Friday, November 29, 2024
Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge
[ed. Have a feeling not enough people caught this link below. Don't miss.]
Working Black Friday in the Rich Part of Town
To be a service worker is to be in constant deference to Karens, but in retail, a Karen can be anyone.
Beauty is a growth industry, so said my CEO. She was new to the company, like me, having only arrived during the last fiscal quarter. Before that, she sold cell phones, and before that, McDonald’s, and years ago, Cap’n Crunch and Rice-A-Roni. Now she sold makeup, or I sold it for her, or it sold itself.
Though my store carried several high-end brands, it lacked the luxury pedigree of Sephora, its biggest competitor. You could see it in the bags—theirs, a glossy black that stood up on its own, ours, a pale orange sack. Sephora was the wife of Moses, she who declared her husband the bridegroom of blood after circumcising her son with a flint knife, her name derived from Hebrew, little bird. Ulta is ultra without an r.
My store split its inventory into five basic categories: makeup, skincare, body, hair, and nails. From there, all products were reduced to one of two classes: mass or prestige. The former meant drugstore. The latter meant expensive. Prestige makeup, hair care, and skincare occupied the store’s upper right quadrant, and mass, its left. Shelves of nail polish marked the boundary between prestige face and prestige hair. Hair tools, both mass and prestige, intermingled in the lower left. The salon abutted them. Fragrances rose along the back prestige wall. The registers were neither a supermarket-style row of parallel bays, nor a station along the wall. Instead, they sat around a ring-shaped counter in the middle of the store, arranged so as to be nearly panoptical. We stood anchoring the center.
I started at Ulta in October, having graduated from college the previous May. I’d spent the summer in Chicago getting rejected for unpaid positions at music agencies and copywriting jobs at Groupon, only to crawl back to my parents in August. While I was in college, they made a permanent move to the South Carolina beach town we had vacationed in for much of my childhood. To me, it was a place without time or adulthood or anything but heat and stillness. My mom picked me up from the airport. We passed the Towne Centre mall in landlocked Mount Pleasant, with its twelve-foot-tall stone horses standing sentinel in front of the P.F. Chang’s. We ascended the sloping bridge that connected Mount Pleasant to the island beach town where my parents lived, at the top of which sat an American flag and, for a tall minute, a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean. We pulled onto the island’s main drag, lined with palms and clogged with tourists, the pickups and surfboard-laden jeeps trundling along in a slow parade. We turned onto their street, which was a half mile long, no curbs or sidewalks, just a short strip of asphalt bookended by the ocean on one side and marshland on the other. Since the ’90s, houses there were required to be built on stilts so that hurricanes could, rather than sweep the houses away, simply flow through them unobstructed. An old, thick pug stood still in the middle of the street, staring at our car as we veered around him. That’s just Dudley, my mom said, driving past. My parents’ right-hand neighbors had a dolphin-shaped fountain in their yard. Their left-hand neighbors owned a small bungalow that sat flat on the ground, which meant it had survived Hurricane Hugo. Between me and my parents’ front door was a long flight of stairs and a fifty-pound suitcase. I lifted the suitcase gently over the first stair. I could feel beads of sweat forming already on my neck and rolling down my spine into my ass. The air felt like morning breath. Lugging the suitcase up the second stair, I let my arms slacken a little, then on the third stair a little more, until I was dragging the thing behind me, letting it bang violently on every single step. You know I hate that, my mom sighed. I reached the top, breathing hard as I shoved through the stacks of Amazon boxes that would be replaced by a new batch the next day. By the time I started punching in the door code, I’d lost all sense of forward motion. I was again a bored and restless child.
My sleep schedule quickly reversed itself. I would wake up as my parents ate dinner and go to sleep to the sounds of my dad making his morning SodaStream. I didn’t need money but I did need a job, any job, something to differentiate living with my parents at age twenty-three from living with my parents at age fourteen. I applied to and proceeded to hear nothing back from Applebee’s, Target, Costco, H&M, the Container Store, Panda Express, an ice cream cart at the zoo, and Urban Outfitters, which required that I take a personality assessment, the sole purpose of which seemed to be divining if and under what circumstances I would be stoned at work.
Only Ulta called me in for an interview. I sat down with Melanie, who had crimpy blond hair that she clipped half up, a southern accent, and the type of black, stretchy, flared trousers that are marked at $89.99 but always on sale for $59.99 under names like The Aubrey and The Blythe and are, somehow, the uniform of every female retail manager at every mall store across the country. She didn’t ask me many questions, but when she looked at my résumé and saw that I’d majored in English, she asked what my future plans were. I paused. My parents had told me to conceal anything that might suggest I had an exit strategy. Ulta, they reminded me, did not want a liberal arts girl with rich parents for whom retail was merely a way to kill time on the way to Brooklyn, graduate school, or both. I’d learned this in high school when I’d looked for summer jobs only to find that summer jobs didn’t really exist anymore, because the people who fill them don’t really exist. If you have money, your summer job is pre-collegiate grooming rituals, all your unpaid internships and philanthropy. If you don’t have money, your summer job is the job you already have. Ulta wanted someone who was likely to stay put. Ulta’s ideal employee was someone who needed Ulta more than Ulta needed her. But in the moment, with my nose ring in my pocket, I panicked and accidentally told the truth. I kind of want to be a writer. She nodded politely.
Our store was located in the upscale-but-not-luxury Towne Centre outdoor shopping mall in the upscale-but-not-luxury town of Mount Pleasant, which was nearly on the water, but not quite. The town is nestled among old-money Charleston, with its million-dollar prewar mansions, some midsize middle-class towns, and a handful of small fishing villages. Mount Pleasant had itself been a small village, but 1931 brought the highway and 1989 brought the hurricane, which decimated the barrier islands. In Hugo’s wake were insurance payouts and talk of new beginnings and, quickly, a real estate boom that never really ended. By the early 2000s its population doubled and became predominantly upper middle class. The new mall opened. Another highway was built. Now, ten years later, its population had doubled again and was sliding toward rich. Not quite Rich rich—Rich rich being an ineffable, ancient stratum of culture and wealth in which almost nobody in America believes themselves to reside—but statistically rich, the kind of rich that thinks it’s upper middle class because it eats at the same chain restaurants as the masses.
On my first day at Ulta, I descended from my parents’ gleaming SUV and walked among the rest of the gleaming SUVs looping endlessly through the Towne Centre’s sprawling parking lot, their reflections shimmering across the windows of the Ann Taylor Loft, the Qdoba, the Hairy Winston Pet Boutique. The white pavement and the shiny cars seemed to magnify the sunlight. It was unseasonably warm that day, so hot the air looked wavy. The brief interludes of heat between icy car and icy store came as a series of shocks to the body, which may in fact be the entire point of outdoor malls: reminding you of your good fortune to be alive in the age of central air.
Dawn, the assistant manager, ushered me to the back room. I wore black pants and a black blouse I’d had to buy from the Old Navy next door. All of my other shirts either had non-sanctioned colors or had been cropped with scissors. My hair was a strange auburn color, the aftermath of a DIY bleach job I’d done a few months ago after watching Spring Breakers. I’d put my nose ring back in after the interview, and Dawn eyed it. That’s fine, she said, aiming to reassure herself as much as me, you’re allowed one facial piercing.
I sat on a folding metal chair as Dawn hit play on a training video. She handed me a headset. The Ulta CEO welcomed me to the family. A robotic female voice told me how to enter my time.
She stood next to me as my first customer approached. In life, my voice is boyish and jocular, but the one that came out was a breezy trill. Did you find everything today? I cooed. Nobody had taught me this phrase or this voice. It’s her first day, Dawn explained as I tried to remember what to press on the register screen. Thanks for bearing with us, I said. Nobody had taught me to say us.
I relished the novelty. I’d always been a shopper, never a seller, and I delighted each time the curtain was pulled back. I learned about the locked perfume cage in the back. I learned new names for the mundane: theft was shrink, a thief was a Thelma, free products were gratis, a customer was a guest and an item they plucked from the shelf and later abandoned was a go back, checkout was the cash wrap, a shelf was positioned by a planogram, a shelf was positioned by mandate from on high, a shelf was a gondola, a shelf was an endcap, a shelf was an étagère. I learned the satisfaction of a workday that dissolved in an instant. The sweet finality of clocking out. I learned just how pale my skin and just how pink my cheeks were. I learned the acute chemical effect of being called pretty a few times a week.
It is perhaps a mark of my comfortable upbringing that the prospect of working retail excited me. But it is also something else. For Christmas one year, my older brother received a toy cash register. I think the idea was to make math fun for him. He abandoned the register after a few hours, but I didn’t. I rang things up well into the evening—I sold myself a Lego, a pop-up book, a wheel for my doomed hamster, a petrified piece of licorice. The items were beside the point. It wasn’t the things that I loved so much as the transaction, the beep of the buttons, the receipt paper smooth between my thumb and forefinger. The way the machine shivered when the cash drawer clicked shut. A friend of mine once declared smoking the perfect sensory experience: you smell it, touch it, fingers, lungs, hot on the inhale, visible on the exhale. It is perfect because your nerves sharpen, then calm. You witness the fact of your steady breathing. You make a habit of it.
Guests who belonged to our loyalty program earned ULTAmate Rewards Points with every dollar they spent. Compared to Sephora, whose Beauty Insider program exchanged dollars not for discounts but for deluxe samples, Ulta’s rewards system was thought to be better, as it provided the illusion of savings. At the time, spending $250 at Sephora got you three-twentieths of an ounce of Intenso Pour Homme. The same sum at Ulta saved you, on the dollar, three-hundredths of a cent.
You needed one hundred points before you could get a discount. I’m sorry, I learned to say to those with fewer, you haven’t yet reached the threshold for redemption. A guest’s point balance was always displayed to me at checkout, but on my first day I was warned never to divulge this freely, at least not before they swiped. The points are an incentive for guests to spend more, said Melanie. If you give that up before they pay, it’s just a free discount.
Instead, I was to do this: Print the receipt and smooth it flat on the counter. Lean over. Underline the fine print. Here is a link to our guest satisfaction survey. You could win a $500 gift card. Raise my eyebrows as if suddenly impressed. Wow. Circle a number at the bottom. Looks like you have 732 points. That’s almost $30 off. Guest frowns. Wait. Couldn’t I have used that today? Well. Conspiratorial. Just another excuse to come back soon. With my neon highlighter I drew a wonky heart.
The slickness of my little script felt balletic. It was a good kind of alien. Soon, stock phrases became mantras, became prayers, became muscle memory. Hi there, If you could just swipe one more time, I apologize for the wait, Are you a rewards member, I’ll take the next guest, You have a great day! I could do it in my sleep.
