The Tea Parties

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think. The claim that they're hypocritical and partisan is a bit stronger - where were they when Bush was running up the deficit, etc. - but in fairness, many of the organizing figures were anti-TARP from the beginning, and there's something slightly odd about saying that if you didn't take to the streets to protests a $300 billion deficit you aren't allowed to protest a $1 trillion deficit. The numbers matter, surely ...

But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism. Obama is a very popular President, at the moment, his unpopularity among Republicans notwithstanding, and it's awfully hard to see the Tea Parties doing much to change that reality in the short run; if anything, they're far more likely to reconfirm the majority in its opinion that American conservatism is increasingly wacky, echo-chamberish, and out-of-touch.

Still, here we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on. So if you're inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong to be alarmed:
 

Is Feminism The New Natalism?

Michelle Goldberg, explaining why liberals should care about demographic decline:

... it's tempting to dismiss concerns about demographic decline as an anti-feminist race panic. The thing is, though, rapidly declining birth rates really are a problem, especially for the sort of generous welfare states that liberals love ... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels - Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore - are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine - they're either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way. (The United States is the exception, for a whole host of reasons - some intuitive and some surprising - that I'll elaborate some other time.) That's why the Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe's pension systems, wrote that "feminism is the new natalism." As he explained:
 

The evidence from Italy, and indeed Spain, is that a traditional family structure now leads to very low birth rates...[a] brief tour of birth rates in four European countries helps demonstrate what modern family policy must be about. It has nothing to do with enforcing traditional roles on women...In most of Europe women still aspire to having two children but in Italy and Germany it is very difficult to combine this with women's other aspirations.

In other words, the threat of population decline is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies. It's a discussion we should welcome.

Well, maybe. I'll be curious to hear what Goldberg has to say about the United States, because one could argue that the threat of population decline is also a reasonable argument for a more flexible, freewheeling labor market, and other dreamy American-style policies. That was one of the takeaways from Russell Shorto's big Times Magazine piece last year on fertility in the developed world, for instance. Like Goldberg, Shorto argued that the combination of a modern economy and a patriarchal social model leaves you with the worst of both worlds where fertility is concerned: Women are expected to be workers and full-time caregivers (to both children and to aging parents, in many cases), men aren't expected to pick up the slack, and so women end up too overwhelmed to contemplate having a second or a third kid, or even a first. But he also noted that while the Scandinavian combination of liberal social attitudes and generous day care and family-leave provisions produce higher birth rates than Spain and Italy, if you're really looking for replacement-level fertility, you need to turn to the United States:

"Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?" says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument -- that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population -- doesn't apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It's also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it's also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. "There's much less flexibility in the European system," Haub says. "In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid." There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: "In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost -- in the form of lower lifetime wages -- is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force." An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

Incidentally, this is a point that the Willetts report makes as well, though Goldberg doesn't mention it: The intersection of traditional gender roles and a modern economy may be driving down the birth rate in Italy, but that explanation doesn't hold up for Germany, where social attitudes are more liberal, and so Willetts spends a lot of time talking about ... the impact of Germany's labor market regulations on family formation.

In other words, saying that "feminism is the new natalism" doesn't necessarily mean that statism is the new natalism. If you're a "choice feminist," interested in maximizing female (and male, for that matter) freedom to choose to work or to choose not to, you may find more to like about the American way of parenting. (And you might be looking for reforms - like, ahem, a more pro-family tax structure - that would increase the flexibility that our model currently affords to parents.) If you're more of a Linda Hirshman-style feminist, on the other hand, you'll probably prefer the Scandinavian model, where after the guaranteed family leave runs its course, the socialized day care effectively incentivizes parents to get (back) to work whether they want to or not.

On the question of whether the latter model is really as empowering as its advocates assume, it's worth quoting Sandra Tsing Loh:

The debate about mothers and work: it always ends--doesn't it?--with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden--such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes ... the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden's GDP ... On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector ... providing social welfare services ... almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband's job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family's finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people's toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, "the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.")

That's from Tsing Loh's review of Neil Gilbert's fascinating A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life. If you're interested in this topic, you should read the whole thing, and the whole thing.

Who's Afraid of Low Birthrates?

Yglesias wonders, in the context of the Georgian Patriarch's pro-natalist baptism policy:

Less clear to me is why so many people seem concerned by the specter of low birth rates. Historically, low levels of population are associated with high average living standards. That should be less true in the modern world where we're not as dependent on agriculture for our economic activity. But the logic hasn't completely vanished. If there were dramatically fewer people in the United States it would be much more realistic for us to all be eating free-range organic grass-fed beef. And even amidst a real estate bust, the country is far too crowded for a middle class family to afford a spacious residence in the most desirable markets such as San Francisco or Manhattan.

As appealing as the vision of a depopulated America where we all get to live like Manhattan gourmands may be, I think it's worth taking note of this Ezra Klein post from the very same day, which cited Angela Merkel explaining her aversion to the kind of big-ticket stimulus that most American liberals are pining for:

It is not, she pointed out, simply a philosophical difference. Borrow and spend today, repay down the road, is a particularly difficult proposition for a country with a shrinking population, she said.

"Over the next decade we will undergo a massive demographic change, and, therefore, borrowing is a greater burden for the future than in a country with a much more continuously growing population, as in the United States of America," Mrs. Merkel said.

Now perhaps these are overstated fears - and of course Ezra's response (and Matt's, in a related post) is that this can all be solved with higher immigration rates. But with apologies to Harry Truman, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that if you want to live like a Whole-Foods-shopping San Franciscan Democrat, you need somebody, somewhere, to procreate like a megachurch-attending Republican. 

The Church, AIDS and Africa, Cont.

My comments on the question of Pope Benedict's culpability for mass suffering and death in Africa has generated quite a lot of reader email, as you might expect. Here's a representative note, from a reader who works for a "leading global health organization":

... while I probably wouldn't accuse the Pope directly of causing "massive death and suffering," here are some facts: many, if not most, Catholic hospitals and dispensaries in Africa refuse to give out condoms. Their staff, both Africans and Westerners, constantly promote the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods about birth control that perpetuate early births, poor family planning, a whole host of STIs (including HIV) and, by extension of all this, crushing, grinding poverty and maternal and child mortality. This is fact in every African country I have worked in.

That the Catholic Church provides - through its hospitals, clinics, schools and organizations like Catholic Relief Services - many other incredibly valuable services to people in the developing world, including Africans, makes it deserving of praise; but equally, it does not excuse the Church from knowingly doing direct harm to public health efforts in the region of the world most affected by HIV/AIDS.

And here's another:

It seems that your main source of frustration is the hyperbolic - these comments will result in "massive death and suffering" - reaction to Pope Benedict's comments.  I wonder what you think about the more subtle assertion that Pope Benedict's comments may contribute to confusion and misperception about how HIV/AIDS is transmitted, whether or not condoms are effective in preventing transmission, and to what extent that confusion may counteract or negate the work of public health officials attempting to reduce the rate of transmission. Both here at home, and in Africa, providing education and accurate information about how HIV is transmitted is an important part of the battle ... Clearly the Pope has the obligation to advocate Catholic principles and dogma, but need that advocacy come at the expense (potentially) of established science/medicine?  Would it not have been possible to advance the Catholic position preferring abstinence without intimating that condoms are not an effective tool in preventing the spread of HIV? 

It seems to me that much of the anger directed at the Pope's comments is a response to something new (condoms are not the solution) as opposed to something old (we prefer abstinence).  I wonder whether a statement that ignored the condoms issue entirely would have been received as negatively, and attacked as ferociously.

I agree with the second emailer that the Pope would have been well-served to confine himself to remarks promoting monogamy and fidelity, and shouldn't have waded into social-science-y pronouncements about the overall efficacy of condom-promotion efforts. But the anger that Benedict's remarks generated isn't a new thing by any stretch. John Paul II may have been more circumspect in his criticisms of the prophylactic approach to AIDS-fighting than his successor, but he was regularly accused of having "killed millions" of helpless, hopeless Africans even so.

And I agree with the first emailer: Catholics have absolutely no business spreading misinformation, cherrying-pick data and otherwise exaggerating the dangers of condom use. I'm sure that these kind of ideological blinders are a serious problem for public-health efforts in Africa. I'm just less sure that they're the only kind of ideological blinders that we should be worried about.

I should note that I don't pretend to be an expert on this topic, and my own conservative and Catholic biases have no doubt shaped the reading that I've done about AIDS-fighting strategies. But it's my impression - created, in large part, by reading Helen Epstein's The Invisible Cure (and if there's a devastating rebuttal to her arguments, please send it my way) - that an awful lot of the money poured into condom-promotion over the years would have much been better spent promoting "partner reduction" in cultures inclined to promiscuity and de facto polygamy instead. This isn't the same as promoting abstinence exclusively, and indeed, Epstein is witheringly critical of some of the abstinence-only programs that American dollars have funded in the Bush era. But "partner reduction" is a lot more consonant with the Catholic Church's longstanding position - that it's better to promote monogamy and fidelity than to take promiscuity as a given and make it as safe as possible - than you'd think from the overheated talk about how the Vatican's flat-earth position on condoms has cost millions of lives.

What's more, I have a hard time believing that the public-health and foreign-aid community's longstanding preference for condom promotion has nothing to do with ideological biases of their own. Yes, the Catholic Church's conservative position on sexual morality determines which public-health interventions the Vatican willing to support, and limits the willingness of Catholic institutions to simply follow the data wherever it leads. But what's true of Catholics is true of other groups as well. And when you read Epstein on how slow the AIDS establishment was to acknowledge the importance of partner-reduction - or when you read about Bill Gates getting booed at an international AIDS conference when he mentioned abstinence and fidelity - it's awfully hard to escape the conclusion that the combination of a liberationist view of sexual ethics and a post-colonial unwillingness to critique existing African patterns of sexual behavior has seriously hampered the international community's efforts to curb the spread of HIV.

This doesn't mean that conservative Catholics should turn around and suggest that the AIDS establishment has blood on its hands for privileging condom distribution over cultural change. That kind of rhetoric is inappropriate and stupid, period. All I'm suggesting is that there are many more shades of gray to this story than you'd think from the way that the media likes to cover it.

The AIDS Libel

I was going to let the latest round of outrage about the Pope, condoms and AIDS pass without throwing in my two cents, but then Jeff Goldberg went and linked to David Rothkopf's list of the world's "biggest losers," which includes Benedict XVI ("a creepy old ex-Hitler Youth member," in Rothkopf's words) for his supposed contribution to "massive death and suffering" in Africa. It's almost as if Jeff's trying to get a rise out of me!

So: I could respond to Rothkopf's claim, and others like it, by suggesting that the Pope's "chastity, not condoms" message to Africans struggling with the HIV epidemic has at least somewhat more evidence behind it than you'd think from the media drumbeat surrounding the issue. But I think the more apposite response is to ask Rothkopf for his evidence that the Vatican's refusal to promote condom use has contributed to disease and death on a grand scale. Do religious Africans have higher infection rates than the irreligious? Do heavily-Catholic populations contract HIV in higher numbers than Muslim, Protestant, or animist populations? Are frequent mass-attenders more likely to contract the disease than infrequent churchgoers? Do graduates of Catholic schools have higher infections than their peers? Are Africans who seek treatment at Catholic hospitals more likely to pass the disease along than people who get their medicine from secular institutions?

"The most striking thing about these articles claiming the Vatican makes Africans die from AIDS is the dearth of factual material," Brendan O'Neill wrote during the last spasm of outrage on this front. His cursory look at the data suggested that no, there was no correlation between being the sort of African most likely to listen to the Pope about sex and being the sort of African most likely to contract HIV. But that was several years ago: Perhaps some new evidence has come to light that Rothkopf would like to share with us. If he has any, I will happily publish it.

In the interim, though, I would suggest that he take a step back and consider that Benedict XVI is the head of an international institution that does as much to fight disease and poverty as any NGO in the world. The Church runs hospitals, clinics, and schools; it channels hundred of millions of dollars in donations from the developed world to the wretched of the earth; it supports thousands upon thousands of priests, nuns and laypeople who work in some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions in the world. And it does so based on the same premises - an attempt to be faithful to the commandments of Jesus Christ - that undergird the Pope's insistence on preaching chastity, rather than promoting prophylactics. There are many other NGOs working in Africa that proceed from different premises, and take a different attitude toward matters sexual as a result, and if David Rothkopf prefers their approach that's perfectly understandable. But unless he's willing to tell the Catholic Church that it should fold up its charitable operations in the developing world and go home, I'd prefer to be spared the lectures on how the Pope is responsible for "massive death and suffering" among populations for whom Catholic institutions have provided lifelines beyond counting over the years, just because he isn't willing to to use his pulpit to preach the importance of playing it as safe as possible, health-wise, while you're committing what the Church considers mortal sin.

Crime and Punishment

Isaac Chotiner, on that Atul Gawande piece I just mentioned:

Gawande makes the case that [solitary confinement] can plausibly be called torture. He mentions that few if any other countries keep their prisoners in such conditions, and regrets this unfortunate example of American exceptionalism. However, he leaves one important point out of his otherwise exhaustive case ... Gawande never considers the idea of punishment as an end in itself, and it is here, I think, where liberal writers tend to miss a major motivating factor in our crime policy. There are numerous historical and religious reasons for this belief, and without getting bogged down in too many details, it is worth pointing out that many people believe wrongdoers "deserve" punishment for bad deeds. Others like, I would assume, Gawande, see no value in punishing people unless it serves distinct ends (keeping criminals off the street, deterring crime, etc.). Now, I happen to agree with Gawande, and I see no value in punishment for punishment's sake, but it is probably safe to say this is not a majority opinion in America. 

I don't think it's necessarily clear from the piece that Gawande sees no value in retributive justice. Certainly his argument doesn't require rejecting retribution in toto: You don't have to abandon the idea that wrongdoers deserve punishment to accept that solitary confinement is much more cruel and unusual than you might think if you've never experienced it, and thus probably shouldn't be meted out as often as it is. Just because a criminal deserves punishment doesn't mean that he deserves any punishment. Indeed, if you want a legal system in which punishments are designed to fit crimes, then that's arguably all the more reason to want a prison system that metes out punishments as they're designed to be meted out, and that doesn't permit or practice cruelties above and beyond what legislators, judges and juries have asked for.

I also wonder about Isaac's broader premise: Is it really the case that most liberals - or "liberal writers," at least - reject outright the notion that lawbreakers deserve punishment for their crimes? Obviously, left-wingers tend to emphasize rehabilitation more than right-wingers do, but my assumption has always been that most liberals would agree in some sense with the premise that punishing criminals is a matter of justice as well as deterrence. But I suppose could be wrong.

