tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45014192945672076652024-03-05T00:50:06.588-05:00Ryan CooperRyanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810858979281766801noreply@blogger.comBlogger1577125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-22111829869151968532020-09-29T20:45:00.001-04:002021-02-10T11:25:27.952-05:00Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to <i>The Intercept</i>, which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent <i>New York Times</i> piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.html">Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito</a>), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects.<div><br /></div><div>Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1305604907236556801">I read</a> a <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/who-is-reality-winner.html"><i>New York</i> story</a> about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/intercepted-podcast-could-trump-start-world-war-iii/">Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017</a>, where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually being behind the email hack of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. By this view, it seems she wanted to correct their mistakes by proving they were wrong. </div><div><br /></div><div>Greenwald doesn't agree. Along with his signature gentlemanly politesse, he pointed to <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/874708705065009152">this statement</a>, which argues that because Winner requested a transcript of a different March 29 episode in which he was absent, she <i>definitely</i> was not trying to correct him.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5H2zI7vB1LBjeLoozy7vEcgeIFvTy-WFgGO9ZbYxnCEtd5Cl1lum-t3qao86IAW0d-XmH1f9UtNE-xnGfY-Rqp1Im5tpAKzsE5SBBatmK70CJTZgMoiAFHUR4o-kkgTwilYdiHspiX_8/s745/Screenshot+2020-09-29+203245.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="745" height="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5H2zI7vB1LBjeLoozy7vEcgeIFvTy-WFgGO9ZbYxnCEtd5Cl1lum-t3qao86IAW0d-XmH1f9UtNE-xnGfY-Rqp1Im5tpAKzsE5SBBatmK70CJTZgMoiAFHUR4o-kkgTwilYdiHspiX_8/w640-h381/Screenshot+2020-09-29+203245.png" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Silly Twitter beefs aside, I think it is worth clearly outlining the case for Winner's probable reasoning, as it demonstrates her honorable motives, and because Greenwald and others like Matt Taibbi <a href="https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1308756815283449858">continue to insist</a> that I am either mistaken or lying about this. They are wrong.</div><div><br /></div><div>I contacted Kerry Howley, the author of the <i>New York</i> story, and she says that it's not known with absolute certainty why she leaked the document — Winner's family is sure that her motives were selfless and idealistic, but they don't know what <i>precisely</i> prompted her to choose that particular document on that particular day. However, the circumstantial case for her wanting to correct Greenwald and Scahill being among the reasons is extremely strong. It goes like this:</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>We know Winner listened to the podcast in general, because she requested a transcript — a pretty unusual thing. I've listened to thousands of podcasts and never once done that.</li><li>Both Scahill and (especially) Greenwald are notorious for being hyper-skeptical of any story having to do with Russian election interference, and they made several wrong assertions about it in the March 22 episode.</li><li>The document Winner leaked is <i>entirely</i> about Russian election interference. She gave it to <i>The Intercept</i> a couple weeks after the episode about Russian hacking.</li></ol></div><div>It proves nothing that Winner requested a transcript for an episode other than the one where Greenwald was talking about Russian hacking, because — at the risk of elaborating the bleeding obvious — requesting a transcript of <i>one</i> episode of a podcast is not <i>proof</i> that someone has not listened to a <i>different</i> episode. She might have just wanted the March 29 one for unrelated reasons. Or she could have gotten the dates wrong, and later figured out that the transcripts were and are <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/intercepted-podcast-could-trump-start-world-war-iii/">posted online</a> (indeed, if they just emailed her a link to the posted transcript, as would seem logical to do, she would have realized it directly). By contrast, Greenwald's story purporting to demonstrate beyond question he was uninvolved doesn't pass the smell test. You'd have to believe that Winner was listening to an episode about climate change with Scahill and Naomi Klein, and then decided to leak some documents about Russian election interference that contradicted all the bullshit in the previous episode, to <i>The Intercept</i> and nobody else, <i>purely by coincidence</i>. Like, <i>come on</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, there could be additional motivations, of course. There is a compelling public interest in revealing how a foreign power has attempted to compromise American election infrastructure, for instance. But it simply beggars belief to think that Winner wasn't also trying to correct Greenwald and Scahill on their mistaken beliefs. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTF2j0OWUi8&ab_channel=holygoat">Alas for that wasted faith</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's rather curious how Greenwald has been so extraordinarily hostile about this whole affair. Perhaps if I were one of the most famous journalists in the world because of how I handled some leaked documents, and I co-founded a publication literally named after snatching hidden communications, and someone took an incredible risk to correct me on a point of fact with classified information, and my publication basically handed them straight to the cops, I might be deeply humiliated. If I were a pathologically muleheaded person who was incapable of admitting even slight error, I might then react with furious outrage to anyone trying to point that out, and concoct tendentious lawyerly evasions trying to prove it was everyone's fault but mine.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because while Winner was also <a href="https://boingboing.net/2017/06/10/reality-winner.html">sloppy with her opsec</a>, and likely (though not certainly!) would have been caught anyway, she might not have felt the need to leak at all if Greenwald hadn't been so willfully dense about whether Russian intelligence was behind the hacking of Clinton's campaign and the DNC. Contrary to Greenwald's assertion in the March 2017 episode that "it’s very possible that the Russians were behind [the hacks], although we still haven’t seen any evidence for it," there was a veritable trainload of evidence by mid-2016. The private security company CrowdStrike published a <a href="https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/">detailed explanation</a> of the coding tracks left by the Russian intruders in June 2016, which was subsequently confirmed by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cyber-researchers-confirm-russian-government-hack-of-democratic-national-committee/2016/06/20/e7375bc0-3719-11e6-9ccd-d6005beac8b3_story.html">Fidelis Cybersecurity and Mandiant that month</a>. Professor Thomas Rid wrote <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/4xa5g9/all-signs-point-to-russia-being-behind-the-dnc-hack">an argument summarizing the evidence</a> for Motherboard in July. The entire U.S. intelligence community <a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/19/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-blames-russia-putin-wikileaks-rele/">said the same thing in October</a> (as did the Mueller report and the SSCI investigation later). </div><div><br /></div><div>Anyways, as Chris Hayes <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/explaining-why-reality-winner-still-prison-kerry-howley-podcast-transcript-ncna1119756">points out on his podcast with Howley</a>, it's really a shame that there has not been much of an organized effort to spring Winner from jail. The fact that her leaking did not fit the narrative of a bitter goofball whose entire politics revolves around hating liberals doesn't change the fact that she did what she did in good faith, her action caused no harm to anyone, and five years and three months in prison is a preposterously cruel sentence. She should be pardoned and freed immediately.</div>Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-76407815086174253562020-02-18T22:53:00.000-05:002020-02-18T22:53:14.726-05:00On Refusing to Vote for BloombergBillionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html">second place</a> in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/04/election-2016-trump-fewer-donors-provided-more-of-the-cash/">entire 2016 presidential election</a> cost both parties before the primary is over.<br />
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I published <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/895985">a piece</a> today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1229771740525551618">riled up</a>. They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins the nomination will beat Trump.</div>
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As an initial matter, as <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/895985">I wrote in the article</a>, it is not at all clear that Bloomberg would do a damn thing to stop Trump's various racist atrocities. <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/02/a-republican-plutocrat-tries-to-buy-the-democratic-nomination">This is a guy</a> who turned the NYPD into an occupation force in New York's black and brown neighborhoods, who has been accused by at least 64 women of sexual harassment, and who set up a police state for New York Muslims. He is also patently untrustworthy. This is a guy who is talking a big game about "LGBTQ+ youth" when <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dominicholden/michael-bloomberg-2020-transgender-comments-video">less than a year ago</a> he was calling trans people "it" and asserting that talking about "some guy wearing a dress" was a losing issue politically.</div>
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But a lot of the people yelling at me on Twitter insisted he would still be better, howling that I am basically endorsing Trump's racist acts by not getting behind Emperor Mike. So let's stipulate the absolute best case, where if Bloomberg wins we will get a president who is like Trump in most ways that matter but marginally less horrible.</div>
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I say that would be an <i>awful</i> outcome. At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason to muster all possible effort to beat Trump in November is not simply to replace him with someone <i>maybe</i> slightly less bad — but to replace him with someone who is <i>actually good</i>. This country very badly needs a president (plus members of Congress, etc) who will actually try to achieve the total structural overhaul needed to undo the carnage wreaked by Trump, confront climate change, and start reversing the last 40 years of neoliberal market fundamentalism.<br />
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In a country as corrupt and unequal as ours, it takes an immense effort just to create ordinary democratic institutions, where a party leadership honestly represents their constituents instead of selling out or collecting bribes. The Democratic Party basically took the bribery route for the last generation, supporting at best crappy half-measures, or at worst <a href="https://www.theweek.com/articles/894898/liberals-need-stop-pretending-president-no-power">selling its constituents to Wall Street</a>, all while pointing to Republicans and saying "at least we aren't them." But as the utter catastrophe of neoliberalism has become undeniable, new institutions and candidates have sprung up to attempt to force the party to seriously live up to its rhetorical commitments.<br />
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As <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/michael-bloomberg-2020-democratic-campaign.html">Tom Scocca writes</a>, Bloomberg is trying to halt that process and stop small-d democracy from taking root in the Democratic Party. He is leveraging Democrats' fear of Trump to position himself as the "electable" candidate, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/15/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-spending.html">using his billions to buy endorsements or silence</a> from Democratic elected officials, liberal think tanks, cable news hosts, and so on. (So far, it seems about half of them are openly for sale.) It is utterly <i>shameless</i> political corruption. His desired end goal is clearly to wrench the party dramatically to the right from where it was even in the Clinton years.<br />
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So the point of promising that I (and by extension a big swathe of the rest of the Democratic electorate) will not vote for Bloomberg is to blow up the only possible argument for his candidacy: that he could beat Trump. We are trying to force the party to actually represent its constituents — by at a minimum nominating a normal politician, not a cartoon caricature of a corrupt right-wing oligarch — instead of selling them out, again. The people who would get <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/156560/michael-bloombergs-polite-authoritarianism">thrown in jail</a>, or see their <a href="https://twitter.com/OrganizingPower/status/1229549108299534337">Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits cut</a>, or killed in the wars Bloomberg would probably start, will take "at least he's not Trump" as cold comfort. Applying "vote blue no matter who" to a despicable racist authoritarian who was a Republican five minutes ago is a pathetic and contemptible abandonment of all the downtrodden people in the United States. The party could and should do better than that.<br />
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Conversely, attempting to scold people into committing to vote for Bloomberg if he wins <i>enables</i> his attempt to subvert American democracy. It communicates that he has the Democratic base in the bag, and hence strengthens his electability case.<br />
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But scold me all you want, my mind is made up. I will not vote for Bloomberg in November. So for all those Democrats who are laser-focused on beating Trump I'm telling you right now, in all seriousness, the leftists in this country will watch this party burn before we see it devoured by a Wall Street oligarch. Vote for literally any of the other candidates. But picking Bloomberg would be throwing the nomination away.</div>
Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-7376239098403346942018-08-16T23:15:00.000-04:002018-08-16T23:15:49.714-04:00Centrist Liberals and Medicare for AllOff his usual beat of gravely intoning about how political correctness on elite college campuses is a <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.html">philosophical threat to American democracy</a>, Jonathan Chait noticed I took a brief swipe at him in today's column about Medicare. He was <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/pretending-single-payer-is-easy-to-pass-doesnt-make-it-easy.html?utm_campaign=di&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw">severely triggered</a>, accusing me of being "deliberately dishonest," and whining about my supposed <a href="https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1030172559936036865">bad faith</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1030182856625139712">lying</a> on Twitter.<br />
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Fair warning: this is a pretty silly slap-fight, so people not interested in columnist beefs can feel free to skip. However I think it is an instructive event in some ways.<br />
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So let me rehearse the argument of the <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/790380/medical-lobby-already-peddling-lies-about-medicareforall">original article</a>. The medical lobby is whipping up fear about Medicare for All by claiming it will cause people to lose their health insurance, and I quote a new lobbying group spokesman to that effect. I argue with a bevy of statistics that this claim is false as a factual matter, and to the extent people will be forced to switch, they will receive superior coverage than what they currently have. The intent is to <i>try to convince people</i> that this talking point is not just wrong, but actually backwards. Medicare for All will <i>decrease</i> the number of people losing their insurance.<br />
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In a parenthetical at the beginning, I note that both Chait and Paul Krugman have "made similar points." The intent of this sentence and putting it as an aside was to note that both of them have pointed to this same false point about losing coverage. But Chait interprets it as me saying he and Krugman are actually <i>part of</i> the medical lobby:<br />
