Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
The Heinz Dilemma Might Reveal That Morality Is Meaningless
BY Esther Inglis-Arkell
io9
29 April 2014
There's a famous moral thought experiment, the Heinz Dilemma, that is supposed to tell us about a person's moral development. What it might tell us is that moral development doesn't matter.
Lawrence Kohlberg was interested in one of the stickier areas of the human mind - morality. As a psychologist, he wanted to know how morality developed over time. To do this he made up a now-famous thought experiment and posed it to children, young adults, and adults.
The Heinz Dilemma
Heinz's wife is dying. There is a medicine that can cure her, but it costs $2000, and Heinz only has $1000. That covers the costs of the pharmacist who makes the medicine, but the pharmacist insists that he discovered the cure, and will charge what he wants for it. Should Heinz steal the medicine, or shouldn't he?
Kohlberg found that people will give different answers, but their reasons for giving these answers are different at different stages.
Only very young children are at stage one or stage two. Stage one is all about obedience. Heinz shouldn't steal because it's against the law or Heinz should steal the medicine because the pharmacist shouldn't be allowed to set a higher price than the money it takes to make the medicine. Stage two involves immediate consequences, like Heinz being happier that is wife is alive, or unhappy because he's in prison for theft.
When people grow into adolescence and early adulthood, they think about larger groups, rather than individual players. Stage three involves thinking about relationships, so Heinz either should steal the medicine to be a good husband to his wife, or he shouldn't because he should not be a criminal. Stage four is more about maintain social order. Heinz should steal because medicine shouldn't be kept from the dying, or not because it would break the law, which keeps society together.
Finally we have full-blown adults thinking about principles, not just social groups. People in stage five are concerned with human rights, either the right to life-saving medicine or the right to determine what happens to one's intellectual property. And stage six is universal ethics. Heinz is right to steal because human life is more important than money. Heinz is wrong because his wife's life is no more important than anyone else who needs the medicine.
The Real Problem
Kohlberg's experiment has drawn criticism, both for the thought experiment itself and the methods he used to collect information. There are certainly problems like this in real life, but Heinz's dilemma feels forced. It's hard not to come up with alternate solutions that Heinz or the pharmacist might have tried. Then again, Kohlberg can be forgiven for not wanting to explain complicated and tragic real-world economics to four-year-olds. Kohlberg's early experiment involved only male children. And when Kohlberg first did the experiment, he surveyed children at different ages, and came up with the idea of moral stages. He didn't ask the same children to think about the problem over a number years, and see whether they progressed from one stage to another.
So much with the methods. But if this finding is true, it seems there are bigger problems with morality. What this experiment seems to say is people can take the same situation, and argue the same principles - social roles, the importance of interpersonal relationships, the likelihood of punishment, and pure humanitarian principles - and come to exactly opposite moral conclusions. And they do this for their whole lives. Sure, it's interesting to see that principles evolve over time, but it's more interesting to see that principles - at least the ones confined solely to the human mind - are irrelevant. There is no method or guiding idea that could possibly allow any group of humanity to come to a consensus. Morality, then, is basically chaos. We can start from the same place, and follow the same principles, and end at diametrically opposite ends of a problem, and there's no way to resolve that.
io9
29 April 2014
There's a famous moral thought experiment, the Heinz Dilemma, that is supposed to tell us about a person's moral development. What it might tell us is that moral development doesn't matter.
Lawrence Kohlberg was interested in one of the stickier areas of the human mind - morality. As a psychologist, he wanted to know how morality developed over time. To do this he made up a now-famous thought experiment and posed it to children, young adults, and adults.
The Heinz Dilemma
Heinz's wife is dying. There is a medicine that can cure her, but it costs $2000, and Heinz only has $1000. That covers the costs of the pharmacist who makes the medicine, but the pharmacist insists that he discovered the cure, and will charge what he wants for it. Should Heinz steal the medicine, or shouldn't he?
Kohlberg found that people will give different answers, but their reasons for giving these answers are different at different stages.
Only very young children are at stage one or stage two. Stage one is all about obedience. Heinz shouldn't steal because it's against the law or Heinz should steal the medicine because the pharmacist shouldn't be allowed to set a higher price than the money it takes to make the medicine. Stage two involves immediate consequences, like Heinz being happier that is wife is alive, or unhappy because he's in prison for theft.
When people grow into adolescence and early adulthood, they think about larger groups, rather than individual players. Stage three involves thinking about relationships, so Heinz either should steal the medicine to be a good husband to his wife, or he shouldn't because he should not be a criminal. Stage four is more about maintain social order. Heinz should steal because medicine shouldn't be kept from the dying, or not because it would break the law, which keeps society together.
Finally we have full-blown adults thinking about principles, not just social groups. People in stage five are concerned with human rights, either the right to life-saving medicine or the right to determine what happens to one's intellectual property. And stage six is universal ethics. Heinz is right to steal because human life is more important than money. Heinz is wrong because his wife's life is no more important than anyone else who needs the medicine.
The Real Problem
Kohlberg's experiment has drawn criticism, both for the thought experiment itself and the methods he used to collect information. There are certainly problems like this in real life, but Heinz's dilemma feels forced. It's hard not to come up with alternate solutions that Heinz or the pharmacist might have tried. Then again, Kohlberg can be forgiven for not wanting to explain complicated and tragic real-world economics to four-year-olds. Kohlberg's early experiment involved only male children. And when Kohlberg first did the experiment, he surveyed children at different ages, and came up with the idea of moral stages. He didn't ask the same children to think about the problem over a number years, and see whether they progressed from one stage to another.
So much with the methods. But if this finding is true, it seems there are bigger problems with morality. What this experiment seems to say is people can take the same situation, and argue the same principles - social roles, the importance of interpersonal relationships, the likelihood of punishment, and pure humanitarian principles - and come to exactly opposite moral conclusions. And they do this for their whole lives. Sure, it's interesting to see that principles evolve over time, but it's more interesting to see that principles - at least the ones confined solely to the human mind - are irrelevant. There is no method or guiding idea that could possibly allow any group of humanity to come to a consensus. Morality, then, is basically chaos. We can start from the same place, and follow the same principles, and end at diametrically opposite ends of a problem, and there's no way to resolve that.
Health Care Politics in One Sentence
Health Care Politics In One Sentence
by Paul Krugman
The politics of Obamacare are clearly starting to shift. It’s not that the public is coming to love it — not yet, anyway. But it’s less and less of a bogeyman, with polls suggesting a majority of the public against flat-out repeal. So there’s increasing pressure on Republicans to lay out an alternative — and continuing surprise about their inability to articulate one.
But this is an example of why it sometimes helps, even in straight political reporting, to understand how policy works. Here’s the essential fact about health care policy, which in turn fundamentally shapes health care politics:
Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to.
Once again, for those who missed it: if you want to cover people with preexisting conditions, you must have community rating. If you want to have community rating without a death spiral — that is, if you want to keep an acceptable risk pool — you have to have an individual mandate. If you want to have an individual mandate, you have to have subsidies for lower-income Americans. And that’s Obamacare: a three-legged stool, with all three legs essential.
Republicans can’t offer an alternative because there isn’t one (aside, that is, from single-payer). Their plan, such as it was, was to wait for the plan to implode, so they would never be put on the spot; since that isn’t happening, Plan B is to bob and weave and avoid the question until the midterms. That’s all there is.
by Paul Krugman
The politics of Obamacare are clearly starting to shift. It’s not that the public is coming to love it — not yet, anyway. But it’s less and less of a bogeyman, with polls suggesting a majority of the public against flat-out repeal. So there’s increasing pressure on Republicans to lay out an alternative — and continuing surprise about their inability to articulate one.
But this is an example of why it sometimes helps, even in straight political reporting, to understand how policy works. Here’s the essential fact about health care policy, which in turn fundamentally shapes health care politics:
Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to.
Once again, for those who missed it: if you want to cover people with preexisting conditions, you must have community rating. If you want to have community rating without a death spiral — that is, if you want to keep an acceptable risk pool — you have to have an individual mandate. If you want to have an individual mandate, you have to have subsidies for lower-income Americans. And that’s Obamacare: a three-legged stool, with all three legs essential.
Republicans can’t offer an alternative because there isn’t one (aside, that is, from single-payer). Their plan, such as it was, was to wait for the plan to implode, so they would never be put on the spot; since that isn’t happening, Plan B is to bob and weave and avoid the question until the midterms. That’s all there is.
Elizabeth Warren - A Fighting Chance
Here we have a bona fide liberal telling her story, and the story is bracing. There is speculation about her running against Hillary for the Democratic nomination. I don't think that would be a good idea. I don't see two women on the ticket either. If a man were to be nominated Warren might be a good VP choice.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Jim Murray - His Autobiography
Jim Murray is my favorite sportswriter of all time. It's too bad that he lived in LA for in growing up I seldom got to read his work. It is only now in retrospect that I am reading his best writing.
His autobiography, published in 1993, is a real treat. Murray is funny, irreverant, and simply a great writer. In this book I get to read about the people and sports heroes of my time, the 50's and 60's. It ain't the same today.
Murray is such an entertaining writer. I don't know that I would trust him to tell what is going on in the Ukraine, but he would have some things to say about the owner of the LA Clippers.
The book reads partly like a series of name droppings. Murray covered Hollywood for TIME magazine before accidently getting into sports writing as he became part of the founding of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, once the best sports periodical. He has hilarious memories of Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and Marlon Brando. Monroe was so vulnerable, Bogart was a fake toughie, Brando was an inveterate prankster who truely traveled to the beat of his own drummer.
Murray defends Pete Rose. Sorry, I think Pete Rose is a jerk and I have no use for him. Murray says it was never definitely proved that Rose bet on baseball and that the Commisioiner had a vendetta against him. Maybe so: I don't know. But if so, why did Rose agree to his ban from baseball?
Jim Murray likes golf. I do not like golf. Love of the little white ball completely eludes me. Hit that little white ball and you never know where it might go. Murray is right in calling attention to the great individuality of the game. I do like Murray's account of the famous golfers of his time that he admired. There's the tenacity of Ben Hogan: so serious sounding. Hogan was before my time. He preceded Palmer, who made the game popular in the television age. I didn't realize that Palmer was so unweildly . Murray makes him sound like a discombulated person. Nicklaus was the greatest of Murray's time. Sam Snead, a Southerner and poor putter, sounds like he was a lot of fun. I wonder what Murray would have thought of Tiger Woods.
In his basketball chapter Murray says Jerry West was as good as Michael Jordan. I don't think so. He pays proper respect to Bill Russell, the best basketball player of all time in my opinion. He talks about Jack Kent Cooke purchasing the LA Lakers.
About Jackie Robinson: The fierciest competitor he ever saw and the best all-around athlete, better at track, football, & basketball than football. From Pasadena, not from a cotton patch in Alabama.
His autobiography, published in 1993, is a real treat. Murray is funny, irreverant, and simply a great writer. In this book I get to read about the people and sports heroes of my time, the 50's and 60's. It ain't the same today.
Murray is such an entertaining writer. I don't know that I would trust him to tell what is going on in the Ukraine, but he would have some things to say about the owner of the LA Clippers.
The book reads partly like a series of name droppings. Murray covered Hollywood for TIME magazine before accidently getting into sports writing as he became part of the founding of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, once the best sports periodical. He has hilarious memories of Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and Marlon Brando. Monroe was so vulnerable, Bogart was a fake toughie, Brando was an inveterate prankster who truely traveled to the beat of his own drummer.
Murray defends Pete Rose. Sorry, I think Pete Rose is a jerk and I have no use for him. Murray says it was never definitely proved that Rose bet on baseball and that the Commisioiner had a vendetta against him. Maybe so: I don't know. But if so, why did Rose agree to his ban from baseball?
