77 Cents

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

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

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

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

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

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

First observation: Who’s right about what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 7, 2012 – 1:27 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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Gays Need Not Apply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fischer was triumphant:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 7, 2012 – 11:41 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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Where the Jobs Are and other short notes

Here’s a comparison between the Bush recovery of 2003-2005 and the Obama recovery of 2010-2012. The original author’s three circles emphasize these points:

  • The Bush recovery was aided by an increase in government jobs, while government has been the biggest job-losing sector during the Obama recovery. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?)
  • The sector where the Bush recovery had its second-biggest advantage was construction. These were largely housing-bubble jobs.
  • The Obama recovery shows a sizable gain in manufacturing jobs, which was a losing sector during the Bush recovery.

Balkinization’s Jonathan Hafetz comments on an appeals court ruling that John Yoo can’t be sued for his role in the conspiracy to torture American citizens, because his torture-justifying legal opinion wasn’t “beyond debate” at the time he wrote it.

The “debate” over torture, such as it was at the time, was largely manufactured by John Yoo and others precisely to engage in conduct that the law prohibited. The court thus takes what might be described as part of a conspiracy to commit torture as the reason to insulate those responsible from liability.

Click for a larger version:

Guilt-by-association is a variant of the ad hominem fallacy:

This Sarah Palin BBQ has a big mouth and smoke coming out of her head. Who says sculptors don’t do realism any more?

Media Matters does a great job of tracing the spread of a bogus story: the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was about to legalize necrophilia for bereaved husbands.

When it comes to making serious issues both amusing and understandable, Cracked’s David Wong is getting right up there with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His latest: 5 Ways to Spot a B. S. political story in under 10 seconds.

Henry Aaron was the intellectual godfather of Paul Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with vouchers for private health insurance. Now he thinks it’s a bad idea.

When Ezra Klein questioned the wisdom of Mitt Romney reassembling Bush’s economic team and re-proposing his policies, he thought he didn’t need to remind everyone how bad the Bush years were for the economy. He was wrong.

Nicholas Kristof doesn’t usually go off over nothing. If he’s worried about endocrine disruptors, maybe we all should be.

Canada, always more sensible than the U.S., is doing away with the penny.

In 2009, three terrorist wannabees planned to put homemade bombs on the New York subway at rush hour. They were serious — collected stuff to make the bombs, picked targets, and so on.

They got arrested before they hurt anybody, were held in ordinary jails, and charged with breaking actual laws passed by Congress. The ringleader was convicted Tuesday in the same federal court in Brooklyn that any other federal offender might see. (His two friends pleaded guilty — without torture — and testified against him.) He faces the possibility of a life sentence in the same kind of penitentiary any other criminal would go to.

Somebody want to explain the Gitmo military tribunal thing again? We needed to circumvent the whole American system of justice because …

Funny or Die lets Republican women tell us where they want government: Not in their banks or their classrooms — in their vaginas.

I think it was Picasso who said, “Photoshop is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Original Patrick Stewart knighthood photo here.

Two popular novelists joined opposite sides of the partisan divide this week. Stephen King minced no words in his Daily Beast op-ed pleading for higher taxes on the rich: “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”

Meanwhile, Orson Scott Card wrote in favor of a North Carolina constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (which is already illegal in North Carolina).

No, legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples.

It’s about giving the left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.

… The left is at war with the family, and they want control of our children’s education. That’s what those signs on the lawns are about.

I’m not making this up – it’s already happening wherever the left has complete control of education.

Regular Sift readers can easily guess that I found the King piece delicious and the Card piece horrifying. But I’m sure one reader comment is being echoed by partisans on both sides:

It’s too bad when an author I like just goes off the deep end.

Remember: Books don’t get to choose their authors. If you like the Dark Tower or Ender novels, they haven’t changed.

This is too true:

This week the moon was unusually big and bright, due to the full moon occurring at the closest point in the moon’s orbit. Here’s how it looked in Morega, CA.

May 7, 2012 – 11:24 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (5)

Poisoned Spring

The right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. … [F]ree competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated

– Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931)

In this week’s sift:

  • Jesus Shrugged — why Christianity and Ayn Rand don’t mix. Rep. Paul Ryan can’t have it both ways: He can’t be a good Catholic as well as a good Randist. The Church is right not to let him wash his cruel budget in the blood of the lamb.
  • How Understanding Should Liberals Be?  Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explains to liberals how conservatives can be good people too. But is there anything useful we can do with that information?
  • Bad Arguments and other short notes. Logical fallacies, the pyramid of refutation, and excuses conservatives use when the facts prove them wrong. Plus:  Obama jams and does comedy. MTP regulars condescend to argue with Rachel Maddow. Maybe high-fructose corn syrup doesn’t cause autism. Where to hear me Wednesday. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. It’s rare for the short-notes post to be the most popular, but Working for the Man and other short notes was, with 161 views.
April 30, 2012 – 12:34 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

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

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

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

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

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

“To shrug.”

