Friday, October 4, 2013
Where the Sun Always Shines. And Where It Never Does.
This man is an asshole.
He is also, as Aaron James rightly observes in his convincing and often quite funny book, Assholes: A Theory, an important object of moral inquiry. Assholes are a social type. They arouse our anger and indignation, and sometimes leave us with a vague feeling of powerlessness and self-loathing. The strength and nature of our reaction to assholish behavior signals the extent of the moral violation caused by it. Thus, for James:
The problem of the asshole [. . .] presents a major obstacle to progress and social justice but also threatens the hard-fought and hardwon gains for decency a society has already made. The problem affects whole societies, international relations, and so the entire world.The problem of the asshole, then, is a problem for us all.
This may sound overstated or glib, but James, a professor of philosophy at UC Irvine, makes a rigorous case for why we should take the problem of the asshole seriously. The book surveys diverse asshole subtypes: asshole bosses, royal assholes, the corporate asshole, and delusional assholes, to name just a few. But first James neatly unpacks the basic features of this most loathsome individual. For him, an asshole is defined by three important qualities, which also serve to differentiate his behavior from other morally repugnant characters such as the jerk, or much more seriously, the sociopath. First, the asshole considers himself — and James and I agree, assholes are almost always men — to possess special privileges or advantages over others. Moreover, he behaves in a manner that reflects this belief (making the asshole distinct from the mere egoist, who may believe that he is better than others, but for a variety of reasons, does not act on this belief systematically.). Second, the grounds for this belief are assumed and not argued for. An asshole believes deeply that he alone deserves special treatment, that he is somehow entitled to it. This kind of asshole behavior, as James goes on to show, produces both minor-league assholes, such as the line-cutter or reckless freeway driver, as well as their major-league brethren, such as, say, Donald Trump or Anthony Weiner. (Of course, significant overlap is possible, and minor leaguers rarely disappoint when called up to the big leagues.) Third, and finally, assholes are “immunized” to the protests of others. An asshole might hear you out, recognizing your complaints as valid in an abstract way, but he never truly listens. A real asshole does not feel the need to justify his behavior to you, okay? Thanks.
by Zach Dorfman, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: from the book Assholes, by Aaron James
Money Makes the World Go Round
The first thing to know about the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is that you should get there a little early. Security is tight—the entrance to the parking lot alone employs a series of three gates, plus guards. To enter the building you have to get a visitor’s badge, which allows you and your bag to go through the metal detectors into the lobby, where you can exchange your first badge for another one. This badge allows you to proceed beyond the lobby, although you’re not exactly free to roam. The reason for all the security is that in the basement of the Dallas Fed there’s a vault the size of a five-story building, and sitting in that vault, under heavy protection, is the most staggering concentration of physical wealth in Texas: trolleys full of shrink-wrapped bundles of brand-new bills, piles and piles of old bills, stacks as far as the eye can see. The exact amount fluctuates, but on any given day, there are billions of dollars down there. And all of it’s in cash.
Take the elevator in the other direction and you’ll find floor after floor of the same types of workers you’d find at a commercial bank: managers and analysts and researchers and lawyers. But these men and women (more of the latter than you might expect) are part of the Federal Reserve System, so they have a public role: they produce research about the region, serve as our friendly local central bankers, and, as a group and along with the Fed’s board of governors in Washington, help make decisions about how much money the richest nation in the history of the world should have on hand.
The twelve regional banks of the Federal Reserve System, which was created by Congress in 1913, are actual banks, but since their customers are other banks, as opposed to people or businesses, they tend to be supersized. The Dallas Fed isn’t the biggest of these regional banks—that would be the New York Fed, naturally—but it is unusual, because of geography. It’s the only Fed bank with a district that’s basically just a single state, and since that state is Texas, the Dallas Fed has a long tradition of being a pain in the ass. (...)
The simplest way to explain what the Fed does is to say that it stabilizes the country’s money supply. This is done by managing currency, overseeing member banks, deciding the interest rates at which the government can borrow or lend money, and, when necessary, making the purchases or loans that private banks will not. To put it another way, the Federal Reserve often acts as a counterweight to looming problems in the private sector. If private players are getting too optimistic, racking up debt, and risking inflation, the Fed may move to raise interest rates, thus tightening the money supply. If, on the other hand, the private banks are too spooked to do much of anything, the Fed can lower interest rates to encourage lending or even act as a sort of substitute, spending money when no one else will.
This last activity has caused a fair amount of debate over the past five years. Since the financial crisis hit, the Fed has intervened several times to make large-scale asset purchases, a move known as quantitative easing. It works like this: If commercial banks have assets they can’t readily sell, they end up in a defensive posture, unwilling or unable to buy anything else. So the Fed buys up huge batches of securities, in the hopes of creating a ripple effect among the private banks, which would enable companies to get access to much-needed credit, restructure their liabilities, make new investments, and above all, put people back to work.
Most countries in the developed world have a central bank like our Federal Reserve. It’s a useful thing, but Americans have historically been torn about whether or not to have one. The bank’s weird, quasi-public nature means it has expansive powers and unusual independence; dissolving the Fed, or at least auditing it, is among the recurring demands of the tea party movement, although the idea attracts support from progressives too. Others support the system in general but frequently disagree with what the Fed is doing. (...)
As in any system, the trick is finding the right balance. When I asked him about the financial crisis, Fisher told me that by the fall of 2007, he was feeling seriously worried. “Mortgage-related markets were manic,” he said, and big banks like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch looked as if they were in trouble (both were sold in 2008). “I don’t think I got a full night’s sleep for eighteen months,” he recalled. Behind closed doors, the Fed was in a state of high alarm, and he would either be awakened by a middle-of-the-night call from one of his counterparts or be already lying awake, wondering if the actions he’d advised were the best ones.