Jim Murray likes golf. I do not like golf. Love of the little white ball completely eludes me. Hit that little white ball and you never know where it might go. Murray is right in calling attention to the great individuality of the game. I do like Murray's account of the famous golfers of his time that he admired. There's the tenacity of Ben Hogan: so serious sounding. Hogan was before my time. He preceded Palmer, who made the game popular in the television age. I didn't realize that Palmer was so unweildly . Murray makes him sound like a discombulated person. Nicklaus was the greatest of Murray's time. Sam Snead, a Southerner and poor putter, sounds like he was a lot of fun. I wonder what Murray would have thought of Tiger Woods.
In his basketball chapter Murray says Jerry West was as good as Michael Jordan. I don't think so. He pays proper respect to Bill Russell, the best basketball player of all time in my opinion. He talks about Jack Kent Cooke purchasing the LA Lakers.
About Jackie Robinson: The fierciest competitor he ever saw and the best all-around athlete, better at track, football, & basketball than football. From Pasadena, not from a cotton patch in Alabama.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Elizabeth Warren Review
‘A Fighting Chance,’ by Elizabeth Warren
By Maura Casey, E-mail the writer
Maura Casey is a former editorial writer for the New York Times.
One of the most moving scenes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s absorbing book “A Fighting Chance” occurs in its first 10 pages. After a heart attack, her father lost his job selling carpets in Oklahoma City and was demoted to a commission-only job selling lawn mowers. It did not go well. The station wagon was repossessed; the family, Warren implies, teetered on the verge of losing its home.
(Metropolitan Books) - ’A Fighting Chance’ by Elizabeth Warren. (Metropolitan. 365 pp. $28)
With the release of her memoir, political insiders are wondering, will Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) run for president? If she does, Warren poses the biggest threat to expected Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. One sweltering day, 12-year-old Elizabeth comes upon her 50-year-old mother, sobbing and trying to squeeze into her best dress, scared but determined to apply for a job answering phones at Sears. When she finally gets it on, she turns to her daughter and says, “How do I look? Is it too tight?” Of course it is. But Warren does the right thing. “I stood there, as tall as she was. I looked her right in the eye, and said: ‘You look great. Really,’ ” Warren writes, recalling it as the moment when “I wasn’t a little girl anymore.”
It may have been the last time Warren pulled her punches. That’s certainly the case in this book, which mostly details her decades struggling against financial institutions that, in her view, are bent on picking every last penny from our pockets even if they destroy the country in the process — along with too many lapdog lawmakers who abet their actions. As such, it is a political narrative first and an autobiography second. Yes, it tells how a self-described daughter of a “maintenance man” attended college on a debate scholarship, went to law school and, one day while she was home caring for her two young children, received an unexpected call from Rutgers University asking her to teach a law course — immediately. The judge scheduled to teach never showed up; were his identity revealed, he might be the most hated man on Wall Street.
Such was the inauspicious beginning of a career that led to path-breaking research on bankruptcy while teaching law at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard; Warren’s evolution as a financial watchdog for ordinary Americans, too many of whom were the victims of predatory banking practices; her role as the brains behind the creation of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and, finally, her improbable election to the Senate from Massachusetts in 2012. The odds were against Warren in that hard-fought race not just because of incumbent senator Scott Brown’s popularity, but because, as Rebecca Traister of the New York Times pointed out, the Bay State is not kind to women, having hanged more of them as witches during the 1600s (14) than it has sent to Congress in all the years since (five, including Warren).
This book demonstrates Warren’s stubbornness and her populism, but what it doesn’t reveal are her presidential ambitions, if any. You can read anything you want into sentences such as “There are many more fights ahead, and more work to be done — and I worry that we’re running out of time.” But nothing is explicit.
Her bluntness has made Warren a populist heroine and roused the ire of lobbyists for the too-big-to-fail banks that in 2008 drove the nation to its worst economic downturn in nearly 80 years — the same institutions that Warren attacks with verbal icepicks through most of these pages. She’s mad as hell, and many readers will be, too, by the time they finish this book. Warren explains how the financial crisis was preceded by congressional and court decisions that shredded public protection from high interest rates and predatory banking practices during the 1980s and ’90s. “Gradually [the bankers’] strategy emerged,” she writes. “Target families who were already in a little trouble, lend them more money, get them entangled in high fees and astronomical interest rates, then block the doors to the bankruptcy exit if they really get in over their heads.”
Ever the professor, she explains bankruptcy law (one reason the book has more than 50 pages of references), which would slow down the narrative considerably but for the stories that Warren and her colleagues gathered while doing research on bankruptcy. There’s Flora, a woman in her 80s, who lost her home after signing a new mortgage that a lender assured would lower her payments. The interest rate soared, swallowing her entire Social Security check; her fallback plan was to live in her car. There is Jason, who bought a car and carefully negotiated affordable payments, only to panic a few days later after the dealer told him that, sorry, the quoted interest rate was only preliminary, and the true monthly payments were $105 more. And there was nothing he could do about it.
But the very starkness with which Warren presents her case makes it seem almost a caricature, making me wonder whether there is a banker left in America who isn’t cackling happily while tying widows and orphans to railroad tracks. Meanwhile, in the autobiographical portions of the book, Warren falls in love and remarries; the kids grow up, get married, and grandchildren arrive; she mourns her beloved parents and Aunt Bee, not to mention her faithful dog, Otis, who died five days before Election Day.
Yet the banks together compose the major character in the book, and they are the root of all evil. Yes, there are some elected heroes here, all Democrats, among them the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and former congressman Barney Frank (Mass.) — and a few unelected and unsung heroes, too, such as Holly Petraeus, the wife of a four-star general, who documented and fought against lenders’ relentless exploitation of vulnerable military families.
There are victories. Warren chaired an oversight commission that publicized each month how the bank bailout money was being spent, exposing the fat bonuses bankers were taking, courtesy of taxpayers. She documented the jobs the auto industry bailout saved. She and the public wait in vain for investigations of the financial sector. Foreclosures mount; the government shrugs and looks the other way.
What keeps the reader from despair is the too-few moments of vulnerability Warren sprinkles throughout the book. On the verge of a divorce, she questions her ability to be a good mother while holding down her job. She notices that most of the time she is the only woman in the room during high-level meetings. While running for the Senate, she is careful to introduce herself to young girls by leaning down and saying softly, “I’m Elizabeth and I’m running for Senate, because that’s what girls do.”
Ultimately, the book’s message is that one person can make a difference, but change is painfully slow, uneven and the work of a lifetime. After reading this book, it is comforting to know that Elizabeth Warren, with her passion, anger and bluntness, will not be silenced.
Maura Casey is a former editorial writer for the New York Times.
By Maura Casey, E-mail the writer
Maura Casey is a former editorial writer for the New York Times.
One of the most moving scenes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s absorbing book “A Fighting Chance” occurs in its first 10 pages. After a heart attack, her father lost his job selling carpets in Oklahoma City and was demoted to a commission-only job selling lawn mowers. It did not go well. The station wagon was repossessed; the family, Warren implies, teetered on the verge of losing its home.
(Metropolitan Books) - ’A Fighting Chance’ by Elizabeth Warren. (Metropolitan. 365 pp. $28)
With the release of her memoir, political insiders are wondering, will Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) run for president? If she does, Warren poses the biggest threat to expected Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. One sweltering day, 12-year-old Elizabeth comes upon her 50-year-old mother, sobbing and trying to squeeze into her best dress, scared but determined to apply for a job answering phones at Sears. When she finally gets it on, she turns to her daughter and says, “How do I look? Is it too tight?” Of course it is. But Warren does the right thing. “I stood there, as tall as she was. I looked her right in the eye, and said: ‘You look great. Really,’ ” Warren writes, recalling it as the moment when “I wasn’t a little girl anymore.”
It may have been the last time Warren pulled her punches. That’s certainly the case in this book, which mostly details her decades struggling against financial institutions that, in her view, are bent on picking every last penny from our pockets even if they destroy the country in the process — along with too many lapdog lawmakers who abet their actions. As such, it is a political narrative first and an autobiography second. Yes, it tells how a self-described daughter of a “maintenance man” attended college on a debate scholarship, went to law school and, one day while she was home caring for her two young children, received an unexpected call from Rutgers University asking her to teach a law course — immediately. The judge scheduled to teach never showed up; were his identity revealed, he might be the most hated man on Wall Street.
Such was the inauspicious beginning of a career that led to path-breaking research on bankruptcy while teaching law at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard; Warren’s evolution as a financial watchdog for ordinary Americans, too many of whom were the victims of predatory banking practices; her role as the brains behind the creation of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and, finally, her improbable election to the Senate from Massachusetts in 2012. The odds were against Warren in that hard-fought race not just because of incumbent senator Scott Brown’s popularity, but because, as Rebecca Traister of the New York Times pointed out, the Bay State is not kind to women, having hanged more of them as witches during the 1600s (14) than it has sent to Congress in all the years since (five, including Warren).
This book demonstrates Warren’s stubbornness and her populism, but what it doesn’t reveal are her presidential ambitions, if any. You can read anything you want into sentences such as “There are many more fights ahead, and more work to be done — and I worry that we’re running out of time.” But nothing is explicit.
Her bluntness has made Warren a populist heroine and roused the ire of lobbyists for the too-big-to-fail banks that in 2008 drove the nation to its worst economic downturn in nearly 80 years — the same institutions that Warren attacks with verbal icepicks through most of these pages. She’s mad as hell, and many readers will be, too, by the time they finish this book. Warren explains how the financial crisis was preceded by congressional and court decisions that shredded public protection from high interest rates and predatory banking practices during the 1980s and ’90s. “Gradually [the bankers’] strategy emerged,” she writes. “Target families who were already in a little trouble, lend them more money, get them entangled in high fees and astronomical interest rates, then block the doors to the bankruptcy exit if they really get in over their heads.”
Ever the professor, she explains bankruptcy law (one reason the book has more than 50 pages of references), which would slow down the narrative considerably but for the stories that Warren and her colleagues gathered while doing research on bankruptcy. There’s Flora, a woman in her 80s, who lost her home after signing a new mortgage that a lender assured would lower her payments. The interest rate soared, swallowing her entire Social Security check; her fallback plan was to live in her car. There is Jason, who bought a car and carefully negotiated affordable payments, only to panic a few days later after the dealer told him that, sorry, the quoted interest rate was only preliminary, and the true monthly payments were $105 more. And there was nothing he could do about it.
But the very starkness with which Warren presents her case makes it seem almost a caricature, making me wonder whether there is a banker left in America who isn’t cackling happily while tying widows and orphans to railroad tracks. Meanwhile, in the autobiographical portions of the book, Warren falls in love and remarries; the kids grow up, get married, and grandchildren arrive; she mourns her beloved parents and Aunt Bee, not to mention her faithful dog, Otis, who died five days before Election Day.
Yet the banks together compose the major character in the book, and they are the root of all evil. Yes, there are some elected heroes here, all Democrats, among them the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and former congressman Barney Frank (Mass.) — and a few unelected and unsung heroes, too, such as Holly Petraeus, the wife of a four-star general, who documented and fought against lenders’ relentless exploitation of vulnerable military families.
There are victories. Warren chaired an oversight commission that publicized each month how the bank bailout money was being spent, exposing the fat bonuses bankers were taking, courtesy of taxpayers. She documented the jobs the auto industry bailout saved. She and the public wait in vain for investigations of the financial sector. Foreclosures mount; the government shrugs and looks the other way.
What keeps the reader from despair is the too-few moments of vulnerability Warren sprinkles throughout the book. On the verge of a divorce, she questions her ability to be a good mother while holding down her job. She notices that most of the time she is the only woman in the room during high-level meetings. While running for the Senate, she is careful to introduce herself to young girls by leaning down and saying softly, “I’m Elizabeth and I’m running for Senate, because that’s what girls do.”
Ultimately, the book’s message is that one person can make a difference, but change is painfully slow, uneven and the work of a lifetime. After reading this book, it is comforting to know that Elizabeth Warren, with her passion, anger and bluntness, will not be silenced.
