Our Newest Culture Warriors: Activist C.E.O.s

In the wake of the school shootings in Parkland, Fla., companies like Delta, Hertz and Symantec distanced themselves from the National Rifle Association by eliminating benefits to their members.

Dick’s Sporting Goods, which owns 35 Field and Stream stores (which feature hunting gear and supplies), took it a step further: The company announced that it had unilaterally raised the age limit for firearms sales and stopped selling the AR-15, the weapon used in Parkland and other recent mass shootings. The chief executive, Edward Stack, said that the company was “going to take a stand and step up and tell people our view and, hopefully, bring people along into the conversation.” Less than 24 hours later, Walmart joined Dick’s in raising the age limit on firearm sales (Walmart stopped selling AR-15s years ago).

They exemplify a recent phenomenon, “C.E.O. activism,” in which corporations and their chief executives pick a side in the culture war.

Some companies have benefited, through gains in popularity or even sales, by taking such stands. Patagonia reportedly saw a revenue surge after announcing its lawsuit against the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the size of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. My research with Michael Toffel of Harvard Business School finds that consumers were more likely to buy Apple products after hearing Tim Cook’s statement opposing Indiana’s religious freedom bill.

But other firms have faced angry consumers and had to retrench, as Target did when hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition in protest of its trans-inclusive bathroom policy. The chief executive of Papa John’s, who blamed the National Football League’s handling of the national anthem controversy for his company’s declining sales, stepped down after he was criticized for his comments.

What has not happened in any of these cases is a cooling of partisan tensions. Even in rare cases when pragmatic business leaders helped to broker agreements, which was reportedly the case in North Carolina with the repeal of the so-called bathroom bill, a culture war still festers.

C.E.O. activism has typically not brought people together, working from the middle out. Instead, this type of activism, largely from the progressive side, has begun to galvanize conservatives. For example, in Georgia, lawmakers stripped tax breaks for Delta over its decision to cut ties with the N.R.A.

In the short term, Dick’s will become another corporate poster child for how political polarization and so-called negative partisanship — an automatic rejection of members of the opposing party — are infecting our society. There will be a rash of news stories about increased sales from liberal consumers rushing into Dick’s stores to vote with their wallets. Conservative media will point to boycotts and highlight other retailers that are stepping in to serve disaffected consumers.

But the real story will be the long game. C.E.O. activism represents a historic shift in the way corporations intersect with national politics. Rather than chief executives shaping political discourse, however, our toxic political environment is dictating corporate strategy. Instead of being cast as practical technocrats who could unite us, chief executives will be swept up in our cultural war, just like university presidents, celebrities, professional athletes and religious leaders before them.

Brands are likely to become even more segmented into red and blue, strengthening the association between liberals and Priuses and conservatives and Cracker Barrel. Corporate brand campaigns could soon resemble political campaigns, with efforts to identify the most intensely loyal consumers for repeat purchases as opposed to attracting new ones.

Mainstream brands may become as common as moderate politicians — that is, a rare, perhaps extinct, species in today’s political environment. Twitter and PayPal serve diverse customers today, but their recent efforts to regulate their own platforms have led to allegations of political bias and incited competitors.

Most companies are not prepared for this new world of politics. Pepsi and Starbucks have already been victims of orchestrated fake news campaigns; there will be many more. As more companies take stands, those remaining will be named and shamed on social media, creating impossible choices in an environment where neutrality is not an option.

Like our politicians, corporate chiefs will have to quickly figure out what stand they should take on the issue of the day by reflecting on their core convictions and estimating how their (customer) base will react. Like pollsters, they will have to assess which kind of consumers they can write off and which ones to curry favor with. The right answer will vary by a company’s geographic location, who their employees are and how much they depend on favorable government regulation.

by Aaron K. Chatterji, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Niv Bavarsky

Maybe Taxi Drivers Don't Hate Progress, Maybe They Just Don't Want to be Poor

As ride-sharing apps have decimated the taxi industry over the last few years, Uber has consistently presented itself as being good for drivers. It has released absurdly overinflated estimates of average driver compensation. In 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a typical Uber driver takes in more than $100,000 a year in gross sales” based on figures from the company. The company had to pay a large settlement after it recruited drivers using compensation figures that were flat-out false. In 2015 Princeton economist Alan Kreuger, the former head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, partnered with Uber’s head of research to produce an “analysis of Uber’s driver-partners” with impressive earnings statistics, showing that average drivers earned well above minimum wage, with their compensation significantly exceeding that of taxi drivers. Here’s a chart from the paper:

These statistics were cited as proof Uber improves drivers’ lives. The Economist (who else?) ran the headline “Princeton economist explains why we should all stop worrying and learn to love Uber,” saying that the “ambitious study” had shown that fears of Uber driving down wages were overblown. (The press has credulously parroted Uber’s fabricated statistics since the beginning, with headlines like “Could Uber’s 90k salary disrupt the taxi business?“) The Kreuger and Hall paper’s findings, with a highly accredited economist’s name attached, were a formidable public relations tool for Uber, which has long be en fighting allegations that it underpays and exploits its drivers. The numbers proved, though, that if you’re mad at Uber, you should be even madder at the taxi industry, and that Uber is actually improving driver compensation. They also bolstered the pro-“disruption” argument that the taxi industry was little more than a cartel trying to protect the corrupt oligopoly that it had established over time. If Uber drivers earn more than taxi drivers, the arguments against Uber’s erosion of the taxi industry could not possibly be based on legitimate concerns for the financial well-being of those who drive for a living. The more Uber grew, the better it would be for drivers.

But the above chart is almost entirely meaningless. That’s because, as it notes at the bottom, it doesn’t factor Uber drivers’ expenses (gas, taxes, insurance, repairs, depreciation, or possibly even renting the car itself) into its “earnings” calculations. If one column is “pre-expenses” and the other is “post-expenses,” then what conclusions can anyone possibly draw from this chart? Unless we know what drivers actually ended up with, we don’t know anything of value. I actually think it’s deeply intellectually dishonest for a reputable economist to produce a chart like this. Krueger said he didn’t include expenses in the chart because he didn’t have the data with which to calculate them. But if you don’t have the data, then you can’t make a comparison between Uber compensation and taxi compensation. Instead of declining to answer a question that he didn’t have the answer to, Krueger made a chart that showed an unsupportable claim.

(This is one reason why serious economists shouldn’t accept money from corporations to produce research about those corporations. The Uber-funded Krueger and Hall study was almost ludicrously propagandistic, from its use of “driver-partners” to its constant touting of “flexibility.” Look at this quote: “When asked directly in [Question 38], ‘If both were available to you, at this point in your life, would you rather have a steady 9-to-5 job with some benefits and a set salary or a job where you choose your own schedule and be your own boss?’ 73 percent chose the latter.” Talk about a biased question: do you want to be your own boss or do you want to have things “set” for you with “some” benefits? Shockingly, 73 percent of people would rather not have bosses!)

