Saturday, July 8, 2017
Friday, July 7, 2017
I Feel It Is My Duty to Speak Out
I am writing to complain about one of your products: namely, Silk Cashewmilk (with a touch of almond). I imagine that you receive many complaints about your use of the word “milk,” and frequent challenges to specify where exactly on the cashew nut the teats are located. This, however, is not a problem for me, since I simply mop up what I take to be a sloppy euphemism with a pair of quotation marks. No, what I wish to complain about is the recent redesign of your half-gallon “milk” cartons.
My bipartite beef with this redesign is 1) the reduction in realism of the illustration and 2) the stance of the nuts represented therein. To start with the latter point: I have come, in recent years, to identify with the two nuts who, like game siblings, plunge pell-mell into their fate. I hope that it is not an anthropomorphism too far to suggest that one splashes down as if propelled from a water chute, and the other arcs forward, as if diving headlong, emboldened by the first’s joyful splash. This is an image of excitement and of freedom (from what, I presume, is for the “milk” drinker to decide). In the new arrangement, however, the two nuts face one another, turning their backs on the world to assume a conservative relation based in partnering and stability. My concern is that here you are affirming and perpetuating recent troubling shifts in political attitudes the world over. Your open and energetic cashews have become inward-looking; even their spatial alignment is now in almost complete agreement with one another, as if no differently oriented nut would be welcome.
The medium into which they are about to be subsumed has similarly been made safe. You have, it seems, seen fit to censor the milk-droplet coronet of the earlier packaging—which was, I felt, a nod to the pioneering photographic work of A. M. Worthington at the turn of the twentieth century, and a salute to the spectactularist high-speed film experiments of Harold Edgerton some fifty years later. The new design suppresses the tremendously uplifting splash motif, implementing instead what might be described as a mellifluous swelling of liquid about the nuts. This is no doubt to draw on connotations of silk, to visually insinuate the creaminess that the tongue can look forward to. Well, for one thing, a tongue cannot look. And for another, I do not need such synesthetic cues or Elysian fictions to aid me in my beverage choices. And for yet another, you have likely alienated your buyer base of thrill-seeking individualists with this new appeal to comfort-loving sensualists. This smacks to me of playing to the risk-averse majority; but then again yours is, I would feel confident in submitting, a numbers game above all else.
On the subject of harsh realities, I come back to my first point: the illustration’s insulting retreat from realism. The previous packaging was so bracingly candid about the earthy origins of the nut. Not only were we invited to contemplate the somewhat irregular seam at which the two halves fuse, we were also treated to a well-lit view of the surface of the nut, ridged and pitted like the craggy face of an ancient poet. I could admire these nuts that had passed into “milk” with dignity and originality. The new protagonists, however, have been airbrushed and plumped up; they appear not to exist in any reality that I can identify with, but to hail from the pulpiest of fictions, and one that ends in an improbable perpetuity.
We all know that food photography lies—that the ice cream is mashed potato, that the meat is seared with shoe polish, that the milk, or “milk,” is PVA glue or hair conditioner or suntan lotion. I understand that the look or sound of reality must be constructed to be convincing. But it is not the material lies you tell so much as the conceptual maneuvering that strikes me to the core. What are you trying to hide from us? What is it that you think we cannot handle?
by Sally O'Reilly, Cabinet | Read more:
by Sally O'Reilly, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Whites
We settled on the edges of their towns, when they would let us. And when they would not—Do not let sundown find you in this county, their signs sometimes said—we traveled on. We wandered from one labor camp to the next in their hot dusty valleys—the Sacramento, the Imperial, the San Joaquin—and side by side with our new husbands, we worked their land. We picked their strawberries in Watsonville. We picked their grapes in Fresno and Denair. We got down on our knees and dug up their potatoes with garden forks on Bacon Island in the Delta, where the earth was spongy and soft. And when the harvest season was over we tied our blanket rolls onto our backs and, cloth bundles in hand, we waited for the next wagon to come, and we traveled on.
The first word of their language we were taught was water. Shout it out, our husbands told us, the moment you begin to feel faint in the fields. “Learn this word,” they said, “and save your life.” Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and had never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and never woke up. “I thought she was sleeping,” said her husband. “Heatstroke,” the boss explained. Another of us was too shy to shout and knelt down and drank from an irrigation ditch instead. Seven days later she was burning up with typhoid. Other words we soon learned: All right—what the boss said when he was satisfied with our work—and Go home—what he said when we were too clumsy or slow.
In the beginning we wondered about them constantly. Why did they mount their horses from the left side and not the right? How were they able to tell each other apart? Why were they always shouting? Did they really hang dishes on their walls and not pictures? And have locks on all their doors? And wear their shoes inside the house? To whom did they pray? How many gods did they have? Was it true that they really saw a man in the moon and not a rabbit? And drank the milk of cows? And that smell? What was it? “Butter stink,” our husbands explained.
Stay away from them, we were warned. Approach them with caution, if you must. Do not always believe what they tell you, but learn to watch them closely: their hands, their eyes, the corners of their mouths, sudden changes in the color of their skin. Make sure, however, that you don’t stare. Expect the worst, but do not be surprised by moments of kindness. Remember to make them feel comfortable. Appear eager to please. Say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all.
Some of us worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong. Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never held a hoe. “Easiest job in America,” we were told. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row. Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked—our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover. One of us was distracted by the handsome Hindu man cutting asparagus in the next furrow over while she worked and all she could think of was how much she wanted to unravel his white turban from his enormous brown head. I dream about Gupta-san nightly. Some of us chanted Buddhist sutras while we worked and the hours flew by like minutes. Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan. Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters—they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars—we never would have come to America to do the work no self-respecting American would do.
They admired us for our strong backs and nimble hands. Our stamina. Our discipline. Our docile dispositions. Our unusual ability to tolerate the heat, which on summer days in the melon fields of Brawley could reach 120 degrees. They said our short stature ideally suited us for work that required stooping low to the ground. Wherever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese—we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite—but none of their vices—we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat. We were faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans. We were soberer than the Mexicans. We were cheaper to feed than the Okies and Arkies, both the light and the dark. A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. These folks just drift, we don’t have to look after them at all.
Sometimes the boss would approach us from behind while we were bending over his fields and whisper a few words into our ears. And even though we had no idea what he was saying we knew exactly what he meant. “Me no speak English,” we’d reply. Or, “So sorry, Boss, but no.” Sometimes one of our husband’s unmarried worker friends approached us the moment our husband stepped away and tried to slip us a five-dollar bill. “Just let me put it in once,” he’d say. “I promise you I won’t even move it.” And every now and then we’d give in and say yes. Perhaps we were unhappy with our husbands, who went out to play cards and drink every night and did not come home until late. Or perhaps we needed to send money to our family back home because their rice fields had once again been ruined by floods. Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly: a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of Modern Screen magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without giving anything in return we knew there would be a price to pay. He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife. And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.
Sometimes they drove by our farm shacks and sprayed our windows with buckshot, or set our chicken coops on fire. Sometimes they burned down our fields just as they were beginning to ripen and we lost our entire earnings for that year. And even though we found footsteps in the dirt the following morning, and many scattered matchsticks, when we called the sheriff to come out and take a look he told us there were no clues worth following. And after that our husbands were never the same. Why even bother? At night we slept with our shoes on, and hatchets beside our beds, while our husbands sat by the windows until dawn. Sometimes our husbands bought themselves guard dogs, which they named Dick or Harry or Spot, and they grew more attached to those dogs than they ever did to us, and we wondered whether we had made a mistake, coming to such a violent and unwelcoming land.
Some of us moved out of the countryside and into their suburbs and got to know them well. We lived in the servants’ quarters of the big houses in Atherton and Berkeley, above Telegraph, up high in the hills. Or we worked for a man like Dr. Giordano, who was a prominent thoracic surgeon on Alameda’s gold coast. And while our husband mowed Dr. Giordano’s lawn and pruned Dr. Giordano’s shrubs and raked Dr. Giordano’s leaves we stayed inside with Mrs. Giordano, who had wavy brown hair and a kind manner and asked us to please call her Rose, and we polished Rose’s silver and we swept Rose’s floors and we tended to Rose’s three young children, Richard, Jim, and Theo, whom we sang to sleep every night in a language not their own. Nemure, nemure.And it was not at all what we had expected. I have come to care for those boys as though they were my own. But it was Dr. Giordano’s elderly mother, Lucia, whom we came to care for the most. She followed us from one room to the next as we dusted and mopped and not once did she ever stop talking. Molto bene. Perfetto! Basta così. And for many years after her death her memories of the old country would continue to linger with us as though they were our own: the mozzarella, the pomodori, the Lago di Como, the piazza in the center of town where she went shopping with her sisters every day. Italia, Italia, how I long to see it one last time.
It was their women who taught us the things we most needed to know. How to light a stove. How to make a bed. How to answer a door. How to shake a hand. How to operate a faucet, which many of us had never seen in our lives. How to dial a telephone. How to sound cheerful on a telephone even when you were angry or sad. How to fry an egg. How to peel a potato. How to set a table. How to prepare a five-course dinner in six hours for a party of twelve. How to light a cigarette. How to curl your hair so it looked just like Mary Pickford’s. How to wash a lipstick stain out of your husband’s favorite white shirt even when that lipstick stain was not yours. How to talk to a husband. How to argue with a husband. How to deceive a husband. How to keep a husband from wandering too far from your side. Don’t ask him where he’s been or what time he’ll be coming home and make sure he is happy in bed.
When they were unhappy and had no one to talk to they told us their deep, darkest secrets. Everything I told him was a lie. When their husbands went away on business they asked us to sleep with them in their bedrooms in case they got lonely. When they fell in love with a man who was not their husband we kept an eye on their children while they went out to meet that man in the middle of the day. We brushed invisible specks of lint from their blouses, retied scarves, adjusted stray locks of hair so they hung just so. “You look beautiful,” we said to them, and then we sent them on their way. And when their husbands came home in the evening at the usual hour we pretended not to know a thing.
