Over at The Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell reports on some really interesting political science (pdf) research, About as Many People Say They’ve Been Abducted by Space Aliens as Say They’ve Committed Voter Fraud. But that headline may give you the wrong idea; the research is very clever and shows that voter impersonation pretty much never happens.

Unlike other research that looks at allegations and prosecutions of voter fraud, this research just asked people. But given that it is a crime, they couldn’t just ask, “Have you ever committed this federal felony?” So what they did was create two groups and gave them a list of innocuous things that people do. But the test group had “voter fraud” added to it. All the people were asked if they had done any of the things listed. By comparing the two groups, they could tweeze out how many had committed voter fraud. The number came out to 2.5%.

That’s pretty high. So the researchers did the experiment again, but this time instead of testing for “voter fraud,” they tested for “abducted by extraterrestrials in the previous year.” And the percentage of people who claim they have been abducted by aliens is—Wait for it!—2.5%. It would seem that roughly 2.5% of the people who take these tests do not pay close attention. Or maybe we have a bigger problem:

But there is a more basic issue here. I understand that political scientists need to test the claims of the voter ID proponents. But these activists are being totally disingenuous. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to make people show ID to vote. But if that were your actual concern, then you would go about it differently. If you must have ID to vote then the government must facilitate you getting an ID free of charge. Otherwise, it is like a poll tax. No one pushing for voter ID laws is at all concerned about voter fraud. Simply put: voter ID laws begin and end with voter suppression.

The authors of the paper note that as real as actual voter fraud may be, it is dwarfed by other problems in our voting system:

But we aren’t seeing any laws passed to deal with these kinds of problems. And that’s because voter ID laws are created to suppress the vote of Democratic leaning citizens. In future decades this will be as big a shame as the voter suppression leading up to the Voting Rights Act.

Afterword

And please don’t tell me that those southern bigots were all Democrats. We all know that the big political shift over the 60s and 70s was those southern Democrats becoming Republicans. Southern bigotry has been the core of Republican victories from Nixon through Bush Jr. If the Republicans are going to use racial resentment to get elected, they should at least own it and not make out like they are still the party of Lincoln.

Paul Krugman has written quite a laudatory article about a recent talk given by Larry Summers. I think part of this is just an attempt for Krugman to make nice after being fairly critical of Summers as a possible Federal Reserve chair. But there is no denying that what Summers has to say is interesting. You can read Krugman’s description of it, Secular Stagnation, Coalmines, Bubbles, and Larry Summers. But the basic idea is pretty simple. And troubling.

What Summers noted was that since Reagan, the only time that our economy has been at full employment has been when some kind of bubble is going on. Part of this goes along with our huge increase in private debt over that time. But it is has not caused inflation. Summers suggests that we have a new normal where the economy is depressed. The takeaway from all of this is what we already know: individual saving during bad economic times is bad for the economy generally. Given that individuals won’t spend, the government ought to be spending more. This is all very basic Keynesian theory.

But having read the article, one thought immediately occurred to me. The real problem here is not how the economy is working on average. The problem is how the economy is being divided up. You may remember a TED Talk by Nick Hanauer that I wrote about last year. In his lecture he talks about how if workers had the same share of the economy as they had in 1970, they would make almost twice as much as they do today. Just imagine what that kind of extra buying power would do for our economy! Instead, we have rich individuals and corporations sitting on huge piles of money—money that could be spent on salaries for the unemployed.

I didn’t come up with this idea all by myself. It came from reading Dean Baker for years. So I was interested to see what he had to say about Summers’ talk. He made four points, Bubbles Are Not Funny. First, when bubbles burst, they tend to cause wealth to trickle upwards—they make income inequality worse. Second, he talks about income inequality. Third, he mentions how our trade deficit harms us (and how it is partly the fault of Summers’ strong dollar policy). And finally, he talks about a very big issue for him: work sharing. The truth is that part of our problem is that Americans work too many hours and don’t take vacations. If they worked less, more people could have jobs.

To me, the biggest issue by far is what I originally spoke about: productivity gains over the last 35 years have not been equitably shared (in fact, to a large extent, they haven’t been shared at all). As Baker noted, “The upward redistribution in the last three decades, from middle and lower end wage earners to the high end wage earners in the 80s and 90s, and to corporate profits in the last decade, likely had an effect in depressing consumption.” Simply by increasing the total taxes paid by the rich, and providing better services at the bottom would greatly help the poor and middle classes. This actually gets to a point that Matt Yglesias makes a lot: if companies can’t think of anything creative to do with their piles of cash, then maybe they should just lower their prices. Well, if the rich can’t think of anything creative to do with their cash, I can think of a lot of creative things the government can do with it.

As Krugman hammers on all the time: economics is not a morality tale. All the Ayn Rand sycophants can talk all they want about “makers and takers.” But the fact is that the bad economy hurts the rich as well as the poor. The rich are not concerned, as Rand always claimed they needed to be, with their enlightened self-interest. The rich are as short sighted as anyone. We need to do what is best for the economy as a whole. And that works out well, because it also means that the economy works well for everyone inside it.

Update (17 November 2013 9:57 pm)

Krugman wrote a column based on the same stuff, A Permanent Slump?

I’m in the process of reading John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness. It is not easy reading. But still, I’m sure you’ll hear me talking more and more about Rawls as time goes on. That’s the way I am.

Reading this book got me thinking of another of his books, Political Liberalism where he tries to answer the question of political legitimacy. Basically: why should we even accept “justice as fairness” as the basis of our society? Why not just accept the idea that what it says in some holy book as the basis of our society? His answer is universality. Only people who accept the book as the word of God think, for example, that God cries whenever a sperm is wasted. But no one can reasonably argue that beating up innocent children is a good thing to do. (Actually, the Bible is pretty big on that too!)