Maura Casey is a former editorial writer for the New York Times.
Warren vs. Clinton
by Dan Balz, Saturday, April 26, 10:14 AME-mail the writer
It’s always been said that you can’t tell a book by its cover. But sometimes book titles reveal something about authors. That’s certainly the case for two notable Democrats, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Warren’s book, published this past week, is called “A Fighting Chance.” Clinton’s book, a memoir of her four years as secretary of state, is due out in June under the title “Hard Choices.” Warren’s title is aspirational, hinting at the world as it might be, a place where power would be more equitably distributed. Clinton’s title conveys a world in which the ideal and the real clash constantly and in which progress can be maddeningly slow.
Clinton is widely assumed to be running for president in 2016; Warren spent the week on her book tour saying she is not. But as two of the Democratic Party’s brightest stars, they are destined to play central roles in shaping the party’s direction after the Obama presidency ends. Whether they end up as rivals for the Democratic nomination is beside the point.
Warren has become a hero to many Democrats because she speaks forthrightly about the powerful and the powerless. She says she learned about how the world works from her research into the root causes of personal bankruptcy. She decries the mismatch between big corporations — along with their armies of lobbyists in Washington — and an economically squeezed middle class to which politicians pay lip service but do not always deliver real service.
Her deeply personal book speaks directly to the widespread feeling of so many Americans — across party lines — that the deck is stacked against them. The senator from Massachusetts shares that worldview and writes about it in terms of her own life experiences. She grew up in a struggling family in Oklahoma. Her father lost his job after having a heart attack, and her mother took a minimum-wage job to help provide for the family.
Her parents, Warren says, never expected her to go to college. But she did. Now she has reached rarefied levels of society, first as a Harvard Law School professor and now as a senator. Yet she continues to speak from a perspective distinct from those two elite worlds. “I am an outsider,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I’ll always be an outsider.”
She is a scourge to big banks and financial institutions, making her a beacon of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. These Democrats have responded enthusiastically to her populist message. They want a fighter to help lead their party. They aren’t sure if the current president will ever quite fulfill their hopes, and they wonder whether a candidate Clinton would take up the cause with the passion and commitment of Warren.
Whether Warren is quite what her admirers — or detractors — believe her to be is another matter. Centrist Democrats view her call for expanding Social Security benefits rather than cutting them as fiscal malpractice. But the Economist magazine, in its current issue, questions whether she truly has policies that match her rhetoric, policies that would create a more level playing field.
Regardless, at a time of more intense focus on income inequality and on a political system in Washington that many Americans believe is unresponsive to their needs, she has captured imaginations as few others in her party have.
Clinton’s appeal is different. She could never claim to be an outsider; not with her résumé. She has long lived in a world of power, money and privilege. The Clintons’ mantra has always been to focus on the middle class, but whether she will be a rousing advocate for the populist yearnings within her party won’t really be known until she decides about 2016.
She has something else with which to create excitement, however. When she first ran for president in 2008, she symbolized the aspiration of many women — and the hope of many men — to see the ultimate glass ceiling shattered. Now, after the 18 million cracks she put in that ceiling in 2008, she is seen not just as a symbol but potentially as the vehicle for finally breaking through it.
Clinton’s forthcoming book differs from Warren’s in significant ways. It does not offer a full life story. She told much of that story in her earlier book, “Living History.” Nor is it advertised as a book about domestic or economic policy. Rather, it reportedly will lay out her accomplishments as secretary of state while offering more insight into her worldview, distinct from Obama’s.
She has always resisted being pigeonholed, though friend and foe have done plenty of it on her behalf. She is grounded in the New Democrat philosophy that carried Bill Clinton to the White House, and yet she is seen by those who have worked for her as holding more populist economic views than her husband. She will polarize the electorate, almost no matter where she draws that line.
But the title of her book, “Hard Choices,” succinctly sums up the way she has long seen her role in public service. “I approach each issue and problem from a perspective of combining my beliefs and ideals with a search for practical solutions,” she once said in an interview.
A few months ago, Clinton’s tenure at the State Department was being compared unfavorably to that of her successor, John F. Kerry. The current secretary was winning praise for tireless and risky diplomacy that had led to negotiations and the prospect of progress on three of the world’s most difficult problems: Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, the civil war in Syria and Middle East peace.
Today, talks between Israel and the Palestinians have broken off. The negotiations over Syria have gone nowhere. Meanwhile, much work remains to bring the Iran negotiations to fruition, and Clinton has said she is skeptical about a successful outcome. The comparisons between Kerry’s record and Clinton’s look far different than they did at the beginning of this year.
I once asked a person who knew her well to sum up Clinton’s philosophy about public service. She pointed to the words of John Wesley that Clinton had absorbed as a young Methodist in the Chicago suburbs. It was Wesley who said: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
What that conveys is a kind of methodical incrementalism and a belief that, while goals may be clear, the means to achieve them are more opaque. That approach probably won’t satisfy those drawn to Warren’s more fiery populism, but it might be what a candidate Clinton actually would be selling, whatever rhetoric she might adopt for her message.
Clinton and Warren are of the same generation, born just two years apart, but they have arrived at this moment occupying different spaces within their party that reflect their real-world experiences. As their book titles suggest, each has something to offer the other.
It’s always been said that you can’t tell a book by its cover. But sometimes book titles reveal something about authors. That’s certainly the case for two notable Democrats, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Warren’s book, published this past week, is called “A Fighting Chance.” Clinton’s book, a memoir of her four years as secretary of state, is due out in June under the title “Hard Choices.” Warren’s title is aspirational, hinting at the world as it might be, a place where power would be more equitably distributed. Clinton’s title conveys a world in which the ideal and the real clash constantly and in which progress can be maddeningly slow.
Clinton is widely assumed to be running for president in 2016; Warren spent the week on her book tour saying she is not. But as two of the Democratic Party’s brightest stars, they are destined to play central roles in shaping the party’s direction after the Obama presidency ends. Whether they end up as rivals for the Democratic nomination is beside the point.
Warren has become a hero to many Democrats because she speaks forthrightly about the powerful and the powerless. She says she learned about how the world works from her research into the root causes of personal bankruptcy. She decries the mismatch between big corporations — along with their armies of lobbyists in Washington — and an economically squeezed middle class to which politicians pay lip service but do not always deliver real service.
Her deeply personal book speaks directly to the widespread feeling of so many Americans — across party lines — that the deck is stacked against them. The senator from Massachusetts shares that worldview and writes about it in terms of her own life experiences. She grew up in a struggling family in Oklahoma. Her father lost his job after having a heart attack, and her mother took a minimum-wage job to help provide for the family.
Her parents, Warren says, never expected her to go to college. But she did. Now she has reached rarefied levels of society, first as a Harvard Law School professor and now as a senator. Yet she continues to speak from a perspective distinct from those two elite worlds. “I am an outsider,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I’ll always be an outsider.”
She is a scourge to big banks and financial institutions, making her a beacon of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. These Democrats have responded enthusiastically to her populist message. They want a fighter to help lead their party. They aren’t sure if the current president will ever quite fulfill their hopes, and they wonder whether a candidate Clinton would take up the cause with the passion and commitment of Warren.
Whether Warren is quite what her admirers — or detractors — believe her to be is another matter. Centrist Democrats view her call for expanding Social Security benefits rather than cutting them as fiscal malpractice. But the Economist magazine, in its current issue, questions whether she truly has policies that match her rhetoric, policies that would create a more level playing field.
Regardless, at a time of more intense focus on income inequality and on a political system in Washington that many Americans believe is unresponsive to their needs, she has captured imaginations as few others in her party have.
Clinton’s appeal is different. She could never claim to be an outsider; not with her résumé. She has long lived in a world of power, money and privilege. The Clintons’ mantra has always been to focus on the middle class, but whether she will be a rousing advocate for the populist yearnings within her party won’t really be known until she decides about 2016.
She has something else with which to create excitement, however. When she first ran for president in 2008, she symbolized the aspiration of many women — and the hope of many men — to see the ultimate glass ceiling shattered. Now, after the 18 million cracks she put in that ceiling in 2008, she is seen not just as a symbol but potentially as the vehicle for finally breaking through it.
Clinton’s forthcoming book differs from Warren’s in significant ways. It does not offer a full life story. She told much of that story in her earlier book, “Living History.” Nor is it advertised as a book about domestic or economic policy. Rather, it reportedly will lay out her accomplishments as secretary of state while offering more insight into her worldview, distinct from Obama’s.
She has always resisted being pigeonholed, though friend and foe have done plenty of it on her behalf. She is grounded in the New Democrat philosophy that carried Bill Clinton to the White House, and yet she is seen by those who have worked for her as holding more populist economic views than her husband. She will polarize the electorate, almost no matter where she draws that line.
But the title of her book, “Hard Choices,” succinctly sums up the way she has long seen her role in public service. “I approach each issue and problem from a perspective of combining my beliefs and ideals with a search for practical solutions,” she once said in an interview.
A few months ago, Clinton’s tenure at the State Department was being compared unfavorably to that of her successor, John F. Kerry. The current secretary was winning praise for tireless and risky diplomacy that had led to negotiations and the prospect of progress on three of the world’s most difficult problems: Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, the civil war in Syria and Middle East peace.
Today, talks between Israel and the Palestinians have broken off. The negotiations over Syria have gone nowhere. Meanwhile, much work remains to bring the Iran negotiations to fruition, and Clinton has said she is skeptical about a successful outcome. The comparisons between Kerry’s record and Clinton’s look far different than they did at the beginning of this year.
I once asked a person who knew her well to sum up Clinton’s philosophy about public service. She pointed to the words of John Wesley that Clinton had absorbed as a young Methodist in the Chicago suburbs. It was Wesley who said: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
What that conveys is a kind of methodical incrementalism and a belief that, while goals may be clear, the means to achieve them are more opaque. That approach probably won’t satisfy those drawn to Warren’s more fiery populism, but it might be what a candidate Clinton actually would be selling, whatever rhetoric she might adopt for her message.
Clinton and Warren are of the same generation, born just two years apart, but they have arrived at this moment occupying different spaces within their party that reflect their real-world experiences. As their book titles suggest, each has something to offer the other.
On Elizabeth Warren
Massachusetts Maverick
‘A Fighting Chance,’ by Elizabeth WarrenBy AMY CHOZICKAPRIL 24, 2014
A couple of months ago, on Connecticut Avenue not far from the White House, I passed a crowd of 20-somethings wearing distressed denim and hoodies. They looked more Williamsburg than Washington and carried placards that read: “I’m from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party.”
I happened to be headed to a source lunch to discuss Hillary Rodham Clinton’s potential 2016 candidacy, and the activists seemed straight out of central casting, planted there by the same progressives who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and are determined to find a 2016 contender to run against Clinton.
Warren, the 64-year-old Massachusetts senator described by one reporter as “a strand of pearls short of looking like the head of the P.T.A.,” is not, however, out of central casting.
A professor who spent most of her career teaching law students about bankruptcy, Warren is an unlikely icon for the Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing set. She didn’t run for elected office until 2011; the following year, she defeated the Republican Scott Brown to capture the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. By the time she was prodded into running, Warren had been turned off by Washington, and her favorite activities were walking Otis, her slobbery and obese golden retriever; knocking back fried clams and beer with her husband, the legal historian Bruce Mann; and visiting her three grandchildren in California. Or, at least, that’s the narrative she lays out in a relatable, folksy voice in “A Fighting Chance.”
Elizabeth Warren at Harvard, 2001. Credit David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The book is a potent mix of memoir and policy that makes politics seem like a necessary evil, and yet it’s impossible to read Warren’s story without thinking about her meteoric rise in the Democratic Party and those Warren groupies on Connecticut Avenue. That makes the aw-shucks, I-just-stumbled-into-the-Senate anecdotes that propel her narrative feel inevitably like the savvy (critics would say self-serving) story lines that would play so well at an Elks Club in Iowa.
