Reading Humanae Vitae

You may not have noticed, but we are in the middle of Natural Family Planning Awareness Week. Each year, the Catholic Church dedicates this week to educating its members about acceptable and unacceptable methods of birth control.

By its own admission, the Church hasn’t been doing this very well — particularly in America, where Catholics use the pill, condoms, and other unacceptable methods at the same rates everybody else does. Meanwhile, the acceptable method — so-called “natural family planning”, in which couples keep track of the woman’s fertility cycle and only have sex during the infertile periods — is more-or-less ignored. Huffington Post reports:

A 2011 survey shows that just two percent of American Catholic women at risk of unintended pregnancy rely on the method. And an overwhelming majority of U.S. Catholics reject the church’s ban on artificial birth control.

HP then quotes the lamentations of Bishop Rhoades of Indiana:

Sadly, the majority of Catholics still do not know about Church teachings on married love nor understand why the Church considers artificial contraception immoral. This, tragically, is due to inconsistent education and formation since 1968.

There is, of course, another possibility: Maybe American Catholics know and understand the Church’s position perfectly, but the Church is just wrong.

And that is how Bishop Rhoades and I reach a point of agreement: We both think people should study this issue. That’s why I went back read the papal encyclical letter at the root of it all: Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), written by Pope Paul VI in 1968.

Like Supreme Court opinions, papal encyclicals make much better reading than you might expect. Like the Court, the Vatican knows that it’s far more effective to persuade than to give orders (even if you retain the right to give orders). So pontiffs typically write in a clear voice that does not go over the heads of ordinary people.

Papal encyclicals can also surprise those of us who know the Catholic Church mainly through it’s public image — a point I made seven years ago when I looked at the stunning (to me, at least) economic liberalism of John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens.

So I came to Humanae Vitae willing to be surprised. But I also came with expectations/prior opinions/biases, which I might as well spell out:

  • I’m generally skeptical of anyone’s attempt to speak for God, no matter what institutional roles they play or how well-intentioned they are. To me, the highest marks of divine inspiration are clarity of thought and surprising simplicity. So if your opinion doesn’t make sense no matter how hard I try to understand it, claiming the authority of God isn’t going to impress me.
  • I’m also skeptical of claims that specific cultural practices are “natural”. I don’t reject the theoretical possibility of finding an authentic “human nature” and a culture that is most in tune with it. But people have an unfortunate tendency to believe that the way they grew up is natural, and that subsequent developments are artificial. (Extreme example: Old folks who think it’s natural to make a phone call but unnatural to text or use Facebook.)

Humanae Vitae considers contraception purely in the setting of a married couple, that being the only setting where the Church considers sex permissible.

It starts well, demonstrating that Pope Paul understood what was at issue. The pro-pill position he considers is not a licentious strawman, but something very similar to what I put forward in my defense of abortion. The Pope asks:

could it not be accepted that the intention to have a less prolific but more rationally planned family might transform an action which renders natural processes infertile into a licit and provident control of birth? Could it not be admitted, in other words, that procreative finality applies to the totality of married life rather than to each single act?

That is followed by a discussion of marriage in general. Unlike my wife and I (who decided to be childless), the Pope believes

[marital] love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being.

It’s fine if married couples turn out to be infertile — they’re still married — but

each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. … Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one’s partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life.

(It’s this metaphor of God as a “partner” in the conjugal act that Stephen Colbert irreverently lampooned as “a divine and ineffably beautiful three-way”.)

Now, you might think from that passage that any attempt to avoid pregnancy was illicit. But Pope Paul provides an out:

married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.

So understanding the human body well enough to predict when a woman is infertile is “natural”, but understanding it well enough to know that metabolizing certain substances will interrupt the menstrual cycle is “unnatural”. And understanding a man’s role in the process well enough to design an effective condom is “unnatural” too.

You lost me.

The birth control pill — like everything science makes — doesn’t work by invoking demons; it depends on our understanding of natural processes. A process isn’t unnatural just because it wasn’t understood in the Middle Ages.

It may seem unnatural, but that seeming depends on the technology you grew up with. If you grew up hunter-gatherer, plowing and planting seems unnatural. (Shouldn’t a plant’s seeds fall where God drops them?)

Having established his point (to his own satisfaction), the Pope then adds secondary arguments like this: Birth control

could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law.

Here, though, the problem is not that the Pill is unnatural, but that it works. If “natural” methods worked just as well, they’d cause the same problems.

The problem here is that the Church has strayed off its turf. I can easily imagine putting forward a moral vision of marriage, sex, and procreation that puts more stress on social, community, and spiritual interests and less on individual convenience. But Humanae Vitae doesn’t do that. Instead, it postulates a natural/unnatural distinction that is itself artificial.

Either nothing about civilization is natural — including our ability to count and chart cycles — or all of it is. There is no point in evolution where “natural” happened or stopped happening.

So yes, Catholics, use this week to educate yourself about the Church’s teaching on contraception. You will find it based on shoddy thinking. To attribute these ideas to God is blasphemous.

July 23, 2012 – 12:56 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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Peak Oil? Maybe Not

The hardest thing about living in the reality-based community is that you have to change your mind when new facts emerge. Lately, after a several-year flat period, global oil production has started growing again. The trend has reached the point where people who backed the Peak Oil Theory a few years ago are publicly changing their minds.

Here’s what George Monbiot wrote a few weeks ago in The Guardian:

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. … Peak oil has not happened and it is unlikely to happen for a very long time. A report by the oil executive, Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun.

In Foreign Policy, Steve Levine is proclaiming “new age of fossil fuel abundance” and assessing the global winners (the U.S. and a variety of “new petrostates”) and losers (Russia, Venezuela, and OPEC).

My cynical first reaction was to check the sources for phony Exxon-funded think tanks, but that’s not what I’m finding. This looks legit to me.