Though my store carried several high-end brands, it lacked the luxury pedigree of Sephora, its biggest competitor. You could see it in the bags—theirs, a glossy black that stood up on its own, ours, a pale orange sack. Sephora was the wife of Moses, she who declared her husband the bridegroom of blood after circumcising her son with a flint knife, her name derived from Hebrew, little bird. Ulta is ultra without an r.
I started at Ulta in October, having graduated from college the previous May. I’d spent the summer in Chicago getting rejected for unpaid positions at music agencies and copywriting jobs at Groupon, only to crawl back to my parents in August. While I was in college, they made a permanent move to the South Carolina beach town we had vacationed in for much of my childhood. To me, it was a place without time or adulthood or anything but heat and stillness. My mom picked me up from the airport. We passed the Towne Centre mall in landlocked Mount Pleasant, with its twelve-foot-tall stone horses standing sentinel in front of the P.F. Chang’s. We ascended the sloping bridge that connected Mount Pleasant to the island beach town where my parents lived, at the top of which sat an American flag and, for a tall minute, a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean. We pulled onto the island’s main drag, lined with palms and clogged with tourists, the pickups and surfboard-laden jeeps trundling along in a slow parade. We turned onto their street, which was a half mile long, no curbs or sidewalks, just a short strip of asphalt bookended by the ocean on one side and marshland on the other. Since the ’90s, houses there were required to be built on stilts so that hurricanes could, rather than sweep the houses away, simply flow through them unobstructed. An old, thick pug stood still in the middle of the street, staring at our car as we veered around him. That’s just Dudley, my mom said, driving past. My parents’ right-hand neighbors had a dolphin-shaped fountain in their yard. Their left-hand neighbors owned a small bungalow that sat flat on the ground, which meant it had survived Hurricane Hugo. Between me and my parents’ front door was a long flight of stairs and a fifty-pound suitcase. I lifted the suitcase gently over the first stair. I could feel beads of sweat forming already on my neck and rolling down my spine into my ass. The air felt like morning breath. Lugging the suitcase up the second stair, I let my arms slacken a little, then on the third stair a little more, until I was dragging the thing behind me, letting it bang violently on every single step. You know I hate that, my mom sighed. I reached the top, breathing hard as I shoved through the stacks of Amazon boxes that would be replaced by a new batch the next day. By the time I started punching in the door code, I’d lost all sense of forward motion. I was again a bored and restless child.
My sleep schedule quickly reversed itself. I would wake up as my parents ate dinner and go to sleep to the sounds of my dad making his morning SodaStream. I didn’t need money but I did need a job, any job, something to differentiate living with my parents at age twenty-three from living with my parents at age fourteen. I applied to and proceeded to hear nothing back from Applebee’s, Target, Costco, H&M, the Container Store, Panda Express, an ice cream cart at the zoo, and Urban Outfitters, which required that I take a personality assessment, the sole purpose of which seemed to be divining if and under what circumstances I would be stoned at work.
Only Ulta called me in for an interview. I sat down with Melanie, who had crimpy blond hair that she clipped half up, a southern accent, and the type of black, stretchy, flared trousers that are marked at $89.99 but always on sale for $59.99 under names like The Aubrey and The Blythe and are, somehow, the uniform of every female retail manager at every mall store across the country. She didn’t ask me many questions, but when she looked at my résumé and saw that I’d majored in English, she asked what my future plans were. I paused. My parents had told me to conceal anything that might suggest I had an exit strategy. Ulta, they reminded me, did not want a liberal arts girl with rich parents for whom retail was merely a way to kill time on the way to Brooklyn, graduate school, or both. I’d learned this in high school when I’d looked for summer jobs only to find that summer jobs didn’t really exist anymore, because the people who fill them don’t really exist. If you have money, your summer job is pre-collegiate grooming rituals, all your unpaid internships and philanthropy. If you don’t have money, your summer job is the job you already have. Ulta wanted someone who was likely to stay put. Ulta’s ideal employee was someone who needed Ulta more than Ulta needed her. But in the moment, with my nose ring in my pocket, I panicked and accidentally told the truth. I kind of want to be a writer. She nodded politely.
Our store was located in the upscale-but-not-luxury Towne Centre outdoor shopping mall in the upscale-but-not-luxury town of Mount Pleasant, which was nearly on the water, but not quite. The town is nestled among old-money Charleston, with its million-dollar prewar mansions, some midsize middle-class towns, and a handful of small fishing villages. Mount Pleasant had itself been a small village, but 1931 brought the highway and 1989 brought the hurricane, which decimated the barrier islands. In Hugo’s wake were insurance payouts and talk of new beginnings and, quickly, a real estate boom that never really ended. By the early 2000s its population doubled and became predominantly upper middle class. The new mall opened. Another highway was built. Now, ten years later, its population had doubled again and was sliding toward rich. Not quite Rich rich—Rich rich being an ineffable, ancient stratum of culture and wealth in which almost nobody in America believes themselves to reside—but statistically rich, the kind of rich that thinks it’s upper middle class because it eats at the same chain restaurants as the masses.
On my first day at Ulta, I descended from my parents’ gleaming SUV and walked among the rest of the gleaming SUVs looping endlessly through the Towne Centre’s sprawling parking lot, their reflections shimmering across the windows of the Ann Taylor Loft, the Qdoba, the Hairy Winston Pet Boutique. The white pavement and the shiny cars seemed to magnify the sunlight. It was unseasonably warm that day, so hot the air looked wavy. The brief interludes of heat between icy car and icy store came as a series of shocks to the body, which may in fact be the entire point of outdoor malls: reminding you of your good fortune to be alive in the age of central air.
Dawn, the assistant manager, ushered me to the back room. I wore black pants and a black blouse I’d had to buy from the Old Navy next door. All of my other shirts either had non-sanctioned colors or had been cropped with scissors. My hair was a strange auburn color, the aftermath of a DIY bleach job I’d done a few months ago after watching Spring Breakers. I’d put my nose ring back in after the interview, and Dawn eyed it. That’s fine, she said, aiming to reassure herself as much as me, you’re allowed one facial piercing.
I sat on a folding metal chair as Dawn hit play on a training video. She handed me a headset. The Ulta CEO welcomed me to the family. A robotic female voice told me how to enter my time.
She stood next to me as my first customer approached. In life, my voice is boyish and jocular, but the one that came out was a breezy trill. Did you find everything today? I cooed. Nobody had taught me this phrase or this voice. It’s her first day, Dawn explained as I tried to remember what to press on the register screen. Thanks for bearing with us, I said. Nobody had taught me to say us.
I relished the novelty. I’d always been a shopper, never a seller, and I delighted each time the curtain was pulled back. I learned about the locked perfume cage in the back. I learned new names for the mundane: theft was shrink, a thief was a Thelma, free products were gratis, a customer was a guest and an item they plucked from the shelf and later abandoned was a go back, checkout was the cash wrap, a shelf was positioned by a planogram, a shelf was positioned by mandate from on high, a shelf was a gondola, a shelf was an endcap, a shelf was an étagère. I learned the satisfaction of a workday that dissolved in an instant. The sweet finality of clocking out. I learned just how pale my skin and just how pink my cheeks were. I learned the acute chemical effect of being called pretty a few times a week.
It is perhaps a mark of my comfortable upbringing that the prospect of working retail excited me. But it is also something else. For Christmas one year, my older brother received a toy cash register. I think the idea was to make math fun for him. He abandoned the register after a few hours, but I didn’t. I rang things up well into the evening—I sold myself a Lego, a pop-up book, a wheel for my doomed hamster, a petrified piece of licorice. The items were beside the point. It wasn’t the things that I loved so much as the transaction, the beep of the buttons, the receipt paper smooth between my thumb and forefinger. The way the machine shivered when the cash drawer clicked shut. A friend of mine once declared smoking the perfect sensory experience: you smell it, touch it, fingers, lungs, hot on the inhale, visible on the exhale. It is perfect because your nerves sharpen, then calm. You witness the fact of your steady breathing. You make a habit of it.
Guests who belonged to our loyalty program earned ULTAmate Rewards Points with every dollar they spent. Compared to Sephora, whose Beauty Insider program exchanged dollars not for discounts but for deluxe samples, Ulta’s rewards system was thought to be better, as it provided the illusion of savings. At the time, spending $250 at Sephora got you three-twentieths of an ounce of Intenso Pour Homme. The same sum at Ulta saved you, on the dollar, three-hundredths of a cent.
You needed one hundred points before you could get a discount. I’m sorry, I learned to say to those with fewer, you haven’t yet reached the threshold for redemption. A guest’s point balance was always displayed to me at checkout, but on my first day I was warned never to divulge this freely, at least not before they swiped. The points are an incentive for guests to spend more, said Melanie. If you give that up before they pay, it’s just a free discount.
Instead, I was to do this: Print the receipt and smooth it flat on the counter. Lean over. Underline the fine print. Here is a link to our guest satisfaction survey. You could win a $500 gift card. Raise my eyebrows as if suddenly impressed. Wow. Circle a number at the bottom. Looks like you have 732 points. That’s almost $30 off. Guest frowns. Wait. Couldn’t I have used that today? Well. Conspiratorial. Just another excuse to come back soon. With my neon highlighter I drew a wonky heart.
The slickness of my little script felt balletic. It was a good kind of alien. Soon, stock phrases became mantras, became prayers, became muscle memory. Hi there, If you could just swipe one more time, I apologize for the wait, Are you a rewards member, I’ll take the next guest, You have a great day! I could do it in my sleep.
by Emily Mester, Electric Lit | Read more:
Image: uncredited but probably Emily
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
How Native Americans Guarded Their Societies Against Tyranny
When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy.
They designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances to guard against tyranny: the Native Americans.
They designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances to guard against tyranny: the Native Americans.
An artist’s depiction of life in Cahokia. (Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)
Although most Americans today don’t know it, there were large centralized civilizations across much of North America in the 10th through 12th centuries. They built massive cities and grand irrigation projects across the continent. Twelfth-century Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi River, had a central city about the size of London at the time. The sprawling 12th-century civilization of the Huhugam had several cities of more than 10,000 people and a total population of perhaps 50,000 in the Southwestern desert.
The ruins of these constructions remain, more than 1,000 years later, in places as far-flung as Phoenix, St. Louis and north Georgia.
The American Colonists and founders thought Native American societies were simple and primitive – but they were not. As research has found, including my own, and as I explain in my book, “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,” Native American communities were elaborate consensus democracies, many of which had survived for generations because of careful attention to checking and balancing power.
Powerful rulers led many of these civilizations, combining political and religious power, much as monarchs of Europe in later centuries would claim a divine right to rule.
In the 13th century, though, a global cooling trend began, which has been called the Little Ice Age. In part because of that cooling, large-scale farming became more difficult, and these large civilizations struggled to feed their people. Elites began hoarding wealth. The people wanted change.
