Category Archives: Articles

Food-eaters are not a special interest group

May 28, 2012 – 1:13 pm

You probably don’t think much about government as you push your shopping cart down the aisle of your local supermarket. But nothing the government does affects your life more often and more directly than food policy. What food is available, what it costs, what’s in it, what you can find out about it, and whether it’s safe — the government has a hand in all of that.

Naively, you might expect a democratic government’s food policy to work out one of two ways: Either food would be hotly debated in every election, or our common interest as eaters would produce a completely non-partisan pro-consumer consensus.

Strangely, though, our government has a pro-food-industry policy which is often anti-consumer, and that policy is hardly ever a major issue. Candidates constantly try to make hay out of invisible threats like Iran’s nuclear weapons program or even completely imaginary ones like the death panels of Obamacare. But when was the last time you heard a politician pledge to do something about the growing rate of salmonella infections?

Obesity and policy. Everybody knows that America has a obesity problem. Because of it, we spend more on healthcare and die younger anyway. But to the extent this issue gets public attention at all, it is framed as an individual character problem — we don’t have the discipline to eat carrots instead of carrot cake — rather than as a problem with the way our food is produced and marketed.

But isn’t it strange how the American character degraded so suddenly since the mid-1970s (when the average American was 18 pounds lighter)? Shouldn’t a major cultural change take longer than that?

The media inundates us with stories about how to diet, but seldom touches the government’s role in subsidizing fats and sugars over healthier fruits and vegetables. Here’s the exception that proves the rule: Peter Jennings’ “How to Get Fat Without Really Trying” from 2003. (Here are the ad-free links for parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.) Would I have to go back to 2003 to find a major-network piece about dieting?

Free enterprise? Any threat to our current food system is quickly labeled as an attack on free enterprise: If industry produces something and people want to buy it, what’s the problem? If it’s bad for them, that’s their own fault. They should eat something else.

But the current food system has little to do with free enterprise. Michael Pollan explains:

So much of our food system is the result of policy choices made in Washington. The reason we’re eating from these huge monocultures of corn and soybeans is that that’s the kind of farming that the government has supported, in the form of subsidies, in the form of agricultural research. All the work is going to produce more of  those so-called commodity crops that are the building blocks of fast food.

GMOs. As an example, ask yourself: When did you decide to start eating genetically-modified organisms (GMOs)?  Probably you didn’t. Probably you ate products made from genetically modified corn and soybeans for a long time before you realized that you were eating them at all. Maybe you still don’t realize you eat GMOs; but unless you’re totally obsessive about where your food comes from, you do eat them.

That also is due to government policy: Kellogg’s doesn’t have to tell you whether their corn flakes have GMOs. They like it that way, whether you like it or not.

The basic research behind GMOs was funded by governments; the profit goes to corporations like Monsanto. The risks have been passed on to the consumer without anyone asking the consumer. That’s not how free enterprise is supposed to work.

And who knows? Maybe there are no risks. Maybe eating GMOs is as harmless as Monsanto claims. Maybe GMOs aren’t responsible for systemic effects like the collapse of bee colonies.

None of the claims against GMOs have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor will they be, most likely, because neither government nor industry has much interest in funding that research. (You can bet the research being done at Beeologics won’t implicate Monsanto, because Monsanto just bought them.)

The Farm Bill is a Food Bill. Your power as a consumer is not going to change the food system until your power as a voter makes it changeable. To change food policy, Pollan says, we need to change the Farm Bill that goes through Congress every five years.

But it isn’t really just a bill for farmers. It really should be called the Food Bill, because it is the rules for the system we all eat by. And those rules are really lousy right now, and they need to be changed.

That 5-year process is almost complete now, so the positive changes that are still possible are minimal. Absent a vocal popular movement, food is a perfect issue for lobbyists: The affected industries have a lot of money to spend, and the general public isn’t paying attention.

We’re not going to raise a vocal popular movement in the next few weeks. Most people don’t care and don’t know why anyone thinks they should care. And that’s what needs to change between now and 2017.

I’m still in the process of raising my own consciousness about this stuff, so I can just point in a general direction. (If you’ve got better advice, make a comment.) I’ve just added Food Politics to the list of blogs I cruise regularly. (Worthwhile recent posts pointed me to the report How Washington went soft on childhood obesity and explained where that supermarket sushi comes from.) Suggestions of other blogs/authors/websites are welcome.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (17)

Tagg, you’re it

May 28, 2012 – 12:32 pm

An April NYT story about Tagg Romney’s private equity firm illustrates two points:

  • How the 1% becomes an entrenched aristocracy.
  • How subtly political corruption works.

Tagg is Mitt’s oldest son. Right after Mitt’s 2008 presidential campaign folded its tent, Tagg, a lawyer, and Romney-for-President finance director Spencer Zwick used the campaign’s rolodex of big-money contributors to start Solamere Capital — which describes itself as

A small number of families with broad networks joined together to aggregate their access to top-tier private equity firms, proprietary deal flow, and unparalleled management resources and expertise.

The strategy page of Solamere’s web site has seven bullet points, six of which begin with the word access. The gist: We know the right people, so we get offered deals that ordinary Joes never hear about.

Only the lawyer had any previous experience in private equity, but between the Romney name, the campaign donor list, and an early $10 million investment from Mitt himself, they have raised $244 million from 64 investors and made $16.8 million in fees.

Zwick was simultaneously raising capital for Solamere and PAC money for Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America — often from the same people. All perfectly legal. Did any of those investors see the son’s company as a way to get in good with the father, a possible future president? Was anybody looking down the road far enough to anticipate Tagg continuing the Romney political dynasty? We’ll probably never know.

George W. Bush’s pre-politics career is a similar story: Contributors to his father’s campaigns repeatedly opened doors for him and invested in his businesses. Was that corruption? Or just helping out a nice young man from a good family?

It seems not to have been classic quid-pro-quo corruption. Nobody has identified any particular favor that the Bushes, senior or junior, did in exchange for junior’s opportunities. But this is one more example of the Washington gift economy. Lobbyist A doesn’t buy the vote of Congressman B; he just does nice things for B, thereby establishing a lasting relationship in which A and B will continue to be nice to each other without breaking any laws. Win/win.

So far, both Solamere and its investors seem to be winning. The firm has made 20% per year for the last two years. (Investments in general have also been up these last two years, though, so it’s hard to say how impressive that is without knowing more. Solamere might get those returns via a high risk/high reward strategy that will burn them in down years.)

But that raises another question: Did Solamere make money because they were cut in on lucrative deals, again, by people who wanted to get in good with a possible future president? Similar suspicions dogged George W. Bush. (The most controversial incident was when Bush Jr.’s company Harken Energy got a surprising contract from Bahrain while Bush Sr. was president, though a WaPo reporter called implications of influence-peddling  “baseless”.) Questions were also raised about the profit Hillary Clinton made in commodity-trading while her husband was governor. (Like everything else about the Clintons, this was investigated to the Nth degree and no charges were brought.)

