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.

Last week, Sci-Tech Today reported, NASA Cuts Ties with Russia Except on Space Station. The reason that we aren’t cutting ties on the space station is that thanks to budget cuts, we have no way to get to and from the space station. It’s a pathetic situation, but then, so is this business of trying to punish Russia for the Ukraine situation by cutting off scientific relations.

This ban involves going to Russia, but there’s more. “They’re also barred from emailing or holding teleconferences with their Russian counterparts.” I really don’t see any point to this. It is a symbolic move that will have no practical effect. And the space station exception just highlights the fact that we are now more dependent upon Russia than they are on us. It makes us look weak, as indeed we are. This is what happens to great countries when they sacrifice advances in new technologies to support the rich owners of old technologies like fossil fuel drilling.

But more than this, NASA’s move is part of a larger American pathology. We are the country that looks askance at other nations and wags a finger. That would be bad enough if we were some lily white country that managed to even come close to its own ideals. We are the most interventionist country in the world. True, most of the time we don’t actually invade. But we stage coups and generally abuse countries until they elect leaders who we (And our corporations!) like. And sometimes, we do invade for no real reason as we did in Iraq.

I’m not in favor of Russia taking over Crimea. But it is not a senseless act perpetrated by a rouge nation. So I’m more than happy to allow the diplomats to work this out. This is not a prelude to World War III. Countries often do things other countries don’t like. And Americans especially don’t like the fact that Russia is powerful enough that we have to treat it with respect. But the situation in Ukraine is very much like the 2008 situation in Georgia. And we ought to treat it like that.

There is no reason to politicize the situation any further. I understand that NASA is and always has been part of the American empire. But starting a little scientific cold war is a really bad idea. It pushes back relations to the pre-Nixon era. And as long as we don’t have a way to get to the space stations, it just makes us look pathetic.

Sahil Kapur wrote a really informative article at Talking Points Memo, Republicans Warn of New Obamacare Reality: No Repeal Without Alternative. It looks at the state of Republican Obamacare delusion. The only reasonably rational statement came from an anonymous Republican aide who said that in order to come up with a viable Obamacare replacement “you have to move in the direction of the ACA.” This will come as no surprise to readers of this blog. Obamacare doesn’t exist the way it does because Democrats just really like complicated laws. If you want to have popular things like no denial for pre-existing conditions, you have to have unpopular things like the individual mandate. Otherwise, given our insurance industry based healthcare, it doesn’t work.

The rest of the article was just a bunch of politicians posturing. That’s to be expected, because that’s what politicians do. I don’t blame them; it’s us voters who make that necessary. But I was very taken by something Eric Cantor said, “We are about proposing real health care reform that will be patient centered—and a plan that we will put forward this year.” Okay, it’s delusional. I don’t even know what “patient centered” means; it seems to imply that Obamacare takes individuals’ healthcare choices away from them, which is absolutely not true. But I’m stuck with the timeline: some time this year.

Obamacare was signed into law over four years ago. The fact that the Republicans felt no need to come up with anything until now (maybe) shows what they actually want to do: nothing. They don’t want to “repeal and replace,” they just want to “repeal.” At this point, the Republican elites are realizing two bitter truths. First, Obamacare isn’t going anywhere. Second, it isn’t actually that bad. It is, after all, a market-centered law to fix our broken healthcare system. Conservatives all claimed to like it until the Democrats proposed it.

The problem is that the right wing propaganda machine has spend about five years convincing the base that it is, “Socialism! Socialism, I tell you!” So the elites can’t just shrug off the defeat and move on. They have to continue this charade that Obamacare is a takeover of healthcare, blah, blah, blah. And thus we get Cantor’s new plan for an Obamacare replacement. It’s pathetic.

But I know how this will go. Or, at least, I know how this will go at best. Cantor will come out with a plan that is a minor variation on Obamacare. It will be what the Republicans could have gotten in the first place if they hadn’t just decided that each and every one of them were going to vote against it. It is what they would have gotten if they had worked to strengthen the law rather than just kill it. It is what they would have gotten if their primary concern had not been to simply deprive Obama of a political victory.

And if they do come out with this best case scenario plan, they will do what Republicans do best: they will sell it. They will magnify the minor differences and try to convince the base that they weren’t just lying for the last five years. But I’m afraid that they are doomed to fail. The base doesn’t seem to know much of anything about Obamacare except that they hate it. When the plan comes out, the Heritage Foundation will look at it and report, “This is just a minor variation on Obamacare.” And the base will rise up and Cantor will quietly bury the plan.

But by then, the election will be over and the nation will get on with the important work of forgetting that Obamacare was ever contentious. I give it 20 years.

There are a lot of great birthdays today, but I have to with Jacques Brel, who was born on this day in 1929. He was one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever. He wrote chansons with interesting characters in complex situations. There is nothing especially interesting about his life other than that he died very young from some ill-defined problems with his lungs. So let’s just focus on his songs.

First up is “Le Moribond,” probably his best known song in the United States. A terrible English translation of it was a big hit for Terry Jacks, “Seasons in the Sun.” The original version is full of pathos that was somehow ripped out of the English version. You can read about it in some depth in, It’s Hard to Die in French.

Next up is “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (don’t leave me). It is haunting in its quiet desperation.

