Monthly Archives: October 2012

Don’t Panic

October 29, 2012 – 3:12 pm

It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words “DON’T PANIC” in large, friendly letters on the cover.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This week everybody was talking about looming disaster

It’s been a tough week to sift, because I’m inclined to get frantic and obsess over exactly the same things everybody else is: the home stretch of the election and Hurricane Sandy.

By this point, the candidates’ messages are about as fleshed out as they’re going to get. There’s not really any new insight to gain about Romney’s math-challenged tax plan or whether the economy is really in recovery or not. You probably made up your mind long ago, and if your state allows it, you may even have voted already.

(I have. Funny story about that: New Hampshire doesn’t have early voting, but I was headed back out to Illinois to deal with the aftermath of my father’s death and didn’t know if I’d be back by election day, so I voted absentee. As I got my ballot, the clerk informed me that if anybody sees me in New Hampshire on election day, my absentee ballot could be challenged. So I’m essentially in exile until November 7.)

So I’m done voting, and I’ve got stuff to do in a non-swing state (plus, I’m introverted enough to hate face-to-face electioneering). So my useful role in this election is more-or-less over, leaving me with no way to work out my pre-election tension other than to obsess over polls.

This puts me in a position I don’t like to be in: preaching what I’m not practicing.

Here’s the text of my sermon: Don’t obsess pointlessly. Figure out how much effort you’re going to put into this election and do it. Volunteer. Or babysit for your friends so they can volunteer. Or make one last pitch to the persuadable people in your life. Or decide not to do any of that. Then forget about it until it’s time to vote and watch the returns. I guarantee that when you look back on your life from a ripe old age, the time you spent fretting over whether Gallup’s likely-voter model is skewed will not seem well-spent.

Isn’t that good advice? You’re not going to follow it either, are you?

BTW, if you do plan to make one last pitch to the persuadable people you know, I wrote this article to help:

Convincing friends to vote for Obama.

Here’s why the campaigns are making me crazy

The final messages of the two campaigns are oddly complimentary. As they come down the stretch, it looks like both campaigns (no matter what they’re saying) believe that President Obama has a slight advantage. (Nate Silver’s model bears this out. He’s giving Obama around a 3/4 chance of winning — an advantage, but hardly prohibitive.) Which means: Romney is still looking for undecided voters, while Obama is focused on turning out the voters he already has.

And that leads to this perverse result: Romney wants the undecided voters to see him as a winner, so his campaign is exaggerating his chances of victory. Meanwhile, Obama is motivating his supporters to get out the vote by exaggerating Romney’s chances of victory. So the message I’m hearing from both sides is: Romney can win this.

Meanwhile, doom approaches from the sea

Other than NASCAR crashes, there are few things that our news media covers worse than a hurricanes. Every few years a truly disastrous storm hits, and once in a great while something like Katrina comes along. But every year, sometimes more than once in a year, there’s a storm that could be historically bad. Factors are converging, and they could all come together into the Perfect Storm.

There’s something pornographic about the coverage. Of course no reporter can root for the Big Disaster. But if it comes, careers will be made, and if it doesn’t, then they’re all just standing on windy beaches getting wet.

As with the election, make your plan and carry it out. But don’t keep looking at weather-service maps saying “Where is it now? Where is it now?”

And once the clean-up is well in hand, isn’t it time to start talking seriously about whether climate change has something to do with all this extreme weather? The insurance industry already is.

… but I wrote about abortion

Richard Mourdock’s comment that rape pregnancies are “something God intended” seemed to call for a stronger reaction than just “I disagree”. What bugs me isn’t just that he’s wrong, but that America isn’t supposed to work this way: Congressmen aren’t supposed to be interpreting the will of God for the rest of us. So I wrote:

Government Theology is Un-American.

Even if you don’t follow the link to that article, you should see the Clay Bennett cartoon I used to illustrate.

… and you might also find this interesting

When I heard that Joss Whedon had endorsed Romney, I thought “That can’t be serious.” But oh, yes. It’s as serious as a Zombie Apocalypse.

While we’re talking about endorsements, here’s Lena Dunham’s endorsement of Obama.

I can’t fathom why anyone found this “controversial” or even “astoundingly tasteless“. It’s a time-honored trick in advertising to make people think you’re talking about sex and then reveal that you’re really talking about something else. I thought it was done very cleverly this time.

I wonder what Dunham’s humorless critics thought of this Andy Borowitz satire.

With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, there is a deep divide among Republican leaders over whether to emphasize misogyny or racism as the campaign’s closing theme.

In Florida, the Republicans’ transparent efforts to suppress minority voters may have backfired.

New evidence that Romney’s private-insurance-with-a-Medicare-option plan will ultimately kill Medicare completely.

The Medicare Advantage program sort of does that already. And the private companies do exactly what health-insurance companies always do: compete to attract the people they don’t expect to get sick.

The study’s conclusion: healthy seniors tend to gravitate to private plans and sicker seniors gravitate to traditional Medicare. That’s because private insurers craft their plans to attract lower-cost patients and leave sicker, more expensive ones for traditional Medicare — a process known as favorable selection.

If that happened on a larger scale, Medicare would go into a death spiral: It would have to keep raising its premiums to cover an ever-sicker client base. And the death spiral would have nothing to do with the efficiency of the health-care it delivered.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Government Theology is Un-American

October 29, 2012 – 2:12 pm

If Congressman Mourdock wants to interpret the will of God to the People, he should move to a country where government officials do that, and leave my country alone.

This week, Indiana’s Richard Mourdock became the latest Republican candidate to make the political mistake of spelling out the consequences of his ideology: Not only would he make abortion illegal in all ordinary circumstances, but he sees no reason for a rape exception. He wants the government to force women to bear their rapists’ children.

Politics being what it is, a Rapist Procreation Act could never make it through Congress, even as an amendment to a larger Forced Motherhood Act. So euphemisms and rationalizations have to be employed.

Senate candidate Akin. Two months previously, Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin had made headlines by abusing science to support rapist procreation: Rape exceptions are unnecessary, he claimed, because rape pregnancies don’t happen. At least they don’t happen in cases of “legitimate rape”, i.e., the kind where the woman is penetrated by violence. “The female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” he said.

Ignore the fact that no legitimate scientist believes this, so Akin had to search out a phony “expert” who is primarily another anti-abortion extremist. Even giving Akin’s words their most generous interpretation — that he meant to say “violent” rather than imply that the rape itself could be “legitimate” — they’re monstrous. In his view, for example, raped women who are drugged rather than beaten are not worth the law’s notice.

A friend of a friend once met a knife-wielding stranger on a stairwell. He said he wanted to kill her, but she negotiated him down to having sex instead. That also would not be a legitimate rape in Todd Akin’s view, so any possible pregnancy would be the woman’s responsibility, not the knifeman’s.

Or consider this account of an incest pregnancy. Sometimes her father raped her “legitimately” by violence. Sometimes threats were enough, and sometimes she submitted to save her younger sisters. What kind of rape got her pregnant? She doesn’t know.

