Dean Baker has written a very interesting review of Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I mean “interesting” in a neutral way: it is notable to see Baker so optimistic. It is probably due to his iconoclastic tendencies. He just has to take a contrary position. And based upon the review, he was forced to be at least somewhat optimistic, because Piketty’s book sounds like a real downer!

Of course, that doesn’t mean he is wrong. His thesis is that based upon the historical trends, income inequality will get ever worse. Piketty’s work with Emmanuel Saez on the income distribution of the very richest people are key to this. Baker has nothing but praise for this work. His problem is with Piketty’s proposed solutions such as a wealth tax. Baker thinks these are very unlikely to happen, although Piketty is in agreement on that. Baker, however, sees politically viable solutions as he documented in his last solo book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. These involve things like limiting intellectual property rights and taxing financial transactions.

All of these ideas are really good, and The End of Loser Liberalism is free for your phone, so you really should go and read it. I’m entirely in agreement with Baker that these are incredibly good ideas. Where I differ from him is in that I don’t see limiting patent protections as distinctly more possible than a wealth tax. For example, Baker wrote:

It sounds nice: divide and conquer. But I don’t see this past time when some segment of capitalists sided with progressives. I think the times that he is talking about owed a huge debt to strong unions. There is nothing like that on which to build. What’s more, there seems to be more solidarity among the rich than there ever has been. And there is less among the poor. “Divide and conquer” is working, just not against the rich.

The big problem that I see is that we simply don’t live in a democracy. A financial transaction tax is very popular with actual voters. But it isn’t on offer from any major politician. That’s because before any people get to vote, the rich get to vote on who the people get to vote for. No politician with Bake ideas, much less Piketty ideas, will ever get the money to be a viable candidate. And given that I think that, I guess I’m even more pessimistic than Piketty.

Update (13 March 2014 2:05 pm)

Eduardo Porter wrote a great sorta review over at The New York Times, A Relentless Widening of Disparity in Wealth. In it he sums up something that Piketty said, “The holders of wealth, hardly a powerless bunch, will oppose any such move, even if that’s what is needed to preserve capitalism against the populist impulses of those left behind.” This is an argument I’ve been making a long time: the rich are shortsighted and so greedy they will never give up a little to keep their wealth safe. Look at what’s happened with their spokesmen: the Republican Party. At a time when the rich are doing better than ever, the demands are more extreme than ever. It’s like they want a revolution.

Update (13 March 2014 2:32 pm)

Eduardo Porter also has an interview at The New York Times that is really worth reading, Q&A: Thomas Piketty on the Wealth Divide.

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article, Pena Ajena! It was based upon an article, 25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist In English. The title of my article refers to a Mexican Spanish phrase. Literally it means “grief of others,” but idiomatically it means, “The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation.” I love this stuff, because you not only learn interesting things about language, you also learn something about cultures. For example, I think it is telling that the Mexicans give us “pena ajena” while the Germans give us “backpfeifengesicht” (a face in need of being punched) and “schadenfreude” (the pleasure felt at others’ pain).

It turns out that there is a whole website for this, Better Than English. And it is great. For one thing, the definitions are generally better than one expects from such websites (for example, Urban Dictionary). Its definition of “pena ajena” is, “Shame experienced on behalf of another person, even though that person may not experience shame.” I love the addition that the subject may not be experiencing the shame.

But it goes further than just the definitions. The comments are invaluable. For example, I learned that there is a similar Portuguese phrase, “vergonha alheia,” literally meaning “shame others.” And a different Spanish phrase, “verguenza ajena,” which literally means the same thing. And even the Germans who I unfairly vilify have such a word, as reported by commenter Daniel:

And then commenter Chris sends us to a word coined by Terence McKenna: “Fardow.” He defines it as, “The embarrassment you feel when someone else fucks up and you just happen to be there…”

The website is set up as a blog, and there seems to be something new there every couple of days. Unlike the increasingly useless Urban Dictionary, it isn’t a free-for-all. So you aren’t going to end up fifty slightly different definitions for the same word because the users can’t be bothered to check if a word is already in the database. Along these same lines, the comments are generally very good—generally discussing the words or phrases in other languages. I didn’t see any trolling or other obnoxious behavior.

For a word freak, the site is a whole lot of fun. I just learned the Basque word “Erdera.” It means, “Any language that is not Basque.” Now that is something you would think Americans would have a word for!

