A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline

If you want to construct a simple, suitable-for-casual-conversation argument in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline, you probably already know everything you need. The ideas are easy to grasp, and the people who want you to construct such arguments have a lot money to get their message out. Here are the pieces:

  • The oil sands are just sitting up there in Canada. BP says: “The province of Alberta contains recoverable oil sands reserves of approximately 170 billion barrels, the third largest reserves in the world.”
  • Giving our oil money to Canada makes a lot more sense than giving it to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Venezuela. For a lot of reasons: Of all the people in the world, Canadians are the ones most likely to send that dollar right back to us by buying something we make or coming here on vacation. They’re also probably not going to use the money to fund terrorism or anti-American propaganda. And we don’t have to worry much about them shutting the oil off to manipulate us or punish us politically.
  • Building the pipeline would employ a lot of people. Paul Ryan’s budget claims (page 48) “20,000 direct jobs and 118,000 indirect jobs.” But the construction-job figure appears to be inflated by a factor of about 10, and the “indirect jobs” are just wild guess.

Probably you know that the case against the pipeline has something to do with global warming, but unless you’ve gone out of your way to study the issue, the pieces of that argument don’t come quickly to mind and aren’t as easy to assemble. It’s not actually a difficult argument, it just doesn’t have as much money behind it, so you don’t have it constantly in front of you.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Global warming is real. It’s not “controversial” or “disputed” in any genuine scientific sense. People who profit from selling fossil fuels have spent a lot of money to buy political controversy and to dispute the scientific results in the media, but that’s different from there being any real scientific controversy about whether the planet is getting hotter, whether greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing it, or whether burning fossil fuels puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Our solar system already gives us a clear example of a runaway greenhouse effect: Venus, which otherwise is the planet that most resembles Earth. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% carbon dioxide, and its surface temperature is over 800 degrees Fahrenheit — even hotter than the hottest parts of Mercury, which is much closer to the Sun. Nobody’s saying that lead is going to start boiling here on Earth, but the greenhouse effect is not some speculation out of science fiction. It’s happening on the next planet over.

There’s a time lag between putting more carbon in the atmosphere and the Earth getting hotter. It’s not like the thermostat on your furnace. (It’s more like putting on a sweater that you can’t take off.) So we can’t wait until apocalyptic things start happening and then say, “Damn. I guess we better do something about this.” If tomorrow, we stopped burning fossil fuels completely — not that anybody expects that to happen — the planet would keep getting hotter for the next several decades.

Estimating how much carbon results in how many degrees warmer how fast is where the science gets iffier. (This is where there is honest debate and more research is needed. Of course, the fossil-fuel people and their minions want to cut off this research, so they can keep exploiting the uncertainty.) In general, though, this graphic sums the best guesses we have:

So, for example, carbon already released (say, by that driving vacation you took ten years ago) is going to increase the global temperature by 1.5 degrees Centigrade, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. A carbon budget that would keep further warming down to 2 degrees C (3.6 F) beyond that is already starting to look impossible.

And this is the mainline scenario, not the worst case. Short of Venus, it’s hard to know what the worst case is, because we could at some point set off some feedback loop we currently know nothing about. At some point, for example, the methane frozen into the Siberian permafrost starts to evaporate into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas, so after that the hotter it gets the hotter it gets.

If we don’t want to have an ecological catastrophe, a lot of fossil fuels will have to stay in the ground. Nobody wants to hear this, and people who hear it have a way of forgetting. But take another look at that graphic: Just burning the gas, oil, and coal that corporations already list on their books will take us to a point about 12 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than we are now. That’s about the difference between Chicago and Atlanta, or Atlanta and Baghdad. The entire state of Florida would need a serious seawall, and hurricanes would hit New York or Boston every few years. I’m not sure what happens to the cornfields of Iowa or the vineyards of California, but I bet it’s not pretty.

The drill-baby-drill scenario, where we find every last hydrocarbon on the planet and burn it, is much, much worse.

If you’re going to leave any oil in the ground, the Canadian oil sands are a good choice. While not as bad as coal for generating energy in general, oil sand is a carbon-intensive way to produce liquid fuels like gasoline. There’s some debate about how much worse than ordinary crude oil it is, with estimates running from 12% worse to 22% worse. Another way to look at that: If carbon is the limiting factor on how much gasoline the world can have, producing five gallons of gas from oil sands might prevent us from producing six gallons from crude oil somewhere else.

Also, the sands are in the early stages of development; leaving them in the ground is a much easier decision now that it will be after we’ve spent a bunch of money to build a pipeline and install other infrastructure. And they’re in a rich country. (Imagine telling a poor country that its people will have to starve rather than develop known energy resources.)

What’s Plan B? Pipeline advocates want to take that argument off the table by saying that the oil sands are going to be developed anyway. At its worst, this is a defeatist the-planet-is-already-hosed-so-we-might-as-well-live-it-up-now argument.

But even ignoring that, the argument is disingenuous. The point of building the pipeline is that it makes developing the oil sands more economical. No energy deposit gets completely exploited — there’s always some oil at the bottom of the well that is recoverable, but only at a higher price. So building the pipeline clearly changes how much of the oil sand will be exploited.

And finally, the economic projections are based on a world that has no carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which is another way of saying that we’re acting as if changing the climate had no cost.

But if the Canadian oil sands are going to be burned in their entirety (or close to it), what is going to be left in the ground? And if the answer is nothing, then what’s the plan for mitigating the damage? What’s the plan for relocating all the Bangladeshis when that country is underwater? How high does the seawall around Florida have to be? What’s the food-supply plan when Iowa turns into a desert and the ocean is too acidic to support fish?

Pipeline advocates would have you believe that the opponents are being impractical, that even if you believe in climate change (i.e., if you believe in science), this is not the place to take a stand.

So: where is the place to take a stand? And will it still be above sea level when we get there?

March 18, 2013 – 11:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (25)

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I Read the Ryan Budget

Last week, when I talked about ideological bubbles and how to tell if you’re in one, I should have mentioned the best way to stay out of bubbles in the first place: Expose yourself to as many original sources as you can, especially the ones you know you’re going to hate.

With that in mind, I read Paul Ryan’s budget. (More accurately: I read the 91-page document he wrote to advertise his budget. An actual budget would have way more numbers in it.) In telling you about it, I’m going to try to keep my commentary as close to the text as possible, with quotes and page references as appropriate. (I wish I had the time to do an end-to-end annotation, but I’ve got some big deadlines looming.)