Warren writes that before the 2012 campaign, the most fund-raising experience she had was a “ferocious effort” to help her daughter’s Brownie troop sell cookies. Her campaign went on to raise $42 million, setting a 2012 Senate fund-raising record, mostly from small donations. Add lines like “America’s middle class is under attack,” “The game is deliberately rigged” and “Politics so often felt dirty to me,” and the book seems written by someone with bigger ambitions than taking the grandkids to Legoland.
Continue reading the main story
These are the flash points, after all, that have become central to the Democratic Party and a White House grappling with how to address income inequality. The anti-Wall Street sentiment for which Warren is the poster girl led to the Occupy Wall Street movement and helped elect Bill de Blasio as the mayor of New York. (Warren has said she will not run for president, and she doesn’t discuss the 2016 election in her book.)
Talking points aside, a politician’s personal story is a powerful currency, especially when it starts with a lower-middle-class childhood in Oklahoma City and features characters like wise old Aunt Bee and salt-of-the-earth Daddy, who lost his job selling carpeting at Montgomery Ward. (Warren writes about how “everyone on our mother’s side . . . talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” and she says she was “stunned” when Republicans called her a “Fauxcahontas”: “Knowing who you are is one thing, and proving who you are is another.”)
When recounting how her political career took off, Warren spends more time on the intricate ticktock behind the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau than on her personal life, perhaps because she didn’t have much of one in those years. But it’s the intimate moments in “A Fighting Chance” that make up its less wonky and infinitely more readable parts. We see Warren as a girl, watching her 50-year-old mother cry as she tried to zip up a too-tight black dress; she had an interview for a job answering phones at Sears, Roebuck to help keep the family from losing its small house in a good school district.
Refreshingly, Warren rarely dwells on her gender (though she does poke fun at an Obama adviser’s suggestion she be the C.F.P.B.’s “cheerleader”). But like many women of her generation, she felt stifled in the 1970s as a young wife and mother to two children, Amelia and Alex. It was in the kitchen one night, after she’d put both kids to bed, that Warren — called “Betsy” by friends and family — looked over at her first husband, Jim, smoking a cigarette as she cleaned up. She asked if he wanted a divorce. “No hesitation, just yes. He moved out the next weekend.”
Three decades later, Betsy was a Harvard law professor and talking with a political operative as she contemplated a run for the Senate. She began to tell him that her first husband had died in 2003. “Before I could take a breath and explain about Jim’s terrible illness, . . . about the blow to Amelia and Alex, about how he never had the chance to know his beautiful grandchildren — the research guy shouted ‘Great!’ ” In political terms, a deceased ex-husband is better than a living one.
That’s the sharp-elbowed world Warren says she never thought she’d be a part of. “I never expected to run for office — but then again, I never expected to do a lot of things in my life,” she writes. “I never expected to meet the president of the United States. I never expected to be a blonde.”
But a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention (right before Bill Clinton) and a seat in the Senate don’t happen willy-nilly, and Warren is far from a passive observer. Before she ran for office, she had become a leading expert in debates about predatory lending practices and bankruptcy legislation, as well as a thorn in the financial industry’s side. The idea that some banks are too big to fail, Warren writes in “A Fighting Chance,” “allows the megabanks to operate like drunks on a wild weekend in Vegas.” Families who fall behind on their debts are usually “desperately ashamed of their situation,” and have been saddled with health care costs or tricked into taking out subprime mortgages with egregious terms hidden in the fine print.
That message first brought Warren national attention with her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke,” written with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. In that book, they wrote about a meeting with Hillary Clinton in 1998 to discuss bankruptcy protections for struggling middle-class families. (Before Warren began her pitch the first lady “snapped her head sharply to the side and called to no one in particular, ‘Where’s lunch? I’m hungry.’ ”) The authors go on to criticize Clinton’s coziness to Wall Street as a New York senator. There’s hardly any mention of Clinton in “A Fighting Chance.”
Warren mostly avoids the overheated rhetoric associated with some well-heeled progressives; her vernacular is more Nick at Nite than The Nation. After Barney Frank said he would include the C.F.P.B. in the Dodd-Frank reform package, Warren thought, “Wowee-zowee! It was a cartwheel moment.” An invitation from the White House arrived while she was in Oklahoma, and she rushed to the local mall to buy the first department-store suit she could find. “Holy cow — the White House! A presidential announcement!” She nagged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to buckle his seatbelt, imitated the Three Stooges with Obama and Geithner before stepping into the Rose Garden, and vomited from nerves backstage at “The Daily Show.”
For all her humble goofiness, the title of this book reminds us that this is about Warren’s fight. She is still the fiery advocate who called for a bureau to protect consumers or, as a second choice, “no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.” And she lit up both political parties in 2011 when she said, at a campaign stop, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” Not even stories about rocking a grandbaby to sleep or baking Sunday-school treats could soften that.
Elizabeth Warren Simplies Piketty: Trickle Down Doesn't Work
ryan@huffingtonpost.com
Elizabeth Warren Simplifies Thomas Piketty: 'Trickle Down Doesn't Work. Never Did'
Posted: 04/25/2014 2:52 pm EDT Updated: 04/25/2014 3:59 pm EDT Print Article
The No. 2 author on Amazon's best-seller list, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, weighed in Thursday night on the No. 1 book, identifying overlapping themes.
At a reading at the Harvard Book Store, the Massachusetts Democrat, author of A Fighting Chance, was asked about Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and specifically about its contention that trickle-down economics "definitively do not work."
Warren cut in. "Can we say that part again? 'Definitely do not work,'" she repeated. "Not as in that's somebody else's opinion or this comes out of a long-held political opinion. The data don't lie on this. He's got good historical data, and boy, what it shows is trickle down doesn't work. Never did, doesn't work. Just so we're all clear on the baseline. I just saved you 1,100 pages of reading." (The book is shorter than that; Warren may have assumed the audience would also read the online technical index.)
Warren, whose own book was going to be titled Rigged but ultimately went out with a more hopeful title, said that while Piketty's book could elicit despair, she found a hopeful note in it, too.
"You can read his book and you just wanna say, 'Ugh.' Because it says over and over -- look, I'll tell you the basic theme: The rich get richer," Warren said.
Piketty argues that the 200-plus years of income and wealth data complied by him and a team of researchers demonstrates that returns on capital (r) significantly outstrip growth in the real economy (g), which relentlessly drives up inequality. His basic equation -- r>g -- has upended the way economists understand wealth and income distribution.
"Here's the hopeful part in Piketty's book: Piketty makes the point that although the data keep documenting this happening, it's not like an act of nature. It's not like gravity and you can't fix it," Warren said. "Piketty's book makes the point that how much equality there is ... is a matter of the policies you choose to follow and that, for example, progressive taxation and investment in everyone's education helps to level the playing field."
Warren pointed to the period from the Great Depression up through the deregulatory era that began in the 1980s as reason for hope -- a period that she noted Piketty found to be an aberration in many ways.
"It is a time when we made those investments that built America's great middle class and we made those decisions -- not we in this room, but our parents, our grandparents, they made those decisions. They said, 'You put a cop on the beat so nobody steals your pension, you do that on Wall Street.' But they also said, 'You tax progressively and then you make those investments.' For those who made it big, God bless 'em, that's great, but they've gotta pay a piece of that forward so the next kid has a chance to make it big and the kid after that and the kid after that. That's what defines America."
Piketty indeed credits high marginal tax rates on wealth in the middle of the 20th century as a driver of flattening U.S. inequality during that period, although he also cites the destruction of capital from the world wars and the anomalously high economic growth rates that carried into the late 1960s and, in some countries, into the 1970s. He describes that high growth as "catch up" and suggests it will be difficult to repeat such a phenomenon in the 21st century.
Piketty proposes a steeply progressive wealth tax, which Warren referenced favorably on Thursday. The suggestion was widely panned by the political class, but it is already earning dividends. On Friday, New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested that conservatives respond by embracing a "beefed up inheritance tax" and "progressive consumption taxes."
Warren also joked with the audience that they may find her book a bit more digestible. "Have you seen Piketty's new book?" she asked. "His book has tables and graphs; this book doesn't. It's one of my first books with no graphs in it, just pictures."
April 2014
Before April beats a hasty retreat with the promise of inclement weather next week, let us pause to give the 4th month it's due and credit. April has turned the world bright green once again. Baseball season is in full swing (did you even notice?). Tax season has come and gone without any threat of garnishments so far. The birds are back and singing outside my house full throttle. This morning it sounds Little Richard & "Tutti Frutti." Spring is here! Let the graduations and commencements now begin. April has done its work well. The cruelest month need not be so cruel.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Piketty, Warren, & Lewis
The Huffington Post
by Mollie Reilly Email RSS Posted: 04/24/2014 7:41 pm EDT Updated: 04/24/2014 8:04 pm EDT
If Amazon's top-sellers list is any indication, Americans are fed up with rising income inequality.
As of Thursday evening, Sen. Elizabeth Warren's new memoir, A Fighting Chance, is the number two best-selling book on Amazon, trailing only Thomas Piketty's Capital In The Twenty-First Century. Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, which exposes the world of high-frequency traders, is number five. Both Capital and A Fighting Chance are also among Barnes & Noble's top five sellers.
While the three works come at the issue from different vantage points, they all arrive at essentially the same conclusion: the game is rigged against the middle class.
Warren's book, released Tuesday, traces the Massachusetts Democrat's journey from law professor to U.S. senator. The book details how the struggles Warren's middle class parents faced motivated her to work toward remedying income inequality -- most notably, in her role in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“This book is about how Washington is rigged to work for those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers and make sure that everything that they want gets done in Washington,” Warren told ABC News earlier this week. “The game is rigged to work for those who already have money and power. I wrote this book because the way I see it, working families, they're not looking for a handout. They're not looking for some special deal. They just want a level playing field. They just want a fighting chance."
Meanwhile, Piketty's manifesto has become an unlikely hit. The nearly 700-page tome is currently sold out on Amazon, as Harvard University Press scrambles to print an additional 80,000 copies. In the interim, the French economist has been on a dizzying U.S. tour, meeting with the likes of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, the Council of Economic Advisers and the IMF, in addition to giving dozens of interviews to major media outlets.
Based on analysis of over 200 years' worth of economic data from 20 countries, Capital argues that unfettered capitalism will inevitably lead to extreme income inequality. If world leaders are unwilling to shrink the widening gap by, say, imposing a global wealth tax or other mechanisms, the rich will continue to grow richer, leaving the rest of society behind. As Piketty explained on HuffPost Live last week, this could cause capitalistic societies to revert back to the economic conditions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Flash Boys, Lewis' New York Times bestseller, sheds light on the predatory practices of high-frequency traders. According to Lewis, these traders are essentially able to front-run typical investors by using lightning-fast network connections to quickly buy stocks and sell them back. Lewis' work was featured in a popular "60 Minutes" segment last month.
"It's bigger than a scam," Lewis said during the segment. "It's the stock market."
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
The Picketty Book (3)
by Steven Perlstein
Just when you thought Karl Marx had finally lost all political and economic relevance, a brilliant French economist has come along to pick up where the German philosopher left off — correcting for many of Marx’s mistakes, updating his analysis in light of subsequent experience and unearthing a bounty of modern economic data to support a theory about capitalism’s inherent and self-destructive contradictions.
The economist is Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, who with Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley has recently turbocharged the debate about income inequality. Piketty and Saez gathered data from tax returns that confirm the story of stagnant middle-class incomes over the past 30 years while revealing how much the super-rich have pulled away from everyone else.
by Steven Perlstein
(Belknap) - ’Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ by Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer
GoingOut Guide
In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” is clearly modeled after Marx’s “Das Kapital.” But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy — owners of capital — capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income.