Economists vs. ecologists. I view peak oil as one more chapter in the decades-long debate between ecologists (who know that in the natural world exponential growth always ends, and so worry that unlimited economic growth makes unsustainable claims on the planet’s resources) and economists (who have two unshakeable beliefs: handling scarcity is exactly what markets are designed to do, and human ingenuity is the one resource we will never run out of).

It’s an asymmetric debate: The economists are almost always right and we muddle along without catastrophe. But catastrophes being what they are, the ecologists only need to be right once. If civilization does go off a cliff someday, it won’t be much comfort to remember all the previous cliffs we avoided.

So a typical ecologist/economist debate goes like this: The ecologist says, “We only have X amount of commodity Y, and we’re using up Z of it every year. So unless we change our ways, it will all be gone in X/Z years, give or take. And if consumption keeps growing exponentially, it will all be gone even faster.” And the economist says, “Chill. In X/Z years we’ll have so many new discoveries, new technologies, and new ways of doing things that it won’t matter.”

Bad bets. The debate starting getting mass-media attention when the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1972. The report didn’t actually predict the world’s oil would run out by 1992, but that was the easiest headline to write. Those headlines generated a lot of panic, and (needless to say) 1992 came and went a long time ago. Every resource-depletion debate since has included an economist crowing about The Limits to Growth.

The classic economist-beats-ecologist story is the Simon/Ehrlich bet. In 1980, economist Julian Simon made the kind of put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge that probably ought to happen more often: Pick any five commodities you want, Simon offered, and I’ll bet you that in 10 years they’ll be cheaper than they are now. Paul Ehrlich took the bet, picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten — and lost. All five were more plentiful and cost less in 1990, and Ehrlich paid up.

Peak oil. So why did anybody think oil production would peak?

Production from individual oil fields follows a well-established pattern: It starts slow, ramps up as more wells are sunk, then eventually peaks and declines. The production peak usually happens when about half the oil is still in the ground.

In the 1950s, geologist M. King Hubbard asked the question: What if we think of the United States as one big oil field? He used the single-oil-field model to predict U.S. oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, which it did.

Hubbard extended his model to predict a world peak in 1995, and his protege Kenneth Deffeyes later updated it to get a peak sometime around 2005-2010, which for a while seemed to be accurate. The prediction graphs looked like this:

But recent production has moved above the Hubbard curve. At least for now, the price spike of 2008 seems to have done what the economists say price spikes are supposed to do: encourage conservation and stimulate production.

So now we’re seeing world oil production graphs like this:

(Notice production flattening out from 2005 to 2009.) Meanwhile, the supply of natural gas in the U.S. is booming (thanks mainly to fracking), and the price has collapsed.

Why didn’t the prediction hold? All along, the speculative part of the Peak Oil theory was that you could extrapolate from the well-supported model of oil field depletion to the depletion of oil on the whole planet. The fact that Hubbard did so well with his U.S. peak prediction made that problem seem smaller than it was.

The economists’ argument was always that as the price went up, new fields and production techniques that hadn’t been tried (because they were too expensive) would come into play. The ecologists responded, “Why didn’t that happen in when U.S. production peaked?”

In retrospect, the answer to that question is obvious: It didn’t happen because there was somewhere else to go. When production peaks in one oil field or even one country, the easiest thing to do isn’t to invent new techniques, it’s to take your old techniques somewhere where they still work. But when there’s nowhere to go, you get creative.

Global warming. In some ways, peak oil was a convenient theory for environmentalists: If we need to shift away from oil anyway, then why not deal with global warming at the same time by developing more sustainable energy sources? (Of course, the debate could have gone the other way: If we’re running out of dirty oil, then maybe we should use even dirtier coal.)

Now, environmentalists who worry about civilization’s carbon footprint are on their own; they won’t get any help from the geologists. Monbiot observes:

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.

More and more it looks like that’s what needs to happen: Somebody who owns a king’s ransom of oil in the ground needs to be persuaded to leave it there. How exactly are we going to do that?

The resource we really do seem to be running out of is the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide while maintaining a biosphere productive enough to support a human population now expected to grow beyond 10 billion. That resource is not conveniently expressible as the price of a commodity, so it’s not clear exactly how markets will deal with it.

So the ecologist/economist debate will continue. And the ecologists only have to be right once.

July 23, 2012 – 11:01 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Everybody’s talking about the Dark Knight shooting. That’s getting plenty of coverage without me, so I’ll focus on three reactions: the gun control discussion it re-ignites (somewhat to President Obama’s consternation), the bizarre fantasy that an armed crowd could have taken the shooter down with less loss of life, and the religious-right view that blames such disasters on separation of church and state. (Seriously. And BTW, the victims are in Hell if they weren’t Christians.)

Until the shooting, everybody was still talking about Mitt Romney’s taxes, Republicans manufactured a gaffe by selectively quoting something sensible President Obama said, and Ann Romney may or may not have called us peons “you people”.

But the main articles this week will be about longer-term issues. In spite of things I’ve encouraged you to believe in the past, it looks like Peak Oil isn’t really happening, at least not anytime soon. And I take advantage of the Catholic Church’s Natural Family Planning Awareness Week to look back on the papal encyclical that is causing all the problems.

I’m moving slowly this morning, so the first article (on the papal encyclical) probably won’t show up until about 11 eastern time.

July 23, 2012 – 8:31 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Shady Lane

I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns.

Woody Guthrie, who would have turned 100 last Saturday

This week everybody was talking about … Romney’s finances, Penn State, and the LIBOR scandal

The Romney thing is complicated enough to need its own article, but the Penn State buzz is simple: Penn State hired former FBI director Louis Freeh to investigate the Jerry Sandusky pedophile scandal, and his scathing report came out this week. He found

total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.

Those senior leaders include the late Joe Paterno.

