Why Scientists Are Overwhelmingly Liberal

Posted on by
11

National Review: Smarter than ThouThis morning, Paul Krugman wrote, Anti-Intellectualism That Dares Not Speak Its Name. It’s about the anti-intellectual bent of the modern conservative movement. In particular, he’s interested in National Review‘s really offensive cover story, “Smarter than Thou.” The subtitle is, “Neil deGrasse Tyson and America’s Nerd Problem. Of all sources, it is particularly sad coming from National Review, because whatever else you can say about its founder, William F Buckley Jr was not anti-intellectual. But while I would agree that in terms of dog whistle racial appeals, this is your father’s Republican Party—in terms of facts, this is not your father’s Republican Party. It is now a postmodern party where things like facts and competence don’t matter and reality is whatever we (they) say it is.

Krugman pointed me to a 2009 Pew Research poll of the politics of scientists. And they found that as a group, scientists are quite liberal. The report says:

Most scientists identify as Democrats (55%), while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. Among the public, there are far fewer self-described Democrats (35%) and far more Republicans (23%). Overall, 52% of the public identifies as Democratic or leans Democratic, while 35% identifies as Republican or leans Republican.

Majorities of scientists working in academia (60%), for non-profits (55%) and in government (52%) call themselves Democrats, as do nearly half of those working in private industry (47%).

That’s very interesting in a number of ways. One is that the “independents” break 81% (26÷32) to the Democrats. Also: this isn’t just a question of scientists working in academia or government. The numbers for scientists working in private industry are 47% Democrat, 10% Republican, and 37% independent. If we assume the overall partitioning of private industry scientists is the same as it is for the independents (as it was for scientists overall), the independents break 80 percentage points (87%) for the Democrats. That gives a total of private industry scientists of 82% Democrats and 16% Republicans.[1] So no matter how you slice it, scientists are overwhelmingly Democratic.

The question is why this would be. Krugman offers, “One simple explanation would be that current Republican doctrine really is anti-science and anti-intellectual, and that scientists are responding to that.” But I actually think this is only a small part of it. Everyone knows the John Stuart Mill quote, “I did not mean that conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any honorable gentleman will question it.” This implies what we see in the polling data. Scientists are on average smarter and given that the overall population breaks about 50-50 conservative-liberal, scientists would break liberal.

But I think it is even more fundamental than that. It’s about the way that scientists (and for that matter, artists) look at the world. They are, in the broadest sense of the word, liberal. They are open to new ideas. They want to be able to see things from different perspectives and this makes them value empathy if not making them actually empathic. On a policy level there isn’t that much difference between Democrats and Republicans. What is really different is the way the two parties talk about the world and the Democratic way is far more open minded and empathic.

Regardless, if I were a conservative, I would be embarrassed about this. I wouldn’t be mocking scientists. And of course, in the past, they have not. It is just that now, the conservative movement is utterly dependent on conservative Christians—so dependent that they wouldn’t even be as competitive as the Green Party without them. And, of course, the conservative movement is now committed to denying the well establish facts of climate science. So I guess they feel the need to lash out at science. But like most acts of the conservative movement generally and the Republican Party in particular, what they are doing is shortsighted. Not only is it not good for themselves—it is not good for the country. Conservatives claim to be very concerned about American hegemony. But the greatest threat to it is not that taxes are too high (they aren’t) or that welfare is too generous (it isn’t). The greatest threat is their campaign to vilify the most creative forces in our country for their short-term political and economic benefit.

[1] It is just a little algebra. Assume D is the percentage of Democrats, R the percentage of Republicans, and I the percentage of independents. Furthermore, ID is the Democratic leaning independents and IR are the Republican leaning independents. Thus, we get the following equation:

(D + ID) / (D + R + I) = ID / I

Everything is known but ID, so we get:

ID = D × I / ( D + R )

Note that there is a question of percentages and percentage points. The percentage of answers actually makes the Democratic tilt look even more extreme.

Elisha Gray’s 1887 Fax Machine

Posted on by
Reply

Elisha GrayOn this day in 1835, one of the greatest American inventors Elisha Gray was born. He’s most interesting because almost no one has ever heard of him. Despite this, he probably invented the telephone. We all know Alexander Graham Bell because, of course, of the company name. And there is the stupid little narrative of the first telephone transmission, “Mr Watson: come here; I want to see you.” That, at least, has the advantage over most stories we are told in grammar school of actually being true.