When you try to produce a real comparison of what Uber drivers make compared to what taxi drivers make (as opposed to a fabricated and nonsensical comparison), the situation becomes much, much murkier. Krueger and Hall were criticized for presenting such a misleading statistic, and two years later they updated their paper to include estimates of the effect of expenses on what Uber drivers actually take home. In the new version, they came to the much less impressive conclusion that “taking expenses into account, the average Uber driver-partner is likely to earn at least as much per hour, and probably more, than the average taxi driver and chauffeur.” (Emphasis added.) Even with this estimate, for part-time drivers they “disregard fixed costs, assuming that drivers are using a car they already owned which would have depreciated regardless of driving on the platform.” The expense estimates vary, but can be almost $6.50 per hour for a full-time driver of a large sedan or SUV. (In the original paper, the authors wrote that unless driver expenses ended up being “more than $6 per hour,” their central conclusion would still hold, implying that this was very unlikely.) (...)

We don’t really know, then, what an Uber driver makes compared to a taxi driver. There are reasons to believe Uber drivers might do worse on the whole than taxi drivers. A BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Uber’s own internal data from 2016, found that in states with high auto insurance rates like Michigan, expenses for drivers could eat up almost 1/3 of the “earnings” that Uber touts. Detroit Uber drivers ended up taking home about $8.77 on average, not much above the state’s minimum wage at the time of $8.50. (And below Michigan’s current minimum wage of $9.25.) According to BuzzFeed, Uber is not eager to try to figure out what its drivers actually end up with, and “says it doesn’t know how much drivers on its platform actually earn per hour, after expenses.” The company “explicitly discourages employees from comparing [Uber’s] estimates to the minimum wage.” Here‘s an anecdotal account from a taxi driver who previously drove for Uber and Lyft, reporting that his income from ride-share apps was dismal compared to his taxi income. That doesn’t in itself prove anything, but it does mean we shouldn’t allow Uber to treat this as an obviously settled question.

A new study out of MIT actually suggests that things may be much worse for Uber drivers than previously thought. From a survey of more than 1,100 drivers, the study’s authors concluded that the median pre-tax profit earned from driving is actually a miserable $3.37 an hour, and that 30 percent of drivers “are actually losing money once vehicle expenses are included.” Their results actually show the median per-mile expenses exceeding the median per-mile profit. If this is true, it certainly helps us better understand why 96% of Uber drivers quit after less than a year. (Hall and Krueger suggest that this is simply because Uber is used as a “bridge” between jobs, though one wonders why those people even need to find another job if driving is as lucrative as the company says.)

There is reason to be skeptical of the MIT number, because they’re so different from prior estimates, and it’s hard to evaluate them given that we only have access to a short summary of the findings. That’s why this needs to be looked at seriously, in research that isn’t just company propaganda or back-of-the-envelope calculations from industry-sponsored bloggers.

There are important reasons to figure out what Uber drivers really earn. The debate over regulating Uber/Lyft in many cities has been framed as pitting innovation/disruption against “taxi company profits.” Language about monopoliesand cartels is ubiquitous. Taxi companies just don’t want competition, they want to keep fares high and squeeze money out of consumers. Framed that way, regardless of what you think of Uber, it’s difficult to see any good argument for the taxi lobby’s desire to put restrictions on ride-share apps and keep local licensing requirements in place. But if Uber is creating a “race to the bottom” effect that is causing considerable economic hardship to people who have spent decades driving for a living, we’re in a different situation. And since Uber fares are obviously far lower than taxi fares, with drivers paying more in expenses, the idea that it’s going to end up being better for workers is… counterintuitive to say the least. The whole success of the gig economy is based on the fact that it’s all cheap, and it’s not just cheap because it’s disrupting cartels, but because it cuts costs that companies would previously have had to pay. (Such as, for example, driver safety training, which ride-share apps don’t offer because they’re worried it will lead the government to conclude that drivers are actually employees who deserve benefits. Being a taxi driver is actually one of the most dangerous jobs in America: you’re more likely to be murdered as a taxi driver than doing any other job, and risks of car accidents and robberies also.)

It would be easy, of course, to fix everything. We don’t need to reclassify “driver-partners” as actual employees instead of contractors, or even try to get them unionized. What we really need is a rideshare system owned and operated by drivers themselves. Libertarians have snarkily pointed out that the “sharing economy allows workers to own the means of production,” which is every socialist’s dream. Why doesn’t the left love this? Well, we know exactly why: because it’s not about “owning the tools you use at your job” it’s about not being exploited by your employer, i.e. not having to turn over a substantial portion of your earnings to them merely because you happen to be dependent on them. But there is a point here: ride-sharing can be good for workers, if corporate profit is out of the picture. We need an alternative, not for profit service that actually operates in a way that servers its workers.

At the beginning of last month, Doug Schifter, a New York City livery driver, committed suicide on the steps of City Hall with a shotgun. Schifter left a note, explaining that he was taking his life because conditions for him as a driver had become impossible. With the industry collapsing, he had lost his health insurance, was deep in debt, and said he was working up to 100 hour weeks. The New York Times described Schifter as a “casualty of the gig economy,” a man who had driven five million miles in his career only to see everything evaporate.” (Bill deBlasio apparently didn’t accept Schifter’s stated motivation for his act, saying it must have been due to an “underlying mental health issue.”) This situation is happening to career drivers across the country. Uber “devastated” the taxi industry in cities like Los Angeles. The executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance said that never she had “never seen anything like the despair she was witnessing now — the bankruptcies, foreclosures and eviction notices plaguing drivers who were calling her with questions about how to navigate homelessness and paralyzing depression.”

Before Doug Schifter took his own life, he wrote:

We are not a government of the People, by the People and for the People any more. We are turning into a Government of the People, by the Corporation for the Rich. People are becoming enslaved and destroyed by politicians and companies with the aid of the rich and the corporations they control… Forget about great country….we are not even good people if we do not care for others in need. Most of the civilized world cares for their own except here where republicans who do not need more money to survive seek to get all they can get from companies and the rich and then take away all they can from the people… I hope with the public sacrifice I make now that some attention to the plight of the drivers and the people will be done to save them and it will have not have been in vain…

In Tunisia, when one fruit vendor committed suicide publicly after conditions had become intolerable, it sparked an uprising that toppled the existing regime. In America, when a livery driver takes his life, the country barely bats an eye. After all, Schifter will be only one of 40,000 people who commit suicide in our country this year. And we’ve decided to accept the ruin of people’s lives as the price of cheap fares.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Alan Kreuger and Uber

Inside the Home of Japan's Fake Food Industry

With a gentle swish through hot water, and some deft tearing and shaping, Kurumi Kono turns a rectangular sheet of white and green wax into what, improbably, is quickly coming to resemble an iceberg lettuce.

Kono makes it look deceptively easy. “Place it in your hands and pull out the edges like this,” she says. “Then roll the remaining wax into a ball to make a small lettuce. Place it onto your hand and, starting from the back, fold the bigger leaf towards the middle. Using both hands, gently form a sphere. And there you have it.”

She then drips a yellowy liquid wax from a paper cup into the hot water. Within seconds, it forms a solid coating, in which she encases a “cooked prawn” to produce a flawless piece of tempura. It really does look good enough to eat.