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The number of words in Cooper’s column devoted to rebutting our actual case about the politics of single payer is zero. Cooper simply concludes “the medical lobby’s argument [is] mistaken,” and driven by “nothing more than greed.” Either Cooper has not bothered to read the columns he is claiming to rebut (they’re short!), or he cannot understand them (they’re quite simple!), or he is intentionally dishonest.</blockquote>
Chait is so laser-focused on his wounded vanity that he completely misread the quite obvious basic thrust of the article, which again is about <i>confronting factual arguments</i>, not political plausibility. The reference to Chait and Krugman is meant to be about how milquetoast liberals are enabling this false argument. I say the <i>medical lobby</i>'s argument is driven by greed, which obviously includes neither of them (as they are not paid lobbyists).<br />
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I certainly could have worded that parenthetical better, but in context the meaning is clear. It's got nothing to do with politics qua politics at all.<br />
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Perhaps I was being unfair to these two gentlemen by not noting they claim to support Medicare for All in the abstract despite being against it in practice and constantly attacking any concrete proposal to put it into place. But the major argument of the article, again, is that Medicare for All would result in a <i>large net decrease</i> in the number of insurance loss events, and neither of them admit this in the articles I linked to. <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/sanderss-bill-gets-u-s-zero-percent-closer-to-single-payer.html">Chait</a>: "First, most people who have employer-based coverage like it and don’t want to change." <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/opinion/healthcare-single-payer-children.html">Krugman</a>: "A far more important consideration is minimizing disruption to the 156 million people [note: this is about <a href="https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/24/single-payer-myths-removing-people-from-employer-plans/">5 years' worth</a> of employer-based insurance loss events] who currently get insurance through their employers, and are largely satisfied with their coverage. Moving to single-payer would mean taking away this coverage ..."<br />
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Still, Chait now <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/pretending-single-payer-is-easy-to-pass-doesnt-make-it-easy.html?utm_campaign=di&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw">apparently admits this reality</a>, so glad to see we've advanced the dialectic on this front.<br />
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I generally try not to make arguments about political plausibility (not always successfully). I am highly skeptical about anyone's knowledge of what is politically plausible, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/why-liberals-should-support-a-trump-nomination.html">pundits more than most</a>. We live under the presidency of Donald J. Trump, something almost all savvy politics insiders took for granted as absolutely impossible until he actually won. I much prefer to make straightforward arguments for or against particular ideas.<br />
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So when Chait says "If single-payer advocates can come up with a way to get around the political obstacles in the way of single payer, they should say what they are," <i>that is exactly what I am trying to do here</i>, by knocking down duplicitous medical lobby talking points. Maybe thinking people can be convinced in this way is naive. But it's certain to work better than constantly trumping up <a href="https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1030180437753294854">highly speculative</a> political obstacles to Medicare for All, demanding the left get around them, and then attacking any arguments to that effect. One tends to wonder what the real goal of that behavior is.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-58822189488674842262018-07-23T23:00:00.000-04:002018-07-23T23:18:13.506-04:00Russiagate and the Left, Round IICorey Robin <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/russiagate-anticommunism-putin-left-foreign-policy">has responded</a> to my article arguing that the left should take the Trump-Russia story <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/785934/why-left-needs-wise-growing-trumprussia-scandal">more seriously</a>. I do appreciate that he considers me an ally, and I feel the same towards him. However I am not convinced. The points I want to make are somewhat disconnected, so I will just take them one at a time.<br />
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<b>What should be done?</b><br />
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Robin complains that I don't give much attention to the question of how we should respond to Russian electoral espionage.<br />
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As an initial matter, the question of whether a problem is an important one is logically distinct from what the response should be. There is a sizable vein of skepticism about Russiagate on the left, and the argument of the post was that skepticism was misplaced. Solutions can be worked out later. This point is rather similar to the centrist argument that you can't talk about Medicare for All unless you've got a fully costed-out bill detailing all the necessary taxes and regulation.<br />
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However, I <i>have</i> advanced some <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/749616/america-breachable">policy solutions</a> in previous writing, mainly centered around improving internal cybersecurity and regulating radio, TV, and social media platforms to deal with cancerous right-wing agitprop. Here are some more <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/how-progressives-should-think-about-russia/">worthwhile suggestions</a> about foreign policy. None of these are remotely close to neocon belligerence.<br />
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<b>Putin really is benefiting</b><br />
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Robin asserts that under Trump, "the US is currently pursuing a very anti-Russia foreign policy, more aggressive than anything pursued by Obama (especially Obama), Bush, or Clinton." He notes that Congress has put through even more Russian sanctions. That much is true, and as I said in my article, the US security apparatus remains very hostile to Russia.<br />
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What he does not mention is that Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/30/even-if-trump-is-blatantly-ignoring-the-russia-sanctions-law-theres-not-a-lot-congress-can-do-about-it/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8a79ea102782">refused to implement</a> those sanctions for 7 months until political developments <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/politics/russia-sanctions-trump-yevgeniy-viktorovich-prigozhin/index.html">forced his hand</a>. More importantly, he does not mention that Trump has caused enormous chaos and panic within NATO and US-EU alliance, and severely damaged the US internationally as well. Putin has by all accounts a fairly zero-sum view of international relations, and views endless NATO expansion (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-us-russia-imbroglio.html">with some accuracy</a>) as Western encroachment on Russia's legitimate sphere of influence. He also likely thinks sanctions were baked in no matter what he did (again probably accurately, American sanctions are notoriously difficult to remove), so they make no difference on way or the other.<br />
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Therefore, causing a huge disruption among anti-Russian coalition is thus a giant benefit to Russia by Putin's lights, and he's probably right. Questions about Ukraine and Crimea have moved to the back burner as world politics is consumed by Trump. Meanwhile, the perception that he's got the American president wound around his finger dramatically raises international estimates of his influence. Putin is a much more fearsome figure than he was before 2016.<br />
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<b>The plutocratic-ethnonationalist alliance</b><br />
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Robin asserts, this time without any evidence at all, that Putin's electoral espionage was "not for any reasons of building an ethnonationalist alliance but simply because [they] believed they’d be better off with Trump than with Clinton."<br />
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I find this a rather incredible suggestion. Putin's base of support is a combination of plutocrats and right-wing nationalists, and he has built up pro-Russian factions in multiple countries by seeding and supporting exactly those sort of people, plus occasional electoral espionage. Hungary has become an <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/why-vladimir-putin-needs-viktor-orban-russia-hungary/">ersatz Russian client</a> through this process, and <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/16/putin-is-poisoning-prague/">so has the Czech Republic</a>. He tried to do the same thing in France, though <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/29/france-beat-russian-meddling-america-could-too/">with little success</a>. Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, and Austria also suffered <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/09/russia-engineered-election-hacks-europe/96216556/">apparent cyberattacks</a> over the last decade. Israel has turned towards the Russian camp more on its own, with Benjamin Netanyahu even <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/video/israel-s-benjamin-netanyahu-joined-vladimir-putin-at-russia-s-victory-day-parade-in-moscow-1228955715551?v=a">attending Putin's recent inauguration ceremonies</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/20/netanyahu-and-orban-meet-in-summit-of-illiberal-nationalists/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f4b6d9f86dbb">cozying up to Hungary's Viktor Orban</a> (who recently unleashed a <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/hungarian-nightmare-viktor-orbans-war-on-george-soros-3">Jew-baiting tirade</a> against George Soros). The politics of apartheid fit quite nicely with European right-wing nationalism, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/16/opinion/l-yesterday-s-nazi-sympathizers-today-s-south-african-leaders-195124.html">DF Malan</a> could tell you.<br />
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This appears to be the playbook in the U.S. as well. A Russian spy <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/us/politics/maria-butina-russia-espionage.html">apparently infiltrated</a> the NRA, using bribes to turn the organization in a Russian direction — in addition to God only knows how much else in the forms of "<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3036316/Special-Report-9-Mar-2015-2.pdf">hidden capital inflows</a>." Mitch McConnell <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/mitch-mcconnell-russia-obama-joe-biden-359531">ran interference</a> for Putin, threatening Obama that he would make it partisan issue if he spoke out on Russian electoral espionage. The rest of the GOP leadership <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/house-majority-leader-to-colleagues-in-2016-i-think-putin-pays-trump/2017/05/17/515f6f8a-3aff-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.eb5dbbf8ec2d">gleefully chuckled</a> at the idea. As Jugurtha supposedly said of Rome, "Yonder is a city put up for sale, and its days are numbered if it finds a buyer."<br />
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And on the ground, the American far right has long admired Putin as the sort of leader they desire. The tiki torch Nazis in Charleston included "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/alt-rights-richard-spencer-leads-torch-bearing-protesters-defending-lee-statue/2017/05/14/766aaa56-38ac-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?utm_term=.fcb2ea7a8c79">Russia is our friend</a>" among their chants, and the League of the South launched a <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/league-south-white-nationalism-russia-language-page-donald-trump-vladimir-1035916">Russian-language page</a> to reach out to Russian nationalists immediately after the Helsinki summit. "We understand that the Russian people and Southerners are natural allies in blood, culture, and religion," the organization's president wrote.<br />
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America is not a Russian client, of course, but this formula plainly did work to some degree.<br />
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This isn't a NATO-style overt political alliance, but the covert buildup of similar coalitions of right-wing nationalists, plutocrats, and corrupt political parties across many countries. Robin is just wrong on the facts here.<br />
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<b>Broader political questions</b><br />
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Finally, Robin suggests that addressing Russiagate is inevitably going to feed into McCarthyite hysteria. "You think you can control the rhetoric; it controls you." Instead, "The Left’s position on all this should simply be that prudential measures should be taken to ensure democratic elections," while noting that electoral espionage is probably less of a threat to democracy to the Electoral College.<br />
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I think this is backwards. First, as noted above, there really is a compelling left-wing narrative about Russiagate, involving how extreme inequality and neoliberalism has subverted democracy and enabled right-wing extremism across the globe. It is a <i>somewhat</i> tricky rhetorical move, but it's certainly possible. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/how-progressives-should-think-about-russia/">Just emphasize</a> that plutocracy and corruption are the internal problems that must be boldly attacked (in addition to election security, a full traditional policy platform, and so on), while diplomacy must <i>always</i> be the first option for foreign policy — especially when it comes to a nuclear superpower.<br />
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Because contrary to Robin's rather ungenerous suggestions that this is about <i>appearing</i> "serious" and not looking bad in the eyes of centrist gobshites, I think it would be a grave tactical error to allow neocons and cruise missile liberals to entirely occupy the Russiagate political terrain. The president being somehow compromised by a right-wing dictator basically can't help being a top political issue, and offering nothing but mild bromides about election security will make Max Boot-style hysterics the only option on offer.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-80727483148512707802018-06-05T00:51:00.003-04:002018-06-05T00:51:51.833-04:00Democratic Ideological HistoryI spent months working on <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/775583/democratic-party-flying-blind-economics">an article</a> — based on extensive interviews with eight different congressional candidates — about how the Democratic Party has failed to promulgate any strategic response from the Great Recession. Alas, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/minutes/148711/democrats-invested-new-deal-history">online discussion</a> of the article has been confined almost entirely to a setup historical phrase at the beginning. Matt Yglesias led the attack, accusing me of romanticizing the mid-20th century Democratic Party in order to slander modern centrist liberals.<br />
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I will admit that the phrase in question was too strong. In particular, it obscures the enormous split between more populist northern liberals and segregationist conservative Democrats in the South (who did indeed tend to vote for union-busting legislation), as well as the split between more left-sympathetic Democrats and fervent anti-Communists. I know this history very well, and simply got a bit careless with phrasing.<br />
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But what I meant to invoke is the obvious and well-documented fact that the Democratic Party as a whole turned hard to the right on economic questions — on labor, anti-trust, the regulatory state, welfare, and so on — from about the late 1960s through the 1990s. The party was a sprawling mess then as it is now, and it was a complicated process, but contrary to the <i>ludicrous</i> revisionism (based on <a href="http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2018/03/the-neoliberal-retreat.html">frankly dishonest quote-mining</a>) of Jon Chait, this did happen. Its previously dominant populist New Deal tradition was slowly extirpated from the party, and a more conservative neoliberalism became the hegemonic ideology.<br />