Bell, of course, got the patent first and so made all the money from the telephone. But it does bring up this issue that I have been grappling with for years. How should a society reward creative work when multiple people develop the same ideas at the same time? We see the same thing with airplanes between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss. I don’t like the system we have for many reasons, but this random aspect of it is quite troubling.

Don’t get the wrong idea, however. Gray was enormously successful. For example, he invented the fax machine. In 1887. Really! He called it the teleautograph, and it allowed handwriting to be transmitted via the telegraph. The company he founded would (through a circuitous route) went on to become Xerox. He was (like many inventors of the time) a telegraph man. It was, after all, the internet of its day. And being an electrical engineer, most of his work was based on the telegraph.

Another such application was the harmonic telegraph. It was a way of sending musical tones over a wire. It is one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first device that can be said to be a musical synthesizer, although it more along the lines of your grandmother’s old electric organ. But this was in 1875.

As I sit here, my partner is fighting with the hardware of our top secret amazing “I never thought we would be able to do this” invention. And as a result, we were not able to go out and do field tests today. I don’t mean to compare myself to Gray, and as much as I admire my partner, I don’t mean to compare him to Gray either. But we are doing this work outside our regular work. So I’m quite interested in the fact that Gray did his greatest work after he retired. The creative instinct in humans is strong. So I find it offensive when conservatives and neoliberals claim that if we don’t allow creative people to become billionaires, we won’t have progress. I think it is rather the opposite. Although I don’t question possible riches as being a motivator, without a certain level of financial stability, nothing creative gets done.

Happy birthday Elisha Gray!

Why Presidential Libraries “Work”

Posted on by
4

George W. BushFor another project, I’ve been reading a lot of books about Ronald Reagan. And you may remember that I wrote, Democrats Must Stop Believing the Reagan Myth. It was a reflection on Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth. I was arguing that the big problem was not so much that Republicans believed the myth but that Democrats did. In particular, our last two Democratic presidents have had nothing but good things to say about Reagan, even though he had a terrible effect on our country that we are still living with.

In the book, Bunch spends the end of it at the Reagan Presidential Library. And I noted, “It gave me an idea for a documentary. I could go to all of the presidential libraries and scoff at them. It would not be partisan at all, because I think they are all fakers.” Bill ClintonI was quite serious about this. I just hate the whole idea of presidents making a big deal about themselves—especially when so many other people already do. One of my great annoyances with the Democratic Party is how they make a big deal out of Clinton, when he doesn’t deserve credit for the good economy and he deserves an enormous amount of blame for destroying “welfare as we know it,” by which he meant simply, “welfare.”

Anyway, even as I was thinking that, Thomas Frank was more or less doing it. He recently went on a little trip where he visited the presidential libraries of the 41st, 42nd, and 43rd presidents. That’s right: two Bushes and a Clinton. It came with a typically zingy Frank title, The Animatronic Presidency: How Presidential Museums Become Propaganda Palaces, Whitewashing Bush’s Disasters and Clinton’s Failings. The most disturbing aspect of the libraries is how effective they seem to be. Frank noted:

This is closer to advertising than it is to scholarship. It can be persuasive. In fact, all three museums I visited were successful, to a certain degree, at convincing me to admire their subjects. I walked into each as the most skeptical possible visitor, ready to find fault and argue with the text. I didn’t particularly like any of the three presidents in question, although I voted for Bill Clinton and I once gave a lecture at the University of Arkansas’ nearby Clinton School of Public Service. But I left all three of these presidential shrines thinking the same thing of the man in question: Dang, he seems like a good guy. Despite all his screw-ups, he must have meant well.

Sometimes this warm feeling would stick to me all the way back to my hotel room, where I would finally wash it away with a cold six-pack.

And this is coming from Thomas Frank: a man I consider more cynical than I am. But I suspect he’s just doing that for effect. He’s making a point about just how appealingly the presidential libraries present their subjects. But there is something natural about the reaction, “Hell, he’s a good ol’ boy!” That’s especially true coming from a white man. That’s not to say that Frank is especially racist (I believe we are all racist in various ways). It is just that we’ve been trained to be forgiving of rich, educated white men, just as we are critical of poor, uneducated brown people. I’m sure if I had been there, subconsciously, I would have wanted to be merciful even though intellectually I want to be extremely judgmental. These men, above all, deserve it.