But even if you assume that everything in Tagg Romney’s career is above board and 100% honest, this is still a story about how the aristocracy reproduces. Tagg hasn’t inherited any of his parents’ hundreds of millions yet. And maybe he never will. Mitt claims he gave away his inheritance from his millionaire/auto-executive/governor father because he and Ann already had “enough of our own”. (Though he did get through school by selling stock his father had given him.)

Tagg is getting rich “on his own” too. Someday he also may claim to be a self-made man, and dismiss his critics as just “envious” of his “success“.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

“If you can’t hear it from me …” — 3 voices that might get through to your conservative friends

May 21, 2012 – 1:23 pm

If you’re a liberal who has any conservative friends or relatives, you know how well defended they are against anything you might say. Any fact you know is wrong. Any source you might quote is biased: Academia is biased (except for institutes funded by the Koch Brothers). Major newspapers are biased (except for the Washington Times). TV news is biased (except for Fox). Government agencies are biased (unless a Republican president has had their reports vetted by a political appointee) … and so on.

Here are three points of view that might sneak under the conservative radar, because of where they come from and how they’re pitched.

Now let’s look at those one-by-one.

BYU’s Barry Bickmore on climate-change denial. Bickmore’s talk isn’t about climate change. It’s about “How to Avoid the Truth about Climate Change“. (If you don’t have time to watch, scroll down the comments to Anna Haynes’ notes on the talk.) In other words: What techniques make it possible for honest and intelligent people to deny something that virtually all the experts in the field believe?

Bickmore knows why people don’t believe in climate change, because he used to agree with them on two points: There’s lot’s of scientific controversy about global warming, and the is theory based solely on complex computer models which are easy to screw up.

When he looked into the issue more closely, though, Bickmore discovered that each of those points is wrong: Around 97% of actively publishing climate scientists believe that human activity is causing the planet to get hotter, and their opinion is verified by a variety of techniques that may not give exactly the same projections, but do agree within the bounds of the published error estimates.

He wondered: Why didn’t I already know that? What led to my confusion?

First, there were those “thousands of scientists doubt global warming” articles. Bickford explains the strategy that generates them: First, expand the field of “experts” to include a lot of people who aren’t really experts at all, and second, report a raw number that sounds big rather than doing a poll and getting a percentage.

So the Oregon Petition (claiming there is “no convincing scientific evidence” of human-caused global warming) claims 30,000 signers. But signers don’t have to be experts or even scientists. They need only have a bachelors degree, not necessarily in a relevant field.

So why is this impressive to people — 30,000 scientists? … People think about scientists as “Well, you know science, so why don’t you tell me?” Right? But in reality we’re much more specialized than that. If you have cancer, you don’t go to your podiatrist. You go to your oncologist.

Ditto for the 900 peer-reviewed journal articles skeptical of climate change. It sounds like a big number, but in what universe of journals? Apparently, a universe big enough to include journals that publish “research” articles on dog astrology and UFO abductions.

Bickford continues, similarly destroying the “What about Galileo?” and “We don’t need experts” objections, leading to this conclusion:

There’s always room for doubt. But there has to be a point — if we’re going to make any attempt at all at trying to be objective — that we have to admit that we’re trying too hard [to avoid the truth]. And I think that for people who are on the side I was a few years ago, I think we should admit that we’ve reached that point.

Rachel Held Evans on the damage Christianity is suffering from the culture wars. After reviewing some research showing how young adults (even those raised in Christian households and even young church-goers) view Christianity’s anti-gay image negatively and are shamed by what they see as un-Christ-like hostility towards their gay and lesbian friends, Evans gives her personal observations. When she speaks at Christian colleges, she finds that “every single student I have spoken with believes that the Church has mishandled its response to homosexuality.“

On the evening when North Carolina’s anti-gay Amendment One was passing by a wide margin, Evans saw a pattern in her Twitter feed:

Christians over 40 were celebrating. Christians under 40 were mourning. Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that [pro-amendment] Billy Graham ad:

You’re losing us.

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again…(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening):

My generation is tired of the culture wars.

Back when gays were in the closet, you could make them out to be any kind of hobgoblins you wanted. All the scary talk about a “gay agenda” depends on that image: sinister conspirators out to destroy everything good and decent in the world.

But to folks under 40, gays and lesbians are their friends from high school. They decorated homecoming floats together and washed cars side-by-side to raise money to send the French Club to Paris.

We know too many wonderful people from the LGBT community to consider homosexuality a mere “issue.” These are people, and they are our friends. When they tell us that something hurts them, we listen.

Evans says her generation wants to “stop waging war and start washing feet”. Translating for those who don’t speak Christian: They want to help people rather than beat them down, and practice their religion humbly rather than be authoritarian ideologues. If they can’t do that inside the church, she says, they’ll do it somewhere else.

Nick Hanauer. This guy was an early investor in Amazon, and then made several other piles of money by starting little-fish companies that he eventually sold to bigger fish like Microsoft. In other words: not a communist, not a fifth-generation Rockefeller who has forgotten where his trust fund came from, not an academic economist who has never made or sold anything.

Hanauer’s 6-minute TED talk addresses one question: Who are the job creators? You might expect him to answer, “People like me.” But he doesn’t.

If there was no one around who could afford to buy what we had to sell, all those companies [I helped start] and all those jobs would have evaporated. That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs. Nor do businesses, large or small.

Jobs are a consequence of a circle-of-life-like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary consumer is more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

… Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a course of last resort for capitalists. It’s what we do if and only if rising consumer demand requires it.

After displaying graphs of rising income and falling tax rates for the rich since 1980, he comments:

If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.

But when the middle class thrives, businesses grow and everyone does better. So he concludes:

In a capitalistic economy, the true job creators are middle-class consumers. And taxing the rich to make investments that make the middle class grow and thrive, is the single shrewdest thing we can do for the middle class, for the poor, and for the rich.

At first, Hanauer’s talk didn’t appear on the TED website — not all of them do — leading National Journal to bill the talk as “too hot for TED“. This prompted a TED official to post “the real story“, claiming that the audience gave the talk mediocre ratings:

a non-story about a talk not being chosen, because we believed we had better ones, somehow got turned into a scandal about censorship.

Even that spin, though, implies that TED and its audience are not very representative. Once the YouTube got out, it quickly went viral and has been seen (so far) by over 400,000 people.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (11)

Citizen of the highest bidder

May 21, 2012 – 12:49 pm

When a story is being spun wildly in more than one direction, it’s important to start with facts: One of Facebook’s initial investors, Eduardo Saverin, has renounced his American citizenship in favor of Singapore, where he had already been living as an American ex-patriate. Because Singapore has no capital gains tax, making the switch before Friday’s Facebook IPO may have saved Saverin many millions of dollars.