Akin’s government would punish such men, presumably, but would also make sure that their reproductive strategy succeeds and their DNA is multiplied in the next generation.

Walsh. Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh went a step further than Akin. Not only is a rape exception unnecessary, but a life-of-the-mother exception is unnecessary too — and for the same reason: It never happens. “With modern technology and science,” he said, “you can’t find one instance” of a medically necessary abortion.

Non-ideologues quickly came up with the example of ectopic pregnancy, which killed 876 American women between 1980 and 2007.

Mourdock. Having seen how much heat Akin took for abusing science, Mourdock decided to abuse theology instead. For Mourdock, the magic pregnancy-prevention intervention doesn’t come from the mysteries of female biology, it comes from God. If a woman gets pregnant through rape, that must be “something that God intended to happen.”

Again, let’s give Mourdock’s words their most generous interpretation, the one he begged for the next morning. (Consider the irony: We’re granting Mourdock a morning-after pill, so that his statement doesn’t bear any unwanted fruit.) He didn’t mean to say that God sends rapists to impregnate women. (“I don’t think God wants rape,” he said, in one of the strangest denials ever.) But once the sperm sights the ovum, it is up to God whether or not conception occurs.

This is the traditional God-of-the-gaps theology: Well-understood processes follow scientific cause-and-effect, but anything that happens mysteriously is God’s will. (Lightning strikes, for example, were God’s will until Ben Franklin thwarted God by understanding electricity and inventing the lightning rod.)

Personal vs. public. I find this view of God absurd, but that’s just me. If you want to interpret every unpredictable event as a message from your Creator, don’t let me stop you. If Mourdock’s family were to suffer a rape pregnancy (not that I’m wishing it on them), maybe they really would welcome the rapist’s baby as a “gift from God”. If they went on to raise that boy up to be a far better man than his father, I might even admire them for it.

But here’s where I get off the train: Mourdock the individual and the Mourdock Family should be free to believe what makes sense to them, and to organize their lives accordingly. But Congressman Mourdock and wannabee Senator Mourdock have no business telling the American people what God wants.

That’s not how America works. That is, in fact, what the Founders revolted against.

Old Europe vs. New America. In the old system of European monarchy, the King had a special relationship to God, and so his government stood between God and the People. In the same way that the bishops channeled God’s religious will, the King channeled God’s political will. The People may or may not understand why God wants them to go to war with Spain or pay a higher toll at the bridge, but no matter: The King and God had it all worked out, and it was the People’s duty to obey.

The American system of democracy reversed all that. In America, the People stand between God and the government.

In America, we believe that God pays no attention to rank; God speaks to everyone, and not just to high government officials.

In America, Congress is supposed to interpret the will of the People, not the will of God.

In America, it is up to the People to interpret the will of God for the government. It is not up to the government to interpret the will of God for the People.

Biology vs. Theology. One reason this anti-American tendency on the Right gets so little attention is that they have carefully framed their theological reasoning in biological terms: They claim to be talking about “when human life begins”, which sounds biological.

If you buy into that false framing, their favored answer “human life begins at conception” seems obvious: The fertilized ovum may be a one-celled organism that looks more like an amoeba than a baby, but it is alive and has human DNA, so it’s clearly “human life”.

But this is a strangely materialistic piece of logic that the Religious Right would not accept in any other case. Something makes killing a human being murder, but killing a pig dinner. Is that difference in the DNA somewhere? Can we hope that science will someday identify the “worth gene” that gives humans their incommensurable value?

Of course not. Imagine the outcry if someone claimed to pinpoint such a gene and showed that it was absent in certain birth defects.

Worth is not about DNA, it’s about soul. (If you don’t ordinarily use the word soul, you can take that as a functional definition: Whatever makes a human’s life more valuable than a pig’s is soul. Whether you think of it as a mystical whatever or as a socio-legal convention is, in practice, irrelevant.)

So the question of abortion is not when “human life” begins, it’s when the soul enters the body. (Or, for secularists, it’s when the law decides to take fetuses under its protection.)

All the biological evidence that is usually offered on the abortion question — when a fetus has a heartbeat or brainwaves or reacts in ways that resemble pain — is beside the point. A pig fetus at a similar stage would also have a heartbeat, brainwaves, and a cringing reflex. Paul Ryan might describe the “bean” that he saw on the ultrasound as a “baby”, but if a prankster had rigged the ultrasound to show Ryan the fetus of a pig or chimp, I doubt he’d have known the difference.

The difference between murder and dinner is not physical, it’s metaphysical. It’s a question for theologians, not biologists.

Government humility. And that means the government should stay out of it unless some compelling public interest is involved, which it isn’t. (In a post-apocalyptic world in need of repopulation, for example, the government would have such an interest.)

The ensoulment question has been debated as long as the Judeo-Christian tradition has existed, and the experts have often disagreed. (One frequently taken view was that ensoulment happened around 90 days — coincidentally corresponding to the first trimester when Roe v. Wade allows the fewest restrictions on abortion.) Other religious traditions have their own opinions on the matter. (Many, for example, would find the pig to be of comparable value to the human, and have a different notion of soul entirely. If they can build a majority somewhere, should the law reflect their theology? Or should they simply practice their beliefs without forcing vegetarianism on non-believers?)

In the American system, government takes a humble position in matters of theology: It recognizes that it has no special expertise, so it leaves such questions to the individual.

That’s what should happen here: Each sect should be free to put forward its own view of when a fetus acquires the incommensurable value of a human soul, and its practitioners should be free to practice that view.

That’s the American way.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

Convincing Friends to Vote for Obama

October 29, 2012 – 11:55 am

I don’t think anybody knows precisely how many voters make up their minds in the last week of a campaign, or how influenced they are by friends or relatives who steer them right. My guess is that the number is considerable. You might only influence one or two of them, but if a million people like you each influence one or two, that turns a close election into a landslide.

It’s worth trying, in other words.

These persuadable voters might be co-workers or classmates who are bored by politics, but feel vaguely guilty about not participating in democracy. Maybe they’re grandparents who have mostly lost interest in the larger world, or who only know what Bill O’Reilly chooses to tell them. Or they’re your grown children, who haven’t yet caught on to the idea that voting is part of their duty as an adult. Maybe they are friends who generally share your ideals, but aren’t in the habit of voting.

My two most important pieces of advice are:

  • Don’t waste your time arguing with committed Romney voters unless you enjoy it or you’re really performing for silent onlookers. Life is too short. If they pick an argument, you can put them off with a flip remark like “I’m not rich enough to vote for Romney.”
  • Don’t be a jerk. People who admire jerks are already voting for Romney, because Rush Limbaugh told them to. Liberalism is attractive because it is both serious and compassionate. Try to embody that; Obama does.

Some people don’t vote for really simple reasons that are easily dealt with.