I think the presidential libraries are above all else exercises in this kind of propaganda: rich white men can’t be all bad. But Thomas Frank has always been reluctant to call out the essential racial nature of American politics. In What’s the Matter With Kansas? he specifically rejects the idea that white people vote Republican because of racism. But in this way, his analysis is very shallow. Of course the nice white Christian Kansans aren’t explicit racists. But that doesn’t mean that implicit racist appeals aren’t having a big effect on them. And in fact, I have no doubt that they are.

The truth is, I think Frank knows it too. The title of his article refers to an animatronic Lyndon Baines Johnson at his much more low-key presidential library. See if you notice:

See? He’s a good ol’ boy. You wouldn’t take away his welfare. In fact, you’d package his welfare so it doesn’t look like welfare. But above all, you’d assume that this rich white guy had a good heart. You’d assume that he didn’t mean to do any harm. And actually, I think you’d mostly be right. I tend to error on the side of mercy. I think people are mostly good. The problem in our society is the implicit assumption that non-European descendants are suspect until proven otherwise. And that’s why we cut way back on welfare—not because more minorities use them (they don’t), but because we assume more minorities use them.

This, my friends, is why people will shell out $17 to visit the George W Bush Presidential Library for a day’s worth of chicanery and mendacity. But will be outraged at the idea of the top marginal tax rate going up a couple of percentage points or of spending a couple of bucks per day to care for child refuges. It’s all about the right kind of people and the wrong kind of people. If we all thought about it, we would rebel against the very idea. But in general, we don’t think about it. And that’s why our nation is in the bad state it is in.

Afterword

For reference, the Elder Bush’s library costs $9 and the Clinton library costs only $7. Of course, you always knew it was cheaper to buy Democrats.

Non-Overlapping Magisteria Helps Theists and Atheists

Posted on by
8

Religion vs SpiritualismNon-overlapping magisteria (strangely given the acronym NOMA) is the idea that there is no conflict between science and religion—they exist in different realms that do not overlap at all. This is an idea that is most associated with Stephen Jay Gould. And to me, it’s always seemed rather obvious. The problem is that most religions do in fact make scientific claims. What’s more, many atheists like to pretend that there is nothing outside of science. But by my definition of religion and science, Gould is completely right.

The biggest problem that I run into with Christians is that there are certain statements in the Bible that are factual claims. And if they see the Bible as literally true, we get into all kinds of problems. The most bizarre is the claim that the world has four corners and thus is flat. This brings about things like the actual Flat Earth Society. But Creationism is no more reasonable a position.

What most bugs me about this kind of stuff is that these people are clearly missing the point of having a religion at all. At one time, it might have been comforting to believe that thunder was the sound of Thor’s hammer. But it was never really useful and it never addressed actual theological questions. So such religious thought not only soils science, but it blinds believers from any theological insights they might gain from their religion.

On the other side, we have atheists who I really think are just trying to annoy me by claiming that they don’t understand basic theology. My favorite example of this was an article I saw in an astronomy magazine. It expressed amazement that people didn’t accept the big bang theory the way they did evolution by natural selection, even though the theory was as well established. The article did an excellent job of explaining why the big bang theory was correct. But the author clearly didn’t understand that it wasn’t that people didn’t accept the theory, but that they found it useless.

Too often, scientists present the big bang theory as an explanation for why the universe exists. In a certain technical sense, the theory does just that. But it is not a complete explanation. It suffers from the very same problem as the explanation that God created the universe. A child of five knows how far this gets you, “Then what created God?” Just the same, “Then what created the big bang?” And it is here that we get into theology.

I think there is only one fundamental theological question, “Why does anything exist?” And I don’t see how this is a question that science can ever address. There is now Lawrence Krauss’ feeble explanation that, “Nothingness is unstable.” And even after 200 pages of A Universe from Nothing, he still can’t see that the instability of “nothingness” means it isn’t nothingness: it has a characteristic; it is “unstable”; it has the remarkable property that allows it to spit out universes now and then.

Now I’m fine with people saying that this theological question makes no sense and there is no answer to it so it’s all rubbish. That’s fine. That is the same as saying that religion is not interesting to you. But to say that such questions don’t exist is simply wrong.

About a year ago, I heard a man I think very highly of, Richard Carrier, say that he didn’t accept NOMA. That surprised me because I have always thought him a deeper thinker than that. But maybe he has an argument I haven’t heard. The standard arguments against NOMA are all straw man arguments. They mostly come down to attacking the fact that as a practical matter, religions make all kinds of falsifiable (and thus scientific) claims. And while this is true, the atheists should be debating Denys Turner and not Pat Robertson.

