Welcome to the first debate for the Republican presidential nomination! It is the “Voters First Forum” put on by the New Hampshire Union Leader and hosted by Jack Heath of WGIR-AM Radio in Manchester, New Hampshire. But it isn’t on the television machine. You will have to go over to C-SPAN to watch it. Luckily, I’ve provided you with this handy link: 2016 Republican Candidates Voters First Forum.

Sadly, Donald Trump will not be taking part. And Mike Huckabee had a prior engagement to drown some kittens. But 14 of the others will be: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, and Scott Walker.

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Last week, I published a quote from an academic paper, Poor Little Rich Kids? The Determinants of the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth. The researchers looked at the economic standing of adopted children and compared it to that of their adopted parents. The reason they did this was to take genetics out of the equation. A normal thing that apologists for economic inequality claim is, “Of course the children of the rich are also rich; they are smarter and harder working…” The fact that this line of reasoning has a very strong connection to racist arguments over the centuries is generally ignored in polite debate. But if that’s the truth — if it is all about genetics — then adopted children of the rich should not end up rich.

What the researchers found was that environmental factors were far greater than any genetic factors. And this was true before looking at inheritance. It’s even more after inheritance. But the factors of wealth — like not growing up in a stressful environment, having enough to eat, getting a good education — have a huge effect on the children. So it isn’t genetics. And we really need to get past this idea. Like I noted before, it is ultimately a racist argument that one could have heard coming from any eugenicist a hundred years ago.

Given this background, an article by Anne Kim at Washington Monthly has a very big punch, The Myth of Mobility. It summarizes a paper by two Stanford researcher, Pablo Mitnik and David Grusky. They looked at the income of parents back in the late 1980s — when the children were in their late teens. Then they compared these data with the income of the children 20 years later. Their conclusion: “children raised in low-income families will probably have very low incomes as adults, while children raised in high-income families can anticipate very high incomes as adults.” Welcome to the American dream!

Of course, many other people who have looked at the data have found the same thing. And it goes along with our intuitions. The people you went to high school with are doing about as well as you are. You probably work with the kind of people you went to school with. If you grew up poor, you probably aren’t working with many people who grew up rich. And vise versa. In fact, the way our society works is so well known that it is surprising that people even study it. I’m glad they do, of course.

But studies won’t matter. Conservatives are dedicated to maintaining the status quo — as though the way things are is the way that God intended them to be. (It isn’t surprising that modern conservatives are overwhelmingly believers in one of the Abrahamic religions.) The idea that the current ordering of society is more or less random would destroy their view of the world. And they aren’t going to give that up without a major fight. But that’s why I think we need to really focus on the genetics issue. Because no level of inequality is bad if it is the case that the winners are simply that much better than the losers. If Mitt Romney really is 400 times as smart and 400 times as hard working as the average person, then maybe he does deserve to make 400 times as much as the rest of us. But we know that isn’t true. And we have actual data to prove it. Conservatives can ignore it, if they wish. But we should be shoving it in their faces at every opportunity.

Update (2 August 2015 3:52 pm)

That’s right: an update that is before the publication date. I’m three days of publishing ahead. But in the meantime, Mark Thoma came out with a blog post that combined the same two articles. So damn him to hell!

I’ve never understood the outrage that erupted over Helen Thomas’ comments about Palestine. That’s not exactly surprising, because I’ve never understood a lot of thing that people get outraged about. I think there is a lot of outrage for its own sake: people wanting to feel outraged so they purposefully misinterpret statements. When asked where the Jewish immigrants to the occupied lands should go, she said back to Russia or wherever they had come from. I think most people took this as some kind of reference to World War II or something. But I’m pretty sure she was referring to the Israeli government’s policy to push recent immigrants into these areas.

At this point, I have to admit to not being sure where I stand on Israel. I greatly admire Max Blumenthal, but I also think he’s a tad naive to think that just because Jews are doing so well in America that there is no need for Israel as a Jewish state. I have no problem at all believing that in ten or twenty years the conservative Christians could turn against American Jews. It could become as uncomfortable a place for Jews as it is for Muslims. So I think that I am still broadly supportive of Zionism.