When the crisis did blow open, Fisher’s public commentary was temperate. In October 2008 he gave a speech in Washington counseling calmness. Countries have weathered crises before, he said, and America would weather this one. In his view, the Fed had to resist providing undue comfort to foundering companies who had run into trouble through their own misconduct or ineptitude. To do so would create moral hazard, the risk of encouraging similarly bad behavior in the future. At the same time, Fisher argued that the Fed’s response should be muscular. (...)
“I think we did that well,” Fisher continued. “My dispute has been with what we did afterward.”
Take the elevator in the other direction and you’ll find floor after floor of the same types of workers you’d find at a commercial bank: managers and analysts and researchers and lawyers. But these men and women (more of the latter than you might expect) are part of the Federal Reserve System, so they have a public role: they produce research about the region, serve as our friendly local central bankers, and, as a group and along with the Fed’s board of governors in Washington, help make decisions about how much money the richest nation in the history of the world should have on hand.The twelve regional banks of the Federal Reserve System, which was created by Congress in 1913, are actual banks, but since their customers are other banks, as opposed to people or businesses, they tend to be supersized. The Dallas Fed isn’t the biggest of these regional banks—that would be the New York Fed, naturally—but it is unusual, because of geography. It’s the only Fed bank with a district that’s basically just a single state, and since that state is Texas, the Dallas Fed has a long tradition of being a pain in the ass. (...)
The simplest way to explain what the Fed does is to say that it stabilizes the country’s money supply. This is done by managing currency, overseeing member banks, deciding the interest rates at which the government can borrow or lend money, and, when necessary, making the purchases or loans that private banks will not. To put it another way, the Federal Reserve often acts as a counterweight to looming problems in the private sector. If private players are getting too optimistic, racking up debt, and risking inflation, the Fed may move to raise interest rates, thus tightening the money supply. If, on the other hand, the private banks are too spooked to do much of anything, the Fed can lower interest rates to encourage lending or even act as a sort of substitute, spending money when no one else will.
This last activity has caused a fair amount of debate over the past five years. Since the financial crisis hit, the Fed has intervened several times to make large-scale asset purchases, a move known as quantitative easing. It works like this: If commercial banks have assets they can’t readily sell, they end up in a defensive posture, unwilling or unable to buy anything else. So the Fed buys up huge batches of securities, in the hopes of creating a ripple effect among the private banks, which would enable companies to get access to much-needed credit, restructure their liabilities, make new investments, and above all, put people back to work.
Most countries in the developed world have a central bank like our Federal Reserve. It’s a useful thing, but Americans have historically been torn about whether or not to have one. The bank’s weird, quasi-public nature means it has expansive powers and unusual independence; dissolving the Fed, or at least auditing it, is among the recurring demands of the tea party movement, although the idea attracts support from progressives too. Others support the system in general but frequently disagree with what the Fed is doing. (...)
As in any system, the trick is finding the right balance. When I asked him about the financial crisis, Fisher told me that by the fall of 2007, he was feeling seriously worried. “Mortgage-related markets were manic,” he said, and big banks like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch looked as if they were in trouble (both were sold in 2008). “I don’t think I got a full night’s sleep for eighteen months,” he recalled. Behind closed doors, the Fed was in a state of high alarm, and he would either be awakened by a middle-of-the-night call from one of his counterparts or be already lying awake, wondering if the actions he’d advised were the best ones.
When the crisis did blow open, Fisher’s public commentary was temperate. In October 2008 he gave a speech in Washington counseling calmness. Countries have weathered crises before, he said, and America would weather this one. In his view, the Fed had to resist providing undue comfort to foundering companies who had run into trouble through their own misconduct or ineptitude. To do so would create moral hazard, the risk of encouraging similarly bad behavior in the future. At the same time, Fisher argued that the Fed’s response should be muscular. (...)
“I think we did that well,” Fisher continued. “My dispute has been with what we did afterward.”
by Erica Greider, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Image: Jeff Wilson
What Is Wisdom?
Proust was on to something. I think there is profound truth to the notion that it is only through our own experience that we gain wisdom. I also believe that there are certain kinds of experiences that are particularly suited to the development of wisdom.
Take a moment and think of someone whom you consider wise. Perhaps it is a revered spiritual or political leader, a grandparent or one of your high school teachers, maybe a pastor or a college professor, or perhaps, as one medical student expressed, it is the person who cleans the hallways of the hospital at night. What qualities or behaviors make you think they are wise? Finally, how do you think that they got so wise?
Then, let's back up for a minute. What exactly is wisdom? Truth be told, wisdom is not so easy to define in the abstract. Why is that? It may be, in part, because we understand wisdom in the context of a life, of decisions and actions, so it is difficult to define in the abstract. This is, in part, why psychologists and sociologists have done research on wisdom by studying people who are exemplars of wisdom. This is not as easy as it might seem, because one of the characteristics of wise persons is humility, so a wise person is unlikely to say that they are wise. Often, then, we identify these people by having other people nominate them, and it is interesting who gets on those lists. It can range from the Dalai Lama to Abraham Lincoln to Oprah Winfrey.