What’s more, when someone is using a term as pretentious as “non-overlapping magisteria,” one is not making a practical case about what people think religion is. It is rather making a theoretical case for what science and religion both are and are not. It seems to me that atheists would want to use NOMA to convince religious people to at least stop soiling the science ground and to stay on their own very theoretical ground. But alas, they do not. Increasingly, I find the atheist community as ignorant and dogmatic as the religious community.

Fixing the Economy Is Only Hard When a Democrat Is in the White House

Posted on by
Reply

Paul KrugmanI remember at college taking Introduction to Economics. It was one of the best courses I ever took. For one thing, I had a great professor. But also, I knew nothing about macroeconomics. So I learned a whole lot.

What I most remember about the course, however, was the idea of fiscal and monetary stimulus. I remember thinking, “That’s great! At least we will never have to live through another Great Depression.” This was sometime in the middle of the 1980s. There is an important lesson here: never extrapolate how Democrats will work with a Republican President to times when there is a Democratic President.

Alberto AlesinaPaul Krugman’s column today is, Knowledge Isn’t Power. As it’s starting point, it takes a recent University of Chicago survey of economists which found that when asked if the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—”the stimulus”—helped the economy, 36 said yes and only one (our old ideologue Alberto Alesina) said it didn’t. So unlike what one hears in the press, there isn’t any disagreement about the nature of our economic trouble. The problem is that the politicians just refuse to do what the economists know is correct.

Krugman even says what I had thought all those years ago, sitting in class:

Economists used to assert confidently that nothing like the Great Depression could happen again. After all, we know far more than our great-grandfathers did about the causes of and cures for slumps, so how could we fail to do better? When crises struck, however, much of what we’ve learned over the past 80 years was simply tossed aside.

Of course, the crux of the matter is more partisan than this. If we had inaugurated President McCain in 2009, there would have been lots and lots of stimulus: not just the under-sized and poorly structured ARRA. Sure, there would have been some Democrats complaining about the budget deficit, but bills would have passed and we would now have a far better economy.

So we know what to do to help the economy. And the politicians are willing to do what needs to be done. But the Republicans won’t do it if a Democratic President will get credit for it. And that means that the Republican Party has sunk so low that its only interests are those of the party. They have no interest in doing what is best for all Americans. This isn’t supposed to be able to happen. Normally, such a party would parish or reform. But in a world where corporations “speak” with money and discriminate with their “religious beliefs,” it is no wonder. The Republican Party is a symptom, not a cause, of our broken democratic system.

All Told a Nice Emperor Claudius

Posted on by
1

ClaudiusOn this day in 10 BC, the Roman Emperor Claudius was born. Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Well, 80% of Claudius’ life was just surviving. We all know Claudius from the BBC television show I, Claudius where he was portrayed as a smart, learned, and decent man who stuttered—played by Derek Jacobi. (Side note: Jacobi believes that the books were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford rather than Robert Graves.) By modern standards, Claudius was not quite as nice a guy, but by the standards of Roman Emperors of his time, he was above average.

According to Wikipedia, Claudius’ ailments were not confined to his stutter:

The historian Suetonius describes the physical manifestations of Claudius’ affliction in relatively good detail. His knees were weak and gave way under him and his head shook. He stammered and his speech was confused. He slobbered and his nose ran when he was excited. The Stoic Seneca states in his Apocolocyntosis that Claudius’ voice belonged to no land animal, and that his hands were weak as well.

No one actually knows what was wrong with Claudius. Graves (Edward de Vere) thought he had Polio. Since then, people have suggested cerebral palsy and even Tourette syndrome. None of those are especially compelling. The cerebral palsy combined with a generally sickly nature makes a certain amount of sense. But if you look at representations of him, you don’t see any of the look of palsy in his lips.

There is an interesting disconnect between Claudius’ writing and what many contemporaries said about him. He was described as cruel, for example. I can’t really imagine an Emperor of that time not doing some things to get that label. And he certainly had a lot of enemies. The Senate did not want him as the new emperor. But they were just fighting to see ought to be in charge. Claudius was really the only person with a good claim to be emperor, plus he had the army behind him. Nonetheless, he spent a long time trying to appease the Senate. Still, he retained many enemies. And various factions in the Senate tried to take him out of power over the years. So I tend to think Claudius just had bad press.