General impressions. Before I get into specifics, I want to say a few things about the overall impression the document makes.

As many people have already observed, Ryan’s proposal is not an attempt to reach a workable compromise with the White House or the Democratic majority in the Senate, both of which would have to agree before his plan could become law. Instead, it’s an aspirational document for conservatives: This is what they fantasize doing if and when they get complete control of the government.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but the Ryan Budget needs to be classed with aspirational budgets from the Left, like People’s Budget put out by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (which also balances the budget in ten years). Both are shots across the bow, not plausible projections of what its backers think they can pass.

So Ryan has written a rallying cry for the troops of the conservative movement, not an attempt convince or convert non-believers like me. The summary (page 7) says

This is a plan to balance the budget in ten years. It invites President Obama and Senate Democrats to commit to the same common-sense goal.

But there is no spirit-of-invitation in Ryan’s style. Any liberal who reads it will get pissed off, and I believe that’s intentional. Conservatives couldn’t fully enjoy their reading experience without visualizing pissed-off liberals.

Let me detail that: You’ve probably already heard that Ryan wants (once again) to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare). But after the first mention, he can’t just call it by name. It’s “the President’s onerous health care law” (page 33) or “the President’s misguided health care law” (page 40) and so on, as if the ACA had been imposed on the country by imperial decree and Congress had nothing to say about it — also as if the ACA hadn’t been an issue in the 2012 election that Romney/Ryan lost by nearly five million votes.

Other partisan stuff is just silly. On page 24, President Reagan is given credit both for the economic expansion of his era, and of President Clinton’s era as well. Clinton is mentioned exactly once (on page 33, when Ryan re-raises the universally debunked lie from campaign 2012 that Obama wants to rescind the work requirement of Clinton’s welfare reform). The reader would never know that Ryan’s stated goal — a balanced budget — was achieved by Clinton (who raised taxes) while Reagan (who cut taxes) ran up record deficits.

You will also hear echoes of 2009’s Lie of the Year: death panels. The ACA sets up an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to make annual recommendations (which Congress can rewrite before they take effect) on keeping Medicare spending within specified limits. The law specifically bans the IPAB from recommending care-rationing, but the heading of the Ryan’s section on it (page 40) is “Repeal the health-care rationing board”.

Background assumptions. In the real world, if a program is important enough, the government could conceivably raise taxes or borrow to pay for it. OK, Ryan’s balanced-budget goal won’t let him advocate borrowing. But a fundamental assumption that runs through his whole budget — usually without being stated explicitly — is that taxes cannot be raised for any purpose. Nothing is important enough to raise taxes to pay for.

Also, defense spending is untouchable. “There is no foreseeable ‘peace dividend’ on our horizon.” (page 61)

So if the domestic demands on government are growing — the population is getting older, the infrastructure more decrepit, healthcare more expensive, weather-related disasters more extreme and more frequent, future economic growth more dependent basic research and an educated workforce etc. — any money you want to spend to deal with one of those challenges has to be taken from the others.

The idea that over the long term our country could decide that it wants to do more of its consumption publicly — that it wants to take its economic growth in the form of Medicare and public education, say, rather than BMWs — is completely off the table.

Big Picture. The numbers don’t appear until the Appendix (page 80). Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put them into a bar graph:

Medicare and Social Security are usually considered “mandatory spending” (because benefits are defined by law rather than by appropriation), but I believe the additional $962 billion of 10-year savings is mostly Food Stamps, Pell grants, and so on.

So the cuts are almost entirely in healthcare, education, or anti-poverty spending. And while Ryan waves his hand at replacing Obamacare with “patient-centered health-care reforms” (page 33), apparently those reforms require no money from the government.

Meanwhile, rich people get a big bonanza: The top tax rate drops from the current 39.6% to 25%. If you make $10 million a year (some CEOs do), you could save nearly $15 million over the ten years Ryan’s budget covers.

So what isn’t in the budget document?

  • Any specifics about discretionary spending cuts. The cuts are just numbers on a spreadsheet. All the “tough choices” necessary to achieve those numbers are left to your imagination, so Ryan can deny his intention to cut anything in particular, as Mitt Romney did in his first debate with President Obama.
  • Any specifics about closing tax loopholes. Ryan claims his rich-guys-bonanza 25% tax rate wouldn’t cut federal revenue, because it would be balanced by eliminating tax loopholes. As in the 2012 campaign, Ryan says nothing about what those loopholes might be. Again, he can deny wanting to cut any specific item, like the mortgage interest deduction. But he’s got to raise that revenue somehow, and I seriously doubt it’s all going to come from the super-rich who benefit most from the lower rate.
  • Any plan for Social Security. Page 37 charges: “In Social Security, government’s refusal to deal with demographic realities has endangered the solvency of this critical program.” But rather than “deal with demographic realities” here and now, Ryan only “requires the President and Congress to work together to forge a solution.”

We have always been at war with Eastasia. The background rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul assumption allows Ryan to construct some truly Orwellian statements. This is particularly true in the “Opportunity Extended” section, which is all about shrinking opportunity for poor and working-class young people.

For example, on page 20 Ryan identifies “tuition inflation” as a problem that “plung[es] students and their families into unaffordable levels of debt”. And then he says:

Many economists, including Ohio University’s Richard Vedder*, argue that the structure of the federal government’s aid programs don’t simply chase higher tuition costs, but are in fact a key driver of those costs.

What could that possibly mean? Well, that federal aid is allowing too many people to go to college, creating a high-demand environment in which colleges can raise tuition. So the “solution” is to lower the maximum Pell grant (thereby “saving” the Pell grant program from spending at an “unsustainable” level, since we couldn’t possibly raise taxes to pay for it). Also to “target aid to the truly needy” by making families report more of their income on financial aid forms. Also “reforming” student loans and “re-examining the data made available to students to make certain they are armed with information that will assist them in making their postsecondary decisions”.

Presumably, when the facts of this harsher you’re-on-your-own world are “made available to students”, fewer of them will decide to go to college, thereby saving both their money and the government’s. So don’t worry about student debt — just don’t go to college at all if you’re not rich, and if you do go we’ll “help” you avoid massive debts by refusing to loan you money.

Oh, and we’ll also “encourage innovation” in education through “nontraditional models like online coursework”. Never mind that’s where the big scams are. Corporations profit from those scams, so that’s not “waste”.