The Tough-On-Crime Trap

Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece on solitary confinement deserves to be read in tandem with Cato Unbound's symposium on American incarceration rates. The former looks at a particular issue in prison policy, and the latter at the general trend toward ever-greater imprisonment, but both invite the reader to ponder the ways in which one of the biggest policy successes of the past twenty-five years - the large-scale reduction in the crime rate - has enmeshed us in a net of moral compromises from which it's difficult to escape.

The turn toward mass incarceration and tough sentencing was championed, largely by conservatives, in response to what amounted to a long period of emergency in American life: A murder rate that had doubled over twenty years, a robbery rate that had quintupled, an urban landscape that seemed increasingly ungovernable, and so on. And the turn worked: The estimates of its impact vary, but most scholars agree that increased incarceration played a substantial role in the plunging crime rates of the 1990s.

But as you might expect, a policy turn undertaken during a period of emergency will eventually produce diminishing returns - as Steven Levitt puts it, "the two-millionth criminal imprisoned is likely to impose a much smaller crime burden on society than the first prisoner" - even as it imposes substantial moral costs. And precisely because the tough-on-crime approach was largely vindicated by events, it's extremely difficult for elected officials to walk back from some of the dubious practices that have grown up around it - like, say, the possibly cruel-and-unusual use of long-term solitary confinement. As Gawande writes:

Commissioners ... could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven't they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim's family and told them that he'd gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This political dynamic explains why the chances for effective prison reform probably depend on Nixon-to-China conservatives, who can put the credibility the Right has built up on law and order to good use. (It wouldn't hurt if conservatives were willing to champion some alternative approaches to crime reduction as well.) But they probably also depend on crime rates staying flat, or falling - and in the current downturn that may be too much to hope for.

The Life and Death of Miss Jade Goody

Via Alex Massie, a life story that no contemporary novelist could invent - and that no future historian of the reality-TV era will be able to resist.

Collapse or Consolidation?

Andrew Stuttaford's big Standard piece on Europe and the economic crisis offers a lot to chew on, but the essential argument is this: Having created a continent-wide government (and governing class) whose responsibilities far outstrip its democratic legitimacy, the nations of Europe risk reaping a populist whirlwind - which "threatens to push already alienated electorates in the direction of the extremist politics of left or right" - as they attempt to navigate through the current crisis. "After decades of routinely bypassing its voters," Stuttaford suggests, the European Union "may well no longer have what it takes to secure their approval for the harsh medicine and painful sacrifices necessary to bring the EU through this ordeal in one piece." 

I wonder, though, if this passage won't turn out to be the most prophetic part of the piece:

... some glass-is-half-full Europhiles believe that the fact that no country can easily work its way through these tribulations alone will conclusively make the case for still closer European integration to some of the EU's more reluctant federalists. You can be sure that this is a rationalization that Brussels will look to exploit: Rahm Emanuel is not the only politician unwilling to waste a crisis. The EU's policy response to the slump is likely to have two objectives: the reconstruction of member-states' economies and the destruction of what's left of their autonomy.

Back here in the States, a week of non-stop "off with their heads" chatter about AIG has left almost everybody in agreement that the primary political fallout from the crisis will be the revival of populism, red in tooth and claw. But if the worst doesn't come to worst, and Western governments manage to muddle through the next couple years without going the way of Iceland, I think it's just as likely that we'll look back on the crash of '08-'09 as having produced a spasm of kabuki populism, followed by the consolidation of even more power in the hands of elite institutions, whether they're in Brussels or the Washington-New York corridor.

If the Western leadership class survives the current crisis, after all, the lesson they're going to draw from it is relatively simple: We must never let this happen again. And while that impulse could be a spur to greater decentralization and democratization, it's more likely to be produce greater supranational regulation, more expansive bureaucracy, and a more hand-in-glove relationship between big government and big business than existed before the crisis. In theory, one way to respond to a "populist whirlwind" would be to make governments more accountable to the voting public. But in practice, I suspect, the more likely response will be to build stronger dikes and firewalls against the dangerous and unpredictable masses, producing post-crisis institutions that are even more insulated from democratic accountability than they were before.

The Case For Small Government

That was the subject, broadly speaking, of Charles Murray's address at the annual AEI dinner, and like Jonah Goldberg and John Miller I found a lot to like in the speech, but some things to raise an eyebrow at as well. At bottom, I think the argument suffers from a problem that's common to both sides in the debates over the desirability of European-style social democracy - namely, the hope that what's ultimately a philosophical and moral controversy can have a tidy empirical resolution. So long as Murray's speech is making the philosophical case for limited government - that human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to "Aristotelian happiness," as he puts it, because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived - he's on firm (if obviously arguable) ground. But when he segues into the possibility that the emerging science of human nature will "prove" the limits of welfare-statism, and force liberals to give ground, I think he's indulging in a conservative version of Jon Chait's famous argument that liberals support bigger government because they're rigorous empiricists, whereas conservatives oppose it because they're hidebound dogmatists. In both cases, there's an unwarranted hope that the right facts and figures can settle a debate that ultimately depends on the philosophical assumptions that you bring to it.

I don't want to dismiss the arguments about the practical costs and benefits associated with different styles of welfare states, mind you. I like those arguments, and they matter a great deal. I would just deny that they can come close to settling, in any meaningful sense, the debate over how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it. That's because both the American and the European models of government are successful in purely practical terms, to the extent that purely practical terms exist - which is to say, both models have provided, over an extended period of time, levels of prosperity and stability unparalleled in human history. (Yes, the stresses that Islamic immigration and demographic decline are imposing on Europe are real and serious - but I think it's too soon to say, with Murray and many on the Right, that "the European model can't continue to work much longer," full stop. The end of history may be more resilient than we think!) And as long as this remains the case, where you come out on the debates over whether we should prefer the continent's sturdier safety nets to America's lower unemployment and higher growth rates (or the continent's more equible provision of health care to America's lead in health-care innovation, or what-have-you) will ultimately boil down to values as much as it will to what the numbers say.

How much do you prize equality and ease of life? The more you do, the more you'll favor a European approach to the relationship between state and society. How much do you prize voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one's family, and to God? The more you do, the more you'll find to like in the American arrangement. Where this debate is concerned, I'm proud to stand with Charles Murray - but I don't think that we should labor under the false hope that scientific advances are going to tilt the argument dramatically in our direction.

Barack Obama, Deficit-Cutter?

Jon Chait takes exception to my suggestion that the Obama budget lays out a kind of starve-the-beast in reverse:

In the most important sense, this is completely wrong. Obama's budget is not a net spender. It would reduce the deficit by some $2 trillion over the next decade (big PDF link; see page 115) compared to continuing current policy. (You can quibble about the "current policy" baseline -- some of the Iraq expenditures would probably have declined under even a Republican administration -- but the basic fact that Obama's policies reduce the deficit on the whole is hard to dispute.) By contrast, all of Bush's major deficit-increasing initiatives -- the tax cuts, the war in Iraq, the Medicare benefit -- came without any attempt at all to pay for them. And, by the way, most of the people who are complaining about Obama's fiscal irresponsibility today uttered not a peep of complaint about Bush.

Ramesh Ponnuru isn't convinced, and neither am I. That deceptive baseline makes all the difference in the world; take it away, and what you have is Obama reducing the deficit from recession-era highs created by TARP and the stimulus package - which are both designed to be temporary anyway - to recovery-era lows that are no lower, as a percentage of GDP, than the deficits Bush ran during his administration's years of economic growth. (This is leaving aside the rosiness of the growth and revenue-collection scenarios underlying the budget's number-crunching, and the fact that it only includes a "down payment" on the still-hypothetical health care reform that Obama wants as the domestic-policy centerpiece of his administration.) Now it's true that some voices within the Obama Administration wanted to run a higher deficit still, and the President apparently sided against them. But that doesn't change the fact that the projected post-recession deficits are in the same range as Bush's pre-recession deficits, if not slightly higher.

But don't listen to me; listen to Jon Chait:

Now, I'll concede that Douthat has a point in spirit. Obama does not get the deficit all the way to where it ought to be. If the economy recovers by 2011, as he projects, and we experience continued growth through 2019, and we're still running the 3.1 percent of GDP deficit he forecasts -- well, that would be a problem. [emphasis mine - RD] It's totally unfair to compare a president who made the problem vastly worse with one who alleviates the problem considerably. But it is interesting to ponder why Obama doesn't go further in the direction of fiscal responsibility.

This isn't a point "in spirit" - it's a point in fact. When the recession is over, and the stimulus spending has finished running through the economy, Barack Obama's budget projects the same level of deficit spending that the United States experienced from 2000 to 2007. The difference is that whereas Bush ran deficits in part as an attempt to establish a lower baseline for tax rates, Obama would run deficits in part as an attempt to establish a higher baseline for government spending. His accounting may more honest than Bush's, as Chait argues in a follow-up post, but that doesn't change the basic reality of what this administration is proposing: Its budgets would use substantial deficit spending to finance an expansion of government, while putting off the tax increases that would be required to pay for it. And I think it's fair to call that "starve the beast" in reverse.

Fooled By Randomness?

Even Warren Buffet is allowed to have an awful year from time to time. But reading about Berkshire Hathaway's losses over the weekend, all I could think about was the fate of Victor Niederhoffer.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Abortion?

I admire the persistence with which Will Saletan argues for common ground in the abortion debate, and attempts to sell his fellow liberals on the notion that reducing the abortion rate belongs in the Democratic Party's agenda. But I remain unconvinced that his preferred method for such reductions - a dramatic new push, whether political or cultural, to expand the use of contraception in the United States - would produce anything like the results that he envisions.

Consider, for instance, the idea that the government should dramatically expand eligibility for free contraception through Medicaid, a notion that conservatives objected to when it was tacked onto the stimulus package, and which Saletan links to as part of his latest proposed framework for an Obama abortion agenda. Here's Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill, both serious folks and proponents of the proposal, on the potential impact of such an initiative:

A recent Brookings Institution policy brief concluded that, in states that have already been granted income-eligibility waivers, this policy led to a significant reduction in the number of sexually-active women who have unprotected sex. We have incorporated this finding into a cutting-edge simulation model of family formation. Our results suggest that a similar expansion in contraceptive services in the remaining states would reduce the annual number of children born out of wedlock by more than 25,000, would reduce the number of pregnancies to unmarried teenagers each year by 19,000, and would reduce the annual number of abortions to unmarried women by nearly 12,000.

That sounds enormously impressive - until you consider that as of 2004, there were 2.8 million pregnancies among unmarried women in the United States, and roughly 1 million abortions. Which means that the universalization of this program, according to its supporters, might reduce the national abortion rate by somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. That's not nothing, obviously, but it's not a whole lot either - and in a country of millions upon millions, where countless trends shift the number of pregnancies and abortions around from year to year, it's perilously close to statistical noise. When you consider that there's good reason to think that Roe v. Wade raised the abortion rate by well over 50 percent, I think you can see why most opponents of abortion look at a "more birth control" strategy as a cop-out, rather than a cure.

But don't listen to me; listen to Will Saletan, in his recent Times op-ed on the same subject:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn't used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn't know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn't get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn't expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn't a shortage of pills or condoms. [emphasis mine - RD] It's a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It's a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation -- and the subsequent killing, through abortion -- of a developing human being.

Well, yeah. But from this admirable premise, Saletan circles back, inevitably, to blaming conservatives yet again - not for supporting policies that cause a shortage of contraceptives, this time, but for cultural messaging that discourages people from using them. Pro-lifers need to recognize that "a culture of life requires an ethic of contraception," he writes. "Birth control isn't a sin or an offense against life, as so many girls and Catholic couples have been taught. It's a loving, conscientious way to prevent the conception of a child you can't bear to raise and don't want to abort."

This makes it sound like the long shadow of Humanae Vitae and the malign influence of the Quiverfull movement are a big part of America's abortion problem. But if religious-conservative objections to contraceptive use were actually a big part of the cultural background to our abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rate, you'd expect to see some actual evidence of it. For one thing, you'd expect evidence that the Catholic Church's position on birth control has a significant impact on American Catholic sexual behavior, let alone on sexual behavior in the society at large. But the vast majority of Catholics are already on board with Saletan's premises. Around 80 percent think the Church should change its teaching on contraception. 88 percent of Catholic doctors prescribe it. As many as 95 percent of married Catholics use it. And I'm pretty sure that the 5-10 percent of Catholics who do obey the Church's teaching aren't having all that many abortions.

Moreover, if Saletan's diagnosis were correct, you'd also expect the pockets of America most influenced by religious conservatism to provide object lessons in the folly of trying to build a culture of life without a culture of contraception. But look at American abortion rates by state: The states with the lowest abortion rates are places like the Dakotas, Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, Kansas, and Mississippi; the states with the most are places like California, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. There are liberal states with low abortion rates (your Maines and Minnesotas), and right-tilting states with higher ones, but by and large the most religiously-conservative states seem to be doing a pretty good job on that whole culture of life business already, despite their failure to recognize the moral imperative of welcoming Planned Parenthood with open arms.

As I said, I applaud Saletan's search for common ground, and I recognize that the distance between his idea of compromise and mine reflects deep philosophical differences than no data set can bridge. But I also think it also reflects faulty empirical premises about what causes high abortion rates (and what produces lower ones), and I wish he'd reassess them.

Being British, Then and Now

From the decline-and-fall annals, it seems like these two items belong together - perhaps with this essay to link them up.

Refugee, Run

No musings on the follies of Davos Man, I think, would be complete without a link to this bit of beyond-parody folly.

(h/t: Alex Massie)

Alas, Babylon

Via Rod Dreher, here's Federico Fubini on the cluelessness of Davos Man:

Publicly, the discourse is all about the dangers of "false market assumptions" and the now-infamous "financial engineering." (I seem to remember it being called "financial innovation" last year.) But offstage, top bankers, private equity bosses, and hedge fund stars keep chitchatting and socializing, just as if banks had not had $1 trillion write-downs, the financial markets had not lost $25 trillion, and up to 30 million jobs were not at risk around the world.

To achieve this state of mind, any human being probably needs to construct a formidable mental shield. A survey I personally conducted at Davos this year of 60 top central bankers, financial market regulators, fund managers, and industry opinion-makers gives an idea of what this shield looks like.

When participants were asked whether they think they have done something in their career which "might have contributed, even in a minor way, to the financial crisis," 63.5 percent opted for a clear "no"; 31.5 percent went for a "yes," often adding in the same breath that nobody in the industry can honestly claim otherwise; and 5 percent said "maybe."

The "yes" people were then asked to explain what triggered their wrong decisions. They had three options: "too much optimism" (68.7 percent), "I felt I had to keep dancing while the music was playing" (31.3 percent), or "greed" (0 percent).

David Rubenstein, cofounder and managing director of the Carlyle Group, expressed surprise at the results. "How strange," he said. "I thought 100 percent of them would say they had nothing to do with it."