The other reason wisdom might be difficult to define is that wisdom actually has many dimensions. I imagine that if I polled all of you about what qualities you selected as wise, we could create a long list of answers. Researchers have actually confirmed this, and the list includes things like compassion, ability to see the big picture, to put things in perspective, to see things from many points of view, to be able to reflect on and rise above one’s own perspective. Wisdom is different from intelligence. Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity. Wisdom on the other hand, resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge. (Sternberg). Monika Ardelt is a modern wisdom researcher who has put all of these into a 3 dimensional model of wisdom: cognitive, reflective and affective. The cognitive dimension includes the desire to deeply know and understand things, including the limits of our knowing. The reflective dimension represents the capacity for self-reflection, and the capacity to see things from many perspectives. The affective dimension of wisdom is empathy and compassion. So, a wise person is one who desires to deeply understand things, who is humble and aware of the limitations of knowing, who can see things from many perspectives and avoids black and white thinking, and who radiates compassion.
Does Adversity Make Us Wise?
But how do we become wise? Think about that person that you identified at the beginning of this essay. How do you think they got wise? This question takes us back to Proust. If no one can hand us wisdom on a silver platter, and we must discover this for ourselves through our own experiences, our own journey, what kind of experience might be the best teacher? I would argue that for all the downsides of adversity, just like necessity is the mother of invention, adversity is the seedbed for wisdom. What better teacher of compassion than one’s own experience of suffering? How better to learn humility than to make a mistake? And what better to discover the deeper meaning of one’s life than to face a circumstance that forces you to focus on that which is of most value to your life? An unexpected turn of events is likely to help us to understand the ambiguity and uncertainty in life, and the limitations of our own perspective. But what evidence do we have that adversity can lead to wisdom?
by Margaret Plews-Ogan, Big Questions Online | Read more:
Image: Getty, h/t 3 Quarks Daily
Thursday, October 3, 2013
[ed. ... and we will continue to work with our Republican friends in Congress to resolve this crisis. Thank you.]
via:
Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.
Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.
Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states. (...)
The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.
“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.” (...)
The law was written to require all Americans to have health coverage. For lower and middle-income earners, there are subsidies on the new health exchanges to help them afford insurance. An expanded Medicaid program was intended to cover the poorest. In all, about 30 million uninsured Americans were to have become eligible for financial help.
But the Supreme Court’s ruling on the health care law last year, while upholding it, allowed states to choose whether to expand Medicaid. Those that opted not to leave about eight million uninsured people who live in poverty ($19,530 for a family of three) without any assistance at all.
Poor people excluded from the Medicaid expansion will not be subject to fines for lacking coverage. In all, about 14 million eligible Americans are uninsured and living in poverty, the Times analysis found.
by Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: James Patterson
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
A Walk to Kobe
As a child, when I climbed the banks of the river, the sea was spread out right in front of me, with nothing blocking the view. I used to go swimming there in the summer. I loved the ocean and loved to swim. I went fishing, too, and took my dog for a walk there every day. Sometimes I just liked to sit down and do nothing. And sometimes I’d sneak out of the house at night, go to the sea with my friends and gather driftwood and light a bonfire. I loved the smell of the sea, its far-off roar, and all that it brought with it.
But now the sea isn’t there any more. They cut down the mountains, hauled all the dirt off to the sea with trucks and conveyor belts and filled it in. With both the mountains and sea so close by, this area is perfect for that kind of construction work. Neat little residential communities have sprung up where the mountains used to be, and similarly neat little residential communities have popped up on the landfill. All this happened after I moved to Tokyo, during the era of high growth in Japan, when the country was in the throes of a nationwide construction boom.
I own a house now in a town on the seashore in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, and travel back and forth between there and Tokyo. Unfortunately, or very unfortunately, I should say, this seaside town reminds me more of my home town than my home town does. The area has green mountains, and a wonderful swimming beach. I want to preserve these as best I can, because once natural scenery is gone, it’s gone forever. Once violence caused by humans is unleashed, it can never be reversed.
Past the banks of the river, the area around what used to be the Koroen seaside resort had been filled in to make a kind of cosy little cove, or pond. Windsurfers were there, doing their best to catch the wind. Just to the west,In the midst of this placid scene it’s hard to deny the vestiges of violence. That’s how it struck me. A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us.on what was Ashiya beach, stands a row of high-rise apartment buildings, like so many blank monoliths. On the shore, some families that have driven there in their station wagons and minivans are using small propane tanks to have a barbecue. So-called outdoor activities. They’re grilling meat, fish and vegetables, and the whitish smoke silently rises like a beacon into the sky on this happy Sunday scene. There’s hardly a cloud in the sky. An almost perfect May tableau. Still, as I sit there on the concrete bank and gaze at where the real sea used to be, everything here, like a tyre leaking air, slowly, and quietly, loses its sense of reality.
In the midst of this placid scene it’s hard to deny the vestiges of violence. That’s how it struck me. A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us. One is a metaphor for the other. Or perhaps they are interchangeable. Lying here, asleep, like a pair of animals having the same dream. (...)
I’d managed to make it this far, so I decided to climb the steep slope that led to my old high school. A light sheen of sweat broke out on my forehead. In high school I always rode a packed bus to school, but now I walked the same road under my own steam. In the spacious playing field that had been carved out of the mountain slopes, girl students were playing handball as part of their gym class. There was an unearthly quiet all around, except for the occasional shouts of the girls. It was so completely still it felt like I’d stumbled into a level of space I shouldn’t be in. Why this utter silence?
I gazed at Kobe harbour, sparkling leadenly far below, and listened carefully, hoping to pick up some echoes from the past, but nothing came to me. Just the sounds of silence. That’s all. But what are you going to do? We’re talking about things that happened over thirty years ago.
Over thirty years ago. There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It’s true for everyone. But maybe that isn’t wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there’s no reason to complain. And besides, who would we complain to, anyway?