  • I don’t know where to vote. The League of Women Voters knows. Go to their Vote411 web site and enter your address. It will locate your polling place and also tell you whether it’s still possible to register to vote in time for the election. (That’s worth checking. Some states allow at-the-polling-place registration.) The Obama campaign site gottavote.com is a good resource for early-voting info and for listing what you need to bring with you.
  • I can’t get to the polls. The best answer is “I’ll take you”, but that may not be practical if you’re talking to someone who retired to Florida. One of the things people can do at barackobama.com is identify themselves as Obama voters. If you do that, I guarantee someone will call you on election day to see if you need help getting to the polls. (I’ve been hanging out at the house of my recently deceased father, who was a 90-year-old registered Democrat. I’ve already gotten a call from the Obama campaign asking if he needed a ride.)

Closing arguments against Romney. The thing that makes you more effective than a TV commercial is that you know who you’re talking to and they know you. So some people will want to see why Romney’s budget numbers don’t add up and others will frost over immediately if you start making them do math. Some will be impressed by the depth of Romney’s duplicity, and others will shrug and say that all politicians lie. Still, seeing is believing.

One of the problems the Obama campaign uncovered early in its focus groups was that moderate voters simply refused to believe that Romney had taken the radical positions he ran on in the primaries, or that he lied as boldly as he did. But it’s true: He said he would cut taxes on “the top 1%” and later denied it. He said he would ban all abortions, without exceptions for rape or incest, and later denied it, at one point championing an exception for the “health of the mother” before denying that too. He said his health plan would cover pre-existing conditions, and later denied it. He says he loves teachers, but also wants to muzzle their unions and slash their retirement programs, and he opposes Obama’s plan to hire more of them in math and science.

Other than simple lying, Romney has taken advantage of vagueness. So he promises to balance the budget, but the only plans he has specified cut taxes and raise spending. (In Virginia, his ads cast him as the candidate who will create jobs by increasing spending, precisely what he denounces everywhere else in the country.) He says he can balance that out (plus the deficit we have now) with by cutting other spending and closing tax loopholes, but since he won’t specify those parts of his program, he can deny anything specific. So, is he planning to slash spending on education? On roads and bridges? On healthcare for the poor or food stamps for the hungry? Is he going to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction or deductions for contributions to charity? He has no plan to do that, he says. But he has to cut or tax somewhere to make his numbers work, and he won’t tell us where.

If the people you’re trying to convince say they’re leaning towards Romney or think he looked good at the debate or find him attractive in some other way, the right question to ask is: “Which Romney do you like?” Romney has literally had every position on every issue. But if he’s elected, which Mitt do you expect to take office in January? In order to support Romney, you need to believe that he was honest in what he promised you, but lying to all those other people.

If someone likes the “severely conservative” Romney of the primaries, there’s not much you can say. Whatever he does is likely to be more conservative than what Obama would do. But if they liked the “moderate Mitt” of the debates, probably they should be voting for Obama, who is the real moderate in the race. Jonathan Alter says it best:

Romney as president would be a man with a strange crick in the neck, constantly looking over his right shoulder to see which pickup truck full of movement conservatives was about to run him over.

Beyond the policy issues, there are character issues. Young Mitt was a bully, and his sons’ attempts to tell heart-warming stories about him only emphasize that he is still a bully. Women who came to him in his role as a Mormon bishop telling horrifying stories of his insensitivity. And of course there’s always the dog-on-the-roof story.

If you read between the lines in the stories of Romney’s friends, you see the larger pattern: He’s a great guy as long as he’s in control and you’re doing what he wants. James Lipton has him nailed:

He is that boss who tells lame jokes and waits for everyone else to laugh (or else), and keeps us forever off balance, uncertain and anxious.

Closing arguments for Obama. Two false charge against Obama are that he isn’t running on his record (or can’t because his record is terrible) or that his campaign is entirely negative. I’ve already devoted an article to Obama’s positive case, but it’s time to boil that down to a few paragraphs.

Here’s the best way to frame Obama’s economic record: Thanks to Obama (and his unfairly maligned stimulus), the next president won’t have to deal with anything like the multiple crises that Obama faced on Inauguration Day. The month Obama took office, the economy lost more than 800,000 jobs. Now it’s gaining at least 100,000 jobs a month. That’s not robust growth, but we are muddling ever upward. Those bad jobs numbers the Romney people throw around always include the massive job losses in the first few months of 2009, before Obama’s policies had taken effect.

When Obama became president, our banks were insolvent and the auto industry was about to collapse. We were fighting two expensive wars. Serious people were speculating about a Second Great Depression. It’s easy to brush that off now, but the fact that it didn’t happen is a major accomplishment.

Crises that deep take time to overcome. (In the First Great Depression, unemployment was still over 10% at the end of FDR’s second term.) Romney likes to compare the current recovery to the Reagan recovery of the early 80s, but that followed an ordinary interest-rate recession, not the popping of a bubble. Bubble recoveries are slower, because the previous peak wasn’t real.

There are a number of reasons to believe that the economy is about to accelerate. Consumer confidence is up. The jobless rate is finally below 8%. And people are starting to build houses again.

On foreign policy, Obama has been the steady hand we needed. He ended the Iraq War, wound down the Afghan War, attacked the people who really attacked us on 9-11 (including Bin Laden), and — best of all — didn’t get our troops involved in any new wars, despite numerous opportunities.

Myths. Many people — especially low-information voters — think they are against Obama because they’ve bought some crazy story about him: He’s Muslim, he’s Kenyan, he quadrupled the deficit, whatever. It’s impossible to list them all, but snopes.com is your best place to start debunking.

Greens are a special case. Some of the undecided are actually very well-informed liberal voters, but they can’t decide whether to vote idealistically for Green candidate Jill Stein or pragmatically for President Obama. If they live in a foregone-conclusion state like Texas or Vermont their Green vote isn’t going to affect the outcome anyway, so don’t bother trying to convince them. But in swing states people need to remember Bush/Gore in 2000. If the Nader voters in Florida or New Hampshire had voted for Gore, we wouldn’t have had an Iraq War.

I’ve made a longer pitch to Greens here, and Leftcandid has done it here.

In short. Across the board, Obama has done a good job in a bad situation. And on issue after issue, Romney has either offered no alternative or has offered every alternative, (when he wasn’t agreeing with what Obama has done). No matter what you think the country’s most important problem is — the economy, the deficit, women’s rights, war, terrorism, inequality, the environment, whatever — Obama is the best bet for progress.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 29, 2012 – 8:00 am

The theme of this week’s Sift is “Don’t Panic”. Yes, I know that the outcome of the election is still uncertain and could herald The End of Democracy as We Know It. And the FrankenStorm is just off the coast, sweeping inexorably towards New York like the villain of a Marvel Comics crossover or Godzilla on his way to Tokyo. But things often don’t turn out quite as badly as we fear. Your odds of survival are excellent.