The debates about whether religion is good for society are endless for a reason: There are too many variables, too many religions, and too many definitions of "good" to make anything like a universally-accepted answer possible. But I'm pretty comfortable saying that a certain kind of religion is good for a certain kind of person. And it's hard to escape the impression that the world would be in better shape today if more of our elites - our bankers and financiers, our tycoons and captains of industry, and yes, our Presidents as well - had spent the last decade's worth of Sundays on their knees listening to readings from Ecclesiastes, and Jansenist-inflected sermons about the innate depravity of man. 

Perspective

From Brad DeLong, part of The Week's impressive new virtual op-ed page:

The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort--where we have enough food that we are not painfully hungry, enough clothing that we are not shiveringly cold, enough shelter that we are not distressingly wet, even enough entertainment that we are not bored. We--at least those lucky enough to be in the global middle and upper classes who still cluster around the North Atlantic--have lots and lots of stuff. Our machines and factories have given us the power to get more and more stuff by getting more and more stuff--a self-perpetuating cycle of consumption.

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century. Then there are all the commodities we consume that were essentially priceless in the past. If in 1786 you had wanted to listen to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in your house, you probably had to be the Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, with a theater in your house--the Palace of Laxenberg. Today, the DVD costs $17.99 at amazon.com. (The multiplication factor for enjoying The Marriage of Figaro in your home is effectively infinite for those not named Josef von Habsburg.)

All true. But the kicker matters, too:

Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

But no dice. I look around, and all I can say is: not yet, not for a long time to come, and perhaps never ... There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.

That we'll never be satisfied with what we have probably goes without saying. But the most pressing issue, it seems to me, is whether we've reached - or will reach - a point at which all our abundance cushions us against the political consequences of suddenly-diminished expectations. In 1932 or so, the West's porridge-eating past wasn't nearly as far in the rearview mirror as it is today, but a Brad DeLong of the Great Depression could still have marshaled all sorts of statistics to prove that even amid economic crisis, your average Westerner was in vastly better shape than his pre-industrial forefathers. Yet that underlying reality didn't save Europe from a decade in which democratic capitalism was thought to be discredited, and the whole edifice of modern civilization was very nearly torn apart.

Hopefully the world - not only DeLong's North Atlantic cluster, but the developing powers as well - has grown rich enough and stable enough that something like that simply couldn't happen again, no matter how hard the fall and how deep the depression. Hopefully.

Abortion and the Morning After Pill

Everything that I've read on the subject suggests that Will Saletan has it right, and the Vatican has it wrong.

Bernie Madoff, Stimulus Czar?

One of Tyler Cowen's alter egos gives Ben Bernanke some advice:

What about that guy who set up the phony investment company? Can the Treasury make a new one of those, only bigger? He took money away from people and gave it to charities and the needy and the arts and higher education. That sounds like stimulus so why are we sending him to jail? Wasn't he ahead of the curve?

For more serious stimulus-related commentary, here's Tyler citing a new paper on taxes, spending, and bang for your buck.

Too Big To Fail, World Edition

Speaking of future foreign policy debates, Ambinder raises a good question:

... Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public,  (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

The public rhetoric from Team Obama seems to treat history as having ended in early October, which is understandable; the priority right now is on the liquidity crisis, the structure of government and the peopling of the administration and the domestic economy.  Most of the administration's major policy voices don't have the luxury of time to game out scenarios. Now -- it can fairly be said that Treasury nominee Tim Geithner, himself an assistant secretary for international economic affairs during the Clinton administration, is aware of the precarious state demand in certain critical countries, as is Larry Summers.  The question: what's the administration's policy in this area? Which countries can we afford to let fail? Which unstable states would concern us the most? Is there something the U.S. can do, in advance, should do, in advance, to forestall the collapse of other economies?

Today: GM. Tomorrow: the Egypt bailout ...?

The Shooting of Brian Beutler

A first-person account, with Ta-Nehisi as his interlocutor:

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Last week, both Ta-Nehisi and Megan had posts on the dubiousness of the search for villains in our current economic mess, when the fault may lie less with specific nefarious actors - whether on Wall Street or in Washington - than with ourselves as a people, and with the desires and impulses and stupidities of a mass capitalist society. Henry Blodget makes a related argument in the just-out December issue of our magazine, arguing that "the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that [bubbles] will form," and that the mass pursuit of rational self-interest is the only real culprit for our present woes.

In one sense, I agree with these arguments, and indeed I've made similarly-themed arguments myself. But it's also worth noting that saying "we're all to blame" for what's happened doesn't exclude the possibility that some people, and some kinds of people, are more to blame than others - because some people have greater responsibilities than others, and all mistakes are not created equal.

Blodget, for instance, runs through a typical housing bubble scenario - somebody buys a house late in the game and loses his shirt - and argues that almost everybody involved, from the homebuyer to the real-estate agent to the mortgage broker to the people on Wall Street and Washington who enabled the whole thing were making the same kind of mistakes, and indeed, were acting "just the way you would expect them to act under the circumstances." Now in a sense, this is convincing. But at a same time, our hypothetical homebuyer had very different responsibilities than a hypothetical Wall Street banker. His decision to buy at the height of the bubble put him at risk to lose, say, tens of thousands of dollars and perhaps the roof over his head. Those are high stakes, obviously, but they're high stakes for him and for his family. Whereas the risky decisions being made the people running, say, Citibank had serious consequences for millions of people, in America and around the world. And this distinction ought to matter, both to how people should be expected to behave, and how they should be judged.

So yes, the mistakes made at the top of the American economic and political pyramid might have been the same kind of mistakes made by people in the middle and the bottom, and might have been motivated by the same logic, and the same psychology. But they were made by people who had a far, far larger responsibility than the average American to be careful, and risk-averse and, dare one say it, wise ... by people who, for the most part, came from the upper rungs of the meritocracy, with advantages arguably unparalleled in the history of the world ... and thus by people whose risk-taking mistakes were worse than those made by the average homeowner or investor, because it should have been their business to be safer.

I don't often plug my first book, Privilege, but I think it's worth mentioning here because when you read about how the American leadership class acquitted itself at Citibank, or on Wall Street in general, I think you can see the dark side of meritocracy at work - the same dark side that shadows an instititution like Harvard, where a job in investment banking became, for a time, the summum bonum of meritocratic life. The mistakes that our elites made, and that led us to this pass, have their roots in flaws common to all elites, in all times and places - hubris, arrogance, insulation from the costs of their decisions, and so forth. But they also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this elite, and this time and place. Flaws like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping competitiveness (because making ten million dollars isn't enough if somebody else from your Ivy League class is making more!). It's a combination, at its worst, that marries the kind of vaulting, religion-of-success ambitions (and attendant status anxieties) that you'd expect from a self-made man to the obnoxious entitlement you'd expect from a to-the-manor-born elite - without the sense of proportion and limits, of the possibility of tragedy and the inevitability of human fallibility, that a real self-made man would presumably gain from starting life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (as opposed to the upper-middle class, where most meritocrats starts) ... and without, as well, the sense of history, duty, self-restraint, noblesse oblige and so forth that the old aristocrats were supposed to aspire to.

Now every elite has its own unique flaws, obviously, and every elite has the capacity to steer the country it leads into some sort of disaster or another. Those old aristocrats were discredited, finally and forever, by the slaughter of World War I, a debacle that makes our current economic meltdown look like a stroll in the Tuileries, and that owed a great deal to a poisonous intersection of chivalric fantasies and gross stupidity - a confluence of qualities to which our meritocratic elite, one assumes, is relatively immune.  And it may be that cultivating your elite through meritocracy is like government by, for and of the people - the worst possible sort of system, except for all the others.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pause a moment, amid the current wreckage, to ponder what went wrong with this elite, here and now, and how its particular sins helped produced this particular crisis. This elite, which is also my elite, and whose vices are very much my own as well: I'm just fortunate than in journalism, as opposed to finance, the fate of the world's economy doesn't usually ride on your decisions. (Though if it did, I suppose we'd have more of a chance at that bailout ...)

Bail The Presses!

BusinessWeek's Jon Fine gets down to nuts and bolts on how this journalism bailout thing might work, offering up two potential "Newspaper Rescue Acts":

Debt Relief/Subsidization. The U.S. assumes all outstanding debt at all newspaper companies. At midyear that was $14 billion for the publicly traded players (excluding News Corp., which only owns two U.S. newspapers, but more on them later), $12.5 billion for the Tribune Co., plus more for other private players. The U.S. may take equity stakes in all companies, should the government deem this wise. This plan also includes a onetime sum to offset current revenue shortfalls. Newspapers took in $45 billion from advertising in '07; let's assume ad declines this year and next will total $15 billion. Cost: Around $45 billion.

Industry Digitization. Think of the "license fee" British households pay to the BBC. Government will subsidize Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle (or equivalent device) and mandate that each household purchase one for $50. (Households below the poverty line will get one free.) This plan also provides several billion dollars to develop new digital news products, retrofit or dispose of obsolete assets (like printing presses), and roughly maintain existing newsroom staffs. Government again has the option to secure passive equity stakes. We will stress this plan's "green" aspects. Cost: Approximately $55 billion.

Okay, so maybe it wouldn't come quite as cheap as I'd hoped. But I'm pretty sure we're worth it.

Provocation of the Day

Alex Tabarrok:

The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.  See the map for more.  It is time for a sale.  Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars - perhaps trillions of dollars - for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes.

More, and the map, here.

Where's The Journalism Bailout?

David Frum, on the fate of GM:

Last week, the stock of Las Vegas Sands Corporation collapsed. Bankruptcy seems a real possibility. Indeed, the whole casino gambling industry in Nevada is facing the worst crisis in at least a generation, maybe ever. Casino gambling directly employs more people than the domestic automobile industry. Add in the supply chain for both industries, and casinos still employ almost half as many people as the automobile sector.

So what about a bailout for the casino industry? Ridiculous! Right? But why right?

More importantly, what about the journalism industry? What about us - my friends and co-workers, and friends of friends and co-workers of co-workers, who've spent the last five years watching our business slowly circle the drain? Doesn't America need the New York Times as much at it needs the Chevy Cobalt? Isn't the Star-Ledger as important as the GMC Savana? Sure, GM employs roughly five times as many people as all all of America's newsrooms combined - but that just means that we'd be much, much cheaper to bail out! GM needs $25 billion, but we'd settle for, I dunno, five billion? Pocket change, in other words! And we'd be so, so grateful. If you think your coverage couldn't get more lovey-dovey than it already is, Mr. President-Elect, the magazine and newspaper editors of America stand ready to prove you wrong - and all for a fraction of what it took to bail out those ingrates on Wall Street.

More seriously, go read Megan on GM: I'm not sure if she's right, but she's on a roll.

A Foray Into Racial Awkwardness

Is there any way for a white American to say that the election of Barack Obama makes him feel happy for black America without sounding condescending, inappropriate, and weird? Probably not. (I think this Maureen Dowd column stands as a particular painful example of the genre, even though - or perhaps because - it strains for levity along the way.)

Nonetheless, I'll take the plunge and say that this Ta-Nehisi post made me feel, well, really happy for black America.

(Cringe!)

Two Paths To Reform

The nice thing about a resounding defeat is that everyone can look at the exit polls and find confirmation that the GOP needs to do better among their favored constituency. I can read the exits and see a party that lost six points, compared to 2004, among voters making $30,000 to $50,000, seven points among voters making $50,000 to $75,000, six points among high school graduates and seven points among voters with "some college," and interpret all of this as evidence that the GOP needs to a better job of, well, winning the working class (and saving the American Dream!) David Frum, on the other hand, can look at polls showing that McCain lost three points among college graduates, nine points among people making $100,000 a year, and an astonishing seventeen points among people making over $200,000 a year, and argue that the party faces a stark choice: It can keep trying to maximize its share of the white working class vote, perhaps by nominating candidates like Sarah Palin, or it can make the wiser choice, in Frum's view, and try to win back rich, well-educated white Americans by embracing "painful change" on issues like the environment and abortion. (Frum's binary assumes, I should note, that the GOP can't improve its standing among Hispanics, at least in the short term.)

Now obviously a successful party would want to regain ground on multiple fronts at once - winning back working-class voters and wooing the college-educated and upper-income demographics. And obviously how you do this depends on who and where you are: A Republican running for office in, say, suburban New England will need to be more pro-environment and more pro-choice than the national party, and a GOP that's losing ground almost everywhere has every reason to be accommodating of regional differences - just as the Democrats have been of late, by mounting pro-life, anti-immigration candidates for office in conservative districts and reddish states.

But for the national party, Frum is right that there are real choices to be made. If you follow the Douthat-Salam model, which Reihan has dubbed "lower-middle reformism," you're going to be crafting a message aimed at the place where the non-college educated and college-educated categories bleed into one another - one pitched to the exurb-living college graduate who picked up a degree from a regional public university (or jumped from school to school and didn't finish in four years, like Sarah Palin), and who probably has more in common, culturally and economically, with a lot of grads of community colleges and technical schools than he does with someone who went to, say, Swarthmore. This approach requires talking a lot about the famous "kitchen table" issues - public education and transportation, crime and health care costs - and trying to expand the definition of what it means to be "pro-family" without abandoning the GOP's core pro-life convictions. If you follow the model Frum recommends in his column, on the other hand - call it "upper-middle reformism" - and pitch your message to the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year, then you're talking to a "post-material" group of people who worry less about day-to-day economic concerns and more about causes like global warming - making Frum's vision of a pro-choice, pro-carbon tax GOP a more plausible fit. (Frum has also proposed a fat tax, which is likewise something that seems most likely to appeal to the healthy, wealthy voters at the upper tail of the income and education distribution.)

Again, I don't think this is a completely either/or matter for the GOP. A party that restores its reputation for competence and policy seriousness, as the Republicans desperately need to do, will win back voters across the income and educational spectrum, no matter what specific positions it takes. But insofar as there's a choice to be made, I think building a coalition of social conservatives and social moderates from the middle of the income and education distribution makes much more political sense than trying to hold together a coalition of social conservatives from the middle of the distribution and social liberals from the upper end. Joe the Plumber and Joe the Office-Park Employee make much more plausible political bedfellows than Joe the Plumber and Joseph the Hedge Fund Guy. Moreover, I think a conservatism that's primarily oriented around the interests of the first pair of Joes is the better choice for America as well - because these are voters who face the most significant socioeconomic challenges in the current landscape, and who most deserve a government, and a right-of-center politics, that looks out for their interests. As a wise conservative writer put it not that long ago:

... The county's new wealth and diversity have created important new social problems. The schools are stressed. The roads are choked. Land use is more contentious ... For most of the Bush administration, G.D.P. grew strongly, the stock market boomed, new jobs were created. But the ordinary person experienced little benefit. The median household income, which rose in the '90s, had only just caught up to its 2000 level when the expansion ended in 2007.