LIBOR deserves its own article, but I don’t have a good handle on it yet. Basically, bankers at Barclay’s have been accused of manipulating the most important interest rate in the world, but they’re just the first ones to get caught. Bloomberg says this could be

one of the most costly and consequential [scandals] in the history of banking

and holds out the prospect that this time bankers could go to jail. If things proceed as usual, though, a period of public breast-beating will be followed by calls for amnesty to put this all behind us.

… and nobody was talking about the anti-austerity demonstrations in Spain


Spain is in an austerity spiral: The economy suffers from lack of demand, which caused a recession. The recession caused a budget deficit by increasing unemployment and decreasing revenue. To close the deficit, the government cut spending and raised taxes, which shrunk demand further. To the government’s surprise, that didn’t close the deficit, so a new austerity package is needed. They go around this vicious circle again and again. Spain has seen four austerity packages in seven months.

The picture is from Tuesday, when a multi-day march of coal miners reached the capital, where the miners were joined by thousands of other protesters.

American mainstream media refuses to take European populism seriously, having totally bought the German bankers’ view that austerity is inevitable and the people will just have to get used to it. If that’s how you look at the situation, demonstrations are just big temper tantrums unworthy of notice. If, on the other hand, you think Iceland-style debt repudiation is a serious option, then Spain is having a real debate you should pay attention to.

… but I decided to write about anarchy and shaving.

  • When Centralized Institutions Fail, Is Anarchy an Answer? Following up on themes from last week’s review of Twilight of the Elites, I look at Carne Ross’ The Leaderless Revolution.
  • What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism. Forty years ago, the shaving problem was more-or-less solved, but the patents were expiring and nobody was going to get rich any more. So now we have “improved” razors that are no better, but ten times as expensive. How come that never comes up when we talk about unleashing the magic of the free market?

Meanwhile, you might also find this interesting

Maybe I was wrong in thinking that ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion was too good an offer for the states to refuse. It seems that red states like Texas would rather renounce federal funding and cripple their hospitals than take care of sick poor people.

FDR is still relevant today:

The next time somebody tells you they’re going to solve the healthcare problem by limiting malpractice lawsuits, explain to them that Texas already did. It doesn’t work.

If Amazon starts delivering the same day, can any local retailer survive?

I don’t know why I’m picking on Texas this week. That’s just the stuff I happened to run across. Here, Paul Begala reads the crazy stuff in the Texas Republican platform.

Let’s end on a bizarre note, with a clam licking salt off a table:

July 16, 2012 – 1:27 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

When Centralized Institutions Fail, Is Anarchy an Answer?


Last week I raised the topic of institutional failure: Why is institutional trust and trustworthiness failing more-or-less across the board? Corporations, political parties, the various layers and branches of government, churches, academia, the banking system, the media — none provides a solid base to stand on while we reform the others.

Two leaps. Then I made a leap you might not agree with: Even though each institution has its own failure story, I decided to look for some common cause, which I called a UFT (Unified Fuck-up Theory). I chose a tongue-in-cheek label because I realize I’m getting uncomfortably close to conspiracy-theory territory. (In Valis, Philip Dick wrote, “It certainly constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.”) But the alternative is big-coincidence territory, and I’m not comfortable there either.

I followed that leap with another, which I’ve since come to call the Agatha Christie Hypothesis: If the clues don’t add up, it means that the culprit never made it onto your suspect list. So the common cause is likely to be something we instinctively don’t question.

Chris Hayes went down that path in Twilight of the Elites and pointed his finger at meritocracy. The certainly satisfies the ACH: Literally nobody had been saying “Our problem is that talented, hard-working people get ahead.”

As I laid out in more detail last week, Hayes argues that meritocracy justifies a level of inequality that has created a new ruling class, i.e., the elite have enough power to game the system that there is no longer anything like the level playing field meritocratic theory assumes. As a result, our institutions are run by an entrenched, hyper-competitive, self-serving elite that feels entitled to whatever it can grab. We have re-created the noblesse without the oblige.

In The Leaderless Revolution, former British diplomat Carne Ross adds another unexpected culprit to the suspect list: representative democracy.

Sheep and Shepherds. The basic idea of representative democracy is that a world of sheep and shepherds is fine, as long as sheep get to elect their shepherds. Presumably, the sheep will choose good shepherds, who will stay good because the sheep could replace them.

Ross criticizes this model from both sides: First, the options offered to the people are too limited and too easily manipulated by those with money and power. My favorite expression of this situation comes from the Cake song “Comfort Eagle”

Some people drink Pepsi, some people drink Coke.
The wacky morning DJ says democracy’s a joke. 

More prosaically, Benjamin Barber wrote:

We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, [but] the powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.

In November, for example, the American people will elect either Romney or Obama. How many important issues does that choice take off the table?

Second, the job of “good shepherd” is impossible in such a complex, diverse, inter-connected world. Even with the best intentions, no one can “represent” a nation like the United States or the United Kingdom. The very attempt (as Ross knows from personal experience) leads you to adopt grossly oversimplified worldviews that create more problems than they solve.

Representing the UK at the UN. The stories from Ross’ diplomatic career are worthwhile whether you end up agreeing with his conclusions or not.

The British Foreign Office is an elite Chris Hayes would recognize. A hyper-competitive process selects Ross and a few others out of thousands of applicants.

We were a chosen elite, given to expect that in due course we would become ambassadors and undersecretaries, the most senior exponents of our country’s wishes. I was elated to join this exclusive club and happy to undergo the many compromises membership in this group entailed.

Then the recruits are indoctrinated into the groupthink of the Foreign Office, which affirms the diplomats’ superiority: Only they know the classified information. Only they have unfettered access to the real experts — each other.