Ditto for job training: Ryan promises to “extend opportunity” by spending less on it.

Ditto for the safety net. Since taxes can’t possibly be raised, every person who is helped by the safety net is taking those dollars away from somebody else who might be helped. So Ryan’s “A Safety Net Strengthened” section is all about spending less on the safety net. Mostly this is accomplished by block-granting programs like Medicaid to give “states more flexibility to tailor programs to their people’s needs.”

So if, say, low-income Texans need to toughen up and stop seeing a doctor at all, Texas can tailor its program that way. That’s what it’s doing already with the “flexibility” the Supreme Court gave it last summer.

Energy. Climate change just isn’t happening. Ryan doesn’t make that claim in so many words, but there’s a big empty spot where climate change would otherwise have to figure in.

He clumps energy together with a grab-bag of other issues in the “Fairness Restored” section. The “unfairness” in this case is the way that the Obama administration favors clean energy over dirty energy. Ryan will “end kickbacks to favored industries” like wind and solar in favor of “reliable, low-cost energy” like coal, oil, and gas. With climate change out of the picture, only corruption can explain Obama’s favoritism. In the Introduction, Ryan says his budget “restores fair play to the marketplace by ending cronyism.”

In current energy policy, fossil fuels and green energy are subsidized in different ways: Green energy gets grants and loans while established-and-profitable fossil energy gets tax breaks. Tax breaks are invisible to Ryan, so he can say on page 50:

on a dollar-per-unit-of-production basis, the level of subsidies received by the wind and solar industries were almost 100 times greater than those for conventional energy

Do it for the kids. So what’s the purpose of all this? A better world for our children. “By living beyond our means, we’re stealing from the next generation.” (page 5)

Of course my baby-boom generation knows how that works, because all that debt America ran up during World War II was “stolen” from us, right? I don’t know how I failed to notice.

In the real America, the big deficits of World War II kicked off 40 years of prosperity, during which the country achieved a level of equality that it hasn’t equalled before or since. So no, deficits are not “stolen” from the future. My generation did not build tanks and landing crafts and put them in time machines to send back to D-Day.

But in order to save our children from the horrible maybe-sorta-problem of the national debt, we need to under-educate them; not do basic research that might create the next computer industry or Internet; leave them crumbling roads, bridges, and electrical grids; not care for them when they get sick; move in with them when we get old; and leave them with a torched planet, where Iowa is a desert and Miami is underwater.

I’m sure they’ll thank us for our foresight.

* As best I can tell, although Ryan identifies only their university affiliations, every economist Ryan mentions by name is inside the conservative bubble. Richard Vedder is with the American Enterprise Institute and John Taylor with the Hoover Institute.

March 18, 2013 – 8:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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.)

March 18, 2013 – 7:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Alms from the Poor

The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone else.

— Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (2001)

This week everybody was talking about … well, actually nothing really caught on

I couldn’t get excited about the death of Hugo Chavez, maybe because I never got that excited about him when he was alive. I did like the discussion Chris Hayes had about Chavez Sunday, because it seemed like he really wanted to know who this guy was and what he meant for Venezuela, rather than to force him into a stereotype.

And I don’t have a lot of hope for the next Pope, so that story didn’t grab me either.

so I wrote about dysfunctions in media and democracy

“Who Do Representatives Represent?” looks at a fascinating new study: Politicians on both sides tend to think their districts are more conservative than they actually are. An earlier study said that legislators’ votes are influenced mainly by the opinions of the wealthy, so I wondered this is all one phenomenon: Maybe politicians correctly estimate the positions of the constituents they really represent — the rich.

“How Bubbles Look From the Inside” considers how you could tell if you were living inside a news bubble, cut off from actual reality. Day-to-day, you probably couldn’t. But the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion reminds us that a fantasy world is vulnerable to sudden shocks from events that are too big to spin.

and you also might be interested in

As President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage faces predictable opposition (in spite of its popularity — another one of those dysfunctions of democracy), the public should educate itself about the realities of minimum-wage life. If you didn’t read it when it came out in 2001, I suggest picking up Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, where she makes three attempts (in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota) to find entry-level jobs and live on her wages for a month.

Middle-class people have trouble grasping the reality of what economists call poverty traps: when you can’t raise enough money to live cheaply. If you don’t have security-deposit-plus-first-month’s-rent for an apartment, you’ll have to rent a motel room week-to-week. It won’t have a kitchen or refrigerator, so you’ll have to eat fast food. Maybe the only car you can afford guzzles gas. Or you can’t afford a car at all, so you can’t get to the better-paying job opportunity. At Ehrenreich’s lowest point, she’s working seven days a week and can’t find a food bank that is open when she can go.

Ehrenreich has a tough time even though she has many advantages: She’s white, healthy, and physically fit. Low-wage jobs are plentiful during the boom at the end of the Clinton administration. She only has to support herself, not a child or parent. Because she’s only trying to survive for a month, she doesn’t face the unpredictable-but-unavoidable challenges that eventually derail even the thriftiest minimum-wage budget: illness, injury, car repair, or toothache. As you read, you’ll simultaneously sympathize with Ehrenreich and realize (as she does) that real minimum-wage workers have it much worse.

And while Ehrenreich takes pride in her ability to work hard and keep up, she quickly realizes that her Ph.D. brain doesn’t stand out. No manager or co-worker ever says, “You’re really smart” or “You pick this up fast.”

Ezra Klein explains why Obama can’t make a deal with Republicans. Here’s a clear case of a Republican saying that a deal would be possible if only Obama would accept X. Informed that Obama accepted X some while ago, he still says there’s no deal.

Tod Kelly compares Portland, Oregon to a nearby city in Washington, concluding that people actually like paying taxes if it buys them visible public amenities.

If you’re stuck for examples of “wasteful government spending”, you can always pick on some science project, because it’s easy to make them sound stupid. If there’d been an NSF in colonial American, somebody would have denounced that wasteful grant to fund a guy flying a kite during a thunderstorm.

The economy added an unexpectedly high number of jobs in February and the unemployment rate fell to 7.7%, the lowest number in four years. But Fox News found a way to spin this gold into straw.

New research indicates that global temperatures are higher than they’ve been in 4,000 years and are near an 11,000-year high. (That would be the highest temperatures ever, if you’re a young-Earth creationist.)