Regardless of his personality, he was a smart guy and a quick study. He administered the empire quite well. This is especially notable considering that throughout his rule he had something of a tenuous grip on power. Of course, his personal life was a bit of mess. He was married four times. And his last wife was Agrippina the Younger, whose son from a previous marriage would become Nero, Claudius’ successor. The main thing about Agrippina is that she has always been suspected of poisoning Claudius. I’m not so sure. Claudius was 63 when he died, with a 13 year reign. Both those numbers are on the high side for Roman Emperors.

So happy birthday Claudius, you slobbering, stuttering, magnificent bastard!

Some Totally Pointless Criticisms of The Mask

Posted on by
Reply

The MaskI just watched The Mask for the first time in a decade. It is a charming film. And in a sense, I am more the target audience for the film than just about anything else I can think of. It appeals to all the prejudices of the kind of guy who thinks that he’s “nice” and walked around with a puppet on a stick for many of his teen years. And I still spend a fair amount of time watching Bugs Bunny. He is one of my heroes. And yes, he is a hare.

But as one gets older (if he is paying attention at all), one notices one’s prejudices. And the “nice guys finish last” trope has come to annoy me. It’s also, I’m afraid, really sexist. The truth is that men and women make terrible mistakes in their love lives. In my experience, nothing is as attractive as self-confidence. And it is often true that people who are self-confident are jerks. I suspect it works differently from the way many people think. Being highly desirable makes people self-confident, but it also makes them more selfish. It’s human nature.

Of course, in The Mask, Stanley Ipkiss is a truly nice guy. I say that because he likes cartoon and has a great dog that likes him. And what is sweet about the film is that Stanley wins the girl the way men have always won the girl: by allowing her to see past all the discomfort and pretense to who he really is. This is why the ending is so sweet with Tina Carlyle (played surprisingly well by Cameron Diaz) throwing away the mask. The truth is, Stanley’s unchecked id was a bit too much for her, but surely she likes knowing that it lives within him.

On a technical level, there are some problems with the film. But I doubt anyone watching the film for the first time notices. As soon as Dorian Tyrell (the bad guy, played by Peter Greene) gets the mask, the film stalls. I understand the problem. You can’t make Tyrell the wacky character that Ipkiss turned into. But the mask doesn’t bring out his naughty child; it just seems to turn him into a more angry version of himself. So those scenes are tiresome. What’s more, I’m afraid that Greene is miscast in the part, because he is too convincing a heavy.

But things do pick up, as Ipkiss breaks out of jail and eventually takes us to the climax of film that is as zany and wonderful as anything that came before. It just would have been a whole lot better to move faster from the point of reporter Peggy Brandt’s double-cross to Ipkiss’ escape. They could have trimmed five or even ten minutes from the film and sped into the third act without driving through a pothole that upsets a very consistent momentum throughout the rest of the film.

Really though: what’s not to love? Jim Carrey has never been so adorable. The script is the silliest of fun. And it has the cutest dog ever. I don’t know why I waited this long to watch it again.

John Hodgman Does Ayn Rand

Posted on by
Reply

John HodgmanThe other day, Andrea called to read from an article by John Hodgman in The New Yorker, Ask Ayn. In it, he created excerpts from a column she had supposedly written for Parade Magazine shortly before her death. Of course, the article isn’t presented that way. It starts, “After a couple of appearances on the interview program Donahue, in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on Match Game and a guest appearance on Fantasy Island as the Spirit of Capitalism.” I did not get the joke.

I knew she had been on Donahue, so it wasn’t a stretch that she was on a second time. And the truth is that Rand had a love a pop culture. Corey Robin’s essay on her is titled, Garbage and Gravitas. And the fact that I have read a couple of biographies of her made the joke much more opaque. She was a supremely strange person. In addition to this, I knew that she had written a column for a popular audience. It turns out it was for The Los Angeles Times, but that isn’t too far off.

Anyway, Andrea started reading to me the fake columns. Here’s the first one she read:

Some of you wrote in last week to express surprise that, when I appeared on the Phil Donahue program, I told him that I was a fan of Charlie’s Angels. This just shows how poor your critical thinking is. It should be obvious why I love Charlie’s Angels. The show is about three beautiful women who are not ashamed of their beauty or their ability at solving crimes. And when their talents were not appreciated by the police department and they were forced to become crossing guards, they refused! They refused to take money from the government to train American children to believe that the state will forever protect them from risk! They left their jobs and made new lives for themselves in a private capitalist enterprise. They went Galt.