Encouraging Engaged Democracy
As they formed these new and more dispersed societies, the people who had overthrown or fled the great cities and their too powerful leaders sought to avoid mesmerizing leaders who made tempting promises in difficult times. So they designed complex political structures to discourage centralization, hierarchy and inequality and encourage shared decision-making.
These societies intentionally created balanced power structures. For example, the oral history of the Osage Nation records that it once had one great chief who was a military leader, but its council of elder spiritual leaders, known as the “Little Old Men,” decided to balance that chief’s authority with that of another hereditary chief, who would be responsible for keeping peace.
Another way some societies balanced power was through family-based clans. Clans communicated and cooperated across multiple towns. They could work together to balance the power of town-based chiefs and councils.
‘Calm Deliberation’
The Native American democracy that the U.S. founders were most likely to know about was the Iroquois Confederacy. They call themselves the Haudenosaunee, the “people of the longhouse,” because the nations of the confederacy have to get along like multiple families in a longhouse.
In their carefully balanced system, women ran the clans, which were responsible for local decisions about land use and town planning. Men were the representatives of their clans and nations in the Haudenosaunee council, which made decisions for the confederacy as a whole. Each council member, called a royaner, was chosen by a clan mother.
The Haudenosaunee Great Law holds a royaner to a high standard: “The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans – which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will.” In council, “all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.”
The law said the ideal royaner should always “look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation.”
by Kathleen DuVal, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)
The ruins of these constructions remain, more than 1,000 years later, in places as far-flung as Phoenix, St. Louis and north Georgia.
The American Colonists and founders thought Native American societies were simple and primitive – but they were not. As research has found, including my own, and as I explain in my book, “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,” Native American communities were elaborate consensus democracies, many of which had survived for generations because of careful attention to checking and balancing power.
Powerful rulers led many of these civilizations, combining political and religious power, much as monarchs of Europe in later centuries would claim a divine right to rule.
In the 13th century, though, a global cooling trend began, which has been called the Little Ice Age. In part because of that cooling, large-scale farming became more difficult, and these large civilizations struggled to feed their people. Elites began hoarding wealth. The people wanted change.
Spreading Out
The residents of North America’s great cities responded to these stresses by reversing the centralization of power and wealth. Some revolted against their leaders. Others simply left the cities and spread out into smaller towns and farms. All across the continent, they built smaller, more democratic and more egalitarian societies.
Huge numbers left Cahokia’s realm entirely. They found places that still had game to hunt and woods full of trees for firewood and building, both of which had declined near Cahokia due to its rapid growth.
The population of the central city of Cahokia fell from perhaps 20,000 people to only 3,000 by 1275. At some point the elite left as well, and by the late 15th century the cities of Cahokia’s realm were completely gone.
The residents of North America’s great cities responded to these stresses by reversing the centralization of power and wealth. Some revolted against their leaders. Others simply left the cities and spread out into smaller towns and farms. All across the continent, they built smaller, more democratic and more egalitarian societies.
Huge numbers left Cahokia’s realm entirely. They found places that still had game to hunt and woods full of trees for firewood and building, both of which had declined near Cahokia due to its rapid growth.
The population of the central city of Cahokia fell from perhaps 20,000 people to only 3,000 by 1275. At some point the elite left as well, and by the late 15th century the cities of Cahokia’s realm were completely gone.
Encouraging Engaged Democracy
As they formed these new and more dispersed societies, the people who had overthrown or fled the great cities and their too powerful leaders sought to avoid mesmerizing leaders who made tempting promises in difficult times. So they designed complex political structures to discourage centralization, hierarchy and inequality and encourage shared decision-making.
These societies intentionally created balanced power structures. For example, the oral history of the Osage Nation records that it once had one great chief who was a military leader, but its council of elder spiritual leaders, known as the “Little Old Men,” decided to balance that chief’s authority with that of another hereditary chief, who would be responsible for keeping peace.
Another way some societies balanced power was through family-based clans. Clans communicated and cooperated across multiple towns. They could work together to balance the power of town-based chiefs and councils.
An Ideal Of Leadership
Many of these societies required convening all of the people – men, women and children – for major political, military, diplomatic and land-use decisions. Hundreds or even thousands might show up, depending on how momentous the decision was.
They strove for consensus, though they didn’t always achieve it. In some societies, it was customary for the losing side to quietly leave the meeting if they couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the others.
Leaders generally governed by facilitating decision-making in council meetings and public gatherings. They gave gifts to encourage cooperation. They heard disputes between neighbors over land and resources and helped to resolve them. Power and prestige came to lie not in amassing wealth but in assuring that the wealth was shared wisely. Leaders earned support in part by being good providers.
Many of these societies required convening all of the people – men, women and children – for major political, military, diplomatic and land-use decisions. Hundreds or even thousands might show up, depending on how momentous the decision was.
They strove for consensus, though they didn’t always achieve it. In some societies, it was customary for the losing side to quietly leave the meeting if they couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the others.
Leaders generally governed by facilitating decision-making in council meetings and public gatherings. They gave gifts to encourage cooperation. They heard disputes between neighbors over land and resources and helped to resolve them. Power and prestige came to lie not in amassing wealth but in assuring that the wealth was shared wisely. Leaders earned support in part by being good providers.
‘Calm Deliberation’
The Native American democracy that the U.S. founders were most likely to know about was the Iroquois Confederacy. They call themselves the Haudenosaunee, the “people of the longhouse,” because the nations of the confederacy have to get along like multiple families in a longhouse.
In their carefully balanced system, women ran the clans, which were responsible for local decisions about land use and town planning. Men were the representatives of their clans and nations in the Haudenosaunee council, which made decisions for the confederacy as a whole. Each council member, called a royaner, was chosen by a clan mother.
The Haudenosaunee Great Law holds a royaner to a high standard: “The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans – which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will.” In council, “all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.”
The law said the ideal royaner should always “look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation.”
by Kathleen DuVal, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)
Dark Doings, Shady Secrets
With no warning, University of Hawaii President David Lassner fired UH athletic director Craig Angelos. Lassner won’t say why.
Those supporting the AD have filled in the blanks with their own explanations, which can be described this way: All conspiracy theories but no facts.
The AD conspiracy theories are part of a conspiracy theory contagion because conspiracy is the prevailing way we talk about Hawaii politics. Secret inside info, dark doings, shady, secret dealings beneath the surface. The anti-Lassner people build on that.
Angelos’ supporters’ response is so common, that it could be the template for the way people in Hawaii respond when they complain about government.
They are also wrongheaded, misleading and disempowering. The lingo bathes in the glory of the B-movie spy story while missing the problem’s guts.
On his Facebook page the other day, Honolulu Star-Advertiser columnist Dave Shapiro asked the basic question: Why the UH president would threaten his legacy by firing UH athletic director Craig Angelos? (OK, it’s a slightly loaded question because Shapiro assumes it will hurt the president’s legacy.)
Here are the responses he got, all from those supporting the athletic director and criticizing his firing:
The Legislature had a hand in it. It was a quid pro quo to save a pet project of the president. The University of Hawaii bureaucracy’s “selfish bureaucratic politics.” “Territorialism:” a wealthy benefactor wanted better results. And finally a palace coup — it was part of a plot to get the assistant athletic director the job.
And it’s not just Facebook. Those responses are common. Pretty spicy, with a kind of insider know-it-all feel.
Here’s the problem, though.
First of all, these reasons are entirely made up. There are no facts to support them. Of course, there are no available facts of any kind about the firing because the reasons have been kept confidential. That does not mean that your pet theory, without evidence, can accurately fill the gap.
Fantasy about the firing replaces facts. If in fact you have no facts, assume that you do because “everyone knows” that is how things work around here.
But you can’t just simply substitute facts with fantasy and call the fantasy facts. Better to assume that nobody knows nothin’ than to believe overconfidently that you have the answer.
Second, this sort of talk about the athletic director goes for the glory of sweeping explanations about how Hawaii government works while it misses the guts of how Hawaii politics works — and especially doesn’t work.
These conspiracies encourage citizen laziness. The way to find out how government works is to look closely, not to make sweeping statements based on suspicions and suppositions.
And that’s the ultimate problem. This is, then, about much more than an AD getting fired.
It’s about the self-deceptions people have about the link between citizens and government: what they think they know, but they don’t, and what they don’t know, but they think they do.
As Louise Penny writes in her novel “The Grey Wolf,” “How easy it was to slide into conspiracies. To mistake misjudgment for deceit. To see treacheries and plots and sedition where none existed …to attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. There was much more stupidity around than malice.”
Those supporting the AD have filled in the blanks with their own explanations, which can be described this way: All conspiracy theories but no facts.
The AD conspiracy theories are part of a conspiracy theory contagion because conspiracy is the prevailing way we talk about Hawaii politics. Secret inside info, dark doings, shady, secret dealings beneath the surface. The anti-Lassner people build on that.
They are also wrongheaded, misleading and disempowering. The lingo bathes in the glory of the B-movie spy story while missing the problem’s guts.
On his Facebook page the other day, Honolulu Star-Advertiser columnist Dave Shapiro asked the basic question: Why the UH president would threaten his legacy by firing UH athletic director Craig Angelos? (OK, it’s a slightly loaded question because Shapiro assumes it will hurt the president’s legacy.)
Here are the responses he got, all from those supporting the athletic director and criticizing his firing:
The Legislature had a hand in it. It was a quid pro quo to save a pet project of the president. The University of Hawaii bureaucracy’s “selfish bureaucratic politics.” “Territorialism:” a wealthy benefactor wanted better results. And finally a palace coup — it was part of a plot to get the assistant athletic director the job.
And it’s not just Facebook. Those responses are common. Pretty spicy, with a kind of insider know-it-all feel.
Here’s the problem, though.
First of all, these reasons are entirely made up. There are no facts to support them. Of course, there are no available facts of any kind about the firing because the reasons have been kept confidential. That does not mean that your pet theory, without evidence, can accurately fill the gap.
Fantasy about the firing replaces facts. If in fact you have no facts, assume that you do because “everyone knows” that is how things work around here.
But you can’t just simply substitute facts with fantasy and call the fantasy facts. Better to assume that nobody knows nothin’ than to believe overconfidently that you have the answer.
Second, this sort of talk about the athletic director goes for the glory of sweeping explanations about how Hawaii government works while it misses the guts of how Hawaii politics works — and especially doesn’t work.
These conspiracies encourage citizen laziness. The way to find out how government works is to look closely, not to make sweeping statements based on suspicions and suppositions.
And that’s the ultimate problem. This is, then, about much more than an AD getting fired.
It’s about the self-deceptions people have about the link between citizens and government: what they think they know, but they don’t, and what they don’t know, but they think they do.
As Louise Penny writes in her novel “The Grey Wolf,” “How easy it was to slide into conspiracies. To mistake misjudgment for deceit. To see treacheries and plots and sedition where none existed …to attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. There was much more stupidity around than malice.”