Even that understates the severity of the situation, because the real problem is the speed of change, not the absolute temperature. The NYT brings in Penn State climatologist (and Climategate smear victim) Michael Mann for comment:

Dr. Mann pointed out that the early Holocene temperature increase [12,000 years ago] was almost certainly slow, giving plants and creatures time to adjust. But he said the modern spike would probably threaten the survival of many species, in addition to putting severe stresses on human civilization.

“We and other living things can adapt to slower changes,” Dr. Mann said. “It’s the unprecedented speed with which we’re changing the climate that is so worrisome.”

The picture explains it:

Steven Lloyd Wilson captures how so many fans of Orson Scott Card’s fiction feel about his ever-uglier political activity: sadness, puzzlement, revulsion. I’m a firm believer that the artist is not the art, and that a lot of world’s great achievements were probably created by people I wouldn’t choose to hang around with. (Yeah, Frank Miller is probably a fascist, but I still like Dark Knight Returns.) At some point, though, what I know about the author starts to interfere with my appreciation of the work. Card has reached that point. I wish I knew less about him.

Continuing the human-interest theme: NYT Magazine has a brilliant feature on an aging physics professor with previously harmless levels of cluelessness and self-delusion. Then an online-romance scam pulls him into a drug-smuggling plot.

A new study claims that religion may help criminals rationalize their crimes. I like the interpretation of Slate’s Justin Peters: It’s not that this is the Great Definitive Study — it’s based on a small sample and blah-blah-blah. But the idea that prison ministries help rehabilitate criminals is also based on pretty flimsy research.

As that Bureau of Prisons report put it, while “religious programs in the correctional setting have been the single most common form of institutional programming for inmates,” nobody really knows whether those programs are effective.

You know you’re in trouble when your defense is that you miscalculated your opportunism.

That’s more-or-less where Jeb Bush is on immigration, which is supposed to be his signature issue. For years, he’s been projecting an image as the reasonable Republican, the one most likely to forge a workable compromise with Democrats. This week we saw that the image is the point, not the policy.

Bush’s book Immigration Wars came out Tuesday, and the shocker was that his proposal — legal residency for undocumented immigrants, but no path to citizenship —  is more conservative than bipartisan Senate framework that came out in February. (It calls for “a tough but fair path to citizenship”.)

But as soon as he’s questioned about it, Bush flip-flops, saying that he could support a path to citizenship. Explanation? “We wrote this book last year, not this year.” In other words, at the time the book was written, the Republican nominee’s immigration proposals (self-deportation) were so extreme that Bush could stake out a centrist position without calling for citizenship. But by the time the book is out, the center has moved. So Bush moves too. He has never really been for or against citizenship; he just wants to be in the center.

So this whole discussion has nothing to do with immigration; it’s about running for president.

Rand Paul does an old-fashioned talking filibuster, holding the floor of the Senate for nearly 13 hours. Eric Holder responds with one word:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American citizen not engaged in combat on American soil?” That answer to that question is no.

I’m torn about Paul’s filibuster. Many of the points he was making were points I’ve made here: It’s very dangerous to allow the executive branch to assemble a “kill list” without oversight from somebody who doesn’t answer to the President. (Even a secret “star chamber” court would be better, if it had independent judges.)

But Paul was also phrasing his questions in ways that made them unanswerable. (Holder’s version puts in key caveats, like “not engaged in combat”.) At a time when well-armed Americans — many of whom seem to have Paul’s sympathy — threaten revolution if the political process doesn’t go their way, the President can’t categorically swear off military operations inside the U.S.

Last month, Elizabeth Warren was expressing her concern that “Too big to fail has become too big for trial.” This week, Eric Holder basically admitted she was right:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.

So when you set out to regulate the banking system, your very first principle should be not to let any bank get too big to regulate.

The Menendez prostitution scandal is looking more and more bogus, vindicating news outlets that refused to break it.

OK, everybody knows that news stations sometimes edit tape to make a public figure look bad. But a 4-year-old?

March 11, 2013 – 1:27 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

How Bubbles Look From the Inside

Somehow, no matter what team I root for, the referees favor the other one. It’s one of the great mysteries of my life. How is that even possible?

I mean, mostly I root for teams in my area, so the refs could have a regional prejudice. But once in a while some team on the other side of the country catches my fancy, and the referees persecute them too! How do they even know? It’s not like I announce on Twitter: “New team 4 me. GO 9ERS!” (Like I’d make it that easy for them.) But somehow they figure it out. Even in the college bowl season, where I’ve never heard of half these teams and sometimes I’m not even sure myself who I’m rooting for until the middle of the second quarter, it’s just inevitable that some bogus pass interference call in the last two minutes is going to give the game to the other team.

Why me? What did I ever do to them?

Deep in their hearts, all sports fans have these thoughts. But for most of us, reason eventually wins out. Sooner or later, no matter how convincing it feels, the International Conspiracy of Telepathic Refs in All Sports becomes too unwieldy a theory to take seriously. “OK,” you reluctantly admit, “maybe I do have a perceptual bias that makes all of Kobe Bryant’s best moves look like traveling. Maybe I have a memory bias that clings to those plays at the plate where the replay showed my guy was clearly safe and forgets all the bad calls that went the other way. Maybe that’s what’s happening really.”

It’s hard to accept, like the first time you hear that the world isn’t flat and the Australians are actually standing upside-down. But after a while it’s the only thing that makes sense. (In weak moments, though, when the red light goes on even though the puck obviously didn’t cross the line, I still nurse the fantasy that someday in a dark smoky bar in Bangkok, a renegade ref on the run will explain to me how it all works.)

Something similar happens in politics. No matter who you root for, it’s pathetically obvious that the media favors the other side. If you’re conservative, you believe that the Liberal Media covers up incredible Obama scandals like Fast and Furious or Benghazi, not to mention oldies-but-goodies like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. If you’re liberal, it makes you crazy how conservatives can get completely baseless stories into the news cycle, like the Menendez prostitute thing or the ACORN pimp scam. David Atkins expressed the common liberal frustration:

The “story” about Menendez bubbled up through the right-wing “news” site The Daily Caller and gained traction from there in the traditional media.

It reminds me of the time that some liberal hacks paid off people to lie about a Republican Senator, the story “broke” on Daily Kos, and then the entire media world talked about it for months.

Oh wait. That didn’t happen, because it would never happen. The Washington press is wired for Republican control, and that includes the credibility given to alternative media sources.