Anxiety is a symptom of pent-up energy, and the best use of that energy is to channel it towards averting the disaster that called it up. People who are doing something — donating to a blood bank, volunteering for the Red Cross, making phone calls or canvassing for their chosen candidates — tend to be less anxious than people who nervously watch minute-by-minute news coverage while doing nothing.

If you can’t come up with something constructive to do, at least don’t make things worse by whipping yourself into a frenzy. Don’t panic, and try to stay mostly harmless.

So this week I’m going to minimize the amount of who’s-going-to-win coverage in the Sift (that’s next week’s election-eve topic) and instead focus on two things: What closing arguments  you should know if you’re going to have any last-minute conversations with persuadable voters, (Parallel advice to “Don’t Panic” is “try to avoid conversations with unpersuadable voters”), and what’s really annoying about those Richard Mourdock comments on abortion.

Plus, you really have to see two endorsement videos: Lena Dunham for Obama and Joss Whedon for Romney.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

Women’s Issues

October 22, 2012 – 9:28 am

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

— Gloria Steinem

This week everybody was talking about binders full of women

This endless campaign needed a good laugh, so thank Mitt Romney for providing one in Tuesday’s debate. Asked what he would do about gender pay inequity (women making less than men) in the workplace, Romney instead talked about gender diversity (hiring women) in his administration in Massachusetts. He apparently didn’t meet any women at Bain Capital, so …

We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, can you help us find folks? And they brought us whole binders full of women.

It was a typical Romneyism: equating people with objects, like viewing companies as spreadsheets of assets to be captured and liquidated, rather than seeing American workers and the communities where they live. (Also typical: Mitt’s story is complete fiction.) The Internet lit up immediately with biting satire and more biting satire. But we shouldn’t let the unintentionally humorous form of Romney’s answer hide the fact that the content is truly hideous:

I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for — making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you. We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.

So if you’re going to have women in the workforce, you need to let them go home to cook dinner for their kids, because job flexibility is a women’s issue, not a family issue. (God forbid Dad should tell his boss he has to come home early and order pizza.) And (unless the Man in Charge is as magnanimous as Mitt Romney) employers will hire those less-flexible women only in boom times when they’re “anxious” about finding enough qualified men. That’s the Romney vision for working women and their families. President Obama struck back with his “Romnesia” speech, which I thought was hilarious.

… and why the polls don’t make sense

At the same time that Gallup’s tracking poll showed Romney opening up a huge lead nationally, state polls had Obama moderately ahead. Nate Silver grappled with the conundrum, while his model shows Obama with a 68% chance of victory — up from 63% last Monday. Two x-factors could lead to Obama doing better on election day than the polls (or Nate’s model) predict. (1) Likely-voter models don’t really know what to do with young voters, or anybody else who doesn’t have a voting history. And (2) most polls interview only in English, so they might miss the size of the Hispanic vote. Obama typically leads in polls of all registered voters, while Romney does better in polls that restrict themselves to likely voters. But if turnout is high — and early-voting numbers hint that it might be — then a lot of unlikelyvoters are going to cast ballots.

… but I wrote about liberals and capitalism

The debate question that struck me was:

What do you believe is the biggest misperception that the American people have about you as a man and a candidate?

President Obama addressed the misperception that he believes in a government-centered economy rather than free enterprise. That gave me a news-hook for an issue I’ve been wanting to discuss for a while: Why do liberals sound so inauthentic when we defend capitalism, and what can we do about it? Hence this week’s main article: Take a Left at the Market.

… and you might also find this interesting

Romney still hasn’t made his budget numbers add up.

Remember when a new version of Windows was a big deal? Windows 95 was like a million years ago. And while we’re talking about Bill Gates: It’s hard to keep a straight face while writing about his quest for the toilet of the future.

Rosie Perez answers Romney’s “joke” that he’d “have a better shot at winning” if he were Latino.

One inevitable consequence of manufacturing horror stories about your opponents: The people on your side start doing horrible things to “catch up”. I think that’s why we’re seeing such outrageous voter-registration fraud among Republicans. Up and down the line, Republicans have talked themselves into believing that Democrats are doing worse.

E. J. Dionne has put his finger on something important: Romney isn’t running as a candidate, he’s marketing himself as a product. What seems like flip-flopping in the political arena is just normal advertising for products like Coke or Tide. As Tom Waits puts it: “It’s new. It’s improved. It’s old-fashioned.” Why not?

If only there were such a network of celebrity super-heroes.

Lately I’ve seen a slew of articles from progressives that I characterize as: “I can’t condone what Obama’s done, but Jesus! The Republicans have gone out of their minds!” In the recent Harper’s article “Why Vote?” (which you can’t see unless you subscribe) Kevin Baker explains that “your vote counts for nothing”, and complains that “what we are witnessing right now in America and throughout the Western world, is not compromise with the opposition but something else entirely: the use of democratic institutions to disassemble democracy itself.” So he thinks you shouldn’t participate in this farce, right? Not exactly:

Go vote for Barack Obama, and whatever other Democrats or progressives are running for office where you live. To vote for a Mitt Romney — to vote for the modern right anywhere in the West today — is an act of national suicide.

Daniel Ellsbergsays: “I don’t support Obama, I oppose the current Republican Party.” He elaborates:

a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better — no different — on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.

Antiwar activist Tom Gallagher titles his column: “Vote for the War Criminal — It’s Important!” Noam Chomsky agrees. He believes that Obama’s targeted assassinations (i.e. drone strikes) are “war crimes“. But:

If I were a person in a swing state, I’d vote against Romney-Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 22, 2012 – 8:19 am

This week’s main article will be a little long, but I think it’s important. “Take a Left at the Market: Liberal praise of capitalism doesn’t have to ring hollow” says we don’t have to talk about capitalism in either Marxist terms (like exploitation) or Libertarian ones (like freedom).

A liberal view of capitalism should revolve around access: How can we create a market economy that everyone can get into? When access is your focus, liberal economic policies make sense, and aren’t just a hodge-podge of taxes and regulations.

In the weekly summary, everybody has been talking about binders full of women. (You knew that already, right?) But we shouldn’t let Romney’s unintentional humor distract us from just how awful his answer really was. Also: the polls are contradicting each other and may be overlooking two important factors.

And George McGovern died. He lost one of the most lopsided elections ever, but history has been kind to him.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Take a Left at the Market

October 22, 2012 – 8:16 am

Liberal praise of capitalism doesn’t have to ring hollow

The final question at Tuesday night’s debate asked each candidate to debunk what he considers “biggest misperception that the American people have about you”. Predictably, Governor Romney used the time to distance himself from his 47% quote, saying “I care about a hundred percent of the American people.”

I couldn’t guess which slander President Obama would try to refute. There have been so many, pushed with so much energy by the right-most fringe of the media: His birth certificate is a fake, so he isn’t really an American citizen or legally president at all. He’s secretly a Muslim. Taxes have gone up, and government is growing. His wedding ring bears an Islamic inscription. He began his term with an apology tour. He instituted death panels. He’s a Communist. He’s gay. He’s the Antichrist.

