The Weekly Sift

A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market. The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society?

— Michael J. Sandel, “What Isn’t For Sale?” (2012)

In this week’s sift:

• “If you can’t hear it from me …” — 3 voices that might get through to your conservative friends. A former climate-change denier explains why he stopped denying. A young Christian author tells her elders how their anti-gay focus is causing Christianity to lose her generation. And a successful entrepreneur explains why he isn’t a job-creator, but middle-class consumers are.
• Citizen of the highest bidder. New FaceBook billionaire Eduardo Saverin didn’t intend to become a symbol when he lowered his tax bill by renouncing his American citizenship. But right and left alike seized on his example to make points about taxes, patriotism, and whether anything is truly priceless.
• 196 People and other short notes. 196 individuals dominated Super-PAC funding in 2011. Austerity flounders in Europe. Harp seals should get jobs. Easter Island heads have buried bodies. Yet another similarity between the Taliban and Pat Robertson. And more.
• Book recommendation of the week: The New Religious Intolerance by Martha Nussbaum. For a bona fide University of Chicago philosopher, Nussbaum has a readable, engaging style. This short book looks at the fear-psychology that religious intolerance is based on, briefly presents the major philosophical theories of tolerance, illustrates how those ideas have played out historically, and then brings it all together to look at current anti-Muslim activism in both the U.S. and Europe.
• Last week’s most popular post. Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030 got 381 views. The most-clicked link was the iSideWith.com election quiz.
• What you can do. From time to time I’ve mentioned the Banyan Project (where I’m on the unpaid Board of Advisors; so is Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media). My friend Tom Stites has come up with a business plan for launching local news co-ops, whose loyalty will be to their reader/owners rather than to the advertisers. Banyan has reached the pilot-project stage, and is looking for start-up money through the journalism crowd-source funding site spot.us. Spot.us works by an interesting model: It uses crowd-sourcing to fund journalism that the for-profit media won’t do. You pledge money via your credit card, and that money is committed to spot.us projects in general. But your spot.us credits only go to the proposal if it meets its funding goal within the specified time period. (So your money doesn’t vanish into projects that never get off the ground. Otherwise you retain spot.us credits to invest in another project.) The Banyan proposal speaks for itself. You can decide for yourself whether it’s the kind of thing you want to support. I’ll vouch for Tom Stites (who used to be my editor at UU World) and for spot.us itself. Neither is a scam. I made a pledge this morning.

All through the Depression influential voices warned about the dangers of excessive government spending, and as a result the job-creation programs of the New Deal were always far too small, given the depth of the slump. What the threat of war did was to finally silence the voices of fiscal conservatism, opening the door for recovery.

– Paul Krugman, End This Depression Now (2012)

In this week’s sift:

• 77 Cents. Who’s right about how much money women make and why?
• Gays Need Not Apply. Richard Grenell’s resignation tells us that the Religious Right has Mitt Romney on a very short leash.
• Where the Jobs Are and other short notes. A great chart compares the Bush and Obama recoveries. The biggest difference between them is in government jobs — up for Bush, down for Obama.
• Last week’s most popular post. Jesus Shrugged — why Ayn Rand and Christianity don’t mix got 357 views. It was another good week for short notes; Bad Arguments and other short notes was viewed 191 times. 41 of those viewers clicked yourlogicalfallacyis.com, making it the week’s most-clicked link.
• Book recommendation of the week. Probably I’ll say more about this next week, but Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now is an excellent book. Nothing he says will surprise Krugman’s regular readers — or regular Sift readers, for that matter: He thinks the economy is suffering a failure of demand, which can be solved by more government stimulus spending, easy money by the Fed, and raising the inflation target to 4%. But it’s good to see all the pieces of Krugman’s view laid out end-to-end. He makes his case very clearly, and directly answers all the objections your friends are likely to raise.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

—  Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012)

In this week’s sift:

