The Weekly Sift

Nobody has acknowledged that
a) the bubble economies of tech and housing were not financially real,
b) we can not “recover” to a condition that was not financially real in the first place, and therefore
c) we need to start focusing on a transition to something close to reality,
which is a long ways from where we currently are.

— Charles Marohn, The Growth Ponzi Scheme

In this week’s Sift:

• Presidents and Precedents. If President Obama’s manipulation of the War Powers Resolution process stands, what might a President Perry or Bachmann build on that foundation?
• Ponziville: The Suburbs Are Unsustainable. Charles Marohn claims that sprawling suburbs are an inefficient use of infrastructure. But the problem stays hidden until the initial developments start to wear out.
• Short Notes. Funny fake news vs. scary fake news. New Yorkers notice that same-sex marriage has not destroyed civilization in Boston. Matt Taibi demonstrates how not to attack Michele Bachmann. A Pulitzer-winner fesses up to being undocumented. Without illegal aliens, Georgia reaps only a metaphorical harvest. It’s not just the music that’s synthesized, it’s the girl. The First Amendment now protects data-mining. Vermont keeps heading towards single-payer health care. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. If you want to help in the Wisconsin recall elections, here’s how.

During the last administration, I often warned Republicans not to claim any powers for President Bush that they wouldn’t want President Hillary Clinton to have. Maybe they trusted W with extraordinary powers, but I hoped it might slow them down to imagine some future Democrat tapping phones without warrants or locking people up without charges.

It never worked.

Even so, I think it may be time to take my own medicine: Sure, I mostly trust President Obama, so I haven’t been watching our involvement in Libya as closely as I might. I know there are War Powers Resolution issues and Congress should be involved to some degree. But seeing congressional Republicans play chicken with the debt ceiling hasn’t made me wish that they had more opportunities to get in Obama’s way.

Still, today’s actions are tomorrow’s precedents. Eventually there will be another Republican president, maybe sooner than I think. And if someday President Bachmann decides to invade Sweden to protect the world from socialism, shouldn’t she have to make her case to Congress? Or somebody?

Maybe it’s time to pay attention.

The Founders’ Vision of War. The Constitution divides the nation’s war-making powers. The President is commander-in-chief (Article II, Section 2), but only Congress can raise armies or declare war (Article I, Section 8).

Why did the Founders do that? They believed that standing armies tempted rulers to impose their will by force. And the US had the unusual advantage of being far away from potential enemies. So they pictured a ground-up form of defense that would only require a sizable federal army on rare occasions.

Most common threats (criminal gangs, pirate or Indian raids) a community would handle itself, maybe with the help of neighboring communities. (Picture the colonial Minutemen or the posse that goes after the bank robbers in a western.) Larger threats (big Indian raids or slave uprisings) would be the responsibility of the state militias. Only when things really got out of hand, say if we were attacked by a European power, would a federal force be needed.

And those big wars would be rare, because we were going to stay out of “entangling alliances”. In President Washington’s Farewell Address, he wrote:

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

So most of the time the President would be commander-in-chief of not very much. When tensions rose, Congress would assemble an army and decide which countries to use it against. The commander-in-chief clause made sure those armies would report to a single commander, avoiding strategy-by-committee in Congress.

(BTW: This interpretation also makes sense out of the “well-regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The people should keep and bear arms not so that they can overthrow the government — as the Tea Party would have it — but so that they don’t depend on a standing army that could be used against them.)

Rep. Lincoln. As a congressman, Abraham Lincoln opposed President Polk’s role in instigating the Mexican War. Arguing by letter with his law partner William Herndon in 1848, Lincoln wrote:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion … and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. …

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

Historical drift. The Founders’ vision slowly came apart. President Lincoln himself, facing an enemy within cannon-shot of the capital, acted on his own authority and sought congressional approval later. By 1900, the US had colonies of its own and intervened constantly in Latin America. We came out of the World Wars with global commitments and a world-spanning enemy. Now we were trying to entangle other nations in our alliances — NATO, SEATO, CENTO, OAS, etc.

Eventually, nuclear missiles threatened to destroy our cities in less time than it took Congress to assemble. So power accrued to the President because no one else was in a position to wield it.

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first major conflict the US fought without a formal declaration of war. That looked like an aberration at the time, but instead it became the new model. Congress has not declared war since, but has indirectly signed off on presidential wars by continuing to fund them and occasionally endorsing them in resolutions like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

President Nixon pushed presidential authority too far by bombing Cambodia secretly in 1969-70 and delivering misleading records to Congress when it investigated in 1972-73. Congress needed to take some power back.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973. Passed over Nixon’s veto, the WPR gives a president 48 hours to inform Congress of a military action, and then gives Congress 60 days to authorize it. If it does not, the President then has 30 days to disengage.

Subsequent presidents have groused, but have mostly gone along with the WPR, for the simple reason that it’s sound practice. (It’s a myth that presidents have all regarded the WPR as unconstitutional.) If you can’t get Congress to endorse a war at the beginning, before the bodies start coming home, then you’d better hope you can go in, declare victory, and get out in short order.

Obama and Libya. The bombing in Libya started on March 19, and Congress has not passed any authorization. So President Obama’s 30-days-to-disengage has run out. But instead of standing down, the administration sent a report to Congress making this claim:

The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of “hostilities” contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision.

Where did the President get that view? Not from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is the official executive-branch body to study such issues. And not from the Pentagon general counsel, either. Instead, he followed the opinion of an ad-hoc group of executive-branch lawyers led by the White House counsel, who is not approved by the Senate and in some administrations is nothing more than the president’s personal lawyer.