A godsend to foreign tourists who, faced with a Japanese-language menu, can simply point and order, shokuhin sanpuru (food samples) have been tempting diners into Japan’s restaurants for almost a century. (...)

Gujo Hachiman, a picturesque town tucked in the mountains more than three hours west of Tokyo, lays claim to being the home of a replica food industry now worth an estimated $90m.

It is said that the father of replica food, Takizo Iwasaki, was inspired by the drops of candle wax that formed on the tatami-mat floor at the home he shared with his wife, Suzu, in Osaka, according to his biography, Flowers of Wax.

After months of perfecting his technique, Iwasaki made Suzu a fake omelette, garnished with tomato sauce, that she initially failed to distinguish from the real thing.

While some artisans had already started making rudimentary food models in the 1920s, Iwasaki pioneered a production method that combined accuracy with volume, and opened a workshop in his hometown of Gujo Hachiman.

His omelette appeared at a department store in Osaka in 1932, and an industry was born.

The more prosaic theory is that the replica food boom grew out of demand by restaurants for models that re-created the increasingly eclectic range of Japanese and foreign dishes that appeared on menus in the postwar period.

“Eating out could be a challenge for some people in those days, so restaurateurs saw display models as a way of putting customers at ease,” says Katsuji Kaneyama, president of Sanpuru Kobo (Sample Kobo), one of several replica food firms in Gujo Hachiman, whose products account for about two-thirds of the domestic market. (...)

“The trick is in striking a balance between realism and aestheticism – the model that looks the most delicious isn’t necessarily the most realistic,” says Kaneyama, whose 10 full-time artists produce as many as 130,000 samples a year, made from durable PVC rather than wax. 

by Justin McCurry, The Guardian |  Read more:

Video: The Guardian

Katsunori Hamanishi, Kimono n°1 2011

via:

Killing a Parasite — Canceling Student Debt

In America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt. That giant pile of financial obligations isn’t just a burden on individual borrowers, but on the nation’s entire economy.

In the world of parasites, the job of the parasite is to benefit from the harm it does to the host, but not to kill the host, at least not until the parasite is done with it:

In biology, parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has characterised parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”…. 

Unlike predators, parasites, with the exception of parasitoids [examples: wasps that lay eggs in paralyzed spiders, or the beast in Alien], typically do not kill their host, are generally much smaller than their host, and often live in or on their host for an extended period. Parasitism is a type of consumer-resource interaction. [Footnotes removed]

Parasites are not the same as predators. Predators kill, eat, and move on. Parasites disable, then live off the energy system of the disabled host for as long as they can keep the host alive.

Viruses are a form of parasite. So are credit card companies.

Loan Companies as Parasites

The parasite first disables the host’s ability to reject the parasite, then derives its own energy (that which sustains it) by robbing the host’s energy system. It attempts to do this for as long as possible. Loan companies whose “business plan” — survival strategy — is to prolong the loan, and at the maximum sustainable rate, are by definition parasites.

But there is a scale of parasitism among loan companies. The least parasitic are mortgage companies, in that mortgages typically don’t destroy incomes; they just feed off them. When the host goes into bankruptcy (usually for other reasons, such as illness, divorce or job change), the host (the home-owner) is abandoned, but mortgage company parasites don’t typically cause these bankruptcies by themselves.

In addition, if a host wants to repay her debt and free herself from the parasite, she is allowed to do so, though typically, hosts usually seek a new parasite, either by necessity or because of cultural pressure.

At the less gentle end of the parasitic spectrum are payday lenders and loan sharks, who actually disable the host’s income capability by extracting so much money that the host almost certainly goes bankrupt, often first drawing on the resources of others and transferring those resources to the parasite as well before they do.

Payday lenders thrive in an environment rich in new hosts, since so many of their former ones become useless. By contrast, most mortgaged homeowners (hosts of mortgage banks) don’t go bankrupt — just some of them.

Student Debt Parasites Feed on Especially Vulnerable Hosts

Not far up the parasitic scale from payday lenders and loan sharks are owners and beneficiaries of student debt, i.e. the lending companies.

First, as the chart above shows, there’s a large and growing population of prospects in the student loan world. New hosts, it seems, are everywhere.

Second, the loan amounts are extraordinarily large and extraordinarily long-lived (my emphasis throughout):

The average debt load for students who graduated in the class of 2016 was around $30,000, and the average rises every year. 

But some students graduate with far more debt than that, especially those who pursue graduate degrees or professional degrees. Nearly 17 percent of those who borrow for education costs will graduate owing more than $50,000, according to the recent study by the Brookings Institution. That is a much higher rate than in 2000, when five percent of new graduates owed that much money. 

Today, many of those who graduate with more than $50,000 in debt aren’t the students who are pursuing highly-lucrative careers, such as becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but undergraduate students and their parents. On the other hand, more people who are pursuing a professional degree are graduating with well over $100,000 in student loans.

While a student debt load of $30,000 doesn’t sound large compared to mortgage debt, remember that these hosts almost never have a source of income when they incur the debt. In contrast, mortgage holders generally have to prove income prior to acquiring the debt.

For high-debt graduates — greater than $50,000, greater than $100,000 — the situation is much worse. The debt burden can hobble their entire lives. I’ve met men and women in their thirties whose most common complaint is, “I will never get out of debt, and I will never get a job in my profession.” I’ve met high-tech workers in high-mortgage-cost regions of the country with incomes greater than $150,000 per year, student loan repayments of nearly $2,000 per month, more than one child, and no way to break even on a month-to-month basis.

All of these people are one bad-luck accident away from bankruptcy — which means good-bye to the next good job for more than a decade afterward.

Student Loan Parasites Also Feed on the Economy as a Whole

But student loan parasites don’t just eat and diminish the host — they eat and diminish the economy as a whole. It’s an axiom in economics that aggregate debt repayment subtracts from GDP, a measure of overall economic production. In practical terms, a dollar spent repaying a debt to a lender is a dollar that doesn’t buy bread, purchase services like health care, or build a factory.

As a nation’s private debt burden increases, private sector demand and spending falls. In the extreme, if everyone in a country decided or were forced to pay all debts at once, the overall economy would collapse. (The same would happen if everyone in an economy went on a savings spree.)

This is what today’s high levels of student debt are doing to our economy. Writes Eric Levitz at New York magazine:

In America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt. That giant pile of financial obligations isn’t just a burden on individual borrowers, but on the nation’s entire economy. The astronomical rise in the cost of college tuition — combined with the stagnation of entry-level wages for college graduates — has depressed the purchasing power of a broad, and growing, part of the labor force. Many of these workers are struggling to keep their heads above water; 11 percent of aggregate student loan debt is now more than 90 days past due, or delinquent. Others are unable to invest in a home, vehicle, or start a family (and engage in all the myriad acts of consumption that go with that).

Note that number: U.S. aggregate student debt has reached almost $1.5 trillion.