Some of them dismissed us without any warning and we had no idea what we’d done wrong. “You were too pretty,” our husbands would tell us, even though we found it hard to believe this was true. Some of us were so inept we knew we would not last more than one week. We forgot to cook their meat before serving it to them for supper. We dropped their best crystal goblets. We threw out their cheese by mistake. “I thought it was rotten,” we tried to explain. “That’s how it’s supposed to smell,” we were told. Some of us had trouble understanding their English, which bore no resemblance to what we had learned in our books. We said “Yes” when they asked us if we would mind folding their laundry, and “No” when they asked us to mop, and when they asked us if we’d seen their missing gold earrings we smiled and said, “Oh, is that so?” Some of us had grown up on large estates with servants of our own and could not tolerate being told what to do. Some of us did not get along well with their children, whom we found aggressive and loud. Some of us objected to what they said about us to their children when they did not realize we were still in the room. If you don’t study harder, you’ll end up scrubbing floors just like Yuki.
From time to time one of their men would ask to have a word with us in his study while his wife was out shopping and we did not know how to say no. “Is everything all right?” he would ask us. Usually we stared down at the floor and said yes, of course, everything was fine, even though this was not true, but when he touched us lightly on the shoulder and asked us if we were sure, we did not always turn away. “Nobody has to know,” he would say to us. Or, “She’s not due home until late.” And when he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed—the very same bed we had made up that morning—we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held.
The first word of their language we were taught was water. Shout it out, our husbands told us, the moment you begin to feel faint in the fields. “Learn this word,” they said, “and save your life.” Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and had never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and never woke up. “I thought she was sleeping,” said her husband. “Heatstroke,” the boss explained. Another of us was too shy to shout and knelt down and drank from an irrigation ditch instead. Seven days later she was burning up with typhoid. Other words we soon learned: All right—what the boss said when he was satisfied with our work—and Go home—what he said when we were too clumsy or slow.
In the beginning we wondered about them constantly. Why did they mount their horses from the left side and not the right? How were they able to tell each other apart? Why were they always shouting? Did they really hang dishes on their walls and not pictures? And have locks on all their doors? And wear their shoes inside the house? To whom did they pray? How many gods did they have? Was it true that they really saw a man in the moon and not a rabbit? And drank the milk of cows? And that smell? What was it? “Butter stink,” our husbands explained.
Stay away from them, we were warned. Approach them with caution, if you must. Do not always believe what they tell you, but learn to watch them closely: their hands, their eyes, the corners of their mouths, sudden changes in the color of their skin. Make sure, however, that you don’t stare. Expect the worst, but do not be surprised by moments of kindness. Remember to make them feel comfortable. Appear eager to please. Say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all.Some of us worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong. Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never held a hoe. “Easiest job in America,” we were told. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row. Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked—our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover. One of us was distracted by the handsome Hindu man cutting asparagus in the next furrow over while she worked and all she could think of was how much she wanted to unravel his white turban from his enormous brown head. I dream about Gupta-san nightly. Some of us chanted Buddhist sutras while we worked and the hours flew by like minutes. Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan. Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters—they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars—we never would have come to America to do the work no self-respecting American would do.
They admired us for our strong backs and nimble hands. Our stamina. Our discipline. Our docile dispositions. Our unusual ability to tolerate the heat, which on summer days in the melon fields of Brawley could reach 120 degrees. They said our short stature ideally suited us for work that required stooping low to the ground. Wherever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese—we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite—but none of their vices—we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat. We were faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans. We were soberer than the Mexicans. We were cheaper to feed than the Okies and Arkies, both the light and the dark. A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. These folks just drift, we don’t have to look after them at all.
Sometimes the boss would approach us from behind while we were bending over his fields and whisper a few words into our ears. And even though we had no idea what he was saying we knew exactly what he meant. “Me no speak English,” we’d reply. Or, “So sorry, Boss, but no.” Sometimes one of our husband’s unmarried worker friends approached us the moment our husband stepped away and tried to slip us a five-dollar bill. “Just let me put it in once,” he’d say. “I promise you I won’t even move it.” And every now and then we’d give in and say yes. Perhaps we were unhappy with our husbands, who went out to play cards and drink every night and did not come home until late. Or perhaps we needed to send money to our family back home because their rice fields had once again been ruined by floods. Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly: a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of Modern Screen magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without giving anything in return we knew there would be a price to pay. He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife. And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.
Sometimes they drove by our farm shacks and sprayed our windows with buckshot, or set our chicken coops on fire. Sometimes they burned down our fields just as they were beginning to ripen and we lost our entire earnings for that year. And even though we found footsteps in the dirt the following morning, and many scattered matchsticks, when we called the sheriff to come out and take a look he told us there were no clues worth following. And after that our husbands were never the same. Why even bother? At night we slept with our shoes on, and hatchets beside our beds, while our husbands sat by the windows until dawn. Sometimes our husbands bought themselves guard dogs, which they named Dick or Harry or Spot, and they grew more attached to those dogs than they ever did to us, and we wondered whether we had made a mistake, coming to such a violent and unwelcoming land.
Some of us moved out of the countryside and into their suburbs and got to know them well. We lived in the servants’ quarters of the big houses in Atherton and Berkeley, above Telegraph, up high in the hills. Or we worked for a man like Dr. Giordano, who was a prominent thoracic surgeon on Alameda’s gold coast. And while our husband mowed Dr. Giordano’s lawn and pruned Dr. Giordano’s shrubs and raked Dr. Giordano’s leaves we stayed inside with Mrs. Giordano, who had wavy brown hair and a kind manner and asked us to please call her Rose, and we polished Rose’s silver and we swept Rose’s floors and we tended to Rose’s three young children, Richard, Jim, and Theo, whom we sang to sleep every night in a language not their own. Nemure, nemure.And it was not at all what we had expected. I have come to care for those boys as though they were my own. But it was Dr. Giordano’s elderly mother, Lucia, whom we came to care for the most. She followed us from one room to the next as we dusted and mopped and not once did she ever stop talking. Molto bene. Perfetto! Basta così. And for many years after her death her memories of the old country would continue to linger with us as though they were our own: the mozzarella, the pomodori, the Lago di Como, the piazza in the center of town where she went shopping with her sisters every day. Italia, Italia, how I long to see it one last time.
It was their women who taught us the things we most needed to know. How to light a stove. How to make a bed. How to answer a door. How to shake a hand. How to operate a faucet, which many of us had never seen in our lives. How to dial a telephone. How to sound cheerful on a telephone even when you were angry or sad. How to fry an egg. How to peel a potato. How to set a table. How to prepare a five-course dinner in six hours for a party of twelve. How to light a cigarette. How to curl your hair so it looked just like Mary Pickford’s. How to wash a lipstick stain out of your husband’s favorite white shirt even when that lipstick stain was not yours. How to talk to a husband. How to argue with a husband. How to deceive a husband. How to keep a husband from wandering too far from your side. Don’t ask him where he’s been or what time he’ll be coming home and make sure he is happy in bed.
When they were unhappy and had no one to talk to they told us their deep, darkest secrets. Everything I told him was a lie. When their husbands went away on business they asked us to sleep with them in their bedrooms in case they got lonely. When they fell in love with a man who was not their husband we kept an eye on their children while they went out to meet that man in the middle of the day. We brushed invisible specks of lint from their blouses, retied scarves, adjusted stray locks of hair so they hung just so. “You look beautiful,” we said to them, and then we sent them on their way. And when their husbands came home in the evening at the usual hour we pretended not to know a thing.
Some of them dismissed us without any warning and we had no idea what we’d done wrong. “You were too pretty,” our husbands would tell us, even though we found it hard to believe this was true. Some of us were so inept we knew we would not last more than one week. We forgot to cook their meat before serving it to them for supper. We dropped their best crystal goblets. We threw out their cheese by mistake. “I thought it was rotten,” we tried to explain. “That’s how it’s supposed to smell,” we were told. Some of us had trouble understanding their English, which bore no resemblance to what we had learned in our books. We said “Yes” when they asked us if we would mind folding their laundry, and “No” when they asked us to mop, and when they asked us if we’d seen their missing gold earrings we smiled and said, “Oh, is that so?” Some of us had grown up on large estates with servants of our own and could not tolerate being told what to do. Some of us did not get along well with their children, whom we found aggressive and loud. Some of us objected to what they said about us to their children when they did not realize we were still in the room. If you don’t study harder, you’ll end up scrubbing floors just like Yuki.
From time to time one of their men would ask to have a word with us in his study while his wife was out shopping and we did not know how to say no. “Is everything all right?” he would ask us. Usually we stared down at the floor and said yes, of course, everything was fine, even though this was not true, but when he touched us lightly on the shoulder and asked us if we were sure, we did not always turn away. “Nobody has to know,” he would say to us. Or, “She’s not due home until late.” And when he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed—the very same bed we had made up that morning—we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held.
by Julie Otsuka, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Univ. of California
Thursday, July 6, 2017
A Way to Own Your Social-Media Data
The European Union imposed a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) fine on Google last Tuesday for manipulating its search engine results to favor its own comparison shopping service. It is just the latest institution to recognize the increasing monopolization of the technology industry.
Google has about a 90 percent market share in searches, while Facebook has a penetration of about 89 percent of internet users. Economists have a fancy name for this phenomenon: “network externalities.” In traditional product markets, one customer’s choice (for example, a particular car tire) does not directly affect other individuals’ preferences for that product, and competition generally ensures that consumers enjoy the best products at the lowest possible price.
In the market for social media, by contrast, when one customer uses Facebook over Myspace, it has a direct (and positive) impact on other customers’ preferences for the same social network: I want to be in the social network where my friends are. These markets naturally tend toward a monopoly.
Historically, there have been two main government interventions to reduce this risk of monopoly power. The first is price regulation. When railway companies gained excessive market power in the late 1800s, the United States government created the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it the power to set maximum prices. (In the long run, the remedy turned out to be worse than the disease, but that’s another story.)