But now the sea isn’t there any more. They cut down the mountains, hauled all the dirt off to the sea with trucks and conveyor belts and filled it in. With both the mountains and sea so close by, this area is perfect for that kind of construction work. Neat little residential communities have sprung up where the mountains used to be, and similarly neat little residential communities have popped up on the landfill. All this happened after I moved to Tokyo, during the era of high growth in Japan, when the country was in the throes of a nationwide construction boom.I own a house now in a town on the seashore in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, and travel back and forth between there and Tokyo. Unfortunately, or very unfortunately, I should say, this seaside town reminds me more of my home town than my home town does. The area has green mountains, and a wonderful swimming beach. I want to preserve these as best I can, because once natural scenery is gone, it’s gone forever. Once violence caused by humans is unleashed, it can never be reversed.
Past the banks of the river, the area around what used to be the Koroen seaside resort had been filled in to make a kind of cosy little cove, or pond. Windsurfers were there, doing their best to catch the wind. Just to the west,In the midst of this placid scene it’s hard to deny the vestiges of violence. That’s how it struck me. A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us.on what was Ashiya beach, stands a row of high-rise apartment buildings, like so many blank monoliths. On the shore, some families that have driven there in their station wagons and minivans are using small propane tanks to have a barbecue. So-called outdoor activities. They’re grilling meat, fish and vegetables, and the whitish smoke silently rises like a beacon into the sky on this happy Sunday scene. There’s hardly a cloud in the sky. An almost perfect May tableau. Still, as I sit there on the concrete bank and gaze at where the real sea used to be, everything here, like a tyre leaking air, slowly, and quietly, loses its sense of reality.
In the midst of this placid scene it’s hard to deny the vestiges of violence. That’s how it struck me. A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us. One is a metaphor for the other. Or perhaps they are interchangeable. Lying here, asleep, like a pair of animals having the same dream. (...)
I’d managed to make it this far, so I decided to climb the steep slope that led to my old high school. A light sheen of sweat broke out on my forehead. In high school I always rode a packed bus to school, but now I walked the same road under my own steam. In the spacious playing field that had been carved out of the mountain slopes, girl students were playing handball as part of their gym class. There was an unearthly quiet all around, except for the occasional shouts of the girls. It was so completely still it felt like I’d stumbled into a level of space I shouldn’t be in. Why this utter silence?
I gazed at Kobe harbour, sparkling leadenly far below, and listened carefully, hoping to pick up some echoes from the past, but nothing came to me. Just the sounds of silence. That’s all. But what are you going to do? We’re talking about things that happened over thirty years ago.
Over thirty years ago. There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It’s true for everyone. But maybe that isn’t wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there’s no reason to complain. And besides, who would we complain to, anyway?
by Haruki Marukami, Granta | Read more:
Image: Granta
The Stranglehold on Our Politics
Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences—none of them good—for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects.
In the past ten elections, voter turnout for presidential contests—which requires a tremendous and expensive effort by the campaigns—has ranged from 51.7 to 61.6 percent, while for the midterms it’s been in the high thirties. Turnout was highest for the two midterms in which the Republicans made their greatest gains: in 1994, when Clinton was president, it was 41.1 percent and in 2010 it was 41.6 percent. In 2006, when Bush was president, the Democrats took over the House and Senate and won most of the governorships, turnout was the next highest, 40.4 percent. The quality of the candidates, the economy, and many unexpected issues of course determine the atmosphere of an election; but in the end turnout is almost always decisive.
The midterms, with their lower turnout, reward intensity. In 2010, the Republicans were sufficiently worked up about the new health care law and an old standby, “government spending,” particularly the stimulus bill, to drive them to the polls in far larger numbers than the Democrats. A slight upward tick in turnout numbers can have a disproportionate impact in Congress and many of the states, and therefore the country as a whole. The difference in turnout caused such a change in 2010; in fact, the Republicans gained sixty-three House seats and took control of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states; the Democrats ended up with control of the fewest state legislative bodies since 1946. The midterms go a long way toward explaining the dismaying spectacle in Washington today. State elections bear much of the responsibility for the near paralysis in Congress thus far this year and the extremism that has gripped the House Republicans and is oozing over into the Senate.
The difference in the turnouts for presidential and midterm elections means that there are now almost two different electorates. Typically, the midterm electorate is skewed toward the white and elderly. In 2010 the youth vote dropped a full 60 percent from 2008. Those who are disappointed with the president they helped elect two years earlier and decide to stay home have the same effect on an election as those who vote for the opposition candidate.
Little wonder, then, that there can be such a gulf between the president and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives—but also between the president and the governments of most of the twenty-four states over which the Republicans now maintain complete control; almost half of these were elected in 2010. Democrats have complete control over fourteen states. The Republican-controlled states include almost all the most populous ones outside of New York and California. Since the midterms of 2010 the Republicans in most of these states have pursued coordinated, highly regressive economic policies and a harsh social agenda. Thus, while there’s largely been stalemate in Washington, sweeping social and economic changes that are entirely at odds with how the country voted in the last presidential election have been taking place in Republican-controlled states.
As a result of the relative lack of interest in state elections, we now have the most polarized political system in modern American history. It’s also the least functional. Many state governments’ policies are not just almost completely divorced from what is going on at the federal level—but also in some cases what is prescribed by law and the Constitution. Systemic factors based in state politics explain more about our national political condition than tired arguments in Washington over who is at fault for what does or doesn’t—mainly doesn’t—happen at the federal level. The dysfunction begins in the states.
The 2010 elections were the single most important event leading up to the domination of the House by the Republican far right. Both the recession and organized agitation by the Tea Party over the newly passed health care law—“spontaneous” campaigns guided from Washington by the old pros Karl Rove and Dick Armey, and funded by reactionary business moguls—helped the Republicans, and especially the most radical elements in the party, sweep into the majority in the House of Representatives and take control of twelve additional states, including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Republicans who took over states in 2010 reset our politics. Among other things, they made the House of Representatives unrepresentative. In 2012 Democrats won more than 1.7 million more votes for the House than the Republicans did, but they picked up only eight seats. (This was the largest discrepancy between votes and the division of House seats since 1950.)