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As I have <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-clintonism/">argued at length before</a>, and demonstrated empirically to some degree in my recent article, this has become a very serious problem for the party, because neoliberal Democrats have tended up line up behind disastrous policies like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/politics/02budget.html">austerity when unemployment is 10 percent</a>, causing human carnage and political disaster. It could be that leftists are romanticizing the past. But it also seems possible that neoliberals tend to get squirrelly and nitpicky about these sorts of arguments in order to distract attention from the world-historical failures of the ideological tradition to which they are committed.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-57031855750026578882018-04-01T15:32:00.000-04:002018-04-01T15:32:28.750-04:00The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation.<br />
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Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with different groups — many of whom absolutely despise each other.<br />
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Twitter is also much faster and wider than those more restricted communities. Not only can one comment reach nearly the whole world in a matter of minutes or seconds, outside media also pays very close attention to what is trending on the platform. That places a huge premium on the funniest jokes, the most savage put-downs, the wildest breaking news, and the most overheated reactions — but much less premium on accuracy (though large corrections do generally circulate quickly), and almost no premium on good faith or considered thought. As Dave Weigel <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_chat_room/2013/08/david_weigel_ama_the_slate_political_reporter_answers_reader_questions_on.html">once said</a>, "Twitter is a much more dangerous cauldron of groupthink than happy hours or dinners. On Twitter the reward comes from agreeing or loudly disagreeing with the joke, or the 'smart take.' In person you hash things out."<br />
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It makes Twitter a great place for instant communication, funny content, and witty writing — one of the reasons I continue to like it and stay there.<br />
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But it also combines to make the platform a potentially bottomless pit of hostility and bad faith. The dissociative properties of all internet-mediated communication are even stronger here. Cliques can and do spend hours obsessing about their enemies' annoying tweets. The high premium on amusing cruelty and hysterical overreactions tends to create a Manichean bifurcation in perception, where people are either perfect and good allies, or vile enemies who deserve zero sympathy or fairness. Often a transition from the first category to the second happens purely as a result of shifting clique politics and guilt-by-association.<br />
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When I was totally unknown, I would often see an odd-sounding accusation about someone or something I knew, and find (after untangling the thread of internet telephone and tendentious bullshit) a severe distortion or even the complete opposite of what was being claimed. Now that happens to me on a near-daily basis, in addition to the usual tide of insults, and I confess it is pretty damn obnoxious. Where before I would often attempt to reason with people, to prevent a lot of wasted time and annoyance I now just mute anyone who is at all hostile. I just don't have time for that anymore. (Unsurprisingly, that in turn gives people a new angle of attack, as me not wanting to talk to the 47th egregious asshole that hour becomes an unwillingness to listen to good faith criticism.)<br />
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Now, of course I often participate in these sort of bad habits as much as anyone. It's a feature of the platform and while I try to be a bit more generous, it's very easy to get sucked in. I hope that by thinking about these structural effects, we on the left (myself very much included) might be a bit less willing to spend so much time on pointless axe-grinding, and focus a bit more on substantive discussion.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-69620662889641597252018-03-04T22:35:00.000-05:002018-03-04T22:55:05.343-05:00The Neoliberal RetreatI wrote a <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-clintonism/">book review for <i>The Nation</i></a> on the rise and fall of Clintonism, in which I labeled his general political tendency as a sort of left-neoliberalism. I argued (in part) that neoliberal Democrats, who gained hegemonic ideological power within the party from Clinton through Obama, advocated laissez faire-inflected policies that contrasted sharply with the old New Deal approach. That explains both stuff like the goofy market mechanisms in Obamacare, as well as repeal of New Deal items under Clinton like the Glass-Steagall banking regulation (passed in 1933) and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (1935).<br />
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Turbo-loyal centrist Dem apparatchik Tom Watson glommed onto the article several days after publication and insisted that neoliberalism <a href="https://twitter.com/tomwatson/status/969721853936840704">does not exist</a> (and spent hours flipping out about it).<br />
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In this Watson follows the lead of Jonathan Chait, who has <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult.html">previously insisted</a> that neoliberalism is merely an epithet, and that there was no significant ideological change between FDR and Obama within the Democratic Party. He quotes the classic history <i>Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal</i>, by William Leuchtenburg, citing FDR's "determination to serve as a balance wheel between management and labor … Despite the radical character of the 1934 elections, Roosevelt was still striving to hold together a coalition of all interests, and, despite rebuffs from businessmen and the conservative press, he was still seeking earnestly to hold business support."</div>
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As history, this is absolutely preposterous. Aside from neoliberal Clinton literally dismantling several New Deal programs, one can just read a bit further in the book Chait is citing. FDR was no socialist or even much of a labor unionist, and did want to include some business elements in his New Deal coalition initially. What Chait does not mention was that FDR was consistently skeptical of big finance (blaming them for the 1929 crash), and more importantly, he <i>failed</i> to receive the other business support he craved.<br />
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The whole point of the section of the book Chait is quoting is to tell the story of how FDR <i>lost</i> his "balance wheel" notions. The denouement starts on the page just after the latter portion of the quote: "It was less the dismay of Roosevelt's progressive supporters than business' own actions that led him to question the viability of the all-class alliance," Leuchtenburg writes, detailing the decision of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to denounce the New Deal in 1935. More left-wing advisers like Felix Frankfurter seized the opportunity to argue the time had come to ditch business:</div>
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The Harvard professor insisted that the attempt at business-government co-operation had failed, and urged Roosevelt to declare war on business. Once the president had understood that business was the enemy, he would be free to undertake the Brandeisian program to cut the giants down to size ...</blockquote>
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By Black Monday, the president had already begun to move decisively in a new direction ... Roosevelt insisted on the passage of four major pieces of legislation: the social security bill, the Wagner labor proposal, a banking bill, and a public-utility holding company measure. A few days later, he added a fifth item of "must" legislation: a "soak the rich" tax scheme. In addition, he demanded a series of minor measures, some of them highly controversial, which in any other session would have been regarded a major legislation ... Thus began the "Second Hundred Days." Over a long period Congress debated the most far-reaching reform measures it had ever considered. In the end, Roosevelt got every item of significant legislation he desired. </blockquote>
This is <i>elementary</i> historiography of the New Deal, and Chait's use of quotes here is borderline dishonest. Indeed, as <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2016/04/29/neoliberalism-a-quick-follow-up/">Corey Robin discovered</a>, all this was old hat to Chait himself <a href="https://reason.com/blog/2013/04/02/lefties-the-death-of-neoliberalism-has-b">as recently as 2013</a>:
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[T]he neoliberal project succeeded in weaning the Democrats of the wrong turn they took during the 1960s and 1970s. The Democrats under Bill Clinton -- and Obama, whose domestic policy is crafted almost entirely by Clinton veterans -- has internalized the neoliberal critique. </blockquote>
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Aside from the odd choice of decades here — the neoliberal turn <i>started</i> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/">in the 1970s</a>, and what they were turning against was as much the product of the 1930s as it was the 1960s — that is more or less exactly the scheme in my article. </div>
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So what is going on here? </div>
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As I argued in my article, it's basically impossible nowadays to ignore the carnage wreaked by the neoliberal turn. Inequality is way, way up, growth is down, welfare reform increased extreme poverty by <a href="http://www.demos.org/blog/2/12/16/welfare-reform-was-quite-bad">150 percent</a>, free trade helped wreck the American industrial base, and so on. Not all that is Democrats' fault of course, but they collaborated on most of them. Especially since the rise of Black Lives Matter, the role of neoliberal Democrats like Joe Biden and the Clintons in stoking mass incarceration has come under severe criticism.</div>
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It's also clear that by far the greatest energy among Democrats is on the left. New Deal-ish Bernie Sanders is the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/08/25/bernie-sanders-nations-highest-profile-socialist-once-again-voted-most-popular">most popular working politician in the country</a> — and largely on the strength of gargantuan margins among the young. Just in the last few days, a brushfire outbreak of labor militancy has swept from West Virginia to <a href="http://www.wdtv.com/content/news/Frontier-Communication--475760713.html">Virginia</a> and <a href="http://ktul.com/news/local/oklahoma-teachers-planning-a-statewide-strike">Oklahoma</a>.<br />
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These are trying circumstances for the advocates of education "reform" (and teacher union busting), means testing, and other such free-markety claptrap. So advancing a ridiculous revisionist history of Democratic Party ideology is, in the first place, a way to hide behind FDR's skirts, where one can continue to attack the left as interlopers instead of heirs to a legitimate tradition.<br />
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But that also makes it, partially at least, a tacit admission that the whole neoliberal project has failed. Even a warped version of 1930s-style policy would be a gigantic change from the Democratic status quo, no matter what bizarre label Chait and Watson try to pin on it. And it needs to happen, quite obviously, because the neoliberal turn was a disastrous mistake that needs to be reversed.</div>
Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-9919138753748104322017-06-17T17:08:00.000-04:002017-06-17T17:12:02.217-04:00Trash Arguments from Lukewarmer Oren Cass<div class="tr_bq">
For those just tuning in, let's have a quick recap. Here's the argument in favor of strong climate policy: Unchecked climate change looks bad, potentially very bad, therefore we should cut the greenhouse gas emissions which cause it.</div>
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In his "<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-03-21/problem-climate-catastrophizing">lukewarmer</a>" <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-to-worry-about-climate-change">manifesto</a> articles, Oren Cass disputes the "potentially very bad" clause of the argument, asserting that there is no scientific consensus behind predictions of extreme devastation from climate change, and that continued economic growth would allow us to buy our way out of any problems we might have.<br />
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In <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/703451/terrible-risk-management-climate-change-moderates">my response</a>, I argued this was improperly conflating predictions about <i>possibilities</i> with ones about what is <i>most probable</i>. It is true that the IPCC summary of what is most likely to happen does not generally track with the most alarming predictions (though as Michael Mann — an actual climate scientist, unlike either of us — <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-04-21/climate-catastrophe-choice">points out</a>, Cass rather understates the actual level of alarm in the IPCC and also its track record of overly cautious predictions).<br />
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But there <i>is</i> generally a scientific consensus that those really terrible predictions are <i>at least possible</i>, even if they aren't most likely (for example, a <a href="http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/acp-16-3761-2016.pdf">recent paper</a> predicted a sea level rise of several meters over the next century, along with many other disasters). And if they are possible, then they must be factored into our risk management thinking. Even if the chance of a civilization-threatening outcome is only, say, 1 percent, it's still worth a great cost to avoid that risk. Would you bet your life on a 1 in 100 chance? Or a 1 in 20 chance? Even the IPCC says there is a <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/10/sea-level-in-the-5th-ipcc-report/">17 percent chance</a> sea level rise will exceed 98 centimeters by 2100, on a bad emissions trajectory, perhaps by a lot. There are <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-unfolding-tragedy-of-climate-change-in-bangladesh/">over 30 million people</a> in Bangladesh alone living below that level.<br />
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Cass, by contrast, implicitly treats a lack of consensus about whether worst-case scenarios will happen as a consensus saying they definitely will not happen. Which is dumb.<br />
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I further argued that predictions of future economic growth over the next century were a thin reed to hang on, in two ways. First, Cass leans heavily on <a href="http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Web-DICE-2013-April.htm">a simulation</a> by William Nordhaus predicting only minor damage to GDP a century out from climate change. To get this result, Nordhaus simply assumes that growth rates will not be harmed by climate change. A <a href="http://policyintegrity.org/files/publications/ExpertConsensusReport.pdf">survey of 1,103 experts</a> on the economics of climate, by contrast, found that 78 percent thought it <i>would</i> harm growth rates — making for vastly larger economic damage.<br />
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Second, I argued that economic predictions of any kind over a century were at least as uncertain as the most wild-assed climate change predictions. Not only is there no consensus theory explaining why there will be steady and continual increase in productivity and growth over the next century, there is not even a consensus theory about why productivity growth happens in the first place. (People argue, <a href="https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/17440/773550JRN0200100Factor0Accumulation.pdf">necessarily rather hazily</a>, that it's probably technology and efficiency, <a href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp8652.pdf">or something</a>.)<br />
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Economics, being a social science, is simply not as predictively rigorous as physics and chemistry. Cass's credulous approach towards <i>highly uncertain</i> and non-consensus economic predictions illustrated the overall unsoundness of his argument. He is cherry-picking his evidence and using an epistemic double standard.<br />
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Now Cass is <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/448380/climate-change-economic-growth-who-uncertain-what">back with a response</a>, and unsurprisingly he has completely failed to grasp the argument. Here's how he recapitulates the above:<br />