The flip side of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is “Mathilde.” In this song he talks about the ecstasy as well as the terror of a returned lover. You know it won’t work out. All your friends and family know it won’t work out. But you just can’t stop, “Mathilde est revenue!”

And just to finish out, here is “Madeleine.” This is just about the delusion of love. The narrator has scheduled meetings (according to him) with Madeleine, but she always stands him up. The song ends with him looking forward to tomorrow where he will take Madeleine to the movies. He plans to tell her that he loves her. He knows she will like that.

Happy birthday Jacques Brel!

Last year, there was a whole media dust up about Pastor Alois Bell who refused an 18% autograt (automatic tip on large parties), writing on the receipt, “I give God 10 percent why do you get 18?” It was an unfortunate incident that the Pastor later apologized for. But there is a larger question here, which Karen Swallow Prior grapples with in her Christianity Today article, Why Are Christians Such Bad Tippers?

On one level, it is a puzzler. In general, Christians are generous; they give more money to charity than non-Christians. But they seem to be lousy tippers. The truth is, we don’t know that Christians are bad tippers. The anecdotal evidence we have suggests only that ostentatiously Christian people are bad tippers. You know, the Matthew 6:5 Christians, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.” Do we know if the more reasonable Christians are bad tippers too?

Another question is whether the ostentatious Christians are generous in charitable giving. Maybe they’re not. But I suspect they are, for the same reason that they make a big show of proclaiming their faith after church at the local Denny’s. Prior thinks this has to do with Gnosticism and the way many Christians separate the holy from the profane. Giving to starving children in Africa is part of the holy, so they are generous. But tipping a server is part of the profane, so they aren’t.

That strikes me as a bit too tidy. I think there a couple of things going on. One is the “Hitler was nice to his dog” effect. The server right in front of you is very real and so complicated and flawed. But the starving African child is an ideal: perfect and pure. And if humans can come up with reasons not to part with money, they will! I think to a large extent, that explains the paradox of Christians giving to Good Causes but not to the good cause of a server making rent.

But this doesn’t explain why these Christians tip worse relative to others. Here I think you have to look at the kind of people who are ostentatious Christians. They are also: conservative Christians. Just in the simplest of terms, these people may not tip for the same reason they won’t go to see Noah: they don’t want to give money to those kind of people. But in this case, it’s even worse because there are all kinds of issues of class and identity. If servers were the right kind of people, they wouldn’t be servers. Servers tend to be younger and female; they really ought to be married. There are all kinds of extra reasons there to hang onto your cash.

In general, people tip based upon how they want to be seen. Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs doesn’t tip because he sees himself as smarter than the bleeding hearts who voluntarily throw away money they don’t have to. I tip well because being a bleeding heart and ostentatiously generation is important to my self image. And I think that everyone fits somewhere in that continuum. But Christians can see themselves as not giving money to servers because they are saving it to give it to more deserving recipients.

Either way, tipping doesn’t actually say anything about you other than whether you are a total jerk to the people who serve you. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, but even servers have bills to pay.”

Dan Mathewson wrote a really interesting article over at Religion Dispatches, Noah, Cosmos Controversies Not About Biblical Literalism. In it, he traces the rise of the conservative Christian movement to the early 20th century. At that time, Christianity had to deal with new scientific discoveries—most especially evolution by natural selection. The liberals decided to make peace with science and see in the Bible certain spiritual truths. The conservatives glommed on to Biblicism. This is the idea that all Christians must believe certain biblical truths, starting with: “the inerrancy of the bible; the virgin birth; the substitutionary atonement; the historicity of the miracles; the second coming.”

So Mathewson sees the outrage over Noah to be simply based on the fact that the film’s director is an atheist. His approach to it was not any different than had he made a film about Snow White. It’s just a story like any other. There is much to what Mathewson said. But I think he is giving a bit too much credit to the Biblicists.

I once had a terrible roommate. He was a violent drunk who brought prostitutes home. But you could not talk about religion with him because even the slightest suggestion that Christianity was not the One True Way would provoke a violent response, whether he was drunk or not. And this was from a guy who never went to church. For him, Christianity was not a religion so much as a cultural signifier. It was what gave his life meaning.

This is what’s going on with the Biblicists. To them, the entire modern world is crashing in on them threatening to destroy the meaning in their lives. But notice in the list above that the first item is “inerrancy of the bible.” This is why people use “fundamentalist” or “literalist” as shorthand for these people. But what they are, above all, are cultural conservatives who are afraid of any information that might disturb their very stable beliefs.

Are there biblical literalists who are not Biblicists? Mathewson certainly implies that there are. But I don’t recall running into such people. This is why I have noted in the past that they are conservatives first and Christians second. A non-Biblicist literalist would not fall into that category. But instead, all we see are a bunch of Christians for whom the religion is primarily a cultural signifier.

In the end, there is no real surprise in the reaction of conservative Christians against the film. People make instant decisions and then rationalize them. I can assure you that I would have a very hard time liking a movie by Dick Cheney. I would focus on everything that was wrong with it. And I would minimize everything that was good. That’s just the way humans are. For Christian conservatives, Noah was just a film made by one of those people who want to destroy God. So of course they hate it.

H/T: Ed Kilgore