The second is antitrust. When Standard Oil, in the early 1900s, controlled 90 percent of oil refinery capacity in the United States, the federal government used its antitrust power to break it up into more than 30 smaller companies. A similar breakup was imposed 70 years later on AT&T.
Still, there is a problem with traditional antitrust policy when looked at through the lens of network externalities: It focuses only on consumers’ benefits from competition. But consumers love Google and Facebook since they do not pay a dime for their services.
What many users do not fully appreciate is that they do pay for these services, in the form of very valuable information. And those who appreciate this cost have no choice: There is no major search engine that does not store our past searches or collect information on our activities, and there is no significant social media platform that does not retain our preferences. That is the cost of using these technologies. Lack of competition also means lack of choice, which is ultimately lack of freedom. But what can be done?
For a 21st-century problem, we suggest a 21st-century solution: a reallocation of property rights via legislation to provide more incentives to compete. In fact, the idea is not new. Patent law, for example, attributes the right to an invention to the company a scientist works for, to motivate companies to invest in research and development. Similarly, in the mobile industry, most countries have established that a cellphone number belongs to a customer, not the mobile phone provider. This redefinition of property rights (in jargon called “number portability”) makes it easier to switch carriers, fostering competition by other carriers and reducing prices for consumers.
The same is possible in the social network space. It is sufficient to reassign to each customer the ownership of all the digital connections that she creates — what is known as a “social graph.” If we owned our own social graph, we could sign into a Facebook competitor — call it MyBook — and, through that network, instantly reroute all our Facebook friends’ messages to MyBook, as we reroute a phone call.
If I can reach my Facebook friends through a different social network and vice versa, I am more likely to try new social networks. Knowing they can attract existing Facebook customers, new social networks will emerge, restoring the benefit of competition.
Today Facebook provides developers with application-program interfaces that give them access to its customers’ social graph, Facebook Connect and Graph A.P.I. Facebook controls these gates, retaining the right to cut off any developer who poses a competitive threat. Anticipating this outcome, very few developers invest seriously in creating alternatives, eliminating even the threat of competition.
By guaranteeing access to new customers’ data and contacts, a Social Graph Portability Act would reduce the network externality dimension of the existing digital platforms and ensure the benefits of competition.
by Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters
[ed. See also: Is social graph portability workable?]
Google has about a 90 percent market share in searches, while Facebook has a penetration of about 89 percent of internet users. Economists have a fancy name for this phenomenon: “network externalities.” In traditional product markets, one customer’s choice (for example, a particular car tire) does not directly affect other individuals’ preferences for that product, and competition generally ensures that consumers enjoy the best products at the lowest possible price.
In the market for social media, by contrast, when one customer uses Facebook over Myspace, it has a direct (and positive) impact on other customers’ preferences for the same social network: I want to be in the social network where my friends are. These markets naturally tend toward a monopoly.
Historically, there have been two main government interventions to reduce this risk of monopoly power. The first is price regulation. When railway companies gained excessive market power in the late 1800s, the United States government created the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it the power to set maximum prices. (In the long run, the remedy turned out to be worse than the disease, but that’s another story.)The second is antitrust. When Standard Oil, in the early 1900s, controlled 90 percent of oil refinery capacity in the United States, the federal government used its antitrust power to break it up into more than 30 smaller companies. A similar breakup was imposed 70 years later on AT&T.
Still, there is a problem with traditional antitrust policy when looked at through the lens of network externalities: It focuses only on consumers’ benefits from competition. But consumers love Google and Facebook since they do not pay a dime for their services.
What many users do not fully appreciate is that they do pay for these services, in the form of very valuable information. And those who appreciate this cost have no choice: There is no major search engine that does not store our past searches or collect information on our activities, and there is no significant social media platform that does not retain our preferences. That is the cost of using these technologies. Lack of competition also means lack of choice, which is ultimately lack of freedom. But what can be done?
For a 21st-century problem, we suggest a 21st-century solution: a reallocation of property rights via legislation to provide more incentives to compete. In fact, the idea is not new. Patent law, for example, attributes the right to an invention to the company a scientist works for, to motivate companies to invest in research and development. Similarly, in the mobile industry, most countries have established that a cellphone number belongs to a customer, not the mobile phone provider. This redefinition of property rights (in jargon called “number portability”) makes it easier to switch carriers, fostering competition by other carriers and reducing prices for consumers.
The same is possible in the social network space. It is sufficient to reassign to each customer the ownership of all the digital connections that she creates — what is known as a “social graph.” If we owned our own social graph, we could sign into a Facebook competitor — call it MyBook — and, through that network, instantly reroute all our Facebook friends’ messages to MyBook, as we reroute a phone call.
If I can reach my Facebook friends through a different social network and vice versa, I am more likely to try new social networks. Knowing they can attract existing Facebook customers, new social networks will emerge, restoring the benefit of competition.
Today Facebook provides developers with application-program interfaces that give them access to its customers’ social graph, Facebook Connect and Graph A.P.I. Facebook controls these gates, retaining the right to cut off any developer who poses a competitive threat. Anticipating this outcome, very few developers invest seriously in creating alternatives, eliminating even the threat of competition.
By guaranteeing access to new customers’ data and contacts, a Social Graph Portability Act would reduce the network externality dimension of the existing digital platforms and ensure the benefits of competition.
by Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters
[ed. See also: Is social graph portability workable?]
Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy
We often talk about Amazon as though it were a retailer. It's an understandable mistake. After all, Amazon sells more clothing, electronics, toys, and books than any other company. Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon.
But to describe Amazon as a retailer is to misunderstand what the company actually is, and to miss the depth of the threat that it poses to our liberty and the very idea of an open, competitive market.
It's not just that Amazon does many things besides sell stuff—that it manufactures thousands of products, from dress shirts to baby wipes, produces hit movies and television shows, delivers restaurant orders, offers loans, and may soon dispense prescription drugs. Jeff Bezos is after something so much bigger than any of this. His vision is for Amazon to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy. Amazon's website is already the dominant platform for digital commerce. Its Web Services division controls 44 percent of the world's cloud computing capacity and is relied on by everyone from Netflix to the Central Intelligence Agency. And the company has recently built out a vast network of distribution infrastructure to handle package delivery for itself and others.
Companies that want to reach the market increasingly have no choice but to ride Amazon's rails. With Prime and digital assistant Alexa, from GE appliances to Ford cars, Bezos has lured a majority of households into making Amazon the default provider of everything they order online. Most Prime members no longercomparison shop. This has forced competitors of all sizes—from major brands like Levi's and KitchenAid to small-scale producers, e-commerce innovators, and independent brick-and-mortar stores—to abandon the idea of reaching consumers directly. Instead, they have to rely on Amazon's platform to sell their goods.
Amazon exploits this dependence to dictate terms and prices to suppliers, and it uses the data it gathers from companies selling on its platform to weaken them as competitors. A company that designs a popular product and builds a market for it on Amazon's site can suddenly find that Amazon has introduced a nearly identical version and given it top billing in search results. One study found that, after a retailer becomes a seller on Amazon, it's only a matter of weeks before Amazon brings the merchant's most popular items into its own inventory.
Being both a direct retailer and a platform for other sellers gives Amazon novel weapons for shaking down suppliers. Last week, Amazon offered to police the many counterfeiters that sell fake Nike shoes on its site as a bargaining chip to get Nike to agree, for the first time, to offer a full line of its products to Amazon. Similarly, when the publisher Hachette resisted Amazon's demands in negotiations over book pricing, it found the buy-buttons removed from all of its titles, putting thousands of books off-limits to both buyers and sellers.
With commerce rapidly moving online, Amazon has positioned itself as lord of the realm, which means that online commerce is no longer a market in any meaningful sense of the word. It's now a privately controlled arena where a single company sets the terms by which we may exchange goods with one another and decides which products—which new authors, which new innovations—get to find an audience.
Investors are fully aware of the implications of this. As Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya put it last year, Amazon is "a multi-trillion-dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight." That assessment explains why Wall Street has bid up Amazon's stock value to a level that bears little relationship to its current profits. Investors are eyeing a future of spectacular, monopoly-style returns.
Last week, investors got to see this future taking firmer shape when Amazon announced its intention to buy Whole Foods. In the hours after the news broke, Amazon's stock did the opposite of what usually happens in such deals: It surged by almost as much as the $13.4 billion purchase price, which means the acquisition essentially paid for itself.
What investors see in Amazon, though, federal antitrust regulators have so far failed to grasp. The Whole Foods deal, which requires federal approval, will be a fresh test. If regulators look at the deal in conventional terms, they may decide that it should go ahead on the grounds that brick-and-mortar grocery is a separate market from online shopping, and that the transaction would give Amazon only a modest share of the supermarket industry.
But that's an analog notion of how commerce works. We're rapidly moving toward a world in which the boundaries between online and offline shopping become fluid, and much of commerce will be, in one way or another, digitally driven.
But to describe Amazon as a retailer is to misunderstand what the company actually is, and to miss the depth of the threat that it poses to our liberty and the very idea of an open, competitive market.
It's not just that Amazon does many things besides sell stuff—that it manufactures thousands of products, from dress shirts to baby wipes, produces hit movies and television shows, delivers restaurant orders, offers loans, and may soon dispense prescription drugs. Jeff Bezos is after something so much bigger than any of this. His vision is for Amazon to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy. Amazon's website is already the dominant platform for digital commerce. Its Web Services division controls 44 percent of the world's cloud computing capacity and is relied on by everyone from Netflix to the Central Intelligence Agency. And the company has recently built out a vast network of distribution infrastructure to handle package delivery for itself and others.Companies that want to reach the market increasingly have no choice but to ride Amazon's rails. With Prime and digital assistant Alexa, from GE appliances to Ford cars, Bezos has lured a majority of households into making Amazon the default provider of everything they order online. Most Prime members no longercomparison shop. This has forced competitors of all sizes—from major brands like Levi's and KitchenAid to small-scale producers, e-commerce innovators, and independent brick-and-mortar stores—to abandon the idea of reaching consumers directly. Instead, they have to rely on Amazon's platform to sell their goods.