Constitutionally, the President is not obliged to follow any particular legal advice. But Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman explained in the NYT why circumventing the OLC is a bad practice:

If the precedent Mr. Obama has created is allowed to stand, future presidents who do not like what the Justice Department is telling them could simply cite the example of Mr. Obama’s war in Libya and instruct the White House counsel to organize a supportive “coalition of the willing” made up of the administration’s top lawyers. Even if just one or two agreed, this would be enough to push ahead and claim that the law was on the president’s side.

Remember Mukasey’s Paradox from the Bush administration: Lawyers can’t commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president, and presidents can’t commit crimes when they act under the advice of lawyers — any lawyers, even if they were hired precisely to give that advice.

We don’t want to go down that track again, because it undermines the whole notion of the rule of law. Regardless of what you think of Libya or Obama or Congress, the really bad thing here is the precedent. Imagine what a President Rick Perry could do with it.

In a classic Ponzi scheme, money from new investors pays off old investors — who then brag about the rate-of-return they’re getting and tempt even more new investors to get in. As long as inflow of new money grows exponentially, everybody stays happy. But that can’t continue forever, and so the scheme collapses.

Charles Marohn claims this model fits the suburbs:

the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era — our post-World War II pattern of development — operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities.

The model has been that state and federal money, developer investment, plus a small amount of local-government borrowing, builds the initial infrastructure of a suburb — roads, sewers, schools, etc. — and so the local tax base goes up accordingly. But the infrastructure has a life span, and the increased tax base is not sufficient to rebuild it when it wears out. The only way to hide this is with more growth — new sprawl that raises the tax base in the near term while adding more long-term liabilities.

In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. … The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. … We’ve simply built in a way that is not financially productive.

I wish Marohn had said more about the urban side of the equation: By moving our rich people to the suburbs, we’ve also wrecked the tax base of our cities.

I’m struck by how Marohn’s vision dovetails with John Michael Greer’s model of long-term decline. Here’s my summary of what Greer says in The Long Descent,:

At its peak a society builds a larger capital base than it can maintain. From then on, the deferred maintenance periodically comes due in some big failure, which cascades through the system until things settle down at a lower level. Then the pattern repeats: The lower capital base generates enough resources to maintain itself day-to-day, but not long-term — eventually leading to the next big failure.

So: News Orleans can’t afford to maintain its dikes, which fail during Hurricane Katrina. Then New Orleans rebuilds, but not all the way. The new, lower tax base will be unable to maintain something else, which eventually will lead to another disaster and another contraction.

In the longer version of Marohn’s article (on his Strong Towns site), he starts prescribing rather than diagnosing:

a rational response is to start insisting that our places show a positive financial return. That will require a completely different approach to building our cities along with a completely different understanding of growth. If you need help getting started on this, check out our Starter Strategies for a Strong Town as well as our Strong Towns Placemaking Principles.

lt’s on: Funny fake news (Jon Stewart) is going after scary fake news (Fox).

Friday night, a same-sex marriage bill passed the Republican-controlled New York Senate, with 4 Republicans and 29 Democrats voting for it. Governor Cuomo signed it just before midnight, and it will take effect after 30 days, in late July. The NYT reports:

In New York, passage of the bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of the state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent of them did.

That’s a much faster increase than you can get just by the passing of an older generation. To me, it’s the natural result of the scare-tactics anti-gay activists have used. For a long time, their message has been that civilization will literally fall if men start marrying men. Such alarmism works as long as the practice is theoretical. But it starts to sound silly when New Yorkers can clearly see that civilization has not fallen in Boston or Montreal.

OK, California. You’re up.

In the current Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi writes a strangely self-defeating analysis of Michele Bachmann. He convincingly characterizes her as  a champion of the ignorant masses who feel abused by the ridicule of the educated. “Bachmann’s stature rises,” he writes, “every time she does something we laugh at.”

But he still can’t stop himself from heaping scorn on her rather than coolly cataloguing her flaws.

She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.

The article goes on like that. Taibbi’s rhetoric is entertaining if you already agree with him. But if you forward it to your fundamentalist cousin or aunt, they’ll think Taibbi despises people like them for not being as smart as he thinks he is. And they’ll want Bachmann to succeed, just to put Taibbi in his place.

The Des Moines Register has Romney and Bachmann neck-and-neck among likely Iowa-caucus-goers. Romney leads 23-22, but Bachmann is the second choice of 18% to Romney’s 10%. When folks realize Cain and Santorum aren’t going to make it, they’ll go to Bachmann.

In one graph, Gallup explains why Jon Huntsman is no threat to be nominated. His polling data shows two clear trends: name recognition up, positive intensity down. The more Republicans know him, the less they like him.

Another recent poll has President Obama beating all major Republicans in an unlikely place: Tennessee. Steve Singiser from Daily Kos Elections explains it like this: Tennessee is experiencing the same kind of Republican over-reach that has wrecked their poll numbers in Florida and Michigan. 2010 voters who thought they were voting for traditional Republicanism suddenly find themselves living in Kochistan.

Remember the Paul-is-dead rumor of 1969? (OK, maybe not if you’re under 50.) Well, Eguchi Aimi of the Japanese girl-band AKB48 has taken it one step further: She never existed to begin with. The uber-cute Ms. Aimi is a computer-generated synthesis of the cutest features of the other girls in the band.