Apparently he made the switch in September, but it wasn’t widely known until his name appeared on a government ex-citizens list on April 30. That made Saverin the central figure in stories that Right and Left had been writing before they knew he was involved.

The Right’s story. The growing numbers of citizenship renunciations (up about fourfold from the Bush administration average, but still just 1800 in 2011) was already being trumpeted as cause for alarm on April 23 by the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. As far as I know, no one has checked who all these 1800 are or asked them why they don’t want to be Americans any more, but McGurn is sure they are rich people fleeing oppressive American taxes.

when it comes to the global inefficiencies of our tax code, these 1,800 ex-Americans are canaries in the coal mine. Our tax code—and especially the onerous reporting requirements that come with it—is turning U.S. citizens into economic lepers.

His conclusion is that the U.S. needs to become “more competitive” by not taxing money that American citizens make overseas. This is related to another popular conservative talking point, but the U.S. should declare a tax holiday to allow American corporations to repatriate profits made overseas either tax-free or at a reduced rate.

On May 8, Bruce Bartlett addressed the ex-citizen issue in the NYT, doubting that any large number of the renunciations were due to taxes, but agreeing that there is a problem. Again, Saverin did not come up.

Saverin got attached to the story sometime in the next few days. Bloomberg was on it by May 11. And then things started to get crazy: Forbes’ John Tamny declared Saverin “an American hero“.

If you’re having trouble follow that logic — how exactly does declaring that you’re not an American any more make you an American hero? —  Tamny explains:

Saverin’s decision will starve the feds of revenue they would almost certainly waste, it will force a rethink of a tax code that penalizes income and investment success, and the unconsumed dollars kept from the hands of government will reach today’s and tomorrow’s businesses. Let’s raise a glass to Eduardo Saverin. He’s a true American hero.

Tamny hopes this will lead us to see the folly of the income tax, abolish the IRS, and institute a consumption tax instead (because apparently you get out of a recession by spending less and saving more, contrary to anything those stupid economists might tell you).

And if the tax is regressive or hits low incomes at the same percentage as high ones, all the better.

And if the world loses faith in the U.S. government’s ability to meet its obligations, that’s good too.

That Saverin has chosen to avoid supporting the Leviathan is a heroic act that will hopefully make investors a little bit more gun-shy about investing in U.S. debt.

Because every patriot wants to see his government default, I guess.

The Left’s story. For the Left, Saverin put a face on the Unpatriotic Rich, who (if they are loyal to anything beyond themselves) identify with their class rather than their country. The Nation’s Ilse Hogue:

[Saverin] has made himself the poster child for the callous class of 1 percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share.

Saverin’s wealthy Brazilian family moved to Miami when 13-year-old Eduardo’s name turned up on a list of kidnap-for-ransom targets. America kept him safe, and then let him into Harvard, which was generous enough to assign him a roommate with a $100-billion idea. (I wonder who he’d have roomed with at University of Singapore.)

I’m sure Saverin will be eternally grateful for those and many other favors America did him. But gratitude is a mere sentiment, and who thinks sentiment is worth tens of millions? (Did I mention that Singapore has no capital gains tax?)

A quick segue will take you to bankers who spout libertarian rhetoric about food stamps but demand that there be no strings attached to their bailout, or industrialists who want government subsidies to help them move American jobs to China. The rich only care about America if they can make money off of it. If not, bye-bye.

Of course, switching your loyalty for money is not new — it’s what Benedict Arnold did. We used to have a name for such people: traitors.

That’s the sentiment behind Senator Schumer’s proposal to levy a punitive capital gains tax on citizenship-renouncing Americans.

To sum up the liberal point: If we’re going to continue being the kind of country where people can get rich — a country with roads and schools and courts and police and a viable currency and salmonella-free food and a communications system and medical care and sidewalks clear of emaciated corpses — rich people are going to have to pay taxes. If they regard that as an imposition rather than a duty, they’re just proving how unpatriotic they are.

Saverin may illustrate that story, but we were telling it already.

Market society. I think a more interesting conversation comes from another pre-Saverin story: Michael J. Sandel’s “What Isn’t for Sale?” from the April Atlantic.

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.

There’s a pretty broad consensus that America should have a market economy. In other words: The price of potatoes and beachfront property and replacement car batteries should be determined by supply and demand rather than set by a bureaucrat. A century ago, intelligent people could disagree about whether a centrally planned economy might work better. But after the bad example of the Soviet Union, we’ll stick with markets.

The problem, Sandel says, is that more and more we have not just a market economy, but a market society, a place where everything is for sale and everything is judged by market values. The problem with selling, say, transplantable kidneys, isn’t whether the price will be determined by markets or regulated by the government; the problem is selling them at all.

Some things just shouldn’t be part of the market economy. But what things?

Let’s suppose that Saverin didn’t just fall in love with Singapore one day, but that his accountant calculated that Singapore offered him a better deal than America. Is it wrong for him to take that deal? Why, exactly? What is the proper boundary between things that ought to be for sale and things that ought not?

Sandel sees that boundary sliding and thinks we need to have a serious conversation about how far it will go. Should first class passengers have a faster TSA line or not? Should rich prisoners be able to buy a cell upgrade or not? Should you be able to hire a surrogate womb to carry your fetus or not? Should parentless babies be auctioned off or not?

Consider privatized juvenile prisons. A decade or two ago, no one would even have suggested such a thing. A decade or two before that, no one would have suggested pushing sugary drinks or fatty sandwichs in public high schools in exchange for funding from Coke or Burger King. Of course you’ve always needed money to run a school or a prison, but schools and prisons weren’t about money. Today, some of them are.

Moving from a drafted citizen army to a professional army was a step towards market society. Moving from a professional public army to a contracted private army would be another. How far should we go?

Once we named parks and arenas for heroes. Now we auction naming rights off to the highest bidder. What values get reinforced every time we go to AT&T Park or Sports Authority Field (both of which I had to correct after remembering their “old” names of Pac Bell and Invesco)?

Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.

When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way.

Is citizenship one of those goods? Why or why not?

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030

May 14, 2012 – 12:36 pm

OK, everybody may be an exaggeration. Let’s just say every politician of any significance: every presidential candidate, every governor, every member of congress, and the leadership of every party in every house of every state legislature.

Two charts tell you all you need to know about the politics of same-sex marriage. First, it has long-term momentum:

Second, it has the most inexorable kind of momentum there is: generational. Each day a few more supporters turn 18 and a few more opponents die. That’s how it’s going to be for a long, long time.