But I don’t see why Zionism has to involve the oppression of Palestine. What’s more: this isn’t a fair fight. Israel has almost all of the power. So the fact that there hasn’t been a two state solution is because of one thing and one thing only: Israel doesn’t want it. But of course, it keeps a pretense up about it. And here in the United States, it is accepted. The same apologetics for racism here is applied to it there: if only the Palestinians were twice as good, then there would be a deal.

I read a heartbreaking story over the weekend, Ali Dawabsheh Was Killed Too Soon. It’s about an act of terrorism committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. They set fire to a Palestinian home, resulting in the death of Ali Dawabsheh, an 18-month old boy. Now, of course, everyone is outraged. And obviously, this does not speak to the way that “Jews are” any more than rocket attacks out of Palestine speaks to the way that “Palestinians are.” Just the same, it isn’t getting much coverage in the United States. We have narratives here! Palestinians are terrorists, not Israelis! And Israel is an Ally™. So that’s that.

Over at Vox, Max Fisher wrote, The Murder of Ali Dawabsheh Is a Direct and Predictable Consequence of Israel’s Occupation. He pointed out in his article, it doesn’t much matter that the Israeli government has condemned this attack without reservation. Its policies make this kind of thing inevitable, “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank empowers and abets settler extremists, who have been increasingly violent for years.” To put it bluntly, Israel hates such acts, but not enough to halt its expansion project into the West Bank.

The more I learn about the situation in Palestine, the worse it gets. Yes, the terrorists firing missiles into Israel are horrible. But they are also largely impotent. And the Israeli government is anything but. And so much that it does is designed to make the situation worse. Eventually, I can see myself getting to the point where I say, “Yes, the global Jewish community needs its own place where it can be safe; but just look at what they’ve done with it; it just isn’t worth it.” And I think younger people — like Max Blumenthal — are already there. If I were running Israel, I’d be really worried about that.

Last week, in the Bay Area, we have had endless coverage about a certain law enforcement officer who was killed on the job recently. I don’t want to mention his name or put in details. The man is dead and that is sad for his friends and family. But I didn’t know him. I had never heard of him before. And so I don’t care except in the sense that I don’t like to see people murdered. But his death and the preparations for the funeral and then the funeral itself were given blanket coverage. Oh what a great man! Well, maybe.

But here’s the thing: sometimes drug counselors get murdered. But we don’t have week long remembrances of them. We don’t turn them into heroes who make local newscasters tear up on screen. If it isn’t a police officer, it is just news. But if it is a police officer, then we have to pretend that Hector himself was slain out their on the mean streets. And I have a real problem with that. It goes quite a bit beyond the very real problem of minimizing all the other senseless murder victims. It makes the abuse of our criminal justice system that much more acceptable.

While making dinner the night of the funeral, the local news did a segment on all the people — 5,000 of them! — who came to the memorial. The point of it was all the generic people who had been touched by this officer. But there apparently couldn’t find any people who had been touched by him. Instead, it was people who had shown up because the whole thing was getting pushed in the media. And their comments showed this, right up to one guy who talked about how dangerous police work is and how they don’t know if they are coming home alive when they go to work. (This is not true.)

A big part of the problem we have with policing is that the current generation of law enforcement thinking is convinced that protecting the community is a secondary goal of police work. The number one thing that the police must do — as far as they are concerned — is to protect themselves. This is why tasers must be used at the slightest provocation. This is why civilians who don’t show enough “respect” must be arrested — and often brutalized as well. This is why every angry confrontation becomes an opportunity for officers to fear for their lives.

But all week as I have seen the lead-up to this funeral and all the coverage of the great tragedy of his death, I’ve noticed something that no one is covering: it’s unusual. The majority of police officers who die on the job, do so in traffic accidents. Thus far this year, there are almost as many health related deaths (mostly heart attacks) as shooting deaths.

I suspect that this big media deal will be seen by most people as indicative of the wonderfulness of the dead officer. But it is really just that the form of his death is fairly unusual. There have only been 17 shooting deaths of police officers this year. That’s a 0.003% chance of death in any given year — not that much more likely than anyone in the US is to die in a car crash. But the big deal made out of this officer’s death will push the idea that it is common and that police work is very dangerous. And that idea is very dangerous for our society.