A Debt Jubilee to Rejuvenate the Economy

The obvious solution to this problem has been practiced since ancient times — a debt jubilee in which all student debts are cancelled. Keep in mind that the U/S. government owns or controls 90% of all student debt in this country:

Thus, if the government were to forgive all the student debt it owns (which makes up more than 90 percent of all outstanding student debt), and bought out all private holders of such debt, a surge in consumer demand — and thus, employment and economic growth — would ensue. 

According to the Levy Institute paper [here], authored by economists Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum, canceling all student debt would increase GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion per year, over the next decade. This would add between 1.2 and 1.5 million jobs to the economy, and reduce the unemployment rate by between 0.22 and 0.36 percent.

Note that the ancient concept of “debt jubilee” doesn’t necessarily apply to all debt, just unproductive debt.

Economist Michael Hudson writes this about debt jubilees in Sumerian and Babylonian times:

The Bronze Age core economies coped with the debt problem simply by canceling society’s unproductive debts when they grew too large. However, the Sumerians and Babylonians only annulled consumer barley-debts; they left commercial silver-debts intact. … This implicit distinction between productive and unproductive debt represents a third way in which Babylonian economics may be deemed more sophisticated than modern economics (in addition to the afore-mentioned focus on the destabilizing role of debts multiplying at compound interest, and the phenomenon of wealth addiction.)

Note his mention of the socially “destabilizing role of debs multiplying at compound interest,” as well as the (similarly destabilizing) role of “wealth addiction.” Our society is hobbled by both.

Student loan debt is by definition unproductive debt — a debt owed to parasites, in other words. There is no question that cancelling it would free both hosts — the millions of graduates (and those who failed to graduate) themselves, and the larger economy as well.

by Gaius Publius, Down With Tyranny |  Read more:

Image: People’s Policy Project
[ed. See also: We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake and Alone among all kinds of debt, we don’t allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy.]

Taxpayers, You’ve Been Scammed

So you go out for dinner with a wealthy acquaintance. “I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and orders you a hamburger. Then he orders himself an expensive steak and a bottle of wine, which he doesn’t share. And when the waiter comes with the check, he points at you and says, “Charge it to his credit card.”

Now you understand the essence of the Trump tax cut, signed into law a little over two months ago.

The key thing you need to know is that right now the U.S. government has no business cutting taxes. We need more revenue, not less.

Why? The federal government, as an old line says, is a giant insurance company with an army. Most of its costs come from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and all three programs are becoming more expensive as ever more baby boomers reach retirement age. This means that unless we cut back sharply on benefits that middle-class Americans count on, we will need to raise more revenue than in the past. (...)

And we already know what will give, if Republicans get their way: programs that benefit working Americans. In fact, the usual suspects like Paul Ryan were talking about the need for “entitlement reform” — meaning cuts in Medicare and Medicaid — to reduce deficits even as they were passing a huge tax cut that will make those deficits much worse.

Hence my analogy about the guy who “gives” you a hamburger, then bills it to your credit card. Ryan celebrated the tax cut with a tweet about a teacher saving $1.50 a week on her taxes; that’s like saying you should feel grateful for a “gift” that’s actually being charged to your own credit card. How’s that $75-a-year saving going to look when the teacher finds out that, partly because of that tax cut, her mother’s Medicare plan has been converted into an inadequate voucher system and Medicaid won’t pay for her father’s nursing home care?

Meanwhile, about your companion’s steak dinner: Most of the tax cut actually consisted of huge tax breaks for corporations, which is in effect a big tax cut for stockholders. And while many Americans own a bit of stock via their retirement accounts, even if you include these indirect holdings, more than 80 percent of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. So on the face of it, the wealthy are giving themselves a big gift, and sending the bill to the middle class.

Now, the tax cut’s defenders insist that it won’t really work that way, that the benefits of lower corporate taxes will trickle down to workers instead. How’s that supposed to happen?

Well, the theory is that lower corporate taxes will draw in lots of money from overseas, which corporations will invest in new plants and equipment, which will drive up the demand for labor, which will raise wages. And to be fair, there’s probably something to this theory — something, but not very much.

First of all, even if the process were to work as advertised, it would take a long time — probably decades. Even the most optimistic analyses suggest that there would be little effect on wages for the first few years, which means that for now what looks like a tax break for the wealthy is, in fact, a tax break for the wealthy.

Second, the story relies on a long chain of events with multiple weak links. For example, corporations with monopoly power won’t see lower taxes as a reason to invest more; they’ll just take the money. Meanwhile, there’s growing evidence that big employers are using their power to suppress wages; cutting their taxes won’t change that fact. So even in the long run we shouldn’t expect a lot of trickle-down.

But wait — weren’t there a lot of stories about companies using the tax cut to give their workers bonuses? Yes, there were — but only because the news media let themselves get played. Most of those bonuses would have happened anyway: In an economy with low unemployment, there are always some companies deciding to pay a bit more to attract workers. But companies had every incentive to pretend that the tax cut was responsible, if only to curry favor with the Trump administration.

And in any case the bonus hype was out of all proportion to the reality. So far, we’ve seen about $6 billion in bonuses versus more than $170 billion in stock buybacks, that is, handing money to wealthy stockholders. And money spent on buybacks is money that isn’t being invested in plants and equipment, the supposed point of the tax cut.

So the message to middle-class taxpayers is, if you think you were helped by the tax cut, think again. Donald Trump and his allies pretended to give you a gift, but they gave themselves and their wealthy patrons much bigger gifts — and they’re going to stick you with the bill. You’ve been scammed.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

In the Dark All Cats Are Grey

Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress (1745)

June 25, 1745

My dear Friend,

I know of no Medicine fit to diminish the violent natural Inclinations you mention; and if I did, I think I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper Remedy. It is the most natural State of Man, and therefore the State in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness. Your Reasons against entering into it at present, appear to me not well-founded. The circumstantial Advantages you have in View by postponing it, are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the Thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissars. If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.

But if you will not take this Counsel, and persist in thinking a Commerce with the Sex inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice, that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

1. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stor'd with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a 1000 Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc'd may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8thly and Lastly They are so grateful!!

Thus much for my Paradox. But still I advise you to marry directly; being sincerely Your affectionate Friend.

by Benjamin Franklin |  Read more:

via: Swarthmore College History 41: The American Colonies; Image via:

The Supreme Court’s Power Play Against Labor

Here’s a possible solution to the most commented-upon mystery growing out of the Supreme Court’s argument this week in a case of crucial importance to the future of public employee unions: Why did the normally loquacious Justice Neil M. Gorsuch stay silent? Could the junior justice have caught something from Justice Clarence Thomas, who famously went a decade without asking a single question? Was Justice Gorsuch overcome by the knowledge that with his eight colleagues tied four to four — as revealed by the vote two terms ago in a nearly identical case that was argued but not yet decided by the time of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death — he holds the fate of organized labor in his hands?