Again, I was confused. I remembered that she did claim to like the show Charlie’s Angels. And she was totally hung up on beauty. Whatever else you can say about her, Ayn Rand was not a beautiful woman and she was painfully aware of it. She idolized Marilyn Monroe, writing at least one entire essay about her. So I was kind of confused because all of the fake columns started off with things Rand believed, written in ways that Rand wrote. Hodgman recreates her style very well. But then the columns slid off sideways but rarely into total absurdity—rather typical of Hodgman.

The whole experience was yet another example of how it is not healthy to know a lot about Ayn Rand. But luckily, John Hodgman performed the piece live and it is on YouTube. And it is hilarious. But at the start of it, he mentions that all of the bits start off with “pretty much verbatim quotes from Ayn Rand.” That would have helped a lot—context is everything in comedy. But you can’t miss the comedy with his performance. Even after having heard most of it, I still really enjoyed this:

For the record, Ayn Rand hated Reagan. She also hated the libertarian movement. She hated pretty much everyone. Even among her circle of Objectivists, people were constantly being excommunicated over trivial matters. There are very good reasons why people call Objectivism a cult. I don’t know if I would go that far. But it was typical of small revolutionary groups so brilliantly parodied in Life of Brian:

Libertarian Zealot Milton Friedman

Posted on by
Reply

Milton FriedmanToday is J K Rowling’s 49th birthday and clearly the world is a better place because of it. I’ve tried to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and I have to say that I didn’t make it very far into it. Not really my kind of thing. It is, after all, written for grammar school children. What I find amazing is that a lot of adults like it. There is no accounting for taste. But I like the fact Rowling seems to be a decent person and even tried to publish a novel without getting massive sales based upon her name. So that’s all very nice. But since I don’t know much about her and don’t particularly want to know anything about her given I have a nice feeling about her and I don’t want to spoil it, I am not going to write about her for today’s birthday post.

Instead, I’m going to provide you with a slightly edited version of last year’s birthday post about probably the most pernicious academic of the twentieth century. That’s right, rather than write about the nice British lady, I am going to write about a nasty American man who symbolizes most of what is wrong with our shared country. A man who not only did great harm here, but also exported his pernicious ideology to other countries where countless were harmed, many dying many years before they would have. All of this happened because of ideas pushed by an ideological zealot.

On this day in 1912, the undoubtedly great economist Milton Friedman was born. The truth is, though, that being a good economist doesn’t mean you know anything about economics in the real world. The the Chicago School that he was so important in building shows that to this day. The people who have followed him tend to get lost in their models and mistake them for reality. I’ve seen it happen in my own field. And I think by the end, you could say the same thing about Friedman.

He was far more influential as a popularizer of libertarianism. That was especially true of the very disingenuous book he wrote with his wife, Free to Choose and then the PBS series Free to Choose. (It is amazing how much conservative propaganda the “liberal” PBS has pumped out over the years.) In this capacity, he pushed the thinking on the right to such an extent that now they would consider him a socialist who wants to steal everyone’s money via the Federal Reserve and its money printing. Of course, I figure if he were still alive, he’d be as crazy as they are. As he got older, his arguments became less grounded in economics and more like the thinking of a religious fanatic.

The other thing about him is that the 2008 economic crisis showed that he was wrong about his greatest claim to fame. He supposedly showed that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression; he claimed that if the Fed had just increased the money supply, all would have been well. That is exactly what the Fed has done since 2008 and you can see that it simply isn’t enough. The only reason we aren’t in the same place as we were in the 1930s is because of automatic fiscal stimulus in the form of Social Security and Unemployment—the very kinds of policies that Friedman was against.

I have long wondered what Friedman would have said if he had lived to see the crisis of 2008. It is certainly the case that most of the people who followed in his footsteps came up with clever ways to justify themselves. I feel fairly certain that Friedman would have used his own remarkable mind to justify his old thinking rather than to adjust it. As it was, he was an adviser to Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Every time Friedman’s free market ideas failed to pan out, Friedman’s excuse was always, “It’s that the economy isn’t free enough!” This is, by the way, a common trick of libertarians and communists and, for that matter, any utopian thinker. There can never be the perfect system (whatever the ideologue might see it as), so there is never a way to disprove their theories. So if Friedman had still been alive in 2008, he probably would have been part of the chorus claiming that there was a crash because the deregulation didn’t go far enough.

The thing is that even though Milton Friedman was totally wrong about the main things he is now remembered for and even though he caused so much pain and suffering all over the world, he had a great life. And even in death, he is deified by modern conservatives, especially the libertarians. He considered himself an agnostic, which means that in his reality, there’s at least a reasonable chance that he is burning in hell. So there’s that.