Over at Wonk Blog, Max Ehrenfreund wrote an article that is close to my heart, Why Dentists Are So Darn Rich. This is following from the lion hunting dentist. But I’ve long been aware of just how much money dentists make. I used to manage a dental office. And actually, I really liked it. I find dentistry fascinating — and it is really important. But it is also a scam.

A big reason that dentists make a lot of money is because they are small business owners. When I was working, a half hour cleaning cost $80, and the hygienists who did all the work got paid $45 per hour or $22.50 per patient — so that’s about one quarter of the cost. Let’s assume an overhead of 100%, which is high. The dentist/owner make $70 for each hour that the hygienist is working. Imagine if the dentist had three hygienists working — as some do.

But it is also true that dentists simply don’t compete with each other. Consider a crown. We charged $850 for a molar crown. The lab charged us $100 for it. The dentist normally had an assistant who made $25 per hour. The dentist needed to do about a half hour of work to prepare for the crown and take the impression. Putting it in could take as long as 15 minutes, but usually took less than five. But let’s make the math easy and say the whole thing took an hour. So the total cost was $125, which we will double with our 100% overhead. So the total cost was $250 for the crown, with a $600 profit. For one hour of work.

Ehrenfreund discussed the effect of insurance on dental costs. But I don’t think this actually has anything to do with it. Insurers pay as much as dentists charge. And dentists charge as much as they do because they are used to a certain standard of living. And that standard is very high. The truth of the matter is that I’ve known a lot of dentists. Some were really good at their jobs. Some I would never let work on me. But none of them was particularly brilliant. I think anyone could be taught to be a decent dentist.

The problem with dentistry is the problem with capitalism. I get so tired of hearing conservatives (libertarians especially) glibly talk about the efficiency of markets. There certainly are such things. I have little doubt that the corn futures market is as close to a Platonic ideal as we are ever going to get. But when we are talking about classes and the people who make them up, it is a very different matter. People often show surprise that billionaires continue to collect money. I’m surprised that they are surprised. Just like most poor people think they deserve to at least not starve to death, the billionaires believe they deserve ever greater wealth. It’s human nature.

So why do dentists make so much money? Because that’s how much money dentists make. The dentist I worked for had a brother who was a dentist. And they both had a father who was a dentist. The father built the practice, and the sons split it between them when he retired. You know: meritocracy! But the point is that no one goes off to dental school without knowing the kind of money that they are going to make. So sure: in an actual competitive market, cleanings could be $40 and crowns could be $300.[1] But they aren’t going to be because all the dentists — not the patients — have decided that they won’t work for that. And they have all kinds of laws and a great big lobbying group to make sure that they don’t have to.

[1] In fact, if you go to Mexico, where you will get US trained dentists, you will pay less than this. They have a far more free market in dental care than we have here in the US.

There was a really good Jeet Heer article over at New Republic, National Review’s Bad Conscience. It brings to mind my favorite William Buckley quote, “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!'” It’s so foreign to me. It would be one thing if history were making us worse, but it is actually making us better. We are, for example, far less violent than we used to be. What Buckley spent his whole life trying to stop was allowing the weak in society to get their fair share of the fruits of society. And that’s a pretty vile thing to stand athwart.

Heer’s article discusses the long history of Buckley’s magazine National Review and its’ love of fascism. We aren’t talking Nazism here. Even they understood that was a bridge too far. But when it came to Italian fascism, the magazine was fairly apologetic. And it was downright keen for Francisco Franco — publishing two laudatory articles about him when he died. This has long been an issue for me. In modern America, fascism is now seen bad exclusively because of the Nazi’s final solution. There is relatively little knowledge of how fascism was a rotten ideology. But that’s hardly surprising in a country that supports a lot of fascist ideals.