Explain it to the kids. That’s why President Obama explained his own change of heart this way:

Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents. And Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

This is how taboos fall. One generation genuinely believes in the taboo. The next follows it out of habit, but can’t defend it. And finally there’s a generation that challenges: The kids ask “Why?” and their parents have no answer.

Many of those parents will stay stuck in their ways, but politicians can’t afford to. They have to follow the majority, even if it goes against what they’ve stood for in the past.

We’ve seen this happen before.

Race and the Owens-Louis kids. When Jesse Owens won Olympic gold in Munich in 1936, and then Joe Louis defended his boxing title against Max Schmeling in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in 1938, the rooting wasn’t black vs. white. It was America vs. Nazi Germany.

To many of the white American kids who listened to those two events on the radio, it only made sense to let Jackie Robinson play major league baseball in 1947, and later, to start breaking down color barriers all across society.

When Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? raised the interracial marriage taboo in 1967, the Owens-Louis kids were the generation in between the Tracy-Hepburn parents and their Sidney-Poitier-dating daughter. They knew interracial marriage was still beyond the pale. Most of them would never consider it themselves. But they couldn’t explain why.

When the Owens-Louis generation reached middle age in the 1970s, segregationist politicians had to capitulate. In 1963 George Wallace could pledge “segregation forever”. In 1970 he successfully ran a race-baiting campaign for governor. But by 1979 he was saying, “I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.”

The 1970s didn’t end racism — racists can still dog-whistle and use code words — but they ended the days when a politician could stake out an openly racist position and hope to win on it, even in Alabama.

Today, the Owens-Louis kids are the old folks, and returning to Jim Crow is as unthinkable as returning to slavery. Whenever same-sex marriage proponents are allowed to make the link to interracial marriage, the argument is over. No public figure will defend banning interracial marriage — a practice that was controversial even to talk about in 1967.

The Willow-Tara generation. In its acceptance of gays and lesbians, sports has trailed the culture rather than leading it. The characters who changed our thinking about homosexuality are more likely to be fictional ones we met through TV and movies.

In the late 1970s, it was edgy for Jack even to pretend to be gay on Three’s Company. Gay and lesbian minor characters started appearing on dramas like Hill Street Blues in the 1980s. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his starring role as a sympathetic gay character in Philadelphia in 1993. From 1998-2006 Will and Grace (cited by Vice President Biden) centered on a gay man’s friendship with a straight woman.

I decided to symbolize this generation with a fictional same-sex couple almost exactly the age of the oldest Millennials: Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose relationship began right around the turn of the millennium.

Earlier pop-culture characters got viewers sympathizing with the problems of gay and lesbian individuals and their same-sex relationships. But for most of two seasons Willow and Tara raised a different question: What if there is no problem? What if two people of the same gender meet and fall in love and are happy together?

Like Willow and Tara, the oldest Millennials are about 50 years younger than the Owens-Louis kids. So as a guess, let’s set the 2020s as the decade of capitulation on gay rights: Every major politician will either leave the business or have a change-of-heart by 2030. Even conservatives, even in the Bible Belt.

Remember the Dixiecrats. Does that seem unthinkable? What about Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and younger politicians who seem eager to follow their lead? But what about Strom Thurmond, who during his Dixiecrat presidential campaign of 1948 said:

that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

In 1971 Senator Thurmond integrated his staff, and in 1983 he voted to honor Martin Luther King with a federal holiday. The sincerity of his transformation may be dubious, but he had to make it.

Biden first. The leading edge of gay-rights capitulation is in the Northeast and among Democrats. So it’s no coincidence that President Obama was put on the spot by Vice President Biden. Whatever happens in 2012, Biden is looking down the road to the Democratic primaries of 2016. No way a Democrat with an ambivalent gay-rights position wins in New Hampshire (where same-sex marriage is already legal) in 2016.

Politicians can read trend lines. If you hope to win statewide office in the Northeast or in California in 2020 — or anywhere in 2030 — you can’t be against same-sex marriage. The question isn’t whether you’ll change, it’s when.

The ancient ship Homophobia has had a long run, but it is going down. While it may take years to sink completely, no politician wants to go down with it. Those with any sense are already checking the exits and plotting their departure.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (12)

77 cents, part II: What if secretaries became programmers?

May 14, 2012 – 12:05 pm

When I was a kid in the 1960s, wage discrimination against women wasn’t something you had to ferret out with statistics.

My grade school was owned by the Lutheran church my family belonged to, and the congregation had to approve  the teachers’ salaries each year. So everyone knew that Male Teacher and Female Teacher were two different professions with different pay scales. If we hired a man and a woman straight out of the same Lutheran teachers’ college, we’d pay the man significantly more.

Everyone knew why: Male teachers (even if currently single) would need to support a family, while women (even if currently childless) taught either before or after their real profession, which was raising children.

That kind of thinking hung on longer in religious workplaces than elsewhere, but it wasn’t uncommon. Men made more than women, even if they were doing the same job. It was out in the open because nobody was ashamed of it.

Today, such overt separate-pay-scale discrimination is both illegal and socially unacceptable, so remaining wage discrimination (if any) must be hidden. That’s why we do statistics.

Last week I verified that at the grossest level, women still make less. In 2011, women working full time made 82 cents for every dollar made by men working full time. (The often-quoted 77 cents figure is a year older and figured slightly differently, which tells you something about the sensitivity of the calculations. In what follows I’ve been careful not to mix data from different sources. Everything comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics table that leads to the 82-cent estimate.)

But why do women make less? Is it for reasons we can all live with, or is the pay gap an injustice that needs fixing? Several reasons are frequently offered, together with explanations why we can live with those reasons. (Never forget that those are two separate conversations. Even if the whole pay gap could be boiled down to something as simple as “Girls don’t like math”, we’d still need to discuss whether that’s a problem we can or should fix.)

For each proposed reason, there’s a study proving that it’s not the whole story. Today I want to look at one of the most popular explanations of the pay gap: Women choose lower-paying professions. In other words, the overall averages compare female special education teachers to male aerospace engineers. No surprise who makes more.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has a study “The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation” proving that occupational segregation (as they call it) is not the whole story. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from 2011 (the same ones in that 82-cent calculation), they list the 20 most popular occupations (out of around 400 listed by the BLS) for men and for women. Four occupations are on both lists, and six more are too segregated (i.e., construction worker, teacher assistant) to provide a reliable estimate of the minority gender’s earnings.

In the 30 remaining occupations, men make more in 28, and the other two are low-pay occupations where the female advantage is small: Female “stock clerks and order fillers” make $1.03 for every male dollar, and female “bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks” make $1.003. On the other pan of the scale, men have huge margins in high-pay occupations like “financial manager” (where women make 66 cents on the male dollar) and “chief executive” (69 cents).