Now that you’re dead, happy birthday Milton Friedman!

“Les Bourgeois” and the Wisdom of Age

Posted on by
Reply

Jacques BrelIt’s always a good time to talk about Jacques Brel. The years have not diminished my admiration for him. What is so great is that he doesn’t just sing. He acts the songs. He is, above all, a storyteller. And the stories that he tells are so filled with keen observations of the way the world is.

I understand that there are other artists who do this. Bruce Springsteen’s best work is like this, but usually he falls into cliche. Bobbie Gentry certainly managed this on a few songs. But American songwriters tend to disappoint. As much as I love the work of Warren Zevon and Randy Newman, they rarely succeeded in any given song. I think the problem is that American popular music, regardless of the form, is too dependent upon “slice of life” stories, with little payoff. It is extremely rare that a songwriter even tries to convey what we get from the best American short story writers like Irwin Shaw.

But Brel doesn’t just try—he succeeds. And he does it consistently. It doesn’t matter if he’s being serious or silly, he always has something to say. A good example of this comes from a song I really like, “Les Bourgeois”—a song that is both serious and silly. It tells the story of three friends: Jojo, Pierre, and the narrator. The first two verses tell of how they are drinking away their youth at the Three Pheasants Hotel bar. And when the older bourgeois pass by, the young men ridicule them in the chorus, “The bourgeois are like pigs!” And so on.

In the third verse, things are different. The three friends are now the bourgeois. They still have the same interests. They are still the same people. But they are old. And now there is a new generation of young people who ridicule them just as they ridiculed the generation before them. This is not exactly a startling denouement, although I think any reasonable person would admit that it has far more to say that most American pop songs. And that’s especially true coming from a man only 32 years old. (Brel wrote the lyrics; the music was written by Jean Corti.)

What’s more notable about the song is the way that Brel performs it. The entire tone of the third verse is different. It is a bit more stiff—the performance of man who knows he has to be dignified but still feels the same inside. And then, he doesn’t even sing the final chorus. This is the same chorus that was sung with such gusto the first two times, “The bourgeois are like pigs!” It is spoken with sense of disbelief, “Can you believe what these kids say to us?” It’s poignant and beautiful.

Here is the song. There are no subtitles, but I hardly think they are necessary:

If He Were Serious, Paul Ryan Would Switch Parties

Posted on by
Reply

Paul Ryan - Eddie MunsterOver at the Huffington Post, Arthur Delaney tries to get to the bottom of, Just How Much Does Paul Ryan Want the Government to Plan Poor People’s Lives? And, as is getting more and more common with the more and more vanilla website, he doesn’t really answer the question. But he does provide a good overview of just what the Republican wunderkind is up to. And as expected, he is showing himself to be the fraud he has always been.

Apparently, Ryan told the Christian Science Monitor today that the whole case management thing was just an idea he was fond of. Just like when people noted the gaping holes in his budget, he argues that despite all the big deal made of his plan, it’s not set in stone. Apparently, anything that anyone has a problem with will be jettisoned and so his poverty proposal is just as serious as his budget was. But it’s worse than even that.

Ryan told the Huffington Post, “What we’re saying is we’re not mandating case management. We’re saying this is one of the things we recommend, but give the states the ability to try other ideas.” Now you may not be as fluent as I am in the obscure Charlatan language, so let me translate. He’s saying that the most important thing is to bind up all the the poverty plans and block grant them. That’s what he really cares about. And the reason he really cares about it is that this is a way that the poverty programs can be destroyed over time.

Again, I wonder: why is anyone taking this guy seriously. He cares about the poor the way I care about Potato Bugs: I know they exist and they will always exist, but I don’t want them around me. Let’s be clear about this. Paul Ryan’s primary plan to help the poor is to do what he’s always wanted to do: block grant programs that conservatives don’t like. His other big idea is to create “case workers” for the poor. What he’s thinking—what he “knows”—is that the poor aren’t poor because of a lack of opportunity; they are poor because they just don’t know any better. If they had a more “can do” attitude and a cool Eddie Munster haircut like Paul Ryan, they too could be on the short list for the Republican presidential nomination.

Return to SenderIt is worse than stupid that the media continue to treat this guy with even a modicum of respect. I assure you that a young black man who had failed as totally in his career as Paul Ryan has in his would undoubtedly be spending life without parole in a prison somewhere. But Paul Ryan is a rich white guy. So we have to listen to him because rich white guys are always serious and important and filled with wisdom.