H/T: Andrea English

David Weigel continues to be essential reading every day, but “bleeding heart libertarianism” seems to have morphed into old fashioned non-crazy conservatism these days. That’s not too surprising, given that libertarians are, regardless of the number of holes in their hearts, conservatives. It is all based upon the conceit of their personal power and the delusion that they aren’t entirely dependent upon their communities. See, for example, Weigel’s total whitewash of Paul Ryan’s recent racist remarks, Paul Ryan Accused of Racism for Suggesting That There’s Endemic Poverty in Inner Cities. So I wasn’t shocked when Weigel seemed to take a certain delight in Alex Sink’s defeat to David Jolly in the Florida 13th District special election.

But that doesn’t mean that he isn’t as insightful as ever. Yesterday, he wrote, Hey, Democrats! This Election Will Make You Feel Less Sad About FL-13. Actually, the article itself is a confused jumble. But his point is clear enough: it’s the turnout, stupid. As he noted:

And then he goes on to document a number of elections (Not one!) where the Democrats invested in turnout and won. We liberals have long known this. In fact, I have long argued that turnout is the only thing that matters and that Democrats should stop going after what are mostly mythical “swing” voters.

What did strike me in the article, however, was the tone that Weigel set in talking about this. And this is largely the reason for my tone here. For example, he wrote, “They won… But barely.” It’s a though he is trying to make a larger point that his Republican friends aren’t that unpopular. But they are.

What’s more, he seems to be implying that that Democrats aren’t aware that they have an difficult task getting out their voters in off year and special elections. I would say that the Democrats are doing well when they even make such races competitive. (Weigel pooh-poohs this idea as it relates to the FL-13 election.) All I can think is that Weigel is falling for the recent libertarian rhetoric coming out of the Republican Party these days. And all I can say is, “Good luck with that!” Libertarian rhetoric leads to old fashioned anti-individual conservatism.

But the bottom line is clear enough. The Democrats have to spend a lot more money on turnout. That is the key to Democratic electoral success. And that should be clear to everyone, even libertarians. Because when I was a libertarian, I was painfully aware just how unpopular my philosophy was. It’s nice to now have a political philosophy where I cheer for more people to vote.

It started yesterday.

All of the YouTube embedded video code that I copied over had a extra closing parenthesis mark after it as follows. (It’s in red!)

<iframe width=”400″ height=”225″ src=”//youtube…”>&lt/iframe>)

Normally, I would have been concerned. But I have this problem of keeping 50 or more Chrome tabs open at all times. This often causes a number a bugs and so yesterday I found myself unable to run any YouTube videos in Chrome. But I didn’t want to have to deal with restarting Chrome and having to put 50 or more tabs back up. So I started to use Internet Explorer for all my videos. IE is clunky, but it is robust.

So when I started seeing this error, I figured it was an IE bug. But last night, my system forced a shutdown. I knew it was coming and I didn’t intercept it. It gave me a time limit, I missed it, the system rebooted. It happens. Thankfully, Chrome is really good at remembering where it was, even with six windows and, as I said, 50 or more tabs open. And when it came back up, Chrome was displaying videos properly, so I closed IE.

But the embed problem was still there! So I went over to Web Pro News and found an article, YouTube Embed Code Has a Weird Parenthesis at The End. There are a lot of people around who have noticed the problem. And Google has been alerted. But here we are after two complete days with no resolution.

Maybe we should change Google’s motto to be, “Don’t be lazy.”

Update (12 March 2014 10:44 pm)

I noticed that Digby’s videos today have that telltale ) after them. See, for example: Very Serious Clowns.

On this day in 1922, the great Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac was born. I am not a fan. In fact, I absolutely can’t stand to read him. Yet he was an extremely important writer. And (unfortunately) he inspired generations of bad writers. When I was young and foolish and went to poetry readings, half the writers (almost always men) wrote nothing more than bad Jack Kerouac.

I understand the appeal of this. Kerouac’s work seems real and filled with simple truth. And to some extent, I suppose it is. But it is Kerouac’s voice and it speaks of his experiences. If it is true of anyone since, then they are very boring people who have nothing to say that is worth listening to.