So clearly, occupational segregation isn’t the whole story of the wage gap. But here’s the more interesting question: Granted that it isn’t the whole story, how big a part is it?

Maybe there’s a study that answers that question, but I didn’t find it. So I crunched some numbers myself. I started with the numbers in Table 1 and Table 2 of the IWPR report, restricting my attention to the 30 comparable occupations.

Eliminating the duplicate occupations and totaling up, we’ve got 18.4 million men making a total of $16.4 billion per week ($892 each) and 20.9 million women making $15.0 billion per week ($715 each), or about 80 cents on the dollar. So these 30 occupations are slightly better than average for both men ($832 overall) and women ($684), with women making almost the same relative wage (80 cents on the dollar) as in the total survey (82 cents).

To understand what I did next, imagine that there are only two occupations: male-dominated “software developers” and female-dominated “secretaries and administrative assistants”. (These are two of the 30 from the IWPR study.)

 occupation  # men  men $  # women  women $
 software  812  $1606  179  $1388
 office  84  $757  2059  $651
 Total/average  896  $1526  2238  $710

(The number of workers is in thousands.) So our miniature, two-occupation economy (call it “2-Job World”) employs 3,134,000 people (896,000 men and 2,238,000 women) and has a total weekly payroll of  $2.96 billion ($1.37 billion to men, $1.59 billion to women). Overall, its men average $1526 per week and its women $710. So the unfortunate women of 2-Job World make only 46 cents for every dollar a man makes, even though they make 86 cents on the dollar in each occupation. (That’s why I picked those two for my example.)

Amateur economists in 2-Job World — there are no professional economists, that would be a third job — could analyze their pay gap by constructing two counter-factual models. In each model, each occupation maintains the same the total number of jobs and the same total payroll, but women move towards equality in two different ways.

In 2-Job World Fantasy #1, the ratio of men and women in each profession equalizes. Overall, 29% of the workers are men. So in Fantasy #1, 29% of workers in each occupation are men. But the wage gap within each occupation stays the same: 86 cents on the dollar. That changes the table to look like this:

 occupation  # men  men $  # women  women $
 software  283  $1735  708  $1499
 office  613  $728  1530  $626
 Total/average  896  $1046  2238  $902

Basically, bringing lower-paid women into software allowed us to raise salaries in general, while bringing higher-paid men into the secretarial pool forced us to cut salaries there. But now we have an economy where there is no occupational segregation, and women make (surprise) 86 cents on the dollar.

In 2-Job World Fantasy #2, we leave everybody in their current job, but equalize pay within the occupations, so everybody makes the average salary for their occupation. That gives a table like this:

 occupation  # men  men $  # women  women $
 software  812  $1567  179  $1567
 office  84  $655  2059  $655
 Total/average  896  $1481  2238  $728

And here you wind up with women making 50 cents on the male dollar. You’ve only nudged the pay gap by 4 cents.

(I know what some of you are thinking: Where’s the extra 10 cents? Shouldn’t the 4 cents from equalizing pay and the 40 cents from equalizing occupational segregation add up to 2-Job World’s whole 54 cent pay gap? Congratulations, you have just discovered non-linearity. Equalizing pay in the already-desegregated world of Fantasy #1 would have a 14-cent effect, while it only has a 4-cent effect in the original 2-Job World.)

So 2-Job World looks like some people’s intuition about our whole economy: The big money is in getting women to become programmers instead of secretaries.

But when I applied the same two fantasies to the more representative 30-Job World, it came out exactly the other way. In 30-Job World (where women make 80 cents on the dollar), Fantasy #1 (desegregating the occupations) only gets us a 3-cent gain to 83 cents.

But Fantasy #2 (where both men and women make the average salary for their occupations) raises women’s relative pay to 92 cents. It gains women 12 cents rather than 3 cents.

So at least in 30-Job World, getting equal pay within each occupation turns out to be about four times more important than getting equal representation within the occupations.

Why? While programmers and secretaries are part of 30-Job World, the bigger effect comes from occupations that are already fairly well integrated, but men just make more, like retail sales supervisors: about 1.3 million men and 1.0 million women, but the women make 79 cents on the dollar.

Is that how things work in the overall economy (400+ Job World, if you use the BLS categories)? I’m not ready to say that yet. But until I see a better analysis, I’m going to be very skeptical of anybody who claims the wage gap is even largely due to women’s choice of professions. I’d be surprised if it ultimately explained more than a nickel of the gap.

Technical notes:

If you need to see for yourself, I’ve posted the larger tables: 30-Job World Actual, 30-Job World Fantasy #1, 30-Job World Fantasy #2.

I anticipate this objection: When I eliminated the 6 occupations where there wasn’t a large enough sample to get a good estimate of one gender’s wages, I disposed of exactly the occupations where desegregation would make a difference.

Strange things happen when you put those occupations back in, and they work backwards from what the objector might expect. Five of the six are male-dominated working-class jobs. When you lump them together, they pay less than even the female average in 30-Job World.

So the main effect is to pull the male average down, which gets the wage ratio in 36-Job World up to 83 cents. From there, Fantasy #2 gets you to 94 cents. Fantasy #1 is hard to apply (because you don’t know what to pay the minority gender). But if you equalize even further (just for those 6 occupations) by paying the minority gender the overall occupational average , you only get up to 84 cents — higher than in 30-Job World Fantasy #1, but showing a smaller improvement over 36-Job World Actual.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (3)

77 Cents

May 7, 2012 – 1:27 pm

Last week I linked to a sexist exchange on Meet the Press where Alex Castellanos all but pinched Rachel Maddow’s cheek and told her she’s cute when she’s angry. (He didn’t quite go that far, but it would have been a logical next step.)

Lots of people (including Rachel herself Monday evening) came back to that argument (probably making it one of the most widely viewed MTP segments in some while), asking the proper now-that-the-dust-has-settled question: Forget how outrageous Castellanos’ manner was or how well Maddow responded – who was right?

Context. The subject was the political gender gap, and Rachel was arguing that it is based on policy rather than image. Romney can’t win over women voters just by giving his wife a more prominent role in the campaign or sending other female surrogates out to campaign for him, because his policies give women good reasons not to like him.

To support that point, she brought up gender inequality in the workplace: Women make less than men. President Obama pushed and signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for women to sue for workplace discrimination. Romney won’t say whether he would have signed that bill or not. (But he has promised not to try to repeal it.) So in terms of substantive policy, what is Romney’s plan for ending gender discrimination in the workplace?

She didn’t get that far. As soon as she said “Women in this economy still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make” Castellanos interrupted, saying “there are reasons” why women make less than men. When asked specifically, “Do women make less than men for the same work?” he answered “No.”