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<span style="font-size: 16px;">Let’s try to untangle this. </span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 16px;">The flow of the argument is: A: "Climate change will be a catastrophe that kills billions." </span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 16px;">B: "Actually, the costs look manageable given the expected rate of human progress." </span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 16px;">A: "That’s only true if human progress continues; what if it halts? I don’t think it will. But it could. So much uncertainty."</span></blockquote>
Everything about this is wrong. First, climate change <i>might</i> be a catastrophe that kills billions, and therefore we must treat that danger seriously. Second, the economic point above does not rest on zero growth. In my article, I used a total flatlining of growth as an extreme example, both because economists can't rule it out and because US productivity growth was <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod3.nr0.htm">negative in 2016</a> (also note the entire Eurozone just had zero GDP growth for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/business/international/eurozone-economy-q1.html">eight years</a>), but <i>not the only one</i>.<br />
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It <i>does not</i> take a total cessation of growth to blow apart Cass's Panglossian economic future. Because it relies on piling up a huge GDP by steady growth, it would be called into question merely by coming in consistently slower than the Nordhaus prediction (as productivity growth has been <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm">extraordinarily slow</a> since 2009). Or, as referenced previously, if climate change harms growth rates instead of levels, the cumulative economic damage will be larger by "<a href="http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1636&context=law_and_economics">many orders of magnitude</a>." So actually, there's a pretty good chance the costs <i>will not</i> be manageable even if growth continues, and something like a carbon tax (which incidentally <a href="https://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/CC-climate">even Nordhaus supports</a>, <a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/why-carbon-tax-bad-country-10034.html">unlike Cass</a>), looks a lot more responsible.<br />
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So the whole response is epically botched. But later in his article Cass makes a couple more erroneous arguments that are worth addressing. Still obsessed with the zero growth canard, he argues that this would be a catastrophe worse than climate change:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: 16px;">And in <i>that</i> case, climate change would be really bad. Of course, another thing that would be really bad is <i>the halting of human progress</i>. </span>Worrying about climate change in a zero-growth world is like worrying about the difficulty of achieving universal health insurance coverage in the midst of a second U.S. civil war. Sure, that would be a problem. Just maybe not the one to focus on.</blockquote>
This does not follow at all. If growth does stop, then that <i>increases</i> the necessity of climate policy, precisely because we won't have the future wealth to buy our way out of trouble, as Cass assumes we will. If we do define human progress as continued economic growth (highly contestable, but never mind), then that's a problem that might be fixed at a later date, as human society existed for thousands of years with zero growth in the past. That means the key task for people stuck in a zero growth rut would be to preserve society in as good a condition as possible, so future generations might figure it out. That means strong climate policy.<br />
<br />
Second, Cass makes a serious factual error:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There’s also the awkward detail that forecasts of rising fossil-fuel emissions, and thus rising climate risks, themselves rely on continued growth. Cooper is describing a contorted scenario where the growth exists for purposes of creating the climate change but not for purposes of coping with it.</blockquote>
This is wrong. It's true that the <a href="http://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at:8787/RcpDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=about">Representative Concentration Pathways</a> (RCPs) used by the IPCC to model the entire world climate system generally predict continued economic growth, but they also contain confounding assumptions about increased efficiency and other factors. All but the worst have emissions peaking sometime this century — the aggressive one actually has <i>negative</i> emissions starting towards the end of this century.<br />
<br />
What Cass gets wrong here is that rising climate risks track rising <i>concentrations</i> of greenhouse gases, not increased emissions, because emissions are <i>already high enough to cause high warming</i>, <i>relatively quickly</i>. Suppose carbon dioxide emissions are frozen at their current level (about <a href="https://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n1/full/nclimate2892.html">40 billion tonnes as of 2015</a>), as part of the zero growth scenario. The <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-only-five-years-left-before-one-point-five-c-budget-is-blown">folks over at Carbon Brief</a> created this handy graphic, based on the IPCC carbon budget analysis:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMbWm8nlP8KOwPU95mWRt9eMdWaUJVQG1-7non9NsGa-okj6V4tLbISkPLPHpPZ-QB0txfILaeBQ7RLbe7G1xss6Hj82K3tb4ab9zx-gFJa6FB7Vqpd9stJ-GvTDw7QTTmGJVcY13PNRE/s1600/Screenshot_20170617_154041.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="885" data-original-width="1385" height="408" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMbWm8nlP8KOwPU95mWRt9eMdWaUJVQG1-7non9NsGa-okj6V4tLbISkPLPHpPZ-QB0txfILaeBQ7RLbe7G1xss6Hj82K3tb4ab9zx-gFJa6FB7Vqpd9stJ-GvTDw7QTTmGJVcY13PNRE/s640/Screenshot_20170617_154041.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
A neat thing such a steady-state assumption allows, due to the linearity (<a href="http://theweek.com/articles/558645/how-harm-climate-change-could-explode-exponentially-down-road">hopefully</a>) of climate sensitivity, is that warming will also happen steadily, so we can make a 4 degree estimate. At the 66 percent chance level, each degree takes an additional roughly 1,300 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, and so at 40 billion tonnes per year, that will be accumulated after about 33 years of emissions.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzFOK3T4qySfxM9NIoObvtN6zHeES6ohmnQAKT5FyygxXrAqYnETBwXnDeImB3wAKENHT3jbRe9s2xvi7pmVzE1ciRR-jUj1yL6VNJaQBvYkZydkm5mg-gueh1vlql8Y0zYbXb2rNQ4Sg/s1600/carbon-budget-ipcc-table.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="377" data-original-width="1052" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzFOK3T4qySfxM9NIoObvtN6zHeES6ohmnQAKT5FyygxXrAqYnETBwXnDeImB3wAKENHT3jbRe9s2xvi7pmVzE1ciRR-jUj1yL6VNJaQBvYkZydkm5mg-gueh1vlql8Y0zYbXb2rNQ4Sg/s640/carbon-budget-ipcc-table.png" width="640" /></a></div>
Therefore, by 2103 — without any increase in emissions at all — the chance of keeping warming below 4 degrees will only be 2 in 3, and fading fast. That would be among the worse RCP trajectories. Here's what the <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf">IPCC says about that level of warming</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Global climate change risks are high to
very high with global mean temperature increase of 4°C or more above preindustrial levels in all reasons for concern...and include severe and widespread impacts on unique and threatened systems, substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional
food security, and the combination of high temperature and humidity compromising normal human activities, including growing food or
working outdoors in some areas for parts of the year (<i>high confidence</i>)...precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger tipping points
(thresholds for abrupt and irreversible change) remain uncertain, but the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points in the earth
system or in interlinked human and natural systems increases with rising temperature (<i>medium confidence</i>).</blockquote>
So, something like a 1 in 3 chance of very serious impacts on all sorts of critical social systems (growing food and being able to go outside are generally considered important activities for people), and an uncertain but nontrivial chance of having hit some tipping point that will cause warming to spiral out of control, with risks rising fast. And after that, every 3-4 decades we'll have racked up another degree of warming.<br />
<br />
Let me emphasize again, at no point does any part of my argument actually rely on zeroing out growth, as he bizarrely suggests over and over. I addressed these latter points only because they illustrate Cass's slippery reasoning.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://theweek.com/articles/445822/how-climate-change-ate-conservatisms-smartest-thinkers">Back in 2014</a> I described Ross Douthat's thinking about climate change as "vague handwaving that reads very much like he has cherry-picked a bunch of disconnected fluff to justify doing nothing." I can see why he's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/opinion/sunday/neither-hot-nor-cold-on-climate.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share">drawn to this sort of garbage</a>.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-8978869415112918642017-06-10T19:15:00.001-04:002017-06-10T19:16:53.890-04:00What Happens to the Electoral College under an Expanded House?Awhile ago I idly speculated that the size of the House of Representatives should be increased. From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment">back in 1913</a> when the size of the House was fixed at its current 435 seats, the number of people represented by each member has increased from a bit over 210,000 to over 700,000 today. Insofar as each member is supposed to be in contact with his or her constituents, that's rather straining the point of the body.<br />
<br />
So suppose we fixed the size of the House based on a desired district size of 150,000 people (incidentally over twice the size of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_Parliament_constituencies">average constituency</a> in the UK Parliament). The way House seats are currently apportioned is a real pain in the neck because first you have to dole out one seat to every state, and then the rest according to a complicated population-based formula — necessary because a few tiny states like Wyoming have less than 1/435th of the population.<br />
<br />
But if we select 150,000 as the desired district size, we can simply divide each state's population by 150,000 and round to the nearest whole number. That way even Wyoming starts out with 4, and we don't have to worry about everybody getting at least one. So calculated, the New House would have a total size of 2055 members. No doubt states with unlucky fractions would complain about getting rounded down, but it's <i>far</i> more fair than the current system.<br />
<br />
This would also affect the Electoral College, because electoral votes are allocated based on votes in Congress: states get one for each representative and one for each senator (and DC gets as many as the smallest state). And because it would reduce the over-representation of small states somewhat, it would make the Electoral College substantially more fair. Here's the <a href="http://www.electproject.org/2014g">2014 voting-eligible population</a> per electoral vote:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCgNfyYpRwMWmwKptU-VIyJFh_UsiFxqnpOc8pmu8b6mITsJ7tC1G-i_2Rw0vb1jL1n2Lbry9SOYwxu2D-DkGr_629ZASPh881em7nbxAppj3K8ybF3OorCNnxfM-YvTUZSRTvhNigNSY/s1600/chart.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="798" data-original-width="668" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCgNfyYpRwMWmwKptU-VIyJFh_UsiFxqnpOc8pmu8b6mITsJ7tC1G-i_2Rw0vb1jL1n2Lbry9SOYwxu2D-DkGr_629ZASPh881em7nbxAppj3K8ybF3OorCNnxfM-YvTUZSRTvhNigNSY/s640/chart.png" width="535" /></a></div>
<br />
And here's the same population under the New Electoral College:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWvpxU9UQtATZLiO1qWIwAd2Ygow-bO8IuEyVZ0eq8Yzm0CpZmLEZ749h5VIl_eSFsqrvljjqyizkfQhpy6duopGqOkjrBF3Nrb0fauzwCo7HvgwtD9sw6eZVfe8aS5lY3r_tO-MKVj94/s1600/chart+%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="830" data-original-width="672" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWvpxU9UQtATZLiO1qWIwAd2Ygow-bO8IuEyVZ0eq8Yzm0CpZmLEZ749h5VIl_eSFsqrvljjqyizkfQhpy6duopGqOkjrBF3Nrb0fauzwCo7HvgwtD9sw6eZVfe8aS5lY3r_tO-MKVj94/s640/chart+%25281%2529.png" width="518" /></a></div>
<br />
Note how the distance between the most over-represented and most under-represented states has been sharply compressed. Still a bit unfair, but vastly less so than the current system.<br />
<br />
Now, the Electoral College is still a stupid system and should be replaced with a simple popular vote. And a first-past-the-post district system is far inferior to a proportional parliamentary system (or MMP system, etc). But this is a quick and easy way to at least wound two birds with one stone — requiring nothing more than an act of Congress.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-21030189196979318302017-05-25T19:15:00.000-04:002017-07-21T10:44:13.838-04:00Socialism and the Welfare State<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXXhtLoAb44XibW2vtLea9Cz1h75MT14wFJ_LfIw_84gaZtmUbTW6msHXJedMgeyGGu6FHJNipAzklj4RyHHgy55o1NN32-WgMl3X3L-OxDU5WwnQi2ImK_QBlyWRo6g3lansYszzcEXA/s1600/ryjthes.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXXhtLoAb44XibW2vtLea9Cz1h75MT14wFJ_LfIw_84gaZtmUbTW6msHXJedMgeyGGu6FHJNipAzklj4RyHHgy55o1NN32-WgMl3X3L-OxDU5WwnQi2ImK_QBlyWRo6g3lansYszzcEXA/s400/ryjthes.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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</div>
Here's a tweet from Matt Yglesias that bears on my <a href="http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2016/12/the-basic-instinct-of-socialism.html">definition of socialism</a> from December.<br />
<br />
I think it's fair to say that my definition is both less radical than traditional socialism and many more hardcore radical perspectives today. However, I think it's important to be clear that this definition demands a <i>complete</i> welfare state, not just a larger one.<br />
<br />
From the perspective of the working class, the point of this brand of socialist policy is twofold. First, we must provide all people who <i>cannot</i> work (children, students, disabled and unemployed people, etc., who make up the <a href="http://www.demos.org/blog/4/30/15/who-are-officially-poor-1987-2013">super-majority of the poor</a>) with a decent income. Second, we must make sure that every single person who <i>can</i> work has a decent job ready and waiting for them (through full employment policy) — or failing that, that they have unlimited unemployment insurance and retraining/job placement assistance (through active labor market policy).<br />
<br />
This mostly removes the traditional capitalist coercion to work. Now, under my scenario, if you are an able-bodied adult out of school, and you refuse to accept an offered job or to look for work, then it is possible that you will fall into poverty (though of course there should be a further safety net to prevent actual starvation). Given that a tremendous volume of labor is simply necessary every day to simply push human society forward through time, I think that there is no getting around at least some level of coaxing people towards work.<br />
<br />
However, I think there is a fundamental difference between that sort of pressure and coercing work through the threat of total destitution. If we have structured our economy well, work should be useful — dedicated towards advancing society through time, or solving some problem or another. I believe that virtually every person wants to participate in society, to perform some useful task, and that if decent jobs are readily available — that is, jobs which are safe, well-paid, leave you with plenty of free time, and are socially necessary — then people will do them willingly.<br />
<br />
The quintessential Bad Job is flipping burgers at Wendy's. Yet it is doesn't get much more socially necessary than keeping the citizenry fed. And indeed, food service can also being one of the highest-status jobs there is, given the right social context. Fast food work is a bad job because it is low-paid and exploitative, not because there is something inherently undignified about cooking burgers.<br />
<br />
I think both liberals and hardcore leftists underestimate the transformative potential of a complete welfare state. If the hand of government is there to catch everyone who has a run of bad luck, provides healthcare, childcare, and leave for all, and structures labor markets to coax people into good work (as opposed to brutally scourging them into whatever jobs capital happens to have on hand, whether they exist or not), people's lived experience of freedom is tremendously expanded. The effects of this can be profound — Katie Baker, for example, once wrote an <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution">excellent piece</a> about how the profound generosity of Denmark's system makes Danish women significantly less vulnerable to predatory men.<br />
<br />