No, nothing as tantalizing as that. I think the answer is probably a good deal more pedestrian. The lawyer representing the labor union, David C. Frederick, is Justice Gorsuch’s former law partner. When President Trump nominated Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court a year ago, Mr. Frederick published an opinion essay in The Washington Post under the headline: “There Is No Principled Reason to Vote Against Gorsuch.” Identifying himself as “a longtime supporter of Democratic candidates and progressive causes,” Mr. Frederick called Judge Gorsuch “a longtime friend” and described him as “brilliant, diligent, open-minded and thoughtful.” So why would Justice Gorsuch beat up on his old friend when Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Anthony M. Kennedy were doing an enthusiastic job of it?

There. Minor mystery solved. But that leaves unaddressed a major mystery that goes to the heart of the case: how Justices Alito and Kennedy, with all their years of experience, could have permitted their intense dislike of organized labor to strip them of judicious inhibition and drive them to act as advocates and even something very close to bullies.

I wasn’t in the courtroom on Monday when the court heard the case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. I didn’t have to be. The transcript was so hot that it almost jumped out of my hands. Usually as I read an argument transcript I make marginal check marks and underline a few passages. This time, when I picked up the transcript for a second reading, I found the margins full of words like “wow” and “oof.”

Here’s an “oof,” preceded by some necessary context.

The question in the case is whether it violates the First Amendment free-speech rights of employees who choose not to join a union to require them to pay a fee in lieu of full dues. As explained and authorized by the 1977 Supreme Court precedent that the court is now about to overturn, the fee is supposed to spare objecting employees from having to support the union’s political activities, while charging them for so-called chargeable expenses, the union’s cost of conducting the collective bargaining that under federal labor law goes to the benefit of all employees, whether they support the union or not. The theory behind what’s known as the agency fee is that labor peace would be threatened by a workplace full of free-riders who enjoy the benefits bargained for and paid for by others.

The challengers, supported by the Trump administration, maintain that this longstanding distinction between chargeable and nonchargeable expenses is unsupportable because everything a public employee union does is inherently political. Thus, they argue, it violates the First Amendment for the objectors to have to support the union in any way, and therefore the precedent, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, must be overruled.

In support of this argument, Justices Alito and Kennedy were obsessively focused on unions as political actors that could, in Justice Alito’s words, “push a city to the brink and perhaps over the brink into bankruptcy.” Their goal was to show that public employee unions are political to their very core.

“Do you think that this case affects the political influence of the unions?” Justice Kennedy asked Mr. Frederick. When the lawyer began his answer with a No, Justice Kennedy went on, with evident sarcasm:

“So you’ve — I can try to find a union newsletter which says don’t worry about the Supreme Court, our political influence will be exactly the same as it was before, if this case comes out against us?”

“That’s not a chargeable expense, Justice Kennedy,” Mr. Frederick began. “We’re talking about —”

Justice Kennedy: “I’m asking you whether or not in your view, if you do not prevail in this case, the unions will have less political influence. Yes or no?”

Mr. Frederick: “Yes, they will have less political influence.”

“Isn’t that the end of this case?” Justice Kennedy said.

That was my “oof.”

A less experienced Supreme Court advocate might have crumpled. But Mr. Frederick is not only a member of the Supreme Court bar’s elite inner circle — a position once shared by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — but also the author of a how-to book, “Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy,” widely regarded as a kind of bible on the subject. In the book, originally published in 2003 and now in a second edition, he describes the “nimbleness in maintaining focus” that’s necessary for “fending off hostile questions that threaten to undermine the case.”

To Justice Kennedy’s “gotcha” question, he replied coolly, “It is not the end of the case, Your Honor, because that is not the question.” To Justice Alito’s dystopian vision of unions pushing cities into bankruptcy, he said, “I would say — and there are briefs on our side that make this very clear — that that particular hypothetical, in fact, is an unfair smearing of the collective bargaining process.” (...)

Trying to understand the unseemly anger radiating from the bench, I came up with two theories. Under one theory, the anti-union justices are simply angry at having to go through this exercise again when they came so close two years ago, with victory snatched from them by Justice Scalia’s death.

In my second theory, these justices are responding to accounts in the press and elsewhere of the intensely political nature of this case, financed by right-wing donors who have spent years looking for an opportunity to cripple organized labor. A brief filed in the case by two Democratic senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, is unusually explicit in recounting how “this case is not only bizarre in its procedural history, it is part of a broader special-interest campaign spanning multiple cases that departs from the ordinary course of litigation in multiple ways.”

This remarkable brief reproduces a fund-raising letter from one group, the Freedom Foundation, which proclaims that thanks to this case and specifically to the arrival of Justice Gorsuch, “The Supreme Court is about to hand us the opportunity of a lifetime.” The letter adds that “we’ve been pointing toward this moment for our entire existence” and asks for financial help “to take advantage of the expected 5-4 decision for freedom.” The two senators — one of whom, Senator Blumenthal, was once a Supreme Court law clerk — tell the justices that “these bold predictions, which can only taint the court’s institutional standing, surely must disconcert any member of the public who cares about the judiciary’s impartiality.

by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

[ed. The fix appears to be in, a death knell for unions.]

Gyptian

[ed. My nephew Tony. Photos: Solve Sundsbo]

The Genesis of Blame

Genesis is a beautiful piece of writing: part poem, part folk tale, it is hard not to fall victim to the idea that here is something pure, which has been dirtied by celibates and misogynists to the subsequent ruin of womankind. As though there were such a thing as an original, Edenic text, in which man and woman were equal, and no one or nothing was to blame. For the first 66 lines of the Bible, this balance seems to exist, then Adam points the finger, says, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree,’ and God curses her into loving him anyway.

The story of the Fall is one of the most enduring stories we have, and it is never fair. You could use it as a template for a certain kind of novel: put a choice in there, tip the balance, make the consequences so disproportionate we doubt our sense of cause and effect, make them suffer, make them into better human beings. Visually, the narrative is brilliantly successful, for being so easy to hold within a single frame. There is nothing static about the way the viewer sees an image of the first couple considering apples. It is a moment of great tension, and they are wearing no clothes. So, to the rules for writing a successful fiction, we might add, pretend that it is not about sex, make the world symbolic, expand the small asymmetries. Here are two human beings who are slightly, but perhaps disastrously, anatomically different. She likes something long, he likes something round – what could possibly go wrong?

The story is a riddle about authority and predestination that has survived the theological palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean.

Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who was, at this stage, an unimportant figure. Although he played a sporadic role in the torment of Job, or in the temptation of Christ in the desert, Satan was not a mythical force before the bestiary of Revelations, and the rebellious Lucifer was some other angel until Milton came along. The idea of a great battle between light and the forces of darkness did not get going until early Christian times, possibly because this small, persecuted sect needed to find a great spiritual enemy against which to pit themselves. The creature in Genesis was just a snake, and though he was crafty, he didn’t seduce, nor did he ‘tempt’ Eve – this last term means ‘to test’ and is used only once in Genesis, when God tests Abraham, requiring the sacrifice of his son Isaac. So Eve did not tempt Adam, either, nor was he seduced by her nakedness. There is, in fact, very little sex in the story. Our readings of it are all subtext, all interpretation, all error. (...)