Using the sad example of Chicago’s parking meters, Senator Durbin warns against the temptation to raise cash by selling off public assets at fire-sale prices. In particular he proposes that if federal money builds a local asset which the local government then sells, the feds should get their money back.

The DREAM Act, if it ever passes, is supposed to normalize the status of undocumented immigrants who came here as children and have done well since they arrived. It makes sense: The original sin belongs to their parents, not them, and they know no other country they can go back to. As they become adults, they keep breaking the law — forging documents, lying on forms — because all the other choices are worse.

Wednesday, young journalist Jose Antonio Vargas put his own face on this problem. In My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant he tells his story: He came to America from the Philippines at age 12, and found out he was here illegally at 16. But rather than pick fruit or work in a sweatshop, he got himself a job with the Washington Post and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer.

He told a lot of lies and forged a lot of documents to give himself those opportunities. But now that he has fessed up, the moral onus is on us: Do we send him back to the Philippines?

Meanwhile, the harsh new law that was supposed to keep illegal aliens out of Georgia is working. Blueberries, onions, and cucumbers are rotting in the fields. They’ve tried getting criminals to do the picking, but it’s not going so well.

In practice, “cutting the waste out of our school budget” means firing librarians.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was in Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s office last week, was asked to leave, and wound up with his hands around her neck. But it’s her fault. Just like it was Justice Shirley Abrahamson’s fault when Prosser called her a “bitch”. Those female judges … you know how they get. What’s a real man to do?

It’s been a very pro-corporate Supreme Court term, as I’ll outline after it ends next week. But the worst of it may be Sorrell v IMS Health, where corporate First-Amendment rights got their biggest boost since Citizens United. The Court threw out a Vermont law that stopped pharmacies from selling prescription data to data miners, who could then advise pharmaceutical companies on marketing to doctors. If you can see any legitimate free-speech issue there, your eyes are sharper than mine.

Vermont’s Senator Leahy called the decision “a win for data miners and large corporations and a loss for those of us who care about privacy not only in my home state of Vermont but across the nation.”

But Vermonters keep plugging with their New England common sense: They’re moving towards single-payer health care because it’s cheaper and it works better.

Right now Wisconsin is the central front in the struggle to defend the middle class and the public sector. Six Republican state senators and three Democrats are up for recall this summer, and the Republicans look far more vulnerable. Picking up three seats will flip the state senate to Democratic control. That would not only change the equation in Wisconsin, it would send a national message: Voters don’t support taking away workers’ rights, or cutting education to pay for corporate tax breaks.

You can contribute online through Act Blue. If you want to phone bank or volunteer in some other way, go to the Wisconsin Democratic Party web site.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

— The White Queen, Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)

In this week’s Sift:

• More Economic Nonsense. Increasingly, the debate between liberal and conservative economists has become irrelevant, as Republicans have divorced themselves from any economic theory whatsoever. Last week it was Boehner. This week it’s Pawlenty.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: Why Marx Was Right. Terry Eagleton makes Marx understandable, and challenges us to take a second look.
• Short Notes. The Germans plan to de-nuke. Business tax credits may kill jobs rather than create them. A Koch sock puppet denounces alternative energy in the NYT. Not only do bad decisions cause poverty, it works the other way too. Comedy: Borowitz on Palin, Colbert on Romney, Stewart on Fox. And a female Daily Show correspondent tells the sad truth about male sexting.
• This Week’s Challenge. Check out the Sift’s twitter feed.

Reasonable people can argue liberal or conservative economic theories, which mostly differ the relative effectiveness of the private sector versus the public sector, and on regulations versus market incentives. But to an extraordinary extent these days, those legitimate arguments have nothing to do with the debate we’re hearing in the mainstream media. Instead, many economic ideas coming from the Right are entirely nonsensical, backed by no legitimate economic theory at all.

Last week I called out John Boehner’s claim that spending cuts would grow the economy and create jobs. (The Street Light blog does the simple arithmetic about spending, demand, and growth.) Tuesday, Boehner’s view was contradicted by that noted leftist Ben Bernanke — President Bush’s choice to run the Fed. Why? Because whatever else Bernanke might be, he’s an economist. He doesn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the other economists by spewing nonsense in public.

Tuesday, Tim Pawlenty — along with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, supposedly the “sensible” Republican presidential candidates — came out with an utterly delusional economic plan. Its centerpiece is a tax reform that I can only describe as pro-aristocracy: Eliminate all the taxes that rich heirs would have to pay on their family legacy. Not just inheritance taxes, but taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains as well. (“When you deposit a dollar in your bank account, every penny should be forevermore yours and your children’s.”) So Muffy inherits from Mom and Dad, lives luxuriously without working a day in her life, and then passes an even larger estate down to the next generation of parasites — all tax-free.

And in case any rich people are still earning wages, let’s cut the top individual tax rate from 35% to 25%, and cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%. And pursue a “strong dollar” policy, which is code for high interest rates. (This will prevent Muffy from losing purchasing power through inflation, and insure that her CDs pay enough to keep the summer house in good repair.)

What fills Pawlenty’s gaping revenue hole? Mostly unspecified spending cuts — a constitutional amendment to cap spending at 18% of GDP, which is impossible without big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

So far Pawlenty’s plan isn’t irrational, it’s just class warfare. What’s irrational is how he fills the rest of the revenue hole: By assuming 5% economic growth for the next decade. He justifies that number like this:

5% growth is not a pie-in-the-sky number. … Between 1983 and 1987, the Reagan recovery grew at 4.9%.  Between 1996 and 1999,  under President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress the economy grew at more than 4.7%. In each case millions of new jobs were created, incomes rose and unemployment fell to historic lows. The same can happen again.