Eventually, Ross becomes head of the Middle East section of the British mission to the UN, where he and his American allies design and maintain the trade sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — sanctions that were not only based on false assumptions about Iraq’s WMDs, but whose burden fell mainly on the Iraqi poor. Ross now accepts demographers’ calculations that the sanctions caused an “excess mortality rate” of half a million Iraqi children.

In other words, half a million children died. Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own responsibility. This was my work; this was what I did.

In what way, Ross now wonders, did he “represent” the people of the United Kingdom? Given the information and responsibility he had, how many of Ross’ sheep would have let hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children die in exchange for a small theoretical increase in their own safety? Might they instead have shown some compassion and courage? And if ordinary citizens of both countries had met in the same room, might they have come up with completely different options?

Rather than a series of gates through which information and power flow, representative democracy has become a series of walls: The people are cut off from their diplomats, and the diplomats in turn are cut off from the foreign peoples their actions affect.

Similar stories could be told in every country, about every aspect of government policy.

Renouncing the pact. So Ross is attacking government from a different side than conservative libertarians do. Libertarian rhetoric focuses on the tyranny of governments interfering with sovereign individuals, and minimizes any collective or social responsibility. “Society” is just a myth that justifies the few ruling the many.

Ross is saying almost the exact opposite: Not only do we have collective responsibilities to do things like take care of the planet, help each other, establish justice, and live together in peace, but those responsibilities are too important to hand off to leaders. He wants us to renounce what he calls “the pact”:

We vote, they act; we get on with our lives, they protect. … For most of us, politics is a spectator sport.

He cites the 2008 Obama campaign. Obama called for and got unprecedented participation from individual citizens. But

The political end of his campaign was not change itself, but for him to be elected to deliver change — a subtle but crucial distinction, and the disjunction at the heart of representative democracy.

Grey anarchy. Ross uses the word anarchy in a positive sense, but he means something subtle by it. Usually we talk about anarchy in a black-or-white way. We have a government or we don’t; anarchy is achieved by overthrowing government and not replacing it.

Ross’ anarchy has more grey in it. Government isn’t evil, just hopelessly inadequate. We need to figure out how to work around government — rather than through it — in order to fulfill our social responsibilities.

If government cannot provide for the stability, safety and just arbitration of our common affairs, who can? The answer is both radical and discomforting. For there is only one alternative if government cannot successfully provide: We must do so ourselves. Self-organized government is one term; another, rather more loaded term, is anarchism.

His model is more the everybody-pitch-in model of Wikipedia than the every-man-for-himself model of conservative libertarianism. Rather than electing the next savior, activists should focus on creating new arenas of interaction and trust where creative self-organization becomes possible.

The goal is to make the leaders become the followers: Rather than change society through politics, directly create social change that the politicians will have to react to.

Methods, not programs. Predictably, Ross’ prescriptions are on the vague side, and are more about methods than programs. (If he said, “Pass my program” he’d be back in the representative democracy model, offering himself as a leader.) He ends with nine principles for action, but unfortunately they take more space to unpack than I have. So I’ll have to do my own summary.

The ideal anarchic action, from Ross’ point of view, is something that will start a wave: It tackles the problem in some small but direct way, other people will see it, and they will be inspired to imitate. It is nonviolent and builds new trustworthy relationships. It will achieve something even if it doesn’t totally catch on. It focuses on those who are suffering most, and asks what they want rather than imposing a solution on them.

Gandhi’s salt march, Rosa Parks not giving up her seat — these are both cited as good examples.

Or maybe we could look at Ross’ current project, which he describes in this interview on the Colbert Report: He’s working an Occupy Wall Street bank.

July 16, 2012 – 12:42 pm Categories: Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (2)

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What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism

A couple months ago, I ran into an article on TechDirt that linked to another guy’s post on his personal blog, both making the same ridiculous point: Shaving technology hasn’t really improved since World War II.

Anybody who watches sports in real time (when you can’t fast-forward through the commercials) knows this is crazy. For decades, shaving has had a “revolution” every two or three years: disposables, cartridges, comfort strips, double-blade, triple-blade, and now even 5-blade cartridges. Each revolution makes shaving a little more expensive, but it achieves the perfect comfort and safety that the previous revolution fell short of.

Or so the ads say.

But these guys on the internet were saying that all the revolutions were just marketing nonsense, and that I (and just about every other male on the planet) had been taken in by it. Shaving itself hadn’t gotten any safer, easier, or more comfortable since the last few bugs were worked out of the double-edged safety razor, a technology that is more than a century old.

All these “improvements”, they claimed, had only two purposes:

  • to create a patentable technology that would protect the manufacturer from generic competition for another 20 years or so.
  • to provide a marketing gimmick that would make men fork over big bucks for a product no better than one they could buy cheaply.

That couldn’t be right. Could it?

Reclaiming the way of my ancestors. It’s actually not that simple to find out. My local supermarkets and drug stores sell double-edged blades if you look hard enough for them — they get one hook in the whole shaving aisle — but the razors they fit into are nowhere. No worries, though, that’s what the internet is for: I got a perfectly functional razor (in the old butterfly style my Dad used) for about $20. That lone hook in my supermarket carries 5-blade packs for $2. Above it, rows of 8-packs of Gillette Fusion cartridges go for $32.

Do the math: 40 cents apiece vs. $4 apiece. Even for somebody like me (who goes bearded in the cold half of the year) that could add up.

But what about the experience and the quality of shave? You have to hold the handle at a slightly different angle (because the double-edged blades sit perpendicular to the handle rather than being angled like the cartridges), and that takes a day or two to get used to. After that, in my opinion, the “improved” 21st-century razor is no better and might even be worse.

Connoisseur shaving. Once you start browsing through shaving web sites, you quickly discover the other side of the market: straight-razor shaving, like the old-fashioned barbers did before King Gillette (his real name, apparently) invented his double-edged blades. (BTW, it turns out this great American entrepreneur was a utopian Socialist.)

