The featured article this week will look at the visionary economics of sustainability: How would our whole society have to change if we accepted that each generation had to leave the planet more-or-less as we found it? In other words, what if we aimed not for growth — more and more people consuming more and more stuff and leaving more and more waste behind — but for a steady-state economy whose output was consistently sufficient to support a stable population?
The text for that sermon is a new book by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, Enough is Enough.
The weekly summary calls attention to: the massive industrial accident in Bangladesh, Jason Collins’ coming out, atmospheric CO2 nearing 400 ppm, and how the Bush Library continues the parade of BS that characterized the Bush administration.
I spent the weekend enjoying Portland, Maine (the best little city in the Northeast) rather than doing my background reading and prep work, so the Sift will come out a little slowly today.
The featured article this week is a review of Tom Allen’s recent book Dangerous Convictions: What’t really wrong with the U.S. Congress.
I don’t usually like books by out-of-office politicians. Most of them are either revising history to make their mistakes go away or polishing their rhetoric for a comeback. But ex-Maine-congressman Allen has done something thoughtful here. He’s taken his impressions from 12 years in the House and combined them with a lot of background reading on how Americans think and talk about politics. I found the result both enlightening and thought-provoking. (And now I have to go repeat Allen’s reading project, starting with Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and Robert Putnam’s American Grace.)
His diagnosis, in brief, is that the fundamental cause of the polarization in Congress is a deep worldview difference between Democrats and Republicans that makes them unable to take each other’s points of view seriously, much less find common ground or work out compromises. He goes a long way towards tracing the roots of that worldview difference. Almost accidentally, he ends up tracing out a Republican reform agenda far better than anything Republicans have come up with.
In the weekly summary, the Boston bombing conversation has shifted towards discussions about Islam and conspiracy theories. I’ll give my advice for dealing with the conspiracy theorist in your life.
Also, the George W. Bush Presidential Library opened, and lots of people bent over backwards to say nice things about the Bush legacy. But when the worst presidents in American history are discussed, George W. Bush will always be part of that conversation.
In the shorter notes: Obama may be looking for a way out of the War on Drugs. Attempts to defend austerity are still falling flat. And Medicare is about to end a program that cuts costs and improves care.
It’s been one of those weeks: At last count, 14 people were dead and dozens still missing in the Texas fertilizer explosion, and that event could barely stay on the front page with all the Boston coverage.
The Sift isn’t a breaking-news kind of blog, so my coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing is to take a step back and wonder what it might mean to the country long-term. The thing that stands out to me is how the narrative hooks of 9-11 got reversed: In 9-11, heroism set the stage for greater tragedy, symbolized by the first responders who charged up the burning tower and died when it collapsed. In Boston, the initial tragedy set the stage for greater heroism.
So I wonder if Boston can be the first step in undoing some of the mistakes we justified by pointing to 9-11. And so the first featured article this week is: “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now”.
The second featured article is longer, because the topic is more complicated. In “Why the Austerity Fraud Matters” I try to explain why you should care about an academic dispute between economists: The case for focusing on the national debt rather than unemployment is based on a highly influential paper that is simply a fraud.
That doesn’t leave much space for a weekly summary, but there’s still that Texas thing to deal with. And the Senate siding with the NRA over the American people.
It’s Tax Day, so it’s time to ask the annual question: “How big was your work penalty in 2012?”
As you may already know, investment income like dividends and capital gains is taxed at a flat 15% rate, which is lower than the rates paid by many people who work for wages. Plus, payroll taxes don’t apply to investment income, and there are a number of other advantages.
Usually, this gets described in terms of the virtues of investment: capital formation, job creation, and so on. But once upon a time, work was considered virtuous too. So I prefer to describe this situation as a work penalty. You pay more tax because you work for a living rather than watching your money work for you.
The simple version of the work penalty is not hard to figure if you have your 1040 handy, and if more people knew their work penalty, we might raise enough outrage to do away with it.
Obama’s budget has put Social Security back in the news, so the second featured article is “Three things I know about Social Security”.
In the weekly summary, everybody was also talking about Margaret Thatcher and (for some reason I can’t fathom) a country-western song.
After two weeks off, the Weekly Sift is back. This week’s featured article will focus on the conservative pundits who framed the firing of player-abusing Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice as a defeat for “old-fashioned discipline” at the hands of the “liberal media” and “political correctness”.