Look, the reality is that Lassner had the right to do what he did, and withholding information about personnel matters is both common and acceptable. So is firing without warning.
At the same time, you would think that a pretty sharp operator like Lassner might have given some earlier public hints along the way that his AD wasn’t doing so good.
You have to feel sorry for the AD’s fans who felt that they were ambushed and dumped by the wayside.
And of course, as far as some Hawaii public agencies are concerned, “We won’t give you that information” might as well be a part of the state motto.
At the same time, you would think that a pretty sharp operator like Lassner might have given some earlier public hints along the way that his AD wasn’t doing so good.
You have to feel sorry for the AD’s fans who felt that they were ambushed and dumped by the wayside.
And of course, as far as some Hawaii public agencies are concerned, “We won’t give you that information” might as well be a part of the state motto.
by Neal Miner, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Hawaii News Now
[ed. Trouble in Paradise, like everywhere else. You have to appreciate the small town flavor though; how many people know the AD of their state's university, let alone have an opinion about their performance?]
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Crony Capitalism Is Coming to America
It’s late 2025, and Donald Trump has done what he said he would do: impose high tariffs — taxes on imports — on goods coming from abroad, with extremely high tariffs on imports from China. These tariffs have had exactly the effect many economists predicted, although Trump insisted otherwise: higher prices for American buyers.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
Well, U.S. trade law gives the executive branch broad discretion in tariff-setting, including the ability to grant exemptions in special cases. So you apply for one of those exemptions. Will your request be granted?
In principle, the answer should depend on whether having to pay those tariffs imposes real hardship and threatens American jobs. In practice, you can safely guess that other criteria will play a role. How much money have you contributed to Republicans? When you hold business retreats, are they at Trump golf courses and resorts?
I’m not engaging in idle speculation here. Trump imposed significant tariffs during his first term, and many businesses applied for exemptions. Who got them? A recently published statistical analysis found that companies with Republican ties, as measured by their 2016 campaign contributions, were significantly more likely (and those with Democratic ties less likely) to have their applications approved.
But that was only a small-scale rehearsal for what could be coming. While we don’t have specifics yet, the tariff proposals Trump floated during the campaign were far wider in scope and, in the case of China, far higher than anything we saw the first time around; the potential for political favoritism will be an order of magnitude greater.
As I understand it, the term “crony capitalism” was invented to describe how things worked in the Philippines under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 to 1986. It describes an economy in which business success depends less on good management than on having the right connections — often purchased by doing political or financial favors for those in power. (...)
Now it’s very likely that crony capitalism is coming to America.
There have been many analyses of the probable macroeconomic impact of Trump’s tariffs, which will, if they are anywhere near as big as he has suggested, be seriously inflationary. Arguably, however, their corrupting influence will, in the long run, be an even bigger story.
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
Will tariffs be the only major potential engine of crony capitalism under the incoming administration? It’s doubtful. If you think about it, Trump’s deportation plans will also offer many opportunities for favoritism.
Some of Trump’s advisers, notably Stephen Miller, seem to imagine that they can quickly purge America of undocumented immigrants, rounding up millions of people and putting them in “vast holding facilities.” Even if you set aside legal issues, however, this is probably logistically impossible. What we’re much more likely to see are years of scattershot enforcement attempts, with raids on various businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants.
But what criteria will decide which businesses become priority targets for such raids and which will be left alone, effectively exempted, for years? What do you think?
And there’s more, of course. For example, Trump has suggested a willingness to take away the licenses of TV networks that provide, in his view, unfavorable coverage.
If crony capitalism is coming, what will it do to America? Obviously it will be bad for democracy, both by helping to lock in a large Republican financial advantage and by guaranteeing vocal business support for Trump, no matter how much damage his policies do. It will also enrich Trump and those around him.
Let’s say you have a business that relies on imported parts — maybe from China, maybe from Mexico, maybe from somewhere else. What do you do?
In principle, the answer should depend on whether having to pay those tariffs imposes real hardship and threatens American jobs. In practice, you can safely guess that other criteria will play a role. How much money have you contributed to Republicans? When you hold business retreats, are they at Trump golf courses and resorts?
I’m not engaging in idle speculation here. Trump imposed significant tariffs during his first term, and many businesses applied for exemptions. Who got them? A recently published statistical analysis found that companies with Republican ties, as measured by their 2016 campaign contributions, were significantly more likely (and those with Democratic ties less likely) to have their applications approved.
But that was only a small-scale rehearsal for what could be coming. While we don’t have specifics yet, the tariff proposals Trump floated during the campaign were far wider in scope and, in the case of China, far higher than anything we saw the first time around; the potential for political favoritism will be an order of magnitude greater.
As I understand it, the term “crony capitalism” was invented to describe how things worked in the Philippines under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 to 1986. It describes an economy in which business success depends less on good management than on having the right connections — often purchased by doing political or financial favors for those in power. (...)
Now it’s very likely that crony capitalism is coming to America.
There have been many analyses of the probable macroeconomic impact of Trump’s tariffs, which will, if they are anywhere near as big as he has suggested, be seriously inflationary. Arguably, however, their corrupting influence will, in the long run, be an even bigger story.
Why do tariffs create more potential for cronyism than other taxes? Because the way they operate under our laws offers so much room for discretionary enforcement. The Treasury secretary can’t simply exempt his friends from income taxes (although Andrew Mellon handed out highly questionable rebates in the 1920s). The president can, however, exempt allies from tariffs. And does anyone really believe that the Trump administration will be too ethical to do so? Trump himself has bragged about his ability to game the system; he has bragged that not paying his fair share of taxes makes him “smart.”
Will tariffs be the only major potential engine of crony capitalism under the incoming administration? It’s doubtful. If you think about it, Trump’s deportation plans will also offer many opportunities for favoritism.
Some of Trump’s advisers, notably Stephen Miller, seem to imagine that they can quickly purge America of undocumented immigrants, rounding up millions of people and putting them in “vast holding facilities.” Even if you set aside legal issues, however, this is probably logistically impossible. What we’re much more likely to see are years of scattershot enforcement attempts, with raids on various businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants.
But what criteria will decide which businesses become priority targets for such raids and which will be left alone, effectively exempted, for years? What do you think?
And there’s more, of course. For example, Trump has suggested a willingness to take away the licenses of TV networks that provide, in his view, unfavorable coverage.
If crony capitalism is coming, what will it do to America? Obviously it will be bad for democracy, both by helping to lock in a large Republican financial advantage and by guaranteeing vocal business support for Trump, no matter how much damage his policies do. It will also enrich Trump and those around him.
by Paul Krugman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times
[ed. Of all the predictions about Trump's second term (and I try to read as few as possible) this'll probably be the most accurate. We've seen this show before. Beyond personally enriching himself and any number of people associated with or supportive of his administration, the distortions in Trump's crony capitalist system promise to create a permanently dysfunctional government (competitively, socially, economically, politically). Which, I guess is what his supporters think they want. Good luck ever getting help if you haven't kissed the Don's ring first. Here's what to expect if tarrifs try to steer industry production and purchases to US companies: Jones Act's Grip on Shipping (HCB).]
[ed. Of all the predictions about Trump's second term (and I try to read as few as possible) this'll probably be the most accurate. We've seen this show before. Beyond personally enriching himself and any number of people associated with or supportive of his administration, the distortions in Trump's crony capitalist system promise to create a permanently dysfunctional government (competitively, socially, economically, politically). Which, I guess is what his supporters think they want. Good luck ever getting help if you haven't kissed the Don's ring first. Here's what to expect if tarrifs try to steer industry production and purchases to US companies: Jones Act's Grip on Shipping (HCB).]
Monday, November 25, 2024
Is Land a Really Big Deal?
I originally reviewed Henry George's Progress & Poverty for Astral Codex Ten's book review contest. Henry George is the founder of an economic philosophy known as Georgism which is principally concerned with the deprivations caused by unchecked rentiers. George is famous for promoting two specific policies, the Land Value Tax (LVT) and the Citizen's Dividend (what we would now call a Universal Basic Income).
I was shocked and humbled when Astral Codex Ten's readership selected me as the winner. Even more shocking was how many people from around the world wrote to me about their interest in the article. Family, friends, and acquaintances for sure, but also a lot of total strangers–including business owners, activists, podcasters, online game designers, investors, even government officials from around the world. Scott's blog has way more reach than I realized.
This fills me with a sense of responsibility. If there's a chance people might make policy decisions based on my writing, I need to make sure I haven't been taken in by an argument that's just really persuasive; it had also better be true. What follows therefore is my best attempt at a fair, rigorous, and (where possible) empirical assessment of whether the claims of the Georgist movement stand up to scrutiny.
Let's admit some bias upfront. I'm a Georgist, and I would be happy to find this philosophy true and sad to find it false. But by George, what would make me really sad is to live in a world where Georgism is wrong but where I blissfully continue to believe in it anyway. In that world, I would waste time and energy advocating for a policy that doesn't work at best, and harms society at worst. I'll do my best to kick the tires here, and hopefully the commentariat will point out any of my blind spots. It's impossible for this to not come across as an advocacy piece to some degree, but I promise to give all my critics plenty of surface area to attack.
Some readers of the book review were understandably skeptical that Georgism actually works in practice, so this week I'm going to empirically assess "the big three" critiques that come up the most often:
If you haven't read the Book Review yet, I've posted a brief recap of the relevant concepts below. Otherwise, feel free to skip directly to the subsequent section.
Table of Contents
Some people come to Georgism because of their aversion to income and capital taxes, some want to use LVT to fund generous social programs, some are motivated by the beneficial environmental effects, and some just think the Rent is Too Damn High. No matter where you come from on the political compass, there's probably a way to mix up a club soda and Georgism that's right for you.
[ed. Fascinating. I wasn't aware of Henry George or Georgism, but was involved in developing a program that eventually purchased easements and title to over 650,000 acres in Alaska (see Habitat Protection as a Restoration Strategy). Obviously, land valuation was a big issue. For more information on Georgism see also: Book Review: Progress And Poverty (ACX; and, Land is a Big Deal (book synopsis)]
I was shocked and humbled when Astral Codex Ten's readership selected me as the winner. Even more shocking was how many people from around the world wrote to me about their interest in the article. Family, friends, and acquaintances for sure, but also a lot of total strangers–including business owners, activists, podcasters, online game designers, investors, even government officials from around the world. Scott's blog has way more reach than I realized.
Let's admit some bias upfront. I'm a Georgist, and I would be happy to find this philosophy true and sad to find it false. But by George, what would make me really sad is to live in a world where Georgism is wrong but where I blissfully continue to believe in it anyway. In that world, I would waste time and energy advocating for a policy that doesn't work at best, and harms society at worst. I'll do my best to kick the tires here, and hopefully the commentariat will point out any of my blind spots. It's impossible for this to not come across as an advocacy piece to some degree, but I promise to give all my critics plenty of surface area to attack.
Some readers of the book review were understandably skeptical that Georgism actually works in practice, so this week I'm going to empirically assess "the big three" critiques that come up the most often:
- Land might have been a big deal in 1879, but it just doesn't matter much today
- Landlords will just pass Land Value Tax (LVT) on to tenants, so it won't work
- In real life you can't accurately assess land value separately from improvements, so even if LVT would work in theory, it doesn't work in practice
If you haven't read the Book Review yet, I've posted a brief recap of the relevant concepts below. Otherwise, feel free to skip directly to the subsequent section.
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Brief Recap
Is Land a Really Big Deal?
1. Most of the Value of Urban Real Estate Is Land
2. America's Land Rents Equal a Sizeable % of Government SpendingLand rents vs. Budgets
How Much Money Can We Raise From Land Rents?
ATCOR and the Henry George Theorem
3. Land Represeents a Significant % of all Major Bank Loans
4. Land Represents a Significant % of all Gross Personal Assets
5. Land Ownership is Highly Concentrated Among the Wealthy
A Brief Recap
Georgism is a school of political economy that is really upset about, among other things, the Rent Being Too Damn High. It seeks to liberate labor and capital alike from those who gatekeep access to scarce "non-produced assets," such as land and natural resources, while still affirming the virtues of hard work and free enterprise. George uses the term "Land" to mean not just regular land, but everything that is external to human beings and the things they produce–nature itself, really.
Georgism's chief insight is to move economic thinking from a two-factor model (Labor and Capital) to a three-factor model (Land, Labor, and Capital). Its chief (but not only) policy prescription is the Land Value Tax (LVT), which taxes real estate at as close to 100% of its "land rent" as possible (the amount of rent due to the land alone apart from "improvements" such as buildings). In actual practice, most Georgists seem to think 85% is a reasonable figure to target.
There’s often a lot of confusion around these terms so let's carefully unpack what they mean.
"Land value" is a term used in multiple conflicting ways in different contexts. When we use the term "land value tax", the "land value" part refers to the rental value of the land. This is the recurring income land is capable of generating from the market. This income (land rent or "geo-rent") is what people are willing to pay for the exclusive use of land alone apart from improvements like buildings. This also includes “imputed” rents (the rent an owner-occupier effectively pays to themselves as a simultaneous landlord and tenant). This recurring income comes from people's willingness to pay to use land because of its location and natural attributes (agricultural fertility, endowment of stuff like water, minerals, etc.).
Rental value is related to, but distinct from, selling value. Selling value is what people often mean when they casually use the term "land value." The selling value of the land is just the price of the land in a sale. Full selling value, however, has a special meaning, equivalent to the use of "full market value" in modern assessing. This is specifically the price a property would fetch in an open market at an arms-length sale, between well informed uncoerced parties. In other words, the "full selling value" of the land is the purchase-price of land under "fair" and open market conditions, rather than e.g., your dad selling you a valuable piece of property for $1 as an obvious gift.
It is the rental value which Land Value Tax is intended to capture. It's not a tax on the market purchase price of a property, nor is it a fixed amount of tax per acre of land, but rather a tax which redirects the flow of land rents. When assessed correctly, as LVT approaches 100% the market selling value of the land will approach zero but the rental value will remain the same (more detail on the relationship between land price and land rents in the next article).
Don't let the "100%" confuse you, either. If a piece of land costs $10,000 to buy, and is leased for $500/year, then an LVT that captures 100% of the land rent is $500/year, which works out to a 5% annual tax of the selling value.
LVT should not be confused with a property tax. Property taxes consider land plus improvements (typically buildings). An LVT considers land alone.
Georgists assert that if we sufficiently tax land in this manner, we'll not only end the housing crisis but also fix a bunch of misaligned incentives that cause poverty to persist alongside economic progress, while raising a bunch of revenue that can lower or even eliminate other less efficient taxes, such as sales and income taxes.
This is because virtually all economists agree that LVT has zero "deadweight loss"–a fancy word for a drag on the economy that makes certain activities no longer profitable. Other taxes with no deadweight loss include Pigouvian taxes on bad things, like congestion and pollution.
But won't landlords just raise the rent to make up for the LVT, passing the burden of the tax on to the tenants? Georgists say no, because land is special in that it is scarce and nobody can make any more of it. Indeed, LVT is a rare form of taxation that actually boosts the economy, because it discourages rent-seeking and speculation. Some Georgists even go so far as to say that LVT can raise enough revenue to replace all other less efficient taxes, becoming the so-called "Single Tax," but this is not a universally held position among modern Georgists. To be clear, modern proponents of the "Single Tax" believe that LVT is sufficient for all public purposes and that no other taxes (such as income tax, capital taxes, and tariffs) are necessary for revenue generation, although they still might support other taxes for various reasons-for example, carbon taxes or "sin taxes" on things they want to discourage.
Georgism doesn't begin and end with the LVT, however, and the movement isn't solely concerned with real estate and tax revenue. Henry George was an early proponent of what we now call "Universal Basic Income," or as he called it, the "Citizen's Dividend" (funded by LVT, naturally). But even if you threw every penny of LVT revenue into the sea, the anti-sprawl effects of the policy are appealing enough by themselves to earn the endorsement of YIMBY's and urbanists like Strong Towns.
If you take Georgism to its natural conclusions, you might start to question government-enforced monopolies over other kinds of "Land," such as electromagnetic spectrum, water and mineral rights, and orbital real estate for satellites, not to mention the deadweight loss created by intellectual property gatekeepers over, say, research papers. (...)
A Brief Recap
Is Land a Really Big Deal?
1. Most of the Value of Urban Real Estate Is Land
2. America's Land Rents Equal a Sizeable % of Government SpendingLand rents vs. Budgets
How Much Money Can We Raise From Land Rents?
ATCOR and the Henry George Theorem
3. Land Represeents a Significant % of all Major Bank Loans
4. Land Represents a Significant % of all Gross Personal Assets
5. Land Ownership is Highly Concentrated Among the Wealthy
A Brief Recap
Georgism is a school of political economy that is really upset about, among other things, the Rent Being Too Damn High. It seeks to liberate labor and capital alike from those who gatekeep access to scarce "non-produced assets," such as land and natural resources, while still affirming the virtues of hard work and free enterprise. George uses the term "Land" to mean not just regular land, but everything that is external to human beings and the things they produce–nature itself, really.
Georgism's chief insight is to move economic thinking from a two-factor model (Labor and Capital) to a three-factor model (Land, Labor, and Capital). Its chief (but not only) policy prescription is the Land Value Tax (LVT), which taxes real estate at as close to 100% of its "land rent" as possible (the amount of rent due to the land alone apart from "improvements" such as buildings). In actual practice, most Georgists seem to think 85% is a reasonable figure to target.
There’s often a lot of confusion around these terms so let's carefully unpack what they mean.
"Land value" is a term used in multiple conflicting ways in different contexts. When we use the term "land value tax", the "land value" part refers to the rental value of the land. This is the recurring income land is capable of generating from the market. This income (land rent or "geo-rent") is what people are willing to pay for the exclusive use of land alone apart from improvements like buildings. This also includes “imputed” rents (the rent an owner-occupier effectively pays to themselves as a simultaneous landlord and tenant). This recurring income comes from people's willingness to pay to use land because of its location and natural attributes (agricultural fertility, endowment of stuff like water, minerals, etc.).
Rental value is related to, but distinct from, selling value. Selling value is what people often mean when they casually use the term "land value." The selling value of the land is just the price of the land in a sale. Full selling value, however, has a special meaning, equivalent to the use of "full market value" in modern assessing. This is specifically the price a property would fetch in an open market at an arms-length sale, between well informed uncoerced parties. In other words, the "full selling value" of the land is the purchase-price of land under "fair" and open market conditions, rather than e.g., your dad selling you a valuable piece of property for $1 as an obvious gift.
It is the rental value which Land Value Tax is intended to capture. It's not a tax on the market purchase price of a property, nor is it a fixed amount of tax per acre of land, but rather a tax which redirects the flow of land rents. When assessed correctly, as LVT approaches 100% the market selling value of the land will approach zero but the rental value will remain the same (more detail on the relationship between land price and land rents in the next article).
Don't let the "100%" confuse you, either. If a piece of land costs $10,000 to buy, and is leased for $500/year, then an LVT that captures 100% of the land rent is $500/year, which works out to a 5% annual tax of the selling value.
LVT should not be confused with a property tax. Property taxes consider land plus improvements (typically buildings). An LVT considers land alone.
Georgists assert that if we sufficiently tax land in this manner, we'll not only end the housing crisis but also fix a bunch of misaligned incentives that cause poverty to persist alongside economic progress, while raising a bunch of revenue that can lower or even eliminate other less efficient taxes, such as sales and income taxes.
This is because virtually all economists agree that LVT has zero "deadweight loss"–a fancy word for a drag on the economy that makes certain activities no longer profitable. Other taxes with no deadweight loss include Pigouvian taxes on bad things, like congestion and pollution.
But won't landlords just raise the rent to make up for the LVT, passing the burden of the tax on to the tenants? Georgists say no, because land is special in that it is scarce and nobody can make any more of it. Indeed, LVT is a rare form of taxation that actually boosts the economy, because it discourages rent-seeking and speculation. Some Georgists even go so far as to say that LVT can raise enough revenue to replace all other less efficient taxes, becoming the so-called "Single Tax," but this is not a universally held position among modern Georgists. To be clear, modern proponents of the "Single Tax" believe that LVT is sufficient for all public purposes and that no other taxes (such as income tax, capital taxes, and tariffs) are necessary for revenue generation, although they still might support other taxes for various reasons-for example, carbon taxes or "sin taxes" on things they want to discourage.
Georgism doesn't begin and end with the LVT, however, and the movement isn't solely concerned with real estate and tax revenue. Henry George was an early proponent of what we now call "Universal Basic Income," or as he called it, the "Citizen's Dividend" (funded by LVT, naturally). But even if you threw every penny of LVT revenue into the sea, the anti-sprawl effects of the policy are appealing enough by themselves to earn the endorsement of YIMBY's and urbanists like Strong Towns.
If you take Georgism to its natural conclusions, you might start to question government-enforced monopolies over other kinds of "Land," such as electromagnetic spectrum, water and mineral rights, and orbital real estate for satellites, not to mention the deadweight loss created by intellectual property gatekeepers over, say, research papers. (...)
Some people come to Georgism because of their aversion to income and capital taxes, some want to use LVT to fund generous social programs, some are motivated by the beneficial environmental effects, and some just think the Rent is Too Damn High. No matter where you come from on the political compass, there's probably a way to mix up a club soda and Georgism that's right for you.
by Lars Doucet, Game of Rent | Read more:
Image: Henry George; Georgism/Wikipedia uncredited
Losing My Son
Enough.
Look, the news media inundates us every day with endless tales of genuine horror and suffering, because in a world with billions of people that will always be happening somewhere. Life is and will always be fundamentally unfair, and the vale of tears filled with a never-ending parade of horrors. And yet, it's also true that for the median person on Earth, life is much better today than ever before in human history.
My own story is exactly one such example – the fact that I'm devastated to lose my son to a crippling injury highlights another fact–that this very thing has become so rare in my country as to be "unimaginable." We should rejoice at this! Losing a child used to be so unremarkably commonplace that everyone, even emperors and kings, routinely suffered it until approximately yesterday.
The correct adjective for the tragedy I'm experiencing is not "unimaginable" but unfathomable. I can imagine it just fine because it's happening to me, and you can imagine it too now because I'm describing it to you. And because we can imagine it, we can turn and face it, and, with God's grace, we can lift up our cross and bear it, somehow.
But what none of us can do is to measure–to fathom–the depth of it.
Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea.
— Elder Sophrony of Essex
***
I’ve heard a lot of bad eulogies in my time. There’s at least three different ways to give a bad eulogy.
First, I could pour all of my efforts into denying every ounce of grief, insisting instead on “celebrating the life” of Nikolas, pursuing the absurd goal of making sure nobody gets sad at the funeral of an eight year old boy.
Second, I could robotically recite a list of dates and anecdotes, leaving you with little more than a disjointed Wikipedia summary of Nikolas’ life.
Last and worst, I could make this all about me, making myself the main character at my own son’s funeral.
I regret to inform you that I will surely fail in each and every one of these ways, so settle in for a bad eulogy. Forgive me. (...)
Many of you know me as a man of deep faith, but I confess to have long been plagued by moments of doubt, moments that are the darkest when thoughts turn to the inevitability of my own death. It is of some relevance that I am also possessed of a pathological phobia of falling from great heights. It is therefore no surprise that when I imagine the experience of death, I picture myself falling into a great yawning abyss. I see myself falling, falling, falling, headlong into that great nothing, and God is not there to catch me.
America Has a Child Marriage Epidemic
Image: uncredited
[ed. This can't possibly be true, it's illegal, right? Apparently not:]:
Despite widespread condemnation and international treaties against it, child marriage continues in the United States unabated. As reported in numerous outlets including the Washington Post and The Independent:
At least 207,468 minors married in the US between 2000 and 2015, according to data compiled by Unchained At Last, a group campaigning to abolish child marriage, and investigative documentary series Frontline. The true figure is likely to be much higher because 10 states provided no or incomplete statistics.And the problem persists. Unchained At Last conducted another study in 2021 and found more than 300,000 documented cases of child marriage, as reported by Rolling Stone:
The youngest wedded were three 10-year-old girls in Tennessee who married men aged 24, 25 and 31 in 2001. The youngest groom was an 11-year-old who married a 27-year-old woman in the same state in 2006. Children as young as 12 were granted marriage licences in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while 11 other states allowed 13-year-olds to wed. More than 1,000 children aged 14 or under were granted marriage licences.
A 2021 study by the advocacy group Unchained at Last found that 300,000 minors were married between 2000 and 2018 in the United States. According to the group, 60,000 of those marriages involved an age difference that would have otherwise been considered a sex crime.Remember, this is yet incomplete data as 10 states do not adequately report this data. But there’s yet another element of horror to this situation. In many states, children who are married cannot divorce—making child marriage a daunting one way ticket.
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Saturday, November 23, 2024
via:
[ed. With a career spanning seven decades, he is regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time - Wikipedia.]
[ed. With a career spanning seven decades, he is regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time - Wikipedia.]
Finding Louie (& Louie)
The FBI spent a lot of time and money trying to determine the words to “Louie Louie.” Years later I read their declassified report. Their suggested interpretations were far more obscene than anything in the song.
These aren’t the real lyrics to “Louie Louie”—but the FBI thought they might be.
Rats in Cars Getting Fruit Loops
We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.
As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.
After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs – featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.
As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars. (...)
Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?
Working with postdoctoral fellow Kitty Hartvigsen, I designed a new protocol that used waiting periods to ramp up anticipation before a positive event. Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop. They also had to wait in their transport cage for a few minutes before entering Rat Park, their play area. We also added challenges, such as making them shell sunflower seeds before eating.
This became our Wait For It research program. We dubbed this new line of study UPERs – unpredictable positive experience responses – where rats were trained to wait for rewards. In contrast, control rats received their rewards immediately. After about a month of training, we expose the rats to different tests to determine how waiting for positive experiences affects how they learn and behave. We’re currently peering into their brains to map the neural footprint of extended positive experiences.
Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism. They performed better on cognitive tasks and were bolder in their problem-solving strategies. We linked this program to our lab’s broader interest in behaviorceuticals, a term I coined to suggest that experiences can alter brain chemistry similarly to pharmaceuticals. (...)
While we can’t directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot – or paw, in this case.
Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.
As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.
As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars. (...)
Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?
Working with postdoctoral fellow Kitty Hartvigsen, I designed a new protocol that used waiting periods to ramp up anticipation before a positive event. Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop. They also had to wait in their transport cage for a few minutes before entering Rat Park, their play area. We also added challenges, such as making them shell sunflower seeds before eating.
This became our Wait For It research program. We dubbed this new line of study UPERs – unpredictable positive experience responses – where rats were trained to wait for rewards. In contrast, control rats received their rewards immediately. After about a month of training, we expose the rats to different tests to determine how waiting for positive experiences affects how they learn and behave. We’re currently peering into their brains to map the neural footprint of extended positive experiences.
Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism. They performed better on cognitive tasks and were bolder in their problem-solving strategies. We linked this program to our lab’s broader interest in behaviorceuticals, a term I coined to suggest that experiences can alter brain chemistry similarly to pharmaceuticals. (...)
While we can’t directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot – or paw, in this case.
Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.
by Kelly Lambert, The Conversation | Read more:
Image: Kelly Lambert, CC BY-ND[ed. Not to be mistaken with Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (but maybe..?). Anyway. Useless science. Pretty soon there'll be self-driving rat cars. Or maybe they'll just Uber it.]
Friday, November 22, 2024
Eric Hoffer: The True Believer
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
***
It needs the iron will, daring and vision of an exceptional leader to concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into the collective drive of a mass movement. The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action. He evokes the enthusiasm of communion—the sense of liberation from a petty and meaningless individual existence.
What are the talents requisite for such a performance?
Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); the unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. This last faculty is one of the most essential and elusive. The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men. These men must be fearless, proud, intelligent and capable of organizing and running large-scale undertakings, and yet they must submit wholly to the will of the leader, draw their inspiration and driving force from him, and glory in this submission.
Not all the qualities enumerated above are equally essential. The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity, fanatical faith in a holy cause, an awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity, and, above all, the ability toevoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants. (...)
What are the talents requisite for such a performance?
Not all the qualities enumerated above are equally essential. The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity, fanatical faith in a holy cause, an awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity, and, above all, the ability toevoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants. (...)
91
The crude ideas advanced by many of the successful mass movement leaders of our time incline one to assume that a certain coarseness and immaturity of mind is an asset to leadership. However, it was not the intellectual crudity of an Aimee McPherson or a Hitler which won and held their following but the boundless self-confidence which prompted these leaders to give full rein to their preposterous ideas. A genuinely wise leader who dared to follow out the course of his wisdom would have an equal chance of success. The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts. No solid, tangible advantage can hold a following and make it zealous and loyal unto death. The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Originality is not a prerequisite of great mass movement leadership. One of the most striking traits of the successful mass movement leader is his readiness to imitate both friend and foe, both past and contemporary models. The daring which is essential to this type of leadership consists as much in the daring to imitate as in the daring to defy the world. Perhaps the clue to any heroic career is an unbounded capacity for imitation; a single-minded fashioning after a model. This excessive capacity for imitation indicates that the hero is without a fully developed and realized self. There is much in him that is rudimentary and suppressed. His strength lies in his blind spots and in plugging all outlets but one.
92
The total surrender of a distinct self is a prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and extolling the habit of blind obedience. When Stalin forces scientists, writers and artists to crawl on their bellies and deny their individual intelligence, sense of beauty and moral sense, he is not indulging a sadistic impulse but is solemnizing, in a most impressive way, the supreme virtue of blind obedience. All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a level with faith: “union of minds requires not only a perfect accord in the one Faith, but complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and the Roman Ponti' as to God Himself.” (...)
94
The frustrated are also likely to be the most steadfast followers. It is remarkable, that, in a co-operative effort, the least self-reliant are the least likely to be discouraged by defeat. For they join others in a common undertaking not so much to ensure the success of a cherished project as to avoid an individual shouldering of blame in case of failure. When the common undertaking fails, they are still spared the one thing they fear most, namely, the showing up of
their individual shortcomings. Their faith remains unimpaired and they are eager to follow in a new attempt. The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.
The crude ideas advanced by many of the successful mass movement leaders of our time incline one to assume that a certain coarseness and immaturity of mind is an asset to leadership. However, it was not the intellectual crudity of an Aimee McPherson or a Hitler which won and held their following but the boundless self-confidence which prompted these leaders to give full rein to their preposterous ideas. A genuinely wise leader who dared to follow out the course of his wisdom would have an equal chance of success. The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts. No solid, tangible advantage can hold a following and make it zealous and loyal unto death. The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Originality is not a prerequisite of great mass movement leadership. One of the most striking traits of the successful mass movement leader is his readiness to imitate both friend and foe, both past and contemporary models. The daring which is essential to this type of leadership consists as much in the daring to imitate as in the daring to defy the world. Perhaps the clue to any heroic career is an unbounded capacity for imitation; a single-minded fashioning after a model. This excessive capacity for imitation indicates that the hero is without a fully developed and realized self. There is much in him that is rudimentary and suppressed. His strength lies in his blind spots and in plugging all outlets but one.
92
The total surrender of a distinct self is a prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and extolling the habit of blind obedience. When Stalin forces scientists, writers and artists to crawl on their bellies and deny their individual intelligence, sense of beauty and moral sense, he is not indulging a sadistic impulse but is solemnizing, in a most impressive way, the supreme virtue of blind obedience. All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a level with faith: “union of minds requires not only a perfect accord in the one Faith, but complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and the Roman Ponti' as to God Himself.” (...)
93
People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and selfconfident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. Moreover, submission by all to a supreme leader is an approach to their ideal of equality. In time of crisis, during foods, earthquakes, epidemics, depressions and wars, separate individual effort is of no avail, and people of every condition are ready to obey and follow a leader. To obey is then the only firm point in a chaotic day-by-day existence.
94
The frustrated are also likely to be the most steadfast followers. It is remarkable, that, in a co-operative effort, the least self-reliant are the least likely to be discouraged by defeat. For they join others in a common undertaking not so much to ensure the success of a cherished project as to avoid an individual shouldering of blame in case of failure. When the common undertaking fails, they are still spared the one thing they fear most, namely, the showing up of
their individual shortcomings. Their faith remains unimpaired and they are eager to follow in a new attempt. The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.
by Eric Hoffer, The True Believer | Read more (pdf):
Image: The True Believer
[ed. I remember this book having a profound effect on me in college. Thinking of it again, I pulled it down from a shelf and randomly started reading a few chapters. Here are the first few things I read. Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman who worked on the docks of San Francisco for most of his adult life. In his spare time he became a self-taught philosopher and eventually published several well-received books. This one, written in 1951, is probably one of his most famous. See a few reviews: here, here, here, and here.]
Daniel Inouye Documentary - Renegades
Daniel Inouye wanted to serve the United States from a young age. Growing up in Hawaii, he was rattled by the attack on Pearl Harbor; in 1944, at the age of 19, Inouye deployed to Italy, then France, to fight the Nazis. War changes most soldiers’ lives, but Inouye, fighting in an all–Japanese American combat unit, also had to get his right arm amputated: A Nazi soldier struck him with a grenade launcher, partly destroying the arm and forcing him to pry the undetonated grenade out with his left hand. He threw it back at the Nazi—this time, it detonated.
After being rehabilitated, Inouye continued to serve the United States, first as one of Hawaii’s earliest delegates to the House of Representatives, then, in 1963, in the Senate, where he remained for nearly 50 years. Inouye supported civil rights, but he was not at the forefront of the disability rights movement; in fact, Inouye did not see himself as a disabled person, likely due to stigma at the time. By 2010, Inouye was president pro tempore of the Senate, making him the highest-ranking person of color with a disability in the presidential line of succession, ever.
Inouye’s story is the subject of a new documentary, out October 8, in PBS’ Renegades series of five short films telling the stories of underrecognized disabled figures in US history, like Inouye and Black Panther Party member Brad Lomax.
Mother Jones spoke with Renegades series creator Day Al-Mohamed, who has worked on disability policy in the Biden-Harris administration, and Tammy Botkin, who directed the short on the late senator, on Inouye’s relationship to his disability and more. (...)
In your work in disability policy, even decades later, do you see similarities in how many veterans may not view themselves as part of the disability community—like Daniel Inouye didn’t?
Al-Mohamed: I still remember, as one veteran explained it to me, “I don’t have a disability. I’m just busted out.” It’s very much a way of thinking about that. Veterans are a community in and of themselves and [had] a job, in many ways, that is based on your your body, abilities and capacity.
We all have different perceptions of what it means to be disabled, and we can even see that within the non-veteran community as well. There’s this general mainstream perception that disability is a wheelchair user, or it’s somebody who is blinded. I think that that has done a disservice to many folks who don’t see the opportunity to take advantage of the policies and politics that protect them, which is also, in some ways, at the heart of the episode.
It does seem there’s a generational shift, where younger people are embracing that identity more than in the days when more people were being institutionalized.
Botkin: It’s definitely related to generational views of disability. It is also related to the Senator’s identity as a war veteran, who has seen many other friends who died and were maimed far worse than he. It also has to do with his identity as a Japanese American. Then, his need as a politician to show himself as strong—and when he started in politics, to have a disability would have been a weakness.
Why was it important to explore multiple aspects of Inouye’s identity—including how anti-Japanese sentiment made it difficult for Inouye to enlist, and led to his being called a communist?
Botkin: First off, the senator being smushed into 12 minutes feels like an aberration. How do you do that? He [had] such a massive, massive life, and he himself was such a prolific storyteller and framer of his experience and our collective experience.
There were so many facets to him that to really even begin to understand him as an individual, to leave any of those out is to not be able to really grasp who he is—that he belonged to many communities. He’s Japanese American, yes, but also Hawaiian. Yes, he’s military. He’s a politician. He’s a man from a certain generation of Americanism. He would fight for people with disabilities, but for him to take the lead on it would be self-serving. He wouldn’t do that, and that leans a lot into his Japanese American heritage. We worked with Japanese American consultants to nail this in.
When you’re telling somebody’s story, it’s terrifying because I personally feel like I have to get it right. Luckily, in this case, the Senator’s best friend, who’s in the film, Jeff Watanabe, was incredibly pleased with the representation, so I can breathe.
Al-Mohamed: If you watch the film, you can see [Tammy’s] pulling strands of different labels. As you even highlighted, the discussion around communism, discussion about being Japanese American, discussion about disability, discussion about veteran, those are all labels. At the heart, it’s about the ones you choose to embrace, the ones you don’t, the ones society puts on you, and the ones that you choose for yourself.
by Julia Métraux, Mother Jones | Read more:
"Kame and Hyotaro would not have dared to dream from their home in the Japanese-American community of Mo’ili’ili, a suburb of Honolulu, that the son born to them on September 7th, 1924 would one day be third in line for the Presidency of the United States. They named him Daniel K. Inouye.
Dan had a normal happy childhood, as it is today it was then, a neat place for a child to grow up. Dan was a senior at McKinley high school on December 7th 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. (...)
The following September, Dan – who had plans to become a doctor – enrolled in the University of Hawaii. Like many Nisei, Dan had tried to enlist but the War Department at first refused to accept Japanese-American volunteers after Pearl Harbor. Then they changed their minds. Dan put his plans to become a doctor on hold, quit school and enlisted. He was assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. During training in Mississippi, the unit found its motto: “Go for Broke!”
By the time the 442nd shipped out for Naples in May 1944, Dan was a sergeant and squad leader. As a matter of interest, the casualty rate was so high that it eventually took 12,000 men to fill the original 4,500 places in the regiment. (...)
On April 21, 1945, Dan’s company was ordered to attack a heavily defended ridge guarding an important road in the vicinity of San Terenzo. His platoon wiped out an enemy patrol and mortar observation post and reached the main line of resistance before the rest of the American force. As the troops continued up the hill, three German machine guns focused their fire on them, pinning them down. Dan worked his way toward the first bunker. Pulling out a grenade, he felt something hit him in his side but paid no attention and threw the grenade into the machine-gun nest. After it exploded, he advanced and killed the crew.
Dan continued up the hill, throwing two more grenades into the second gun emplacement and destroying it before he collapsed from loss of blood from his wounds. His men, trying to take the third bunker, were forced back. He dragged himself toward it, then stood up and was about to pull the pin on his last grenade when a German appeared in the bunker and fired a rifle grenade. It hit Dan in the right elbow and literally tore off his arm. He pried the grenade out of his dead right fist with his other hand and threw it at the third bunker, then lurched toward it, firing his tommy gun left-handed. A German bullet hit him in the leg. A medic reached him and gave him a shot of morphine. In his typical stoic manner he didn’t allow himself to be evacuated until the position was secured. In the hospital, the remnants of his right arm were amputated.
Dan left the Army and after a long period of recuperation, Dan finished college. Forced to give up his dream of practicing medicine, he decided to study law. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii in 1959—Congress’s first Japanese-American—and to the Senate in 1962."
Inouye’s story is the subject of a new documentary, out October 8, in PBS’ Renegades series of five short films telling the stories of underrecognized disabled figures in US history, like Inouye and Black Panther Party member Brad Lomax.
Mother Jones spoke with Renegades series creator Day Al-Mohamed, who has worked on disability policy in the Biden-Harris administration, and Tammy Botkin, who directed the short on the late senator, on Inouye’s relationship to his disability and more. (...)
In your work in disability policy, even decades later, do you see similarities in how many veterans may not view themselves as part of the disability community—like Daniel Inouye didn’t?
Al-Mohamed: I still remember, as one veteran explained it to me, “I don’t have a disability. I’m just busted out.” It’s very much a way of thinking about that. Veterans are a community in and of themselves and [had] a job, in many ways, that is based on your your body, abilities and capacity.
We all have different perceptions of what it means to be disabled, and we can even see that within the non-veteran community as well. There’s this general mainstream perception that disability is a wheelchair user, or it’s somebody who is blinded. I think that that has done a disservice to many folks who don’t see the opportunity to take advantage of the policies and politics that protect them, which is also, in some ways, at the heart of the episode.
It does seem there’s a generational shift, where younger people are embracing that identity more than in the days when more people were being institutionalized.
Botkin: It’s definitely related to generational views of disability. It is also related to the Senator’s identity as a war veteran, who has seen many other friends who died and were maimed far worse than he. It also has to do with his identity as a Japanese American. Then, his need as a politician to show himself as strong—and when he started in politics, to have a disability would have been a weakness.
Why was it important to explore multiple aspects of Inouye’s identity—including how anti-Japanese sentiment made it difficult for Inouye to enlist, and led to his being called a communist?
Botkin: First off, the senator being smushed into 12 minutes feels like an aberration. How do you do that? He [had] such a massive, massive life, and he himself was such a prolific storyteller and framer of his experience and our collective experience.
There were so many facets to him that to really even begin to understand him as an individual, to leave any of those out is to not be able to really grasp who he is—that he belonged to many communities. He’s Japanese American, yes, but also Hawaiian. Yes, he’s military. He’s a politician. He’s a man from a certain generation of Americanism. He would fight for people with disabilities, but for him to take the lead on it would be self-serving. He wouldn’t do that, and that leans a lot into his Japanese American heritage. We worked with Japanese American consultants to nail this in.
When you’re telling somebody’s story, it’s terrifying because I personally feel like I have to get it right. Luckily, in this case, the Senator’s best friend, who’s in the film, Jeff Watanabe, was incredibly pleased with the representation, so I can breathe.
Al-Mohamed: If you watch the film, you can see [Tammy’s] pulling strands of different labels. As you even highlighted, the discussion around communism, discussion about being Japanese American, discussion about disability, discussion about veteran, those are all labels. At the heart, it’s about the ones you choose to embrace, the ones you don’t, the ones society puts on you, and the ones that you choose for yourself.
by Julia Métraux, Mother Jones | Read more:
Image: via uncredited
[ed. Will have to look for this. The international airport in Honolulu is named after Sen. Inouye, and the one in Anchorage, Alaska named after Ted Stevens. Both were great friends and co-conspirators during their time in Congress (one Democrat, the other Republican), and were together extremely effective in getting the most they could for each of their small states. In the process both became legends, greatly shaping each state's destiny. See also: Grit, Courage: 2nd Lt. and U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, U.S. Army (Hawaii Reporter):]
"Kame and Hyotaro would not have dared to dream from their home in the Japanese-American community of Mo’ili’ili, a suburb of Honolulu, that the son born to them on September 7th, 1924 would one day be third in line for the Presidency of the United States. They named him Daniel K. Inouye.
Dan had a normal happy childhood, as it is today it was then, a neat place for a child to grow up. Dan was a senior at McKinley high school on December 7th 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. (...)
The following September, Dan – who had plans to become a doctor – enrolled in the University of Hawaii. Like many Nisei, Dan had tried to enlist but the War Department at first refused to accept Japanese-American volunteers after Pearl Harbor. Then they changed their minds. Dan put his plans to become a doctor on hold, quit school and enlisted. He was assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. During training in Mississippi, the unit found its motto: “Go for Broke!”
By the time the 442nd shipped out for Naples in May 1944, Dan was a sergeant and squad leader. As a matter of interest, the casualty rate was so high that it eventually took 12,000 men to fill the original 4,500 places in the regiment. (...)
On April 21, 1945, Dan’s company was ordered to attack a heavily defended ridge guarding an important road in the vicinity of San Terenzo. His platoon wiped out an enemy patrol and mortar observation post and reached the main line of resistance before the rest of the American force. As the troops continued up the hill, three German machine guns focused their fire on them, pinning them down. Dan worked his way toward the first bunker. Pulling out a grenade, he felt something hit him in his side but paid no attention and threw the grenade into the machine-gun nest. After it exploded, he advanced and killed the crew.
Dan continued up the hill, throwing two more grenades into the second gun emplacement and destroying it before he collapsed from loss of blood from his wounds. His men, trying to take the third bunker, were forced back. He dragged himself toward it, then stood up and was about to pull the pin on his last grenade when a German appeared in the bunker and fired a rifle grenade. It hit Dan in the right elbow and literally tore off his arm. He pried the grenade out of his dead right fist with his other hand and threw it at the third bunker, then lurched toward it, firing his tommy gun left-handed. A German bullet hit him in the leg. A medic reached him and gave him a shot of morphine. In his typical stoic manner he didn’t allow himself to be evacuated until the position was secured. In the hospital, the remnants of his right arm were amputated.
Dan left the Army and after a long period of recuperation, Dan finished college. Forced to give up his dream of practicing medicine, he decided to study law. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii in 1959—Congress’s first Japanese-American—and to the Senate in 1962."
Thursday, November 21, 2024
An Immense World
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong (Random House, 2022).
You live in a world of physical phenomena: surrounded by objects of all sorts, suffused by electromagnetic radiation, buffeted by waves of pressure propagating through the air and awash with tiny organic molecules that waft on it. Your senses are exquisitely attuned to perceive some of these things — certain frequencies of radiation become a beloved face, a mess of floating chemicals resolves into the scent of baking bread — but many others fall outside the narrow band of your perception. Without specialized equipment, you are quite literally blind to the ultraviolet or infrared and deaf to the ultrasonic cries of rodents or the infrasounds of elephants and whales. And forget about electric and magnetic fields; they’re so far outside our actual experience that we don’t even have a word for our inability to sense them.
Animals are attuned to a different spread of phenomena. Everyone knows that dogs are good at smelling (though just how good — good enough to detect a single fingerprint on a glass slide that has been left out on a rooftop for a week — is still a surprise). Fewer know about elephants, who can identify supposedly-odorless TNT and have been known to survive droughts by scenting out buried water and digging wells. Almost no one knows that the family of seabirds called tubenoses are able to navigate the trackless ocean by following diffuse plumes of the gas released when plankton are eaten by krill. And as for smell, so for sight: who knew that nearly all animals, including most non-primate mammals, can see well into the ultraviolet spectrum? (In fact, many flowers that look solid-colored to us actually have clear UV runways to guide their pollinators in for a landing.) And on and on, for more than three hundred gloriously diverse pages full of senses I’d never even thought of.
This book is a guide to the physical world and how animal senses perceive it, with plenty of fascinating descriptions of biomechanics and organic chemistry. More than that, though, it’s an invitation to imagine what it might be like if our senses worked differently. Borrowing a term from early 20th century Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, Yong describes the “sensory bubbles” of our Umwelt: like the blind men and the elephant, we have access to only a fraction of the available data, but it seems like the whole world.
We have pretty good noses and exceptionally sensitive fingertips, but the human Umwelt is dominated by sight. Not so for many other creatures, for whom touch or scent is more important — and it’s hard to overemphasize how differently other senses work. Light travels rapidly over great distances, but it can be easily blocked and it vanishes quickly and with little trace. Smells, on the other hand, seep and spread. A barrier impenetrable to sight poses no difficulty to scent; odorant molecules are so small they’re virtually impossible to entirely block, and they move around corners and through darkness as easily as they do in straight lines. But even more importantly, they linger. An Umwelt where scent reigns is one of layers, of history, of trails that slowly waft and dissolve over the course of hours or days. What would your relationship to time and space be if you came to the world nose-first?
And then make it even weirder: what if we could interpret the pressure waves of water moving between sand grains to find clams buried deeper than our probing fingers can reach, like the way the red knot can with its bill? What if we could feel the tiny air currents of an insect in flight, or the track the passage of a fish through water by the turbulence it leaves behind?
It’s difficult to imagine, and so we often don’t. After all, we have remarkable trouble wrapping our heads around other humans whose culture differs from our own; how much harder with something thoroughly alien? Maybe it’s no surprise that while the monsters we come up with may look different, they often act basically like “humans but” — human but larger, human but with big teeth and wings, human but with face tentacles and mind control. But they needn’t! Think of the (seemingly) simplest of additions, the ability to see in the dark. It adds tactical complications, sure, but it would do more than that: depending on how the dark-vision works, it can change nearly everything. Pit vipers use (you guessed it) specialized pits to “see” in infrared, but only at very low resolution and very close range. Cats and many other mammals have a reflective layer behind the retina that sends back light to be gathered a second time; in a reindeer, it grows and changes during the cold dark winter. Bats and dolphins “see” by echolocation. The golden mole finds mounds of dune grass amidst the sands of its desert home by listening for the ground-borne vibrations caused by the wind rustling the grass. Each one of these senses enables a creature to navigate a lightless environment much better than you can, but each also makes its world strange in ways you’d never think of — and which are therefore much more fun.
Just to whet your appetite for this book, I’ll leave you with a few animals.
Here’s the emerald jewel wasp:
You live in a world of physical phenomena: surrounded by objects of all sorts, suffused by electromagnetic radiation, buffeted by waves of pressure propagating through the air and awash with tiny organic molecules that waft on it. Your senses are exquisitely attuned to perceive some of these things — certain frequencies of radiation become a beloved face, a mess of floating chemicals resolves into the scent of baking bread — but many others fall outside the narrow band of your perception. Without specialized equipment, you are quite literally blind to the ultraviolet or infrared and deaf to the ultrasonic cries of rodents or the infrasounds of elephants and whales. And forget about electric and magnetic fields; they’re so far outside our actual experience that we don’t even have a word for our inability to sense them.
This book is a guide to the physical world and how animal senses perceive it, with plenty of fascinating descriptions of biomechanics and organic chemistry. More than that, though, it’s an invitation to imagine what it might be like if our senses worked differently. Borrowing a term from early 20th century Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, Yong describes the “sensory bubbles” of our Umwelt: like the blind men and the elephant, we have access to only a fraction of the available data, but it seems like the whole world.
We have pretty good noses and exceptionally sensitive fingertips, but the human Umwelt is dominated by sight. Not so for many other creatures, for whom touch or scent is more important — and it’s hard to overemphasize how differently other senses work. Light travels rapidly over great distances, but it can be easily blocked and it vanishes quickly and with little trace. Smells, on the other hand, seep and spread. A barrier impenetrable to sight poses no difficulty to scent; odorant molecules are so small they’re virtually impossible to entirely block, and they move around corners and through darkness as easily as they do in straight lines. But even more importantly, they linger. An Umwelt where scent reigns is one of layers, of history, of trails that slowly waft and dissolve over the course of hours or days. What would your relationship to time and space be if you came to the world nose-first?
And then make it even weirder: what if we could interpret the pressure waves of water moving between sand grains to find clams buried deeper than our probing fingers can reach, like the way the red knot can with its bill? What if we could feel the tiny air currents of an insect in flight, or the track the passage of a fish through water by the turbulence it leaves behind?
It’s difficult to imagine, and so we often don’t. After all, we have remarkable trouble wrapping our heads around other humans whose culture differs from our own; how much harder with something thoroughly alien? Maybe it’s no surprise that while the monsters we come up with may look different, they often act basically like “humans but” — human but larger, human but with big teeth and wings, human but with face tentacles and mind control. But they needn’t! Think of the (seemingly) simplest of additions, the ability to see in the dark. It adds tactical complications, sure, but it would do more than that: depending on how the dark-vision works, it can change nearly everything. Pit vipers use (you guessed it) specialized pits to “see” in infrared, but only at very low resolution and very close range. Cats and many other mammals have a reflective layer behind the retina that sends back light to be gathered a second time; in a reindeer, it grows and changes during the cold dark winter. Bats and dolphins “see” by echolocation. The golden mole finds mounds of dune grass amidst the sands of its desert home by listening for the ground-borne vibrations caused by the wind rustling the grass. Each one of these senses enables a creature to navigate a lightless environment much better than you can, but each also makes its world strange in ways you’d never think of — and which are therefore much more fun.
Just to whet your appetite for this book, I’ll leave you with a few animals.
Here’s the emerald jewel wasp:
The wasp — a beautiful inch-long creature with a metallic green body and orange thighs — is a parasite that raises its young on cockroaches. When a female finds a roach, she stings it twice — once in its midsection to temporarily paralyze its legs, and a second time in its brain. The second sting targets two specific clusters of neurons and delivers venom that nullifies the roach’s desire to move, turning it into a submissive zombie. In this state, the wasp can lead the roach to her lair by its antennae, like a human walking a dog. Once there, she lays an egg on it, providing her future larva with a docile source of fresh meat. This act of mind control depends on that second sting, which the wasp must deliver to exactly the right location. Just as a red knot has to find a clam hidden somewhere in the sand, an emerald jewel wasp has to find the roach’s brain hidden somewhere within a tangle of muscles and internal organs.And a whale:
Fortunately for the wasp, her stinger is not only a drill, a venom injector, and an egg-laying tube but also a sense organ. Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat showed that its tip is covered in small bumps and pits that are sensitive to both smell and touch. With them, she can detect the distinctive feel of a roach’s brain. When Gal and Libersat removed the brain from a cockroach before offering the roach to some wasps, they repeatedly stung it, trying in vain to find the organ that was no longer there. If the missing brain was replaced with a pellet of the same consistency, the wasps stung it with the usual precision. If the replacement pellet was squishier than a typical brain, the wasps seemed confused and kept rooting around with their stingers. They knew what a brain should feel like.
The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.
Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together.
by Jane Psmith, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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