So 5% for a decade is reasonable because if you cherry-pick the best days of the Reagan boom and the Clinton boom, the economy maintained growth not quite that good for less than half that long. And we’ll get back there by imitating not Reagan or Clinton, but George W. Bush, whose massive tax cuts gave us the worst growth since the Depression. Plus we’ll have growth-killing high interest rates.

He also makes amazing claims like “cutting just 1% of overall federal spending for 6 consecutive years would balance the federal budget by 2017” and unverifiable ones like “federal regulations will cost our economy 1.75 trillion dollars this year alone”. Although that one might be right: Imagine how much money the chemical industry saved by dumping their waste in Love Canal instead of dealing with the kind of federal regulations we have today. Or how much Massey Energy saved by ignoring regulations about ventilating their mines. Nuclear power could cost less if no one regulated radiation. Health care and air travel could be cheaper if doctors and pilots didn’t have to have licenses or well-maintained equipment. The possible savings are endless.

You know what you won’t find in Pawlenty’s speech: the name of any economist, economic theory, or econometric model that justifies his projections. That’s because there isn’t any. It’s pure nonsense, undiluted by economic thinking of any type — liberal, conservative, whatever.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which has covered Pawlenty since his days as goveror, comments:

Pawlenty didn’t even try to support his central argument — that tax cuts and smaller government would spur astounding economic growth of 5 percent annually over 10 years — with evidence. That’s because neither economic research nor reality confirms his promise.

And have his Republican rivals called him out on his nonsense? Not yet. We’ll see if they do it in tonight’s debate, but I’m not holding my breath. More likely, Romney and Huntsman will have to offer their own nonsense to stay competitive.

While we’re talking nonsense, let’s not ignore what Republicans are saying about the debt ceiling. The academic cover for this position comes from the Mercatus Center — a wing of the Koch Empire. The New Republic debunks.

You should be reading: Brad DeLong’s economic blog Grasping Reality With Both Hands. He does a daily Virtual Green Room post, giving simple rebuttals to the economic nonsense of the day.

When a thinker has had an impact on history, it’s hard to put that out of your mind and read his or her words in their original context. It’s hard not to judge Christ by the Christians, or Freud by the Freudians. Nietzsche was done writing before Hitler was born, but it is hard not to equate Nietzsche’s supermen with Hitler’s master race.

That’s what Terry Eagleton is asking us to do for Karl Marx: Put aside the distorting lens of Stalinism, Leninism, and Maoism and read Marx on his own terms — as a 19th-century critic of capitalism rather than the patron saint of 20th-century communism. The book’s main point is that most of what “everybody knows” about Marx is stereotype, not reality. Correctly understood, Marxist ideas about 19th-century capitalism still provide a lot of insight into what’s going wrong with 21st-century capitalism.

Eagleton defeats one stereotype immediately: that Marxists are dour and humorless, and that they write in an impenetrable style whose jargon is meaningful only to other Marxists. Chapters of his books begins with plainly stated present-day attacks on Marx. Chapter One, for example:

Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots, coal miners and chimney sweeps, widespread misery and massed working classes. But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present.

Each chapter is an answer to a particular attack like this, and is written in an engaging style that doesn’t make you feel like you missed the prerequisite course. There’s no Marxist glossary in the back, and I never felt the need for one.

Capital, property, and oppression. Here’s the main definition you need in order to understand Eagleton’s version of Marxism: Capital is labor that makes future labor more productive. The purpose of clearing and plowing a field, for example, is not any immediate consumption; the purpose is to make future planting and reaping more productive.

Economic progress happens because capital accumulates, and so labor keeps getting more productive. So I’m more productive as a journalist because I can use computers, which wouldn’t be possible if people like Ben Franklin hadn’t spent countless hours experimenting with electricity. Franklin’s labor — and the labor of generations of successor scientists and engineers — is capital for me.

The fundamental mystery of economic progress, then, is: Why do people create capital? They could be laboring to produce something immediately consumable, or they could be resting or playing. Why labor to make future labor more productive?

Marx has two answers: property and oppression. A person will create capital if the surrounding society will recognize it as property. (I’ll plant in the spring if my tribe will recognize that the fall crop is mine to reap. Otherwise I probably won’t. Or I’ll clear the stumps out of a field if people will recognize it as my field, so that it is my future labor that will be more productive.)

A society’s level of technology determines what kinds of capital are possible, and that in turn determines what kinds of property the society will recognize. The Native Americans who sold Manhattan to the Dutch, for example, had no notion of what it meant to “own” an island. It would be like someone offering you trinkets in exchange for your share of the Moon. The Moon isn’t property to us, but it could be to a space-traveling society.

The other reason people create capital is oppression — someone forces them. They work, and the capital they create belongs to someone else. (Picture the slaves who dug the irrigation systems of ancient Sumer.)

Property and oppression interact. If I own all the arable land in a region, then people will work for me or they will starve. Naturally, I will set them to raising the food that they will consume. But I will also make them create capital that will belong to me, not them.

Subsistence and abundance. Looking at individuals, Marx saw two important production levels: subsistence, which is enough to keep the person alive, and abundance, the level at which a person will stop working and enjoy leisure. (When a deer is cooking, a tribal hunting band will not keep hunting. They’ll gather around the fire and tell stories.)