Another media-bias notion popular on the left is false equivalence, where any story about Republican wrong-doing also has to mention some Democratic sin, no matter how trivial, so that the journalist can conclude that “both sides do it”, even if both both sides actually don’t do it.

This week’s false-equivalence story was the liberal war on science, which balances the conservative war on science. You see, a handful of liberals share popular conservative anti-science views (19% don’t believe in global warming) and there are even some issues where a fringe of liberal environmentalists or anti-corporatists reach beyond the facts (like the bogus vaccine/autism link). Even though none of these views have the slightest influence on Democratic politics or Obama-administration policy, they are totally the same as, say, Republican denial of global warming or evolution.

So let’s take for granted that (like sports fans) political partisans across the board feel persecuted by the media, or at least by the portion of the media that isn’t clearly on their side. From there, it’s tempting to dismiss the whole issue of mainstream media bias. But that might be false equivalence: What if some part of the media really is biased? (I mean, occasionally one team really does get the short end of the calls.) How would you know?

Increasingly, media has gotten polarized into self-contained liberal and conservative orbits. If you’re a liberal, you watch MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interview people from The Nation or American Prospect. If you’re a conservative, Fox’s Sean Hannity is telling you what the Washington Times or Breitbart.com just discovered. The worldviews you get are so diametrically opposed that they can’t both be right. So — unlike in sports — you know that there is at least one set of biased refs out there. But which one? Or both?

Once you get inside one orbit or the other, almost everything you hear confirms what you’ve already been told. But how could you tell if it’s all a delusional bubble? What do bubbles look like from the inside?

Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf is arguably part of the liberal bubble, but recently he posed exactly the right question: Who best equipped readers to anticipate the outcome that actually happened?

Most of the time, a news bubble has the resources to cover up its mistakes. So if One-Sided News announces that something is the Biggest Scandal Ever, and then the scandal doesn’t catch on with anybody else, OSN can explain that it’s all being covered up by Other-Sided News. OSN might have predicted from the outset that the other OSN would stonewall, and so the non-scandalousness of the scandal merely emphasizes how deep the scandal goes.

But some events are just too big to spin, so those are the ones to focus on. Friedersdorf argues that when you do that, you’ll see that there is a conservative delusional bubble unmatched by anything on the left. This puts conservatives at an “informational disadvantage” in their competition with liberals. (Mitt Romney’s Benghazi blunder in the second debate, for example, probably happened because he believed what he heard on Fox.)

Friedersdorf focuses on the recent coverage of the Chuck Hagel nomination, where conservative pundits kept reporting signs of Hagel’s support beginning to fracture, while liberal pundits consistently predicted a bumpy ride that would eventually arrive at its destination (which is what happened).

But a story of that middling size could come from Friedersdorf’s selection bias. Maybe there are stories just as big where the informational disadvantage runs the other way, but they just don’t pop to his mind.

So let’s look at a much bigger shock: Barack Obama got re-elected. Right up to the moment polls closed, Dick Morris was predicting a Romney landslide, and many other conservative pundits agreed. (This election-night liveblog captures the full conservative shock as the votes come in.) They had elaborate explanations of why the polls were skewed in Obama’s favor. Karl Rove kept his denial going even after most of the votes were counted.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver’s readers saw pretty much the election they expected. Silver had prepared them for what actually happened.

We’re closing in on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which has put another shock back in the news: Saddam had no WMDs. That was a shock even to the mainstream media, which suggests that the MSM had a conservative bias going in to the war.

As the war went on, the Bush administration consistently argued that the MSM was biased against the war; it was ignoring the good news out of Iraq, and focusing only on the bad. Again: Who prepared you for what really happened? If the Bush administration view had been right, people who believed the MSM account of the war would have been repeatedly surprised by American success in Iraq. Eventually, the peace and prosperity in Baghdad would have been too obvious to spin away.

Quite the opposite: the MSM’s Iraq reporting was consistently too positive. When the shocks came, they were bad ones. Again, the mainstream media was too conservative, and the Fox News part of the media was that much worse.

How can you tell if you’re living in a bubble? A bubble is like an earthquake zone. Life rolls along smoothly for months at a time, and then there is some huge shock.

The next time you feel the Earth shake, take a look over at the other end of the spectrum and see how they’re doing. If they’re OK, consider the possibility that they might be living in the real world.

March 11, 2013 – 11:45 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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Who do representatives represent?

Earlier this month, a study by political science graduate students at Berkeley and the University of Michigan uncovered a fascinating fact: By a considerable margin, candidates for state legislatures think the voters of their districts are more conservative than they actually are.

Maybe it’s not surprising that conservative candidates would overestimate the conservatism of their districts; we all want to believe that our ideas are popular, and it’s human nature to hang around with people who agree with you. But strikingly, even liberal candidates overestimate the popularity of conservative views.

The results are summed up in these two graphs:

They’re a little hard to read, but gist is that if you ask politicians how much support universal health care or same-sex marriage has in their district, and then compare that result to polls of actual voters, conservative politicians underestimate the public’s support for these liberal proposals by about 20 points — approximately, the authors note, the difference between California and Alabama. And liberal politicians underestimate by a smaller, but still significant, margin.

Most politicians appear to believe they are representing constituents who are considerably different than their actual constituents.

This happens despite the fact that polling has become ubiquitous and relatively cheap compared to other campaign expenses.

in an era when correctly ascertaining district opinion would represent little burden for most politicians, American politicians appear to operate under massive misperceptions about their constituents’ demands that they make little effort to correct.

The authors also tested a fairly extreme conservative proposal: “Abolish all federal welfare programs.” Nationally, only about 13% agree with this statement. But conservative politicians, on average, think almost 40% of Americans agree, while liberal politicians imagine that 25% do.

Maybe this generalized myopia explains why universal background checks on gun buyers are hard to pass, even though polls consistently show 70-90% of the public supports them. A background-check proposal may not pass in Minnesota, despite a local poll showing 72% public support. (79% favor the idea in Washington state and 90% in Ohio.) A Republican Minnesota legislator simply knows that such a result can’t be true.

“There is a lot of opposition,” said Cornish. “I think the survey is bogus. If you have legislators who believe that 70 or 80 percent were in favor of this, you would think they would vote for it.”

You would, wouldn’t you?

Similarly, polls consistently show large majorities in favor of reducing the deficit by closing tax loopholes that favor the rich or cutting defense rather than Social Security or Medicare, but Congress seems to be leaning the other way.