So who’s right? I find this kind of discussion hard to follow on TV, where it’s so easy for each side to talk past the other, shifting the argument to a slightly different issue rather than directly refuting or admitting the point just made by the other side. But now that I’m sitting at my computer, with time on my side and Google and Wikipedia strapped onto my utility belt, who’s right?

First observation: Who’s right about what?

The argument has one major issue in the background: Do women face workplace discrimination? Several similar-but-not-identical factual questions relate to that issue:

  • On average, do working women make less money that working men? This one is easy, and the answer is yes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that men working fulltime in 2011 averaged $832 a week, while women working fulltime made $684 – 82 cents on the dollar. (The 77 cents number came from 2010 and was based on annual earnings rather than weekly. I’m not completely sure why that makes a difference.) In general, things have been slowly equalizing; the weekly-earnings number was 62 cents in 1979.
  • Do women make less money than men for the same quantity and quality of the same work? This is a tougher question, because how do you define “same quantity and quality”? For any two workers, you can almost always find some difference in their qualifications or duties or output. The question is whether we’re talking about legitimate distinctions or ones dreamed up after-the-fact to justify discrimination. It seems undeniable that some women make less for the same quantity and quality of the same work – Lilly Ledbetter, for example. If this never happened, Romney could cheerfully support the Fair Pay Act knowing that it makes no actual difference.
  • How much of the pay gap between men and women is due to discrimination? This has come to be the center of the debate, and it’s what I wanted to focus on, but I can’t because the research either wasn’t as clear or as easy to find as I wanted. So I offer an IOU: I’ll get back to it next week after I’ve had more time to sift through the numbers.

Here’s what I’m looking for: The insidious thing about this argument is that pay-gap-due-to-discrimination is not something you can measure directly. All you can do is start with the 82 cents on the dollar and see how much of that deficit you can attribute to some legitimate cause. After you allow for everything reasonable you can think of, you can say with some confidence that the rest of the pay gap is unreasonable.

So what I’d like to find is a study that chips away: X cents is due to men and women being in different professions. Y cents is due to women entering high-paying professions recently and so still being relatively younger than their male colleagues. Z cents comes from having less seniority because they interrupted their careers to have children. And so on, leading to D cents that is inexplicable unless employers discriminate.

I can find pieces of that, but I’ll hold them for next week in hopes of painting a clearer picture.

In the remainder of this post, I’d like to knock off some side-issues.

The just-so story. On Meet the Press, Castellanos made this argument: If the 77 cents thing were true, then

every greedy businessman in America would hire only women, save 25% and be hugely profitable.

Let me turn that logic back on itself: If Castellanos’ argument were true, then there would never have been any wage discrimination in America against any group ever.

All through the 1930s, any greedy owner of a major league baseball team could have hired can’t-miss stars like Satchell Paige or Josh Gibson for peanuts. (Gibson, the “black Babe Ruth” died at 35, three months before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Paige arrived in the majors in 1948, well past his prime. At age 47, he was still good enough to pitch in the 1953 All-Star game.)

No owners did. Why? You’d have to ask them. But discrimination does happen. It can’t be dismissed with a just-so story about capitalism.

Are statistics the whole story? If gender discrimination happens at all, it’s wrong and should be illegal, independent of whether it happens often enough to affect the averages. Since when do we decide moral issues by statistics? (Compare: Pro-life activists are not mollified by the fact that partial-birth abortions are an insignificant percentage of all abortions.)

What’s reasonable? Kevin Drum was all over this point: A lot of what is considered a “reasonable” explanation of the pay gap is just discrimination by a different name.

When all’s said and done, women are punished financially in three different ways: because “women’s jobs” have historically paid less than jobs dominated by men; because women are expected to take time off when they have children, which reduces their seniority; and because even when they’re in the same job with the same amount of experience, they get paid less than men. All of these things are part of the pay gap. Whether you call all three of them “discrimination” is more a matter of taste than anything else.

What’s a problem? As Kevin pointed out, many women interrupt their careers for children. For the moment, leave aside the question of whether men’s careers should be equally disrupted. I just want to point out that there was a time in American history when large numbers of men had their careers disrupted: World War II.

When they came back from the war, our country decided that those interrupted careers were a problem, and something should be done about it. Hence, the G.I. Bill of Rights, which paid for millions of returning servicemen to go to college or get some other kind of training.

When women come back to the workforce after raising children, though, they’re on their own. That’s a kind of discrimination right there.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Gays Need Not Apply

May 7, 2012 – 11:41 am

Richard Grenell is gay. Here’s the signal his appointment as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman was supposed to send:

When Grenell’s appointment was announced last month, most observers took it as a sign that Romney was starting to move to the center to win moderate and independent voters in November, a welcome change after a Republican primary process often dominated by religious-right candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

Foreign-policy-wise, Grenell is a Bush-administration guy with impeccable neo-conservative credentials. So if anything, his appointment made the substance of the Romney campaign even more conservative.

But Grenell is gay. (Did I mention that already?) So he symbolized that Romney isn’t totally under the thumb of the Religious Right.

But then the Religious Right looked under its thumb and said, “Where’s Mitt?”

The reaction of the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is worth watching, because if I just describe it you’ll think I’m exaggerating.

Fischer says this very slowly, so his radio listeners can appreciate just how beyond the pale the situation is:

Richard Grenell is an out, loud, and proud homosexual. And he is now the face of the Romney campaign on national security and foreign policy.

Horrors! Fischer begins by discussing Grenell’s advocacy of same-sex marriage in New York state (which I suppose could become a foreign policy issue if New York secedes from the Union) and then goes off on how homosexuals want to change the marriage laws, but

they don’t actually care about getting married … because they are not about commitment. Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters. … Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.

Ignorance is never a reason to stay silent, though, so Fischer launches into a minute-long rant about gay promiscuity in general. You know: up to 1000 sexual partners, men having sex in public parks and restrooms, and so on. And then suddenly we’re talking about Grenell again. The segue goes like this:

This is endemic in the homosexual community: these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters. And that becomes a serious issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.

Finely honed logic like that may be why Fischer’s lead was followed by other theocrats like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer. And then not-specifically-religious voices like National Review and Daily Caller weighed in against Grenell.

For two weeks — even when the issue-of-the-day was a national security thing like the killing of Osama bin Laden —  Romney kept Grenell in the closet (which kind of nullifies the whole “spokesman” thing) and waited for the storm to blow over. The campaign claims they wanted him to stay, but when Grenell was instructed not to speak during a national-security conference call he had organized, it was too much. He resigned.

Fischer was triumphant:

This is a huge win…. I will flat-out guarantee you [Romney] is not going to make this mistake again. There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.

He’s probably right. Mitt learned his lesson — and so should moderate swing voters.