Looking at societies, Marx saw that any surviving society had to be achieving subsistence. But until his own era, no society had achieved a level of production that could provide abundance for everyone. For that reason, he theorized that every previous society had needed oppression to keep growing its capital. Somehow, large numbers of people had to be kept working for future productivity, even though their present needs were not being satisfied.

So when Marx looked at any historical society, he saw:

• a technological level that determined what could be produced,
• a definition of property appropriate to that production system,
• a ruling class that owned the vast majority of the defined property,
• a system of oppression that forced everyone else to labor at creating capital for the ruling class.

He wasn’t judgmental about this. It was just the way things had to be if a society was going to grow its capital to a point where it could provide abundance. (How, for example, could ancient peoples have invented writing — a great capital improvement for the rest of history — if slaves hadn’t supported a class that had the time to think about such things?)

But in his own era, Marx believed that abundance-for-everybody was finally possible, because the highly efficient oppression of capitalism had accumulated enough capital to make labor sufficiently productive. If only the fruits of labor could be properly distributed, everybody could work enough to produce abundance for himself/herself, and then stop and enjoy leisure. To the extent that capital needed to develop further, it could be a kind of play — like Ben Franklin mucking about with electricity or volunteers creating the Wikipedia.

In Marx’s era (and even moreso today) considerable effort went into controlling production, so that overproduction didn’t swamp the markets and ruin the capitalists. So you frequently had (and have) fallow fields, idle factories, unemployed workers, un-used raw materials — and people whose needs go unsatisfied.

This state-of-affairs Marx did get judgmental about, because he believed we could finally be done with systems of oppression. The only thing that prevented this happy development was that society was still organized around the goal of growing capitalists’ capital as fast as possible. He believed that a revolution was necessary to re-orient the economy towards producing abundance-for-everybody rather than ever-increasing capital for the ruling class.

So what didn’t Marx foresee? Several things. He didn’t foresee the European welfare state, which produces something like abundance-for-everybody by taxing capitalism rather than overthrowing it. He also didn’t foresee the extent to which technology could create new products and advertising could create dissatisfaction, so that people would keep working for iPhones and HDTVs and designer jeans even after they had achieved a 19th-century level of abundance.

But mainly he didn’t foresee that communist revolutions would happen in countries like Russia and China, which hadn’t accumulated enough capital yet to provide abundance. So he didn’t anticipate Stalinism: communist oppression to build mines, factories, and other productive capital. The kind of revolution Marx expected — one in a highly developed capitalist economy like England — has never happened.

Say you want a revolution? To Marx, it goes without saying that the ruling class rules for its own benefit, and preserves the institutions that solidify its power. Everything putters along nicely as long as the interests of the ruling class are in line with the economic possibilities of the era, and its institutions are socially productive.

But sooner or later new possibilities develop, and those possibilities line up with the interests of a new class. Eventually that class achieves enough consciousness to understand its potential, and then you have a tug-of-war until the new class comes out on top. The prime example here was what Europe had recently gone through: the transfer of power from the feudal aristocracy to the businessmen. Unlike the suddens spasms of the French or Russian Revolutions, the feudalism/capitalism revolution played out over centuries.

The symptoms of a revolution, then, are also symptoms of a ruling class being out of joint with its times. The institutions, traditions, concepts, and categories that support the ruling class become baggage rather than assets. Society has to do complicated tricks to keep them functioning, and they seem increasingly artificial rather than natural. (To see how artificial feudal traditions looked in the early capitalist era, read Jane Austen.)

In this context, it’s interesting to look back at Martin Ford’s The Lights in the Tunnel, which I reviewed two weeks ago. Ford is worrying about how we will provide human jobs in an era of intelligent machines, and so continue to have enough viable consumers to keep a consumer market economy going. He winds up with elaborate systems to pay people for socially productive behaviors that aren’t considered “jobs” today.

Whatever you may think of Ford’s specific suggestions, they’re a symptom. Capitalist-era concepts like jobs and profits are starting to hobble economic thinking rather than facilitate it. Increasingly, the problem isn’t how to produce stuff and distribute it; the problem is how to produce stuff at a profit and distribute it by paying people to work jobs.

Now that the 19th-century proletariat is shrinking, I don’t have a clue what class Marx would think is achieving consciousness or what re-definitions could make the economy work for them. But it sure looks like this era is getting long in the tooth.

Imagine: The Germans are planning to live without nuclear power by 2022. You couldn’t even start that discussion here.

Encouraging new tech: better batteries and solar panels. Even without these developments, solar power has reached the point where it can make sense for homeowners who live in the right place and have sufficient ingenuity. My friend Malacandra blogs about the installation process.

NYT readers might wonder what the point is, though, after reading an op-ed about the hidden costs of solar and wind power written by Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute. The Times does not mention that MI is yet another academic tentacle of the Koch octopus, which (as is so often the case) will profit directly if you accept their propaganda at face value. The Class M blog debunks.

Tax breaks for business investment are supposed to create jobs, as companies expand production and buy tools from American factories. But in a low-demand globalized environment, companies might buy machines overseas to automate jobs in the U.S.

Middle-class people often look at the poor and think, “I’d make better decisions than that.” New psychological research indicates that the poor would make better decisions too — if they didn’t have to make so many of them. The kinds of trade-offs that confront the poor turn out to be inherently draining. If you have to make too many such choices, you exhaust your mental stamina and start choosing badly.

Translate that insight to the conservative health-care vision, where we all manage our own care and are constantly seeking the best value. How many vital decisions could you make on iffy information before you just started picking stuff at random?

