a positive attitude about the world and the future. And it will be our downfall.

Afterword

I have nothing against Johnny Depp. I picked him to talk about precisely because I like him.

If anyone knows anything about the economics I’ve touched on here, please let me know because I’m flailing, trying to understand it.

Recently, a German fisherman,Konrad Fischer, discovered a message in a bottle off the coast of Kiel in the Baltic Sea. He took it to the Internationales Maritimes Museum in Hamburg and scientists there set about tracking down its owner. And shockingly, they succeeded.

The message was on a post card that had been badly decayed because of the ravages of time and moisture. The Museum intends to do more work to decipher the entire message. But they did determine the address and that it was a request that once found the bottle be returned to the sender. With some research, they found that it had to have been sent by the then 20-year-old Richard Platz.

Apparently, Platz was on a nature hike with a group in 1913 when he threw the bottle into the sea. And the bottle seems to have bobbed around for a century without anyone noticing it. The world really is a big place. It likely never made it out of the Baltic Sea. So you can imagine the number of bottles floating around the oceans proper.

Platz is long dead, of course; he would be 121 today. In fact, he didn’t live that long—dying at 54, shortly after the end of World War II. But the museum folk found his granddaughter, Angela Erdmann, who visited the museum and provided a little background about Platz.

We know three things about him, all good. First, he was the kind of nerd who put messages in bottles and threw them into the sea. Second, he liked to read. And third, he was a Social Democrat.

In this depressing world, the story of the consummation of a century old creative act is cheering.

Last year’s birthday post was, In Which the Birthdays Suck. That was unkind. There were a number of interesting people: Carl Perkins, Jim Fowler, and Steve Gadd. But I rightly noted that Hugh Hefner was a very creepy guy. I implied it about Nathaniel Branden. And I noted that Joe Scarborough was an idiot. But I totally missed a truly great man.

Tom Lehrer is 86 years old today. He is probably the most famous mathematician in the world. Strangely, he never managed to complete his PhD work, most likely because he was to distracted by his other passion: music. And not just any music. He’s quite an accomplished light opera pianist, singer, and most of all, songwriter. But we really only know of him because of recordings. He hasn’t done anything in music for over four decades. In his entire career, he performed publicly only 109 times and wrote only 37 songs. But what performances and songs they were!

Here are two of his songs: “National Brotherhood Week” and “When You Are Old And Gray.” Enjoy:

Happy birthday Tom Lehrer!

I know that we Americans love stories about people who do stupid things. It apparently makes us feel better about ourselves. It’s sad though. The popularity of shows like Cops do indicate that America is filled with a lot of stupid people, but they are mostly sitting in front of the TV. So it is with this context that I present to you the easily mocked Evelyn Hamilton, “A Texas woman who complained to police that a drug dealer sold her a bad batch of marijuana.”

I guess in a winner-take-all society like our own, the prols have to feel good about something and so they are left with, “At least I know not to get the police involved in my drug deals!” But this gets to the very heart of what is wrong with the underground economy. Undocumented workers can’t complain about employer mistreatment. Prostitutes can’t complain about being brutalized by pimps and johns. And drug users can’t complain about being ripped off by dealers.

Having policies that create these underground economies takes the weakest members of our society and steals even more power away from them. Look at Hamilton. The very next day, the police arrested her again for public intoxication. She was allegedly in the street shouting. Given that she doesn’t seem to know that cannabis purchase is illegal and she shouts at no one in particular in the streets, I think we can conclude that this woman has some problems. My guess: minor schizophrenia.

But do we help her? No. We’ve already closed down most mental health facilities because giving billion dollar tax cuts to oil companies is more important than taking care of our poor and sick. So we just throw her in jail when she has a bad day. And then we mock her in the press, because our callous disregard isn’t fulfilling enough.

If you want to know why the United States keeps more people in cages than any other country in the history of the world, this story tells most of what you need to know. First, we vigorously criminalize all kinds of behavior that is voluntary. In the case of undocumented work, it’s particularly bad because we actively promote it at the same time that we actively prosecute it. It’s the absolute best possible system for the elites. But drug users and prostitutes are arguably abused even more. The second part of our prison problem is that we do very little to help people. Even apart from drug users (who I think we abuse as much with medicalization as we do with criminal justice), our prisons are overflowing with people who are simply the troublesome mentally ill.

I don’t see this changing anytime soon. It’s not an issue that affects the power elite so in a political sense, it isn’t even an issue. But the least that we, the non-power non-elites, could do is take pity on the likes of Evelyn Hamilton. Quite literally, because of the vagaries of genetics and environment, any of us could have been her.

H/T: FARK (who I love but who are also one of the worst offenders)

I just read Ha-Joon Chang’s excellent Bad Samaritans for the second time. It is an attack on neo-liberal policies that claim that the best thing developing economies can do is open themselves up to globalization and all will be well. As Chang shows, this results in undeveloped countries remaining undeveloped. He points out countless examples, but one will suffice. Japan protected their auto industry for decades while it struggled. Today, of course, cars are the first thing that Americans think of with respect to Japan. But had Japan simply embraced free trade, Toyota would today be at best a subsidiary of GM. And more likely, it would just be a long bankrupt company.

But the book is at its best when it is talking about American history, where it notes we were “the most protectionist country in the world throughout the 19th century and right up to the 1920s.” The Antebellum era is particularly telling. In addition to the issue of slavery, there was another big divide between north and south: protectionism. The north was trying to industrialize and get its manufacturing economy to fulfill its potential. So it was in favor of high tariffs, especially against England. The south, however, wanted to keep tariffs low so that they could cheaply sell their cotton to England. As Chang writes, “Many Americans call Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president (1861-5), the Great Emancipator—of the American slaves. But he might equally be labelled the Great Protector—of American manufacturing.”

It’s curious, because in as much as there is any difference of opinion about globalization between the two parties, it is now the Republicans who are the free trade warriors. Of course, the situation has changed. Then America was developing technologically. Now, we are an advanced country and we should have relatively free trade. Our domestic employment problems are due to income inequality and the over-valued dollar, not free trade. Of course, what is now presented as free trade are mostly just agreements to push our excessive patent and copyright systems onto other countries.

This gets to the core of the book, which is about how powerful countries harm weaker countries. They do this by forcing them to make neo-liberal changes to their economies. These changes are supposed to spur growth, but they don’t. Chang notes:

Chang focuses on how historically countries that got ahead economically would “kick away the ladder” so that other countries couldn’t follow in their footsteps. And that is what neo-liberal policy is in the modern world. But this is much like the racist underpinnings of conservative policy. It could be that the advanced countries are really doing this to keep the weaker countries down or it could be just that they really think these are the right policies. As with the racist charge, it doesn’t really matter to me. The policy is bad and should thus be changed.