Wikipedia was kind enough to provide an excerpt from On the Road that pretty much sums up why I can’t read him:

It’s probably the 1960s that destroyed Kerouac as a going artistic concern. I don’t doubt that future generations will be able to transcend this connection. But for me, I can’t read it without thinking of every idiot hippy I’ve ever seen.

Kerouac is more important in how he inspired Burroughs and Ginsberg, both of whom totally out distanced him. We will have to wait a hundred years to know for sure. But they are the Holy Trinity of the Beat Generation, and I admire them all.

Happy birthday Jack Kerouac!

Digby posted a Quote of the Day that made me burst out laughing. It isn’t actually the quote that was funny. It is how she juxtaposed it with Lee Atwater’s infamous “nigger, nigger, nigger” quote. For those that don’t know it, Atwater gave an interview back in 1981 where he discussed the evolution of racial politics. He said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff…”

Well, as we all know, Paul Ryan now “cares” deeply about the poor. He put out his 204-page poverty report and openly campaigned against those evil liberals who want to fill children’s stomachs with food and thus deprive them of a top rate soul. But this morning on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, Ryan said:

This reminds me of the new The Young Turks segment, Is It Racist? In a word: yes!

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s just finish Mr Atwater’s quote:

It is much more abstract! It just isn’t any less racist.

I actually think that Paul Ryan is actively a racist. He seems like an Ayn Rand true believer. Yet he doesn’t make the Ayn Rand argument: selfishness is good and all that crap. Instead, he makes the argument that is coded to sound okay to moderates but which simultaneously pushes all those tribal and racist buttons. So I don’t think he necessarily holds the “screw the poor” opinions because of any personal racial animus. But he sure is willing to knowingly use coded racist rhetoric to reach his preferred Ayn Rand dystopian future. And that is racist.

I am fond of quoting the opening of A Tale of Two Cities to note that it is always the best and worst of times. But there is one way that I am particularly focused on that modern America is the worst of times. That is the overwhelming influence of the power elite on economic policy. Right now, there is a huge push to tighten the money supply. The net result of this will be to stop even the modest economic recovery we have going. And why do we supposedly need to do this? Because the inflation rate might—Might!—tick up a bit past two percent.

Consider Evan Soltas. In Bloomberg View a couple of days ago, he argued that the economy is nearly at full employment. “The strongest piece of evidence is that far too many people are choosing to leave their jobs in search of better ones—what economists dryly call ‘quits’—for there to be much slack left in the economy and, in particular, in the labor market.” But Dean Baker countered this last night, Getting to Full Employment By Lowering the Goalpost. He noted that although the “quit rate” is up a bit, it is still well below the rate at the bottom of the last recession.

The point here is that the power elites are running around looking for any reason at all to raise interest rates. They’ve never cared about high levels of unemployment. But as long as inflation was running at under two percent, they couldn’t really get away with calling for higher interest rates. Not that many didn’t do just that, but it wasn’t mainstream. Now we have a situation where people are looking at the “quit rate” and screaming inflation, despite the fact that the employment situation looks like this:

This morning, Paul Krugman countered a different attack, Wages of Fear. In this case, the folks who are worried about inflation rising to a reasonable level are arguing that wages are rising and that spells disaster. But as Krugman notes: we are barely seeing any rise in wages and what we are seeing is only quite recent. But more to the point:

Sadly, I have an answer for Krugman. For the people trying to sell the “overheating economy” line, nothing is wrong with rising wages. It is just another plausible sounding argument to justify doing what they want: keeping inflation low. Remember, this is the rentier class. Inflation can’t get too low. The lower the inflation rate, the more their current rents are worth. These people aren’t concerned about the economy generally—only how it affects their particular form of wealth.

Notice that these people can go around and lobby for bad economic policy and no one raises an eyebrow. But the moment the working classes complain about a lack of jobs and income inequality, well, that’s class warfare. It’s maddening. A good economy helps everyone. A bad economy only helps the already rich. This really shouldn’t be a difficult choice. But the fact that even council members of small towns are dependent upon rich benefactors means that their interests take precedence over everything else. And that is class warfare. They’re killing the rest of us.

The Young Turks has introduced a new segment in their show, “Is It Racist?” And I think their premiere segment is great because it brings up a really important issue. Minnesota State Representative Pat Garofalo tweeted out the following:

And the question is, of course, “Is it racist?” This one isn’t even close: it’s racist. As Cenk says in the following video, “It’s a dog whistle I can hear.” Indeed it is!