The key to the art of flip-flopping is convincing people that you were lying to the other guy; your true heart is in what you’re saying now. As he heads towards the general election, Romney needs to be retiring severely conservative Mitt and taking Massachusetts moderate Mitt out of mothballs. Because … you know (shrug, wink), you have to say a bunch of crazy shit to get nominated. That was then; this is now.

The theocrats aren’t going to go along with that. And it doesn’t matter which version of Romney holds his true heart, as long as he wears a dog collar and the likes of Bryan Fischer hold a very short leash.

If that’s the case in a general election campaign, when swing voters have the most leverage, won’t it be even more true after Inauguration Day?

And finally, Romney’s willingness to be dominated raises an authentic foreign policy question that even the theocrats should be asking. Bring it home, Bryan Fischer:

if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.

At last, Bryan, you and I can agree on something.

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Jesus Shrugged — why Christianity and Ayn Rand don’t mix

April 30, 2012 – 12:19 pm

To a sizable number of conservatives, Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged is practically scripture. To another sizable number, Christian scripture is a law higher than the Constitution.

If you want to appreciate just how strange that is, consider the passage that gives Atlas Shrugged its title:

“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?”

“I … don’t know. What … could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

Both Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden are heroes of the novel. Ultimately, Francisco convinces Hank and many other right-thinking capitalists to vanish and let the success-punishing world economy fend for itself without their genius and productivity. Francisco’s exit is particularly dramatic: He destroys all the assets that he can’t take with him into hiding.

The capitalists are Atlas. They shrug and let the world economy collapse. (Well, Francisco does a bit more than shrug. He didn’t just let those copper mines collapse. But never mind.)

Now imagine entering the novel to ask this question: “Mr. d’Anconia, if you saw Jesus, whipped and with a crown of thorns on his head, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to drag his cross down the streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha – what would you tell him to do?”

To shrug?

That impossible image – Jesus shrugging off the cross and returning to Heaven six weeks early – sums up the incompatibility of Randism and Christianity. Rand taught that the powerful bear no obligation to the helpless. Jesus had other ideas.

Rand held private property rights to be absolute. That’s how Francisco can guiltlessly blow up his mines. They’re his. Forget superstitious nonsense like Psalm 24’s “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Property is not something you hold in trust for a higher power. Owning property entails no moral responsibility at all. It’s yours. Do whatever you want with it.

Short of pure Orwellian doublethink, there’s no way to square that with Christianity. Rand herself didn’t even try. She found “the inviolate integrity of man’s soul” and “a code of altruism” to be “a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus”.

This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for two thousand years. The reason of their failure was not men’s natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work.

And that brings us to Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent go-round with the Catholic bishops and the Jesuits of Georgetown University.

Ryan is a Randist whose budget plan Francisco d’Anconia would love. As Paul Krugman sums up, “it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy”. It deals with the resulting deficit increase by closing unspecified tax loopholes that lobbyists will undoubtedly manage to keep open once they get specified.

But Ryan also claims to be a good Catholic, so now he’s trying to make that work too. Like Peter denying Jesus, Ryan now calls his Randism “an urban legend“. But that trick is hard to pull off in the Age of Google, when everything you’ve been saying for years is easily retrievable. You know who started that urban legend? Paul Ryan.

Unfortunately for Ryan’s attempt to wash his budget in the blood of the lamb, popes have been handing down bleeding-sacred-heart encyclicals on economic policy since Rerum Novarum in 1891. (You can get the general flavor from this week’s Sift quote or  my article on John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens.) Worse, the Church has actual experts who keep track of these things, so you can’t just cherry-pick the Catholic tradition for out-of-context quotes and expect nobody to call you on it.

Ninety members of the Georgetown faculty called Paul Ryan on it:

we would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few. … In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The particular doctrine Ryan misuses is called “subsidiarity” (first enunciated in Rerum Novarum). As theologian Meghan Clark explains it:

According to the principle of subsidiarity, decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary.

And BeliefNet editor David Gibson elaborates:

[Subsidiarity] argues that lower levels of society (individuals, families, communities) should be allowed to carry out social functions that they can fulfill and larger society (state and federal governments), meanwhile, should provide help (“subsidium,” is the formal Latin term) to cover things the smaller units cannot. … If Washington has to do it, so be it; if Mayberry can do it, all the better. But if Mayberry can’t, then Washington has an obligation to step in.

Conservative policy genuinely based on subsidiarity would work upward from below: As local churches, charities and neighborhood organizations developed plans and raised resources to care for the poor and helpless, local governments could re-purpose their resources on services that the state now provides. States could similarly replace federal programs, and the federal government would shrink because there was less for it to do.

None of that is actually happening in any significant way. Instead, conservatives at all levels cut programs and taxes, using the excuse that problems would be better handled further down the chain. But down-the-chain conservatives are not reaching up to take the responsibilities that up-the-chain conservatives are dropping.

I could sympathize with, say, Ryan’s desire to cut federal services for the poor in his district if conservative Governor Scott Walker were eager to expand Wisconsin’s state programs to take up the slack (and raise state taxes to pay for them) as subsidiarity demands.

But is he? I don’t think so.

If elected at all levels, conservative officials from the president to the councilman would shrug and let responsibility for the poor drop like a stone. That’s not subsidiarity, and it’s not Catholic or any other kind of Christian.

Francisco d’Anconia, though, could probably give a great speech about it.

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How Understanding Should Liberals Be?

April 30, 2012 – 11:54 am

In a polarized world, it’s tempting and satisfying to think: My side is right and the other side is wrong. We represent truth, justice, and all that is good; they represent lies, corruption, and all that is evil. So the most direct way to improve the world is for Us to kick the crap out of Them.

As a liberal, though, I sometimes find it just as tempting (and satisfying in a different way) to think: No one has a monopoly on Truth; there are wise and good people on all sides. Democracy doesn’t work without compromise, and for any conflict there’s usually a higher Truth that transcends both poles. So it’s important for the wise and good people on all sides to stay in dialog and work towards understanding and consensus. Only then can we achieve the kind of win/win solutions that move humanity forward.

On one path, anger and self-righteousness provide energy and direction. On the other, identification with the yet-to-be-discovered wisdom of the future yields a softer (but perhaps more lasting) determination.

Each attitude (if I’m being really honest) offers its own kind of ego boost. In one, I’m superior to those stupid and corrupt conservatives; in the other I’m superior to everyone who hasn’t been to the mountaintop and seen my vision – or at least the vision that I plan to see when I get to the mountaintop.

In the blogosphere, kick-the-crap-out-of-them liberals and find-the-higher-truth liberals have their own polarization, which often manifests in bitter fights between idealists and pragmatists. So in this post, I’m doing what any good meta-liberal would do: I’m searching for the higher truth that transcends the conflict between crap-kicking liberals and conflict-transcending liberals.