The authors didn’t investigate the cause of this pro-conservative perception bias, attributing it mostly to political mythology like Richard Nixon’s “silent majority”. But Salon’s David Sirota wonders if politicians are in fact answering a different question: Maybe they’re not estimating public opinion in their districts as a whole, but support among the people they actually represent — the wealthy. Being wealthy themselves, most politicians enter politics “unfamiliar with their constituencies”. Then things get worse.

Ensconced in a bubble of conservative-minded corporate lobbyists and mega-donors, they come to wrongly assume that what passes for a mainstream position in that bubble somehow represents a consensus position in the larger world.

The electoral process, of course, is supposed to be the panacea – it is supposed to pop that bubble and force a connection between the representative and the represented. However, because getting elected to office is now less about town meetings than about buying expensive television ads, even the campaign process fails to familiarize politicians with rank-and-file voters.

This would match the results in a seminal paper by Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels. 

In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents.

Maybe that’s why liberal politicians’ assessment of their constituents’ views are somewhat more accurate, if also skewed: Liberal politicians aren’t any more perceptive than conservative ones, they’re just slightly less responsive to the wealthy.

March 11, 2013 – 10:44 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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.

March 11, 2013 – 10:02 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Taking Chances

[Political economy] does not treat the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end.

— John Stuart Mill,
Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1830)

In life, we take chances on one another. We trust, and we behave in trustworthy ways. Not always; not with everyone. But much more often than the cynical and unflattering views of human nature and interaction would predict. And when we do, it turns out that we thrive; at the least we do better than when we do not trust anyone.

— Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011)

This week everybody was talking about the Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday about whether to strike down one of the bill’s key sections. There’s a fairly narrow legal point at issue, but the arguments about that point set off much wider arguments about racism, voter suppression, and federalism.

A little history you may already know: After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment was added to the Constitution. It’s short and to the point:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

That worked for a while, but then the southern states figured out how to circumvent it via the Jim Crow laws, which set up a variety of procedural hurdles that white-supremacist local officials could use to keep blacks from voting.

In the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court started overturning discriminatory laws, but it couldn’t keep up with white-supremacist legislatures. That’s why the Voting Rights Act of 1965 contained Section 5: States or towns with a history of voter suppression (explained well here and pictured in red on the map) would need prior federal approval before they changed their voting procedures. In the pre-clearance hearing, they’d have to establish that the change would not have the effect of disenfranchising minority voters.

Just last year, Texas’ Voter ID law was blocked because the people who did not already have the mandated ID were disproportionately Hispanic, and the IDs were harder to get in parts of the state where many Hispanics lived.

Everybody recognizes that it’s an extreme step for the federal government to treat some states differently from others. But the 15th Amendment empowers to Congress to enforce the right to vote “by appropriate legislation”. The argument is over what’s appropriate.

In the past, the Court has found the VRA appropriate, given the problem it was trying to solve. However, John Roberts has never liked the VRA and clearly believes it isn’t appropriate any more: Now that blacks in the South vote — sometimes in higher percentages than whites — he clearly believes they can protect their right to vote through the ordinary channels that protects minorities in other states. He asked:

is it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?

My personal answer would have been “Well, duh.” But Roberts apparently believes this is a crushing point.

His attack is part of a larger strategy: On the surface it may look like you could solve Roberts’ problem by extending Section 5 to cover the whole country. But then Roberts could question Section 5 as too broad: How can it be appropriate to interfere in the affairs of states that don’t have a history of disenfranchisement? (He made precisely that argument when he was in the Reagan administration.)

One thing that is clear is that the nature of disenfranchisement has changed. In the Jim Crow era, whites disenfranchised blacks because they were black. Current voter suppression efforts have a partisan angle: Republicans disenfranchise blacks and Hispanics because they are likely to vote for Democrats.

The race/party relationship is particularly pronounced in the South. In Alabama, for example, Romney won 84% of the white vote and Obama 95% of the black.

and the Violence Against Women Act

which passed the House and will be re-authorized as law. I can guess what you’re thinking: “Seriously? This is what a victory looks like these days?” I mean, women also managed to keep the right to vote (in spite of the National Review) and to own property without their husbands’ approval. Pop the champagne!

The VAWA didn’t used to be controversial, for the obvious reason that nobody (in public, at least) is for violence against women. It was last reauthorized in 2005 without a lot of fanfare and signed by that notorious leftist George W. Bush. The Senate passed it this time 78-22 — the 22 all being white male Republicans — but then it got hung up in the House. House Republicans objected to three new provisions: extending the domestic violence protections in the law to same-sex couples, giving temporary visas to battered immigrant women who entered the country illegally, and letting courts on Native American reservations try rape cases.

I haven’t been able to fathom whether opposition was based on substantive objections, or just reactions against buzzwords: illegal immigrants! lesbians! Indians judging white people!  (That was a weird one: Senator Grassley really said “on an Indian reservation, [a jury is] going to be made up of Indians, right? So the non-Indian doesn’t get a fair trial.” I don’t know whether anybody asked him if a Native American can get a fair trial from a white jury.)

Ordinarily, Speaker Boehner won’t let a bill come to the floor unless a majority of the Republican caucus supports it — that’s called the Hastert Rule — but I think he realized that the Tea Party lemmings were headed for a cliff on this one, so he arranged for the Senate bill to get a vote after the Republican alternative failed. All 199 Democrats and 87 Republicans voted for the Senate bill, with 138 Republicans against.

But we should be talking about Detroit’s emergency manager

Think of it as the municipal equivalent of being sold into slavery to pay your debts.

Under Michigan’s emergency manager law (which existed before Governor Snyder, but got much more draconian during his administration), if a city or town gets into sufficiently difficult financial shape, the governor can appoint an emergency manager whose powers supersede ordinary politics. The elected officials become empty suits, contracts with the unions don’t count any more, the manager can sell parks or other municipal properties to whomever for whatever he can get.

It has happened to several small-to-medium-sized Michigan cities before, but now the state is taking over the big enchilada, Detroit.

The voters rejected the law by referendum in November, but the legislature just passed it again — with a clever gimmick that shields it from repeal by referendum. Add in gerrymandered state legislature districts, and the law becomes virtually voter-proof.

Everyone should be paying attention, because this is one scenario for the death of democracy: Well-to-do people move to suburbs and gated communities, leaving the poor behind in a city with a crippled tax base. The state cuts aid for local things like schools and waits for a recession to put the city in financial trouble. Then the state takes it over and throws out the elected officials.