The funniest reaction to the Anthony Weiner fiasco: the Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal telling men the sad truth about penis photos.

Check out Andy Borowitz’s parody of Sarah Palin’s history tour. At Monticello, Sarah says:

at a time of our history when the American people needed leadership, it was Jefferson who said the immortal words, “We’re movin’ on up.”

Stephen Colbert takes apart Mitt Romney’s claim to be a private-sector job-creator. Actually, he made his money as a job-destroyer.

More comedy: Texas traded to Mexico in 4-state deal. We get Baha, Yucatan, and a state to be named later.

Watch Glenn Greenwald’s speech on corporate-media propaganda to the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting conference.

You’d think this would be obvious: Food service workers need paid sick days.

Vyan speculates that Jon Stewart is inoculating his viewers against Fox News.

If Wisconsin’s Walker administration is for the common man, then why is it attacking craft beer brewers and credit unions?

This one isn’t very challenging. If you do Twitter, check out the brand new @weeklysift. It’s the easy way to get the Link of the Day, and to be notified when a new Sift goes up on the blog.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

— President “Give-’em-Hell-Harry” Truman

In this week’s Sift:

• Is Medicare a Fair Issue? The corporate-media pundits are telling us how unfair it is for the Democrats to “demagogue” the Medicare issue. But what is really unfair is the way Medicare came under attack to begin with.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. Millions of people are spending billions of hours in the virtual worlds of online games. What can those games teach us about fixing the “user experience” of the real world?
• Short Notes. Cities as software. Sane Republicans need not apply for the 2012 nomination. Sarah still isn’t running. Rolling Stone profiles Roger Ailes. A Palestinian view of Obama’s Middle East speech. And I’ve added a Link-of-the-Day to the Weekly Sift Facebook page.
• This Week’s Challenge. Lots of people had advice for new graduates last week. This week: How do you talk to people who disagree with you?

This week the momentum officially changed. Democrats have been reeling since the debacle of the 2010 election. They’ve been wondering how far the tidal wave would roll and how many of them it would wash out to sea.

Tuesday, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a special election in a very Republican congressional district. She did it by focusing on her opponent’s support for the Paul Ryan budget plan, which would privatize Medicare. 235 Republicans in the House and 40 in the Senate voted for that proposal, so they’ll be hearing about the issue too.

Suddenly, it’s the Republicans who are feeling the fear.

Almost immediately, the pundit class started wringing its hands — even in the so-called “liberal” parts of the corporate media. Across the board, the pundits had bought into the following line of thought: Long-term, the federal deficit is insupportable. Something has to be done to rein in entitlement spending. The fastest-growing entitlement is Medicare, so it has to be reined in first. The Ryan plan may have been extreme, but at least it recognized those realities. Now, everyone will be afraid to touch Medicare so nothing will happen. We’re all doomed because the Democrats are demagoguing the Medicare issue.

Is that really what’s happening?

The frame. Here’s one of the most widely applicable tricks of propaganda: If you want to attack a party, a program, an ethnic group or whatever, you start with a problem that affects everybody. Then you take the particular way that the universal problem affects the people you want to attack, and you spin it as if it were a completely unique problem, something that “those people” need to fix right away.

It’s easy. Sexual abuse of children by teachers and ministers is a problem, so let’s ignore it and define the special problem of sexual abuse by gay teachers and ministers. What’s wrong with those gay people? We have to do something about their child-abuse problem right away. You’re not condoning gay sexual predators, are you?

Or we could ignore the general crime problem and focus on crime by illegal immigrants. Do they commit more burglaries and murders than comparable citizens? No. Is it worse to be killed by an illegal immigrant than by a citizen? I doubt it. But illegal immigrants have the same criminal tendencies that all humans do, so you can find cases to play up and make into a big deal.

That’s what Republicans have done to Medicare. They’ve never liked Medicare, because it delivers a valuable service and so is like a billboard advertising the good that government can do. Republicans were against passing Medicare to begin with, and they make a serious run at it maybe once a decade.

To attack Medicare, Republicans can use this larger problem: America has by far the most expensive health care system in the world, one whose costs are pulling away from those of any other country — including countries that consider health care a right, that cover everybody, and that have higher life expectancies than we do.

President Obama’s Affordable Care Act began to attack that problem, but it’s just a beginning. If we were serious, we’d be studying countries like France, Germany, and Japan to see how they deliver better medical care for 2/3rds (or less) of what we spend per person.

But instead, Republicans have shaped the expensive-American-health-care problem into a bludgeon to use against Medicare: Medicare is too expensive (just like the rest of American health care), and its costs are rising fast (just like the rest of American health care). So Medicare’s cost is a completely unique problem that we absolutely have to do something about right now — even as we try to undo Obama’s timid first steps at medical cost control in general.

Paul Ryan claims that his privatization plan will control costs. (The Free Market Fairy will wave her wand.) But according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, that’s wishful thinking. Actually, the Ryan plan will just shift the cost of medical care from the government to old people. (Ezra Klein takes Ryan’s case apart in more detail.)

So fundamentally, the Ryan plan is just a Medicare bludgeon: It ignores the underlying problem to focus on the particular program it wants to destroy.

What can we afford? These days, we’re hearing many cries of “we can’t afford it” because “we’re going broke”. But it’s important to ask who is going broke and what, exactly, we can’t afford.

One answer is: If medical inflation continues its current pace indefinitely, our whole economy will go broke. Eventually, exponential growth would push our medical costs higher than our GDP. In the very long term that’s a real problem, and if the Republicans have any plan to deal with it, I’m all ears. So far they haven’t offered one.