But it's the <i>completeness</i> that is key to this effect: it means that no matter who you are or what happens to you, so long as you're alive you'll be looked after.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-32307420891704706092017-05-12T23:52:00.003-04:002018-02-23T09:17:24.855-05:00Climate Bullshit at the New York Times<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibk9G55o6l_Y1AgVGKVaZAdvFxNyzZ_hXQ73s8IWHTyaQxh0gNyXmlsxRqKrv_Awmp-7LPzsa1hCWBa-IF4n22F4nL_gB_Xd-HofbZ_a8-JpAo38mRY7kOLRiu7N2g346JvG6o5Scbsik/s1600/LAG-002342-Bret-Stephens-400x485.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibk9G55o6l_Y1AgVGKVaZAdvFxNyzZ_hXQ73s8IWHTyaQxh0gNyXmlsxRqKrv_Awmp-7LPzsa1hCWBa-IF4n22F4nL_gB_Xd-HofbZ_a8-JpAo38mRY7kOLRiu7N2g346JvG6o5Scbsik/s200/LAG-002342-Bret-Stephens-400x485.jpg" width="164" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bret Stephens</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Apparently the <i>New York Times</i> lost a ton of subscribers for hiring the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberalisms-imaginary-enemies-1448929043">climate denier</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/5/1/15482698/new-york-times-bret-stephens">Bret Stephens</a> (who, it should be noted, is also a <a href="http://fusion.kinja.com/the-best-of-bret-stephens-your-newest-new-york-times-o-1794297718">bilious anti-Arab racist who supports torture</a>). <i>Times</i> publisher Arthur Sulzberger wrote an email to subscribers who had canceled their subscriptions addressing the issue. He <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/05/12/new-york-times-bret-stephens-column-cancel-paper-238338">made two arguments</a>: first, that the Times pays a lot of climate reporters. That is a fair point. Second:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sulzberger wrote that, with so many people "talking past each other about how best to address climate change," putting different points of view on the same page will hopefully help advance solutions.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Our editorial page editor, James Bennet, and I believe that this kind of debate, by challenging our assumptions and forcing us to think harder about our positions, sharpens all our work and benefits our readers," he wrote. "This does not mean that The Times will publish any commentary. Some points of view are not welcome, including those promoting prejudice or denying basic truths about our world. But it does mean that, in the coming years, we aim to further enrich the quality of our debate with other honest and intelligent voices, including some currently underrepresented in our pages. If you continue to read The Times, you will encounter such voices — not just as contributors, but as new staff columnists."</blockquote>
This is bullshit.<br />
<br />
First, climate denial — which <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304017404575165573845958914">Stephens</a> <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-a-big-idea-1446510186">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberalisms-imaginary-enemies-1448929043">espoused</a> at the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, before he <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15413718/bret-stephens-new-york-times">retreated a bit</a> so he could keep his job — is beyond question a viewpoint which should not be welcome on op-ed pages. Scientific consensus is as reliable a guide as there is to "basic truths about our world," and Stephens was quite recently a science denier. (Naturally, Sulzberger does not even address Stephens' anti-Arab bigotry.)<br />
<br />
Second, while a debate about climate policy and strategies would be extremely welcome on the <i>Times</i> op-ed page, Stephens is not the man for the job. As I have <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/695761/new-york-times-staggering-goal-climate-change">explained in detail</a> (and will explain further on Monday), he is neither honest nor intelligent. His <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/climate-of-complete-certainty.html">very first column</a> was about climate change, it had one scientific fact, and he got it wrong. I almost could not imagine a more humiliating start to a new columnist position.<br />
<br />
An actual climate policy debate would tackle questions like: what are the relative strengths of various policy approaches — eg, carbon tax versus a total war on carbon? What are the most promising zero-carbon technologies, and how might they be developed faster? Should we prioritize rollout of existing tech or moonshot ideas? Given that some warming has already happened and some more is already baked in, what are the best amelioration and resilience policies? How can we accommodate climate refugees? What are the various geoengineering options, and what sort of risks do they present? Those questions intersect with politics in all manner of ways, presenting a nigh-inexhaustible vein of material for the opinion writer. (At the risk of self-flattery, I think this sort of writing actually is fairly well-suited to advancing climate policy in a way that is understandable to the lay public.)<br />
<br />
Sulzberger's point about people "talking past each other about how best to address climate change," and the desirability of advancing solutions through debate, <i>presupposes an agreement about climate change being a serious problem</i>. Stephens clearly does not agree, and what's more, he very obviously does not know what the fuck he is talking about. His whole shtick is making meta-debate points so as to game centrist discourse norms and set himself up as the Open Debate Avatar without actually debating anything.<br />
<br />
If the <i>Times</i> wants a real debate about climate policy in its op-ed section (as opposed to soothing centrist liberal neuroses, or a blinkered attempt to advance the <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/568321/why-buzzfeeds-ethics-guide-incoherent-mess">realpolitik of the <i>Times</i>' cultural legitimacy</a>) it will at a minimum need to hire a writer or two who understands and accepts climate science. So long as Stephens is a columnist there (no doubt being paid well into six figures), I'd say you're well justified in taking your journalism subscription dollars elsewhere.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-34165361978131276432017-02-11T16:37:00.001-05:002017-02-13T15:55:14.018-05:00Hillbillies and Cultural CapitalEvery time I open Amazon and Audible they recommend J.D. Vance's dumb book <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i>, and it reminds me to make a point I failed to mention in my <a href="http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2016/12/hillbilly-elegy-and-culture-argument.html">previous post</a> on it. This is about his story about attending a private function while he was attending Yale Law School, and his social anxiety at trying to navigate the weird norms of the upper class.<br />
<br />
It's a great microcosm of the book's jarring contrast between fairly well-done memoir and idiotic political interpretation thereof. He relates going to some kind of Yale-sponsored dinner, and at one point having to hide in the bathroom to call his girlfriend and ask why there were four different kinds of forks, and just what in God's name he's supposed to do with each one. It's funny, charming, and relatable.<br />
<br />
Yet later he includes this sort of thing as part of the list of hillbilly cultural deficiencies. If these poor white people would drop their brash and unsophisticated fork practices, they might be able to leap up into the middle class. And indeed, that was part of a process which worked out relatively well for him.<br />
<br />
Yet it never occurs to Vance that the entire point of having Four Forks-style norms is to <i>set up arbitrary social barricades in the service of upper-class self-dealing</i>. There is nothing inherently dignified or superior about eating with more than one fork. It just happens to be the upper class way of doing things. Familiarity with the Four Forks signals that you are a member of the upper class, and therefore a reasonable candidate for jobs, grad school slots, and so on. That sort of thing is most of what people call "cultural capital." And in a hugely unequal society, there are only so many upper class slots to go around. Set up a Fork Instruction Institute in Kentucky someplace, and the elite would merely shift to a different obscure method of signaling the right background.<br />
<br />
Of course, these sort of systems are not totally impervious to the lower class, as Vance's story demonstrates. But overall, America's class structure is <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/551356/advice-smart-hungry-college-grads-born-rich">quite rigid</a>: College dropouts from the top income quintile are 2.5 times more likely to remain in the top quintile than college graduates from the bottom income quintile. Stories like Vance's are nothing more than a meritocratic veneer on top of a massively unfair system of entrenched privilege.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-46578490870314596122016-12-29T00:15:00.001-05:002016-12-29T00:20:24.481-05:00The Basic Instinct of SocialismThis year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State">very much included</a>. But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that.<br />
<br />
So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms.<br />
<br />
The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no social project that cannot be corrupted by human frailty and viciousness. Many people looked to Karl Marx as a sort of pope whose words might save them from disaster. Doesn't work like that. But on the other hand, one cannot dismiss socialism merely because some people calling themselves such were or are monsters. That's human beings for you and it applies to any political ideology.<br />
<br />
So that said, my vision of socialism is fairly loose and freewheeling. I've read <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/443025/what-karl-marx-teach-2014">quite a bit of Marx</a> and gotten a lot of out him, but I think it's a great error to treat anyone as a prophet. <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/559073/bernie-sanders-right-time-democratic-socialism">I like</a> Polanyi's definition of socialism, but precisely because it is broad and not a highly detailed program:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglCjYKjHmyCkspmP_C6xr0uu8r23HJSPyEiUAPfoQOE-5wQ7aNexE6Yx7T5K5sJuIPru5a1L2owJ07SXvMxCSpcm6lydu5Ege-Hp8hsQ2bLTMf4_-SNpezimJOnR7Ce8dWSWBWFqKh8i8/s1600/karl_polanyi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglCjYKjHmyCkspmP_C6xr0uu8r23HJSPyEiUAPfoQOE-5wQ7aNexE6Yx7T5K5sJuIPru5a1L2owJ07SXvMxCSpcm6lydu5Ege-Hp8hsQ2bLTMf4_-SNpezimJOnR7Ce8dWSWBWFqKh8i8/s400/karl_polanyi.jpg" width="283" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Karl Polanyi</td></tr>
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Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society. It is the solution natural to the industrial workers who see no reason why production should not be regulated directly and why markets should be more than a useful but subordinate trait in a free society. </blockquote>
For me, that is the animating instinct of socialism: conscious decisions and policies to adjust the institutions of society so that they serve the common interest, broadly defined as a rough and ready egalitarianism. (One can slot in some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice">Rawls</a> or <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/">Sen</a> as a more sophisticated moral justification for this, but <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25:31-46&version=KJV">Jesus Christ</a> might serve equally well.) Those least well-off get the greatest moral priority, and inequality is acceptable only insofar as it necessary to generate a sufficiently large economic product so that everyone can have a decent standard of living and pursue what they have reason to value.<br />
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By this view, capitalism is problematic because it only distributes income to the factors of labor and capital. Its engine is the coercion of labor from people who don't own anything, because they would otherwise starve. In its early days capitalism was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_boy">insanely brutal</a> about this, shredding the social fabric with its voracious demand for work. It is better today — though still <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/29/child-poverty-in-the-u-s-is-among-the-worst-in-the-developed-world/">terrible for many people</a>, especially in the US — but insofar as it is has improved, the reason is precisely the basic instinct of socialism, which produced the welfare state.<br />
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The weak and vulnerable poor, which in a capitalist system means those who own nothing but find it impossible to work, must be protected. Capitalist institutions are only useful insofar as they serve broad human needs — they are not ends in themselves.<br />
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The polar opposite of socialism, then, is classical liberalism (or libertarianism today) — which says that capitalist institutions <i>are</i> ends in themselves. This view holds that property rights should be sacrosanct, and all social relations should operate through capitalist market mechanisms. Not many people are full libertarians these days, but the ideology was and is extraordinarily influential — just witness the titanic effort that went into <a href="https://baselinescenario.com/2016/05/09/the-problem-with-obamacare/">badly simulating a market</a> in the Obamacare exchanges.<br />
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Polanyni notes a deep irony — capitalism was developed along highly utopian, planned lines, to which elites clung so hard during the Great Depression that the entire thing almost came apart. A large part of the initial socialist impulse was a fundamentally conservative, then: a desire to preserve existing society as capitalism ripped up the social contract. But mature socialism — an approximation of which can be seen in the Nordic countries today — is more forward-looking than this. The damage of capitalism has already been done, and there is basically no going back. The key is to harness the machinery and technology built up under capitalism to create a better society that works for everyone, without exception.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-65836303054559365632016-12-10T15:26:00.000-05:002016-12-10T15:26:34.686-05:00Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture Argument against WelfareDuring Thanksgiving, a relative happened to have JD Vance's book <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> lying around, and so I picked it up out of curiosity. As <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/138717/jd-vance-false-prophet-blue-america">other reviewers have said</a>, the politics in it are pretty terrible. However it was better than I was expecting it to be. Mainly, it's a book about growing up in a fucked-up family, and Vance ends up emphasizing how his surroundings more or less controlled what kind of a person he ended up being. He made it out of Kentucky and Ohio and ended up graduating from Yale Law school, but unlike most conservatives, he doesn't paint that as some Randian heroic act of self-bootstrapping. Over and over he notes how lucky he was to have people to help him sort out his problems. "I am one lucky son of a bitch," he concludes.<br /><br />The few areas of explicit conservatism — whining about white welfare queens, or dumbass libertarian notions about being coerced into paying taxes — fit very poorly with the overall thrust of the book. (Don't read <i>National Review</i>, folks.) With only a few alterations it could have pretty ordinary liberal politics.<br /><br />But like Jonathan Chait, he does conclude that hillbilly culture is in part responsible for why poor whites are doing so poorly these days. If downscale white people are to become healthier, "we hillbillies must wake the hell up," he writes. It's not an argument I accept, but it does have some surface plausibility. Poverty leaves scars; poor people often make maddeningly terrible decisions (though they often <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor/">make more sense than it may appear</a> from the outside).<br /><br />But let's suppose that Vance is right, and culture is dragging the hillbilly population down. The problem with this and his conservative politics is that Vance does not even try to show that conservative policy — making welfare benefits hinge on work, or cutting them altogether — will help hillbillies sort out their culture problem. The theory behind conservative social policy is that by taking away benefits from people who have been lulled into the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/paul-ryan-welfare-reform_n_1368277.html">hammock of dependency</a>, as Paul Ryan calls it, or building in some work requirements and time limits as happened with welfare reform, will give people the kick in the ass they need to buckle down and get to work.<div>
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But the whole point of Vance's culture argument is that hillbillies are often impervious to economic incentives. One example he leans on is a time when an owner at a tile factory where Vance worked bent over backwards to provide a good-paying job to an unemployed young man and his pregnant girlfriend. The woman was soon fired for absenteeism, and the man didn't last much longer. And fair enough, that is pretty dumb. But if <i>actually having</i> a good job isn't enough to make someone work hard enough to keep it, then it seems rather unlikely that further deepening the abyss and desperation of unemployment (already <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-sharp-sudden-decline-of-americas-middle-class-20120622">very bad in this country</a>) isn't going to do it either.</div>
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And on the other hand Vance dedicates a long and rather good section of his book to how the terrific stress of growing up in poverty and an unstable family gives his people a condition akin to PTSD — emotional distance, a hair-trigger temper, and a constant readiness to fight. It might be that completely axing all unemployment insurance and other welfare would have made the above-mentioned person so desperate that he would have shaped up, but it seems just as likely that the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/toxic-stress-poverty-hurt-developing-brain/">additional stress</a> would simply worsen his psychological problems and make him even more unlikely to stick with a job. (And in point of fact, all that welfare reform achieved was an <a href="http://www.demos.org/blog/2/12/16/welfare-reform-was-quite-bad">increase in extreme poverty of 150 percent</a>.)</div>
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It seems to me that if you really believed this culture argument, you'd start by putting an economic floor under everyone, without exception — health insurance for all, retirement for all, some level of income for all, and so on. (Universal programs would also remove much of the welfare stigma, which has its own <a href="https://www.ncoa.org/wp-content/uploads/An-End-to-Stigma-Issue-Brief-NCOA.pdf">horribly damaging psychological effects</a>.) An uninsured relative getting a very expensive illness can tear a family apart, easily. Conversely, knowing that no matter what happens, absolute destitution can be avoided is a great relief.</div>
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With some basic stability achieved, then social critics like Vance — together with social workers, job trainers, and other such people — would have a lot more purchase on the people he's ostensibly trying to help. It seems like the only people really paying attention to him right now are <a href="http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/07/30/whats-trumps-appeal-to-the-working-class.cnn">rich coastal elites looking for an Appalachia Translator</a>.</div>
Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-82160604314867450072016-12-06T11:00:00.000-05:002016-12-06T11:00:24.979-05:00Matt Christman on the Chaos of CapitalismOn the <a href="https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-63-successfail-the-mcmegan-story-feat-theshrillest-12416">latest Chapo Trap House</a> Matt Christman discusses (starting about 1:03:00) the job-seeking advice contained in Megan McArdle's 2014 book <i>The Up Side of Down</i>.<br />
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She makes "two incredibly banal points...Advice for job-seekers 1: keep applying! Don't give up, keep it up, keep applying, even though it's discouraging...The other one that is <i>duh</i> and also vile is: Oh, and have you considered moving? The <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump">Kevin Williamson shit</a>...<br />
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"Nothing highlights libertarianism's cold-blooded disconnection from any notion of human interaction or society better than their penchant for saying that people should just move around to the jobs and create these atomized pinball-humans moving from shantytown to shantytown looking for employment, and just sundering all communal bonds along the way. Nothing makes me more sympathetic to the trad caths than reading this fucking garbage..."<br />
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McArdle suggests that people could be helped to move to North Dakota where unemployment is low: "There are two hilarious things about that. One is now, in the last couple years, because of the falling oil prices, all those jobs in North Dakota <a href="http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-northdakota-bust/">have dried up pretty quickly</a>. So joke's on you if you fucking piled in the minivan and spent your last 50 bucks to get to North Dakota to show up and find out all those jobs are gone.<br />
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"And the other is that even when that boom was happening, those oil towns in North Dakota were basically <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/09/28/dark-side-of-the-boom/">dystopian nightmare hells</a>, like Philip K. Dick mining colonies. The kind of thing that no one on Earth would want to live in, the kind of place where community is basically impossible to form. So like Kevin Williamson, her recipe is basically 'have you considered turning the world into a sci-fi dystopia?'"<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/296167910&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-69198375539465757612016-11-15T22:07:00.000-05:002016-11-15T22:07:06.897-05:00The Economic Aspect of RedemptionA common take on the election of Donald Trump is by analogy to the Redemption of the South after the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when white supremacists took over the Republican governments of the southern states and stood up Jim Crow. Here's one from <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/welcome-to-the-second-redemption/507317/">Adam Serwer</a>, here's one <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/white_won.html">from Jamelle Bouie</a>, here's one from <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/137741/donald-trumps-campaign-echo-reconstruction-era-racism">Donald Neiman</a>.<br />
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I think this is a reasonable way to think about things, so long as we don't lose sight of the fact that nothing on the horizon is remotely as bad as the <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/8/29/1011562/-">terrorism-enforced caste system</a> of Jim Crow as yet. However, none of the above takes mention the Panic of 1873, something that was absolutely critical to the death of Reconstruction. This was the second-worst economic collapse in American history, and as tends to happen to the party in power, Republicans were utterly obliterated in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1874">1874 midterms</a>. They lost 93 seats in the House, and enough state legislatures that 7 Senate seats were lost as well. It was the single biggest wave election of the 19th century.<br />
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Elements within the Republican Party tried in 1874 to pass an inflation bill to increase the supply of currency and hopefully restore jobs and output. But they ran headlong into the ideology of the upper class. "To the metropolitan bourgeoisie, it epitomized all the heretical impulses and dangerous social tendencies unleashed by the depression," writes Eric Foner in <i>Reconstruction</i>. Under their pressure, President Grant vetoed the bill.<br />
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The Reconstruction-era Republican Party was a coalition between whites in the North, many of them well-to-do, and largely poor blacks in the South. When capitalism had one of its periodic meltdowns, and push came to shove, rich Northern whites decided they would rather have property than democracy. "The depression also pushed reformers' elitist hostility to political democracy and government activism (except in the defense of law and order) to almost hysterical heights," writes Foner. He quotes <i>The Nation</i> explicitly warning of poor southern blacks and poor northern whites forming a "proletariat" that would be "as if they belonged to a foreign nation."<br />
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The background to this, of course, is the ongoing debate over the role the unquestionable economic failures of the Obama administration played in Trump's rise. I think Sam Adler-Bell <a href="http://samadlerbell.com/trump-and-the-working-class/">strikes the right balance</a> — not only is this a false dichotomy, it is simply preposterous to think one can provide a full picture of racism without considering class, or vice versa. But when we're talking historical lessons, the one I see from Reconstruction is that any political formation dedicated to protecting broad civil rights must also avoid economic calamity, or fix it immediately if it does strike. Social justice politics cannot survive coupled to neoliberalism and austerity — and conversely, full employment and a strong welfare state are <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/655041/how-americas-threadbare-welfare-state-enables-sexual-predators">powerful weapons</a> <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/573307/end-police-violence-have-end-poverty">against bigotry</a>.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-72226656202806901592016-10-31T22:06:00.000-04:002016-10-31T22:06:40.405-04:00Socialism, Neoliberalism, and Competence<div class="tr_bq">
Alon Levy has an <a href="https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/sewer-socialism-or-sewer-neo-liberalism/">interesting post</a> about ideology, technocrats, and public works. He suggests that competent socialism is impossible, because any extensive program of public works will of necessity end up being more interested in competence than ideology, and therefore will invariable slide into neoliberal technocracy.</div>
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This is based partially on what he see as an actively anti-competence spirit in the American left. After giving a reasonably fair definition of neoliberalism, Levy concludes:</div>
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The populist left today defines itself in diametric opposition to some subset of the above points, and this requires defining itself against the notion that competence in governing is important. This is unmistakable in Jacobin, the most important magazine of the American far left today...see [Jacobin editor Bhaskar] Sunkara in <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/14419/programmed_for_primetime/">this extended rant</a>, calling Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias less than human. Klein is "a technocrat, obsessed with policy details, bereft of politics, earnestly searching for solutions to the world’s problems through the dialectic of an Excel spreadsheet." Per Sunkara, political success comes not from understanding policy but from emotional appeal, as in the Reagan Revolution, which, he concludes, "wasn’t a policy revolt; it was a revolution."</blockquote>
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I don't think this is a remotely accurate reading of what Sunkara is saying. Though he is having some fun at Klein and Yglesias's expense (calling them robots and such), in no way is he saying an understanding of technical details is <i>actually bad</i>; instead he is saying that an understanding of technical details <i>cannot substitute for politics</i>. The problem with liberal technocrats is that they tend to assume you can get past ideological differences with better data, which can lead to extraordinary errors of interpretation. That's how Klein got <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/rep_paul_ryans_daring_budget_p.html">snookered</a> <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/the_virtues_of_ryans_roadmap.html">by Paul Ryan</a>, a lying poor-starving snake who can do a passable impersonation of a Serious Policy Guy.</div>
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Indeed, one odd thing about the "wonk"-branded crowd, including Klein and Yglesias, is that virtually none of them have any really serious expertise in anything. There are not many such people who can actually decode the complicated math in cutting-edge economic models, or conduct custom analyses of government survey microdata, or understand the fine details of climate models, and so on. Instead what they do is half pay attention to the abstracts of published research, the policy books that come out (and get promoted properly), the opinions of actual experts, and provide an intelligent layman's translation.</div>
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Now, of course I am not a true expert in anything either. But Vox is not remotely what it would be if it were staffed by a bunch of practicing academics. For one, people actually read it, but for another, it is notorious for <a href="http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/46-times-vox-totally-fucked-up-a-story-1673835447">rather amateurish errors</a>.<br />
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This complicates Levy's assertion that the center-left is the place for detailed policy expertise these days. Rather what they have is a technocratic <i>ideology</i> — a belief that detailed policy expertise and lots of empirical study is the <i>best way to make decisions</i> rather than the actual expertise itself.<br />
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But as I said above this is impossible. Virtually every policy question is deeply entangled with unavoidable normative questions. Hence technocratic ideology, like any ideology, has a basic moral framework. Right now that framework is heavily neoliberal, as seen by the goofy-ass market mechanisms built into Obamacare (which incidentally <a href="https://medium.com/@jamesykwak/the-problem-with-obamacare-46cc74827131#.6035tk4kb">don't work that well</a>, but that's another post).<br />
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But my suspicion is that what technocratic ideology <i>really</i> is, deep down, is just a belief that whatever the hegemonic moral ideology happens to be is by definition correct. You take whatever the most powerful people think, and just build that into the background of every technical analysis.<br />
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Again, details definitely do matter, and Levy is right to say that the left doesn't have a really deep bench of credentialed experts. But that is a case of being out of power for a very long time. If, say, Bernie Sanders were headed to election as president, whatever left-wing experts there are out in the woodwork (and in a country this big, there are surely quite a few such people) would be getting ready to head to Washington. Other elite left-liberals who hadn't totally alienated themselves from the Sanders wing of the party would be patching things up and adjusting their politics to suit the new party reality.<br />
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After a presidency or two of that sort of government, the technocrats would be saying that universal social insurance is clearly the way to go when it comes to service provision. And I think they'd be <a href="http://www.demos.org/blog/12/23/13/heres-why-us-spends-more-social-needs-you-think">more right than they are today</a>.</div>
Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-58100248095502842752016-10-20T19:09:00.000-04:002016-10-20T19:09:34.696-04:00Racist Whites, Union Organizing, and Political CoalitionsSome aggro person on twitter reminded me to respond to this from Elias Isquith:<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper">@ryanlcooper</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/cd_hooks">@cd_hooks</a> <a href="https://t.co/3zItc9nFXy">pic.twitter.com/3zItc9nFXy</a></div>
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) <a href="https://twitter.com/eliasisquith/status/788885875342147585">October 19, 2016</a></blockquote>
I'll quote so everyone can read clearly:<br />
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If we agree that the Southern Strategy was premised on leveraging white racial resentment against economic liberalism — that working class whites were more willing to give up liberal economic policy than whiteness — then how do we imagine a coalition that is racially egalitarian and economically leftist will function <i>if allowing the white working class to go its own way is not an option</i>.</blockquote>
First, let me restate: my point about downscale whites and coalition building applies <i>specifically to union organizing</i>. If we view all Trump voters as irredeemable racists who must be shunned and cut out of any sort of leftist institution (as this person <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/789148791681212416">appears to be arguing here</a>), then that leaves a big chunk of the working class able to serve as scabs and a reserve labor supply to hold down wages. Trump is, at least as of a few months ago, winning white people without a college degree by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/upshot/the-one-demographic-that-is-hurting-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0">something like 30 points</a>. Such people are likely to be concentrated in certain places and in certain industries, making those workplaces nearly impossible to organize without at least some buy-in from Trump supporters.<br />
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The reverse situation — when minorities were left largely unorganized, partly due to racism within unions and partly due to fanatical resistance on the part of southern state governments — was a major factor in why postwar unions were able to be slowly crushed by business. This is a simple point and has been <a href="http://www.webdubois.org/dbSocialism&NProb.html">obvious for a century</a>.<br />
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Isquith's making a different point about electoral political coalitions. This is a much easier question. Racist whites are small enough in number that they aren't needed to assemble a winning national coalition anymore. You simply win power and steamroll them, as Hillary Clinton is close to doing right now.<br />
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Indeed, if the Democratic Party were actually committed to labor, then the immediate future would look pretty promising for unions and the country as a whole. If Clinton wins by a big enough landslide to take Congress, then Dems could put through card check, repeal Taft-Hartley, and dust off the rather outdated structures of the NLRB. That might enable a new wave of organizing, and with a bit of luck, perhaps even draw mass numbers of working class whites into unions with ironclad racial egalitarian protections, thus moderating their prejudice and driving home their common class interest with working class minorities, as <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/trump-voters-white-working-class-vox-racism/">Seth Ackerman argues</a>.<br />
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The problem, of course, is that the Democratic Party as currently constituted is tolerant at best of labor and not remotely interested in replaying John L. Lewis's mass organizing of the 1930s. Neither is it interested in balls-to-the-wall economic stimulus, nor in cutting the size of Wall Street back to its postwar share of GDP, nor in massive expansions in the welfare state to slash poverty. Instead it's the same old cosmopolitan finance capitalism with moderate restraints and piddling little new benefits here and there, often <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/654658/how-hillary-clinton-beef-child-poverty-plan">restricted to the working poor only</a>.<br />
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The great danger I see for the currently popular brand of milquetoast liberalism is that some post-Trump Republican will stumble onto the fascist formula of authoritarianism plus Keynesianism <a href="http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2016/10/the-political-economy-of-trumpism.html">I mentioned in my last post</a>, and Dems will be unable to meet the challenge due to excessive reliance on and deference to the ultra-wealthy donor class. If the Republican Party becomes the place for all-out stimulus plus aggressive attack on Wall Street parasitism and corporate monopolies (perhaps tailored for whites and Latinos against blacks, or for whites and blacks against Latinos); as against a Democratic Party of balanced budgets, somewhat more partially-refundable tax credits, and secret speeches to Goldman Sachs, I worry that furious attacks on Republican-sympathetic voters as despicable racists will simply lead people to <a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6632.html">embrace the label</a> and lead to electoral defeat.<br />
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-20933308403246241382016-10-19T14:12:00.001-04:002016-10-20T10:35:25.250-04:00The Political Economy of TrumpismMike Konczal has a <a href="https://medium.com/@rortybomb/would-progressive-economics-win-over-trumps-white-working-class-voters-43f78cc7f005#.78uvwzm7l">pretty good post</a> discussing whether or not left-wing economic policy might win over white working-class Trump voters in the future. He discusses four broad policy directions: "a more redistributive state, a more aggressive state intervention in the economy, a weakening of the centrality of waged labor, and a broadening, service-based form of worker activism," and argues that all of these will repulse white conservatives even more from the left.<br />
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Konzcal aptly notes that the major engines of conservative politics are highly moralized notions about desert (to wit: poor people, especially minority ones, deserve their fate) and a love of coercive hierarchy as such, the most important of which is the racial hierarchy with its roots in antebellum slavery. Therefore, those four policies, which involve new transfers and government action to benefit the disproportionately black and brown bottom of the income distribution, and union organizing among increasingly black, brown, and female service workers, will inspire snarling outrage among Trump-inclined white voters.<br />
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This is a good excuse to get down something I've wanted to outline for awhile: my napkin sketch theory of Trump. Let me start with that.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alf Landon</td></tr>
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In pre-Great Depression capitalist politics, the impulses Konczal mentions were translated into a basically libertarian economic ideology insisting that enforcing markets and (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York">ludicrously lopsided</a>) contracts was the only proper role of economic policy, and that business should rule the economy. As <a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html">Michal Kalecki wrote</a>, "The social function of the doctrine of 'sound finance' is to make the level of employment dependent on the state of confidence."<br />
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The Depression broke that ideology to smithereens. It turns out the bigger and more sophisticated a capitalist economy becomes, the more direct a role government <i>must</i> play in its management — otherwise disaster results. The New Deal and especially WWII cemented a new bedrock ideology that the state must use monetary and fiscal policy to prevent mass unemployment, regulate industry to some degree, and provide at least a meager welfare state. After losing every presidential election from 1932 through 1948 (and most of the midterms), <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/153796-should-any-political-party-attempt-to-abolish-social-security-unemployment">even Republicans accepted this as a fact of life</a>.<br />
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Conservative politics for the past 80 years has been dedicated to ripping up that bedrock ideology and replacing it, brick by brick, with the pre-Depression version. They want to <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/gop-debate-gold-standard/415386/">return to the gold standard</a>, (or failing that, to <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/forget-interest-rates-republicans-want-the-federal-reserve-to-destroy-the-economy-d7d463e42f57#.ov9tc5sre">disembowel the Fed's ability to fight unemployment</a>), deregulation, and <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article77921467.html">privatization or abolition of the welfare state</a>. That ideological project is largely complete, assisted greatly by the Democrats' turn towards neoliberalism starting with the election of Jimmy Carter. Any trace of Eisenhower Republicanism has been purged from the GOP, and the vast majority of conservative elites now reject the basic legitimacy of the postwar welfare and regulatory state.<br />
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Importantly, the raw political fuel of this movement is still the same largely sociocultural factors as before. But the striking thing about conservatives in the Obama era is how the expression of these has been turbocharged, culminating with the nomination of Trump. Republican voters are more comfortable now with open bigotry than at any time Wallace voters in 1968 — and not only that, they nominated a candidate who is also egregiously unqualified according to any respectable notion of what sort of person should be president.<br />
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Much of that is no doubt due to the browning of America, the first black president, and the absolutely debauched state of the conservative intellectual apparatus. But I think another factor <i>must </i>be increasing material desperation. Among the bottom half or so of the white population, <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/stagnant-wages-in-2014/">wages are flat or declining</a> and have been for decades, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/middle-aged-white-americans-left-behind-and-dying-early/433863/">mortality is up</a>, and opioid addiction is an <a href="http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20160227/MAGAZINE/302279871">ongoing catastrophe</a>.<br />
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Now, as <a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6632.html">Steve Randy Waldman notes</a>, desperation doesn't translate automatically to political change — among many other reasons, because the most desperate people generally don't vote at all. It's a chaotic and weird process. But the <a href="https://baselinescenario.com/2016/10/17/you-cant-get-there-from-here/">severely-underpowered</a> arguments that attempt to pin Trump's rise on <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/15/13286498/donald-trump-voters-race-economic-anxiety">100 percent <i>ex nihilo</i> racism</a> are unconvincing, not least because they <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/642979/why-poor-whites-flock-donald-trump">fail to explain the <i>character</i> of Trump's racism and overall candidacy</a> (and contain more than a whiff of apologia for cosmopolitan finance capitalism). Again, Trump is not just a racist, but the first presidential candidate in American history with precisely zero relevant experience.<br />
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Desperation fuels a search for scapegoats and thus a more and more open bigotry, in addition to furious contempt for elite political norms in general. Outside a US electoral context, this is a trivial observation about the rise of Nazi Germany — is it simply a coincidence that their best electoral result <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_July_1932">happened in 1932</a>, when unemployment was <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/lo/countries/de/de_economic.html">nearly 30 percent</a>?<br />
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So there is a feedback loop here. Conservative and neoliberal austerity fuels a harder-edged reactionary movement, which elects more and more reactionaries to political office, who then put through more austerity. But austere libertarian economics has not gotten any more workable since 1929 — on the contrary, active policy is more necessary now than ever. So this process continues until taxes and government services have been cut so far that the basic structure of the state starts to come unglued. This happened in the nation as a whole from 1929-32, it has happened in <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/sam-brownback-kansas-tax-cuts-trickle-down">Kansas</a> and <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/how-bobby-jindal-broke-louisiana-economy-337999">Louisiana</a> today, and to a lesser extent in most other conservative states, as <a href="https://medium.com/@cd_hooks/stakes-is-high-6b45374e0157#.nm5n7cxo0">Chris Hooks notes</a>.<br />
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There are two basic paths from there. One is for voters to turn out Republicans made hideously unpopular by their destructive policy and elect Democrats who can undo the damage (<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/08/08/louisiana-what-difference-democrat-makes/SsWMOft2LgMDOdpIMa8J3M/story.html">Louisiana</a>). The other is the <a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html">basic fascist formula</a>: a truly vicious conservatism translated into a Keynesian economic ideology — basically, full employment plus the secret police. Trump, with his demagogue's ear for what people want to hear, has stumbled close to this formula — but because he is a complete ignoramus about all policy and theory, he can't make the full leap to Keynesianism.<br />
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All this means is that to a very great extent I think it will be completely impossible to win over Trump supporters to actually vote for Democrats. However, more left-wing policy might go a considerable distance towards <i>defusing</i> Trumpism and nudging Republicans to vote for less deranged candidates. It's quite plausible to think that if in 2009 Democrats had put through a big enough stimulus to quickly restore full employment, Medicare for all, cut the size of the financial sector in half, and not <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure">enabled the foreclosure epidemic</a>, the 2010 and 2014 midterms would not have been lost, and Republicans would have nominated an ordinary politician in 2016. (Equally important, the Democrats might have made serious inroads into the huge population of nonvoters.)<br />
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I think the political stance of the broad left should ideally be something like this. We should confidently push forward on social democracy wherever possible, blithely ignoring the furious protests that are sure to result from white conservatives, and build on the hopefully resulting coalition to further entrench new benefits. After a few more shellackings at the ballot box, Republicans will hopefully calm the hell down and again accommodate themselves to the welfare state, and we can start the whole merry process over again.<br />
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One final note: three out of four of Konczal's policies are mostly about government policy. The final one, labor organizing, seems like a much more difficult nut to crack, at least in theory. As <a href="https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/788582363265654784">Jamelle Bouie notes</a>, any sort of revitalized service worker organizing must be cognizant of the fact that working class service jobs are disproportionately held by minorities and women. Therefore, he argues that racist whites must be kept out of the organizing effort, "lest you undermine the larger effort."<br />
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That's probably a good idea for any particular union looking to expand. But I suspect such a situation will be long-term poison for any labor movement, for the exact same reason that keeping minorities out of most of the postwar unions helped lead to their downfall. Keeping a large slice of the working class un-organized means a big population of reserve labor that can be exploited as competition and scabs by business. And while America is browning fast, service jobs are the jobs of the future, and white people will be by far the largest ethnic group for decades and decades at least.<br />
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I honestly don't have the slightest idea what to do about that (and it goes without saying I am piss-poor at organizing). But I do think organizers and thinkers should continue to hammer home the fact that the economic fortunes of working class whites are <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/587242/why-poor-white-americans-are-dying-despair">inextricably tied up</a> with those of minorities. The more people you can cover with union contracts, however grudgingly, the greater the potential staying power of the labor movement — and you might even help erode racist attitudes to boot.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-64831011023990133462016-10-18T23:14:00.000-04:002016-10-18T23:14:29.240-04:00Chase Madar on Samantha PowerA recent episode of Chapo Trap House featured Chase Madar, a civil rights attorney in New York. Here's an excerpt dealing with Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book <i>A Problem from Hell.</i> This starts at about 20 minutes in:<br />
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MADAR: It's a 600-page book subtitled "America and the Age of Genocide." And what's most striking about it is really what's not in this 600-page book — again, subtitled "America and the Age of Genocide." Those postwar genocides that the US had some kind of hand in — supplying intelligence, condoning, complicity — are airbrushed from this.<br />
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The <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jul/28/news/mn-27536">Indonesian massacre</a> of Communists and fellow travelers in the 1965-66, death toll in the hundreds of thousands, we don't know how many, is simply not mentioned even once in this book...the word "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War">Guatemala</a>" is not even in the index.<br />
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In fairness, East Timor — this was a genocide committed by Indonesia when they invaded in 1975 — that gets exactly one sentence. She even gets that sentence wrong, saying the US "looked the other way." In fact the US was looking right at it. President Ford and Henry Kissinger spent the night in Jakarta <a href="http://johnpilger.com/articles/blood-on-our-hands">meeting with the dictator of Indonesia</a>, Suharto, literally the night before. There was a kind of green light given, and they provided military training and weaponry...<br />
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What I found also kind of barf-worthy was some liberal handwringing after [the <a href="https://twitter.com/ambassadorpower/status/454467914419429377">infamous picture she tweeted with Henry Kissenger</a>] saying "oh, it's so sad how Samantha Power has really compromised her values, because that book she wrote about genocide was so good" ...<br />
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But I think Samantha Power's scholarly career shows an incredible lack of integrity. To leave out the genocides that her country and my country had a hand in borders on genocide denial. What would we think if a Polish intellectual wrote a 600-page book subtitled "Poland and the Age of Genocide" and then just somehow forgot to mention those death camps that were set up with some complicity of Polish people in Poland?Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-61936846357431745692016-09-13T23:36:00.000-04:002016-09-13T23:36:10.347-04:00Educational Trends Within 35-and-Up Wealth QuintilesPreviously <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/645683/landmark-prison-study-1-big-problem">I wrote</a> about educational composition within under-35 wealth quintiles as a way of testing the reliability of a prison study which used wealth at 20-28 as a marker for class. (Again, I must note that I had much help from Matt Bruenig, both for the idea and the execution.)<br />
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My main result was that the bottom wealth quintile for 1989 (near when their study was done) was unusually well-educated, thus demonstrating that wealth at a young age is not a reliable marker for class.<br />
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I thought I would confirm this result by looking at 35-and-up families in the Survey of Consumer Finances. It's the same calculations, just with different families. If the previous hypothesis is correct, in this group we should see a smooth increase in educational attainment with increasing wealth. Here's the chart:<br />
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As I suspected. Not quite perfect, but very close.</div>
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Now, just for fun, here are the same time series charts I did for each under-35 wealth quintile in my <a href="http://www.ryanlouiscooper.com/2016/09/educational-trends-within-under-35.html">previous post</a>, but for 35 and up.<br />
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No real big trends to notice here, except for a general increasing educational attainment as we go up the wealth quintiles — and an odd sustained increase in grad school in the third quintile. No idea what that's about, honestly.</div>
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Up next: determining the break points separating the wealth quintiles.</div>
Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-32370110100168850752016-09-06T23:44:00.000-04:002016-09-06T23:44:05.946-04:00Educational Trends Within Under-35 Wealth QuintilesLast week, with much help from Matt Bruenig, I wrote <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/645683/landmark-prison-study-1-big-problem">a post</a> using microdata analysis of the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances. Since I have the script, I figure I might as well make full use of it, both for practice and to see what I can find.<br />
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So for a start, here are some time series trends for educational attainment within income quintiles for under-35 families. Basically what we're doing here is breaking the under-35 population into fifths based on their wealth, determining the educational background of each fifth, and plotting the change over time using the SCF surveys, which are done every three years. (This starts at 1989 and runs through 2013, the most recent survey.)<br />
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I bet there is a way to cram all this into one graph, but for the time being here are some simple line charts for each income quintile.</div>
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A few things jump out here. The education level of the top wealth quintile is increasing over time, which makes intuitive sense. </div>
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But surely most striking is the high level of education in the bottom quintile. This group is <i>not</i> the least educated, and its education level has increased over time. The share of people with any grad school education and up has doubled for this group, and the share of college graduates has nearly tripled. Interestingly, in the 2013 survey the quintile with the absolute lowest share of less-than-high-school educated families (with 3.3 percent) is the bottom one. </div>
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As I argued in my <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/645683/landmark-prison-study-1-big-problem">previous post</a>, wealth at a young age is not a great proxy for overall economic class, because a substantial number of future rich people will appear wealth-poor due to taking out loans for education and not having inherited yet. The wealth brackets for the bottom quintile will probably be massively negative (more on this later), and most high school dropouts will not have the credit rating to take on that kind of debt.</div>
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Not much is going in with the middle charts, but it's still kind of interesting to see.</div>
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Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-7109483640713878782016-05-23T20:00:00.000-04:002016-05-23T21:29:31.132-04:00Matt Christman on Twitter PoliticsI've been meaning to write something about how politics is conducted online, but in the latest episode of <a href="https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house">Chapo Trap House</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/cushbomb">Matt Christman</a> hit most of what I was going to say, only better. He meditated on the fact of hundreds of people (both Clinton and Sanders partisans) taking this tweet seriously:<br />
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Vile Berniebros at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/nvdemconvention?src=hash">#nvdemconvention</a> fired an RPG covered in dildos at Barbara Boxer. This is unacceptable.</div>
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— white wonka class (@cushbomb) <a href="https://twitter.com/cushbomb/status/731639494617792512">May 15, 2016</a></blockquote>
Here's Matt:<br />
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"Politics in America is dead as a part of your life. We think of politics all the time but it's generally as this spectacle we absorb. We don't have a praxis, as they obnoxiously say in Marxist lingo. There's nothing we do on a day to day basis that constitutes making a political choice and asserting political ideology. We observe, and then we spout off online.<br />
<br />
"What happens is on the internet, specifically on Twitter, is millions of people — fans of every candidate — basically have volunteered themselves to be part of the rapid response crew of a given campaign. They're going to respond to everything thinking that they're helping — having the psychic satisfaction of thinking that they're helping the campaign.<br />
<br />
"And because Twitter is this fucking insane asylum of undifferentiated, context-free streams blasting into your face, it strips your ability to do any kind of rational, balanced analysis of things, any ability to challenge whether it's true.<br />
<br />
"So you just become this raw nerve of response. You just have to reflexively respond to any stimuli, in this way that's instantaneous. That, I think, is the generator of a lot of this shit. It's not coordinated — it doesn't need to be. It's basically the pent-up and unexpressed, frustrated political will of millions of people being jizzed out onto the internet at the same time."<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/265482968&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-30695624645755308432016-04-12T12:00:00.000-04:002016-04-12T19:06:18.192-04:00Social Insurance and Leveling Incomes Is Pretty EasyThere's a new study out about income and life expectancy, and unsurprisingly it finds that rich people live much longer than poor ones — 15 years for men, 10 years for women. There's a smooth relationship between more money and more life, particularly at the very bottom of the income ladder, where there's a collapse of several years:<br />
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However, there are also apparently some geographic wrinkles here. Poor people do very badly in Nevada, West Texas, and Indiana, but much better on the west coast and Glenwood Springs. At the <i>New York Times</i>, Neil Irwin and Quoctrung Bui <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/11/upshot/for-the-poor-geography-is-life-and-death.html">seize on locally-based policy</a> as an interim step that would be much easier than fixing income inequality:<br />
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But the fact that some places have increased the life span of their poorest residents suggests that improving public health doesn’t require first fixing the broader, multidecade problem of income inequality. Small-scale, local policies to help the poor adopt and maintain healthier habits may succeed in extending their lives, regardless of what happens with trends in income inequality.</blockquote>
The sense of relief here is palpable. Thank <i>Christ</i> we don't have to change the distribution of income, because that is nigh-impossible.<br />
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But at least when it comes to policy design and implementation, the reverse is very obviously true. National-level programs to hand out checks to the poor — and thus level the distribution of income — are about the easiest policy it is possible to imagine. There is already a <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/">big check-writing bureaucracy</a>, with detailed information about basically every person in the country. Adjust taxes a bit and send out more checks, the end.<br />
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Universal health insurance, or universal paid leave, or a child allowance would be somewhat more logistically challenging, but still easily within the remit of even the fairly incompetent American state.<br />
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By contrast, convincing thousands of local communities to drastically alter their local infrastructure and government programs would be a gargantuan political challenge. It means attention must be dispersed to thousands of simultaneous fights, tough in the best of circumstances — which this clearly is not, as most of the worst places are rural and conservative. Worst of all, local communities are generally far more resource-constrained than the national government. Poor people in Detroit do very poorly, for example. I'd say it's a safe bet this is because Detroit had most of its economic base torn out with a mellon baller a generation ago. Rest assured, Detroit knows all about this, and hasn't been able to do shit about it.<br />
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The only other obvious solution is that <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432796/working-class-whites-have-moral-responsibilities-defense-kevin-williamson">favored by conservatives</a>: post-WWII-style population transfers from struggling to thriving communities. That would be hellishly expensive, probably not very popular, and has every chance of just creating a new struggling underclass in the previously-thriving location. San Francisco could not simply absorb all of Appalachia.<br />
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Anyway, that is not to say that improving local communities shouldn't be a high priority. It is, and should be. It's just vastly more difficult than using the tax system to shift money around, or creating universal social insurance.<br />
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I suspect Irwin is actually referring to wages when he says "income inequality," in keeping with the casual neoliberalism that dominates economics coverage in this country. This school of thought implicitly believes that wage labor is the only legitimate way of obtaining income (aside from capital rents, of course). Therefore whenever it might come up, welfare is either actively shunned, or more commonly excluded from the policy menu.<br />
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But the product of crummy social insurance and huge inequality is the exactly poor health and despair that is under discussion. So the "wonks" root around for any sort of wrinkle in the data that might suggest a course of action other than taxing the hell out of the rich and kicking the money down the income ladder. I dunno, tax credits for local wellness programs??<br />
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Don't be fooled. Simple transfers and universal social insurance are by far the most promising avenue for improving the lot of the American poor.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501419294567207665.post-32795734219044632732016-03-14T21:59:00.002-04:002016-03-14T21:59:59.957-04:00When outsiders get a chance at governanceBernie's free college idea has convinced <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11194158/bernie-sanders-free-college">Matt Yglesias on the merits</a>, but as he <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/3/14/11222482/bernie-sanders-free-college">argues later</a>, it's not that practical. Universities are run by states, and so Bernie's plan relies on matching funds at a 2-1 level. Total tuition at all public colleges and universities is only $70 billion, so the feds would pick up 2/3rds if states would pick up the other third.<br />
<br />
Probably a lot of blue states would jump at this idea (the University of California alone contains <a href="http://universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-system">238,000 students</a>), but as Yglesias notes red states assuredly would not. There's only so much leverage the feds have over states, and it's pretty tough to convince states that are dead convinced on pummeling their own citizenry.<br />
<br />
And that's fair enough, policy design does matter. However, as with the single-payer scuffle and the ensuing <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/606698/why-are-bigshot-liberal-economists-hippiepunching-bernie-sanders">extremely irritating debate</a> about whether Bernie was being sufficiently deferential to the WONKS, I think much of unpolished policy can be chalked up to him being a political outsider for basically his entire national career before this year.<br />
<br />
When you're a left-wing critic railing against centrist compromises like Obamacare, it's really not necessary or practical to have completely worked-out policy proposals for every single idea. For single-payer, for example, you just look at places like Canada or Taiwan, conclude that the basic idea is workable, add the obvious fact that Obamacare isn't going to cover everyone, and then put forward rough outlines or utopian bills.<br />
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But now that Bernie is a national contender making Hillary Clinton fight hard for the nomination, suddenly he's got to have "serious" proposals to impress the high-status DC gatekeepers. Unsurprisingly, they're often bit rushed, and sometimes don't have all the t's crossed and i's dotted policy-wise.<br />
<br />
I see no reason to be unduly concerned about this. So long as his ideas are not completely impossible (and he has <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/605611/president-bernie-sanders-couldnt-stop-mass-incarceration-by-himself-but-reform-good-start">gone too far in some areas</a>, to be fair), then it's the basic workability that matters. If he were to win, the details can be filled in later, when he will have command of the Democratic Party intellectual apparatus. I think a lot of "wonk" criticism of Bernie is more about <a href="http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6429.html">affect and cultural deference</a> than it is about policy (recall how Ezra Klein, a prominent Bernie critic, was briefly <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/the_virtues_of_ryans_roadmap.html">snookered by Paul Ryan</a>).<br />
<br />
And speaking of free college, what about <a href="http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/05/01/one-year-of-emptiness-at-the-krach-leadership-center/">Freddie's idea</a> for five big new federal universities? Simple, utilitarian, cheap, administrator-lean, and free for any American citizen. Put the enrollment target at 100,000 per school and go from there.Ryan Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17164379024023137718noreply@blogger.com1