“The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers,” writes Piketty.
The quest for a unifying theory on the nature of capitalism began with the earliest political economists. The Rev. Thomas Malthus theorized that population growth would keep the bulk of mankind trapped in misery and poverty, as was indeed the case for much of human history. David Ricardo theorized that the landed gentry would become ever more wealthy as the value of a fixed amount of land rose relative to the expanding supply of other goods. And Marx predicted that ruinous competition among workers and investors would inevitably drive wages to subsistence levels and investment returns to zero, concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
We now know that what each of these determinist theories failed to anticipate was an explosion of productivity driven by new technology that allowed society to escape from the dystopic futures they imagined. But Piketty, marshaling an impressive array of data going back centuries, argues that the underlying mechanisms of capitalism are likely to reassert themselves, once again generating “arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”
In Piketty’s telling, it was only the unique circumstances between 1930 and 1975 that allowed capitalism’s natural drift toward inequality to be reversed. These circumstances included two world wars, a global depression and an outbreak of debt-fueled recession, all of which conspired to destroy vast amounts of wealth. Those years also ushered in government economic policies that consciously set out to redistribute income and economic power while spreading the latest technology to developing countries. Rapid growth in economic output in much of the world reduced the importance of inherited wealth and created a vast new global middle class with wealth of its own.
It was at the height of that “golden era” that economist Simon Kuznets — the father of GDP accounting — put forward the notion that as countries moved through various stages of development, household incomes would eventually become more equal. But Piketty lays out the case that the “Kuznets curve” was merely a fairy tale told by Americans and Europeans to bring developing countries in the capitalist fold. And once inflation and population growth began to slow in the industrialized world in the 1970s, and economic growth returned to more normal levels, capitalism’s natural tendency toward inequality of wealth and income began to reassert itself.
Piketty’s prediction of a 21st century of slow growth and extreme inequality is based on historic data and a simple equation. The data, which he assembled with various collaborators in several countries, show that over long periods of time, output per person — productivity — tends to grow at an average of 1 to 1.5 percent. The data also show that average return on investment over long periods of time ranges between 4 and 5 percent.
The problem with these two historic trends, Piketty explains, is that whenever the return on financial capital (investment) is higher than the return on human capital (productivity) for an extended period, it is a matter of simple arithmetic that growing inequality will result. The reason: Those with the highest incomes will save and invest, generating capital income that will allow them to pull away from those relying solely on wages and salaries. It takes only a few generations before this accumulating and accumulated wealth becomes a dominant factor in the economy and the social and political structure.
Indeed, Piketty says, the data show that it has already happened in the United States, where inequality in the distribution of both wealth and income surpasses that of class-bound Europe of 1900.
Part of that American story, Piketty writes, reflects the surge in pay for corporate executives and Wall Sreet financiers who make up a large part of the top 1 percent of income earners. As Piketty sees it, their soaring compensation cannot be adequately explained simply by superior education or performance, but also reflects imperfectly competitive labor and product markets that allow the top 1 percent to extract way more than their real economic contribution.
The wealthy, Piketty says, are also in a position to take more risks with their savings while having access to the best investment and hedge fund managers, allowing them to earn a higher return than middle-class savers. And unlike middle-class savers, they are likely to reinvest their investment income each year rather than spend it. Combine those higher-than-average returns with the magic of compounding, and you begin to understand how a rigid class structure can start to take hold.
Indeed, one of the more delightful touches that Piketty brings to his task is how he draws on the novels of Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen and Henry James to illustrate the economics of a rigidly stratified society built on a foundation of accumulated capital. But even these literary forays are buttressed by incredibly detailed data on the size and flow of inheritances in France and England over the past two centuries. The creative use that Piketty makes of this historical information is as impressive as the painstaking work he did in collecting it.
Although Piketty’s prose is clear and compelling and translated artrfully into plain English by Arthur Goldhammer, this is a book aimed more at other economists than general readers. At 577 pages of text and 75 pages of footnotes, it is annoyingly repetitious at times. Long discourses on topics such as inflation and the current euro crisis add little to his central thesis, while Piketty spends way too much time on tedious explanations of minor cross-country differences in economic history. Like Marx, he would have benefited from an editor with a sharper pencil.
In the end, Piketty’s analysis of the past is more impressive than his predictions for the future are convincing. He fails to adequately explain how the accumulation of so much capital looking for good investment opportunities won’t eventually drive down returns, as economic theory would suggest. And like the grand theorists before him, he too easily dismisses the possibility of a burst in technology-induced productivity that could usher in another extended period of above-average growth in output and average incomes. “If one truly wishes to found a more just and rational social order,” he warns, “it is not enough to count on the caprices of technology.”
Moreover, unlike the 19th century, when real estate and government bonds were the primary form of capital, it is riskier assets that generate most of the wealth in the modern global economy — assets that can more quickly lose value as a result of changes in technology or global competition.
Nor is it clear, as Piketty asserts, that the only way to avoid a future of slow growth and extreme inequality is through confiscatory taxation. His prescription is an annual global wealth tax of up to 2 percent combined with progressive income tax rates as high as 80 percent. Yet as he acknowledges, the “golden years” were golden because of a complex interplay among laws, regulations, taxes and other restraints on corporate power. If confronted with unacceptable levels of inequality, why would democratic societies in the future be unable or unwilling to formulate a similar set of institutional restraints on capitalism?
For all its faults, however, Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity
Just when you thought Karl Marx had finally lost all political and economic relevance, a brilliant French economist has come along to pick up where the German philosopher left off — correcting for many of Marx’s mistakes, updating his analysis in light of subsequent experience and unearthing a bounty of modern economic data to support a theory about capitalism’s inherent and self-destructive contradictions.
The economist is Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, who with Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley has recently turbocharged the debate about income inequality. Piketty and Saez gathered data from tax returns that confirm the story of stagnant middle-class incomes over the past 30 years while revealing how much the super-rich have pulled away from everyone else.
by Steven Perlstein
(Belknap) - ’Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ by Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer
GoingOut Guide
In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” is clearly modeled after Marx’s “Das Kapital.” But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy — owners of capital — capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income.
“The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers,” writes Piketty.
The quest for a unifying theory on the nature of capitalism began with the earliest political economists. The Rev. Thomas Malthus theorized that population growth would keep the bulk of mankind trapped in misery and poverty, as was indeed the case for much of human history. David Ricardo theorized that the landed gentry would become ever more wealthy as the value of a fixed amount of land rose relative to the expanding supply of other goods. And Marx predicted that ruinous competition among workers and investors would inevitably drive wages to subsistence levels and investment returns to zero, concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
We now know that what each of these determinist theories failed to anticipate was an explosion of productivity driven by new technology that allowed society to escape from the dystopic futures they imagined. But Piketty, marshaling an impressive array of data going back centuries, argues that the underlying mechanisms of capitalism are likely to reassert themselves, once again generating “arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”
In Piketty’s telling, it was only the unique circumstances between 1930 and 1975 that allowed capitalism’s natural drift toward inequality to be reversed. These circumstances included two world wars, a global depression and an outbreak of debt-fueled recession, all of which conspired to destroy vast amounts of wealth. Those years also ushered in government economic policies that consciously set out to redistribute income and economic power while spreading the latest technology to developing countries. Rapid growth in economic output in much of the world reduced the importance of inherited wealth and created a vast new global middle class with wealth of its own.
It was at the height of that “golden era” that economist Simon Kuznets — the father of GDP accounting — put forward the notion that as countries moved through various stages of development, household incomes would eventually become more equal. But Piketty lays out the case that the “Kuznets curve” was merely a fairy tale told by Americans and Europeans to bring developing countries in the capitalist fold. And once inflation and population growth began to slow in the industrialized world in the 1970s, and economic growth returned to more normal levels, capitalism’s natural tendency toward inequality of wealth and income began to reassert itself.
Piketty’s prediction of a 21st century of slow growth and extreme inequality is based on historic data and a simple equation. The data, which he assembled with various collaborators in several countries, show that over long periods of time, output per person — productivity — tends to grow at an average of 1 to 1.5 percent. The data also show that average return on investment over long periods of time ranges between 4 and 5 percent.
The problem with these two historic trends, Piketty explains, is that whenever the return on financial capital (investment) is higher than the return on human capital (productivity) for an extended period, it is a matter of simple arithmetic that growing inequality will result. The reason: Those with the highest incomes will save and invest, generating capital income that will allow them to pull away from those relying solely on wages and salaries. It takes only a few generations before this accumulating and accumulated wealth becomes a dominant factor in the economy and the social and political structure.
Indeed, Piketty says, the data show that it has already happened in the United States, where inequality in the distribution of both wealth and income surpasses that of class-bound Europe of 1900.
Part of that American story, Piketty writes, reflects the surge in pay for corporate executives and Wall Sreet financiers who make up a large part of the top 1 percent of income earners. As Piketty sees it, their soaring compensation cannot be adequately explained simply by superior education or performance, but also reflects imperfectly competitive labor and product markets that allow the top 1 percent to extract way more than their real economic contribution.
The wealthy, Piketty says, are also in a position to take more risks with their savings while having access to the best investment and hedge fund managers, allowing them to earn a higher return than middle-class savers. And unlike middle-class savers, they are likely to reinvest their investment income each year rather than spend it. Combine those higher-than-average returns with the magic of compounding, and you begin to understand how a rigid class structure can start to take hold.
Indeed, one of the more delightful touches that Piketty brings to his task is how he draws on the novels of Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen and Henry James to illustrate the economics of a rigidly stratified society built on a foundation of accumulated capital. But even these literary forays are buttressed by incredibly detailed data on the size and flow of inheritances in France and England over the past two centuries. The creative use that Piketty makes of this historical information is as impressive as the painstaking work he did in collecting it.
Although Piketty’s prose is clear and compelling and translated artrfully into plain English by Arthur Goldhammer, this is a book aimed more at other economists than general readers. At 577 pages of text and 75 pages of footnotes, it is annoyingly repetitious at times. Long discourses on topics such as inflation and the current euro crisis add little to his central thesis, while Piketty spends way too much time on tedious explanations of minor cross-country differences in economic history. Like Marx, he would have benefited from an editor with a sharper pencil.
In the end, Piketty’s analysis of the past is more impressive than his predictions for the future are convincing. He fails to adequately explain how the accumulation of so much capital looking for good investment opportunities won’t eventually drive down returns, as economic theory would suggest. And like the grand theorists before him, he too easily dismisses the possibility of a burst in technology-induced productivity that could usher in another extended period of above-average growth in output and average incomes. “If one truly wishes to found a more just and rational social order,” he warns, “it is not enough to count on the caprices of technology.”
Moreover, unlike the 19th century, when real estate and government bonds were the primary form of capital, it is riskier assets that generate most of the wealth in the modern global economy — assets that can more quickly lose value as a result of changes in technology or global competition.
Nor is it clear, as Piketty asserts, that the only way to avoid a future of slow growth and extreme inequality is through confiscatory taxation. His prescription is an annual global wealth tax of up to 2 percent combined with progressive income tax rates as high as 80 percent. Yet as he acknowledges, the “golden years” were golden because of a complex interplay among laws, regulations, taxes and other restraints on corporate power. If confronted with unacceptable levels of inequality, why would democratic societies in the future be unable or unwilling to formulate a similar set of institutional restraints on capitalism?
For all its faults, however, Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity
The Piketty Book (2)
Wednesday, Apr 23, 2014 06:50 AM CDT
The right’s new public enemy No. 1: Why Thomas Piketty has conservatives terrified
His new book reveals just how perilous capitalism can be. No wonder Ross Douthat is trying to brand him a Marxist
Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet
Thomas Piketty is no radical. His 700-page book Capital in the 21st Century is certainly not some kind of screed filled with calls for class warfare. In fact, the wonky and mild-mannered French economist opens his tome with a description of his typical Gen X abhorrence of what he calls the “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.” He is in no way, shape, or form a Marxist. As fellow-economist James K. Galbraith has underscored in his review of the book, Piketty “explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view” of economics.