(I have a plan: single-payer health care. Model it on what the French, Germans, and Japanese are doing. Their costs are lower and are rising more slowly than ours. And they have lower amenable mortality — fewer deaths from curable conditions.)

Instead, we’re talking about particular government programs funded in particular ways, and worrying about the date on which the funding will be inadequate. To solve that, the Ryan plan draws a line in the sand and says, “We’ll only fund this much.”

That “saves” the Medicare program by giving up on its mission. Ryan just surrenders to the notion that our society can’t afford to take care of old people when they get sick. (Imagine applying the same “solution” to defense: We’ll cap what the government spends, and if in the distant future that turns out not to be adequate, each of us will be responsible for the cost of defending our own homes against the invaders.)

That’s the outcome we should be working hard to avoid, not the one we should be embracing.

And that’s the Medicare issue in a nutshell: Democrats remain committed to the idea that America will take care of its old people when they get sick, and Republicans are willing to give that commitment up.

That issue is totally fair. Democrats should use it to give the Republicans hell — in the Harry Truman way, by telling the truth about them.

To a large extent, Republicans are just starting to reap what they have sown. They won in 2010 by spreading the false idea that government spending was riddled with bridges-to-nowhere that the Democrats weren’t willing to cut. Now that they control the House and a lot of state governments, what do they want to cut? Medicare, Medicaid, education, and a bunch of other programs that deliver services people actually need and use.

You can’t turn off an idea like government-is-full-of-waste just because it’s inconvenient now that you’re in office. People know that huge numbers of bridges-to-nowhere have not been cancelled. And they’re going to resent giving up services they need while all that (fictitious) waste is still untouched.

Unless you’re a gamer — which I’m not (unless Sudoku counts) — you probably have no idea how much time and effort your fellow citizens are investing in virtual worlds. It’s awesome.

In the U.S. alone, there are an estimated 5 million “extreme” gamers, who average 45 hours a week gaming. Other sources say that 10 million Western Europeans and 6 million Chinese put in at least 20 hours a week. And if you picture this as vegging-out time, similar to watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island, you don’t get it. We’re talking about spending time in a virtual world that in many ways is more challenging than reality.

Know what the largest wiki other than the Wikipedia is? The WoWWiki created and maintained by the 12 million people who play World of Warcraft. The Halo-playing community also has a massive wiki. Think about that. This isn’t just time spent playing the game, these are massive community documentation projects, undertaken by volunteers who just want to demonstrate and share their knowledge.

Once you understand that, there are a variety of standard reactions. You might deplore the extreme waste of time and effort. Or you could blame someone: Something is wrong with the gamers; they’re escaping because they can’t hack it in reality. Or something is wrong with the games; they’re designed to cause addiction.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer and a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Her new book Reality is Broken asks a different question: What is lacking in Reality, that people go into game worlds to find? And what can game worlds teach us about how to improve the user experience of Reality?

These are some of her findings:

• Reality is simultaneously too easy and too unrewarding. The optimal human experience is to face a genuine challenge that we know we can overcome if we try hard enough and use all our abilities. Too often what we face in Reality is drudgery that may or may not accomplish anything — or unemployment.
• Games provide clear missions and well-defined success criteria. Reality usually doesn’t.
• Games emphasize hope over fear. You aspire to reach higher levels. And failure is nothing to be afraid of — you just start over and try again. But Reality often emphasizes fear over hope.
• Real work disconnects us from our social network. Games can keep us in touch with each other.
• Reality trivializes our effort. The backstory of a game like Halo puts each individual’s effort in an epic context. How often does your real job do that?
• Reality is unimaginative and uninspiring. Things are the way they are, and we are seldom challenged to imagine them differently. But a game world can help us envision something radical.

The gaming community — like the open software community — demonstrates something we don’t know how to think about yet: The 21st-century economy produces large numbers of people who are hungry for the right kind of challenges. Whoever figures out how to provide those challenges in real life will be able to channel vast amounts of effort and creativity.

The most interesting part of the book concerns “happiness hacks” — simple habits that are clinically proven to make people happier: (Dance. Help a stranger. Get outside. Teach somebody something useful.) The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to be happy. The problem is that happiness-enhancing habits seems hokey, we have a hard time motivating ourselves to maintain them, and our everyday lives don’t provide easy opportunities to practice them.

McGonigal describes a number of games that get around those problems. The most interesting was an experimental iPhone game implemented in Boston: GroundCrew. GroundCrew players submit and grant each other’s wishes, which appear on a World-of-Warcraft-like quest board. The example in the book is of a dancer who can’t leave rehearsal but really wants a latte. Another player queries the game for “quests” near him, sees the latte wish, and fulfills it — gaining points in the game that will raise the value of his own wishes. I can imagine a lot of ways this model could go wrong, but the game designers seem to have anticipated them.

Watch McGonigal’s 20-minute TED talk.

Do you have trouble motivating yourself and your housemates to keep the place livable? Do you want to settle once and for all that argument about whether you or your spouse does more housework? Do you want the kids to stop whining about every little thing you ask them to do?

You need to play Chore Wars. It’s a game based on the quest-for-experience-points model, except the quests are household chores. The “players” design characters for themselves, agree on a set of “quests” and the points each one should be worth, and come up with real-life rewards for the winners. After the game is set up, players log in and claim the points whenever they complete something.

Basic accounts are free, and a one-time charge of $10 upgrades you to a gold account with extra capabilities.