I too see this as a story about the decline of discipline in America, but I think Sean Hannity is looking at it upside-down: America’s real discipline problem is at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. Like Mike Rice, our bankers, billionaires, and CEOs are running wild, and their misbehavior mostly goes unpunished, even when it’s criminal. Rice has become one of the rare examples of the success of discipline in America — a person in authority made to face the consequences of his actions.
We’d fix a lot of what’s wrong in America if we could get back to the “old-fashioned discipline” Stan Lee put in the mouth of Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben in 1962: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And accountability. And a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.
In the weekly summary I’ll review what people have been talking about these last few weeks: what the Supreme Court will do with same-sex marriage, whether this wave of outrage at gun violence will result in any changes, and how seriously we should take the threats coming out of North Korea. Plus, short notes that include what an honest cable company would tell the public.
This week’s Sift will be a little longer than usual because I’m about to take two weeks off*, so I can’t push any articles back to next Monday.
Last week I talked about ideological bubbles and how to know if you’re in one. I should have mentioned the best technique for avoiding getting into a bubble in the first place: Read original documents from the other side, not just the paraphrases of them that your side generates.
With that in mind, this week I read the 91-page document Paul Ryan wrote to advertise his budget. So this week’s first featured article is my report “I Read Paul Ryan’s Budget”.
The second featured article will look at an issue the Sift hasn’t covered very well, the Keystone Pipeline. Supporters of the pipeline have done such a good job getting their message out that I think a lot of people regard building the pipeline as a “common sense” idea, while opposition seems fringy. I make the don’t-build-it case in “A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline”.
The weekly summary talks about the new pope, Senator Portman’s switch on same-sex marriage, how an entire committee’s worth of Republicans can oppose 91% of the public, the Cruz-Feinstein clash, and a few other things.
*Not really. I’ve just got too much other stuff going to be able to get a Sift out. Next Saturday I’ll be giving two completely different talks at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I’ll be leading the Sunday service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on March 31, which to my great surprise turns out to be Easter. No pressure there. (Funny story about that, which I’ll tell next Monday in my quarterly column at uuworld.org.)
This week has two featured articles, and they’re both more-or-less done, so they should come out fairly soon. The first, “Who Do Representatives Represent?” looks at a fascinating discovery by political scientists: liberal and conservative politicians alike think their districts are more conservative than they really are. Following David Sirota’s lead and bringing in an important research result from 2005, I raise this possibility: Maybe those politicians are accurately estimating the views of the constituents they actually represent — the rich.
The second featured article “What Bubbles Look Like From the Inside” asks how you could tell if you were living in a propaganda bubble. Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has the right test: Are the people you listen to preparing you for what really happens? Or are you constantly adjusting to big surprises — like Obama’s re-election? Now that ten years have passed, let’s take a look back at the Iraq invasion.
None the supposedly “big” stories this week caught my imagination, probably because I never really cared one way or the other about Hugo Chavez. But the week produced its fair share of shorter notes and interesting human-interest stories.
I’m running behind today. This week’s featured article, “Nobody Likes the New Capitalist Man”, will pull together observations from a number of recent books and articles about selfishness and cooperation, focusing on what it’s doing to us to live inside an economic theory that says we’re totally selfish. It should be out by 11 or so.
The weekly summary talks about the Voting Rights Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and the fact the Detroit is about to become a dictatorship — and it’s all legal.
This week’s featured article will be a look at William Baumol’s recent book The Cost Disease, which presents a unique point of view on the country’s long-term fiscal problem: It may not be a problem.
In other words, what if the exponential growth in medical expenses that drives the long-term exponential growth in government spending is just the ordinary course of affairs in an economy with growing productivity? What if medical spending isn’t squeezing out other consumption, but instead our ability to make everything else with less labor is leaving more space in our economy for health care?
Also worth attention this week: The resemblance between Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy might be more than just a trick of the camera angle. Why there’s no White History Month. Fascinating new stuff about dolphin communication. The NRA thinks it has found a wedge issue. And you have no idea just how far out there the discussions on right-wing talk radio are getting.
This week’s featured article is an attempt to take on the creation/evolution debate in a non-eggheady way. (Happy birthday, Chuck Darwin. I hope I’ll still be relevant when I’m 204, but I kind of doubt it.) The weekly summary will focus on the new stuff in the State of the Union, the complete unresponsiveness of the Rubio/Paul SOTU responses, and a new book about the food mega-corporations. Plus: Is it great to have Elizabeth Warren in the Senate or what?
I’m battling a cold today, so when this will all appear depends on my nap schedule.
The Weekly Sift 