As a society, we accept this. So in general, you don’t see people arguing against gay marriage because “God” is against it. Instead, you see arguments cloaked in a patina of universality when the actual point is simply a plea to a particular religious or cultural doctrine. So they argue (against all actual facts) that same sex couples are bad for children. Sure, their holy book is very clear that God hates fags, but that has nothing to do with their argument. It’s just about the children!

What this all comes down to is the fact that policy debates usually have a high percentage of content that is disingenuous. What’s more, those arguments come mostly from the conservative side. Consider abortion. The only argument against abortion rights is that the fetus should be considered a full citizen. But this isn’t a reasonable argument when you are talking about a zygote that has no brain. Again: it is a religious argument about souls masquerading as a universalist argument about protecting the innocent.

It isn’t just social issues either. Almost every conservative economic argument I hear is based upon the aristocratic idea that the rich really are better than the rest of us. It is a belief of pure faith and is completely unsupported by the facts. But the argument is rarely put in this way. Instead of “the rich are better” we get the Job Creator myth. By this myth, the poor will only have jobs if we let the rich keep all their money. Again: a disingenuous argument intended to hide the real argument.

Related to this is the evolution debate. In the 19th century and through much of the 20th, the argument was purely religious: God said it was seven days, dontcha know! But over time, the creationists realized they were losing the battle with all this religious talk. So they got disingenuous. They started making scientific-like arguments against evolution. They developed Intelligent Design. But regardless of how much mumbo jumbo you pile on, it is still Genesis 1.

I love theoretical discussions and I think John Rawls is brilliant and adds a lot of insight into my thinking about these things. But such serious discussions don’t mean much in the practical world. The conservatives know how to play the game, even if they don’t really understand the game. And as a fairly practical guy, I want to know how to deal with all this disingenuousness. I wish the Christians would just go back to their old way of arguing: God said it; I believe it; that settles it. At least it’s truthful.

Afterword

I would never try to prove natural selection by offering Bible verses. I really do not understand why they think it is alright to pollute my science as they do. They think they have the whole truth. If it were me and I just knew that after I died God was going to take me to heaven for eternity, I wouldn’t care much about this life. I know there are Christians like that out in the world. But most American Christians seem awfully angry when they talk about anything but how much Jesus loves them. Why does it matter to them what I believe? By their way of thinking, the best that’s going to happen to me is that I’m going to cease to exist. Given I only get one go at this, why not at least let me have my science and politics unpolluted by their faith-based disingenuousness?

There has been a lot of excitement about the fact that Kshama Sawant seems to have won her race for the Seattle City Council. The reason is that she ran as a socialist. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t mean that much. The world “socialist” has lost most of its meaning both on the left and on the right. And it is mostly a very good thing.

The Republicans are mostly to blame. They are experts at vilifying words. But they tend to take it too far. As I found myself asking conservatives a lot during the first two years of his presidency, “If Obama is a socialist, what was Stalin?” If you listen carefully to conservatives, you will quickly notice that to them, any deviation from their current ideology is, “Socialism! Socialism, I tell you!”

Obama was called a socialist. Clinton was called a socialist before him. Is there any doubt that any Democratic president will be vilified as a socialist? This kind of name calling can only work for so long. After a while, the word becomes nothing more than “doodie pants.” Okay, we get it: you don’t like the Democrats so you call them socialists. But it doesn’t mean anything more than that.

Look, it would be one thing if Republicans actually did stand for some kind of libertarian utopia. But they don’t. They are among the biggest supporters for the three biggest socialist programs we have: Social Security, Medicare, and the military. That’s 80% of the federal budget, folks. So if the difference between “Socialist!” and “Patriotic American!” is that remaining 20%, I think we can say that the Republicans are being a mite hyperbolic. (And note: the Republicans are also for most of the remaining 20% too.)

Some time in the 1950s, it seemed that the definition of socialism got watered down. If you wanted to talk about central planning dictatorships, you talked of “communism.” If you wanted to talk about the theoretical worker utopia, you talked about “Marxism.” Socialism came to mean those nice European nations where people were free but the society wasn’t dog-eat-dog.

What this all means is that “socialism” became just a slightly more robust version of the system that we have. But the conservatives couldn’t scream “Communist!” at liberals because that was patently false. So they depended upon the historical connection between “socialism” and the Soviet Union to do their dirty work. But it doesn’t work anymore—at least not for people under 40 years old. To them, socialism is just another word for the kind of political system that they prefer. The truth is that most of what Sawant stands for is very much what they believe in.

But is Sawant an actual socialist? In a word, maybe. I’m not especially clear on all her positions, but when you get into the weeds of policy, she seems to have some ideas (or at least Socialist Alternative does) that I wouldn’t support. But from a practical standpoint, she’s just a real liberal and that’s why she has been elected. As I talk about all the time here, the United States has been pulled so far to the right that it would be years of leftist control before things got balanced and I started to disagree with anything the left wanted to do. Regardless, Sawant and her party seem pretty far removed from nationalizing the corporate world, which is what a real socialist would do.

If we start getting more aggressive liberal politicians running under the banner of socialism, you know who to blame: the conservatives. They distorted the usage of the word socialism for their own purposes for decades. And now the liberals are distorting it for their own. And I’ll be clear: I’m thrilled. I’ve always thought, “You think Obama’s a socialist?! I’ll show you a real socialist!” And it looks like that time may have come.

Afterword

It is interesting to think about Elizabeth Warren becoming president. She is not at all a socialist, but you know the kind of freak out we would see from the right! Suddenly they would talk about how reasonable Obama was but this Warren chick is a… Socialist! Communist! Doodie pants!