Today, straight-razor shaving is a way for a man to establish his connoisseur identity, and it carries a comparable price tag. A high-class straight razor can set you back hundreds. Then you need a leather strop, and the perfect brush and bowl to mix your special shaving soap, and on and on.

Upper-crust malls have a chain of shops called The Art of Shaving, many of which include a barber chair where a straight-razor professional can demonstrate proper technique.

Does it make a difference? I got the cheap cousin of the classic straight razor — a $19 arm-and-handle that holds half of a double-edged blade. Straight-razor shaving turns out to be like driving a manual transmission or baking a cake from scratch. It takes some learning, there’s a certain satisfaction to mastering it, and even if you never do it again, you’ll have a deeper appreciation of what’s really going on when you shave.

Here’s the deeper appreciation I got: All blade shaving comes down to covering your face with something slick, and then dragging something sharp across it. You can improve by making the slick stuff slicker or the sharp thing sharper, but pretty soon you’ve gone as far as you can go. Beyond that, it’s all marketing.

Profit margins. So let’s review. Shaving has basically been a solved problem for at least half a century. By the 1970s the patents on those solutions had expired, and nothing of importance has been invented since. In a sensible world, all men would know this and the factories would focus on delivering cheap high-quality double-edged razor blades.

That didn’t happen because it wouldn’t have made anybody rich. Since a standardized, patent-expired product like the double-edged razor can be made cheaply by anybody, the profit margin is too small to buy Super Bowl ads or pay stupendous CEO salaries.

So instead, the market has gone two ways. The mass market has kept research labs busy churning out phony “improvements” that generate market-protecting patents and give advertisers something to work with. And vast amounts of money have been spent persuading men (successfully!) that there’s something new worth paying up for and something primitive about the double-edged safety razor.

For men who have caught on to that game, a connoisseur market sells expensive shaving paraphernalia to bolster an overclass identity. So whether you’re a mass-market Gillette-Fusion-type guy or a connoisseur wielding a buffalo-horn-handle Damascus-steel-blade straight razor, you support a market with high profit margins.

Computers, razors, and public schools. This isn’t a personal-care blog, so I didn’t tell you any of that because I think you care about shaving. Instead, I believe there’s a lesson here about capitalism and politics.

Whenever we have a public discussion about the virtues of the free market, we always end up talking about computers. Computers keep getting better and lighter and faster and cheaper because that’s what the market does; it forces everybody to improve or die.

So we’re always promised that if we turn the magic of the free market loose in some new area — if we get rid of public schools, say, and let the market educate our kids, or if we stop regulating healthcare and let hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies compete freely — we’ll see the same incredible progress we’ve seen in computers. Everything will get better and cheaper in ways no one can imagine now.

But how do we know that the education market or the healthcare market won’t turn out to be like shaving? What if, instead of low prices and spectacular improvements, we get high prices funding marketing campaigns that obscure and denigrate the low-profit-margin solutions that already exist and actually make sense?

Realistically, it could go either way. Neither the computer market nor the shaving market is an invention of some political propagandist. Both exist in the same economy.

Capitalism is double-edged that way. Sometimes the market inspires scientists and engineers to build a better mousetrap. But sometimes it’s the advertisers who turn out to be slicker and sharper than the rest of us.

July 16, 2012 – 10:20 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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Believe in America, Mitt

Now available on t-shirts. Click the image.

When Mitt Romney wrapped up the Republican nomination in April, I framed the next phase of the campaign in terms of four narratives: pro/anti-Obama and pro/anti-Romney. The anti-Romney narrative was:

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.

In the last few weeks we’ve seen Obama’s people establishing that narrative and Romney’s people floundering to counter it. The threads of that story are Romney killing American jobs while he was at Bain Capital and Romney maneuvering around taxes by running his money through Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and Switzerland.

When this stuff came up in the Republican primaries, Romney toughed it out by saying his critics were jealous of his success, he did nothing illegal, and he wasn’t going to talk about it.

Those answers worked then for two reasons:

But Romney should fire whoever told him the same answers would work now. The Republican establishment may have whipped Gingrich and Perry into line, but they can’t make Obama back off. And general-election swing voters do see tax evasion as a moral issue. It’s not enough for Romney’s high-priced accountants to follow the letter of the law. When the rich wriggle out of taxes by using special dodges not available to working people, that’s not clever, it’s sleezy.

Plus, it undermines the pro-Romney narrative, which I phrased like this:

This country is going the wrong way and Romney is a smart executive who knows how to turn things around.

Sure, Romney is smart. But is he Steven Jobs smart or Bernie Madoff smart? Swiss bank accounts, Bermuda shell corporations, deals where Romney walks away with all the money and everybody else gets screwed … what does that sound like?

Once you get past first impressions, the argument over Bain turns technical, which is never good for a politician trying to dispel a bad odor. (That’s what Lee Atwater meant when he said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing” — a line Romney misquoted and apparently doesn’t understand.) Romney’s defense against the job-exporter charge is that Bain outsourced to Mexico and China only after Romney left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics. That answer temporarily convinced New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who, in a remarkably balanced analysis, concluded that Obama’s attacks were false … until the next shoe dropped and he had to write an update.

The next shoe was the Boston Globe uncovering filings with the SEC in which Bain listed Romney as CEO up to 2002 and said he made a six-figure salary for what he now claims was a no-show job. Also, when Massachusetts Democrats challenged his residency prior to his 2002 run for governor (partly because Romney had been avoiding state taxes by listing his Utah home as his primary residence), Mitt claimed he was merely “on leave” from Boston-based Bain, making Massachusetts his real home.

So where Romney lives, who he works for, and the location of his money all vary depending on who’s asking and why.

Shifty. Sleezy. And in retrospect, maybe not as clever as he thought.