But he does do something that gives right-wingers in America the willies. He writes calmly and reasonably about economic inequality, and concludes, to the alarm of conservatives, that there is no magical force that drives capitalist societies toward shared prosperity. Quite the opposite. He warns that if we don’t do something about it, we may end up with a society that is more top-heavy than anything that has come before — something even worse than the Gilded Age.
For this, in America, you get branded a crazed Communist by the right. In this past weekend’sNew York Times, Ross Douthat sounds the alarm in an op-ed ominously tited “Marx Rises Again.” The columnist hints that he and his fellow pundits have only pretended to read the book but nevertheless feel comfortable making statements like “Yes, that’s right: Karl Marx is back from the dead” about Piketty. TheNational Review‘s James Pethokoukis joins in the games with a silly article called “The New Marxism” in which he repeats the nonsense that Piketty is some sort of Marxist apologist.
For Douthat and his tribe, the proposition that unfettered capitalism marches toward gross inequality is not a conclusion based on carefully collected data, strenuous research and a sweeping view of history. It has to be a Communist plot.
The very heft of Piketty’s book is terrifying to the Douthats, and no wonder they don’t dare to read it, because if they did, they would find chart after chart, data set after data set, and hundreds of years worth of economic history scrutinized.
Income and wealth inequality have not been comprehensively studied to date, which has to do with the paucity of historical data and the difficulties of making comparisons between countries and populations when there are so many variables. Piketty’s contribution is to painstakingly comb over the available data and illuminate trends that would leave no reasonable person in doubt of the fact that capitalism’s inherent dynamics create inequality, and that only our express intervention, in the form of things like a global wealth tax, investment in skills and training, and the diffusion of knowledge can lead us to a different outcome.
To the horror of conservatives, the public is rushing out to buy this weighty economic treatise: the book is #1 on Amazon and has hit the New York Timesbestseller list. A public that not only inuits conservative economic nonsense but has the detailed information to back up that gut instinct is just too awful for words.
Piketty is scaring the right because he is a serious researcher and a calm, disciplined observer who writes in measured tones. But for conservatives who have based the last several decades of economic discussion on mythology, this dose of reality has come at them like a chillling blast of Arctic air.
Let them have their hysteria. It’s a testimony to the utter bankruptcy of their ideas.
Memo to liberals and progressives: making Piketty into a rock star isn’t helping, either. Let’s let the facts speak for themselves.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
A Long Way to Tipperary
It's a long way to Tipperary. I hope there are rest stops along the way. Gas stations with lots of good snacks. No road closures. Radio stations playing country and western. Good yard sales here and there. It's a LONG way to Tipperary.
Monday, April 21, 2014
Good to be in Auburn
It was good to be in Auburn today. There was a bomb threat last Wednesday and classes were suspended for the day. It was a beautiful spring day after A Day and the hope of another great football season coming up.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Sunday Roundup
Arianna Huffington
Sunday RoundupThis week began the way so many do: with more tragic gun violence, as three people were killed in two shootings at Jewish centers in the Kansas City area, part of the 86 killed by guns in the U.S. every day. "We are united in our condemnation of this heinous attack," said Attorney General Holder. "These acts cannot be ignored." And yet, one year ago this month, the Senate rejected even a modest background check bill, despite the support of 90 percent of Americans. In the wake of the Kansas shootings, Michael Bloomberg's $50 million gun control effort, "Everytown for Gun Safety," unveiled its first ad. We "have another chance to stop a child from being killed," it said. We do, but only if we refuse to lower our expectations. As Gabriel García Márquez, who died on Thursday, wrote, "It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
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Sunday RoundupThis week began the way so many do: with more tragic gun violence, as three people were killed in two shootings at Jewish centers in the Kansas City area, part of the 86 killed by guns in the U.S. every day. "We are united in our condemnation of this heinous attack," said Attorney General Holder. "These acts cannot be ignored." And yet, one year ago this month, the Senate rejected even a modest background check bill, despite the support of 90 percent of Americans. In the wake of the Kansas shootings, Michael Bloomberg's $50 million gun control effort, "Everytown for Gun Safety," unveiled its first ad. We "have another chance to stop a child from being killed," it said. We do, but only if we refuse to lower our expectations. As Gabriel García Márquez, who died on Thursday, wrote, "It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
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Saturday, April 19, 2014
The Piketty Book
From Bill Moyers
Reactions to ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
April 18, 2014
13Belknap Press, 696 pages
This week, Bill talked with economist Paul Krugman about Thomas Piketty’s landmark new book that Bill calls “revolutionary.” You can read an excerpt at the publisher’s website, read a Q&A with Piketty at the Times Economix blog and, if you’re more visual, check out a summary of the book in six charts at The New Yorkerwebsite.
As Bill mentions in this week’s show, a lot of (digital) ink has been spilled over Piketty’s book. Reviewers have called it “a bulldozer of a book,” “magisterial,” “seminal,” “definitive,” “a watershed.” Below is a selection of reviews we think are worth reading, including several by previous Moyers & Company guests, that includes a variety of reactions — from both the left and the right — to Piketty’s groundbreaking and important work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Krugman on Why We’re in a New Gilded Age
The New York Review of Books
New York Times columnist and a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton“Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age — or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque — defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty’s work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible to track the concentration of income and wealth deep into the past — back to the early 20th century for America and Britain, and all the way to the late eighteenth century for France.
The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality. Before this revolution, most discussions of economic disparity more or less ignored the very rich.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey Madrick on the Indictment of the Invisible Hand
Special to BillMoyers.com
Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at The Century Foundation“What’s by and large been lost in the discussion as America’s most prominent economists try to contend with Piketty’s empirical findings is that they don’t seem constitutionally able to do so. In fact, the financial markets have failed to fully utilize capital, or worse, used it in perverse ways to make bankers rich while not dispersing capital effectively. Capital basically just sits there, enabling fat cats to get fatter. Not entirely, of course. Some of this capital has been put to good use, but as it grows so much faster than the economy, it seems more than obvious that it is the result of monopoly, rents that are not related to real returns of investment, manipulation of markets and regulations, political influence, and so on. Free market competition has not worked.
If Piketty had paid more attention to such market failures rather than gloss over them, he would have uncovered a treasure trove of policies that could reduce the hold on capital and distribute the benefits of the economy more widely.
Instead, he believes higher taxes are the only solution. But regulation of monopolists and Wall Street manipulators would be part of such a solution. More vigorous anti-trust prosecution would be another. Fairer and more strongly implemented labor laws would have given workers a fairer shake, as would more union-friendly regulations and a higher minimum wage. Keynesian stimulus policies have been stymied by the deficit hysteria of Republicans and not a few Democrats.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heather Boushey on Clichés About the American Economy
The American Prospect
Chief Economist, Washington Center for Equitable Growth“In Piketty’s analysis, without rapid economic growth — which he argues is highly unlikely now that population growth is slowing — returns from investment will continue to grow faster than output. Inheritances and income inequality will keep rising, possibly to levels higher than ever seen.
Among other conclusions, the data lead Piketty to describe the popular argument that we live in an era where our talents and capabilities matter most as “mindless optimism.” The data also lead him to reject the idea that wage inequality has grown as technological change increased the demand for higher-skilled, college-educated workers.
Instead, Piketty’s evidence suggests it is the rise of what he calls the “supermanager” among the top 1 percent since 1980 that is driving the rise in earnings inequality. It is here that Piketty takes his sharpest swipe at economists. In his discussion of the thriving top decile, he points out that “among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.” Piketty agrees that in the long run, investments in education are an important component of any plan to reduce labor-market inequalities and improve productivity. But on their own they’re not sufficient.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean Baker on How Capital in the 21st Century’ Is Still Mired in the 19th
The Huffington Post
Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC“Thomas Piketty’s new book on the history and future of capitalism (Harvard University Press) is a bold attempt to pick up where Marx left off and correct what he got wrong. While there is much that is useful in this lengthy and well-written book (Piketty and his translator Arthur Goldhammer can fight over credit), it owes too much to the master and not in a good way.
For backdrop, economists and social scientists in general have a huge debt to Piketty. His work with Emmanuel Saez has advanced enormously our understanding of income distribution at the top end. The World Top Incomes Database that they constructed along with Facundo Alvaredo and Anthony Atkinson is an enormously important source of data that economists are just beginning to analyze. This book is a further contribution to providing a wealth of information about historical trends in income distribution and returns to capital over large parts of the world.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson on a Tocqueville for Today
The American Prospect
Authors of Winner-Take-All Politics and Professors of Political Science at Yale University and University of California, Berkeley“When historian and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, the aspect of the new republic that most stimulated him was its remarkable social equality. “America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon,” Tocqueville marveled. “Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect … than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.
To Tocqueville, who largely ignored the grim exception of the South, America’s progress toward greater equality was inevitable, the expansion of its democratic spirit unstoppable. Europe, he believed, would soon follow America’s lead. He was right — sort of. Democracy was on the rise, but so too was inequality. Only with the 20th century’s Great Depression, two terrible wars and the creation of the modern welfare state did concentrations of economic advantage in rich democracies start to dissipate and the fruits of rapid growth begin to accrue generously to ordinary workers.
Now another Frenchman with a panoramic vista — and far more precise evidence — wants us to think anew about the progress of equality and democracy. Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was.”
James Pethokoukis on the New Marxism
National Review
James Pethokoukis
Policy Fellow, National Review Institute“Piketty, a left-wing Frenchman who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, is hardly the only economist arguing inequality is headed inexorably higher. Tyler Cowen, a center-right economist and New York Times columnist, contends accelerating technological change will create an America where nearly all of us have stagnant incomes and serve as valets and massage therapists to the STEM-savvy and wealthy geek-ocracy.
Piketty is making a different and broader argument, one that intentionally rises to the level of grand theory: Embedded within the very fabric of capitalism is a powerful force pushing in the direction of rising inequality. The income generated from owning capital (everything from real estate to financial assets to intellectual property) tends to exceed the rate of economic growth. And when wealth grows faster than output — as it did in the 19th century when Marx was writing and as Piketty forecasts it will again in the 21st — inequality moves toward extreme levels since income from capital is outpacing wages from labor. When capital income gets reinvested, inherited wealth also grows faster than the economy. Even worse, from Piketty’s perspective: Not only will capital owners take more and more of national income, but more and more of labor income will go to a small group of “supermanagers” who rig the executive pay system in their favor.”
Read more at the National Review »
Branko Milanovic on Returning Economics to its Classical Roots
The American Prospect
Economist and Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected.
Piketty’s key message is both simple and, once understood, almost self-evident. Under capitalism, if the rate of return on private wealth (defined to include physical and financial capital, land and housing) exceeds the rate of growth of the economy, the share of capital income in the net product will increase. If most of that increase in capital income is reinvested, the capital-to-income ratio will rise. This will further increase the share of capital income in the net output. The percentage of people who do not need to work in order to earn their living (the rentiers) will go up. The distribution of personal income will become even more unequal.
The story elegantly combines theories of growth, functional distribution of income (between capital and labor), and income inequality between individuals. It aims to provide nothing less than the description of a capitalist economy.”
Reactions to ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
April 18, 2014
13Belknap Press, 696 pages
This week, Bill talked with economist Paul Krugman about Thomas Piketty’s landmark new book that Bill calls “revolutionary.” You can read an excerpt at the publisher’s website, read a Q&A with Piketty at the Times Economix blog and, if you’re more visual, check out a summary of the book in six charts at The New Yorkerwebsite.