Thus, while Obama won 51.1 percent of the popular vote in 2012, as a result of the redistricting following 2010 the Republican House majority represents 47.5 percent as opposed to 48.8 percent for the Democrats, or a minority of the voters for the House in 2012. Take the example of the Ohio election: Obama won the state with 51 percent of the vote, but because of redistricting, its House delegation is 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic.
The state government’s power over the redrawing of congressional districts every ten years is probably the single most determining factor of our political situation. It’s clear that the Republicans were successful in winning and using the 2010 elections as a prelude to the most distorted and partisan redistricting in modern times. Their approach was so different in degree as to be a difference in substance—and the post-2010 politics in Washington resemble nothing that has gone before. There has been something of a war raging among students of electoral politics over the role of redistricting in our current situation. But Sam Wang of Princeton, a neuroscientist who founded the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year:
The Republicans have made the greater effort to shape the House to their benefit, through a deliberate two-step process: first, win state elections so as to control the redistricting, and then redistrict to give the party as much advantage as possible in the House. Though they’ve done their own self-interested redistricting, Democrats haven’t been as zealous about controlling reapportionment. Still, through the combination of both parties’ actions, they have ended up with more safe seats than before.
There was just one problem: when the Republicans began their intense effort in the run-up to 2010 to take over state legislatures and draw districts free of serious Democratic challengers, they failed to anticipate that this would leave their members more vulnerable to challenges from the right. The fear of being defeated in local contests by even more radical Republicans has also taken hold in the state legislatures, which in turn affects the nature of the House. The more established House Republicans, including the leaders, now live in terror of a putsch from the most extreme right-wing elements of their caucus, in particular the Tea Party. They are not yet a majority of the party but they have the power to behave like one through their use of fear. A lamentable result of the effort to draw safe districts is that only an estimated thirty-five House seats out of 435 will actually be competitive in the 2014 election. Therein lies the source of the near paralysis of the federal government.
In the past ten elections, voter turnout for presidential contests—which requires a tremendous and expensive effort by the campaigns—has ranged from 51.7 to 61.6 percent, while for the midterms it’s been in the high thirties. Turnout was highest for the two midterms in which the Republicans made their greatest gains: in 1994, when Clinton was president, it was 41.1 percent and in 2010 it was 41.6 percent. In 2006, when Bush was president, the Democrats took over the House and Senate and won most of the governorships, turnout was the next highest, 40.4 percent. The quality of the candidates, the economy, and many unexpected issues of course determine the atmosphere of an election; but in the end turnout is almost always decisive.The midterms, with their lower turnout, reward intensity. In 2010, the Republicans were sufficiently worked up about the new health care law and an old standby, “government spending,” particularly the stimulus bill, to drive them to the polls in far larger numbers than the Democrats. A slight upward tick in turnout numbers can have a disproportionate impact in Congress and many of the states, and therefore the country as a whole. The difference in turnout caused such a change in 2010; in fact, the Republicans gained sixty-three House seats and took control of both the governorships and the legislatures in twelve states; the Democrats ended up with control of the fewest state legislative bodies since 1946. The midterms go a long way toward explaining the dismaying spectacle in Washington today. State elections bear much of the responsibility for the near paralysis in Congress thus far this year and the extremism that has gripped the House Republicans and is oozing over into the Senate.
The difference in the turnouts for presidential and midterm elections means that there are now almost two different electorates. Typically, the midterm electorate is skewed toward the white and elderly. In 2010 the youth vote dropped a full 60 percent from 2008. Those who are disappointed with the president they helped elect two years earlier and decide to stay home have the same effect on an election as those who vote for the opposition candidate.
Little wonder, then, that there can be such a gulf between the president and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives—but also between the president and the governments of most of the twenty-four states over which the Republicans now maintain complete control; almost half of these were elected in 2010. Democrats have complete control over fourteen states. The Republican-controlled states include almost all the most populous ones outside of New York and California. Since the midterms of 2010 the Republicans in most of these states have pursued coordinated, highly regressive economic policies and a harsh social agenda. Thus, while there’s largely been stalemate in Washington, sweeping social and economic changes that are entirely at odds with how the country voted in the last presidential election have been taking place in Republican-controlled states.
As a result of the relative lack of interest in state elections, we now have the most polarized political system in modern American history. It’s also the least functional. Many state governments’ policies are not just almost completely divorced from what is going on at the federal level—but also in some cases what is prescribed by law and the Constitution. Systemic factors based in state politics explain more about our national political condition than tired arguments in Washington over who is at fault for what does or doesn’t—mainly doesn’t—happen at the federal level. The dysfunction begins in the states.
The 2010 elections were the single most important event leading up to the domination of the House by the Republican far right. Both the recession and organized agitation by the Tea Party over the newly passed health care law—“spontaneous” campaigns guided from Washington by the old pros Karl Rove and Dick Armey, and funded by reactionary business moguls—helped the Republicans, and especially the most radical elements in the party, sweep into the majority in the House of Representatives and take control of twelve additional states, including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Republicans who took over states in 2010 reset our politics. Among other things, they made the House of Representatives unrepresentative. In 2012 Democrats won more than 1.7 million more votes for the House than the Republicans did, but they picked up only eight seats. (This was the largest discrepancy between votes and the division of House seats since 1950.)