... Between 2001 and 2008, the amount that employers paid for labor rose impressively, at least 25 percent. Yet almost all of that money was absorbed by the costs of health insurance, which doubled over the Bush years. In the 1990s, thanks to the advent of H.M.O.'s, health-care costs rose more slowly, so more of the money paid by employers could flow to employees.

Out of their flat-lining incomes, middle-class Americans have had to pay more for food, fuel, tuition and out-of-pocket health-care costs. In the past few months, they have suffered sharp tumbles in the value of their most important asset, their homes. Their mood has turned bleak. Almost 70 percent disapprove of the policies of George W. Bush. At intervals over the past two decades, Gallup has asked Americans whether the United States is a society divided into "haves" and "have-nots." Back in 1988, more than 70 percent of Americans rejected this description. This year, the country split evenly: 49-49. When asked, "Are you better off than you were five years ago?" only 41 percent of middle-class Americans say yes, the worst result since pollsters started asking the question half a century ago.

It's this pervasive economic unease that is capsizing the Republican Party ...

This writer, of course, was David Frum.

Palin, Plumbers, and Polarization

Chris Caldwell, on class and the election:

... the Palin pick was the electoral equivalent of an atomic bomb. It was one of those tactics that turns into a strategy. What the Palin pick did was to unleash a latent class tension in American life and turn the two parties, previously somewhat socially mixed, into vehicles of social classes. Prominent intellectuals who once leaned rightward sorted themselves into the Obama camp. So did most north-eastern Republicans. The party has focused on its proletarian rump. Rallies have grown more strident, with howls of 'Communist!' when Obama's name is mentioned. McCain singled out an Ohio man -- 'Joe the Plumber' -- who had buttonholed Obama as he canvassed his neighbourhood. Soon McCain and Palin were building a following of tradesmen with sobriquets out of children's books: Tito the Builder, Suzanne the Sandwich-Maker. There have been a lot of books lately urging Republicans to think more about the interests of their lower-middle-class base. That is a problem that is going to take care of itself.

The Democrats are now the partisan home of the upper crust of the American meritocracy, of the credentialled classes, the classes that believe every endeavour is some variety of IQ test. USA Today did a review of fund-raising data and discovered that Obama dominates fundraising among the leaders of 'finance, insurance, real estate, health, communications and law'. His campaign has run through hundreds of millions more than McCain's, and will spend a quarter of a billion dollars on television alone before this election is over. Obama has far more than twice as many ads up in Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In Florida, he has run 18,909 ads to McCain's 5,702. The Democratic party is the vehicle through which, after a populist interlude, the governing classes are proposing to take their country back. Obama is a restoration candidate but that doesn't mean he has a plan.

There's some smart analysis here, especially in the latter paragraph, but I don't know what Caldwell means by "a problem that is going to take care of itself." It certainly didn't take care of itself in this election: Instead, you had a lot of posturing from the Republican ticket about how the GOP is the more proletarian party, joined to very little substance addressed to the actual interests of lower-middle-class voters. If the Palin pick had actually turned into a vehicle of class polarization, and if for every lost country-club Republican the GOP ticket were adding a Joe the Plumber or a Tito the Builder to its pool of voters, then the polls wouldn't look nearly so dire for McCain. But compare the last Pew poll conducted in this race to the results from 2004. Among voters without a college degree, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 53 to 47 percent; in 2008, Obama's going into today's vote leading 47 to 43 percent in that working-class demographic. The same goes if you define class in terms of income rather than education. In 2004, Kerry beat Bush by just one point among voters making $35,000-$50,000; among voters making $50,000-$75,000, Bush beat Kerry by thirteen points. Fash-forward to '08, and according to Pew, McCain's beating Obama by only six points in the $50,000 to $75,000 demographic, and he's losing to the Democrat by seven points in among voters making between $35,000 and $50,000.

In other words, the GOP has lost ground both among the elites and among the proles in this campaign. The Palin-and-the-plumber strategy didn't polarize the race by socioeconomic class: It cost the Republicans votes among the upper crust, most likely, without gaining them anything with the Joe Sixpack demographic, which is going for Obama too. All of this is subject to revision pending tonight's actual results, but for the moment it looks like the GOP's relationship to working class voters worsened considerably between 2004 and 2008, Palin-related class tensions notwithstanding, creating a problem for Republicans that may be resolved eventually (ahem), but almost certainly won't take care of itself.

It's a Wonderful Movie Reference

I like Edward Rothstein's columns and I enjoyed this piece, but I feel like somebody else got there first.

Too Soon To Tell

I've written before about Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity) - and I've argued before with Will Wilkinson about whether it's possible to envision a successful society in which the liberal impulses dominate completely, and the conservative impulses are stigmatized and/or essentially disappear. Haidt, for his part, thinks that it probably isn't; here's Will arguing with him:

Frankly, I find this extremely unconvincing, and I daresay even pernicious ... What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect ... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest-that is, the most imbalanced-are by and large the best places for human beings to live. 

My own view is that there is a distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies. As Hayek noted, the decisive shift in human history was the shift (in some places) between personal to impersonal exchange. And part of this is a shift from personal to impersonal mechanisms for achieving order. If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.) 

I think the answer is that in Hayek's "extended order," the conservative sentiments play a relatively small and decreasing role. A more thoroughly liberal moral culture evidently not only sustains order, but sustains an order that leaves us healthier, happier, and orders of magnitude wealthier. If cranked-up conservative sentiments were necessary to sustain that order, then their decline would indeed endanger us, and could not constitute moral progress. But insofar as they have become superfluous, the failure to further suppress them is a failure of further moral progress. This is not a story of liberal/conservative Yin and Yang. This is a story of Yin devouring Yang. 

I admire Jon's anthropologist's impulse to take the variety of moral cultures seriously, and to take our own society's mostly intra-liberal moral pluralism seriously. But I think he's making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It's pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren't in them. When we recognize that, in the advanced world, those conditions have largely vanished-when we recognize that is partly what makes it the advanced world "advanced"-the question cannot be "Why do we need to respect tribalism, subordination, and moralized disgust?" The question is what to do with impulses that now hurt more than help, but are written into us anyway. 

I have a Fukuyaman streak that thinks Will might be be proven right about this in the long run - that the levels of wealth generated by market capitalism will rise and rise, cushioning away the impact of any negative externalities that the "conservative" moral instincts may be evolved/designed to guard against. But I also think that it's way too soon for the partisans of a purely liberal order to get cocky. The liberal impulses have been gaining ground against the conservatives ones ever since Christianity came on the scene, but they started from a pretty weak position: It took them the better part of two thousand years to reach parity, and only in the twentieth century did they really gain the upper hand, making it possible for Will and others to fantasize about a world in which the non-liberal sentiments can be ignored and/or discarded. Today, the world's most liberal societies are still only a couple generations deep into a massive experiment in the kind of social organization that Will favors, and I'm not sure that results to date are a guarantor of future returns.

Take the Sexual Revolution in the United States, for instance - which represented a massive ratcheting down of the "purity/sanctity" index, to borrow Haidt's terms, and a ratcheting up of a more "liberal" approach to sexuality. If you'd freeze-framed America in 1991 or so, a generation into this particular experiment in a more liberalized morality, it wouldn't have been hard to make the case that the costs were exceeding the benefits: Alongside the increase in sexual freedom, you had skyrocketing divorce, teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth rates, rising rates of STDs alongside the then-uncontainable plague of AIDS, a thirty-year crime wave that many social scientists believed would be compounded by a new generation of "super-predators," and various other stark indicators of social decline. Flash forward fifteen years, of course, and things look much better on many of these fronts, which has prompted various people to argue that we've passed through what Francis Fukuyama terms a "Great Disruption" (and then through what Tom Wolfe famously called a "Great Relearning") and reached a stable post-Sixties equilibrium. But there are still reasons - some of which are detailed in Grand New Party - to be pessimistic, or at least not completely optimistic, about the long-term consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Yes, there's much more reason for optimism today than there was in 1991. But I don't think the trends that produced a great deal of early-1990s declinism are quite far enough in the rearview mirror to be dismissed as just a temporary pit stop on the road to the broad sunlit uplands of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European version of the liberal experiment currently involves the intersection of a post-Sexual Revolution birth dearth with immigration policies seemingly designed without much input from Haidt's "conservative" moral impulses - particularly the whole "ingroup/loyalty" business. Now maybe this experiment, despite some hiccups along the way, will work out to the long-term benefit of the all the peoples involved. I know that Will assumes it will, and it's quite possible he's right. But there, I think, it's definitely too soon to tell for sure. The indicators point in a lot of directions at once, and it's by no means absurd to suspect that we'll look back from the vantage point of 2100 or so and say that Europe would have been better off if the conservative moral impulses hadn't ceded the floor quite so completely to the liberal ones in the latter part of the twentieth century.

It's also worth pointing out that we don't really have any idea how Will's "distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies" would handle a severe and extended economic shock of the sort that (God willing) we've just narrowly avoided. The last time the liberal West endured such a shock, the results were extremely ugly, and it was touch-and-go for a while whether democracy would survive at all, or whether the Wilkinsons and Douthats of the future would be competing for blogging licenses in a world divvied up between competing totalitarianisms.

Of course, maybe the totalitarian moment was only made possible because the liberal weltanschauung hadn't advanced far enough, and there was still enough conservative atavism left for fascists and communists to batten on. Maybe we've advanced past all that: Maybe we won't have to find out how Will's Yang-less order bears up under severe stress; maybe we will, and it'll bear up fine.

But I tend to think that the liberal as well as the conservative moral impulses off Haidt's list went into the forging of totalitarianism, and that conservative as well as liberal impulses served as bulwarks against the worst crimes and excesses of that era. And with that in mind, the fact that rising liberal sentiments and declining conservative ones have correlated, to date with greater human flourishing overall seems somewhat short of dispositive proof that we can do without the latter entirely.   

The GOP and the Investor Class

While I'm on the subject of capital-gains tax cuts and political strategy, this seems like a good time to cite my friend Matt Continetti's 2005 profile of Eliot Spitzer, which included a prescient explanation of why a growing "investor class" doesn't guarantee a growing share of the vote for the GOP:

... while universal stock ownership may be desirable for other reasons--most economists believe that lower-income Americans would benefit from having at least some of their savings in stocks--it hardly guarantees political catnip for Republicans. For one thing, if 80 or 90 percent of Americans own stocks and bonds, "investors" will no longer be a class at all--unless it's the class of all voters, in both parties. Furthermore--and more immediately--there's a corollary to the investor-class thesis that favors Democrats. As more people enter the market, they may turn to politicians who offer protection from rapacious capitalists and irresponsible money managers. Burned by market downturns, they will want politicians to go after those who did them harm. And those politicians, in turn, will say they are "saving" markets in the process. Politicians like Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer is gone, of course, and this isn't an exact summary of how the current financial crisis has played out for the GOP. (And as I've said before, I don't think that a straightforward focus on punishing the bad guys, as opposed to finding solutions, plays that well with voters caught up in an economic calamity.) But the broad point is timely, and true: When the stock market drops, the average middle-class investor may be more likely to look to the Democrats than to the Republicans for answers, and an ever-larger investor class may actually be more supportive of regulation - the better to minimize the short-run risks their portfolios and 401(k)s face, even at the expense of long-run gains - than a middle class that isn't heavily invested in the stock market.

Bet On America

Both/And

In the spirit of this blog post from Megan (which may be my favorite of the entire economic crisis), here are two readings for the day. For the first is for every left-liberal who thinks the housing crisis was entirely the result of wicked Republicans (and quisling Democrats) who deregulated the hell out of the American economy in the name of cowboy capitalism; it's a month-hold interview with Warren Buffett (via Tyler Cowen), in which he talks about Fannie, Freddie, and the limits of regulation:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it's really an incredible case study in regulation because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that's $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies.

QUICK: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you can get them on the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to Sarbanes and Oxley every year. And they went--wrote 100 page reports, and they said, 'We've looked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.' And then all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350--340 page report examining what went wrong, and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit committee. They didn't have a word in there about themselves, and they're the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.

QUICK: That sounds like an argument against regulation, though. Is that what you're saying?

Mr. BUFFETT: It's an argument explaining--it's an argument that managing complex financial institutions where the management wants to deceive you can be very, very difficult.

The second is for any free-market conservative who thinks that the only thing that matters in this whole story is government's distortion of the market - the long bipartisan push to increase homeownership by any means necessary, that is - and that capitalism's tendency to encourage greed-addled shortsightedness has nothing to do with it. It's an interview N+1 did with a hedge fund manager nine months ago:

... There were people at the firm, say, at the middle of last year [2006], who were not mortgage experts, who were saying, you know, "I see the run-up in housing prices in some of these geographies, and I just don't really get it. I go down to Florida and see the forest of cranes, and I just really wonder, who's going to be in all those apartments? And I hear about all sorts of friends who are getting loans to buy apartments or houses speculatively and who are lying about the fact that it's not a primary residence, and I see these commercials on TV, you know, about low-doc, no-doc mortgages--and there is no way, there is no way that this is not going to end badly. And I see that these mortgages are being created by this massive demand for CDO paper, by this robotic bid, and this is the perfect example of a bubble--and we should be short, we should be short sub-prime paper."

n+1: This is what guys do? They travel around Florida, they watch TV?

HFM: Just in your normal life, I mean, like me, I trade a different market, I don't trade subprime, but, you know, I travel for other reasons, and some of my partners do the same thing. And we all, a number of us thought, "This is just crazy. We should be short. This is a bubble waiting to be popped." But the person who was the expert [at the fund], the person who ran the sub-prime business, who traded subprime paper and issued the CDOs, he was a true believer in the paradigm: "In 2003, people said that the credit quality of the average subprime mortgage was deteriorating, and now look, those mortgages have performed fine. The subprime market works." And, hey, he was the expert--you defer to the expert.

Via Keith Gessen. (They did a follow-up interview, after the Bear Stearns fiasco, that's also worth your time.)

Real Estate and Inequality

This paper's findings won't be surprising to any college graduate who's pondered buying a house in the greater D.C. area:

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a high cost of housing. This implies that college graduates are increasingly exposed to a high cost of living and that the relative increase in their real wage may be smaller than the relative increase in their nominal wage. To measure the college premium in real terms, I deflate nominal wages using a new CPI that allows for changes in the cost of housing to vary across metropolitan areas and education groups. I find that half of the documented increase in the return to college between 1980 and 2000 disappears when I use real wages. This finding does not appear to be driven by differences in housing quality and is robust to a number of alternative specifications.

Via Will Wilkinson, of course - your one-stop source for findings that complicate the inequality picture, and the proprietor of a snazzily-redesigned blog.

The Pickens Plan

It scores high on the folksy scale, at least:

Matt comments here. Naturally, I'm curious about the Manzi take.

Alan Wolfe, Renaissance Man

Via Will Wilkinson, I see that Alan Wolfe's grasp of economics is about as impressive as his grasp of American conservative thought.