Who thought this up? A think tank funded by billionaires.

Indiana has passed its own emergency manager law. (Indiana’s emergency managers can void union contracts to resolve financial problems, but they can’t raise taxes.) Other Republican-controlled states may follow.

and the larger implications of Justice Scalia’s “racial entitlement” remark

which ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser explained. In the oral arguments on the Voting Rights Act (see above), Justice Scalia brushed off the wide majorities (98-0 in the Senate) that reauthorized the VRA in 2006 by saying

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

(Millhiser has the longer version.) I’m sure you can fill in your own objection to the idea that voting is a “racial entitlement”. But the subtext of his statement is that legislators who secretly disapprove of the VRA nonetheless vote for it because they are intimidated by the threat of being accused of racism. (Conservatives often complain about the power and unfairness of accusations of racism, as if this were a bigger problem than racism itself.)

Appearing on the Daily Show, Rachel Maddow gave her interpretation of Scalia’s remark: He’s a troll.

He knows it’s offensive. He knows he’s going to get a gasp from the court room, which he got. And he loves it. He’s like the guy on your blog comment thread who is using the N-word — “Oh did I make you mad? Did I make you mad? Did I make you mad?” — he’s like that.

But Millhiser’s interpretation is more sinister. One justification for abandoning judicial restraint is that the political process is broken. In such a case, the judge views himself as the last line of defense against injustice. In that context, Scalia’s logic plugs into some other popular notions on the Right, namely Romney’s 47% and the idea that Obama bought the election by giving out favors to “the takers” in society.

Millhiser’s analysis:

it’s not hard to predict how a judge who agrees with both Romney’s view of welfare and Scalia’s view of when judges must destroy democracy in order to save it would react to the modern welfare state. With his racial entitlement comment, Scalia offered a constitutional theory that would allow movement conservatives to strike down the entire American safety net.

To me, it’s interesting where Scalia doesn’t see a broken political system unable to reverse injustice. He favors unlimited corporate political spending and rejects attempts to overrule entrenched corporate entitlements, like the essentially infinite copyright that Disney has on Mickey Mouse.

But I wrote about what capitalism is doing to us

It’s kind of a multiple-book review called Nobody Likes the New Capitalist Man.

and you also might be interested in …

The sequester started. For the next week or so it’s easily reversible, but the House shows no interest.

The New Yorker’s John Cassidy has a good summary of the Bob Woodward flap.

Mark Hurst pictures Google Glass as a giant step down the road to universal surveillance.

I know that Congressman-Gohmert-said-something-stupid could be a weekly feature, but this stood out:

Slavery and abortion are the two most horrendous things this country has done but when you think about the immorality of wild, lavish spending on our generation and forcing future generations to do without essentials just so we can live lavishly now, it’s pretty immoral.

I suppose if you accept the unBiblical and very-very-weird theological idea that fertilized eggs have souls, abortion could be in a class with slavery. But the debt?

First, I question whether any purely monetary event could be as immoral as slavery (or the Native American genocide, which Gohmert seems to have forgotten). And second, I go back to Warren Mosler’s point: All the goods and services produced in the future will be consumed in the future. Our grandchildren will not be sending stuff back in time to pay for our “lavish” lifestyle, any more than we are sending stuff back to 1944 to pay for World War II.

And finally, if lavish living were the problem, the obvious solution would focus on those living lavishly: the rich. Instead, Gohmert’s party wants to cut food stamps.

Oh, and one more thing: If we’re really worrying about future generations, shouldn’t we focus on global warming instead? In a true fiscal emergency, a future government could renounce its debt. But it can’t renounce its atmosphere.

You know those arguments we have about guns? We could have people study those questions and report back to us. Oh wait — we started to do that and the NRA made us stop.

Noted fake-historian David Barton is branching out. He used to lie about the Founders and religion. Now he’s lying about the Founders and guns.

Molly Ball: Five false assumptions of political pundits.

March 4, 2013 – 1:15 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Nobody Likes the New Capitalist Man

A number of insightful recent books and articles point out various pieces of the following picture:

  • People are fascinating bundles of benevolence and selfishness.
  • A well-designed market can channel people’s selfish tendencies into actions which, in the aggregate, achieve beneficial social ends.
  • Our economic theory models markets, not people, so only human selfishness is relevant. Homo economicus is entirely selfish.
  • Because the conditions that nurture benevolence are invisible to market theory, an “optimized” market system may inadvertently poison benevolence. In other words, market theory may create the perfectly selfish people it postulates.
  • For-profit corporations are artificial entities designed for the market. Consequently, they are defined to be the perfectly selfish, totally profit-driven players market theory postulates.
  • “Good management” means training each employee to internalize the values of the corporation.
  • Top managers are valued for their ability to “make the tough decisions”. In other words, they eliminate all human values other than profit from their decision process.
  • Increasingly, all the rewards of the corporate system flow to those at the top.

Put all that together, and you see that we have created a system that trains us to be bastards, and rewards us according to how well we have managed to stamp out our benevolence.

When you put it that way, it sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it?

Let’s start with the upside of this vision: If our economic system is making us into worse people than we would otherwise be, then we could be better people and live in a nicer world if we just stopped making ourselves worse. This is not the utopian vision of the “new Soviet man“, a society-centered being who will spontaneously appear (for the first time in human history) after the revolution. It’s the far more modest observation that human beings have benevolent as well as selfish tendencies, and that creative system-builders could figure out ways to make use of human benevolence and nurture it.

That’s the uplifting message of The Penguin and the Leviathan by Yochai Benkler. Benkler says that through most of history, big cooperative projects only happened through “the Leviathan” — the state, exercising top-down power to make people play their parts. (Picture slaves dragging blocks to build the pyramids.) With capitalism comes the alternative of “the Invisible Hand” — the market, in which many individual decisions can add up to something big. (Think about how we wound up with lots of personal computers rather than the “big iron” IBM originally offered.)

Most of our political debate is about the Leviathan vs. the Invisible Hand: Will we get things done through government or by manipulating the incentives of the market?

(One hybrid observation doesn’t get enough attention: A corporation or cartel can dominate a market to the point that it essentially becomes a government, usually an unelected and unaccountable one.)

Anarchists have long claimed that another choice is possible: voluntary cooperation. But until recently, it was hard to find examples on scales larger than a barn-raising.