As Bill mentions in this week’s show, a lot of (digital) ink has been spilled over Piketty’s book. Reviewers have called it “a bulldozer of a book,” “magisterial,” “seminal,” “definitive,” “a watershed.” Below is a selection of reviews we think are worth reading, including several by previous Moyers & Company guests, that includes a variety of reactions — from both the left and the right — to Piketty’s groundbreaking and important work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Krugman on Why We’re in a New Gilded Age
The New York Review of Books
New York Times columnist and a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton“Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age — or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque — defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty’s work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible to track the concentration of income and wealth deep into the past — back to the early 20th century for America and Britain, and all the way to the late eighteenth century for France.
The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality. Before this revolution, most discussions of economic disparity more or less ignored the very rich.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey Madrick on the Indictment of the Invisible Hand
Special to BillMoyers.com
Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at The Century Foundation“What’s by and large been lost in the discussion as America’s most prominent economists try to contend with Piketty’s empirical findings is that they don’t seem constitutionally able to do so. In fact, the financial markets have failed to fully utilize capital, or worse, used it in perverse ways to make bankers rich while not dispersing capital effectively. Capital basically just sits there, enabling fat cats to get fatter. Not entirely, of course. Some of this capital has been put to good use, but as it grows so much faster than the economy, it seems more than obvious that it is the result of monopoly, rents that are not related to real returns of investment, manipulation of markets and regulations, political influence, and so on. Free market competition has not worked.
If Piketty had paid more attention to such market failures rather than gloss over them, he would have uncovered a treasure trove of policies that could reduce the hold on capital and distribute the benefits of the economy more widely.
Instead, he believes higher taxes are the only solution. But regulation of monopolists and Wall Street manipulators would be part of such a solution. More vigorous anti-trust prosecution would be another. Fairer and more strongly implemented labor laws would have given workers a fairer shake, as would more union-friendly regulations and a higher minimum wage. Keynesian stimulus policies have been stymied by the deficit hysteria of Republicans and not a few Democrats.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heather Boushey on Clichés About the American Economy
The American Prospect
Chief Economist, Washington Center for Equitable Growth“In Piketty’s analysis, without rapid economic growth — which he argues is highly unlikely now that population growth is slowing — returns from investment will continue to grow faster than output. Inheritances and income inequality will keep rising, possibly to levels higher than ever seen.
Among other conclusions, the data lead Piketty to describe the popular argument that we live in an era where our talents and capabilities matter most as “mindless optimism.” The data also lead him to reject the idea that wage inequality has grown as technological change increased the demand for higher-skilled, college-educated workers.
Instead, Piketty’s evidence suggests it is the rise of what he calls the “supermanager” among the top 1 percent since 1980 that is driving the rise in earnings inequality. It is here that Piketty takes his sharpest swipe at economists. In his discussion of the thriving top decile, he points out that “among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.” Piketty agrees that in the long run, investments in education are an important component of any plan to reduce labor-market inequalities and improve productivity. But on their own they’re not sufficient.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean Baker on How Capital in the 21st Century’ Is Still Mired in the 19th
The Huffington Post
Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC“Thomas Piketty’s new book on the history and future of capitalism (Harvard University Press) is a bold attempt to pick up where Marx left off and correct what he got wrong. While there is much that is useful in this lengthy and well-written book (Piketty and his translator Arthur Goldhammer can fight over credit), it owes too much to the master and not in a good way.
For backdrop, economists and social scientists in general have a huge debt to Piketty. His work with Emmanuel Saez has advanced enormously our understanding of income distribution at the top end. The World Top Incomes Database that they constructed along with Facundo Alvaredo and Anthony Atkinson is an enormously important source of data that economists are just beginning to analyze. This book is a further contribution to providing a wealth of information about historical trends in income distribution and returns to capital over large parts of the world.”
Read more »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson on a Tocqueville for Today
The American Prospect
Authors of Winner-Take-All Politics and Professors of Political Science at Yale University and University of California, Berkeley“When historian and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, the aspect of the new republic that most stimulated him was its remarkable social equality. “America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon,” Tocqueville marveled. “Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect … than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.
To Tocqueville, who largely ignored the grim exception of the South, America’s progress toward greater equality was inevitable, the expansion of its democratic spirit unstoppable. Europe, he believed, would soon follow America’s lead. He was right — sort of. Democracy was on the rise, but so too was inequality. Only with the 20th century’s Great Depression, two terrible wars and the creation of the modern welfare state did concentrations of economic advantage in rich democracies start to dissipate and the fruits of rapid growth begin to accrue generously to ordinary workers.
Now another Frenchman with a panoramic vista — and far more precise evidence — wants us to think anew about the progress of equality and democracy. Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was.”
James Pethokoukis on the New Marxism
National Review
James Pethokoukis
Policy Fellow, National Review Institute“Piketty, a left-wing Frenchman who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, is hardly the only economist arguing inequality is headed inexorably higher. Tyler Cowen, a center-right economist and New York Times columnist, contends accelerating technological change will create an America where nearly all of us have stagnant incomes and serve as valets and massage therapists to the STEM-savvy and wealthy geek-ocracy.
Piketty is making a different and broader argument, one that intentionally rises to the level of grand theory: Embedded within the very fabric of capitalism is a powerful force pushing in the direction of rising inequality. The income generated from owning capital (everything from real estate to financial assets to intellectual property) tends to exceed the rate of economic growth. And when wealth grows faster than output — as it did in the 19th century when Marx was writing and as Piketty forecasts it will again in the 21st — inequality moves toward extreme levels since income from capital is outpacing wages from labor. When capital income gets reinvested, inherited wealth also grows faster than the economy. Even worse, from Piketty’s perspective: Not only will capital owners take more and more of national income, but more and more of labor income will go to a small group of “supermanagers” who rig the executive pay system in their favor.”
Read more at the National Review »
Branko Milanovic on Returning Economics to its Classical Roots
The American Prospect
Economist and Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center“Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected.
Piketty’s key message is both simple and, once understood, almost self-evident. Under capitalism, if the rate of return on private wealth (defined to include physical and financial capital, land and housing) exceeds the rate of growth of the economy, the share of capital income in the net product will increase. If most of that increase in capital income is reinvested, the capital-to-income ratio will rise. This will further increase the share of capital income in the net output. The percentage of people who do not need to work in order to earn their living (the rentiers) will go up. The distribution of personal income will become even more unequal.
The story elegantly combines theories of growth, functional distribution of income (between capital and labor), and income inequality between individuals. It aims to provide nothing less than the description of a capitalist economy.”
A Middle Class is a Societal Choice
Saturday, Apr 19, 2014 09:00 AM CDT
Reaganomics killed America’s middle class
This country's fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980
Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
There’s nothing “normal” about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it’s a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation’s middle class.
Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.
At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, “middle” class of professionals and mercantilists – doctor, lawyers, shop-owners – who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people – typically over 90 percent of the population – who make up the working poor. They have no wealth – in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives – and can barely survive on what little money they make.
So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in “normal” capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.
You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today’s dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical “raw capitalism,” what we call “Reaganomics,” or “supply side economics,” our nation’s largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.
This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed – this huge change was done in less than 35 years.
The only ways a working-class “middle class” can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval – a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century – or by heavily taxing the rich.
French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.
According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.
Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?
This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America’s middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.
Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.
History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.
If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you’ll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich – the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations – was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.
You’ll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.
Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
Coincidence? I think not.
Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it “Voodoo Economics.” And we’re still in the era of Reaganomics – as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.
This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.
And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and ’70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement – social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era’s middle class – these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they’ve made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.
We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we’ve been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can’t have both.
And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.
The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.
Friday, April 18, 2014
Senator Elizabeth Warren
I see that she has a new book coming out Tuesday. I can't wait to read it. Here is the progressive who should be President.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Chair Fixed
We got Moyna's chair fixed today. It warms my heart to have someone with expertise do a job promptly.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Is Reading Anti-Social? I Hope So!
Wednesday, Apr 16, 2014 06:00 PM CDT
Is reading antisocial?
by Laura Miller
Another attempt to socially network books has bitten the dust. Maybe readers just want to be alone.
My parents had a mixed marriage. I’m referring not to their religious upbringings (Catholic and Episcopalian) but to their attitudes toward reading in company. My father thought two or more people sitting in a room, each one reading, could be a highly congenial arrangement. My mother regarded poking your nose in a book when you could be talking to another person as an offense against society and all that was decent; she could not allow it to stand. Later, when I starting dating a man whose own mother picked up a book and happily joined the two of us as we sat reading in her living room, I felt a bit like Harry Potter arriving at Hogwarts for the first time.
Reading is a private activity, even as it allows us to commune with the mind and imagination of an author we will probably never meet. Yet because reading a great book can be so overwhelmingly gratifying and transformative, many of us yearn to share the experience with the people we care about. That’s why we join book groups and pester our friends to read our favorites. I once heard of two men, both obsessed with a popular novel series, who check into a hotel whenever a new title in the series is released so that together they can read the whole thing in one fell swoop and talk about it afterward — all without aggravating their wives.
When e-books and tablet computers first came along, they brought with them the prospect of being able to share and discuss responses to a book with a friend while you were actually reading it, in the form of highlights and annotations that appear right on the digital page. You can set your Kindle to show you which passages other readers have highlighted, for example. Too often, however, those readers’ choices — almost always lines that do double duty as inspirational mottos — are tedious. I don’t care what some random stranger thinks is the takeaway from, say, Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger.” I have, however, long harbored fantasies of using a shared reading app with one (or more) of my actual friends.
Most e-reader apps allow you to post the title of whatever book you’re reading on Facebook, and perhaps a quote from it as well. This is nice enough, but hardly “social” in any meaningful sense. A more ambitious app, Subtext, launched several years ago, promising a way for, say, book club members to share marginalia among the members of their group. Subtext debuted with some new books that had been annotated by their own authors; one was “The Magician King” by Lev Grossman, a friend whose tastes jibe well with my own. I posted a few responses to his annotations in Subtext, but he never noticed, having quite understandably moved on to writing the next novel in his “Magicians” trilogy. I suspect the last thing any author cares to look at are the off-the-cuff scribblings people have made on his work, and besides: What I wanted to discuss with Lev was other people’s books.
Subtext soon recast itself as an educational app for K-12 classrooms, leaving the field to the other major shared-reading alternative, Readmill. An elegantly designed app, Readmill allowed members to follow each other’s highlights and notes in the same way you can subscribe to the posts of a Tumblr. I persuaded my friend Liz, another novelist and critic whose opinions I value, that we should read Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels together on Readmill. I couldn’t get to the first book right away — my job involves heaps of assigned reading — and by the time I started it, she’d already torn through the entire series of five novels. “I couldn’t help myself,” she confessed. Having finally gotten around to reading the books myself, I can’t say I blame her.
Finally, my Salon colleague Daniel D’Addario and I agreed we’d read and annotate the new Evie Wyld novel, “All the Birds, Singing,” on Readmill, then collaborate on a story about the experience. There were some legitimate delays to starting our project (jury duty, freelance assignments) and there was, I confess, some dawdling. Wyld’s novel opens with a scene of a disemboweled sheep, and I seldom felt up to soldiering through it during my designated window of recreational reading time, late at night with my iPad propped up against a pillow.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Readmill announced that it had been bought by Dropbox and would soon be closed. “Many challenges in the world of ebooks remain unsolved,” its former owners announced on Readmill’s website, “and we failed to create a sustainable platform for reading.” If there’s a comparable e-reader app that permits its users to share on-the-page annotations with a select group of friends, I’ve yet to find it.
All of which prompts a question: Is my dream of a collaborative reading experience merely that, a dream? On the many occasions when I tried to set up a shared Subtext or Readmill reading with a friend, we always ran into endless snags, from an inability to settle on a book we both found appetizing to scheduling and pacing incompatibilities like the ones I had with Liz. Apparently, and despite the ongoing popularity of book groups, we weren’t alone in being flummoxed by the logistics of reading the same book together. After all, if there were a robust demand for a complexly shared reading app, wouldn’t Subtext and Readmill have found more users?