Garofalo has defended his tweet by saying that he was not talking about blacks (that make three-quarters of the NBA), but rather the athletes who feel they are above the law, blah, blah, blah. That’s to be expected. That’s the point of a dog whistle: you can always say, “I didn’t mean that! You are the racist for thinking I did!” It’s just perfect for the hateful. It’s what allows Ann Coulter to say things designed to offend and then pretend to be offended when others don’t find her humorous.

What really bothered me was what Democratic Representative Dan Schoen said, “It was the wrong thing to tweet. Do I think Pat is a racist? No I don’t think that.” This is one of the problems with our modern thinking on racism. Schoen thinks that Garofalo isn’t a racist because he’s well spoken, wears a suit, and doesn’t use the N-word. But Garofalo not only is a racist—he’s the face of modern racism. His tweet is how its done by sophisticated racists.

See what the Turks have to say about it. It’s good and I look forward to more segments.

Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) wrote a great article, The Good Kind of Protesters—and the Bad Kind. It looked at the coverage of protest movements in Ukraine and Venezuela. And then compared it to coverage of Palestinian protest movements. Now you know that I am sympathetic to the current Venezuelan government. While they certainly could have done a better job, they’ve been infinitely better than the pro-corporate right wing movement that the United States government prefers.

But the point isn’t who is right or who is wrong. It is that the United States media might as well be controlled by the government. If the government is an ally of a country, then any protest movement against it is painted by our media as invalid. On the other hand, if our government considers a country an enemy, then any protest movement against it is portrayed as great, regardless of it nature. So in Palestine, peaceful protesters who get killed by Israeli forces just don’t matter. But in Venezuela, violent protesters are portrayed as though they were Thomas Paine himself.

Consider Leopoldo Lopez, the man who now seems to be the leader of the violent opposition. Based on his name being mentioned 77 times in diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, he seems like a despot in waiting. What’s more, these recent protests seem more like an internal struggle in the opposition than they do anything that has to do with the current government. This seems to have been Lopez’s way to leap to the top of the movement. Yet look at how Karla Zabludovsky of Newsweek portrayed him in the article, Leopoldo Lopez Gives Venezuela the Image of a Revolutionary Who Has It All:

Personally, I think that if Ms Zabludovsky has a crush on Lopez, she should keep it to herself. But the truth is that this kind of reporting is standard. The US government is against the current democratically elected government in Venezuela, so all the good “independent” journalists in the United States are hot on the trail for any story that will push that narrative.

As for the reporting in Palestine, that’s more an issue of just not caring. There are important nonviolent protest movements going on in the occupied territory. But the only time they get any coverage in the mainstream press is when some clueless reporter hears of one and writes what has become a genre article, “Why don’t we see this more of this?” As Patrick O’Connor notes in the Electronic Intifada article, The invisibility of Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance in The New York Times:

This is much bigger than these countries. Our media constantly push the narrative of the power elite. It has allowed our entire political system to move far to the right even while the people, if anything, have moved left. A critical media never would have allowed that. But since they’ve behaved as though everything is just fine—that whatever the millionaires and billionaires say speaks for the rest of us—the people do not realize just how out of kilter our government has become.

On this day, there are so many people I could have chosen to write about. There is the least interesting of the Three Stooges. There are two men who have been highly effective at making the United States a far worse country. And there are lots of good film directors, writers, and composers. But in the end, the choice was easy.

On this day in 1811, the great mathematician Urbain Le Verrier was born. He’s my kind of guy because he made great discoveries in astronomy without ever having to leave him room. What’s more, unlike other great mathematicians, I completely understand his work because it is mostly just celestial mechanics. He is best known for having predicted that the planet Neptune existed based upon discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus. (Note: another great mathematician, John Couch Adams, did the same work at roughly the same time.)

Le Verrier was also the first person to note problems with the Newtonian calculation of the orbit of Mercury. It was thought that this might be due to another planet as was the case with Uranus. But the real reason for the discrepancies had to wait almost 50 years after Le Verrier’s death when Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. But Le Verrier’s calculations were the basis of one of the first tests of the theory.

Here is Richard Feynman talking about both of Le Verrier’s discoveries:

Happy birthday Urbain Le Verrier!