Amazon exploits this dependence to dictate terms and prices to suppliers, and it uses the data it gathers from companies selling on its platform to weaken them as competitors. A company that designs a popular product and builds a market for it on Amazon's site can suddenly find that Amazon has introduced a nearly identical version and given it top billing in search results. One study found that, after a retailer becomes a seller on Amazon, it's only a matter of weeks before Amazon brings the merchant's most popular items into its own inventory.
Being both a direct retailer and a platform for other sellers gives Amazon novel weapons for shaking down suppliers. Last week, Amazon offered to police the many counterfeiters that sell fake Nike shoes on its site as a bargaining chip to get Nike to agree, for the first time, to offer a full line of its products to Amazon. Similarly, when the publisher Hachette resisted Amazon's demands in negotiations over book pricing, it found the buy-buttons removed from all of its titles, putting thousands of books off-limits to both buyers and sellers.
With commerce rapidly moving online, Amazon has positioned itself as lord of the realm, which means that online commerce is no longer a market in any meaningful sense of the word. It's now a privately controlled arena where a single company sets the terms by which we may exchange goods with one another and decides which products—which new authors, which new innovations—get to find an audience.
Investors are fully aware of the implications of this. As Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya put it last year, Amazon is "a multi-trillion-dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight." That assessment explains why Wall Street has bid up Amazon's stock value to a level that bears little relationship to its current profits. Investors are eyeing a future of spectacular, monopoly-style returns.
Last week, investors got to see this future taking firmer shape when Amazon announced its intention to buy Whole Foods. In the hours after the news broke, Amazon's stock did the opposite of what usually happens in such deals: It surged by almost as much as the $13.4 billion purchase price, which means the acquisition essentially paid for itself.
What investors see in Amazon, though, federal antitrust regulators have so far failed to grasp. The Whole Foods deal, which requires federal approval, will be a fresh test. If regulators look at the deal in conventional terms, they may decide that it should go ahead on the grounds that brick-and-mortar grocery is a separate market from online shopping, and that the transaction would give Amazon only a modest share of the supermarket industry.
But that's an analog notion of how commerce works. We're rapidly moving toward a world in which the boundaries between online and offline shopping become fluid, and much of commerce will be, in one way or another, digitally driven.
by Stacy Mitchell, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
‘James Bond of Philanthropy’ Gives Away the Last of His Fortune
Nearly five years ago, Charles F. Feeney sat in a cushy armchair in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan, grandchildren’s artwork taped to the walls, and said that by the end of 2016, he was going to hand out the last of a great fortune that he had made.
It was a race: Mr. Feeney was then 81, and Atlantic Philanthropies, a collection of private foundations he had started and funded, still had about $1.5 billion left. Flinging money out the window or writing checks willy-nilly was not Mr. Feeney’s way.
Last month, Mr. Feeney and Atlantic completed the sprint and made a final grant, $7 million to Cornell University, to support students doing community service work.
He had officially emptied his pockets, meeting his aspiration of “giving while living.” Altogether, he had contributed $8 billion to his philanthropies, which have supported higher education, public health, human rights and scientific research.
“You’re always nervous handling so much money, but we seem to have worked it pretty well,” Mr. Feeney, now 85, said last week in a phone interview.
His remaining personal net worth is slightly more than $2 million. That’s not quite broke, by any standard, but it is a modest amount for a man who controlled thousands of times as much wealth. He and his wife, Helga, now live in a rented apartment in San Francisco.
“You can only wear one pair of pants at a time,” Mr. Feeney has said.
Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag. For many years, when in New York, he had lunch not at the city’s luxury restaurants, but in the homey confines of Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion on East 57th Street, where he ate the burgers.
None of the major American philanthropists have given away a greater proportion of their wealth, and starting in 1982, Mr. Feeney did most of this in complete secrecy, leading Forbes magazine to call him the “James Bond of philanthropy.”
His name does not appear in gilded letters, chiseled marble or other forms of writing anywhere on the 1,000 buildings across five continents that $2.7 billion of his money paid for. For years, Atlantic’s support came with a requirement that the beneficiaries not publicize its involvement.
Beyond Mr. Feeney’s reticence about blowing his own horn, “it was also a way to leverage more donations — some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights,” said Christopher G. Oechsli, the president and chief executive officer of Atlantic.
During the early 1990s, Mr. Feeney met secretly with paramilitary forces in Belfast, Northern Ireland, urging them to drop armed guerrilla conflict and promising financial support if they embraced electoral politics. Atlantic grants paid to create a public health system in Vietnam, and to provide access to antiretroviral treatment for AIDS in southern Africa. The last rounds of grants, about $600 million, included support for Atlantic Fellows, described as young emerging leaders working in their countries for healthier, more equitable societies.
[ed. Don't make many like this anymore.]
It was a race: Mr. Feeney was then 81, and Atlantic Philanthropies, a collection of private foundations he had started and funded, still had about $1.5 billion left. Flinging money out the window or writing checks willy-nilly was not Mr. Feeney’s way.Last month, Mr. Feeney and Atlantic completed the sprint and made a final grant, $7 million to Cornell University, to support students doing community service work.
He had officially emptied his pockets, meeting his aspiration of “giving while living.” Altogether, he had contributed $8 billion to his philanthropies, which have supported higher education, public health, human rights and scientific research.
“You’re always nervous handling so much money, but we seem to have worked it pretty well,” Mr. Feeney, now 85, said last week in a phone interview.
His remaining personal net worth is slightly more than $2 million. That’s not quite broke, by any standard, but it is a modest amount for a man who controlled thousands of times as much wealth. He and his wife, Helga, now live in a rented apartment in San Francisco.
“You can only wear one pair of pants at a time,” Mr. Feeney has said.
Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag. For many years, when in New York, he had lunch not at the city’s luxury restaurants, but in the homey confines of Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion on East 57th Street, where he ate the burgers.
None of the major American philanthropists have given away a greater proportion of their wealth, and starting in 1982, Mr. Feeney did most of this in complete secrecy, leading Forbes magazine to call him the “James Bond of philanthropy.”
His name does not appear in gilded letters, chiseled marble or other forms of writing anywhere on the 1,000 buildings across five continents that $2.7 billion of his money paid for. For years, Atlantic’s support came with a requirement that the beneficiaries not publicize its involvement.
Beyond Mr. Feeney’s reticence about blowing his own horn, “it was also a way to leverage more donations — some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights,” said Christopher G. Oechsli, the president and chief executive officer of Atlantic.
During the early 1990s, Mr. Feeney met secretly with paramilitary forces in Belfast, Northern Ireland, urging them to drop armed guerrilla conflict and promising financial support if they embraced electoral politics. Atlantic grants paid to create a public health system in Vietnam, and to provide access to antiretroviral treatment for AIDS in southern Africa. The last rounds of grants, about $600 million, included support for Atlantic Fellows, described as young emerging leaders working in their countries for healthier, more equitable societies.
by Jim Dwyer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images[ed. Don't make many like this anymore.]
Google's Enhanced Job Search
Whether you’re a student looking for a part-time job, an electrician seeking work closer to home, or a teacher moving to another state to be close to family, finding a job can be difficult. With job postings scattered across the web, newspapers and help wanted signs, it’s not always easy to find ones that are a good fit based on your unique needs and skills. As a result, many job seekers feel like they can’t find the job they’re looking for or apply to roles that aren’t the right fit. At the same time, 46 percent of U.S. employers face talent shortages and have issues filling open positions with the right candidate.
We have a long history of using our technology to connect people with crucial information. At I/O, we announced Google for Jobs, a company-wide initiative focused on helping both job seekers and employers, through deep collaboration with the job matching industry. This effort includes the Cloud Jobs API, announced last year, which provides access to Google’s machine learning capabilities to power smarter job search and recommendations within career sites, jobs boards, and other job matching sites and apps. Today, we’re taking the next step in the Google for Jobs initiative by putting the convenience and power of Search into the hands of job seekers. With this new experience, we aim to connect Americans to job opportunities across the U.S., so no matter who you are or what kind of job you’re looking for, you can find job postings that match your needs.
Starting today in English on desktop and mobile, when you search for “jobs near me,” “teaching jobs,” or similar job-seeking queries, you’ll see in-depth results that allow you to explore jobs from across the web. For many people, a job needs to satisfy some key criteria, like commute time, job specialties they've honed or the hours they have available to work. For many jobs, you’ll also see reviews and ratings of the employer from trusted sites, right alongside the job description, and if you’re signed in, for some jobs you’ll even see how long it would take to commute to the job from home. We’ll continue to add additional filters and information in the future. Looking for jobs is a personal and complex journey, and one that we’re trying to support in this new search experience.
Searching for a job can take time. And keeping up with new jobs that are posted throughout the day can be impossible. Now, if you step away from your job search, you can pick up right where you left off and stay in the loop on opportunities that interest you. Just turn on alerts for your search to receive an email notification whenever new jobs arrive, keeping you up-to-date and on top of your job hunt.
We have a long history of using our technology to connect people with crucial information. At I/O, we announced Google for Jobs, a company-wide initiative focused on helping both job seekers and employers, through deep collaboration with the job matching industry. This effort includes the Cloud Jobs API, announced last year, which provides access to Google’s machine learning capabilities to power smarter job search and recommendations within career sites, jobs boards, and other job matching sites and apps. Today, we’re taking the next step in the Google for Jobs initiative by putting the convenience and power of Search into the hands of job seekers. With this new experience, we aim to connect Americans to job opportunities across the U.S., so no matter who you are or what kind of job you’re looking for, you can find job postings that match your needs. Starting today in English on desktop and mobile, when you search for “jobs near me,” “teaching jobs,” or similar job-seeking queries, you’ll see in-depth results that allow you to explore jobs from across the web. For many people, a job needs to satisfy some key criteria, like commute time, job specialties they've honed or the hours they have available to work. For many jobs, you’ll also see reviews and ratings of the employer from trusted sites, right alongside the job description, and if you’re signed in, for some jobs you’ll even see how long it would take to commute to the job from home. We’ll continue to add additional filters and information in the future. Looking for jobs is a personal and complex journey, and one that we’re trying to support in this new search experience.