Thus, while Obama won 51.1 percent of the popular vote in 2012, as a result of the redistricting following 2010 the Republican House majority represents 47.5 percent as opposed to 48.8 percent for the Democrats, or a minority of the voters for the House in 2012. Take the example of the Ohio election: Obama won the state with 51 percent of the vote, but because of redistricting, its House delegation is 75 percent Republican and 25 percent Democratic.
The state government’s power over the redrawing of congressional districts every ten years is probably the single most determining factor of our political situation. It’s clear that the Republicans were successful in winning and using the 2010 elections as a prelude to the most distorted and partisan redistricting in modern times. Their approach was so different in degree as to be a difference in substance—and the post-2010 politics in Washington resemble nothing that has gone before. There has been something of a war raging among students of electoral politics over the role of redistricting in our current situation. But Sam Wang of Princeton, a neuroscientist who founded the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year:
Political scientists have identified other factors that have influenced the relationship between votes and seats in the past. Concentration of voters in urban areas can, for example, limit how districts are drawn, creating a natural packing effect. But in 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor.Moreover, the redistricting has become different from the process that we learned about in civics classes. Traditional “gerrymandering,” which had been practiced since the early 1800s, involved drawing weirdly shaped districts for the purpose of protecting incumbents. But in recent years redistricting has developed into a vicious fight for control of redistricting—though the shape of the districts can be just as weird.
The Republicans have made the greater effort to shape the House to their benefit, through a deliberate two-step process: first, win state elections so as to control the redistricting, and then redistrict to give the party as much advantage as possible in the House. Though they’ve done their own self-interested redistricting, Democrats haven’t been as zealous about controlling reapportionment. Still, through the combination of both parties’ actions, they have ended up with more safe seats than before.
There was just one problem: when the Republicans began their intense effort in the run-up to 2010 to take over state legislatures and draw districts free of serious Democratic challengers, they failed to anticipate that this would leave their members more vulnerable to challenges from the right. The fear of being defeated in local contests by even more radical Republicans has also taken hold in the state legislatures, which in turn affects the nature of the House. The more established House Republicans, including the leaders, now live in terror of a putsch from the most extreme right-wing elements of their caucus, in particular the Tea Party. They are not yet a majority of the party but they have the power to behave like one through their use of fear. A lamentable result of the effort to draw safe districts is that only an estimated thirty-five House seats out of 435 will actually be competitive in the 2014 election. Therein lies the source of the near paralysis of the federal government.
by Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
So a couple of months ago Douglas Atkin, head of Community and E-staff Member at AirBnB, took to the stage of the Le Web conference in London (video) to announce the formation of Peers: “a grassroots organization that supports the sharing economy movement.” I like grassroots organizations and I like the co-operative impulse, but this… Well here is his speech in its entirety (in italics) with comments from yours truly.
Andrew Leonard from Salon has been following the story, and tells us that funding comes from “mission-aligned independent donors”. So that’s wealthy backers with a financial interest in the sharing economy. This is not grassroots, it’s astroturf.
If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is people appropriating the language of collective and progressive politics for financial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Executive Director Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the sharing economy: well-intentioned people end up contributing to immiseration and injustice when they think they are doing the opposite.
At the end of this post I’ve added a table of what I could find. It tells us that almost all the funding is going to the Bay Area or New York. The non-profits in this organization are being taken for a ride by the appealing anti-establishment language of Silicon Valley . They need to take a look at who their bedfellows are and what the real agenda is.
I joined AirBnB about four months ago, but I’m going to talk about a different organization.He means Peers.
In fact I’d like to talk about a movement for the sharing economy. By “a movement” I mean exactly that. I mean huge numbers of people, with a shared identity, mobilized to take action to do two things: to grow the peer sharing economy, and to fight for their collective interests against unfair and unreasonable obstacles.A grassroots organization with 40 corporate “partners”, with unspecified but significant funding, formed with guidance from a set of high-profile “thought leaders”, without local chapters, and with nothing much for the grassroots to do, but with an Executive Director on day one.
Andrew Leonard from Salon has been following the story, and tells us that funding comes from “mission-aligned independent donors”. So that’s wealthy backers with a financial interest in the sharing economy. This is not grassroots, it’s astroturf.If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is people appropriating the language of collective and progressive politics for financial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Executive Director Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the sharing economy: well-intentioned people end up contributing to immiseration and injustice when they think they are doing the opposite.
So what we’re talking about here is not just people sharing their skills, or their apartment, or their car, but also their collective power to expand the sharing economy together, and to stand up against entrenched interests who stand unfairly in their way. So “people power” if you like, or more accurately “peer power”.And what we’re not talking about here is venture capital. Going through Crunchbase tells me that the total funding for the 40 partners is over $600M. AirBnB has received $120M, including funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Ashton Kucher. You know, people standing up against entrenched interests.
At the end of this post I’ve added a table of what I could find. It tells us that almost all the funding is going to the Bay Area or New York. The non-profits in this organization are being taken for a ride by the appealing anti-establishment language of Silicon Valley . They need to take a look at who their bedfellows are and what the real agenda is.
Venture Capital funds are not interested in people power, they are interested in an investment with a good return. The fact that Douglas Atkin doesn’t once mention the financial motivations of the forces behind the sharing economy is either dishonest or unbelievably self-deceiving.
Now why would there be a need for such a thing? The sharing economy seems to be barrelling along pretty happily. Why do we need another organization? Well, firstly the opportunity. This was brought home to me a week ago in San Francisco where I attended a meeting of sharing economy participants. So there were drivers, passengers, hosts, guests, and tour guides from RelayRides, Lyft, AirBnB, Vayable and Sidecar, and they were literally bouncing up and down with enthusiasm about the opportunity to collaborate together — with each other.