Every day, huge numbers of adults play Lexulous — online Scrabble — with their mothers. “Check in on your mother regularly” is one of those good habits people feel guilty about not keeping up. But day-in-day-out, Lexulous players send a move, get a responding move, and maybe add a comment or two about the weather or how the grandkids are doing.

If you think “I’d rather get a call or a visit”, you’re missing the point. People who touch base every day are more likely to call or visit, and more likely to have something to talk about when they do.

The Quest to Learn school is using the gaming model to define a curriculum. Its web site explains:

Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.

Two sci-fi novels imagine how game worlds can influence Reality: Halting State by Charles Stross and the Daemon/Freedom™ series by Daniel Suarez.

The most paradigm-changing thing I read this week: Cities as Software. An Australian writing in a Dutch magazine points out:

The built environment and geography of a city is its hardware. … [V]irtually every urbanist I know is a hardware person. They come from backgrounds in town planning, engineering, design, architecture or activism around the preservation or possibilities of the built environment.

But cities are also software: sets of rules that define how spaces and buildings are used. And many cities have empty buildings — idle hardware — that are nonetheless expensive and/or difficult to access for temporary events. And yet, if you have enough temporary events, one after another, you have lasting change.

He goes on to explain how a shoestring operation, Renew Newcastle, is re-writing the software of an old Australian steel-making city:

In Newcastle in many respects nothing has changed since 2008. The buildings are mostly the same. The hardware is unchanged. Nothing has been built. No government has fallen. No revolution has taken place. Yet, on another level much has changed – dead parts of the city [are] active and vibrant, 60 projects have started, hundreds of new events have been created, and whole new communities are directly engaged in creating whatever it is that the city will become.

Recently, Lonely Planet rated Newcastle #9 on its Cities to Visit list.

When I think about what has made cities near me interesting — Waterfire in Providence, Steampunk City in Waltham, the Lowell Folk Festival — it’s usually a temporary rewrite of the city software, not new hardware.

Here’s what you need to know about the race for the 2012 Republican nomination: Sane people need not apply. This video was created to attack Jon Huntsman as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). But if you showed it to the average Independent, I think they’d vote for him. I was halfway through before I grokked the rhino image and realized it was supposed to be negative.

I’m constantly bewildered by the pundit-class assumption that the Republican establishment will control this process. After Romney implodes, I keep hearing, they’ll steer the nomination to Tim Pawlenty, who garners 6% in the latest Gallup poll. Or maybe Huntsman, who (at 2%) is within the margin-of-error of zero. Bachmann, Palin, Santorum, Cain — they’ll all get swept under the rug somehow.

Propagandists are like arsonists: They always think they can control the blaze, and sometimes they’re wrong. The Republican establishment stoked craziness they couldn’t control in 2010, and wound up with un-electable Senate candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. They don’t control the craziness now, either.

BTW, I’m standing by my prediction that Sarah Palin won’t run. Yeah, she’s hinting, but I predicted that, too. I was particularly amused by this:

a person familiar with a potential Palin campaign describes a different approach. “What you would likely see [in Iowa] if Palin were to run is an unconventional and modern campaign focusing more on mass communications, internet contact, and mass assemblies as opposed to the more traditional one-on-five coffees,” the insider said.

The “insider” is spinning Palin’s biggest weakness: She can’t run a traditional Iowa/NH campaign, because she can’t answer unscripted questions. The kind of blather she gets away with on stage or on Twitter won’t work in somebody’s living room.

Rolling Stone: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory. And Media Matters gives a prime example of how it’s working out.

The buzz has all been about the Israeli reaction to President Obama’s Middle East speech. Rashid Khalidi gives a Palestinian view.

For a while now I’ve been thinking that the Weekly Sift Facebook page ought to provide something more than just a Monday-afternoon announcement that the Sift is up. This week I’ve started experimenting with a Link of the Day: A couple lines about something cool that I expect to say more about in the next Sift.

The Link of the Day is in the spirit of being a political blog for people who don’t have time for political blogs (one of the slogans I’ve used to describe the Weekly Sift). It’s just one thing. If you’re looking for something to read over lunch, check it out.

Last week’s challenge — what advice do you have for new graduates? — got a lot of interesting responses. Only one person had a direct career suggestion (medical technology — because it combines technology with people skills and subtle pattern recognition, it should be hard to automate completely). But more general advice (summarized and in no particular order) included:

• Live within your means. (Several people offered some version of this advice: Spend less than you earn. Don’t go into debt. Live below your means. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need. Take compound interest very seriously.)
• Learn basic skills that will make you less dependent on the money economy. (This is my abstraction from a lot of more specific suggestions: Learn how to grow and preserve food, to repair stuff, to give first aid, to entertain yourself and others, and so on.)
• Don’t get married before you’re 25.You don’t want to hear the details. Just don’t.
• Make time to do what you love. If you can turn it into a career, that’s wonderful. But even if you can’t, don’t lose it.
• Bicycles. They’re good for your health and the environment at the same time.
• Don’t let yourself rust. Keep moving, keep learning, keep adapting.
• Maintain a social network. You can’t count on staying in the same place or keeping the same job, so this won’t happen by itself.

This piece of advice popped into my head while I was reading other people’s suggestions: Don’t wait for permission. If you want to be a journalist, go cover stuff. If you want to make movies, make them. Who’s stopping you? Do stuff, throw it out there, and get feedback so that you can improve.

This week: Do you stay close to people whose worldviews/philosophies/politics are opposed to your own? Can you talk to them? How do you do it?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.