The story of Adam and Eve (...) is an invitation to childhood curiosity. The question of whether they had belly buttons has occupied both great minds and small. They are not just naked: their story is about nakedness and the idea, puzzling to an infant, that we should hide our bodies from view. Whether they had sex in the garden and, if so, what was it like – these were proper theological concerns. In fact their story is also about curiosity, and it does not end well. Almost before we know what the question is, we have received a catastrophic sequence of answers: shame, exile, suffering, death itself. When, ‘Because I say so’ fails to work, God must, like an Irish mother, resort to the fully tragic: ‘Because all men must die.’ So now you know. No wonder we try to get back to the moment before the question started to form. We try to imagine what it might be like to live without the knowledge that we are naked, and what that nakedness implies.

‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation. As for ‘no shame’, Jerome in his translation into the Vulgate Latin uses ‘et non erubescebant’ implying that Adam and Eve did not blush – and this is sweet, for Jerome. It suggests a moment of virginal self-consciousness, full of possibility. It also, perhaps, reflects Jerome’s skill as a linguist. The original word in Hebrew, bosh, comes from a primitive root ‘to pale’, and is here used reflexively – ‘and they were not ashamed before one another.’ In the rest of the Old Testament, bosh is used in contexts that involve feeling confounded or disgraced, but it is rarely linked to ideas of impurity and abomination (when it comes to sex, the Old Testament is mostly worried about marrying out). Other Latin translations settled on the stronger pudere, a term for shame which conveys bashfulness, as well as a sense of decency. Pudor contains the idea of being caught out, but it also had social and ethical implications. It was, for the Romans, a manly difficulty and not something a slave could experience. A woman’s honour was usually limited to sexual respectability, and this was referred to by the more limited form pudicitia. The concept conveyed by the word pudor suffered a narrowing of meaning over time, becoming more sexualised and specific. By the 17th century the root had yielded ‘pudenda’, meaning ‘genitals’, usually female. This is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck.

The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a term in popular psychology for the unbearable feelings of worthlessness that flood the infant when abandoned or alone. Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom, merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had been found out, but because they realised their fragility and insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal ones. (...)

Augustine’s ideal of voluntary desire is contradictory in a way that is hard to describe. It begs the question of where desire, or more properly arousal, comes from, and how it begins. What would sex be like with no sense of taboo? One answer is that sex without shame sounds a lot like sex, another is that sex without shame would be pretty dull stuff. A third might be that sex moves us through a series of hugely interesting, transgressive propositions to a less shame-bound place; the happier Eden of conjugal bliss.

According to Augustine, our pure affections become disobedient because wounded by the Fall. The uncontrolled or spontaneous nature of desire was both proof of, and the penalty for, Adam and Eve’s sin. The fact that mankind was subject to its vagaries was a sign that this sin did not die with them, but ran through us still, like three big letters through a stick of rock. The problem of concupiscence was also spiritual, but it lapsed repeatedly into the libidinal, partly because of the method of transmission – babies were made bad by the pleasure that made babies. This highly contagious idea became so central to Christian thought that it is worth noting the anxiety about performance and arousal that underlies it. This was not just a Catholic position, or a Catholic problem. Luther and Calvin were both proponents of original sin, and in 1563, the founding articles of the Church of England stated that it was ‘the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man’, and the resulting lust is ‘an infection of nature’.

It is a long way from talk of infection to the benign modern Anglican view that the story of Adam and Eve is about free will and the choices that face us all in our daily lives. There is a long humanist tradition in which Adam and Eve were made better by the Fall, not worse; that this was God’s plan all along. Without Adam there can be no redemption in Christ. For fundamentalist churches, this is not just a metaphor, the story of the Fall has to be as true as that of the Resurrection, and as historical. In 2017 a Gallup poll found that 38 per cent of Americans believe that humans were created, by God, in their present form, within the last ten thousand years. The Catholic Church agrees, a little surprisingly, not because salvation is real, or transubstantiation is by definition real, but because of the doctrine of original sin. According to the Catechism, Genesis 3 ‘uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man’. (...)

Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.

It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal. Instead it was, for centuries, taken literally. It was her fault. Woman was to blame for the fact that mankind must toil, suffer and die. Of course she was. Misogyny was also a moral position, it was seen as natural instead of a disordered point of view. Woman, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall.

To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a child: a toddler who blames his sister, or his shoe, or his own foot, perhaps, because to be less than perfect is unbearable. And, besides, God is very big now.

The whole thing was a trap, a plot, a conundrum about free will. It seems people only believe the story in order to point out how unfair it is. This is the way Adam and Eve played out on Twitter today: ‘God may have wanted to keep Adam and Eve innocent,’ says a woman called Jamie, a Trump-hating conservative from Tennessee. ‘But he still gave them free will which is why Eve ate the shit outta that apple, and her nakedness got Adam to agree.’ Meanwhile in Johannesburg a young man asks, ‘Is it ever considered that it wasn’t the woman’s fault, that it was the serpent, the devil, who coerced them?’ and his online friend Victoria weighs in with: ‘Didn’t he already know they’d eat the fruit anyway?’

The questions raised are familiar for being so ancient, but because they come from random believers, it is easier to see how entangled people become in their own riddles about authority. They don’t have to believe in this God, who is so unfair, but they do anyway. The wound of his omniscience is deeply felt. Adam and Eve were stooges, the story was over before it began, it swallows its own tail. There is some finger-wagging about disobedience, but also a fretfulness about the authority of the text: ‘If God said to Adam and Eve, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” why didn’t they die that day?’ Meanwhile, Nathan, Trump supporter and Mormon, moves towards Milton’s humanism when he says: ‘Has anyone ever had the thought that Adam and Eve would never have had children in the Garden of Eden and Eve figured this out first by her conversation with the “serpent”. And that all of this was part of God’s plan for us. Eve was one of the most brave people ever to have lived.’

by Anne Enright, LRB |  Read more:

Image: detail from Hugo van der Goes, The Fall via:

How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled

Thomas “Bud” Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm, pointing at something. It’s where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 7:15 a.m. on the last day of 2016, bleeding out.

Brown is telling the story now, about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son Jarred, 28, had just picked up Bud’s Taurus PT-145 Millennium Pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near the house in Griffin, Ga., with his best friend, Tyler Haney. Bud figured Jarred had fired at something for the fun of it, like he did sometimes. “I was thinking I’d better go out there and tell him to be careful or something,” Bud, 54, says, his voice trailing off. But what he’d heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a .45-caliber slug through Jarred’s femoral artery. “Oh shit, my leg, my leg,” Jarred yelled, loud enough for his father to hear. Haney, 26, rushed into the house in a panic, pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in the holster, tucked into Jarred’s waistband.