Searching for a job can take time. And keeping up with new jobs that are posted throughout the day can be impossible. Now, if you step away from your job search, you can pick up right where you left off and stay in the loop on opportunities that interest you. Just turn on alerts for your search to receive an email notification whenever new jobs arrive, keeping you up-to-date and on top of your job hunt.
We’re working with a number of organizations from across the industry to bring you the most comprehensive listing of jobs—including LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor and Facebook. This means you’ll see job postings from these sites and many others from across the web as soon as they’re posted. To ensure even more jobs are listed over time, we’re publishing open documentation for all jobs providers, from third-party platforms or direct employers, big or small, detailing how to make their job openings discoverable in this new feature.
by Google | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
The Seventh Man
The man was the last one to tell his story that night. The hands of the clock had moved past ten. The small group that huddled in a circle could hear the wind tearing through the darkness outside, heading west. It shook the trees, set the windows to rattling, and moved past the house with one final whistle.
‘It was the biggest wave I had ever seen in my life,’ he said. ‘A strange wave. An absolute giant.’
He paused.
‘It just barely missed me, but in my place it swallowed everything that mattered most to me and swept it off to another world. I took years to find it again and to recover from the experience–precious years that can never be replaced.’
The seventh man appeared to be in his mid-fifties. He was a thin man, tall, with a moustache, and next to his right eye he had a short but deep-looking scar that could have been made by the stab of a small blade. Stiff, bristly patches of white marked his short hair. His face had the look you see on people when they can’t quite find the words they need. In his case, though, the expression seemed to have been there from long before, as though it were part of him. The man wore a simple blue shirt under a grey tweed coat, and every now and then he would bring his hand to his collar. None of those assembled there knew his name or what he did for a living.He cleared his throat, and for a moment or two his words were lost in silence. The others waited for him to go on.
‘In my case, it was a wave,’ he said. ‘There’s no way for me to tell, of course, what it will be for each of you. But in my case it just happened to take the form of a gigantic wave. It presented itself to me all of a sudden one day, without warning. And it was devastating.’
Igrew up in a seaside town in the Province of S. It was such a small town, I doubt that any of you would recognize the name if I were to mention it. My father was the local doctor, and so I led a rather comfortable childhood. Ever since I could remember, my best friend was a boy I’ll call K. His house was close to ours, and he was a grade behind me in school. We were like brothers, walking to and from school together, and always playing together when we got home. We never once fought during our long friendship. I did have a brother, six years older, but what with the age difference and differences in our personalities, we were never very close. My real brotherly affection went to my friend K.
K. was a frail, skinny little thing, with a pale complexion and a face almost pretty enough to be a girl’s. He had some kind of speech impediment, though, which might have made him seem retarded to anyone who didn’t know him. And because he was so frail, I always played his protector, whether at school or at home. I was kind of big and athletic, and the other kids all looked up to me. But the main reason I enjoyed spending time with K. was that he was such a sweet, pure-hearted boy. He was not the least bit retarded, but because of his impediment, he didn’t do too well at school. In most subjects, he could barely keep up. In art class, though, he was great. Just give him a pencil or paints and he would make pictures that were so full of life that even the teacher was amazed. He won prizes in one contest after another, and I’m sure he would have become a famous painter if he had continued with his art into adulthood. He liked to do seascapes. He’d go out to the shore for hours, painting. I would often sit beside him, watching the swift, precise movements of his brush, wondering how, in a few seconds, he could possibly create such lively shapes and colours where, until then, there had been only blank white paper. I realize now that it was a matter of pure talent.
One year, in September, a huge typhoon hit our area. The radio said it was going to be the worst in ten years. The schools were closed, and all the shops in town lowered their shutters in preparation for the storm. Starting early in the morning, my father and brother went around the house nailing shut all the storm-doors, while my mother spent the day in the kitchen cooking emergency provisions. We filled bottles and canteens with water, and packed our most important possessions in rucksacks for possible evacuation. To the adults, typhoons were an annoyance and a threat they had to face almost annually, but to the kids, removed as we were from such practical concerns, it was just a great big circus, a wonderful source of excitement.
Just after noon the colour of the sky began to change all of a sudden. There was something strange and unreal about it. I stayed outside on the porch, watching the sky, until the wind began to howl and the rain began to beat against the house with a weird dry sound, like handfuls of sand. Then we closed the last storm-door and gathered together in one room of the darkened house, listening to the radio. This particular storm did not have a great deal of rain, it said, but the winds were doing a lot of damage, blowing roofs off houses and capsizing ships. Many people had been killed or injured by flying debris. Over and over again, they warned people against leaving their homes. Every once in a while, the house would creak and shudder as if a huge hand were shaking it, and sometimes there would be a great crash of some heavy-sounding object against a storm-door. My father guessed that these were tiles blowing off the neighbours’ houses. For lunch we ate the rice and omelettes my mother had cooked, waiting for the typhoon to blow past.
But the typhoon gave no sign of blowing past. The radio said it had lost momentum almost as soon as it came ashore at S. Province, and now it was moving north-east at the pace of a slow runner. The wind kept up its savage howling as it tried to uproot everything that stood on land.
Perhaps an hour had gone by with the wind at its worst like this when a hush fell over everything. All of a sudden it was so quiet, we could hear a bird crying in the distance. My father opened the storm-door a crack and looked outside. The wind had stopped, and the rain had ceased to fall. Thick, grey clouds edged across the sky, and patches of blue showed here and there. The trees in the yard were still dripping their heavy burden of rainwater.
‘We’re in the eye of the storm,’ my father told me. ‘It’ll stay quiet like this for a while, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, kind of like an intermission. Then the wind’ll come back the way it was before.’
I asked him if I could go outside. He said I could walk around a little if I didn’t go far. ‘But I want you to come right back here at the first sign of wind.’
I went out and started to explore. It was hard to believe that a wild storm had been blowing there until a few minutes before. I looked up at the sky. The storm’s great ‘eye’ seemed to be up there, fixing its cold stare on all of us below. No such ‘eye’ existed, of course: we were just in that momentary quiet spot at the centre of the pool of whirling air.
While the grown-ups checked for damage to the house, I went down to the beach. The road was littered with broken tree branches, some of them thick pine boughs that would have been too heavy for an adult to lift alone. There were shattered roof tiles everywhere, cars with cracked windshields, and even a doghouse that had tumbled into the middle of the street. A big hand might have swung down from the sky and flattened everything in its path.
K. saw me walking down the road and came outside.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Just down to look at the beach,’ I said.
Without a word, he came along with me. He had a little white dog that followed after us.
‘The minute we get any wind, though, we’re going straight back home,’ I said, and K. gave me a silent nod.
The shore was a 200-yard walk from my house. It was lined with a concrete breakwater–a big dyke that stood as high as I was tall in those days. We had to climb a short flight of steps to reach the water’s edge. This was where we came to play almost every day, so there was no part of it we didn’t know well. In the eye of the typhoon, though, it all looked different: the colour of the sky and of the sea, the sound of the waves, the smell of the tide, the whole expanse of the shore. We sat atop the breakwater for a time, taking in the view without a word to each other. We were supposedly in the middle of a great typhoon, and yet the waves were strangely hushed. And the point where they washed against the beach was much farther away than usual, even at low tide. The white sand stretched out before us as far as we could see. The whole, huge space felt like a room without furniture, except for the band of flotsam that lined the beach.
We stepped down to the other side of the breakwater and walked along the broad beach, examining the things that had come to rest there. Plastic toys, sandals, chunks of wood that had probably once been parts of furniture, pieces of clothing, unusual bottles, broken crates with foreign writing on them, and other, less recognizable items: it was like a big candy store. The storm must have carried these things from very far away. Whenever something unusual caught our attention, we would pick it up and look at it every which way, and when we were done, K.’s dog would come over and give it a good sniff.
We couldn’t have been doing this more than five minutes when I realized that the waves had come up right next to me. Without any sound or other warning, the sea had suddenly stretched its long, smooth tongue out to where I stood on the beach. I had never seen anything like it before. Child though I was, I had grown up on the shore and knew how frightening the ocean could be–the savagery with which it could strike unannounced.
And so I had taken care to keep well back from the waterline. In spite of that, the waves had slid up to within inches of where I stood. And then, just as soundlessly, the water drew back–and stayed back. The waves that had approached me were as unthreatening as waves can be–a gentle washing of the sandy beach. But something ominous about them–something like the touch of a reptile’s skin–had sent a chill down my spine. My fear was totally groundless–and totally real. I knew instinctively that they were alive. The waves were alive. They knew I was here and they were planning to grab me. I felt as if some huge, man-eating beast were lying somewhere on a grassy plain, dreaming of the moment it would pounce and tear me to pieces with its sharp teeth. I had to run away.
by Haruki Murakami, Granta | Read more:
Image: Clark Little
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
U.S. Military Spending: The Cost of Wars
One of the striking aspects of American military power is how little serious attention is spent on examining the key elements of its total cost by war and mission, and the linkage between the use of resources and the presence of an effective strategy. For the last several decades, there has been little real effort to examine the costs of key missions and strategic commitments and the longer term trends in force planning and cost. Both the Executive Branch and the Congress have failed to reform any key aspect of the defense and foreign policy budgets to look beyond input budgeting by line item and by military service, and doing so on an annual basis.