So they were developing ideas — brilliant ideas actually — to share customers with each other, across verticals. One person even suggested that there could be a peer economy currency — maybe Bitcoin. Or even points to encourage people to cross verticals and recruit new people into this new economy.
The language changes, the mask slips. Participants become customers, sharing becomes buying. The phrase “across verticals” reminds us that Douglas Atkin is an advertising executive. Now the sharing economy is about loyalty programs and cross marketing? Not the kind of sharing I want to be part of. I don’t have a problem with commerce, but what I do object to is commerce wrapped up in, and appropriating, the language of solidarity.
by Tom Slee, Whimsley | Read more:
Image: FastCompany
Prescription Heroin
[ed. See also: Heroin, cocaine and weed are stronger, cheaper and easier to get than they've ever been.]
Prescription heroin is used in some European countries, including Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, but it's been a long time coming to North America. The first Canadian study that tested the effectiveness of giving addicts heroin under the supervision of doctors was the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI), which started in 2005. It eventually recruited 251 addicts in Vancouver and Montreal who had unsuccessfully attempted to kick smack numerous times. A control group was given methadone, which is commonly prescribed to heroin addicts so they can wean themselves off hard drugs.
The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009, showed that injectable heroin—known in medical-speak as diacetylmorphine—was a far more effective and efficient treatment than methadone in getting users out of the vicious and costly cycle of crime, infection, overdoses, and hospital visits that are a way of life for those in the grips of long-term, hardcore addiction. Compared to those trying to kick heroin using methadone, participants used street drugs less often, committed fewer crimes, and were employed more often, more connected to their families, and straight-up happier. A "cost of illness" analysis from 2000 found that severely addicted individuals can cost society over $43,000 per year, so getting addicts off the streets and into roles as members of productive society is good for all of Canada.
Dave Murray participated in the study and went on to found the NAOMI Patients Association in 2011. But in 2005 he was in his 50s and addicted seemlingly for life.
“I’m living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in a single-room-occupancy hotel, I’m down on my luck and I’m down to nothing," he told me over the phone. "I’m dealing drugs to support my habit and committing crimes. Doing various horrible things that I don’t even want to talk about. I often describe the addiction like if you can picture a dog chasing his tail, round and round and round and then finally it falls asleep. And then when it wakes up, and it’s back to chasing its tail around. That’s the stress of addiction. That’s the life of an addict.” (...)
“If you’re going to pull someone out of the ditch, you don’t pull them halfway out and leave them on their own," he said. "You’ve got to pull them out and really start helping them, and you’ll be amazed how resourceful these people are. I mean, think about if you had to go out there and come up with a hundred or two hundred bucks every day without a job, you’re quite a resourceful character—if you can give them some other direction to use that resourcefulness to become successful in some other field other than obtaining enough money to buy their heroin every day, I think you’d be amazed how far some people could go if you gave them a hand.”
by Dave Dean, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Myths of the Golden Age
The key shows in this new wave have been collectively dubbed “prestige TV,” a term which neatly captures the importance of reputation and cultural cachet to their success. Prestige television’s supporters are fond of the idea that the morally complex protagonists of their favourite shows are unsympathetic, and that it is a testament to the shows’ writing that audiences have always managed to root for them. The typical protagonist of prestige shows is a middle-aged American man, almost always a father and husband, who carries out a semi-secret double life in crime or some other form of deviance, like serial adultery. For all their flaws, these characters have been admired, even loved. The Sopranos made James Gandolfini, with his hulking frame and reedy voice, into a sex symbol, and no amount of lies, alcohol, or moping seems to be able to dim Don Draper’s appeal in the eyes of Mad Men’s fans. The adulterous ad man, the cop who dips into the drug trade himself, the chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer—this kind of protagonist has become so popular that some networks now prefer “anti-heroes” to the more traditional kind.
These characters began to appear precisely when premium cable stations—for which viewers pay monthly “subscription” fees, as with magazines—stopped pursuing the largest possible audience. Instead, as Martin writes, “Networks now targeted specific demographics: rich, young, educated, male, and so on.” An audience that fit this profile could be attractive to advertisers despite its modest size, and so prestige television dramas have all been targeted at educated professionals. These are people who work long hours and invest much of their social identity in their careers. It is not surprising, then, that they have no trouble relating to television’s anti-heroes. These characters, after all, are defined by their intelligence and success at their jobs. Don Draper’s infidelities are forgiven on the grounds of his ability to sell an unconventional advertising slogan to a cigarette company. Breaking Bad’s wildly inaccurate portrayal of the drug trade is overlooked in exchange for the pleasures of watching a middle-class suburban male outsmart scores of adversaries. The truth is that prestige television actually makes its protagonists a little too easy to sympathise with.
But perhaps there is another reason why television’s anti-heroes have been such a hit. In a conversation recently published by the website Slate, Stephen Metcalf proposed a theory about our obsession with the middle class father living a double life in crime. The economic collapse of 2008, he argued, revealed the hollowness of the economic promises made to the middle class. A responsible life of white-collar work no longer guaranteed you a retirement or a house of your own (at least not a house with any value). What’s more, the middle class was destroyed by a group of plutocratic investment bankers whose behaviour is widely regarded as criminal in its own right. With the rules degraded to the point of cruel uselessness, why should it be any surprise that TV viewers find themselves hungry for shows in which middle class dads break the laws that were not really protecting them in the first place?
It’s a compelling argument, but it misses an important aspect of the genre, which is its aggressive and resentful masculinity.
by Richard Beck, Prospect | Read more:
Image: Breaking Bad
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
‘‘It Was the Biggest Game of Chicken I’ve Ever Seen.’’