The rest is a blur for Bud. His wife, Sonie, recalls running out of the house in her nightgown. She’d grown close to Jarred since he moved into their home a year or so earlier, taking him to the stables to feed her two horses, cooking for him, and just talking with him. And now Jarred was on the ground, his father kneeling over him, applying pressure to the wound. Sonie wrapped Jarred’s belt around his leg as a tourniquet. It was hard to tell how bad the bleeding was because Jarred was wearing thick waterproof hunting pants. Sonie worked on Jarred, alternating between chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, using the training she’d gotten during a career as a Georgia state parole and probation officer. Haney paced back and forth until Sonie ordered him to call 911. “Jarred was trying to say something, but then the words wouldn’t come out, and he stared,” Sonie says. By the time paramedics got there, she knew her stepson was gone. “I wasn’t going to say anything, because Bud was so torn up, but I knew,” she recalls today. “I can still taste the cigarettes on his breath.”

In the days after his son’s death, Brown couldn’t get his head around how that Taurus pistol went off. He’d spent his career in law enforcement, first as a Spalding County Sheriff’s Department deputy, then as a cop in Jackson, a little town nearby, and finally with a Drug Enforcement Administration task force in Macon. (He retired 10 years ago before having surgery to remove a softball-size cancerous tumor from his esophagus.) For years, Brown was a police shooting instructor. He started teaching Jarred how to shoot with a .22 rifle when he was 7 and drilled safety into his head on hunting trips and at the shooting range.

Sonie also knows guns, down to the .38 revolver she’s licensed to use and carry in her purse for work as a probation officer. Sonie and Bud have 12 firearms in their small brick home—seven rifles and five handguns—and Bud is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. The Browns refused to accept that Jarred had accidentally shot himself. “Jarred knew his way around guns and safety better than I did,” Bud says. “He never would have done anything that would have made that gun go off.”

In a given category, Taurus guns usually cost significantly less than models by more-storied companies. The materials and capabilities are generally comparable; the price differences reflect differences in manufacturing costs and the value of the brands. The Taurus 85 is the top-selling revolver in the U.S., according to Gun Genius.

Those doubts were gnawing at Haney, too. He watched Jarred come out of the house with the Taurus safely in a holster and swears his best friend didn’t touch the pistol when it fired. “I knew there was something wrong with that gun,” Haney says. “So I Googled it.” He found a curious announcement on Taurus’s website: The company was offering to fix or replace nine of its handguns. The pistol that killed his friend was on the list.

Haney kept Googling. He learned that the repair-or-replace offer was the result of the 2016 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by Chris Carter, a deputy in the Scott County, Iowa, sheriff’s department, against Brazilian gunmaker Forjas Taurus SA and two of its Florida-based units. In July 2013, Carter’s suit claimed, he was running down a suspected drug dealer when his Taurus PT-140 Millennium Pro pistol fell out of the holster at his hip, hit the ground, and fired, sending a slug into a nearby car. The suit further asserted that because of defects of design and manufacturing, nine different models of Taurus handguns can fire unintentionally when bumped or dropped or when the safety is on and the trigger is pulled. Taurus agreed to repair or buy back, for as much as $200, any of those models owned by people in the U.S. and its territories—an estimated 955,796 guns, according to the settlement. (The cut-off date for the offer was Feb. 6.) The company denied any negligence, wrongdoing, or defects in its firearms and also denied that its offer to fix its guns was a recall.

Haney sat Jarred’s dad and stepmother down in their living room to show them what he’d found. Sonie took down the name and number of Todd Wheeles, a state trooper turned lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., who’s handled 16 lawsuits against Taurus, including the class action in Iowa.

Two days later, Wheeles and another Birmingham lawyer, David Selby, were sitting at the Browns’ kitchen table. Wheeles showed them how the Taurus gun that killed Jarred would fire, even with the safety on. “In about 10 seconds he showed us three different ways that gun could go off on its own,” Sonie says.

Bud couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d never heard of any problem with Taurus guns. He never saw a notice at the pawnshop where he paid $250 for the gun that killed Jarred or at Walmart when he bought his ammunition. Before the kitchen table meeting was over, the Browns had hired Wheeles and Selby to sue Taurus for negligence and manufacturing defects. “I couldn’t believe that no one had warned us that those guns were bad,” Bud says. “Why didn’t Taurus warn us? Why did the government let them sell those guns?”

The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.

To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.

For Brown, none of that explains why he hadn’t heard that Taurus had sold bad guns. It’s one thing if the government didn’t do anything, but he reads every issue of American Rifleman, the NRA’s official magazine, and he never saw a warning about Taurus guns. “Why didn’t the NRA warn us? I guess there’s too much money and politics going into the NRA, so they had reason not to tell us,” he says.

by Michael Smith and Polly Mosendz, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Joanna McClure

Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Inventor Accused of Swindling $5 Billion of Cryptocurrency

Image via:

Job Interview 2018

[ed. Ok, I know Millennials are easy targets and unfortunate scapegoats for just about everything that's screwed up these days (... when actually it's their parents and Trump voters who are the real problem), but this cracks me up anyway. Great acting!]

Cipriani on Anitdepressants

The big news in psychiatry this month is Cipriani et al’s Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. It purports to be the last word in the “do antidepressants work?” question, and a first (or at least early) word in the under-asked “which antidepressants are best?” question.

This study is very big, very sophisticated, and must have taken a very impressive amount of work. It meta-analyzes virtually every RCT of antidepressants ever done – 522 in all – then throws every statistical trick in the book at them to try to glob together into a coherent account of how antidepressants work. It includes Andrea Cipriani, one of the most famous research psychiatrists in the world – and John Ioannidis, one of the most famous statisticians. It’s been covered in news sources around the world: my favorite headline is Newsweek’s unsubtle Antidepressants Do Work And Many More People Should Take Them, but honorable mention to Reuters’ Study Seeks To End Antidepressant Debate: The Drugs Do Work.

Based on the whole “we’ve definitely proven antidepressants work” vibe in coverage, you would think that they’d directly contradicted Irving Kirsch’s claim that antidepressants aren’t very effective. I’ve mentioned my disagreements with Kirsch before, but it would be nice to have a definitive refutation of his work. This study isn’t really it. Both Kirsch and Cipriani agree that antidepressants have statistical significance – they’re not literally doing nothing. The main debate was whether they were good enough to be worth it. Kirsch argues they aren’t, using a statistic called “effect size”. Cipriani uses a different statistic called “odds ratio” that is hard to immediately compare.

[EDIT: Commenters point out that once you convert Cipriani’s odds ratios to effect sizes, the two studies are pretty much the same – in fact, Cipriani’s estimates are (slightly) lower. That is, “the study proving antidepressants work” presents a worse picture of antidepressants than “the study proving antidepressants don’t work”. If I had realized this earlier, this would have been the lede for this article. This makes all the media coverage of this study completely insane and means we’re doing science based entirely on how people choose to sum up their results. Strongly recommend this Neuroskeptic article on the topic. This is very important and makes the rest of this article somewhat trivial in comparison.]

Kirsch made a big deal of trying to get all the evidence, not just the for-public-consumption pharma-approved data. Cipriani also made such an effort, but I’m not sure how comparable the two are. Kirsch focused on FDA trials of six drugs. Cipriani took every trial ever published – FDA, academia, industry, whatever- of twenty-one drugs. Kirsch focused on using the Freedom Of Information Act to obtain non-public data from various failed trials. Cipriani says he looked pretty hard for unpublished data, but he might not have gone so far as to harass government agencies. Did he manage to find as many covered-up studies as Kirsch did? Unclear.