Then came the open-source movement, which Benkler identifies with the Penguin, the logo of the open-source Linux computer operating system. The Internet grew up together with a host of open-source projects created and maintained by volunteers: Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and eventually Wikipedia. Each in its own way defeated corporate-sponsored for-profit competitors. (Some, like Linux, eventually drew in corporate support, but on their own terms. IBM pays employees to contribute to Linux, but IBM still can’t own Linux.)

Benkler doesn’t claim that we could live in a complete open-source utopia; only that the principles that make open-source projects work have unexplored potential. Many people in our society are starved for opportunities to express their inventiveness, skill, and creativity in ways that do not pay them money, but win them the admiration of a peer group that shares their values. Similar motivations could complement monetary incentives more broadly.

He reviews much of the recent research into cooperation, reaching this conclusion:

In hundreds of studies, conducted in numerous disciplines across dozens of societies, a basic pattern emerges. In any given experiment, a large minority of people (about 30 percent) behave as though they really are selfish, as the mainstream commonly assumes. But here is the rub: Fully half of all people systematically, significantly and predictably behave cooperatively. … In practically no human society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly.

The bulk of the book explores non-internet examples of how these principles play out in Japanese management, in community policing, in politics, and elsewhere. He concludes by offering principles for “growing a penguin” — designing a system that nurtures cooperation rather than incentivizing selfishness.

One of Benkler’s political examples — the get-out-the-vote strategy of the Obama campaign — is examined in more detail in The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg. It turns out that who people vote for may be determined by self-interest, but whether they vote isn’t. Nobody really believes their single vote will decide the election, so purely selfish people will stay home and pursue their other interests. The most effective method of motivating marginal voters, it turns out, is to appeal positively to their civic pride, while subtly reminding them that their non-voting will be a matter of public record. In laboratory experiments, this pride/guilt combination is more effective than paying people to vote.

Staying positive for a bit longer, Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, which I have reviewed before, finds that online gamers hunger for the chance to be a respected member of a questing community. She reports that many gamers feel their online persona is a better person than they are in their offline jobs and relationships. Like Benkler, she examines ways that the design principles of games could be used to encourage cooperative and altruistic behavior in real life.

Now let’s look at the negative side, starting with a book that walks the line between seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor: Assholes, a theory by Aaron James. A sociopath is someone who lacks any moral core, but uses other people’s moral scruples to gain an advantage over them. An asshole, according to James, is different: He has a moral sense, but his moral vision comes with an unassailable sense of entitlement. So, for example, he understands perfectly why other people should wait their turn in a line, and is honestly incensed when they don’t. But he also feels — not occasionally, but constantly — that his special situation or status entitles him to cut to the front.

Like Benkler, James recognizes that most people aren’t assholes. (If they were, there would be no lines. We’d all just shove our way to the front.) But late in the book he considers whether a society can reach a tipping point, where there are so many assholes that the rest of us are driven to behave like assholes just to avoid constant exploitation.

From there he considers how capitalism can devolve into asshole capitalism. Suppose some social change causes the system to send

a powerful entitlement message, for instance, that having ever more is one’s moral right, even when it comes at a cost to others. As asshole thinking and culture spread and take hold, the asshole-dampening systems that used to keep assholery in check become overwhelmed. Parents start preparing their kids for an asshole economy, the law is increasingly compromised, the political system is increasingly captured, and so on. As some switch sides while others withdraw, cooperative people find it more difficult to uphold the practices and institutions needed for capitalism to do right by its own values. … Society becomes awash with people who are defensively unwilling to accept the burdens of cooperative life, out of a righteous sense that they deserve ever more.

James applies this model to various countries and concludes: “Japan is fine, Italy already qualifies as an asshole capitalist system, and the United States is in trouble.” (One symptom of Italy’s trouble: Even Silvio Berlusconi’s supporters understood that he was an asshole. Nobody cared.)

And that brings us to Gus DiZerega’s blog post Capitalism vs. the Market. In some ways this belongs to the same genre as my own Why I Am Not a Libertarian — insights that begin with a critique of a simplistically appealing libertarian worldview. DiZerega views the fundamental libertarian error as upholding corporate capitalism because markets are good. DiZerega agrees that markets are good, but corporate capitalism is something else entirely.

Markets, he says, are ways that producers and consumers send each other signals about supply and demand. The market doesn’t tell you what you should do, just what it will cost you. For example, the slave market won’t tell you whether or not you should free your slave, just how much money you’ll be passing up if you do.

But in corporate capitalism the market usurps the decisions once made by humans.

To succeed in managing a capitalist institution a person must always try and buy for the lowest price and sell for the highest before any other value enters in.  Any corporate CEO allowing other values to trump this principle will see his or her decisions reflected in lower share prices.  If these prices are much affected the corporation risks the likelihood of being taken over in an unfriendly acquisition, its management ousted, and financial values once again elevated above all others. In other words, as a system of economic organization capitalism defends itself against richer human values by penalizing and expelling people who to some degree put them ahead of profit when making economic decisions.

In theory corporations are owned by people. But in practice you cannot remove your capital from a corporation. All you can do is sell your shares to someone else. By selling, you disassociate yourself from practices you may consider immoral, but you do nothing to end them. Think of slavery again: You can free your slave, even if it lowers your net worth. But if instead you own shares in Rent-a-Slave, Inc., all you can do is give or sell those shares to someone else. No slaves are freed when you do.

So if I don’t want to profit by addicting people to drugs that kill them, I can sell my shares in tobacco companies. But the tobacco companies themselves roll on. To the extent that they are profitable, the new owner of my shares will make money and gain power in society. Even individually, power accrues to people who have no values beyond profit.

The libertarian ideal is of people who are free to live by their own values, trading with each other without coercion.

Capitalism is different. It is the gradual overwhelming and destruction of all values that are not instrumental. … Once capitalism exists non-instrumental values are actively selected against, and receive little opportunity for expression.  Human beings become profit centers for corporations, and nothing more. … Capitalism cannot distinguish love from prostitution.

I wish DiZerega had said “corporate capitalism” rather than just capitalism, but otherwise I agree. As I put forward two years ago in Corporations Are Sociopaths, we have created entities that embody all of our worst traits. James and DiZerega are pointing out what then happens to us and our society when those created entities are allowed to dominate.

March 4, 2013 – 11:34 am Categories: Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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.

March 4, 2013 – 10:13 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment