Monthly Archives: September 2015

Now There Are Two Israel Lobbies — One Is Good!

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Jonathan ChaitThe pro-Israel lobby was never the shadowy, government-controlling entity portrayed by its most paranoid critics. It was, however, an important influence on American politics. Zionism is to Jews what the civil-rights movement is to African-Americans, a political program organized to protect basic survivalist concerns. Jews participate disproportionately in political life in every way: voting, intellectual debate, donating, and organizing. The pro-Israel lobby organized an important constituency in American politics that shared a relatively unified understanding of its collective self-interest.

A month ago, that lobby was gearing up for a massive national campaign to block the Iran nuclear deal, using every medium at its disposal: television ads, face-to-face lobbying, impassioned pleas from the bimah and in the Jewish press. The campaign has not only failed, it has appeared almost completely ineffectual, and its failure has left its members stupefied. The deal’s anticlimactic success shows that the world has moved beyond them, and they fail to understand how or why this happened…

The deal’s opponents not only misjudged public opinion as a whole, but more astonishingly, they misjudged the state of American Jewish opinion in particular. Congress might have been moved to oppose the Iran deal if the American Jewish community had viewed it as an existential threat to Israel. But Jews did not, on the whole, take that view. A detailed survey of American Jewish opinion by The Jewish Journal found, on the whole, that American Jews support the deal, 53 percent to 35 percent…

Liberals like the deal, and conservatives don’t, by roughly equal margins. But most Jews are liberals. Rising polarization of American life has cleaved in two everything in its path. There is no more “Israel lobby”; there is a red Israel lobby and a blue one.

—Jonathan Chait
The Iran Deal and the End of the Israel Lobby

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Amendment: We Need Voters to Demand Equality

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Robert ReichI’ve long been a fan of Robert Reich. But I thought he went a little off the playing field yesterday, What Happened to the Moral Center of American Capitalism? The article is in two parts. I’ll discuss them both, but note that I don’t actually disagree with the second half.

Like a lot of liberals, Reich pines for the days after World War II when CEO salaries were reasonable and social norms dictated that workers took part in increased productivity. But part of this is what I just wrote about this morning regarding Nicole Aschoff’s The New Prophets of Capital. As long as everything was fine and the US companies totally dominated the world, then sure: the capitalists were willing to spread a few crumbs around.

But even at that time, they weren’t happy about it. Remember: the Taft–Hartley Act was passed in 1947. That is probably the single most devastating law constraining union power. The reason that the business community hates unions is not about money. They can manage the money side of things. It is all about power. When they are feeling beneficent, they don’t mind giving out some raises or (Even better!) bonuses. What they don’t want is for workers to have any power — any say in the company. They don’t want them to be stakeholders.

So yes, the 1970s and 1980s, things got much worse. First with Carter and deregulation and then with Reagan and his tax cuts and declaring open season on unions. But that didn’t just happen. There was part of a long continuum. And it didn’t start in 1947 either. Throughout the Great Depression, the capitalist class did little but bitch and complain. You know how today conservatives are always on about how people don’t have jobs because they are lazy — that if they were just more “go-getters” then jobs would suddenly appear? Well, the same thing was going on during the depths of the Great Depression, even though today everyone thinks people were more understanding. Well the rich weren’t, because they never are.

So Reich is wrong to romanticize the post-war period. But he is right in the second part of his article where he talks about solutions. Because unlike Whole Foods’ John Mackey, Reich doesn’t think that companies are going to spontaneously become good guys through “conscious capitalism.” The truth is that our economy is a totally made up concept. It exists because the government exists. And if we want to do something about the extreme levels of income inequality in this country, it is going to be done through laws.

Here he lays out some concrete ideas that while unimaginable now, are great and necessary:

We’ve got to put limits on executive pay and have a much more progressive income tax so that people who are earning tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year are paying at a rate that they paid before 1981, which is at least 70% at the highest marginal level.

Then he goes on to talk about campaign finance reform. I’m all for that, but I think there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. The truth is that we wouldn’t need campaign finance law if we had relative economic equality. If the richest person in the world had a total net worth of $10 million, then she simply couldn’t distort the political system that much. (There are rumors that Donald Trump may only be worth about a quarter billion dollars, which means he is in no position to finance his own campaign.) So ultimately, we don’t need a constitutional amendment. We need people to show up to vote for candidates that are going do tangible good regarding inequality. And those policies are listed above in the bit of Reich’s article that I quoted.

The Useless Messiahs of Reform Capitalism

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The New Prophets of CapitalI’m only about halfway through Nicole Aschoff’s excellent The New Prophets of Capital, but her argument is so clear that I want to talk about it briefly. She deals with four case studies in the book: Sheryl Sandberg, John Mackey, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates. The fundamental idea with all of them is that the problems that capitalism creates can be fixed by capitalism itself. It is not at all surprising that they are all Americans because this is very typical of our “can do” attitude. We always think that we can tinker with a system. We are, after all, the only country on the planet that had a revolution that didn’t revolutionize anything.

Sandberg is the Facebook COO and the author of Lean In, where she argues that women will gain more equality by having more of them on corporate boards and in corner offices. And how will they do that? Well, Sandberg has an example of when she was really pregnant, walking a long way from her car to her office at Google (where she worked at the time). She had an epiphany, “There should be close parking for pregnant women!” So she marched into the CEO’s office and demanded it and ever since, Google has had special parking for pregnant women. Hooray!

It’s funny and sad that Sandberg thinks that really pregnant women need shorter walks to their offices and not, maybe, time off. But that is exactly the point from my perspective. It’s like the television anchor who says, “I’ve never been told what stories to do!” Of course not! The network would never allow someone who didn’t self-censor to be the television anchor. And Google would never allow a normal woman to be a high ranking executive. Of course, Aschoff destroys this notion in a different way by noting that Yahoo!’s female CEO, Marissa Mayer, cut thousands of jobs and eliminated flex time, which is especially helpful to women. Allowing woman who are just like the very worst men to rise to the top will not change a damned thing.

Similarly, John Mackey is the co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods. And he thinks that we can just fix capitalism by corporations being more responsible and less greedy. That’s so obviously a fairy tale that it should come as no shock to you that Mackey is a libertarian. But the truth is that Whole Foods is, on the whole, a lot better a company than I had been led to believe. That’s one of the great things about Aschoff’s work: she goes out of her way to show that these people aren’t frauds. But here’s the critical matter: Whole Foods is not the first company to treat its workers and customers well. IBM, for example, did the same thing in the 1950s and 1960s. But IBM is not such a great company to work for now. What happened? Competition.

As long as a company is riding high, it can afford to pay its workers well and invest in do-gooder projects. But the moment that profits start to slide, all of that will be pushed aside. And that’s for one reason: profit is what these companies are about. It trumps all. But when a company is at the top of the market, it isn’t so clear. Everyone focuses on the good things they do and not all the money they are making. It is like John Mackey highly publicized salary of $1 per year. All that means is that Whole Foods is his baby and he loves running it. Oh, and he has $100 million net worth, so he doesn’t need a salary.

None of these are bad people. But I very much see myself as a young man in them. There is something incredibly self-serving about it all. What each and every one of them is saying (I already know a great deal about Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates) is that if only everyone were more like them, then all the world’s problems would be fixed. It’s not enough that they are ridiculously wealthy having never worked that hard. It isn’t enough that people bow down to them as great oracles of business wisdom. They must be seen as messiahs! They have brought the Word to the masses and the Word is themselves.

Morning Music: Stevie Wonder

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You Are the Sunshine of My LifeI’ll admit it: mom’s favorite songs was a bit of a bust. But I can’t be smart all the time. What’s more, tomorrow we are going to start a week of really great music by a guy you probably have never heard of. What’s more, he has a (distant) connection to this week’s selections. So stay tuned!

But we finish out this week strongly, I think. We are going to listen to Stevie Wonder perform “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” It was my parent’s “song.” That’s interesting because my first wife and my “song” was “Holiday in Cambodia.” And my second wife and my “song” was “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

Anniversary Post: Great Fire of London

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Great Fire of LondonOn this day in 1666, the Great Fire of London finally ended. It had started early in the morning of 2 September, so it went on for four days. It made 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 people homeless. There is some question as to how many people died as a direct result of the fire, but it appears to have been fairly low. But no one really knows, because no one creating official records really cared when poor people died.

The fire started in a bakery. But at the time, the people of London decided that it had been started by Mexicans immigrants. In that case, it was French and Dutch because England happened to be at war with them. So many people were beaten and lynched. It’s an interesting kind of mentality of us humans, “There’s a terrible fire going on! Let’s do something! Let’s kill innocent people based on rumor!” Clearly, even if the immigrants had been responsible, that was not the time to seek justice.

This is yet another reason why demagoguery is such a bad thing. It’s all fine for Donald Trump to go around saying that Mexican immigrants are rapists. But the moment there’s a crisis of some kind, who gets blamed? Who do the rest of society start attacking? This is the very worst of what we humans are — and it is in us all. This is why we need to create institutions and ways of thought to counteract this in us. And let’s be honest: we are better than we have been in the past. But we have a long way to go. And there are a lot of people who continue to push us in the other direction.

A Word From Our Tired Writer

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Frank MoraesI hope you don’t mind if I waste a post by explaining to you why I don’t feel like writing anything. It’s funny. When I was out of town the other day, I was following the news on my phone. So I wrote up a whole schedule of articles for the next day in my notebook. Now, that’s notebook as in the thing that people from the 1950s would recognize. I still do a lot of writing by hand. But the point is that I wrote down what I was going to write once I got back home with all my standard tools like the keyboard I like, the trackball, and the computer set up the way that I like it.

And here’s the thing: I got those articles written fast. The hardest thing about writing articles is coming up with what to write about. But that isn’t exactly true. I have about fifty tabs open right now with things that I would like to write about. But I just don’t care to do it right now. Part of it is just that I don’t feel good. And that may have something to do with not eating enough today. So I’m cooking dinner — which I’m also not very excited about.

But I’ll tell you: I have been feeling tired a lot recently. It hasn’t stopped me from writing like a madman. But I constantly have to fight the urge to crawl into bed with a book. And God knows, that would be good for me! What is the point of all this writing? That’s especially true of the writing here. I understand the point of the other writing: money. And I’m very keen on money right now. In fact, let’s talk about money — as it relates to the writer.

Here’s the thing: you can be a really good writer — even a great writer. You can work really hard as a writer. And by that, I don’t mean it in the sense of, “Well, I’m thinking about my novel as a drink a beer and shoot pool over at the local pub.” In fact, the people around you can even be aware that you are a good and hard working writer. But if you aren’t making money, you are still pretty much a joke to them. It’s nothing personal. It is just people don’t know enough about writing (or almost anything) to judge what you do. So they go with commerce.

For example, I’ll bet I could find two generic paragraphs: one each from Stephen King and John Steinbeck. They are good examples because they are both great writers and popular. (Fun fact: it has not been cool to show disdain for King since 1981.) And I could show both of these paragraphs to a group of people, and they would not be able to identify which writer is which, even though they have pretty distinctive styles. So people don’t much get writing. I don’t blame them for it. But that’s the reason they fall back on every writer’s most hated question, “Yeah, but are you making any money?”

But that’s one great thing about these other paying gigs. The fact that Frankly Curious brings in about ten bucks in Amazon referrals each month, doesn’t really matter anymore. Now people have to accept that what I do here has value because other people are paying me to write the same kind of stuff elsewhere. And really, it isn’t that different — except in one way: those who pay me tell me what to write about. Which means writing here is a whole lot harder. I hope you appreciate it!

Afterword

Having written this, I feel so much more energetic. And dinner’s almost done.

The Problem With Economics

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Noah SmithI think that what’s odd about econ isn’t that it uses lots of math — it’s the way it uses math. In most applied math disciplines — computational biology, fluid dynamics, quantitative finance — mathematical theories are always tied to the evidence. If a theory hasn’t been tested, it’s treated as pure conjecture.

Not so in econ. Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed if they don’t make sense in the context of leading theories. This isn’t a problem with math — it was just as true back when economics theories were written out in long literary volumes. Econ developed as a form of philosophy and then added math later, becoming basically a form of mathematical philosophy.

—Noah Smith
Economics Has a Math Problem

Donald Trump Is Rich Because He Was Born Rich

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Donald TrumpWhen I was a kid, Esphyr Slobodkina’s book, Caps for Sale terrified me. It involved this guy who I now understand was a cap peddler who wore many caps on his head at the same time. I thought he was Satan. I have no idea why I thought that. I was a strange kid. Anyway, I now wish that I were that peddler, because I would love to tip a hundred caps to SV Dáte who wrote the best article I’ve read in ages, The One Easy Way Donald Trump Could Have Been Even Richer: Doing Nothing.

People often ask me where I get my story ideas. I tell them it is mostly cartoons (which is true). Perhaps as a result, it would not occur to me to do what Dáte did. We all know that money makes money. And since Donald Trump was born rich, Dáte decided to look at how rich he would be now if he had just floated along: put his money in a regular investment vehicle. In this case, he chose an indexed mutual fund. These are funds designed to do roughly as well as the market itself. His results: if Trump had just put his 1974 inheritance into an index fund, he would now have $3 billion; if he had put his $200 million estimated fortune in 1982 into an index fund, he would not have $8 billion.