How confident should we be in the conclusion? These are very good researchers and their methodology is unimpeachable. But a lot of the 522 studies they cite are, well, kind of crap. The researchers acknowledge this and have constructed some kind of incredibly sophisticated model that inputs the chance of bias in each study and weights everything and simulates all sorts of assumptions to make sure they don’t change the conclusions too much. But we are basically being given a giant edifice of suspected-crap fed through super-powered statistical machinery meant to be able to certify whether or not it’s safe.

Of particular concern, 78% of the studies they cite are sponsored by pharmaceutical industries. The researchers run this through their super-powered statistical machinery and determine that this made no difference – in fact, if you look in the supplement, the size of the effect was literally zero:

In our analyses, funding by industry was not associated with substantial differences in terms of response or dropout rates. However, non-industry funded trials were few and many trials did not report or disclose any funding.

This is surprising, since other papers (which the researchers dutifully cite) find that pharma-sponsored trials are about five times more likely to get positive results than non-sponsored ones (though see this comment). Cipriani’s excuse is that there weren’t enough non-industry trials to really get a good feel for the differences, and that a lot of the trials marked “non-industry” were probably secretly by industry anyway (more on this later). Fair enough, but if we can’t believe their “sponsorship makes zero difference to outcome” result, then the whole thing starts seeming kind of questionable.

I don’t want to come on too strong here. Science is never supposed to have to wait for some impossible perfectly-unbiased investigator. It’s supposed to accept that everyone will have an agenda, but strive through methodological rigor, transparency, and open debate to transcend those agendas and create studies everyone can believe. On the other hand, we’re really not very good at that yet, and nobody ever went broke overestimating the deceptiveness of pharmaceutical companies.

And there was one other kind of bias that did show up, hard. When a drug was new and exciting, it tended to do better in studies. When it was old and boring, it tended to do worse. You could argue this is a placebo effect on the patients, but I’m betting it’s a sign that people were able to bias the studies to fit their expected results (excited high-tech thing is better) in ways we’re otherwise not catching.

All of this will go double as we start looking at the next part, the ranking of different antidepressants.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Cipriani et al.

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We All Must Live With Mitch McConnell’s Proudest Moment

Remember when the Senate confirmed Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, the veteran federal appeals court judge, to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly two years ago this month? It was a brilliant tactical move by Mr. Obama — picking a moderate, widely respected jurist who had won the highest praise from top Republicans, and giving the court a majority of Democratic-appointed justices for the first time in nearly half a century.

Oh, right. That’s not what happened.

Let’s pause to recall once again what did happen: Justice Scalia’s body wasn’t even in the ground before Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said he would refuse to consider any nominee President Obama might put forward. The reason, he claimed, was the importance of letting Americans “have a voice in the selection” by voting in the presidential election, which at the time was nine months off. It was his coded way of saying he intended to preserve the court’s Republican-appointed majority at any cost.

Against long odds, Mr. McConnell won. Now parked for life in the seat where Judge Garland should be sitting is the ultraconservative Neil Gorsuch, who we’re supposed to believe represents the “voice” of a citizenry that preferred Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly three million votes.

That enormously consequential swap is already having concrete effects on American society, and very likely will determine the outcome of a case the justices heard on Monday — a challenge to the ability of public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for expenses related to collective bargaining, such as negotiations over wages, hours and working conditions. The plaintiff says his First Amendment rights are violated by being forced to pay these so-called fair-share fees to a union whose political positions he disagrees with.

Legally, this should be an easy win for the unions. The Supreme Court upheld fair-share fees four decades ago in a unanimous ruling it has reaffirmed repeatedly, and on which more than 20 states have relied in negotiating thousands of contracts covering millions of public employees, including firefighters, teachers and police officers. The logic is simple: When the government is an employer, it has more control over its employees’ speech than over that of regular citizens. Any burden the fees impose on employees’ First Amendment rights is justified by the need to eliminate free riders — workers who enjoy union benefits without having to pay for them, which can deplete the unions’ resources in states where they are legally required to represent all workers, members and nonmembers alike. Anti-union advocates dismiss the free-rider concern, but it’s very real: In states that have ended the fees, more than one-third of public-school teachers are free riders.

None of this seems to register with Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who has made no secret of his dislike for that 1977 opinion, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, and has been searching for the votes to overturn it for at least six years, writing opinions intended to set up its demise. Justice Alito probably assumed he had victory in hand in 2016, when the court considered the same question in a case brought by California public-school teachers against their union. But when Justice Scalia, whose remarks during oral arguments strongly suggested he would provide the fifth vote against the union, died a few weeks later, the case deadlocked.

As it turned out, Justice Scalia’s death only briefly slowed the march of corporate interests that have sought for years to protect their huge profits and kill off the last remnants of organized labor in America. They and the right-wing groups that support them quickly regrouped around another plaintiff, a child-support specialist from Illinois named Mark Janus, who makes the same argument the California teachers did: Activities by public-sector unions are inherently political, so it’s impossible to separate the costs of collective bargaining from those of political lobbying. No matter what benefits the unions negotiate on his behalf, he shouldn’t have to pay a dime. Mr. Janus lost decisively in the lower federal courts for the same reason the teachers did: the Supreme Court’s precedent in the Abood case.

That precedent should guide the justices here, too. Beyond the court’s core principle of stare decisis, which keeps it from overturning its own prior decisions except in extraordinary circumstances, the Abood decision reasonably balanced workers’ First Amendment rights against the government’s interest in labor peace. Two notable conservative scholars go further, arguing in a supporting brief to the court that the First Amendment does not apply at all in this case. The government is allowed to compel subsidies of others’ speech all the time without violating the Constitution, they point out, such as by collecting and spending taxes.

In Monday’s arguments, several of the conservative justices seemed immune to such reasoning. Justice Alito referred to fair-share fees as “compelled speech” that infringes on a worker’s “dignity and conscience.”

But the true goal of this litigation strategy has never been to protect workers’ speech rights; it is, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly said, “to do away with unions,” which not only make life a little harder for the world’s plutocrats, but have also become a potent organizing tool in Democratic politics. One recent paper by political scientists found Democrats’ share of the presidential vote fell 3.5 percentage points in states that eliminated fair-share fees. In Wisconsin, public-sector union membership fell by half after the state’s newly Republican leadership eliminated the fees in 2011.

Justice Gorsuch was silent on Monday, but it’s hard to imagine he will vote with the unions. Since joining the court last April, Justice Gorsuch has voted nearly all of the time with the other most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. Had the seat he occupies been filled by Merrick Garland, it’s unlikely the case would have been brought at all.

Whatever the justices decide in Mr. Janus’s case, the drama that preceded it is another reminder of the importance of every Supreme Court appointment, and of the degree to which Mr. McConnell may have altered the course of history with his cynical ploy. After all, President Trump will be in power until 2025 at the latest, but Justice Gorsuch could easily be issuing opinions four decades from now.

by Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more: