The Pickens Plan

It scores high on the folksy scale, at least:

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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