The program budgeting and integrated force planning efforts pioneered towards the end of the Eisenhower Administration—and put into practice in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations—have decayed into hollow shells. The effort to create meaningful Future Year Defense Programs seem to have been given a final death blow by the Budget Control Act (BCA)—legislation originally designed to be so stupid that the Congress could not possibly accept it. Efforts to integrate net assessment with budget submissions were effectively killed by the Joint Staff decades earlier, during the Reagan Administration.
Critical Failures by Both the Executive Branch and Congress
What is even more striking, is the failure of both recent presidents and the Congress to properly analyze and justify the cost of America's wars. If one counts the Cold War, the United States has been at war for virtually every year since 1941. The United States has been actively in combat since late 2001, and there is little prospect that it can end the need to use force to check terrorism and violent extremism within the next decade. Moreover, the Cold War may be over, but the United States still faces strategic challenges from Russia and the emergence of China as a major global power in what is already a multipolar world.
"War" may not be the normal state of U.S. national security planning indefinitely into the future, but war—and/or the constant risk of war—is a grim reality of our time. Yet, the Administration and the Congress have tended to treat warfighting as a temporary aberration—as something to be delt with by supplementals or creating short-term budget categories like the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account that seem to reflect the cost of wars, but have become something of a slush fund and a mechanism for selectively avoiding the caps on defense spending set by the BCA. (...)
This report is divided into 12 sections, each of which illustrates the need for better planning, programming, and budgeting; as well as the need for far more transparency and better official reporting:
The charts and tables in this section summarize the actual and projected cost of U.S. wars as reported for the OCO accoun—drawing heavily largely on earlier work by the Congressional Research Service.
Three alternative cost estimates are also summarized in this section.
If these alternative estimates—and many others—are taken into account, it is all too clear that the United States now has no official estimate of the cost of its wars. Further, without such an estimate, there is no credible basis for either Executive Branch or Congressional review of the budgets and plans for such wars, much less of the ability to effectively execute given strategies, and provide credible indicators of the cost effectiveness and progress of key elements of military and civil activity.
The program budgeting and integrated force planning efforts pioneered towards the end of the Eisenhower Administration—and put into practice in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations—have decayed into hollow shells. The effort to create meaningful Future Year Defense Programs seem to have been given a final death blow by the Budget Control Act (BCA)—legislation originally designed to be so stupid that the Congress could not possibly accept it. Efforts to integrate net assessment with budget submissions were effectively killed by the Joint Staff decades earlier, during the Reagan Administration.
Critical Failures by Both the Executive Branch and Congress
What is even more striking, is the failure of both recent presidents and the Congress to properly analyze and justify the cost of America's wars. If one counts the Cold War, the United States has been at war for virtually every year since 1941. The United States has been actively in combat since late 2001, and there is little prospect that it can end the need to use force to check terrorism and violent extremism within the next decade. Moreover, the Cold War may be over, but the United States still faces strategic challenges from Russia and the emergence of China as a major global power in what is already a multipolar world.
"War" may not be the normal state of U.S. national security planning indefinitely into the future, but war—and/or the constant risk of war—is a grim reality of our time. Yet, the Administration and the Congress have tended to treat warfighting as a temporary aberration—as something to be delt with by supplementals or creating short-term budget categories like the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account that seem to reflect the cost of wars, but have become something of a slush fund and a mechanism for selectively avoiding the caps on defense spending set by the BCA. (...)
This report is divided into 12 sections, each of which illustrates the need for better planning, programming, and budgeting; as well as the need for far more transparency and better official reporting:
The charts and tables in this section summarize the actual and projected cost of U.S. wars as reported for the OCO accoun—drawing heavily largely on earlier work by the Congressional Research Service.
- The Department of Defense's OCO costs of the Afghan conflict since FY2001 will rise to $840.7 billion—if the President's FY2018 budget request is met. They will be $770.5 billion for Iraq.
- The total costs for all OCO spending between FY2001 and FY2018 will be in excess of $1,909 billion. Given the costs omitted from the OCO budget, the real total cost will almost certainly be well over $2 trillion, even using OCO data as the only costs of the wars.
Three alternative cost estimates are also summarized in this section.
- One by Lina J. Blimes puts the total cost at $4 to $6 trillion by end FY2016.
- A related estimate by the Watson Institute puts the cost at $4.8 trillion through FY2016.
- A third estimate, by Neta Crawford, puts costs at more than $4.8 trillion through FY2017, plus more than $7.9 trillion in cumulative interest on past appropriations, or more than $12.7 trillion.
If these alternative estimates—and many others—are taken into account, it is all too clear that the United States now has no official estimate of the cost of its wars. Further, without such an estimate, there is no credible basis for either Executive Branch or Congressional review of the budgets and plans for such wars, much less of the ability to effectively execute given strategies, and provide credible indicators of the cost effectiveness and progress of key elements of military and civil activity.
by Anthony H. Cordesman, CSIS | Read more:
Monday, July 3, 2017
Where Commute Is a Four-Letter Word
Hieronymus Bosch painted a torture chamber where mutant beasts snacked on human flesh. Dante conjured fire, ice and a devil with three faces. If either man lived in New York City today, he’d know better. Hell is the subway at rush hour.
Or Penn Station almost anytime. If you’re really cursed, the subway disgorges you there, into a constipated labyrinth where all beauty, civility and dreams of punctuality go to die. It’s the designated site of the “summer of hell,” to begin on July 10, when several tracks shut down for repair and New Jersey Transit and Amtrak won’t be able to live up to their current standard of wretchedness. I can’t for the life of me imagine what worse looks like. Will conductors line us up behind the cabooses and have us push our trains to their destinations?
I’m losing faith in New York. I’m losing patience. Last week we got an especially vivid reminder of what an overwhelmed, creaky menace the city’s infrastructure has become: Two cars on an A train in Upper Manhattan derailed, injuring about three dozen people.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo subsequently declared a state of emergency for the subway system, pledged $1 billion for improvements and demanded a detailed action plan. I have just one question. What took him so long? Actually, I have another. How much of his sudden zest reflects a possible presidential bid and the need to pretty up an ugly blot on his record?
But it’s not just the subway. On so many days in so many ways, I see evidence of a city in the grip of a communal panic attack.
True story: Some weeks ago, I emerged, downtrodden, from my latest debasement on the subway to encounter a traffic jam near the street where I live. Pointlessly and obnoxiously, a driver in one car honked and honked at the cars ahead. This prompted a passing pedestrian to screech at him to stop. Then someone else began to scream at her for adding to the din. And you wonder why more people are wearing bulky headphones over their ears.
Yeah, yeah, I know: No one’s making us live here. And New York isn’t America. It’s a one-off.
But is that really so? Right now the Big Muddle — I’m sorry, Apple — strikes me as a proxy for the country and a cautionary tale. (...)
Popularity-wise, American cities are thriving. Millennials want to live in them. So do many retirees. But New York raises the question of how prepared these ever-denser hubs are. It’s dirtier than it should be. Smellier, too, especially in July and August. Its schools struggle. Even its jails are broken, as the plan to close Rikers Island affirms.
Many of us New Yorkers feared that one of our biggest headaches this year would be frequent, disruptive visits from President Trump, but he has chosen to go elsewhere on weekends. Maybe that should tell us something.
Or Penn Station almost anytime. If you’re really cursed, the subway disgorges you there, into a constipated labyrinth where all beauty, civility and dreams of punctuality go to die. It’s the designated site of the “summer of hell,” to begin on July 10, when several tracks shut down for repair and New Jersey Transit and Amtrak won’t be able to live up to their current standard of wretchedness. I can’t for the life of me imagine what worse looks like. Will conductors line us up behind the cabooses and have us push our trains to their destinations?
I’m losing faith in New York. I’m losing patience. Last week we got an especially vivid reminder of what an overwhelmed, creaky menace the city’s infrastructure has become: Two cars on an A train in Upper Manhattan derailed, injuring about three dozen people.Gov. Andrew Cuomo subsequently declared a state of emergency for the subway system, pledged $1 billion for improvements and demanded a detailed action plan. I have just one question. What took him so long? Actually, I have another. How much of his sudden zest reflects a possible presidential bid and the need to pretty up an ugly blot on his record?
But it’s not just the subway. On so many days in so many ways, I see evidence of a city in the grip of a communal panic attack.
True story: Some weeks ago, I emerged, downtrodden, from my latest debasement on the subway to encounter a traffic jam near the street where I live. Pointlessly and obnoxiously, a driver in one car honked and honked at the cars ahead. This prompted a passing pedestrian to screech at him to stop. Then someone else began to scream at her for adding to the din. And you wonder why more people are wearing bulky headphones over their ears.
Yeah, yeah, I know: No one’s making us live here. And New York isn’t America. It’s a one-off.
But is that really so? Right now the Big Muddle — I’m sorry, Apple — strikes me as a proxy for the country and a cautionary tale. (...)
Popularity-wise, American cities are thriving. Millennials want to live in them. So do many retirees. But New York raises the question of how prepared these ever-denser hubs are. It’s dirtier than it should be. Smellier, too, especially in July and August. Its schools struggle. Even its jails are broken, as the plan to close Rikers Island affirms.
Many of us New Yorkers feared that one of our biggest headaches this year would be frequent, disruptive visits from President Trump, but he has chosen to go elsewhere on weekends. Maybe that should tell us something.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Zender
Video ad Absurdum
How a collection of fifteen thousand Jerry Maguire VHS tapes reveals the ugly underbelly of the media-entertainment industry.
If you were walking down Sunset Boulevard in mid-January—right around the time America’s forty-fifth president (a man and a president fit for his time) was inaugurated—you may have come across a familiar, though half-forgotten site: the façade of a video rental store. Through the window was the usual setup: movie advertisements, shelves of VHS tapes, genre signs, a gum ball machine, a couple dorky clerks chitchatting behind the counter, even a curtain with the label XXX, beyond which, you might guess, you could sneak a glimpse of videotaped smut. What was different about this video store—besides the fact that it was 2017, not 1997—was that all the tapes, all the posters, even the celebrity cardboard cut-out and the genre signs plastered high on the shelves were for the same movie: Jerry Maguire. Indeed, it was the only movie available in the entire store, and none of them were for rent. These fifteen thousand “Jerrys,” as they are affectionately known, were put on display by the video/art collective Everything is Terrible! (EIT!), which has been mashing up videos and collecting copies of Jerry Maguire video tapes for about eight years.