On Friday, Romney broke out of his bubble and let himself be interviewed by every major news network other than MSNBC. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t understand the playbook for such situations. Unlike, say, Barack Obama trying to settle the Jeremiah Wright controversy or the Clintons responding to Gennifer Flowers’ charges, Romney offered no deeper insight into himself and no broader frame for the story as a whole. Instead, he just put his own face behind the unconvincing denials his people had already offered.

Two media responses to the Romney interview blitz sum up how ineffective it was. Rachel Maddow (of the spurned MSNBC) laughed at the situation:

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And Forbes’ T. J. Walker captured how little Romney had settled in 35 Questions Mitt Romney Must Answer About Bain Capital Before The Issue Can Go Away.

Meanwhile, there’s some evidence that the Bain story is moving the polls in swing states, where Obama is running ads like this one.

But at this stage, the main thing is the narrative, not the polls. Come November, both Romney and Obama will need a closing argument to convince those last few undecideds. That argument will have to build on the stories being established now. “I’m a smart executive” is not going to do the job.

July 16, 2012 – 9:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s Sift has three articles, so there won’t be as many short notes as usual. I had planned two:

  • a discussion of Carne Ross’ new book The Leaderless Revolution, which pairs nicely with what I talked about last week, Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites. Both books are looking at the broad failure of our institutions and finding its roots in the dark side of something we believe in deeply. Hayes targets meritocracy, and Ross attacks the whole notion of representative government. Ross uses his experiences as a British diplomat to argue that the world has become too complicated to turn our responsibilities as citizens over to leaders. He argues instead for a more anarchic, more directly participatory way of addressing our problems. (Yes, Ross is an Occupy Wall Street guy.)
  • a lighter piece that I think makes an important point: What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism. Discussions about the free market always end up focused on computers, where the market has stimulated better performance for less money. For some reason they never focus on shaving, where a series of phony “revolutions” in technology have justified higher prices for no improvement in performance. In the course of my research, I end up reclaiming the inexpensive tool of my ancestors, the double-edged safety razor. (And since I know someone is going to notice: The bearded picture above is how I look in the winter. In the summer I’m clean-shaven.)

But this week’s news-network buzz about Mitt Romney’s finances and business career was such a perfect illustration of what I was talking about last April (in The Narratives of November) that I just had to comment. So there’s a third article: Believe in America, Mitt.

The shaving article should go up in an hour or so, and I expect the complete Sift to be up roughly noonish on the East Coast.

July 16, 2012 – 7:45 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Roll Over, Mr. Madison

While our legislative branch, the foundational pillar of our republic, is the least trusted institution in the country, our standing army and police forces are the most. Increasingly, we trust the men with the guns, not the men in suits. The sound you hear is the founders rolling over in their graves.

Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites (2012)

This week everybody was talking about … the heat

Records were set all over the country. But unlike the DC snowstorm of 2010, it had nothing to do with global warming.

… and the Higgs boson

I love discussions where nobody knows what they’re talking about, including me. I caught up a little by consulting the Instant Egghead at Scientific American.

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You can also get some  general background on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider from this 2008 rap by Alpinekat (a.k.a. Katherine McAlpine).

… and the political fallout from the ObamaCare decision

Some argued that the ruling was good for Romney, because it energizes the conservative base. But I agree more with Alec MacGillis:

Judging this the better outcome for Romney means seriously understating just how brutal the law’s rejection would have been for Obama. It would have allowed Romney to argue—to crow to the skies, surely—that Obama’s entire first term had been a giant zero.

From Day 1, the right-wing drumbeat against Obama has been that his presidency is illegitimate: He’s not really American, he doesn’t understand America, he doesn’t follow the Constitution, and so on. John Roberts saying ObamaCare is constitutional makes that look like the crank theory it has always been.

Of course, you fix a crank theory with another crank theory, so Roberts’ betrayal sparked wild conspiracy theories on the Right.

My theory: Roberts doesn’t want to go down in history as the Chief Justice who broke the Supreme Court. As much as people have always complained about the Court, it used to be seen as above partisan politics. But controversial decisions like Bush/Gore and Citizens United have put that image in serious jeopardy. If a party-line vote threw out the biggest Democratic legislative accomplishment of the last half century, with a majority opinion based on a new legal distinction invented precisely for that purpose, the Court might not recover.

The Court doesn’t control any money or soldiers, so it needs its reputation. If they’re just nine over-the-hill political hacks who can’t be fired, then why shouldn’t presidents defy them? Why wouldn’t some future President Nixon just burn the tapes?

[I covered the ruling itself last week. Harvard’s Einer Elhauge has an enlightening refutation of Roberts’ reading of the Commerce Clause.]

Meanwhile, the Partisans made fun of people who now want to leave the country to avoid socialized medicine.

… but I decided to write about institutional failure and Leviticus

  • In Search of a Universal F***-Up Theory. It’s not hard to come up with specific theories explaining why our political institutions are dysfunctional, our religious institutions corrupt, our economic institutions rapacious, our media institutions untrustworthy, and so on. But why is all this failure happening at once? (And no, I don’t think it’s the Internet, the Koch Brothers, or the end times.)
  • The Economics of Leviticus. You can’t have a culture-war conversation without somebody quoting Leviticus. What if you couldn’t have an economic conversation without somebody quoting Leviticus? That would change a lot of things, right down to our basic understanding of property.

Meanwhile, you might also find this interesting

Verizon has opened the next front in the corporate-personhood battle: It says that the FCC’s net neutrality rules are unconstitutional because

Broadband networks are the modern-day microphone by which their owners [e.g. Verizon] engage in First Amendment speech

Weird. I thought I was engaging in First Amendment speech, and that Verizon’s broadband network was just carrying that speech to some of my readers. But no, Verizon is speaking. Can you hear them now?

The Obama campaign is making hay out of Romney’s offshore accounts and his refusal to release tax returns before 2010.