But most of the article is dedicated to the way that National Review, while not pro-Nazi, was anti-anti-Nazi. It goes into some depth about how the magazine constantly criticized the “lurid extravaganza” of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. So the narrative was always: the Nazis were terrible, but these Jews are culpable because they can’t just forgive and forget. Really, Heer quotes one complaint about the Eichmann trial resulting in “bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive…”

What’s interesting is that this is the same way that National Review approached the civil rights struggle. But I think you can just use the “one generation” rule of thumb. Conservatives are always one generation behind history. It makes the whole “yelling ‘Stop!'” thing nonsense. What it looks more like is a petulant child who makes every possible excuse for not doing something. World War II ended in 1945, so it took National Review roughly until 1965 to get over its Nazi apologetics. Of course, it took Buckley two generations to apologize for all his racist publishing. And I’m not sure if National Review is even now over its fondness for non-Nazi fascism.

But the whole thing is fascinating in the sense that National Review’s past history of fascism apologetics and even love are behind it’s continued use of “fascism” to slander liberals. There is, for example, Kevin D Williamson’s recent claim in the magazine that Bernie Sander is a national socialist. And then, of course, “Jonah Goldberg authored a lengthy tome in 2008, Liberal Fascism.” But this isn’t a sign of conservatives trying to stop history. It is them being so devoid of any ideas — or intellectual integrity — that they just use their own sins and project them onto the other side. It used to be fine to call liberals socialists. But that word just doesn’t have the bite it once did. So we are fascists. Even though it was never liberals who claimed that Adolf Eichmann was being treated too harshly.

Steve M Over at No More Mister Nice Blog brought my attention to an interesting story, I Guess You Don’t Have to Be a Cop to Charge People With “Contempt of Cop.” Apparently, back in June, a woman whose friend had just been shot got into a little argument with a 911 dispatcher. The dispatcher asked, “Is he breathing?” The caller said, “He is barely breathing. How many times do I have to fucking tell you?!” At that point, the dispatcher said, “Okay, you know what ma’am? You can deal with it yourself. I’m not going to deal with this, okay.” And hung up. The friend died.

The point here is not that the dispatcher is a horrible person. For one thing, he didn’t completely abandon the caller. He had already called an ambulance, which arrived at the scene less than five minutes later. But clearly he was young and poorly trained. But his attitude speaks to a larger issue about public servants who demand to be treated with some conception of dignity that they think they deserve.

How the dispatcher acted on the phone was very much the sort of thing I would expect from customer service with AT&T. Well, worse than that. They put up with a whole lot worse than this. The caller said only a single even slightly offensive thing and the dispatcher decided that he had had enough. But in this case, the caller is watching her friend die. And the dispatcher thinks that his discomfort at being yelled at trumps that. It’s amazing.

But as Steve M noted, when the police go off in cases like this, they are always allowed to make the “threat” argument. Or as I put, “They were vewy vewy afwaid.” Clearly the dispatcher did not feel threatened in this case. And in most cases with police officers, this is all that is going on: they feel that they aren’t receiving the proper amount of respect. But whereas the dispatcher just abandoned the target of his anger, the police attack.

The best recent example of this is Sandra Bland. When Officer Brian Encinia pulls her over, he could just give her the ticket and move on. But he decided instead to make her bend to his will. It’s all about him getting the respect that he thinks he deserves. He most clearly never feels threatened. In fact, when Bland wouldn’t get out of the car, he went in after her. He didn’t call for backup. It’s all about some twisted notion of respect.

The question is why it is that people in these positions feel that others should be so deferential to them. After all, they generally interact with people under the worst of circumstances. Both the dispatcher and the Sandra Bland arresting officer got their start in fire departments. So I don’t think this is really about police in general. I think it is about the nature of their inbred — male dominated — cultures. It is a conservative culture: us against them; the good against the bad. So it is not at all surprising that this attitude sneaks in and they end up being far less professional than some minimum wage hack at AT&T.

But I would hope that cases like this would cause the society to stop apologizing for police brutality and murder with the facile claim, “Well, they have such dangerous jobs.” No they don’t! And even if they did, cases like Sandra Bland and Eric Garner and Walter Scott show that “danger” is not what these guys are on about. It is some notion of respect that they think they are owed. And if it comes down to it, they think it is all right to kill for it. But as a society, we need to stop thinking that this unconscionable violence is about public safety.