On opening night of the exhibit, I watched as about a thousand of LA’s video nerds and scenesters streamed past the wall-to-wall red-and-white Jerry shelves, through the XXX curtains, and into an ankle-deep pool of unspooled Jerry Maguire, wrapping their arms around a cardboard cutout of Tom Cruise talking on his mid-90s flip phone to pinch-zoom and snap Instagram/Facebook/Twitter-ready photos. What (the fuck) to make of this? The store was a meme, hypertrophied and incarnate. Jerrys stacked into pyramids along every wall. Jerry-inspired art selling for hundreds of dollars. Jerry socks. Jerry mix-tapes. A Jerry video game. A treasure chest of still shrink-wrapped Jerrys sent from an adulatory Cameron Crowe (the film’s director). And then the actual (fucking) pyramid—the actual pyramid EIT! is in talks with actual architects to build in the actual desert—a tomb and a shrine “for all the Jerrys to live in for all time,” according to Nic Maier, one of the lead members of the video art collective. Was it Scientological mission creep? A Malkovichian nightmare? A glitch in the matrix? Or a mirror held up to an entire media-drunk generation?
[ed. What a world.]
On opening night of the exhibit, I watched as about a thousand of LA’s video nerds and scenesters streamed past the wall-to-wall red-and-white Jerry shelves, through the XXX curtains, and into an ankle-deep pool of unspooled Jerry Maguire, wrapping their arms around a cardboard cutout of Tom Cruise talking on his mid-90s flip phone to pinch-zoom and snap Instagram/Facebook/Twitter-ready photos. What (the fuck) to make of this? The store was a meme, hypertrophied and incarnate. Jerrys stacked into pyramids along every wall. Jerry-inspired art selling for hundreds of dollars. Jerry socks. Jerry mix-tapes. A Jerry video game. A treasure chest of still shrink-wrapped Jerrys sent from an adulatory Cameron Crowe (the film’s director). And then the actual (fucking) pyramid—the actual pyramid EIT! is in talks with actual architects to build in the actual desert—a tomb and a shrine “for all the Jerrys to live in for all time,” according to Nic Maier, one of the lead members of the video art collective. Was it Scientological mission creep? A Malkovichian nightmare? A glitch in the matrix? Or a mirror held up to an entire media-drunk generation?
by John Washington, Guernica | Read more:
Image: EIT![ed. What a world.]
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Why We Crash Our Motorcycles
What do you learn if you pick 100 riders, put five video cameras and data-logging equipment on their motorcycles and record them for a total of 366,667 miles?
Several things, some of which we knew, some surprising. Intersections are dangerous. We either need to pay better attention or work on our braking techniques, because we crash into the back of other vehicles way too often. We’re not good enough at cornering, especially right turns. And we drop our bikes a lot (probably more often than any of us imagined or were willing to admit).
The study was done for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. (...)
The VTTI team explains its methodology, including efforts to standardize and define terms and procedures. All the details are in a 20-page report you can download from the MSF. But here are some of the things I picked out.
Where we crash
Intersections. No surprise there. VTTI created a system to calculate how much a certain scenario or riding behavior increased the odds of a crash or near-crash. An uncontrolled intersection presents nearly 41 times the risk of no intersection. A parking lot or driveway intersection is more than eight times as risky and an intersection with a signal is almost three times as risky.
A downhill grade increased the risk by a factor of four while an uphill grade doubled it. Riders were nine times as likely to crash or have a near-crash incident on gravel or dirt roads than on paved roads. And riders were twice as likely to have an incident in a righthand turn than on a straight section of road (crossing the center line is considered a near-crash scenario, even if nothing else bad happens).
How we crash
We complain all the time about other people on the road trying to kill us, especially cars pulling into our paths. The VTTI study partially backs that up. Of the 99 crashes and near-crashes involving another vehicle, the three categories of other vehicles crossing the rider’s path add up to 19.
Here’s the surprise, however. What’s the most common scenario? Riders hitting (or nearly hitting) another vehicle from behind. There were 35 of those incidents. Are we really almost twice as likely to plow into a stopped car in front of us as to have someone pull into our path? Or should we write this off as the result of a small sample size?
Maybe there are clues in the risk section. Researchers tried to break down rider behavior in crashes and near-crash incidents into two categories: aggressive riding or rider inattention or lack of skills. The cameras and other data helped determine, for example, if the rider ran the red light because of inattention or aggressive riding.
The study found that aggressive riding increased risk by a factor of 18 while inattention or lack of skill increased it by a factor of nine. Combine the two, and odds of an incident increased by 30.
Now here's one of the less dramatic findings, but an interesting one, just the same. It seems we drop our bikes a lot. Or at least the riders in the study did. More than half the crashes were incidents some riders wouldn't define as a crash — not a dramatic collision but an incident defined as a case where the "vehicle falls coincident with low or no speed (even if in gear)" not caused by another outside factor. Rider inattention or poor execution are to blame. The study finds "These low-speed 'crashes' appear to be relatively typical among everyday riding," but they are incidents that would never be included in a different kind of study of motorcycle crashes. The cameras, however, capture it all, even our mundane but embarrassing moments.
Several things, some of which we knew, some surprising. Intersections are dangerous. We either need to pay better attention or work on our braking techniques, because we crash into the back of other vehicles way too often. We’re not good enough at cornering, especially right turns. And we drop our bikes a lot (probably more often than any of us imagined or were willing to admit).The study was done for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. (...)
The VTTI team explains its methodology, including efforts to standardize and define terms and procedures. All the details are in a 20-page report you can download from the MSF. But here are some of the things I picked out.
Where we crash
Intersections. No surprise there. VTTI created a system to calculate how much a certain scenario or riding behavior increased the odds of a crash or near-crash. An uncontrolled intersection presents nearly 41 times the risk of no intersection. A parking lot or driveway intersection is more than eight times as risky and an intersection with a signal is almost three times as risky.
A downhill grade increased the risk by a factor of four while an uphill grade doubled it. Riders were nine times as likely to crash or have a near-crash incident on gravel or dirt roads than on paved roads. And riders were twice as likely to have an incident in a righthand turn than on a straight section of road (crossing the center line is considered a near-crash scenario, even if nothing else bad happens).
How we crash
We complain all the time about other people on the road trying to kill us, especially cars pulling into our paths. The VTTI study partially backs that up. Of the 99 crashes and near-crashes involving another vehicle, the three categories of other vehicles crossing the rider’s path add up to 19.
Here’s the surprise, however. What’s the most common scenario? Riders hitting (or nearly hitting) another vehicle from behind. There were 35 of those incidents. Are we really almost twice as likely to plow into a stopped car in front of us as to have someone pull into our path? Or should we write this off as the result of a small sample size?
Maybe there are clues in the risk section. Researchers tried to break down rider behavior in crashes and near-crash incidents into two categories: aggressive riding or rider inattention or lack of skills. The cameras and other data helped determine, for example, if the rider ran the red light because of inattention or aggressive riding.
The study found that aggressive riding increased risk by a factor of 18 while inattention or lack of skill increased it by a factor of nine. Combine the two, and odds of an incident increased by 30.
Now here's one of the less dramatic findings, but an interesting one, just the same. It seems we drop our bikes a lot. Or at least the riders in the study did. More than half the crashes were incidents some riders wouldn't define as a crash — not a dramatic collision but an incident defined as a case where the "vehicle falls coincident with low or no speed (even if in gear)" not caused by another outside factor. Rider inattention or poor execution are to blame. The study finds "These low-speed 'crashes' appear to be relatively typical among everyday riding," but they are incidents that would never be included in a different kind of study of motorcycle crashes. The cameras, however, capture it all, even our mundane but embarrassing moments.
by Lance Oliver, Revzilla | Read more:
Image: via:
The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party
I have been a Democrat my entire life. Today, the Democratic Party matters more than ever because it is the only organization currently capable, at least theoretically, of preventing the Republicans from turning the United States into a fully-fledged banana republic, ruled by and for a handful of billionaire families and corporate chieftains, with a stagnant economy and pre-modern levels of inequality. Yet I cannot find anything to disagree with in Senator Bernie Sanders’s assessment:
The Democratic Party was once the party of working people. So why is it increasingly becoming the party of well-educated, socially tolerant, cosmopolitan city-dwellers? Because, in an age of stagnant median incomes and a disintegrating social safety net, Democrats have no economic message for the many people who are struggling to make ends meet, to pay for college, to stay in a home, or to save for retirement.
This impotence is the product of sweeping changes in the intellectual and political landscape of the United States. As I discuss in my recent book, Economism, contemporary thinking about economic issues is dominated by “economism”: the belief that simplistic models accurately describe the real world and should be the basis of public policy. (For example: The minimum wage is an artificial price floor in the labor market, therefore supply will exceed demand, therefore unemployment must increase.) This naive or disingenuous worldview, according to which unregulated markets produce the best of all possible worlds, is frequently invoked to defend policies that favor the wealthy and justify the vast inequality that results.
Economism was promoted by conservatives who sought to roll back the New Deal and restore a mythical libertarian paradise governed by free markets, with a minimal state and low taxes. Their vision became the platform of the Republican Party in the 1970s and the policy handbook for President Ronald Reagan and every conservative leader since. In response, Democrats have tacked to the right on economic issues. Since Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party’s economic vision has been that prudent management of macroeconomic factors would foster higher private sector growth, which would in turn create jobs and prosperity for working families. The central planks of this platform have included: cutting budget deficits to reduce interest rates; reappointing Republican Federal Reserve chairs who would control inflation; and even seeking a “grand bargain” that would reduce Social Security spending in exchange for modestly higher taxes. As the Republican Party has been taken over by charlatans who insist on cutting taxes and crippling government at every opportunity, Democrats have rebranded themselves as the moderate party of responsible economic stewardship.