Here’s why Romney might carry Pennsylvania: Under the new voter-ID law passed by the Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor, 9.2% of registered voters don’t have the appropriate IDs yet, including 18% of voters in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia. That’s more voters than Obama’s margin in 2008.

One of the mysteries of polling this year is why Romney is sometimes ahead in the Gallup tracking poll, while Obama is consistently ahead in polls of swing states and close in states Romney has to carry, like North Carolina. It seems unimaginable that Romney could win the national popular vote and not carry North Carolina handily.

Possible answer: Gallup’s methodology systematically undercounts non-whites.

Meanwhile, polling wonks will love Nate Silver’s attempt to model the influence of the economy on presidential elections.

A good, practical talk about teaching:

The Myth of the Super Teacher from EdWriters on Vimeo.

I was going to write my own decline-of-Justice-Scalia article, but Salon’s Paul Campos did it for me. Back in the day, Scalia was the kind of conservative a liberal could admire. He viewed the world through a different lens, but he challenged us to raise our game. I always learned something from reading a Scalia opinion. Now, though, he just repeats what he’s heard on Fox News. It’s embarrassing.

Anybody who goes to a big 4th of July celebration must wonder: What if all the fireworks went off at once? Well, in San Diego they found out.

I spent Wednesday evening in Lowell, where the fireworks were backlit by lightning over Boston. But if I had been in Alabama Friday I could have attended a different night-time ritual: the “sacred Christian cross lighting ceremony” that culminated a conference sponsored by the white supremacist Christian Identity Ministries. Apparently this was not a hoax.

After waffling for a few days, Mitt Romney now has his position on whether an individual healthcare mandate is a tax: It’s a tax when Obama does it nationally, but it wasn’t a tax when he did it in Massachusetts. In his own words:

The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax. … The chief justice in his opinion made it very clear that at the state level, states have the power to put in place mandates. And as a result, Massachusetts’s mandate was a mandate, was a penalty, was described that way by the legislature and by me, and so it stays as it was.

Salon checks in on the Elizabeth Warren campaign. To me that race comes down to: Do you want your senator to be owned by the bankers, or not?

Here’s the difference between public and private: Public employees have a mission that goes beyond profit. Case in point: A private Florida lifeguard company fired a lifeguard for saving a life outside company territory.

Republicans want to replace ObamaCare with “patient-centered health care”. What is patient-centered health care? A phrase that tests well in focus groups. It does not refer to any specific proposal.

A legislator who voted for Louisiana’s radical new school-voucher program is now opposed to it. What changed? She suddenly realized that a “religious school” doesn’t have to be Christian. She supports freedom of religion, just not for Muslims.

Factoid discovered while researching something else entirely: The word boycott comes from Captain Charles Boycott, who was the agent of an absentee landlord in Ireland in 1880. To protest Boycott’s eviction of tenant farmers, the local community ostracized him, and workers refused to harvest the land he managed.

Come November, women shouldn’t forget what conservatives stand for.

But let’s end on a moment of cute. Pandas on a slide are like 4-year-olds who are too round and fluffy to get hurt.

July 9, 2012 – 1:05 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Post a comment

In Search of a Unified F***-Up Theory

The biggest mystery of recent years is: Why are all our institutions failing at the same time? Think about it:

  • We just had a banking crisis that required trillions of dollars of bailouts and interest-free loans to the very people who caused it and profited from it. No one went to jail, in spite of massive evidence of criminality. More-or-less nothing has been done to prevent the same thing happening again.
  • Our election campaigns have become open bidding wars. As a result, Congress is largely unresponsive to the desires of anybody who’s not rich, and the number of people who rate the “honesty and ethical standards” of congressmen as high or very high is an anemic 7% — the same rating lobbyists get.
  • The public distrusts scientists. Among scientists who study climate, 97% believe in man-made global warming. But only about half of the public does, and that’s a recovery to 2009 levels after a considerable dip.
  • The Catholic Church has been rocked by its pedophilia scandal. And the worst of it is this: When bishops found out, they uniformly protected the guilty priests rather than the innocent children. That part of the scandal goes all the way to the Pope, and there’s been no house-cleaning of implicated bishops.
  • Public expectations of presidential candidates have plummeted. In 2000, Al Gore was tagged with being a “serial exaggerator” after saying a few mostly true things. This year, much of Mitt Romney’s stump speech consists of publicly debunked lies, and it’s not an issue. Voters shrug and say that all politicians lie.
  • The Supreme Court has become partisan. People have always complained that the Court’s legal philosophy was too liberal or too conservative. But only since John Roberts and Sam Alito replaced David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor have major cases routinely been decided on 5-4 party-line votes. Today, if the president who appointed you was Republican or Democrat, that’s the side you take. The shock of Roberts’ ObamaCare decision wasn’t his legal reasoning, it’s that he crossed party lines.
  • In discussions about baseball’s Hall of Fame, the main topic isn’t how good players were, it’s whether they cheated or not. It’s very possible that the biggest stars of the 1990s — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa — won’t be in the Hall.
  • Both Presidents Bush and Obama embraced the doctrine that the president can rain death on countries we are not at war with. If Americans get killed in the process, too bad. American citizens might even be the target.
  • Trust in journalism has collapsed. Again and again, the press has been the watch-dog that didn’t bark: Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, the housing bubble, and so on. Plus, they’ve increasingly practiced he-said/she-said journalism that punts the question of what is true. Newspapers are closing, reporters are being laid off — and yet, at the top, the marquee journalists remain the same no matter how many stories they screw up. The marquee pundits keep their jobs no matter how often they are proven wrong.

It goes on and on. All eras experience some institutional failure, but usually when one institution fails, you can take refuge in another: When Al Capone had city government in his pocket, the feds took him down. When the political process denied justice to blacks, the courts provided it. When Nixon’s White House was corrupt, Congress, the judiciary, and the press performed well.