But something more general has been on my mind. This isn’t just about the media needing to find a “serious” Republican. It is about this idea that both sides of the political isle want to help the poor; both parties care about making America better for everyone. But that is absolutely not true. If you want to see the real political divide in this country, look at the anti-immigration protests. Look at the angry people screaming with their “Return to Sender” signs. This is the Republicans Party in a general sense. They don’t care about the kids fleeing death in their home countries. And to the point: they don’t care that people are born into poverty, live in poverty, and die young in poverty. If Paul Ryan really cares about poverty, he needs to switch parties first.

Democrats Making Chumps Out of Us

Posted on by
Reply

Bill ClintonThomas Frank has been recycling some old essays recently, and yesterday, he posted one he wrote after Obama had won the election but before he took office, Obama Really Let These Clowns Win? How Right-Wing Obstruction Always Trumps Sober Centrism. In a certain way, it is just his way of saying, “Told you so!” But I’m not so interested in it for being prophetic as I am in how much it parallels my own thinking.

The base of his essay is that Clinton played the “moderate” game and moved the country to the right and Obama was looking as though he was going to do the same thing. And we all now know that he did just that. It’s true that Obama did not hurt the country nearly as much as Clinton did. But given the opportunity that Obama had coming in right after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, you have to say that he did as bad a job as Clinton.

Frank ended his essay on what was undoubtedly meant to sound hopeful but in retrospect just makes me want to close up the house and go back to bed for a decade or two:

Centrism is a chump’s game. Democrats have massive majorities these days not because they waffle hither and yon but because their historic principles have been vindicated by events. This is their moment. Let the other side do the triangulating.

But there is more Frank’s article than a look back on Clinton and a look forward to Obama. He also gets into the thinking of the professional centrists, of which Obama and Clinton are members, but who are mostly journalists. As he noted, “The real-world function of Beltway centrism has never been to wage high-minded war against ‘both extremes’ but to fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of liberalism. Centrism’s institutional triumphs have been won mainly if not entirely within the Democratic Party…” Indeed.

I’ve gone farther on this issue, as I did back in 2012 when I wrote, Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness. In it, I discussed William Saletan of Slate, but more as a type than as an individual:

The reason that Saletan and his peers share this kind of [economically conservative, socially liberal] political outlook is clear enough: it speaks to their personal interests. They are socially liberal because the corresponding views improve their lives. They have friends who are gay. They’ve had girlfriends who have had abortions. Their careers depend upon a strong first amendment. So their lives would be poorer and their bank accounts too, if the social conservatives got power in the United States. As a result, they are socially liberal—even extremely so.

On the other side of things, they are rich. Whether on the TV, in newspaper, or increasingly even on the internet, pundits are rich. They are all well inside the top 20% of earners. As a result, Saletan finds it easy to be a booster for so called free trade. No Chinese worker is going to take his job. (Not that there aren’t about a million who could do it as well.) But unionized IT professionals might reduce his income. And increased taxes on the upper class could certainly reduce his income. So it just makes sense to argue that Social Security must be cut while ignoring the obvious fix of increasing the payroll tax cap, which it just so happens would increase his tax burden.

And I suspect this is the problem with Clinton and Obama. They are winners in society. They may care more about the poor than the Bush family, but they are no less estranged from the poor. So of course Obama would never think about raising the payroll tax cap: that would hurt every one of his friends and himself. So the only solution that makes sense to him is to cut Social Security benefits in a politically viable way. It isn’t that he’s a bad man, it is just that like everyone, he is largely biased by his own class interests. And those are the interests of what is called a centrist.

Barack ObamaBut as I’ve shown, centrism isn’t the middle between the two extremes. In fact, if you look at the American people, elite centrism is more or less the popular anti-centrism. The people tend to be economically liberal and socially conservative. So what Democrats and most of the press call the “middle” is anything but. The main thing to remember however, is that whether it is elite centrism or popular centrism, it is still an ideology. Obama’s claims about being post-partisan make him either a charlatan or a fool. Regardless, we are lost as long the “liberal” Democratic Party keeps electing people like him. As Thomas Frank noted, “Centrism is not merely a mental habit of the comfortable, but an ideology of its own, a system of cognition that stands beyond proof or refutation.” Obama and Clinton will go to their graves certain that they had found the Aristotelian perfection: the golden mean between the two extremes.