I’m sure I missed a few. Which would he pick out as the “biggest misperception”? This one:

I think a lot of this campaign, maybe over the last four years, has been devoted to this notion that I think government creates jobs, that that somehow is the answer. That’s not what I believe. I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded.

I have two reactions.

  • I totally empathize. I consider myself a liberal — left of Obama on most issues — but that doesn’t mean I consider the Soviet Union a model worth emulating. I think competitive markets usually allocate scarce resources much better than centralized bureaucracies. I think people should be free to take economic risks and profit when they win. Capitalism vs. Communism? I’m glad capitalism won.
  • I don’t think it will work. Like Romney’s compassion for the 100%, Obama’s love of capitalism (and mine) just sounds false. “Sure, you say the words,” I imagine viewers responding, “but you don’t really mean them.”

Yeah, I do mean them, and I think the President does too. (Romney and the 100% I’m not so sure about.) But I think Barack and I both need to take this question seriously: Why don’t we sound convincing? Why do conservatives — who I see as a bigger threat to capitalism than liberals — seem to own markets and free enterprise?

The answer, I believe, is that their pro-capitalism story hangs together better than ours. I don’t think it’s more true, but it is simpler and has more internal structure. Let’s look at it.

The conservative capitalism story. Conservatives can boil their story down to one word: freedom. Capitalism, Milton Friedman told us, was all about being “free to choose“. Consumers choose what to buy. Retailers choose what to sell. Manufacturers choose what to make and who to hire. Workers choose what jobs they’ll apply for. Borrowers choose to borrow, lenders choose to lend, and the magic of the marketplace makes it all work out.

You don’t have to understand some complicated economic theory to value such freedom. We all want to make our own choices.

It’s just as obvious that regulations and taxes restrict freedom. Regulations keep you from doing things you want to do. (There’d be no point in regulating against something nobody wants to do.) Government collects taxes so that it can buy things in your name that you wouldn’t buy on your own. (Again, there’s no point in taxing and spending if people would buy the same things on their own.) We can all see that in our own lives.

So the conservative capitalism story is: Get rid of regulations and taxes so that we can all be free together. You make your choices, I’ll make mine, and the market will sort it out in a way that makes us all prosper.

Before you start arguing with that vision — I’ll argue with it myself later on — take a moment to appreciate how well it works: It’s easy to hold in your head. It’s rooted in everyday experiences. And by now (thanks to billionaire-funded think tanks and news networks and political campaigns) we have heard it so many times that they don’t even have to spell it out any more. Just say “free market” or “free enterprise” and the rest comes to mind automatically.

The inauthentic liberal. So when a liberal or moderate like Obama says, “I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known” he’s walking into a conversation already in progress, and his words get forced into the frames that are active in that conversation.

“Oh? So you believe in freedom too?” the skeptics ask. And when the conversation gets down to details, the answer is “Not exactly. Or at least not in the same way.”

Liberals, for example, don’t think businesses should be free to hire only men, or sell their products only to whites. (Rand Paul disagrees.) Businesses also shouldn’t be free to merge into monopolies or create bottlenecks in the supply chain. (Ayn Rand disagrees.) Food packers shouldn’t be free to sell botulism or salmonella, or to lie about or not disclose what’s in their products. Coal companies shouldn’t be free to send workers into unsafe mines. Sweatshops shouldn’t be free to pay less than the minimum wage, even if workers are desperate enough to volunteer for those jobs. If you want to take a chance on a cheap ticket on an uninspected airplane, or go without health insurance and hope you don’t get sick — sorry, I don’t want to let you.

So no, I don’t believe in the same kind of freedom a conservative does. If capitalism means freedom, and freedom refers only a very special type of economic freedom, then my advocacy of capitalism rings hollow, because I do want government inspections and regulations.

Liberal freedom. What’s more, I want taxes, because I also want freedoms that the market doesn’t offer.

I want to be free to drive from coast to coast without hitting a red light, which I can do because the government built the interstate highway system. I want to be free to plan a picnic Saturday, because the government put up weather satellites and runs a National Weather Service that can assure me it won’t rain. I want my wife (or your daughter) to be free to tell her boss to go to hell if he wants sexual favors, because if he fires her the government will provide unemployment benefits and let her keep her health insurance.

I could go on, but you get the idea: Conservative freedom is not the only kind. Some other kinds of freedom demand government intervention, because often in our history the market has failed to provide them.

Access. But even that reframing misses the point: Freedom is not a one-word description of my highest economic value, and it’s not what I value about markets. So if the contest is just my favorite freedoms against theirs, I’m still eventually going to sound inauthentic and lose.

While I totally sympathize with the people who claim the boil-it-down-to-a-word requirement is bogus and unfair, I don’t want to abandon that battlefield to the conservatives. If a conservative says “freedom” and a liberal says “read my treatise on political economy,”the liberal loses, deservedly or not.

I don’t want to lose, so this is my one-word summary of my highest economic value: access.

A short history of access in America. Given that I don’t have my own cable news network or a multi-billion-dollar web of think tanks to prepare the way for my one-word answer, grant me a little space to unpack what access means.

When Thomas Paine looked at the Native Americans, he saw a society that lacked a lot of good things. Already in the 1700s, when the Industrial Revolution was just taking off, there was a profound technological gap between hunter-gatherer cultures and the emerging Western powers. But the Indians also lacked some things Paine wished the West didn’t have, like poverty and unemployment. Any able-bodied Indian who wanted to turn his effort into food or other desirable goods just had to apply himself: There’s the forest, the lake, the prairie. Go hunt, fish, or gather whatever the Earth has to offer. No owner can stop you or make you pay a fee.

Paine, who often had to scrounge for a job, envied that. That’s why (in Agrarian Justice) he called for some rudimentary social engineering “to preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced.” His solution was a one-time grant of capital to each new adult, which he or she could use to get training or buy tools or open a shop. (It was funded by a modest tax on inherited land, which he justified by arguing that ownership of land was artificial. After all, you didn’t build that.)

But Paine’s America would soon be the envy of Europe due to a different government program: Without directly addressing class issues at all, the Homestead Act effectively limited the extent to which the rich could push the poor around. A young family that felt too oppressed could head west and turn its sweat into tillable land. From there, land plus further sweat could produce an acceptable living.

Eventually Karl Marx gave us some terminology to express what the Native Americans, Paine’s vision, and the Homestead Act had in common: easy access to the means of production. If you wanted to consume and were willing to work, you had a way in to the economy. You didn’t need anyone’s permission or approval.

By Marx’s time, though, industrialization had severely restricted access to the means of production in America and Europe alike. If you lived in Factoryville, you couldn’t turn your effort into consumable goods unless the factory owner hired you. The owner was effectively a gatekeeper who controlled access to the means of production. (That’s one reason why he could get so rich: not just his entrepreneurial ability, but because he could effectively charge the workers for access by paying them less than their effort was worth.)