What’s bizarre and unsettling about our era is that there seems to be nowhere to turn. Why is that? What’s making all our institutions suspect at the same time?

Devil theories. If you’re a certain breed of conservative Christian, what’s going on is obvious: The Devil and his minions are stepping up their malignant activities in preparation for the End of the World. And various secular subcultures have their own devil theories: the Koch Brothers, the worldwide socialist conspiracy, and so on.

While I’m no fan of the Kochs, all these one-big-conspiracy theories seem nutty to me. (I’ll bet lots of eras had evil billionaires.) But I do have to give them this: A devil theory is an answer on the scale of the problem. 

Conspiracy theorists respond to our attempts to be rational with: “What? You think this is all a coincidence?”

They’ve got a point. This situation begs for a UFT (Unified Failure Theory, or, as I sometimes call it, Unified Fuck-Up Theory), something that pulls it all together. But could we get a non-crazy one?

The meritocracy did it. If you read classic mysteries, you’ve seen this situation before: The clues link up here and there, but don’t make sense when you put them all together. Usually that means that the murderer is somebody who is off your radar completely, either because you’re trained not to see them (the butler) or you trust them implicitly (the vicar or the victim’s loyal-but-mousy sister).

That’s the approach Chris Hayes takes in Twilight of the Elites. Whatever ties these failures together must be something we’re incapable of doubting. Otherwise we’d have seen the connection by now.

What is it that all our smartest people believe in implicitly? The meritocracy. The principle that the most talented, hardest working people should rise to the top.

And while belief in the meritocracy is self-serving for those who do make it to the top, it’s more than that: All the social progress of the last half-century — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — justified itself in meritocratic terms: If you are good at what you do, you should rise, even if you don’t look like the people currently on top.

But what if elite failure — bankers who can’t bank, representatives who can’t represent, immoral moral leaders, and so on — is the dark side of the meritocracy?

What is meritocracy? Hayes says meritocracy depends on two principles: inequality and mobility. There is a top to rise to, and nothing but your own limitations can stop you from rising.

The problem is that the combination is unstable: When inequality passes a certain point, the people on top become powerful enough to screw up mobility. Eventually, no matter where they came from originally, the meritocratic elite comes to look on itself as a class and pursue its own interests.

The first example Hayes gives is the best: his alma mater, Hunter College High School in Manhattan.

Entrance to Hunter rests on a single “objective” measure: one three-hour test. If you clear the bar, you’re in; if not, you’re out. There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected.

Hunter’s racial/ethnic composition never matched New York City’s, but the gap has widened in recent years. The entering class was 18% black/Hispanic in 1995, but just 4% in 2009.

Why? The test-prep industry. If you’re almost Hunter quality but have money, you can train to pass the test. If you’re just barely Hunter quality and you don’t have money, you’ll get aced out.

New York’s wealthy elite has figured out how to game the system for its children. And Hunter’s selection process has not kept up because … why would it? People powerful enough to make the system ungameable are precisely the ones who want to game the system.

Entitlement. What happens when a meritocracy gets corrupted like this? The appearance of rigorous competition remains, leaving the elite with an undeserved sense of entitlement: We are the ones who passed the test, so we deserve the cookies.

Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members, it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward, and would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking, and self-dealing as those on top pursued the outsize rewards promised for superstars.

But such a ruling class would also not be as smart as it thinks it is. It might, for example, think it has come up with a totally new and foolproof way to handle financial risk — and screw it up.

It would also see success as its own justification, an attitude that Hayes connects to Enron and the mortgage bubble. The people making the most money must be the smartest, and anyone who tries to tear them down is just jealous.

Co-opting Obama. Newcomers to the ruling class really did have to jump some hurdles, and as a result they have undue faith in the class they have entered into. President Obama, for example, cannot shake his faith in the experts. Surely the bankers must be the right people to fix the banking system. The businessmen must be the right people to revitalize business. If they weren’t the smartest people in the room, they wouldn’t have made it to the top, right?

Fractal inequality. This is my favorite phrase from the book. No matter how high you rise — the 1%, the 0.1%, the 0.001% — there always seems to be a higher level where the real action is. Again, Hayes uses his own experience well: When he finally got an invitation to the Davos meetings, it seemed like evidence that he had really made it. But once there

you realize that in the context of Davos attendees, you are a member of the unwashed masses

And the people you look up at are the unwashed masses of an even higher level.

As a result of this fractal inequality, everybody is constantly struggling to rise higher, grasping for whatever advantage they can get, and no one reaches a position where they can relax and turn a beneficent eye to the people below.

Distance. Representative democracy was supposed to close the distance between the rulers and the ruled. Leaders were supposed to spring up from among the people, and then go off to represent them in Congress.

Again, that’s been circumvented. No one who isn’t already well connected can hope to raise the money necessary to run for Congress or just about any other major office. And so we have a huge social distance between the leaders and the led.

That distance leads to disasters like New Orleans. The evacuation worked very well, Hayes points out, for people with cars. The leadership just underestimated the number of people without cars or what they would be likely to do, even though that information was available if anyone had thought to look for it.

So that’s the picture in failure after failure: A entrenched and entitled elite, hyper-competitive within itself, but distant from the people their actions affect.

What to do? It’s a basic part of our political rhetoric that we want equal opportunity, but want the government not to try to equalize outcomes. Hayes thinks that position is naive. With sufficient inequality of outcome, equality of opportunity is impossible. Meritocracy needs some inequality (or there’s nothing to win). But too much inequality destroys the meritocracy itself. So Hayes’ solutions are all about seeking more equality of outcome.

A second approach is something I’ll explore next week: moving towards a more anarchic system, where less responsibility is delegated and less is expected or demanded of elites. The text for that discussion will be The Leaderless Revolution by Carne Ross.

July 9, 2012 – 12:37 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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