• The Narratives of November.  What matters at this point in the campaign isn’t the Electoral College, favorability ratings, or head-to-head polls. It’s whether either candidate can assemble believable stories explaining why he should be president and his opponent shouldn’t.
• Jobs, Hobbies, and Reflections on a Viral Post.  The most common complaint about last week’s Rich People Don’t Have Jobs is that I co-opted the perfectly good word job. Why that seemed necessary opens a whole other can of worms.
• Working for the Man and other short notes. Private prison corporations, lobbyists, and industries that pay peanuts for prison labor have established an incestuous relationship with government. The Yes Men take on the Bank of America. The Vatican cracks down on American nuns. Environmental arguments against immigration are actually arguments against the poor. Plus links to a few other things I found worth reading this week.
• Book recommendation of the week: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, where this week’s quote comes from. It’s an important book for anybody who wants to influence politics (so I may give it a longer review in some future week). One key insight: It’s now possible to prove rationally that people are not rational. Intuition reacts to any situation first, and the rational mind then turns that intuition into a post-hoc argument that might convince somebody else. That’s not a glitch; it’s what the rational mind evolved to do. The possibility of using to reason to find truth is a happy accident that came later. Rational truth-finding hardly ever works except in subcultures (like the scientific community) that go to great lengths to foster it.
• Last week’s most popular post. Rich People Don’t Have Jobs was only the sixth 1000-view post since the Sift moved to weeklysift.com last summer. At last count it had 1156 views. It has a follow-up post (Jobs, Hobbies …) this week.

Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid

— Bob Dylan,  “Union Sundown” (1983)

In this week’s sift:

• Seven Issues the Election Should Be About. I have to confess I have low expectations of the Romney vs. Obama fall campaign: a lot of negative ads, deception, misdirection, and bad journalism. And that’s a shame, because this country needs a good and accurate airing of liberal and conservative views on a number of important issues.
• Democracy in Michigan: What Rachel Got Right and Wrong. Thursday, Rachel Maddow did a long segment on the abuses of democracy happening in Michigan. It’s a huge story that more people should be covering, but she also screwed it up a little. As the Daily Show used to say: “When news breaks, we fix it.”
• Too Racist for the National Review and other short notes. John Derbyshire just proved that it is possible to get yourself fired from National Review for being too racist; you should take a look at how far he had to go. Can Koch Industries be strip-searched? The coming War on State Universities. Executive pay is still going up. And more.
• Book recommendation of the week: I haven’t finished Nick Harkaway’s new novel Angelmaker yet, but it reminds me that Harkaway’s first novel, The Gone-Away World, is one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever. He’s John le Carre’s son, but his style resembles Neal Stephenson’s: original ideas in wild plots, lavishly written.
• Last week’s most popular posts. Rather than one big viral outbreak, last week’s traffic was distributed among Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism (242 views), Student Debt: the New Involuntary Servitude (221), and continuing interest in Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See (an additional 141 views to total 592). Interestingly, August’s Why I Am Not a Libertarian continues to chug along, getting about 50 views a week. It’s now up to 21,924.
• This week’s challenge. While visiting Chicago recently, I discovered the Open Books used-book store. Its high-quality stock is donated, and its staff consists of volunteers who love books. (Every little sub-category has excellent staff recommendations, right down to “mysteries with a strong sense of place”.) Lots of cushy old furniture makes it a great hang space. With no expenses for staff or stock, there must be profits — they support literacy programs in the Chicago area. Use the comments to tell me about public-spirited non-profits in your area, or to give a shout-out to your locally-owned independent bookstore.

By protecting the lawbreaking license for other powerful individuals, [the political and media classes] strengthen a custom of which they might avail themselves if they too break the law and get caught. It is a class-based, self-interested advocacy. That is why belief in this prerogative and the devotion to protecting it transcend political ideology, partisan affiliation, the supposed wall between political and media figures, and every other pretense of division within elite classes. — Glenn Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice For Some

In this week’s sift:

• Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See. White America really doesn’t want to believe that racism is still a problem.
• Glenn Greenwald Lays Out the History of “Elite Immunity”. His book With Liberty and Justice for Some came out in October. Rather than attack Democrats or Republicans, Greenwald makes the case that an elite class is forming in government, industry, and media. It sees itself as above the law, and has the power to make it so.
• Covering Climate Change Seriously and other short notes. What if climate change got covered by the same standards as the deficit? Is the media going to start exposing liars? Evangelical theology follows its politics, not the other way around. One of the best Daily Show episodes ever. And more.
• Last weeks’ most popular post. The Tragedy of Mitt Romney had 297 views. The most-clicked link was to the photo of the skypunch.
• This week’s challenge. The Justice Department memos explaining why targeted killings are within the president’s power are still secret. Sign this petition to demand they be released.