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

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

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

To shrug?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And BeliefNet editor David Gibson elaborates:

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

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

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

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

But is he? I don’t think so.

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

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

April 30, 2012 – 12:19 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (40)

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How Understanding Should Liberals Be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 30, 2012 – 11:54 am Categories: Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (10)

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Bad Arguments and other short notes

This week’s articles are so wordy that I’m going to focus the short notes on images.

Don’t know your ad hominems from your slippery slopes? This poster can help.

Or you can show your opponents where their response falls in the pyramid of refutation.

Here’s how democracy works:

Most editorial-cartoon flow charts are funny. This one is just accurate:

I keep hoping that Obama’s pop-culture appearances will tempt Mitt Romney to prove that he’s cool too.

Obama’s stand-up routine at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was pretty good too.

Taking on the nuns at the same time they’re challenging Obama on contraception may not be the Catholic hierarchy’s greatest idea.

I don’t know what possesses people to go on TV shows where they are bound to be humiliated. Here, former Texas Board of Education Chair Don McLeroy gets interviewed by Stephen Colbert — in a segment that promotes a documentary critical of McLeroy.

The marketplace gives you great power to decide which corporate octopus will take over the world.

Rachel Maddow continues her reporting on Michigan’s loss of democracy. In this chapter, a petition to put Michigan’s controversial Emergency Manager Law up for referendum is rejected it used the wrong font size. Or did it?

And while it is a step forward for a liberal woman like Rachel to get an occasional seat at the Meet the Press table, how long will it take for male conservatives to treat her like an equal?

The tussle took a more personal turn when Castellanos told Maddow, “I love how passionate you are. I wish you are as right about what you’re saying as you are passionate about it. I really do.”

“That’s really condescending,” Maddow replied. “I mean this is a stylistic issue. My ‘passion’ on this issue is actually me making a factual argument.”

Department of Corrections: In last week’s short notes I balanced the report that high-fructose corn syrup causes autism with a link to an article by the Corn Refiners Association. Here’s a better counter-argument:

If you find yourself near Concord, MA Wednesday evening, come hear me talk to the Concord Area Humanists on “A Humanist Approach to Death”.

April 30, 2012 – 10:45 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

Story Logic

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.
April 23, 2012 – 1:28 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

The Narratives of November

All across the Commentariat, I’m hearing the same message: “The pregame warm-up is over.” The Obama vs. Romney show-down has finally arrived, so it’s time to get serious about the November election.

It’s fascinating, though, to see what “getting serious” means to different people. For some, it means getting down to the nuts and bolts of the electoral college. We actually hold 51 presidential elections – don’t forget D.C. – or even 56, once you realize that Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote for each congressional district plus two for the winner of the statewide election.

People who get electoral-college-serious are already drawing their swing-state maps, like CNN’s above, where they give Obama 196 EVs, Romney 159, and leave 183 up for grabs in 15 swing states. If you want to try your own scenarios, go to 270towin.com. (Here’s mine: Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina only go to Obama in another landslide. Ditto for Romney taking Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So I start with Obama 242, Romney 206 and eight swing states worth 90. I think it will ultimately come down to Ohio and Virginia.)

Other people get demographic-serious. These folks focus on the Latino vote, the gender gap, and the turnout of Obama’s “new voters” (mainly blacks and young people) who showed up in 2008 but not in 2010.

You can also get characteristic-serious. People’s voting choices might still be in flux, but Obama is more “likeable” than Romney (56%–27% in a recent poll), and is also seen as “more honest and trustworthy” (44%–33%).

Here’s the way I’m looking at the race: April head-to-head polls are fun, but a lot can happen before November. Unless you’re a professional campaign strategist, it’s also too early to get electoral-college-serious. That’s a game to play in October, when it merges with demographic-seriousness and you start talking about the Hispanic vote in Colorado or how the urban/rural split is playing out in Virginia.

Characteristic-seriousness is only part of the story. Nobody liked or trusted Richard Nixon, but in 1972 Tricky Dick had one of the biggest landslides ever. Nate Silver says favorability predicts the outcome in October, but not so well in April. (Maybe we talk ourselves into liking a candidate after we decide to vote for him.)

So instead, I’m getting narrative-serious. To me, this phase of the campaign is about fleshing out four stories: Why you should vote

  • for Obama
  • against Obama
  • for Romney
  • against Romney.

Come November, one of those stories is going to sound a lot more believable than the other three. Whoever benefits from that story is going to win.