The Communist solution — getting the gatekeeper out of the way through public ownership of the means of production — didn’t work out so well in practice. The Soviet Union may not have been exactly what Marx had in mind, but even so, the Soviet experiment should discourage anyone who envisions a government-centered economy.

Again, you have to wait for a later era before the right explanatory terminology turns up: Running a modern economy requires processing a vast amount of information. Markets that link many privately owned enterprises are a distributed processing system that can bring much more brain-power to bear on the problem than any central bureau can.

But something gets lost in the simple Communism-failed argument: Public ownership was just a means. The end — public access to the means of production — is as valid a goal as ever. But what if capitalism could do a better job of providing access?

Happy Days. In the 1950s, the real “worker’s paradise” wasn’t the Soviet Union, it was the United States. Even if you didn’t own any part of the industrial system, it wasn’t hard to get access (at least if you were white and male). Unskilled men who entered the workforce in the 50s could get secure long-term jobs that paid enough to buy a house and raise a family. Men who aimed higher could fairly easily work their way through college and enter the professional or managerial ranks. It wasn’t even all that hard to accumulate enough capital to open a small business and become an owner yourself.

One source of this bounty was competition within the owning class. A 1950s worker still needed an owner’s permission to access the means of production — someone had to hire him, in other words — but there were lots of owners around and they needed workers. So workers, especially unionized workers, were in a position to get a good deal.

It’s easy to forget how much government intervention was necessary to maintain this high-access situation: High taxes (especially inheritance taxes) kept the rich from getting too entrenched. Anti-trust laws and other regulations preserved competition. Government defended the workers’ right to unionize. Government-funded research created whole new industries. And the government subsidized skill-acquisition: The free K-12 public education system was the best in the world, state universities were inexpensive, and the Cold War military would teach you any number of skills.

The problem with freedom. Since the Reagan Revolution, we’ve been systematically dismantling the programs that created the great American middle class of the 50s, 60s, and 70s — all in the name of freedom. As a result, we’re losing that middle class.

The main problem is that “freedom” has come to mean primarily freedom for owners. And owners left to their own devices will combine into cartels and monopolies that restrict access to the means of production. They’ll insist on low taxes that starve education and other government efforts to keep access open. What regulations they allow will favor big WalMart-style enterprises that leave little space for new shops or small manufacturers.

So today, if you’re a young person who doesn’t have a family fortune behind you or a family business to inherit, you have a lot to worry about. Conservatives will tell you to worry about your freedom: Obama and his minions will force you into a social contract that takes care of the sick and the old, and educates the children of the poor. Your drive to wealth will be slowed by the contributions to the general well-being that liberals will force out of you.

But I think you have a bigger, more immediate worry: How are you going to get access to the means of production? No matter how able or ambitious you may be, how can you be sure that you’ll be able to transform your effort into the goods and services you’ll need to thrive? The pre-Columbian Native American had access to the land. What do you have?

Conservatives like to pretend the access problem doesn’t exist. Competition happens by itself, without any government intervention. Unemployment occurs because people are too lazy to take available jobs, or too short-sighted to get the training they need. It’s government — not big business — that strangles small businesses. And big corporate bureaucracies are more efficient than the Soviet Politburo because … well, they just are, that’s why. All we have to do is cut even more regulations and more taxes, and Americans will have all the access we need.

Health-care and banking. Consider the conservative response to ObamaCare: Let health insurance plans compete across state lines — remove state regulations on insurance, in other words — and competition will produce better care at lower costs. Regulation (to force coverage of contraception, say, or to insure your 20-something children) will be unnecessary, because rival insurers will compete to offer every conceivable kind of policy.

Ignore for a minute the fact that competition between insurers has nothing to do with better care at lower costs. (Actually, they compete to insure healthy people and thrust sick people off on someone else. That’s how a real-world insurance company makes its money.) Can anyone doubt what will happen if the government doesn’t carefully guard that competition? The same thing that happened when government allowed interstate banking: Instead of two or three plans in each state, we’ll have a merger boom that results in two or three national plans — or even just one plan, if the government allows it.

Underneath all the many labels and wrappers, how many credit-card choices do you have now, really? Four: Capital One, Chase, Citi, and Bank of America control 2/3rds of the market. And do they really compete, or do they just jostle within a friendly cartel like Coke and Pepsi? That’s the kind of health-insurance competition you can expect if conservatives have their way.

Financial consolidation after interstate banking.

Liberal capitalism. The liberal vision of capitalism is public access to the means of production through genuine competition among many private enterprises in a transparent marketplace. The government is the ultimate guarantor of access, but not through public ownership or direct government employment.

Instead, government enforces antitrust laws and other regulations that maintain competition among private owners. It helps workers organize unions and consumers organize co-ops so that the owners’ power does not go unchallenged. It protects market transparency by inspecting production, and gathering and publicizing information about products, so that consumers’ decisions are not blind, but add their distributed brain-power to the management of the economy. It underwrites the infrastructure that is too big for a single company to build and too important to allow a single company to own. It sponsors the basic scientific research that, again, could not be sponsored and should not be owned by any private entity. It makes high-quality education available to everyone. It provides a safety net for those who lose access, so that their loss does not become permanent.

In these and many similar ways, government acts to fulfill the promise of the free enterprise system: a modern market-driven economy that nonetheless provides widespread access to the means of production. The goal is simple: With ability and effort, you should be able to produce what you need to thrive, no matter where you were born or who your parents are.

But you can’t achieve that goal without limiting the freedom and privileges of owners.  They remain on top — with more choices and luxuries than anyone else — but they don’t get to do whatever they want. It’s a small price to pay for a high-access society.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (8)

The Retro Campaign

October 15, 2012 – 12:18 pm

We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work and access to birth control in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago until the Republicans brought them back.

— Elizabeth Warren

This week everybody was talking about the VP debate

Initial reports were mixed: Biden dominated the conversation, but Ryan seemed to defend his position well enough, and maybe Biden’s aggressive style turned off some voters. Democrats were happy with their guy and Republicans were happy with theirs, so the pundits called the net result a draw.

But it soon became clear that the debate’s most memorable moment didn’t go well for Ryan, who was denouncing “pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups” in the stimulus when he ran into this buzzsaw:

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: He sent me two letters saying, by the way, can you send me some stimulus money for companies here in the state of Wisconsin? We sent millions of dollars. You know why he said he needed —

MS. RADDATZ: You did ask for stimulus money, correct?

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Sure he did. By the way — (inaudible) —

REP. RYAN: On two occasions, we — we — we advocated for constituents who were applying for grants.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)

REP. RYAN: That’s what we do. We do that for all constituents who are — (inaudible) — for grants.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I love that. I love that.