[ed. From the series: Launch. Hack. Meow.]
Plus: Yahoo? Really? When a similar idea circulated back in 2009, Tumblr’s then–lead developer, Marco Arment, summed up the party line in a scornful blog post: “I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo … I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can’t make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking.” Thanks, but no thanks. Yahoo was a lumbering Sunnyvale company with irrelevant products that no one used. Tumblr was a nimble startup in the nation’s greatest city with a boy-genius founder. An acquisition wasn’t just unlikely, it was insulting. The only company to whom they might have sold, an early employee said, was Apple (if Apple had asked).Yahoo’s reputation as a wet blanket may have been allayed by the arrival of Marissa Mayer as CEO, but an acquisition still struck employees at the party as too icky to be true. (One guest summed it up: “No one who works in tech wants to work at Yahoo.”) As more wine and whiskey were consumed, however, the incredulity turned into fidgety speculation. One employee pointed out that Mayer had been dropping into the Tumblr office as far back as December; he remembered peering into the fishbowl conference room to see her meeting with their CEO, David Karp, and head of product, Derek Gottfrid. Nothing secret about it. Other employees were aware that after a hiring spree and floor-to-ceiling office remodel, the amount of cash left in Tumblr’s coffers was dwindling. At some point, partygoers who worked on the engineering side began forecasting how shitty the company would become if Yahoo were to buy it, and by the end of the night, guests were running numbers, trying to figure out how much their options might be worth. On Monday, Karp called an all-team meeting to announce the deal.
If low- and mid- and even some high-level employees were shocked—“I don’t think anyone saw it coming necessarily,” says Gottfrid—anyone paying attention to Tumblr’s burn rate should have been expecting an exit. Despite its popularity (it is the fourteenth-most-visited site in the U.S., according to Quantcast, a few slots above Wikipedia), Tumblr was a six-year-old blogging platform with disappointing revenue targets, no clear path to profitability, and alarmingly little cash in the bank (just $16.6 million when it was purchased). To stay afloat without selling, it would have needed a sixth round of funding, which, given the situation, might have led to a “down round,” and to Karp ceding a substantial chunk of his equity. As one person watching the deal unfold put it: “It was the biggest game of chicken I’ve ever seen in a startup. Literally months away from bankruptcy, and he manages to find an angel in Marissa Mayer.”’ (...)
Tumblr’s appeal can be summed up in one word, which is “easy.” If you traveled back in time to 1996 and took a grandmother whose understanding of the web was AOL and wormholed her to 2013, she’d be able to create a Tumblr blog in less than three minutes with no direction. The site’s posting icons are big, the fonts are big, everything is big: The whole thesis is that there’s no fine print and no learning curve. Generating new blogs is so easy that Tumblr limits the number that users are allowed to create in a single day. (The limit is ten.)
If the “easy” mandate feels unimaginative today, it was less so in 2007. Karp has talked a lot about his frustration with tools like Wordpress and Blogger, and he is shrewder these days in his framing of Tumblr as “a novel alternative” rather than a middle finger. Blogging in 2007 required too much work: “I had all sorts of things I wanted to share, but they were screenshots, jokes, poorly formed ideas, videos that I had just watched that were hilarious, and things that I was working on.” Karp’s idea was to create a little portal to Internet heaven, with George Takei videos, Homer Simpson quotes, pictures of Italian luxury cars, dream logs, self-portraits, observations, Lost trailers, and porn (which makes up around 11 percent of the site’s content). The new blogging would be less about writing and more about declaring a personal sensibility. Thanks to an innovation called the reblog, users wouldn’t even need to create anything themselves; they could just post what they scavenged elsewhere and, Karp says, “use that curation to tell their stories.” He sees Tumblr as a tool for “the most talented people in the world.”
by Molly Young, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Platon. Grooming by Marco Braca at Kramer + Kramer.
Let Me Tell You About the Most Heartfelt $200 I Ever Made
The hook was baited perfectly, and now, for the first time since the O’Dwyer administration—look it up!—more people are coming here than are leaving. But if New York City is better than ever—and we think it is—then why does it suck so bad?
The money, yes. And the cupcakes, and the ATMs, and all these apartments that somehow are in clock towers, which are all also just money. Among the young set, it’s newcomers’ parents paying up at our phantom tollbooth. There is now a class of New Yorkers with the luxury of not just money but also plenty of time. Once you got a crappy coffee at the deli or you didn’t get coffee. Now the city is a wonderland of delicious pour-over. Every day is choose-your-own-adventure when you’re not dying over the rent. Now there’s a substantial population who thinks New York’s a lark, or college 2.0, or an indie-lectual Rumspringa, a lazy not so Grand Tour before packing it in to get married in Dallas. Not to pick on the millennials: The olds aren’t suffering either. Now a vast number of them pretend to live in the city while gardening at their second homes, in the sweet spread from Germantown to Ghent to Kinderhook. The result: New York has fewer who’d bleed for her. Once the city was for people who craved it with the stridency of a young Madonna. The result was entertainment, friction, mayhem, disaster, creation, magic. (...)
Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. New York City wasn’t the inventor or progenitor of wealth inequality, the great national trend of the last dozen years, but we do it best. It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.
I couldn’t help but wonder, like an aging Carrie Bradshaw: Does everyone else daydream about the New York That Got Away? An afternoon in an art dealer’s enormous apartment, when he carelessly shuffled Warhol Polaroids, and they were all a grand. The apartment in the West Thirties was $380,000, but there were hookers. Now New York seems like every little thing in it is beyond priceless, and nothing will ever be yours. That’s absolutely true, and you never will have the things that you helplessly crave—but also it has always been like that.
by Choire Sicha, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
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