Even the smaller figure exceeds the lower range of his possible net worth as reported to the Federal Election Commission, while the larger number exceeds by billions recent estimates of Trump’s worth by financial publications. And it would have come without the high-drama, roller-coaster career that has included four corporate bankruptcies.

That a purely unmanaged index fund’s return could outperform Trump’s hands-on wheeling and dealing calls into question one of Trump’s chief selling points on the campaign trail: his business acumen.

He added that if Trump had given War­ren Buf­fett his money to invest, Trump would now be worth almost $70 billion. But most of the rest of the article is about how much Trump is actually worth. Most recently, Trump has claimed that he is worth ten billion dollars. But that number is certainly not true. And it is possible that he is only really worth something like hundreds of millions of dollars. It doesn’t really matter. The main thing is that he hasn’t done any better than a simple computer algorithm in terms of managing his money.

At Vox, Dylan Matthews looked into the question a bit more deeply.
Even after taking into account all of the costs associated with a mutual fund (fees and taxes), it turns out that Trump currently has (based on the most liberal estimates) just about the same amount of money that he would have had. And I think the title of his article says all that need be said, “Donald Trump isn’t rich because he’s a great investor. He’s rich because his dad was rich.”

That, my friends, is the story of modern America. Meritocracy? American exceptionalism? It’s all rubbish. Donald Trump is the perfect symbol of America.

Gilad Edelman and the Bagel Whine

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Gilad EdelmanAt Slate recently, Gilad Edelman complained, New York Bagel Places Put Way Too Much Cream Cheese on Their Bagels. But he couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, he strikes me as representing everything I hate about many of the political and cultural writers that I most read: this tendency to think that they and their friends are somehow representative of the larger society. But let me back up a bit.

Edelman finds that the amount of cream cheese on a New York bagel ranges from 0.7 ounces all the way up to 3.9 ounces. I’ll admit, a quart-pound of cream cheese is a lot. But it is hardly normal on my coast. But he complains about the glob of cream cheese in the hole. But really, most bagels don’t have much of a hole. In fact, that kind of geometrical perfection is usually reserved for the fake bagel: bagel shaped bread. But I know what he’s talking about. And I either throw it out or redistribute it in the rest of the bagel. It has never occurred to me that it might be something bad — something that I ought to complain about.

Bagel and Cream CheeseBut why do bagel shops pile on the cream cheese? Well, a couple of vendors give him the two reasons. First: if there is too much, you wipe it away. Most people are not whiny “writer, musician, popcorn enthusiasts” who complain about this. It’s better to have too much than to have too little. Second, bagel places do charge a small fortune for cream cheese. It’s not just that I would feel cheated by paying a buck fifty for a thin butter-like layer of cream cheese. It is that I wouldn’t want it. Cream cheese doesn’t have a very hearty taste. You need a fair amount of it to experience it.

Here is the ultimate thing: the right amount of cream cheese isn’t just a personal thing. The right amount depends upon my mood. So today, I may want 0.7 ounces and then tomorrow, I may want 2 ounces. So what the bagel places are doing is providing me with the option to ingest as much cream cheese as I want. What am I going to do? Walk into House of Bagels (which is fantastic) and say, “Well, I want a fair amount of cream cheese, but not too much, you know, the way you made it last Thursday, something like that”? It’s crazy. It is expecting too much of the bagel place, and frankly, it’s expecting too much of me. I know that if I press down harder on a bagel with a lot of cream cheese, it will squish out and I won’t eat it.

So come on, Edelman. Man up! Take responsibility for your bagel! This just isn’t hard. But I’ll make a deal with you. If you go work in the Peace Corps for a couple of years, helping poor farmers in Haiti, then I’ll start caring about our wasted cream cheese problem in the bagel industry. Until then, I will eat bagels the way that God intended poor people to eat bagels: I will buy them in bulk, cut them myself, and apply generic cream cheese to them. But the next time I’m in Palo Alto, getting a bagel and cream cheese — I will think of Edelman as I relish each ounce of excessive cream cheese that House of Bagels offers me.

Morning Music: Roses Are Red (My Love)

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Roses Are Red - Bobby VintonMy mother really liked Bobby Vinton. But the truth is that I can’t really remember any particular song. But I do remember hearing her sing, “Roses Are Red (My Love).” It is a memorable song. It’s interesting that the writers were able to transcend the simple rhyme with the insertion of “my love.” Also, the music works really well.