But there are two problems with this approach. The first is that it is economism lite. While Republicans say, “Free markets solve all problems,” Democrats respond, “Free markets solve most problems, but markets sometimes fail, so sometimes they need to be judiciously regulated to produce efficient outcomes.” This may be more accurate, but it undermines Democrats’ appeal to people who have not benefited from overall economic growth—because they have the wrong skills, live in the wrong place, got sick at the wrong time, or otherwise got unlucky.
The second problem is that economism lite doesn’t work, at least not anymore. A rising tide might lift all boats, as President John F. Kennedy claimed; but, then again, it might not. Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, labor productivity—the amount that each person can produce in an hour of work—has grown by 94% (a modest but respectable 1.9% per year); real per capita gross domestic product—total economic output per person—has grown by 82% (1.7% per year). Over that same period, however, median household income has increased by only 16% (less than 0.5% per year). In other words, the country as a whole has become almost twice as rich, but the typical family makes only a little more money than in 1980. Where has all the money gone?
To the very rich, as can be seen in one chart:
(If you compare the top 1% with the bottom 99%, or the top 10% with the bottom 90%, or the top 0.01% with the bottom 90%, you get the essentially the same picture.)
To be clear, the failure of overall economic growth to benefit the middle and working classes is not solely or even primarily the Democrats’ fault. The villain in that story is the Republican conservatives who weakened unions, undermined the social safety net, and slashed taxes on the rich. Globalization and competition from low-wage countries were another factor. But since the onslaught of the conservative revolution, Democrats have played defense by claiming the space once occupied by moderate Republicans. Recall the pivot to deficit reduction in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, the capital gains tax cut of 1997, the commitment to free trade agreements from NAFTA to TPP, and the bipartisan commitment to financial deregulation that helped produce the devastating financial crisis of 2008.
Barack Obama temporarily had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and yet his principal accomplishments were an economic stimulus bill that was more than one-third tax cuts; a health care plan modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reforms; a technocratic financial reform bill that neither reduced the dominance of the megabanks that caused the 2008 crisis nor, judging from subsequent experience, deterred them from serial lawbreaking; and a financial system rescue that kept the big banks (and their executives and shareholders) afloat while they fraudulently foreclosed on millions of homeowners. There were positives in Obama’s economic record: The recession would have been worse without the stimulus, millions of people got health coverage, and the Dodd-Frank Act included some steps in the right direction. Taken as a whole, however, Obama governed as what we called a moderate Republican only a few decades ago, and the only vision one can distill from his actions is that of prudently harnessing market forces to generate growth. (Perhaps the president and his advisers would have preferred more progressive policies in some areas such as health care—but they were constrained not just by the Party of No, but also by a Democratic caucus effectively controlled by its conservative wing.) For an unemployed recent graduate buried by student debt, or a factory worker laid off in middle age while underwater on her mortgage, or a retiree who saw her savings evaporate in 2008 and 2009, the argument that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are not as bad as the Republicans was just not compelling enough.
One of the central themes of my book is that economism is an ideological worldview: a lens through which we see the world, which affects the way we interpret reality and serves the interests of certain groups. Logically, it can only be overthrown by another worldview. And so the book ends this way:
by James Kwak, Baseline Scenario | Read more:
Image: www.wid.world
[ed. See also: Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now.]
“The model the Democrats have followed for the last 10 to 20 years has been an ultimate failure. That’s just the objective evidence. We are taking on a right-wing extremist party whose agenda is opposed time after time and on issue after issue by the vast majority of the American people. Yet we have lost the White House, the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, almost two-thirds of the governors’ chairs and close to 900 legislative seats across this country. How can anyone not conclude that the Democratic agenda and approach has been a failure?”A central shortcoming of the party is that, on economic issues, it has nothing to say to people trapped on the wrong side of our country’s growing inequality divide. Hillary Clinton won the “working class” (household income less than $50,000) vote, but by a much smaller margin than Barack Obama in 2012 or 2008—despite Donald Trump’s ardent efforts to alienate African-Americans and Latinos. Some people voted for Trump because of racism or misogyny. But Clinton was also flattened by Trump among voters who feel their financial situation was worse than a year before or who think that life will be worse for the next generation. She lost the Electoral College in the “rust belt” states of the Upper Midwest, whose economies have never fully recovered from the decline of American manufacturing.
The Democratic Party was once the party of working people. So why is it increasingly becoming the party of well-educated, socially tolerant, cosmopolitan city-dwellers? Because, in an age of stagnant median incomes and a disintegrating social safety net, Democrats have no economic message for the many people who are struggling to make ends meet, to pay for college, to stay in a home, or to save for retirement.
This impotence is the product of sweeping changes in the intellectual and political landscape of the United States. As I discuss in my recent book, Economism, contemporary thinking about economic issues is dominated by “economism”: the belief that simplistic models accurately describe the real world and should be the basis of public policy. (For example: The minimum wage is an artificial price floor in the labor market, therefore supply will exceed demand, therefore unemployment must increase.) This naive or disingenuous worldview, according to which unregulated markets produce the best of all possible worlds, is frequently invoked to defend policies that favor the wealthy and justify the vast inequality that results.
Economism was promoted by conservatives who sought to roll back the New Deal and restore a mythical libertarian paradise governed by free markets, with a minimal state and low taxes. Their vision became the platform of the Republican Party in the 1970s and the policy handbook for President Ronald Reagan and every conservative leader since. In response, Democrats have tacked to the right on economic issues. Since Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party’s economic vision has been that prudent management of macroeconomic factors would foster higher private sector growth, which would in turn create jobs and prosperity for working families. The central planks of this platform have included: cutting budget deficits to reduce interest rates; reappointing Republican Federal Reserve chairs who would control inflation; and even seeking a “grand bargain” that would reduce Social Security spending in exchange for modestly higher taxes. As the Republican Party has been taken over by charlatans who insist on cutting taxes and crippling government at every opportunity, Democrats have rebranded themselves as the moderate party of responsible economic stewardship.
But there are two problems with this approach. The first is that it is economism lite. While Republicans say, “Free markets solve all problems,” Democrats respond, “Free markets solve most problems, but markets sometimes fail, so sometimes they need to be judiciously regulated to produce efficient outcomes.” This may be more accurate, but it undermines Democrats’ appeal to people who have not benefited from overall economic growth—because they have the wrong skills, live in the wrong place, got sick at the wrong time, or otherwise got unlucky.
The second problem is that economism lite doesn’t work, at least not anymore. A rising tide might lift all boats, as President John F. Kennedy claimed; but, then again, it might not. Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, labor productivity—the amount that each person can produce in an hour of work—has grown by 94% (a modest but respectable 1.9% per year); real per capita gross domestic product—total economic output per person—has grown by 82% (1.7% per year). Over that same period, however, median household income has increased by only 16% (less than 0.5% per year). In other words, the country as a whole has become almost twice as rich, but the typical family makes only a little more money than in 1980. Where has all the money gone?
To the very rich, as can be seen in one chart:
(If you compare the top 1% with the bottom 99%, or the top 10% with the bottom 90%, or the top 0.01% with the bottom 90%, you get the essentially the same picture.)
To be clear, the failure of overall economic growth to benefit the middle and working classes is not solely or even primarily the Democrats’ fault. The villain in that story is the Republican conservatives who weakened unions, undermined the social safety net, and slashed taxes on the rich. Globalization and competition from low-wage countries were another factor. But since the onslaught of the conservative revolution, Democrats have played defense by claiming the space once occupied by moderate Republicans. Recall the pivot to deficit reduction in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, the capital gains tax cut of 1997, the commitment to free trade agreements from NAFTA to TPP, and the bipartisan commitment to financial deregulation that helped produce the devastating financial crisis of 2008.
Barack Obama temporarily had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and yet his principal accomplishments were an economic stimulus bill that was more than one-third tax cuts; a health care plan modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reforms; a technocratic financial reform bill that neither reduced the dominance of the megabanks that caused the 2008 crisis nor, judging from subsequent experience, deterred them from serial lawbreaking; and a financial system rescue that kept the big banks (and their executives and shareholders) afloat while they fraudulently foreclosed on millions of homeowners. There were positives in Obama’s economic record: The recession would have been worse without the stimulus, millions of people got health coverage, and the Dodd-Frank Act included some steps in the right direction. Taken as a whole, however, Obama governed as what we called a moderate Republican only a few decades ago, and the only vision one can distill from his actions is that of prudently harnessing market forces to generate growth. (Perhaps the president and his advisers would have preferred more progressive policies in some areas such as health care—but they were constrained not just by the Party of No, but also by a Democratic caucus effectively controlled by its conservative wing.) For an unemployed recent graduate buried by student debt, or a factory worker laid off in middle age while underwater on her mortgage, or a retiree who saw her savings evaporate in 2008 and 2009, the argument that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are not as bad as the Republicans was just not compelling enough.
One of the central themes of my book is that economism is an ideological worldview: a lens through which we see the world, which affects the way we interpret reality and serves the interests of certain groups. Logically, it can only be overthrown by another worldview. And so the book ends this way:
“Millions if not billions of people today hunger to live in a world that is more fair, more forgiving, and more humane than the one that we were born into. Creating a new vision of society worthy of that collective yearning—one that goes beyond the false promises of economism—is the first step toward building a better future for our children. That is the story that remains to be written.”What the Democratic Party needs is an economic message that: addresses the real problems that many Americans face on a daily basis (instead of callously insisting that “America is already great”); and resonates with their very real frustrations and anxieties. Both politically and as policy, the idea that the rising tide of economic efficiency and growth would lift all boats has failed. It is time for something new.
by James Kwak, Baseline Scenario | Read more:
Image: www.wid.world
[ed. See also: Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now.]
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