Then the fact-checkers weighed in. As in his convention speech, Ryan was making stuff up right and left: No, there wasn’t $90 billion of “green pork” in the stimulus. No, six studies didn’t prove Romney’s tax-plan arithmetic works.  (Even Fox News isn’t buying that one.) And how can Mr. Obstruction Himself criticize the Obama administration for its unwillingness to work with Republicans?

After a few days, Republicans were still claiming Ryan did well, but they were behaving as if he had lost: blaming the moderator and complaining about how “mean” Biden was to their boy wonder.

Ryan absorbed another barb when he defended Romney’s tax math:

REP. RYAN: You can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayers —

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Not mathematically possible.

REP. RYAN: It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.) It has never been done before.

REP. RYAN: It’s been done a couple of times, actually.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: It has never been done before.

REP. RYAN: Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth. Ronald Reagan —

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy.

REP. RYAN: Ronald Reagan — (laughter) — (chuckles) — Republicans and Democrats —

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: This is amazing.

And lest you think “now you’re Jack Kennedy” was a cheap shot, New Republic’s Timothy Noah takes the time Biden didn’t have to explain why Romney’s tax cut bears no resemblance to Kennedy’s.

In short, Biden made good on my prediction from August:

The Republican rank-and-file … believe Ryan is really, really smart and expect him to wipe the floor with that doofus Joe Biden.

I think they’ll be surprised.

BTW, from my point of view (and Grist’s David Roberts’), moderator Martha Raddatz’s questions favored conservative frames and talking points: Social Security is going bankrupt. The abortion issue is about religious values rather than individual rights.

And why were there no questions about climate change or increasing economic inequality?

Many people were moved by Ryan’s story about seeing “a little baby … in the shape of a bean” on his wife’s ultrasound. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik said what I was thinking:

Ryan’s moral intuition that something was indeed wonderful here was undercut, tellingly, by a failure to recognize accurately what that wonderful thing was, even as he named it: a bean is exactly what the photograph shows —- a seed, a potential, a thing that might yet grow into something greater, just as a seed has the potential to become a tree. A bean is not a baby.

… it isn’t life that’s sacred—the world is full of life, much of which Paul Ryan wants to cut down and exploit and eat done medium rare. It is conscious, thinking life that counts, and where and exactly how it begins (and ends) is so complex a judgment that wise men and women, including some on the Supreme Court, have decided that it is best left, at least at its moments of maximum ambiguity, to the individual conscience

… and the continuing tightening of the polls

Nate Silver’s model is designed not to over-react to the current headline, so the tightening has showed up gradually. Before the first debate, Nate was giving President Obama an 86% chance of victory, but now it’s down to 63%.

There’s always a lag between events and polls about the public’s reaction, partly because it takes time for people to figure out what they think, and partly because it takes time to assemble meaningful poll results. So we don’t really know yet whether Biden’s performance Wednesday stopped the slide. (This morning’s ABC/WaPo poll, where Obama has a 49%-46% lead, hints that it did.)

Kevin Drum adds an interesting bit of hindsight: If you look carefully at the polling, Romney’s comeback started before the debate. Possibly it began as a bounceback from the public’s pro-Obama reaction to the 47% controversy.

Here’s some wild speculation: I think maybe 2-3% of voters are deciding purely on optics; they don’t want to vote for a guy who looks like a loser. After Romney’s 47% video, they swung to Obama, but after the first debate they swung to Romney.

The fate of the country may hang on those fickle 2-3%.

Meanwhile, the Republican hope to take the Senate is quietly fading. But they’re on course to retain the House.

One reason Democrats might retain the Senate is this hard-hitting ad from Claire McCaskill.

… and the campaign in general

So, Romney voters, which of these two guys are you voting for?

Speaking to the Columbus Dispatch, Mitt Romney repeated one of the “five pretty lies” I identified in August. #2 on that list was “The uninsured can get the medical care they need in the ER.” Here’s Romney’s version:

We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, “Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.” No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.

By focusing on heart attacks, Romney avoided a direct lie and instead was just grossly misleading. A more illuminating example is high blood pressure: An ER may diagnose you with treatable hypertension and write you a prescription to control it. But if you can’t pay for those drugs, you won’t get them. If that non-treatment leads to a stroke, once again the ER can help you. But (assuming they save your life), if you need post-crisis rehabilitation to regain your ability to speak or walk or use your hands, you’re on your own again.

In short, if Romney convinced you that the uninsured are doing fine, you’ve been tricked. TPM linked to a variety of studies that estimate the number of Americans who die each year for lack of insurance. The estimates vary depending on the technique, but they are all five-digit numbers.

In other words, lack of insurance has a death rate comparable to a major war.

Paul Krugman combines this with Romney’s tax cuts and draws the obvious conclusion:

a literal description of their plan is that they want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income.

Some “job creators” have announced their plans to be job destroyers if Obama is re-elected. But if we do what they say, nobody gets hurt.

About those “six studies” that supposedly back up Mitt Romney’s claims about his tax plan … Bloomberg columnist Josh Barro got the Romney campaign to list them.

Guess what? They aren’t studies. (Some are newspaper op-eds or blog posts.) There aren’t six of them. (Marty Feldstein gets counted twice; once for an op-ed and then again for a follow-up blog post.) And none proves that Romney’s numbers add up. Barro comments:

Finally, I would note one item that the Romney campaign does not cite in support of its tax plan: Any analysis actually prepared for the campaign in preparation for announcing the plan in February. You would expect that, in advance of announcing a tax plan, the campaign would commission an analysis to make sure that all of its planks can coexist. Releasing that analysis now would be to the campaign’s advantage, helping them put down claims like mine that their math doesn’t add up.

Why don’t they release that analysis? My guess is because the analysis doesn’t exist, and the 20 percent rate cut figure was plucked out of thin air for political reasons without regard to whether it was feasible.

Bad talking point: Obama doubled the price of gas.

Average retail gasoline prices have more than doubled under President Obama, according to government statistics, rising from $1.84 per gallon to $3.85 per gallon.

True? As far as it goes, but look at the graph:

Gas prices are pretty much exactly where they were during the Bush administration’s final summer. They crashed with everything else in the fall of 2008, hitting their low in December. But as the economy recovered, people started driving again and gas prices went back up.

So gas prices are a perverse measure of the success of the Obama economic policy, not its failure. If we had gone into the Second Great Depression that seemed to be looming on Inauguration Day, I’m sure gas would be much cheaper now.

… but I wrote about food safety

Or, more accurately, Bloomberg News did. “When the Food Industry Inspects Itself” is a short note that overgrew its space. (It’s still a lot shorter than the original article.)

Free-market dogma says that the market provides all the motivation companies need to keep their products safe and high-quality: A company depends on its spotless reputation, it needs repeat customers, and so on. So government regulators, inspectors, and testers just get in the way.

You may not realize it, but the U.S. has been running a massive experiment to test that notion, and you’re the guinea pig. Over the last 30 years, the government has been withdrawing from its food-inspection role, leaving the job to contractors and to the food companies themselves.

How’s it working? Not so well, actually.

… and you also might find this interesting

I’m considering making “What did Chris Hayes talk about this weekend?” a regular part of the weekly summary. Sunday’s edition of “Up” had a great discussion of polling; not just “Who’s going to win the election?”, but “What is polling about and how does it enlighten or mislead us?”.

The biggest problem with polling is that it can make public opinion seem real when it really isn’t. On a complex issue like cap-and-trade as a way to mitigate global warming, the honest majority opinion might be “I don’t know what that is.” But that’s not what the headline is going to say when poll is published.

Another persistent issue is that questions tend to be abstract, when many people think in specifics. You’ll get one response if you ask “Do you support same-sex marriage?” But you might get a different one to “If two women or two men want to get married, should the government stop them?”, and a different one yet in real life, when the two guys have names and live next door.

SNL skewers geeky critics of the iPhone 5.

The WaPo reports on a follow-up to one of the classic psychology experiments, the Stanford marshmallow experiment. In the original, children got a choice between eating a marshmallow now, or sitting in the marshmallow’s presence for 15 minutes to earn two marshmallows. Years later, researchers determined that the kids who had successfully delayed their gratification were more competent young adults than the others.

The experiment is widely discussed among non-psychologists because it verifies a piece of folk wisdom: There is such a thing as self-control. Some people have it, others don’t, and it determines a lot about how successful you’ll be.

The follow-up undermines that explanation. In this case, the marshmallow offer is preceded by interactions with an adult. Some of the kids interact with a reliable adult, who keeps promises and is organized enough to make things happen on schedule. The others interact with an unreliable adult whose promises and predictions may not pan out.

Well, guess what? The first group of kids are much more likely to wait for the two-marshmallow payoff than the second group. And that suggests an alternate interpretation: Some kids grow up in reliable, predictable environments where the future is worth strategizing over, and some kids don’t. Maybe that reliable environment is what predicts success, rather than a some-got-it-some-don’t quality of a child’s character.

What’s America’s fastest-growing major religion? None of the above.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been studying religious trends for a long time. Recently the trend towards religious non-affiliation has accelerated:

“Nones” went from 15% of the population in 2007 to nearly 20% only five years later. They now outnumber white evangelicals and are gaining on Catholics. To a certain extent individuals are leaving their churches, but the bigger story is that increasing numbers of young people never develop a religious affiliation to begin with. As their church-going elders die off, young adults are not filling the ranks.

It’s striking how much more political deference white evangelicals get, even though there are fewer of them. Six Supreme Court justices are Catholic, but I can’t imagine a nominee sailing through Congress as a confessed None.

Maybe someday, Nones will develop a sense of identity and demand equality.

And finally, remember to protect your cats this Halloween. Jack-o-Lanterns love cats.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

When the Food Industry Inspects Itself

October 15, 2012 – 9:06 am

According to the government-is-unnecessary crowd, the market gives industry all the motivation it needs to police itself. Even without government inspectors, they claim, airlines wouldn’t cut corners on maintenance, because planes falling out of the sky would look really bad for them. In the long run it would hurt profits, so they just wouldn’t do it. Even if nobody was looking. Not even a little bit, in a pinch.

We could have endless what-if arguments about this theory, but we don’t have to, because (unknown to most of the public) we’ve been running an experiment on ourselves for many years now, as the government slowly retreats from food inspection.

This week, Bloomberg News took a look at how it’s going. Not so well, apparently.

Food-borne illness kills about 3,000 Americans a year, which you might think would be a big deal politically, given that most voters eat and don’t want to die. But as I’ve observed before, eaters don’t think of themselves as a special-interest group, so they don’t have a national organization that hires lobbyists and makes campaign contributions. Food companies, though, do all that stuff. So the system works better for them than for us.

One way it works for them is that food inspection is mostly privatized.

In 2011, the FDA inspected 6 percent of domestic food producers and just 0.4 percent of importers.

The rest? Well, they sort of inspect themselves.

The food industry hires for-profit inspection companies — known as third-party auditors — who aren’t required by law to meet any federal standards and have no government supervision. … The private inspectors that companies select often check only those areas their clients ask them to review.

In some cases, for-hire auditors have financial ties to executives at companies they’re reviewing. AIB International Inc., a Manhattan, Kansas, auditor that awarded top marks to producers that sold toxic food, has had board members who are top managers at companies that are clients.

… “There’s a fundamental conflict,” says David Kessler, a lawyer and physician who was FDA commissioner from 1990 to 1997. “We all know about third-party audit conflicts. We’ve seen it play out in the financial world. You can’t be tied to your auditors. There has to be independence.”

As with most privatization schemes, the problem is that even honest for-profit auditors do not have a broad protect-the-public sense of mission. At best, contractors fulfill their contracts. They don’t take a step back and say, “Wait a minute, people could die from this.”  (Another egregious example is privatized juvenile detention facilities. The mission “care for these kids so that they don’t become hardened criminals” is difficult to express in an enforceable contract.)

In the food industry, it works out like this:

Auditors evaluate their clients using standards selected by the companies that pay them, says Mansour Samadpour, owner of IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group in Lake Forest Park, Washington, which does testing for the FDA. The auditors sometimes follow a checklist that the company they’re inspecting has helped write.

“If you have a program for adding rat poison to a food, the auditor will ask, ‘Did you add as much as you intended?”’ Samadpour says. “Most won’t ask, ‘Why the hell are we adding poison?”’

This business-can-inspect-itself stuff sounds so Republican. Surely things changed when the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. Right? Well, this is one of those cases where industry owns the Republicans, but when that’s not enough they can rent some Democrats too.

The FDA is trying, so far without success, to wrest back control of food inspection from the industry. In 2008, the agency estimated that it would need another $3 billion — quadrupling its $1 billion annual budget for food safety — to conduct inspections on imported and domestic food, the FDA’s former food safety chief David Acheson says.

Instead, the food industry lobbied for, and won, enactment of a law in January 2011 that expanded the role of auditors — and foreign governments — in vetting producers and distributors of food bound for the U.S.

I’ve skimmed the ideas out of the Bloomberg article, but the human-interest stories — of people who died because they foolishly ate cantaloupes or something — are horrifying. Don’t put yourself through it (unless you’re one of those radical pro-eater activists).

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (9)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 15, 2012 – 8:49 am

This week I found so much interesting stuff written by other people that I put my own article off to next week. I am going to separate off a post on food safety, but even that is based on a much longer Bloomberg News article. It’s basically a short note that mushroomed.

As we move towards the election, that’s increasingly dominating the news. This week we had the VP debate, which pundits immediately declared a draw, but which in hindsight looks more and more like a Biden win. We also saw the polls tighten, producing some white knuckles among Obama supporters. Meanwhile, Democrats seem likely to hold the Senate and Republicans to retain the House.

But fortunately, there was some fascinating stuff that had nothing to do with the election. Let me tell you about the fastest-growing major religion in America, about the toilet of the future, and about marshmallows …

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)