Even as a kid, I didn’t think much of Vinton. His voice lacked character. The arrangements were all standard. He never took a risk. But what the hell? He made a boat load of money. And in the end, isn’t that what pop music is really all about? This is something that my friends who like modern pop music really don’t understand. It doesn’t matter how much the production techniques have changed: they are still listening to the same soulless music that Bobby Vinton was producing in the early 1960s.

Anniversary Post: Fantasy Founding of Los Angeles

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Chumash TribesmanOn this day in 1781, a bunch of Spaniards settled “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula” — later to be known as simply Los Angeles. Luckily for the native population, elders from the Tongva and Chumash got together to discuss the situation. They decided that if they allowed the Spaniards to stay there, they would spread disease, try to push their ridiculous god who gets himself nailed to a stick, and ultimately commit a genocide. So they acted.

The women of the tribes came to the settlement offering native fruits and vegetables. While they were talking to the settlers, the men came up behind them and killed all the settlers. It was quick and painless. Unlike the Spaniards and all of the other Europeans who were invading the Americas, these tribes were not savages.

But once all the settlers were dead, they had to make a decision as to what to do next. Finally, they decided that Los Angeles would be a great place to produce films. So they started the film industry. In fact, “Hollywood” is an old Chumash word meaning, “That which is white with a bloody throat.” But this explains why Hollywood spent so many years using Italians to play the parts of Native Americans: the Native Americans were too busy running the studios.

Afterword

In fact, there were Native and African Americans as part of the settlement. This is a broader commentary, in as much as it is a commentary at all. Mostly, it’s just silly.

The Stupid Way We Report on Global Warming

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Climate Change Is a HoaxMany outlets are reporting, Scientists Reveal There Are 3 Trillion Trees in the World in Latest Count. This is important because it is over seven times higher than the last global count (or estimate). It’s interesting and it is an indication of just how hard it is to study and understand the entire Earth. My PhD dissertation was focused on a really complicated model of the atmosphere that was 2.5 dimensions. It had height and latitude, but longitudinally, it just had land or ocean — that was the half-dimension. But what I’m interested in here is how the news was reported.

I was listening to NPR — the show The World. They are partly a production of the BBC, and so they get their news updates from the BBC. The little 30 second story said (more or less — I can’t find the transcript online), “This doesn’t affect global warming, but it does give policy makers more information.” I was impressed because it simply presented global warming as a fact. And I wondered how it would be presented in the mainstream American media. Some outlets, like The Los Angeles Times have taken a stand on the issue. But for most, it is still just a “matter of opinion.” Pretty much the entire scientific community thinks one thing and some oil companies with billions of dollars of profits on the line say another. Who can determine which side is right?!

I expect that mainstream American media outlets would have reported this story differently, “This new estimate will cause those on both sides of the global warming debate to claim that they are right.” Note the total equivalence there. If the two sides were equally valid, that would absolutely show no bias either way. It would also be a vacuous statement, because it isn’t really true. But the main point is that it would be presented in a way that highlighted the two sides as somehow equal.

The conservative press will look at it differently, I suspect. It will claim that it shows that scientists don’t really know what is going on in the world. “They can’t even count trees, how can they know that the Earth is getting hotter?!” Of course, determining the number of trees is actually a hell of a lot harder than measuring the temperature all over the world. Temperature is a contiguous distribution. Trees and treed areas are discrete. So you can look at two temperatures separated a mile apart and have a very good idea of what the temperature is at every spot between them. That’s not at all true of trees.

But this isn’t about science. And it isn’t really about what the global warming deniers say. The issue is that our media — with notable exceptions — treats the global warming deniers as if they were just one side of the debate. The BBC story showed that it doesn’t need to be that way. The truth is that fewer people accept global warming now than when I was activity studying it 20 years ago. And the reason for that is that the oil companies and other moneyed interests got together and produced a bunch of science-like nonsense that we see constantly coming out of The Heartland Institute. But they could have done that forever and no one would have cared, if the media had treated their “propaganda as science” with the derision that it deserved. But they didn’t.

On one hand, it is cheering to know that coverage of global warming in other countries is more reasonable. But on the other hand, it is depressing to know that if the power elite can twist the truth into knots here, it can do it anywhere. And most concerning of all: it can do it wherever it is most important to do it.