The text for my sermon is Jonathan Haidt’s recent book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Obviously, Haidt hails from the conflict-transcending tribe. He describes himself as a life-long liberal from academia, but living among the common people in India opened his eyes to the worthiness of conservative values like in-group loyalty and respect for authority, and the data he has collected since convinces him that there is wisdom on both sides.

Now if only all the wise and good people could transcend polarization and get into dialog.

Not so fast. If Haidt had completely convinced me, I would write a polemic about how conflict-transcending liberals need to kick the crap out of the crap-kicking liberals who poison the dialog that we otherwise could be having with wise and good conservatives.

But I also read Charles Blow’s post in February, showing that compromise itself is a liberal value conservatives don’t share. In poll after poll, Democrats say their leaders should compromise to get something done, while Republicans say their leaders should stick to conservative principles.

Given that difference, the path of least resistance is for Democrats to compromise and Republicans to move ever further to the right. So the Heritage Foundation’s conservative alternative to HillaryCare begets ObamaCare, which Heritage now denounces as an unconstitutional Marxist plot to take over the economy.

I sometimes imagine inviting the Ricks (Santorum and Warren) to a dialog aimed at finding a truth that transcends both my secularism and their Christianity. It’s a non-starter. To the Ricks, the very idea of a truth transcending Christianity is Satanic. Even liberal Christianity might be Satanic.

Worse, you can’t negotiate with Wisdom and Goodness when Lies and Corruption are in the driver’s seat. Think about climate change: The “controversy” over global warming comes not from the laboratories of dissident scientists, but from the board rooms of Exxon-Mobil and Koch Energy.

Corporations are sociopaths; they aren’t influenced by arguments about truth and goodness. So whatever evidence emerges, fossil-fuel companies (and their PR firms, lobbyists, and senators) will challenge the scientific consensus on global warming until they’ve sold the last trainload of coal to the last power plant to run the last air conditioner.

How do you find common ground with that? Don’t we just have to win?

Haidt’s case. Armored with appropriate skepticism, then, let’s look at what Haidt has to say.

Haidt has very artfully organized his book to illustrate his own principles. He believes people first react to an idea intuitively, and only then engage their rational minds to justify their reaction. So Haidt knows that if he turns people off on page 1, none of the evidence he offers later will get a fair hearing. So instead he engagingly tells the story of how he got to his conclusions while saving the conclusions themselves until the end.

He offers (and supports with data) a model of how this all-powerful moral intuition works: Humans have evolved to ‘taste’ six different moral ‘flavors’. Four are easy to describe:

  • Care/harm. Don’t hurt the innocent, especially if they’re cute and helpless.
  • Loyalty/betrayal. Don’t break your agreements or sabotage the team.
  • Authority/subversion. Don’t get uppity and disrespect your betters.
  • Sanctity/degradation. Don’t break your community’s fundamental taboos.

Haidt spells out the emotions these flavors evoke – violations of sanctity evoke disgust, for example, while violations of loyalty evoke rage – and how these responses (even the ones that contradict others) might have evolved.

Originally fairness was a fifth flavor, but eventually he realized that this word is used ambiguously for two different flavors.

  • Liberty/oppression. Nobody is inherently better than anybody else. Example: Count each person’s vote equally.
  • Fairness/cheating. Rewards should be proportional to contributions. Example: People who worker harder should make more money.

The punch line is that liberal moral arguments focus on Care and Liberty, while conservatives season their arguments with all six flavors. (Again, there’s supporting data.)

Politically, Haidt’s book has two big takeaways for liberals: (1) We should learn how to appeal to a wider palate. (2) Conservatives aren’t evil, they just taste different flavors of morality.

Not so fast, part II. I can buy (1), but I’ve got problems with (2). First, I taste those other flavors, I’m just deeply ambivalent about them, because I understand how they can serve evil purposes as easily as good: Being a team player and respecting authority can be bad (say, when you’re in Nazi Germany). Sanctity provides the ugh-factor that justifies oppression of out-groups like homosexuals. Distributing rewards proportionately to contributions can hide an unequal distribution of the opportunities to contribute.

I love a good strong salty taste, but it makes me worry about the value of what I’m eating.

Second, go back to my Exxon-Mobil example: Corporations don’t taste any flavors of morality, they just know how to manipulate the people who do. Fry up some pink slime, add a bunch of salt, and it tastes great!

How understanding do I want to be? But now I’m leaning too far over in the crap-kicking direction. I promised some transcendence. So here’s how much of Haidt I take to heart:

First, liberals need to distinguish what we’re fighting for from who we’re fighting with.

That dittohead friend from high school or the cousin who forwards right-wing viral emails – you probably already realize that they’re not bad people. If you can stand to talk politics at all with them, Haidt has a lot to tell you: You’re never going to convince them by yelling your liberal values back at them. To be convincing, you need to understand what flavor of morality they find in the positions they’re taking, echo that value to the extent you honestly can, and then detach it from the case at hand while you add liberal flavors to the stew.

But lies are poison, no matter how they’re flavored. You can cut some slack for the woman in the next cubicle who tells you Obama is a Kenyan. But you can’t cut any slack for the lie itself. “Why do you believe that?” invites dialog, but “You might be right” just surrenders.

And that TV-talking-head that a Koch-Brothers astroturf group pays to lie for them? He’s evil. Don’t waste your compassion trying to understand anything deeper about him than his paycheck.

Compromise on proposals, not principles. There’s nothing wrong with supporting the best proposal you can pass, even if the other side also manages to get some of its agenda in as well. That’s how democracy works.

For example, the 15th Amendment guaranteed black men the right to vote. Some feminists opposed it, because it should have given women the right to vote as well.

In principle, they were right: It should have. But I’m glad the 15th Amendment passsed, especially since the 19th Amendment eventually followed.

But no post-Civil-War liberal should have said, “It’s good that the 15th Amendment doesn’t apply to women.” Pass as much as you can, but never surrender your intention to come back for more.

Liberal/conservative isn’t symmetric. Haidt is right that six-flavor conservatism has an inherent advantage over two-flavor liberalism. We just don’t have as many ways to provoke a knee-jerk response. That’s why conservatism corrolates with low-effort thought.

That’s also why we can’t just invert the knee-jerk arguments of the right. The correct response to “Black people are bad” isn’t “White people are bad.” “America is always right” shouldn’t lead to “America is always wrong.”

Our side needs nuance. We need to engage thought rather than shut it down.

In particular, we need nuance when we respond to books like The Righteous Mind. The proper response to “Conservatives are good people” isn’t “Conservatives are bad people.” It’s “In what cases and what ways are conservatives good, and how can we engage them there without betraying our own values?”

By weeklysift | Also posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Tagged , | Comments (10)