The candidates’ characteristics matter, but only as the building-blocks of their stories. So Mitt Romney’s message can’t be: “You should vote for me because I’m a regular guy like you.” That loses, because we’ve all already decided we don’t believe it.

Losing campaigns are characterized by images that crystalize the unbelievability of some part of the candidate’s story: Mike Dukakis in a tank. John Kerry hunting geese. Mitt Romney trying to look like a regular guy is a similar image waiting to happen.

This didn't help.

But Romney doesn’t have to be a regular guy to win. FDR wasn’t and neither was JFK. Neither, for that matter, is Obama. So Romney could have a winning message like this: “This country is going the wrong way and Romney is a smart executive who knows how to turn things around.” People who don’t like Mitt at all might believe that story and vote for him.

Who says aristocrats can't win?

Vote for Romney. The Romney smart-executive message depends on a couple of things. The more the economy appears to need saving, the better it works. Plus, Romney has to look and sound like that guy. He needs to win the debates, and he needs some economic proposals that seem new.

Obama’s allies can throw sand in Romney’s gears in two ways: (1) By pointing out that Romney wasn’t a turn-around executive, he was a vulture capitalist who profited from deals that destroyed jobs. (2) By identifying Romney’s don’t-tax-the-rich, don’t-regulate-BP policies with the Bush administration. If Romney’s so smart about the economy, why does he sound just like George W. Bush?

Vote for Obama. Obama needs to portray himself as a reasonable guy who did well under difficult conditions, and who has kept his eye on the country’s long-term goals. He needs to contrast how the economy is now (middling) with how it was on Inauguration Day (in free fall).

No matter what the Supreme Court does with it, he needs to defend Obamacare as the only progress recent presidents have made on reforming our broken healthcare system. Make Romney (or the Court) own all the problems of the pre-Obamacare system.

Obama can also point to foreign policy successes that have no parallel on Romney’s resume: We’re not fighting in Iraq any more. We’re winding down Afghanistan. And Osama bin Laden is dead.

Romney’s allies can counter this by exploiting any bad news and blaming it on Obama. They need voters to judge the economy on an absolute scale rather than a relative one. Who cares how things were under Bush? They’re bad now.

Vote Against Romney. You should vote against Romney because he’s not on your side. His policies favor the rich because he’s rich, he’s always been rich, and the rich are the only people he understands or cares about.

A simple “he’s rich” argument won’t work, because nobody cares. Every big name in politics, Obama included, is rich by most people’s standards. But if Romney’s wealth and general stiffness can be tied to his pro-1% policies, he loses.

In the primaries, Romney interpreted every such attack as envy of his success, not resentment of his being on the wrong side. That was sufficient for a Republican audience, for whom the rich are heroes. (But even there you have to wonder what would have happened in Michigan and Ohio if Santorum had hammered economic issues rather than wandering off into Jesusland.) But he’ll have to come up with a better answer in the general election.

The Obama campaign will make sure that specific groups are reminded of the extreme positions Romney took against them when he needed right-wing support. Women will hear a lot about what Romney-supported “personhood” laws would do to contraception, and Latinos won’t be allowed to forget his self-deportation policy. These attacks will be hard to counter without feeding the Romney-will-say-anything meme.

Vote Against Obama. There are two anti-Obama messages. The one for general consumption is that he hasn’t performed well enough to deserve a second term. The economy is still bad, the deficit is high, the wars have fizzled rather than ending in victory, and Iran is still on track to get the bomb.

That all works better if there is bad news to tie it to: a new downturn, a big bankruptcy, a terrorist attack, and so on. (Karl Rove thinks Obama can be beaten on foreign policy, but it’s hard to see how that happens without some striking event.)

The second anti-Obama message needs to be carefully targeted to the white Christian population:  In Obama’s vision of America’s future, you’re not on top any more. Working-class whites in particular feel insecure and long for an imagined past. Romney needs to (subtly) cast Obama as the reason that past can’t come back.

What Works? It’s possible one campaign will just be better than the other at telling its stories. The anti-Obama story will have a ton of corporate money behind it, and that might make a difference.

But if both campaigns are competent, it’s going to come to events. If the news between now and November is neutral or positive, Obama’s stories work. But if there’s major bad news, voters may decide that Romney deserves a first chance more than Obama deserves a second.

April 23, 2012 – 1:25 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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Jobs, Hobbies, and Reflections on a Viral Post

Last week I wrote Rich People Don’t Have Jobs to point out one of the most important distinctions in American life: the one that separates the people who work out of necessity from the people who either don’t work or work purely for personal satisfaction.

Usually, a distinction that basic corresponds to a pair of one-syllable words: young/old, boy/girl, rich/poor, black/white, smart/dumb, gay/straight, and so on. People like to talk about important categories, so they give them nice short names.

But what happens when there’s a distinction people don’t talk about? Then the words are longer and sound like scientific classifications. When I was young, nobody was supposed to talk about men who love men or women who love women, so they were homosexuals rather than heterosexuals. I first heard the word gay (in that sense) in the 70s, right about the time it became OK to talk about gays.

You know you’ve really hit a taboo subject when you can’t think of a word at all. Picture Freud laboriously searching his dictionary, looking for the word that describes a boy’s lust for his mother. Sorry, Sigmund, you’ll have to coin oedipal yourself.

That’s where I was. I’m not as creative with mythology as Freud, but I suppose I could have hyphenated something: necessity-workers and satisfaction-workers, say. It would have sounded sociological, an academic distinction rather than something people butt their heads against every day.

The other approach is to be outrageous. Gay was outrageous, back when it was coined. It made boys smirk at the idea of donning “gay apparel” at Christmas, or Fred and Barney having “a gay old time” down in Bedrock. A lot of people hated the homosexual community’s appropriation of a perfectly good one-syllable word – as if homosexuality were something people should want to talk about, as if English should reconfigure itself to make those conversations easier.

I decided to be outrageous. So I called work-you-do-out-of-necessity a job and work-you-do-for-satisfaction a hobby. “Rich people don’t have jobs,” I said, “they have hobbies.”

I heard from a lot of people who hated it. (And others who loved it.) Many wanted to talk about the words rather than what they represented. Some accused me of saying that rich people don’t work. (I didn’t.) Or of denigrating well-to-do “hobbyists”. (Why anyone would feel denigrated to be classed with Warren Buffett and Tiger Woods escapes me.) There were the usual write-offs of “class warfare”. Some of the wilder comments I saw were by Facebook friends of my article-sharing Facebook friends. (One thought the point of my post was to beatify my mother and demonize Ann Romney.)

Here’s what I think is going on: America is in denial about inequality and class. It’s fine to talk (occasionally) about rich and poor, but only as a difference of degree. The one has a new BMW and the other an old junker, but they both get where they’re going. The one eats at a four-star restaurant while the other has a bag lunch, but they both eat.

What’s taboo is to suggest that there’s something qualitatively different about living with money. We’re fine with the idea that a concierge doctor will come out to see a billionaire while a waitress goes to the emergency room — a little more convenience, that’s what money gives you a right to expect. But it’s taboo to suggest that the billionaire will live in situations where the waitress will die.

If we don’t talk about those qualitative differences, though, the conversation gets distorted. Inevitably it tilts towards justifying the privileges of the rich, because they appear to be so much better at life than the working poor.

Take the situation I focused on: the necessity-driven working-class housewife versus the wealthy stay-at-home mom. Picture how each might cook for her family. All day, the less affluent one has been juggling the laundry, the chauffeuring, and the baby-minding. Running out of time, she combines the left-over hamburger from last night’s tacos with a jar of Ragu and serves a spaghetti good enough to keep body and soul together for another day.

Meanwhile the wealthy woman sends her cook home early, shops for fresh organic ingredients, and then spends all afternoon in the kitchen trying out what she’s been learning in her Italian cuisine class. The meal she produces is better in every way: tastier, healthier, more artfully presented. Proud of her achievement, she is a more pleasant dinner companion than the harried working-class mom.

If you imagine that the two women are doing the same thing, then you’re forced to conclude that the rich woman is doing it better. Not only is her product of higher quality, it’s superior for virtuous reasons: She devoted more time, searched for better ingredients, and applied more expert knowledge.

It’s that way across the board. If you imagine that necessity-driven families and surplus-enjoying families are doing the same things, it’s obvious that (on the whole) the richer families do them better. Once you accept that frame, you’ll be driven to the conclusion that wealthier families are just superior at doing the stuff life is made of. From there it’s a short jump to the conclusion that each family gets the life it deserves.

But they’re not doing the same things. In America, class differences are qualitative, not just quantitative. Rich and poor lead different lives.

College students who spend the summer manning a cash register or an assembly line are not doing the same things as the middle-aged people they work next to. Living on ramen while you finish your MBA is not the same as living on ramen from now on. Scrimping to save for your Caribbean vacation is not the same as scrimping to pay off what you owe the dentist. The “jobs” of CEOs who choose not to retire to the Hamptons (yet) bear no resemblance to the jobs their secretaries and salesmen do.

The fundamental difference between the classes in America is not the difference between steak and hamburger. It’s the difference between choice and necessity, between striving for fulfillment and striving for survival.

We need qualitatively different words to express those differences. Jobs and hobbies — not perfect, maybe, but better than any alternatives I can think of.

April 23, 2012 – 12:12 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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