The Table At Aspen (III)

Here's part two of the party politics conversation - and there's lots more Aspen video going up all the time over at our Ideas Festival page.

Tim Russert, RIP

I think Matt's remarks on the passing of Tim Russert strike the right balance between respect for the man's achievements and honesty about what Matt - and many others - viewed as the weaknesses of the Russert interviewing style. But I'd take a little issue with this comment:

The blue-collar persona was, in many respects, a bizarre posture for a multi-millionaire television celebrity.

This is something you hear a great deal from contemporary liberals, whether the "ordinary Joe" affect in question belongs to Russert or George W. Bush, Bill O'Reilly or Lou Dobbs. And obviously there can be something unpleasant about this sort of persona, particularly when it's wedded to a chip-on-your-shoulder, bullying sensibility, and particularly when it requires what Mike Kinsley memorably described as "downward social climbing." But there's also something unpleasant about the insistence that rich Americans - especially self-made rich Americans - don't have the right to stay true to their blue-collar roots, and that public figures who like to talk about their Rust Belt hometowns and their working-class Dads and their favorite sports teams are somehow all frauds and phonies and reverse-poseurs. (Thus Paul Waldman: "That Russert no doubt actually prefers the Bills to other teams makes it no less of an affectation." Really?) A blue-collar persona on an inside-the-Beltway anchor can be fake and deeply irritating, but it doesn't have to be: To wax Laschian, or Kausian, there's a lot to be said for refusing to let your paycheck (and yes, your summer home) stand in the way of your sense of social equality, and your commitment to giving blue-collar America a voice in a white-collar town. I had my problems with the Russert style of interviewing as well, but it's hard to see how he would have been a better anchor if he hadn't self-consciously tried to ask questions that he thought his Dad's friends back in upstate New York would want the powerful to answer. Maybe he didn't live up to the role he assigned himself - Buffalo's man in Washington - but his viewers, and American democracy, are better off because he tried.

The (Ir)relevance of ANWR

Of course we should drill for oil there. And yes, McCain's resistance to doing so is a good small-bore example of what's wrong with his style of reformist conservatism: It deviates from right-wing orthodoxy on boutique issues that please the media (see also campaign-finance reform, tobacco legislation, etc. etc.), rather than issues that connect with actual voters, and draw usable contrasts with the Democrats.

But it's a small-bore example. On the level of policy, drilling in ANWR isn't going to make more than a small dent in America's energy difficulties over the long run. On the level of politics, meanwhile, the idea that pushing for drilling is going to be some sort of major difference-maker in the fall campaign is just silly. And it's the sort of silliness that makes me dread a McCain presidency, frankly, because it will set up a situation in which the debate over the future of conservatism gets defined as a struggle between McCainism on the one hand and Limbaughism on the other, when both are a poor basis for a viable conservative party in America.

Perfect Madness

John Podhoretz nominates this Judith Warner post for the "Repulsive Blog Item of the Year Award." I would second the nomination, but I also think it's worth zeroing in the structure of Warner's post, which reflects the kind of gonzo inanity that's made her a hathetic joy to read for a long time now. The item starts with her reading about hymen restorations among Muslim women in Europe, which in turn inspires her to forage for a Times story she's clipped about father-daughter "purity balls." At which point you think you know where this is going: Toward a "plague on both your houses" attack on the creepiness of Muslim and Christian fixations on female virginity. And if you're a fair-minded reactionary, as I like to fancy myself, you think to yourself: Well, that's a little bit of a stretch, but those purity balls are high on the "ick" factor ...

But then Warner pulls the rug out from under you:

“From this, it’s only a matter of degree to the man in Austria,” I’d scribbled across the first page [of the purity ball story].

"The man in Austria"? Wait for it ...

The “man in Austria,” of course, was 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, who was around that time also making headlines after it was discovered that he had kept his daughter, Elisabeth, 42, locked up in a cellar for 24 years, during which time he’d raped her regularly, and had her bear him seven children.

Yep, that's the Judith Warner I've come to know and love. (Though I still think that Warner's meditation on why her readers shouldn't resent her for having a summer place in Normandy remains in a hathos-inspiring class by itself.)

A Mother's Work

Needless to say, you should check out the entirety of the Atlantic's July/August issue, now online. Since it probably won't get the attention afforded Nick Carr's Google piece, or Hanna Rosin's "American Murder Mystery", let me particularly recommend Sandra Tsing Loh's review essay on women and work, which tackles books by my least favorite feminist (take a bow, Linda Hirshman) and one of my favorite sociologists, Berkeley's Neil Gilbert. Reihan and I draw on some of his work in Grand New Party, but we finished our book before his book appeared - and frankly, that might be for the best, since our gloss on Gilbert is about one-tenth as entertaining as Tsing Loh's.

But don't take it from me: read the whole thing. (I'm happy to report that it even includes a foray into the Sweden wars.)

The Google Effect

The thesis Nicholas Carr advances in the latest Atlantic - that the internet is changing our reading and thinking habits, and not necessarily for the better - prompts the following response from Max Boot :

For my part, I haven’t noticed my attention flagging because of the Internet. What I have noticed is that the Internet makes it much easier to produce longer pieces of writing. Google, especially, is invaluable, and not only because it enables anyone to look up obscure facts with a few keystrokes. Another function of Google is less famous but growing in importance for those of us in the book-writing biz — namely its “book” search function. Google has digitized thousands of volumes, allowing researchers to easily find obscure tomes. While no preview is available of many recently published books, and others offer only a “snippet view,” growing numbers of books whose copyright have lapsed are available in “full” search mode, meaning that you can, if you so desire, read the entire book online — or, more likely, print it out.

I have found this to be in invaluable resource while researching my new history of guerrilla warfare. It used to take me a long time to get books via interlibrary loan, and then the 19th century volumes usually arrived in very poor conditions. Now for nothing more than the cost of the paper and ink I can get printer-fresh copies of General Phil Sheridan’s memoirs, George Macaulay Trevelyan’s classic volumes on Garibaldi, or the Rev. James Gordon’s “History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798.” Moreover, if necessary, I can use Google to search for keywords inside the books.

This is a huge and growing boon for scholars or interested readers, and it is the product not of a traditional nonprofit library but of a decidedly profit-making business. Thanks, Google, for making me-and lots of others-smarter. Of course whether readers raised on the Internet will be interested in reading what I or other authors produce is another question.

As the last line suggests, I don't think there's actually necessarily a huge tension between Boot's argument and Carr's thesis; indeed, Carr himself notes that the internet has been "a godsend" to his ability to do research for his writing projects. I've made a related argument in the context of blogs, arguing that the web is very good for certain forms of writing - the highly political and the highly personal chief among them - and very bad for others; by extension, I'd say that the web is very good for certain forms of book-writing (shorter forms on the one hand, and forms that require large amounts of research on the other ) and very bad for others (forms that require large amounts of serious reflection to write, and to read). I think the two books I've written - a short memoir and a short political book - are classic internet-age books, in the sense that they're the sort of books that writers are conditioned to write, and readers are conditioned to expect. (And I say that with neither shame nor satisfaction.) The sort of books that Boot writes - longer works of history, with arguments woven in - are in a more complicated position: As Boot says, it's vastly easier to produce them in the age of Amazon and Google Books, but I suspect that the Google effect that Carr's talking about - the declining patience for long-form, serious, and dense prose - means that the audience for 600-page history books that aren't about a Founding Father is shrinking apace. And the sort of authors whose works tend to stand the test of time - the great novelists and poets, the philosophers and theologians - are getting it from both directions: The Google effect makes it harder to write War and Peace, and harder to read it.

The Character Issue

Nick Beaudrot and Matt Yglesias want to know what I think about John McCain's less-than-heroic treatment of his first wife. Beaudrot writes:

If you think a candidate's behavior in his or her personal life bears relevance to his merits as a Presidential candidate, McCain's dalliances with other women and near gold-digging appear fundamentally disqualifying, roughly on par with anything Rudy Giuliani did to his spouses.

Well, as a card-carrying defender of the Freak Show, I see no reason why McCain's 1970s behavior shouldn't be an issue in the Presidential race; if McCain's beloved high school teacher is relevant to the campaign, then so is his treatment of Carol McCain (and their children). I don't, however, think the comparison to Giuliani quite holds up: Not only because Rudy's callousness was considerably more public than McCain's, but - more importantly - because McCain's first wife has remained friends with him, and supported him politically, which contrasts sharply with Rudy's estrangement from his ex-wife and children. And this difference probably explains why McCain's '70s caddishness hasn't become a big issue in the past, and won't become one in this election cycle: The American people, I expect, will take the view that if the wronged party seems to have forgiven McCain for jilting her, it would be churlish not to do the same.

As for my view of the matter - well, as I've mentioned before, I tend to agree with James Poulos that an America in which politicians had a more difficult time recovering from flagrant private misbehavior would be a better place to live and vote and marry in. It's not that I think an adulterer can't be an effective political leader; it's that I'd like to see the social costs of sexual misconduct go up, at least on the margins, and having certain avenues to prominence closed off to you if you decide to ditch your family and take up with a younger, richer, healthier woman seems like a reasonable cost to impose on would-be divorcees. All of that said, though, we're obviously a long, long way from that state of affairs, and things being what they are, I'm not going to argue that social conservatives should deliver the White House to Obama in order to make a futile protest against the decline of masculine honor among our politicians.

Photo by Flickr user ChristheDunn used under a Creative Commons license.

Immortal Longings

Via Andrew, here's John Horgan, contributing to a symposium on the Singularity:

Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.

But the very fact that the Singularity's appeal derives from some of the same impulses that drive religious faith - even as the prophets proclaiming its imminent arrival insist that they're relying on cold hard science - means that you aren't coming to make very much hay by telling the Ray Kurzweils of the world that we need to train our attention on terrorism or nuclear proliferation or famine or climate change instead. Some of the yearning for "transcendence" that the Singularity satisfies might go away in a juster, safer world, but the fundamental yearning it's addressed to - the desire for immortality - wouldn't. Eliminate terrorism and nuclear weapons, and you'll still die. Do away with poverty, clean up the environment, and ensure a fairer distribution of the earth's resources, and you'll still die. Find a cure for AIDS, and not only will you still die, but so will everybody you've cured.

Seen through this lens, telling people that they need to solve all the world's immediate problems before they take up the biggest Problem of all is like telling doctors facing a bubonic-plague outbreak that they can only address themselves to it once they've found a cure for colds, allergies, and stomach flu. Now of course this lens assumes that there could be a cure for death, which is where the issue of pseudoscience enters the picture, and the (im)plausibility of the claims the Singulatarians are making - an issue, I should note, that the substance of Horgan's essay is addressed to. But the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently "escapist," and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn't a problem with the concept. It's the whole point.

The Google Pundit

It's a vice I've no doubt dabbled in from time to time, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy this Michael Moynihan takedown.

Where The Answer Is Always Socialism

He and I may have our differences, but I always enjoy reading Will Wilkinson on John Cassidy. (Previous installments here and here.)

The Great Higher Education Debate

There's been a surfeit of interesting commentary lately that touches on higher education, and more specifically the question of whether too many people are going to college: Start with Professor X's view from "the basement of the ivory tower" in the latest Atlantic and Charles Murray's essay on "educational romanticism" in the New Criterion, then take up these posts from Rod Dreher (and the accompanying comment threads) and Russell Arben Fox, and then see Matt and (especially) Kevin Carey, who pushes back vigorously against the thesis that we're trying to push too many people through higher education.

My own somewhat mealy-mouthed take is that Carey and Charles Murray are both right: There are people going to college who shouldn't be and there are people who aren't going to college who should be; there are people in Professor X's classes who deserve better than a "college of last resort" and there are people in Professor X's classes who would be better off doing something completely different with their time. Which means that I think we ought to be spending more public dollars on the sort of colleges that educate "lower-income students, first-generation students, disadvantaged students, working students, immigrant students, minority students, older students, disabled students, students from often dismal high schools," to quote Carey's litany, and fewer public dollars on the kind of schools that exist to provide the "college experience" to the children of the mass upper class. (More public money for Virginia's community colleges, in other words, and less for a school like UVA - or again, more public money for people who want to go to school part-time or over the internet, and fewer public dollars for kids who want to spend four years on a brick-and-mortar campus.) But I also think that we ought to become vastly more flexible in our understanding of what constitutes an ideal post-high school education, and what our high schools should be preparing their students for - which means more vocational education, more shop class as soulcraft, and fewer attempts to pretend that everyone can read Hamlet, or score above the national average on the Math SAT.

Harvardiana

In a pair of incisive posts occasioned by this proposal, Brad DeLong explains why our shared alma mater is like socialist Yugoslavia, while Jim Manzi explains why it's a "$40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University."

Bill Cosby And Cultural Decline

I highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' profile of Bill Cosby in the latest Atlantic, but one passage seemed worth plucking out and arguing with. Here's Coates:

Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception ... Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments ...

In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.

At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”

Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?

In one sense, these are all good points: The supposed golden ages of the past had problems of their own, which are connected to the problems we have today; the impact of pop cultural trends on sociological trends can be vastly overstated; gangsta rap is as much a manifestation of pre-existing pathologies as it is a cause of new ones; etc. But there's also a sense in which Coates' argument here, with its emphasis on the perpetual recurrence of cultural declinism among reformers and intellectuals, runs the risk of eliding the reality of actual-existing cultural decline. The fact that legends of a golden age can obscure a far more complicated reality doesn't change the fact that cultural indicators do vary from era to era; true, no era is Edenic, but some periods simply are more virtuous than others. The fact that prior generations of intellectuals fretted, Cosby-style, about African-American crime rates, family structure, and so on doesn't change the fact that those problems have grown much, much worse in the interim. And the fact that some moralistic crusades are foolish and misguided doesn't mean that all of them are. The anti-jazz crusaders confused the music with the venues where it played, but that doesn't mean that they were wrong to inveigh against alcoholism and gambling, and the fact that fifty years later jazz has become easy-listening music for the haute-bourgeoisie doesn't mean the same thing will happen - or should happen, more importantly - to this kind of thing.

Choose Your Explanation

When it comes to that Larry Bartels chart comparing income growth (and its distribution) under Democratic Presidents to the same numbers under Republicans, I find the Cowen-Tabarrok explanation vastly more persuasive than the Klein explanation. But you may disagree.

I Am Jeffrey Robbins

Let me second Reihan and say that while I enjoyed Gabriel Sherman's New York piece on Facebook-abetted teacher-bashing at Manhattan's Horace Mann School, the piece could have done with a bit more of the students' point of view - particularly "Jeffrey Robbins" (a pseudonym), the conservative teen accused of menacing his lefty history teacher - and a bit less self-dramatizing self-pity from the faculty. No doubt the kids weren't allowed to talk to Sherman, whereas the lefty teacher in question was more than happy to describe, doubtless with perfect evenhandedness, how Robbins liked to "storm" into her office and "rail" against her politics - and how his claim that she called him a "Nazi" in class made her sob into her pillow at night. (Did she actually call him a Nazi? The story doesn't say.) And perhaps Robbins is just as much of a trust-fund brat and right-wing creep as his teacher's account makes him out to be. (The fact that he was later elected student-body president could be accounted as evidence for the defense or the prosecution, depending on one's opinion of the Horace Mann student body as a whole.) But having found myself in minor ideological scrapes with my own high school teachers from time to time, I left the piece harboring a lot more sympathy for young Robbins - and a lot more curiosity about his account of things - than the story seemed designed to make me feel.

What's The Big Deal About Sex?

Will Wilkinson, on the ethics of renting your body out for sex:

... absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance² disgust response, but it just doesn¹t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies - thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people¹s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.
I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular ... But bracket your intuitions about the commercial use of genitalia for a moment and consider that a good volume of trade in sexual services involves renting an expert hand. Couldusing your hand to give another person an orgasm possibly be a form of self-inflicted violence? Delivering manual relief is a great kindness, a sweet thing to do … unless you do it for money! At this level, Ross¹s claim is evidently ludicrous. Sweet charity cannot be transformed into self-inflicted violence by a twenty dollar bill.

Kerry Howley makes a similar point:

There are any number of activities that we classify, in different contexts, as both work and markers of intimacy. You can prepare a meal for your family in the morning as an act of love, and for customers in the afternoon as a source of income. You can take care of a sick spouse and expect nothing in return, and take care of sick strangers and demand a paycheck. Yes, yes, I know - sex is different. But I'm still waiting for a convincing explanation of how and why that doesn’t hinge on the stigmatization of sexually active women.

She’s right: Any distinction between renting out your body for sexual gratification and renting out your body to, say, hammer nails is only persuasive if you accept the contention that there is a significant distinction between sexual intercourse and other kinds of human activity. And she’s also right, I think, that any such distinction has implications for sexual morality in general, not just prostitution. If you think that sex, by virtue of being bound up not only culturally but biologically with emotional attachment on the one hand and reproduction on the other, is a unique kind of physical act, one that’s intimate by its very nature in a way that, say, preparing dinner isn’t, then it makes sense to assign a hierarchy of moral value (and moral stigma) to different kinds of sexual activity – most likely with monogamy at the top, serial monogamy somewhat lower, promiscuity lower still, and activities that treat sex as a commodity to be bought and sold somewhere near the bottom. I don’t think, however, that accepting this sort of hierarchy, and believing that some of the acts at the bottom deserves to be banned as well as stigmatized, requires you to shun any girl with multiple notches on her bedpost as a slut, any more than believing in a moral hierarchy that runs from true generosity to miserliness requires you to show the mildly stingy the same disdain you would bestow Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Potter. (Though I will admit that given the history of the sexual double standard, one can certainly see where feminists get the idea that any sexual standard at all is just a stalking horse for misogyny, and that they have to throw out moral distinctions entirely to get rid of the bathwater of patriarchy.)

I have a serious question, though, regarding the point of view that treats the handjob as just another form of manual labor, no different from laying bricks or mowing lawns. There’s been a lot of talk during this whole debate about the fact that many prostitutes were sexually abused as children, and from my point of view, of course, this correlation makes perfect sense: If you’re abused by others as a child, you’re more likely to seek out self-destructive behaviors as an adult. In the Wilkinson-Howley worldview, I presume, the correlation has more to do with our unjust war on sex than with anything inherent to the sex trade: If prostitution is outlawed and pushed to the margins of society, only marginal, damaged people end up becoming prostitutes. You’d have more well-adjusted call girls, presumably, if streetwalking were legalized.

Now this is fair enough so far as it goes, but it seems to beg an important question: Given the premises of the pro-prostitution worldview, what’s so abusive and damaging about incest and molestation in the first place? If there’s no moral distinction between giving a handjob in exchange for twenty dollars and getting paid twenty bucks to wash dishes or mow lawns, then why is there a moral distinction between a father who teaches his daughter how to pound nails and one who teaches his daughter to do something more intimate and (to go all wisdom-of-repugnance on you) disgusting? I understand that the kids involved aren’t “consenting adults,” but if selling sex is just like selling labor, and adults force kids to perform all kinds of menial tasks as part of their education, why can’t adults force kids to have intercourse too – especially if they’re safe about it? If selling sex is no big deal because sex itself is no big deal, what’s the big deal about incest?

Prostitution and Promiscuity

Kerry Howley, criticizing feminists who oppose legalizing prostitution:

… Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.

If you find all of these cultural pathologies unfortunate, what is the public policy you should prefer? It seems to me that it is not the policy that deems it a crime against the American people to open your legs. Anti-prostitution laws add a layer of legal sanction to all of our worst intuitions about the treatment of sexually independent women; they strengthen and validate the idea that women who bed men with any frequency are sick, marginal, pariahs. Even decriminalization, which treats Johns as outlaws and sex workers as victims, assumes that all sex workers are damaged, that no woman would ever love sex enough to make a career out of it. And why not? Well, because every woman knows that she is her sexual purity rating. No sane woman would ever choose to mess that up.

In sum: If we are ever going to introduce a conceptual distinction between the moral character of individual women and the integrity of their hymens, it seems extremely important not to criminalize aberrant sexual behaviors.

Hmm. The suggestion that there exists no middle ground between the virgin/whore dynamic on the one hand and a wholesale acceptance of every single kind of sexual practice on the other strikes me as moderately fanciful. The notion that the "women need be preserved in glass so as not to 'ruin' themselves" tradition is in any way dominant in American life today strikes me as fantastic in the extreme. But then again, I'm speaking as someone who thinks that there might be a few reasons besides an irrational attachment to the patriarchy to think that a little “shaming” here and there isn’t the worst response to sexual promiscuity - male and female alike. So I'm not really the target audience for this kind of argument.

I do wish, though, that we heard this sort of line from sexual liberationists more often. A debate in which Kerry Howley's side is committed to the position that true sexual liberation requires removing any distinction between having sex for love or pleasure and having sex for money is a debate that social conservatives can win. I think.

The Costs Of Living

Ezra writes:

… I was looking at some family income distribution numbers yesterday and was a bit surprised by how the distribution looked. To enter the Top 20 percent, you need to be making $88,000 a year. To enter the Top 5 percent, you need to make $157,000 a year. I've known a lot of families making around $150,000, and none of them would have described themselves as much beyond upper middle class, or "doing pretty well." And though I'd call Top 5 percent rich, in income terms, I probably would have said $250,000.

In response, Matt makes some good points about the crudeness of family income as a metric of actual wealth. I would add that geographical variations in the cost of living make an enormous difference as well, and one obvious reason why a family of Ezra’s acquaintance making around $150,000 annually might not describe themselves as rich would be that, well, they probably aren’t - at least not if they live in the greater New York or Washington or Los Angeles area, where the cost of living is far too high for 150 grand to buy the kind of lifestyle that most Americans associate with being wealthy.

I would also note that when I say the “cost of living” I really mean the “cost of raising children,” since a childless couple in NYC or DC making $150,000 annually enjoys a vastly different lifestyle than a couple trying to raise 2 or 3 school-age children on the same salary. This distinction is worth pondering in the context of the debate over whether conservatives should push for child-friendly tax policy; it’s also worth pondering the context of the desuburbanization agenda beloved of progressives nowadays. You’ll frequently hear Ezra and Matt, among others, lamenting the latticework of subsidies and tax breaks that incentivize Americans to buy biggish homes in spread-out suburbs and exurbs, rather than clustering more efficiently in inner-ring ‘burbs, medium-sized towns and urban cores. But of course these policies don’t just redistribute people from energy-saving cities to gas-guzzling exurbs; they also effectively redistribute money away from the singletons, childless couples and small families who are more likely to be drawn to urban areas, and to the larger families that are more likely to be drawn to bigger yards, quieter streets, and houses with 3-5 bedrooms.

Obviously, if you’re the sort of progressive (or conservative) who doesn’t think the government should show any pro-family bias at all, you won’t have a problem with a policy agenda that eliminates this sort of redistribution. And just as obviously, there may be more effective (and energy-efficient) ways to make it easier for parents to raise the next generation of taxpaying Americans: I’d happily combine a Ponnuru-style tax reform with, say, congestion pricing on highways and a smaller home-mortgage deduction. (And making it easier to build in urban areas is a good idea, period.) But all things being equal, it’s worth keeping in mind what when progressives talk about fighting sprawl and incentivizing re-urbanization, they’re often talking about making it vastly more expensive to raise kids the way most Americans want to raise them.

Photo by Flickr user PeterBaker used under a Creative Commons license.

Posner On Buckley

He makes some fair points, but this passage strikes me as somewhat obtuse:

The suggestion in the obituaries that he united free-market economists with other conservatives is especially misleading. Free-market economists have always been on a different track from the kind of political and social conservative that Buckley exemplified. He was a friend of free markets, but on moral grounds rather than because he thought the market a more efficient method of allocating resources than the government, though he thought that also.

The conservative economic movement has had two major streams, which are convergent. One is the Austrian school, whose best-known exemplar was Friedrich Hayek ... The other stream, largely independent of the Austrian, originated with maverick economists, such as Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stigler, who at the height of the 1930s depression, when free-market economics was in the dog house and the Soviet Union's collectivist economy was widely admired including among economists, had the temerity (like Hayek) to argue that collectivist regulation of the economy was inferior to leaving the regulation of economic activity to the market ...

... The movement received virtually no hearing during the 1960s, the era of the "Great Society" programs of Lyndon Johnson. However, the stagflation of the 1970s exposed the failure of conventional “liberal” (in the welfare-state sense) policies, promoted increased acceptance of free-market economics, and stimulated the deregulation and privatization movements, which began in the Clinton Administration and expanded in the Reagan and (first) Bush Administration, continuing into the Clinton Administration, notably with welfare reform.

All this had nothing to do with William Buckley. Most of the causes dearest to his heart were unrelated to economic policy, such as his belief about the proper strategies for defending against the Soviet Union, expelling Soviet agents from the federal government, or defeating our current enemies ...

Buckley may not have united free-market economists with conservatives (though I think even that assertion is open to question), but he certainly united free-market economics with conservatism, and that marriage had a considerable impact on the developments that Posner claims Buckley had "nothing to do with." In the 1970s as today, debates over economic policy - or any policy question - aren't just settled on questions of efficiency and growth maximization; they're settled in public arguments where questions of morality play a not-insignificant role. And by wedding conservatives (and others) to the idea that the free market might be not only morally defensible but actually morally superior to socialism, Buckley helped make free-market economics seem politically as well as theoretically appealing - and that made an enormous difference to its eventual success.

See also Gary Becker's thoughts.

Rage of a Privileged Class

As regular readers know, I think populist appeals have their place in politics, but Rod Dreher nails what's so grating about Michelle Obama's shtick: It's shot through with self-pity. First, he quotes Byron York, following her through Ohio:

“I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Whyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”

There's a lot more lines like this one in the York piece - all fair enough, so far as they go (it is stressful and expensive to be a Bobo parent), but perhaps not just the thing to say to women in a depressed blue-collar town. And then there's this line, from this week's New Yorker profile:

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

There are many sorts of populism, from the optimistic (think Reagan, or LBJ) to the angry and doom-ridden (think John Edwards). But a self-pitying populism, in which a Princeton-educated, upper-middle-class woman - or a wealthy woman, really; Michelle Obama earned roughly $400,000 in 2005 - equates her own struggles to pay off her college loans with the woes of the working class seems like a remarkably unappealing variation on the theme. (Like Rod, I didn't much care for Edwards' Kingfish act, but at least he went out of his way to acknowledge both his humble beginnings and how lucky he is now.) Not that the upper-middle class doesn't have its struggles too; God knows I whine to my friends about how how hard I work from time to time. But it's mildly inappropriate to whinge about those struggles publicly, and extremely inappropriate to whine about them in the context of a political campaign. It's like having Judith Warner campaigning to be First Lady.

The Lost City

Via Tyler Cowen, a remarkable look at the abandoned Detroit School Book Depository, and a meditation on the same.

More from the same blogger here. And still more here, from a different photographer but on a similar theme.

Was There a Housing Bubble?

As someone who plans to buy my first home around 2011 or so, I hope Alex Tabarrok is wrong and the housing market still has a lot of correcting left to do. I imagine that many of my more settled readers, though, are hoping that he's right. (Megan weighs in here.)

Marry Him

A modest prediction: Lori Gottlieb's "The Case For Settling" will inspire more reader mail than anything else in the Atlantic's March issue.

(And here's some useful background reading, from our archives.)

Learning To Love Big Brother

Writing in the overly-cheery, "just do as I say and all should be well" style of Dolores Umbridge explaining a new regulation from the Ministry of Magic, Brendan Koerner tries to persuade me to stop worrying and embrace "compact fluorescent light bulbs." (Not that I have any choice in the matter.) Why would you want to stick with "inefficient incandescent technology that has barely changed since the invention of the tungsten filament nearly a century ago," he wonders, when you can enjoy the hip and refreshing taste of New Coke - sorry, I mean, the chilly pulse of energy-efficient fluorescence? (It's the official light bulb of Tomorrowland, kids - and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project!)

You might be a little concerned about what to do when a CFL bulb breaks, but not to worry: "Just follow the EPA's easy cleanup guidelines." (Who doesn't want a lightbulb that comes with government-issued "cleanup guidelines"?) True, those guidelines suggest that you flee the room at first, and then use rubber gloves and two sealed plastics bags to clean up the broken bulb, but the good news is that "even a broken CFL bulb won't leak too much toxic metal." And while you might have trouble throwing the broken bulb away, since putting it in the trash is probably, er, illegal, there's hope on the horizon: "Look for several major retailers to set up recycling drop-off boxes this year, in order to goose their CFL sales." (Jonah Goldberg, call your office ... )

Oh, and "use common sense and don't place CFLs where they can be damaged by young children." You know, like in your living room.

Then there's the kicker:

The last, desperate swipe at CFLs ... is that their light is cold and dreadful. Perhaps this was true in years past, but the Lantern just doesn't see it anymore: In a recent test, Popular Mechanics rated CFL light as far superior to that produced by incandescent bulbs. Don't believe the hype? You've got nothing to lose by trying a single CFL bulb (one that's received EnergyStar certification) and seeing for yourself. And then, once you've become a convert, please spread the word.

Also, we have some stress tests you might be interested in ...

For the record, I've seen several of the new CFL bulbs in action, and I'm not a convert. And come 2009, you'll see in my local hardware store, frantically stockpiling incandescent bulbs against the long, dark, environmentally-efficient night to come.

Photo by Flickr user Tiago Daniel used under a Creative Commons license.

How Harvard Rules

Matt gets the same emails I do, apparently:

I'll happily admit that I'm not much of a charitable donor one way or the other. Still, I'm always a bit flabbergasted by the fundraising solicitations I get from Harvard. It seems to me that insofar as I give money away, it should be directed at an institution that actually helps people in need.

And Noah Millman adds:

What saddens me the most about enormous bequests to organizations like Harvard or Yale is the poverty of the imagination of the givers. The elite university strikes me as precisely the kind of institution that is ripe for radical reinvention. People like Meg Whitman made their fortunes founding or leading companies that radically transformed sectors of the economy, and reaped enormous rewards for doing so. Why on earth wouldn’t they want to tackle philanthropic missions with the same seriousness? Why would they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fancy residences for students, when they could put not only their name but the stamp of their personalities on an institution in a way that really shapes the future?

The trouble is that philanthropy, done seriously, is awfully hard work no matter what sector you're investing in (that's why Warren Buffet outsourced it!), and elite universities, while ripe for reinvention in many ways, are rich enough to make them one of the hardest places for even the richest donor to exert any serious influence. What they do offer to donors, though, is immediate (if superficial) bang for the buck. Or put another way, what they lack in terms of actually, you know, "helping people in need," they make up for in rock-solid tangibility. If Meg Whitman poured tens of millions of dollars fighting AIDS in Africa (and maybe she has, for all I know), she'd probably end up in the same position the U.S. government is in - struggling to figure out what kind of a difference her money is making. Whereas by giving millions to her alma mater, she knows she can end up with a lovely residential college that will bear her name for as long as Princeton is Princeton. And without disputing anything Noah says - if I were graced with enormous wealth, Harvard wouldn't see a dime of it - I can understand the temptation to see one's own name planted forever on an Ivy League campus, alongside all those ancient Brahmins. (Douthat College has a certain ring to it, don't you think ...?)

Then, of course, there's the more obvious and more hardheaded reason why obscenely rich people give so much money to universities that don't need it - namely, to ensure that their kids get in.

Why Should We Be Moral?

In a seven-thousand word investigation into humanity's moral instincts, Steven Pinker essentially endorses Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity). Then, near the close of the essay, he takes up the question of whether any of these impulses ought to be obeyed, and if so, why:

Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

So it turns out that the "features of reality" militate in favor of a moral system that emphasizes harm, fairness, and individual rights - which is to say, reality is a liberal! Of course, as Will Wilkinson notes, this argument swipes a few bases. For one thing, the liberal instincts are "rational" only if you assume the liberal premise that the primary goal of human life is material flourishing. (As Will writes: "I simply don’t see how this stands as an adequate reply to someone who says that it is better that millions suffer and/or die for the greater glory of the tribe, or the Prophet, or to prevent the defilement of the blood of the Motherland.") For another, even if you set material flourishing as your highest good, it's still possible to make a case on rational, self-interested grounds for the usefulness of the illiberal impulses, because human nature is such that many people may be happier, longer-lived, more prosperous and so forth in societies shaped at least in part by hierarchy, purity, in-group solidarity, and so forth (what Haidt terms the "beehive" instincts) than in societies that recognize "do as you will, harm no one" as the only moral principle there is. (I make roughly that case here, albeit while repeatedly misspelling Haidt's name.)

Moreover, as a guide to individual moral action - as opposed to a description of the impulses most consonant with the goals of a liberal society - Pinker's argument is incredibly weak stuff. Certainly, in a stable, lawbound society, it’s generally rational to deal fairly with your friends and neighbors and co-workers, because you want them to deal fairly with you. But that "generally" excludes all the hard cases, in which doing the right thing isn’t in a person’s rational self-interest, and those hard cases are the essence of what separates morally-impressive behavior from the reverse. Pinker's "rational actor" calculus makes sense in a landscape of equality, where if your neighbor is going hungry today you could easily be going hungry tomorrow, and in a landscape of transparency, in which your neighbor (or your spouse or friend or business partner) will have perfect knowledge of the wrongs you've done them. But most serious moral dilemmas arrive from power differentials on the one hand - situations in which a stronger person has the opportunity to do something for a weaker person, but at a real cost to themselves and with little chance that they'll suffer if they don't - and secret temptations on the other, where you have a chance to commit a wrong that will be known only to yourself (and God). And Pinker's argument that morality should be based on rational self-interest, and that as a general rule, it's in your rational self-interest to treat people as you'd wish to be treated, tells us nothing about why it's wrong in a particular instance for someone to refrain from cheating on his taxes - or on his wife - if he knows he won't get caught. Or why it's wrong in a particular instance for a Hutu family to deny refuge to their Tutsi neighbors if they know that offering the Tutsis sanctuary will put their own lives at risk.

You can fill in your own example, obviously. The point is that Pinker's argument for why our moral instincts aren't just as arbitrary as, say, the color of the sky or the taste of an apple bails out precisely at the moment when any argument for morality needs to kick in - when doing the "wrong" thing will have no obvious cost, or when doing the "right" thing has the chance to do real, palpable damage to the interests (or life) of the person doing it.

Friedmanland

While I agree with Peter Suderman that the whole "me and my cool friends are doing our best to change the world, but it's so hard" meme (propagated here, commented on here and here and here) is deeply irrititating, it's not nearly so annoying as the Thomas Friedman column that kicked off the discussion, which I only just now got around to reading. After complaining that today's younger generation are "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good," Friedman writes:

Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit -- so we all won't be working for China in 20 years?

I'm sorry, but this is just ... just ... asinine. The notion that today's college kids are going to forge a mass movement capable, in Friedman's words, of "speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall" to protest the growth of the federal deficit - which is likely to start rising again soon, but currently is only 1.2 percent of GDP - and the absence of Social Security reform (an issue that only Republicans want to talk about at present, and one where the time horizon for action is still measured in decades) suggests a truly awesome detachment from the realities of American politics, American life, and human nature. But then again, this passage appears in a piece in which Friedman, without a trace of irony or self-awareness (but to the sound of Matt's jaw hitting the floor), dubs my peers ''the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad," so "awesome detachment" might be too kind a phrase for what's going on here ...

Incidentally, if you're a NYRB subscriber, or have three bucks to burn, I highly recommend John Gray's savaging of The World is Flat from a couple years back. And if not, there's always Matt Taibbi's classic review, which (as always with Taibbi) isn't half as funny as it thinks it, but remains pretty damn funny for all that.

You Can't Go Home Again

Do go read Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, James Poulos, Matt Frost, and Rod again on the topic of why the young and ambitious (even, or especially, the young and ambitious conservatives) abandon their home towns for the pleasures of the metropolis. Among other things, it's a discussion notable for Deneen's sharp explication of how Hamilton saw it all coming, and Frost's somewhat-unfair but amusing coinage of the term "Berry's Razor" (after Wendell, of course) - "which declares that any undesirable social or economic phenomenon can be explained by self-indulgence."

The Family That Drinks Together ...

I'd always assumed that introducing kids to alcohol in the home, rather than trying to enforce our society's ridiculously draconian restrictions on teen drinking, made adolescents less prone to really stupid booze-related behavior. But it's good to have some cold hard statistical proof.

The Variety of Religious Experience

I suppose Labor Day isn't the ideal moment to link to a story about a lottery winner, but this is too priceless to pass up:

A Wicca devotee and small businessman from Dundalk came forward yesterday with a photocopy of a lottery ticket showing the winning numbers to Friday's Mega Millions drawing and claimed a share of the estimated $330 million jackpot, though lottery officials have yet to verify his assertion.

... Bartlett gathered just a stone's throw from the Walther Boulevard store to celebrate with friends and fellow pagans at Mystickal Voyage, a New Age gift shop he considers his spiritual home and that he said he plans to help improve with his winnings.

As an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, Bartlett recalled feeling compelled to do more teaching in the New Age store last month, but felt torn because he couldn't pull away from his job. He told the "powers that be" that if he won the lottery, he would focus on teaching completely.

"And a month later, here I am," he said. "I thank the gods for this gift. ... I don't know which one granted me this wish, but whichever one did, thanks!"

If you click through to the story, you'll see that he looks at least a little bit like the Comic Book Guy. Which somehow doesn't seem at all surprising.

Medium Town

Over at Andrew's place, Jamie Kirchick flags something I meant to link to but let slip my mind - Mark Oppenheimer's New Haven Review of Books, a collection of essays by writers who call the Elm City home (as I did, throughout my childhood). The collection includes Oppenheimer's own ode to the Springfield, Massachusetts of his youth, the New Haven of his adulthood, and other such medium cities - the places, in other words, that aren't New York, Washington or Boston, but aren't the suburbs or the deep country either. His affection for New Haven mirrors my own, though I wonder if our shared hometown isn't a special case among medium cities, given the presence of Yale. Having a great university in a small downtown, especially so close to Manhattan, enables New Haven to offer the charms of small-city life with some of the benefits of bigger-city living, and it's enabled the Elm City to survive a disastrous period of urban "renewal," sustain itself through the 1970s and 1980s - an era that tore the heart out of places like Springfield (among many others) - and then renew and reinvent itself over the last ten years.

My fear for New Haven (whose virtues I've defended for years against skeptics and snobs from the megacities) is that this recent renewal will go too far, in some sense - that the slow but unstoppable growth of Yale, and the expansion of New York's commuting population up the Connecticut coastline, will make it more and more like a miniature version of D.C. or New York, an upper-middle class town with a ghetto thrown in, rather than the working and middle-class area where I grew up. But of course this sort of "problem" is a luxury the Springfields of the world would kill to face.

Photo by Flickr user Andrew D. Miller used under a Creative Commons license.

My Assignment Desk

For Reihan: A review essay, expanding on this post, that takes on trends in recent South Asian historiography.

Cat Ladies

Unlike Matt, I was familiar with the term "cougar" - a descriptor for older women on the prowl for younger men - but it's still a little weird to see it show up as a category in Mark Penn's ridiculously fine-grained typology of American voters. I thought of "cougar" as a pejorative phrase like "butterface" or "two-bagger," or at least a mildly offensive one like MILF - in other words, the sort of thing you'd hear all the time from a certain kind of guy, and absolutely never from a political consultant.

Your (Don't Call It) Eugenics Roundup

I said I wouldn't post any more about this, but I'm going to cheat a little by posting links to other people, starting with Yuval Levin:

... surely the most essential problem with the eugenics movement was not coercion or collectivism. It wasn’t even the revolting notion of some duty to improve the race. The deepest and most significant contention of the progressive eugenicists was that science had shown the principle of human equality to be unfounded. These eugenicists badly misread Darwin. The eugenicists of today, in contrast, employ actual scientific principles to support their beliefs; nevertheless, their abuse of science is no less misguided. It is, again, being used to demonstrate distinctions among human beings that—the new eugenicists claim—are so fundamental as to make some lives not worth living, and therefore not worth protecting.

The challenge of eugenics was, and is again, a challenge to our egalitarianism. That is what lies at the heart of the abortion debate, and of the larger debate about emerging biotechnologies. These arguments are not about when a new human life begins—an empirical matter not in real dispute—but about whether every human life is equal. That question is a perfectly serious one, and there are defensible positions on both sides. But too many American progressives have answered in the negative without thinking through the consequences. And increasingly the reasons they give are not liberal reasons—reasons of liberty and personal choice—but scientific reasons, be it the great promise of some very particular avenue of medical research, or the instrument readings that demonstrate Down’s or another genetic condition.

See also Cheryl Miller, Matt's remarks and Reihan's response, and Cheryl again.

A New Eugenics?

Kevin Drum, scoffing at the suggestion that contemporary progressives might be enabling eugenics:

Now, here's the thing: Glenn Beck, Yuval Levin, and Ross Douthat didn't come up with this stuff themselves. But it didn't just pop up out of nowhere either. It's way too abstruse for that. Rather, some bright boy or girl in the conservative movement dreamed this up and now it's being run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. If it gets some attention, it'll be rolled out to a wider audience.

So whose bright idea was this? Is there a proud parent out there who wants to take credit?

Leaving aside the hilarious idea that I, Yuval Levin, and Glenn Beck (!!) are all getting fed the same talking points from some Central Command deep in the Republican Noise Machine, has Kevin Drum ever, you know, read any right-of-center magazines in the last ten years or so? Or any magazines at all? Has he read any Leon Kass, or Francis Fukuyama? (Or Will Saletan, for that matter?) Conservatives - and not only conservatives - have been fretting about eugenic-ish tendencies in the contemporary West (and elsewhere) for as long as I've been following politics. And the trends that the Right dislikes find their defenders, or at least their enablers, in two camps: bio-libertarians who welcome our transhuman future, and progressives who, whether they welcome transhumanism or not, are committed to an unfettered right to abortion, with all the consequences that entails.

Now, look - I assume that Drum is untroubled by the scale of pre-natal eugenics around the globe. I assume that he thinks that the elimination of the genetically unfit in the womb isn't something we should be worried about, because the state isn't involved and anyway fetuses aren't human beings. I assume that he's on roughly the same page as Johann Hari, who makes the case for "liberal eugenics" here on the grounds that it is "entered into by parents and it is motivated by love." That's fine: Just say so, and spare me the "eugenics? what eugenics?" hand-waving, and the pretense that conservatives are just making up crazy fantasies to smear liberals. A difference of opinion about bioethics isn't a smear.

(Though yes, Glenn Beck is certainly crazy.)

The Right's "Science" Problem

Isaac Chotiner (and various commenters) seem to think it's self-evidently ridiculous for me to put quotation marks around the "Science" that liberals claim to be defending against conservatives, given that conservatives are, in fact, arrayed against the scientific consensus on several issues. By coincidence, I wrote a piece on roughly this subject in 2005, during the intelligent design debate, and here it is. It's behind the TNR firewell, so I've pulled out some excerpts below the fold.

Continue reading "The Right's "Science" Problem" »

Dept. of Pyrrhic Victories

Obviously, the political undesirability/demonization of the term "liberal," and the left-wing adoption of the term "progressive" instead, has been an epiphenomenon of a larger conservative ascendancy in American life, and as such it isn't something right-wingers can really complain about. Still, I don't think conservatives should consider it a great victory that the modern Democratic Party's leading candidate wants to associate herself with a political tradition that, insofar as it's philosophically distinct from liberalism (and obviously there are many historical complexities involved here), is from the conservative perspective more dangerously utopian as well. I take Matt's point that "Progressive" is basically just a useful umbrella term for a left-of-center coalition. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that it's a coincidence that the revival of progressivism as a political label has coincided with a more strident secularism/atheism, a greater obsession with the supposed right-wing threat to "science" (read: left-wing policy preferences on stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, etc.), and a greater sympathy for Darwinism-as-a-universal-theory among thinkers associated with the political left. In one sense, as I've argued elsewhere, conservatives should welcome the relabeling of liberalism as a blow for linguistic precision; at the same time, I think it's at least partially the reflection of trends within the left that conservatives should regard with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Stratification by Biology

In the Cato Unbound discussion of Brink Lindsey's (excellent) book, Julian Sanchez writes:

On the economic front, since everyone seems to be focused on healthcare, it's not entirely clear to me which way technological progress in the medical sector is going to push. It may be that ever-rising costs make clear that public provision of cutting-edge care for everyone is unsustainable. But, paradoxically, medical innovation might also undermine the sense that we live in a "post-scarcity" economy, even in the colloquial sense. Suppose, for instance, that Ray Kurzweil is right that cascading and accelerating development will soon entail that buying a few more years of life with current state-of-the art tech allows people to survive until the next innovation, which will give them enough of a boost to reach the next horizon, and so on indefinitely. It might become possible to radically extend the human lifespan, but only at massive cost. Would we countenance a situation where the very wealthy enjoyed a century or more of middle-aged vigor while the rest of us were stooped and grey after a mere 80 or 90 years? Or would our conception of what constitutes an acceptable amount of "survival" expand to fill the available space? This may sound like sci-fi speculation, but again, if we consider the scale at which Lindsey's argument works, if it works, we need to consider the kind of changes we should anticipate by midcentury, not the next midterms.

I'm currently involved in finishing up what aspires to be a very sober and serious book about the Republican Party and class politics, and sober and serious books don't, by definition, traffic in Kurzweil-style theories about the coming availability of radical life extension. Nonetheless, I have a strong suspicion that something like what Julian summons up - some form of radical transhumanish innovation that's available to the rich long before it trickles down to the middle-class and the poor - is going to radically change the landscape of Western politics at some point over the next century or three.

I, of course, will immediately seek a leadership position in the Butlerian Jihad when that moment arrives - which again, isn't really something that you can say in a sober and serious book about public policy. That's why they invented blogs, I guess.

Update: Just to be clear - yes, as Matt says, the Butlerian Jihad was directed against thinking machines, not transhuman genetic engineering projects. But I think the spirit of the Butlerian Jihad would apply equally well to both. Clearly, this makes me a theological liberal.

Heresy and Democracy

Just a quick response to Ramesh's characteristically thoughtful post on the question of Bush's heresies, or lack thereof. I agree that neither Christianity nor Anglo-American conservatism is necessarily incompatitable with the following propositions: That human beings have political rights that are a gift from Almighty God, that democracy is to be preferred to tyranny, and that the U.S. has a moral obligation to support human rights-recognizing, democratic governments abroad.

But what Bush seems to believe is something more sweeping - that the fact "a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom" means that the universalization of "forms of government that are based upon liberty" are historically "inevitable." This may be true, but it is not Christianity, and it is not conservatism.

Men At Work

As fellow laborers in the thankless but necessary task of convincing readers everywhere to pay no further attention to Alan Wolfe, I commend the efforts of Daniel McCarthy, R.R. Reno, and Kevin Holtsberry.

Lazy Friday Blogging (I)

Okay, it's no Veiled Conceit (where have you gone, Veiled Conceit?), but this site has a certain potential.

Charlotte Simmons Goes To Yale

So a Yalie named Aurora Nichols - a financial-aid student, and the daughter of community college grads - did a senior project that was supposed to be a commentary on class and money in the Ivy League: She took pictures of her everyday purchases - deodorant, takeout, etc. - and interspersed them with her classmates' abstract paintings. This earned her a profile in the Hartford Courant, which in turn earned her, well, commentary like this on a Yale message board:

"The thought if people having to rub elbows with such a gauche and uppity poor and worse her yokel trash family made me ill. Why do we have to be egalitarian?"

Ah, Yalies. And then this:

"Her story is proof that elites lower the bar for poors. 5th in her class at a TTT high school, and a 1440 SAT should not be getting her into Yale."

Seems like a straightforward morality play, right? On the other hand, here's an example, from the Courant profile, of how the brutal realities of class differences were rubbed in Aurora's face at Yale:

Continue reading "Charlotte Simmons Goes To Yale" »

Melancholy Elephants

Via a coworker, the case against copyright extension, in the form of a Spider Robinson short story.

Free Culture

I would almost be sympathetic to Mark Helprin's argument that copyrights should last forever, and that his great-great grandchildren, rather than the publishers of Barnes & Noble Classics, should profit from Winter's Tale - almost but not quite, both for the reasons Matt proposes and for others - if he were simultaneously arguing for a far more lenient definition of "fair use." This, to my mind, is the real way that copyright and intellectual-property laws stifle creativity - not by preventing five different publishers from bringing out competing editions of the same book, but by preventing other artists from piggybacking on existing works and making something new out of them. (Unless they're willing to confine themselves to parody.) Our language's greatest writer, remember, was a shameless thief, copying themes and plots and characters with abandon to create his plays. Yet if a twenty-first century Shakespeare wanted to take, say, the plot of Star Wars as the jumping-off point for his genius, his Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker would have to sit unpublished on a hard drive for seventy years after George Lucas's death. Copyright law, to my mind, should give an artist control over the work itself, but not the world it summons up: If I want to publish a novel set at Hogwarts or a sequel to Gone With the Wind, J.K. Rowling and the Mitchell estate shouldn't have veto power.

The Hinges of Fate

Speaking of military history, the latest Nation includes a review of what sounds like a fascinating Ian Kershaw book on ten "fateful choices," in 1940 and '41, that determined how the Second World War turned out. (I'm particularly interested in the argument that Hitler was right to declare war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor - or at least that he didn't have any better options.)

Arms and the Student

I agree with the general point of Fred Thompson's defense of teaching military history, and the old Victor Davis Hanson column that he draws on, though I share some of the caveats expressed here. The best reason to teach military history, to my mind, isn't that the Battle of Gettysburg is necessarily more important than half a dozen other topics a student might study, but that it's more interesting, offering an exciting gateway - particularly for boys, whose progress through our educational system leaves a lot to be desired these days - into a subject that can easily become dry as dust. Plenty of people, myself included, have gone on to be interested in the Missouri Compromise, the tariff controversy, and Reconstruction because they first thrilled to accounts of heroism and cowardice, genius and incompetence, at Little Round Top and Marye's Heights and Lookout Mountain. I'm willing to bet the progression rarely happens in the opposite direction.

Meet the New Core, Same as the Old Core

I try to avoid so much as thinking about Harvard these days, having spent more of my post-college life immersed in the topic than is strictly healthy. But humor me for a moment, since my alma mater has decided to replace its Seventies-era baggy-monster of a Core Curriculum - long an embarrassment to the term "Core" - with a new program in "General Education" that promises to be, well, more or less identical to the old Core.

The old system required students to take a semester-long course in each of the following topic areas: Foreign Cultures; Historical Study; Literature and Arts; Moral Reasoning; Quantitative Reasoning; Science; and Social Analysis. The new system, by contrast, will require students to take courses in each of the following topic areas: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding; Culture and Belief; Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning; Ethical Reasoning; Science of Living Systems; Science of the Physical Universe; Societies of the World; and the United States in the World. Pretty revolutionary, huh? After all, this is Harvard: Why have Quantitative Reasoning when you can throw in an extra fifty-cent word and come up with Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning?

The new system, according to its proponents, will be better attuned to the "real-world" applications of the liberal arts, though insufficient interaction with the "real world" never seemed to be a problem at the Harvard I remember. What was a problem was the intersection between the university's horror of anything resembling a canon and its desire to pretend to have a Core Curriculum, which meant that students were required to spend a quarter of their academic time choosing amongst the random hodgepodge of "Core" courses, which were burdensome and restrictive without making any attempt at all to add up to something approaching a comprehensive liberal arts education. "Approaches to knowledge" was the buzzword: You learned the scientific approach to knowledge, the literary approach to knowledge, and so on and so forth, and it didn't matter whether you learned it while reading Dante's Divine Comedy or taking "Women Writers in Imperial China: How to Escape from the Feminine Voice." The approach was all; the knowledge itself didn't matter.

Perhaps the new General Education curriculum will do better: It isn't clear, as yet, which courses will go under each of the "new" umbrellas, and perhaps the end result will purge the trivia and esoterica, and leave roster of worthwhile options for students to select from. But more likely, the new curriculum will serve the same function as the old: It will serve to limit students' freedom, as any educational system must, but it will do so in the service of no vision grander than the the belief that Harvard is Harvard, and needs to have something it can call a Core.

Families Matter

I'm late coming to this, but Mark Thoma responded to my earlier comments on Jacob Hacker's thesis about rising income volatility, and then Reihan responded to Thoma here.

As Reihan says, I think that Thoma is taking a somewhat narrow view of what counts as the results of the Sexual Revolution. First, he writes that "the most likely explanations for increasing income volatility are quite different from the 'policy from liberals caused more family breakups, which in turn caused increased income volatility' explanation we are hearing from conservatives." (Actually, I wouldn't say that "policy from liberals" was the main reason behind the increase in family instability since the 1960s, only that some liberal policies exacerbated the problem.) Then he lists those "most likely explanations," and here are his first three:

1. Families rely on two incomes now, so when one worker leaves the workforce, income drops. Likewise, there’s no potential second earner to bump up his/her hours when earnings/hours of the prime worker drop.

2. There are more single individuals. This group has always had higher income volatility.

3. Government taxes and benefits do less to cushion income shocks than they once did.

Er, yes, and numbers one and two are partially the consequences of ... the Sexual Revolution, no? Women move in and out of the workforce more than they used to, creating more volatility; people delay marriage longer than they used to, creating more volatility; women are more likely to have children while they're single, creating more volatility. Of these three trends, it seems to me that policymakers should ignore the second - income volatility among metropolitan singletons is hardly a pressing issue - while doing more to help parents who want to take time off to raise their kids (rather than just subsidizing daycare), and more, as well, to encourage people to get and stay married.

Reihan and I proposed some possible steps in our Party of Sam's Club essay, which I won't bore you by rehashing here. I would suggest, though, that this shouldn't be cast as a debate about whether we're going to roll back the Sexual Revolution by government fiat; obviously we aren't. It should be a debate about how to deal with the landscape we face now - a debate, for instance, over whether we should attack the instability in working-class life by simply funneling more money to Americans when they hit a moment of crisis (as, say, an expanded wage insurance program would do), or whether we should seek policies that sharpen the incentives to form stable families, so that Americans need less government help when the crisis arrives, and their children need still less, and so on.

And yes, I'm aware that liberals more or less have the floor to themselves right now in this debate, because conservatives don't want to talk about anything except cutting pork and fighting terror these days. But the election season is young ...

Update: Just to clarify, when I said "of these three trends" above, I meant the three trends I mentioned in the preceding sentence, not the three trends Thoma mentions in the preceding quotation. Sorry for the sloppy writing ...

Sex Ed That Works?

Jennifer Roback Morse explains it all:

Continue reading "Sex Ed That Works?" »

The Moral Obligation to Have Children?

I'm going to regret getting back into this, I know, but ... while guest-blogging for Andrew I wrote what was probably a somewhat slipshod post arguing that it's somewhat solipsistic to decide how many kids to have based entirely on whether you think each additional child will add substantially to your happiness, since one of the best reasons to have children is to make another person's happiness possible - by, well, making that person's existence possible. Will Wilkinson wrote a rather waspish post in response, in which he accused me of "not making sense, and insulting low-breeders on the way." I'll quote him at length below the fold:

Continue reading "The Moral Obligation to Have Children?" »

Freedom Is Freer Than You Think

Maybe you thought that Monday of this week was Tax Freedom Day, the day you stopped working for the government and finally started working for yourself. Well, think again: Julian Sanchez, taking what I'm sure is a temporary break from the cause of "advancing liberty," explains why your Tax Freedom Day probably happened a lot earlier than the Tax Foundation would have you believe.

(Unless, of course, you're stinking rich, in which case may I suggest that you consider giving the gift of the Atlantic to all your less-fortunate friends?)

Risky Business

The hot book of last year among populist-leaning liberals was Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift, which argued that income volatility has gone way, way up for most middle-class Americans in the long era of GOP dominance. A lot of smart people I know were skeptical about his claim, and now there's some pretty comprehensive data from the Congressional Budget Office report suggesting that individual income volatility hasn't gone up since the 1970s.

Hacker defends his argument here; Tyler Cowen isn't impressed by Hacker's defense, to say the least. What's interesting to me, though, is that Hacker's argument now rests on the contention that even if individual income hasn't become more volatile, family income has, and family income is what we should care about. That's a perfectly plausible point of view: Given the changes in family structure over the last thirty years, you would expect greater volatility, some of it from benign factors (the income swing that comes when a woman eaves and then re-enters the workforce, say) and some of it from darker trends, like rising illegitimacy and the growing divorce divide. And you'd expect working-class Americans, in particular, to be hardest hit by this family-related volatility, since they have much higher rates of divorce and single parenthood than the well-off and well-educated.

But the subtitle of Hacker's book, you'll note, isn't "How The Sexual Revolution Created Higher Levels of Risk For American Families and What To Do About It." It's "The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement - And How You Can Fight Back." In other words, he's taking data that would seem to support the socially conservative contention that changing family structure has had a lot of negative externalities for vulnerable Americans, and using it to claim that 1) Republicans have shredded the safety net and 2) we need a much, much stronger one than what we currently have. The first point is at best debatable - if our safety net is shredded, then why aren't individuals experiencing more income volatility too? - and the second point just amounts to the rather predictable liberal claim that a bigger welfare state is the answer to increasing family breakdown.

I'm skating rather quickly over a very complex terrain, admittedly, and I should also note that I actually agree with a few of Hacker's policy prescriptions, if memory serves (I don't have the book in front of me). I just think that he's taking a narrative that, if true, provides a lot of grist for social conservatives and claiming, somewhat simplistically, that it vindicates a rather conventional liberal worldview.

Zero Grazing

Like most conservatives, I'm all for a little hypocrisy now and then - it's the tribute that vice plays to virtue, the glue that holds society together, and all the rest of it. It does seem, though, that the Bush Administration's abstinence advocates have stretched this principle to the breaking point.

I don't really have much to say about the fate of Randall Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State who seems to have frequented escort services when he wasn't out promoting the ABC method of AIDS prevention ("abstain, be faithful, use a condom"). If you're curious about the question of how best to fight AIDS in Africa, though, I highly recommend this New York Review of Books essay from two years back on Uganda, which has been something of a success story in the effort to drive down HIV rates. The author, Helen Epstein, argues that neither abstinence education nor condom distribution really addresses the root of the problem, which has more to do with the consequences of polygamy, formal and informal, than any other single factor:

Continue reading "Zero Grazing" »

When Meritocracy Attacks

Now that we're the junior left-right team here at the good ship Atlantic, I'm sure Matt Yglesias and I will be disagreeing an awful lot, so let me take this opportunity to say that I agree with every word in this post.

Why Americans Have More Children

A fascinating post from Will Wilkinson, riffing on Nicholas Eberstadt's American Interest essay on America's enduring demographic exceptionalism.

(See also Reihan's post on the Eberstadt essay.)