I suspect that, despite our pervasively socially networked culture, willful idiosyncrasy remains the very essence of reading. A book, and especially a novel, is a world you can enter at a time of your own choosing, and the world itself can be chosen from a seemingly infinite array of alternatives to suit whichever mood has taken you. That’s one of the things we love about reading. A reader’s imaginative freedom is absolute. My mother was not wrong in recognizing my childhood book binges as a retreat into a mental sanctuary whose doors were closed in her face. It turns out that even when we want to let other people in, there may not be enough room. I still love to share a sofa with a reading friend, but maybe, like planets circling each other in orbit, that’s as close as we need to get.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Sunday, April 13, 2014
The Monuments Men
It's okay but I'm glad I saw it for a buck at the Carmike on Lorna Road. The problem with this movie is that it's a serious historical subject but the mood seems more whimsical and humorous than serious. It is as if the director couldn't decide how he wanted to treat the subject. George Clooney is a good actor but it's hard to take him seriously in a role like this. I never could take the story seriously.
Along the Road Less Traveled
The road less traveled took some unexpected detours this week causing me to miss several important due dates and at least one critical appointment. At least I'm organized so that I miss things in chronological order.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
You Know
Some people seem to be able to find things out. Some people seem to "know things," as in what's really going on. Some people seem to always be "in the know." I envy these people because I am always one of the last to know anything. I made friends with one of these people once, but then he immediately clammed up and wouldn't say another word. I try to find out things but when I hear something new everyone else has already known about for at least a week. So when I say "what do I know?" I am speaking the truth.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Ben Tarnoff - The Bohemians
Mark Twain moved to the West Coast with his brother Orion in 1861 to assist his brother in the new state of Nevada but also to flee from the Civil War. He remained until 1867 balancing his time between Nevada and California. This book is mostly about the time he spent in San Francisco meeting fellow writers that the author of this book calls Bohemians. The book is entertaining though I'm not sure how much his Western experience really propelled his eventual literary success. The national success of the jumping frog story, yes, but the truth is that Twain left the West to seek his literary future in the East. Eventually he became known as an Easterner rather than a product of the West.
By the way, I have read and reread Twain's famous jumping frog story which launched his fame in the East. I know that humor is a personal thing and this illustrates it for I do not find the story at all funny.
San Francisco in the 1860's seems like a rollicking time. I wish I were there running around Montgomery Street.
My judgement on Twain is that he is overrated. Were it not for Huckleberry Finn he would not be much talked about.
By the way, I have read and reread Twain's famous jumping frog story which launched his fame in the East. I know that humor is a personal thing and this illustrates it for I do not find the story at all funny.
San Francisco in the 1860's seems like a rollicking time. I wish I were there running around Montgomery Street.
My judgement on Twain is that he is overrated. Were it not for Huckleberry Finn he would not be much talked about.
Dry and dry
We've been finally dry in Shelby County this week. We had our roof repaired this week. Let us hope spring weather continues.
Monday, April 7, 2014
Rain and More Rain
A terrific and scary weather front moved thru central Alabama last night. It rained HARD. We have a drip in our living room. The rain has stopped and we'll have somebody out to repair. I've never seen such flooding around Pelham. What a mess!
Sunday, April 6, 2014
The Week in Review
Arianna Huffington
Sunday RoundupThis week reminded us once again of the costs of accepting lowered expectations as the new normal. On Wednesday, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision struck down overall limits on campaign donations, further ceding our political system to the highest bidder in the guise of "free speech." On the same day, Ft. Hood, Texas suffered its second mass shooting in five years, as a married father of four, in a fit of anger, killed four people, including himself, and wounded 16 others. Senator Harry Reid introduced a background checks bill the next day, but it will likely suffer the same fate as the one that failed last year even with the support of 90 percent of Americans. The week ended with yet another middling jobs report, with just 192,000 added in March. All three of these things should spark urgent calls for reform and change, because accepting them as the new normal only guarantees more of the same.
Sunday RoundupThis week reminded us once again of the costs of accepting lowered expectations as the new normal. On Wednesday, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision struck down overall limits on campaign donations, further ceding our political system to the highest bidder in the guise of "free speech." On the same day, Ft. Hood, Texas suffered its second mass shooting in five years, as a married father of four, in a fit of anger, killed four people, including himself, and wounded 16 others. Senator Harry Reid introduced a background checks bill the next day, but it will likely suffer the same fate as the one that failed last year even with the support of 90 percent of Americans. The week ended with yet another middling jobs report, with just 192,000 added in March. All three of these things should spark urgent calls for reform and change, because accepting them as the new normal only guarantees more of the same.
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Social Media
I don't care for social media. It's for the young and I don't understand it. I'll stick to Facebook and Twitter.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Doo-Rail
April 2
.Our cat Doo-Rail just had a complete $288 physical. We spend more on this cat medically than we do ourselves. For a 16yr. old diabetic he is a medical marvel. To know him is to love him.
Like · · Promote · Share.
Marian Quinn, Monya Havekost, Vicki Holt Adams and 15 others like this..View 1 more comment..Moyna O'Riley Hudson @Diane ~ Yes, Doo-Rail gets 2 insulin shots/day - one in the morning & one in the evening. Plus he has special food to eat....April 2 at 5:58pm · Edited · Like
..Diane Bystrom That all sounds very familiar. It's amazing how well they can do when you get the correct insulin dosage going.April 2 at 6:13pm · Like · 1
..Alice Mintz Hill Looking good, Doo-Rail!April 2 at 7:34pm · Like
..Gwen Kirk It's only money Fred...and you know he is worth every penny!April 2 at 9:43pm · Like
.Our cat Doo-Rail just had a complete $288 physical. We spend more on this cat medically than we do ourselves. For a 16yr. old diabetic he is a medical marvel. To know him is to love him.
Like · · Promote · Share.
Marian Quinn, Monya Havekost, Vicki Holt Adams and 15 others like this..View 1 more comment..Moyna O'Riley Hudson @Diane ~ Yes, Doo-Rail gets 2 insulin shots/day - one in the morning & one in the evening. Plus he has special food to eat....April 2 at 5:58pm · Edited · Like
..Diane Bystrom That all sounds very familiar. It's amazing how well they can do when you get the correct insulin dosage going.April 2 at 6:13pm · Like · 1
..Alice Mintz Hill Looking good, Doo-Rail!April 2 at 7:34pm · Like
..Gwen Kirk It's only money Fred...and you know he is worth every penny!April 2 at 9:43pm · Like
The Truth About the Ryan Budget Proposal
Morning Plum: In GOP, 47 percenter-ism is alive and well
By Greg Sargent April 4 at 9:18 am
A new report to be released in coming days by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that an astonishing 69 percent of the budget cuts in Paul Ryan’s new fiscal blueprint would hit programs designed to ”serve people of limited means.”
CBPP calculates that Ryan’s new budget would level $3.3 trillion in cuts to such programs over 10 years — even as Republicans have been working to recast the party as concerned about poverty.
Ryan’s plan, which purports to balance the budget in 10 years, has no chance of going anywhere. But it matters as a statement of continuing GOP priorities, as a blueprint for the GOP’s vision for the economy and of government’s role — or lack of one — in combatting poverty and inequality and boosting economic mobility. It will, and should, figure in the midterm elections as a point of contrast with the Democratic agenda — raising the minimum wage, pay equity, early childhood education, infrastructure spending to create jobs, unemployment insurance, and of course the continued implementation of Obamacare, including the Medicaid expansion wherever it is moving forward.
The CBPP, which is liberal-leaning, previewed the new report in a blog post. The report itself will spell out the methodology. But the short version is that CBPP assumes that cuts the Ryan plan makes to particular budget categories — but that aren’t distributed among specific programs — would be imposed equally across all programs in any given category, including those not designed to help low-income Americans.
Using this method, CBPP calculates that the Ryan budget would cut $2.7 trillion from Medicaid and subsidies to help people buy private insurance, leaving 40 million people uninsured by 2024. It would cut food stamps by $137 billion over 10 years; Pell Grants by up to $125 billion; $385 billion from mandatory programs helping poor and moderate income Americans such as SSI; and so on.
The overall 69 percent figure is comparable to CBPP’s calculation that Ryan’s 2013 budget would get 66 percent of its cuts from programs for people with low or moderate incomes, and its calculation that Ryan’s 2012 budget would get 62 percent of its cuts for such programs. And so deep and harmful cuts to the safety net remain every bit as central to the GOP’s chief economic blueprint, despite the rising volume of GOP rhetoric about crafting a poverty agenda. No problem there, however: Ryan explicitly sells this budget as a means to expand opportunity, and claims its deep cuts to the safety net would “empower” those benefiting from it.
********************************************************
Update: I’m told that it’s not accurate to characterize the percentage of cuts as rising from previous budgets, because of differing baselines, though they are comparable, so I’ve edited the above to correct. The broader point — that 47 percenter-ism has as much of a hold over the GOP as ever, despite promises of a poverty agenda — obviously stands.
A new report to be released in coming days by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that an astonishing 69 percent of the budget cuts in Paul Ryan’s new fiscal blueprint would hit programs designed to ”serve people of limited means.”
CBPP calculates that Ryan’s new budget would level $3.3 trillion in cuts to such programs over 10 years — even as Republicans have been working to recast the party as concerned about poverty.
Ryan’s plan, which purports to balance the budget in 10 years, has no chance of going anywhere. But it matters as a statement of continuing GOP priorities, as a blueprint for the GOP’s vision for the economy and of government’s role — or lack of one — in combatting poverty and inequality and boosting economic mobility. It will, and should, figure in the midterm elections as a point of contrast with the Democratic agenda — raising the minimum wage, pay equity, early childhood education, infrastructure spending to create jobs, unemployment insurance, and of course the continued implementation of Obamacare, including the Medicaid expansion wherever it is moving forward.
The CBPP, which is liberal-leaning, previewed the new report in a blog post. The report itself will spell out the methodology. But the short version is that CBPP assumes that cuts the Ryan plan makes to particular budget categories — but that aren’t distributed among specific programs — would be imposed equally across all programs in any given category, including those not designed to help low-income Americans.
Using this method, CBPP calculates that the Ryan budget would cut $2.7 trillion from Medicaid and subsidies to help people buy private insurance, leaving 40 million people uninsured by 2024. It would cut food stamps by $137 billion over 10 years; Pell Grants by up to $125 billion; $385 billion from mandatory programs helping poor and moderate income Americans such as SSI; and so on.
The overall 69 percent figure is comparable to CBPP’s calculation that Ryan’s 2013 budget would get 66 percent of its cuts from programs for people with low or moderate incomes, and its calculation that Ryan’s 2012 budget would get 62 percent of its cuts for such programs. And so deep and harmful cuts to the safety net remain every bit as central to the GOP’s chief economic blueprint, despite the rising volume of GOP rhetoric about crafting a poverty agenda. No problem there, however: Ryan explicitly sells this budget as a means to expand opportunity, and claims its deep cuts to the safety net would “empower” those benefiting from it.
********************************************************
Update: I’m told that it’s not accurate to characterize the percentage of cuts as rising from previous budgets, because of differing baselines, though they are comparable, so I’ve edited the above to correct. The broader point — that 47 percenter-ism has as much of a hold over the GOP as ever, despite promises of a poverty agenda — obviously stands.
Obamacare's Victory
Friday, Apr 4, 2014 09:20 AM CDT
Paul Krugman: It’s time to “celebrate” Obamacare and “ridicule right-wingers”
After years of waiting and a hellacious autumn of website glitches and system failure, Paul Krugman writes in his latest column for the New York Times that it’s time for Obamacare supporters to celebrate — and time for reform’s opponents to admit defeat.
“The Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, has made a stunning comeback from its shambolic start,” Krugman writes. “As the March 31 deadline for 2014 coverage approached, there was a surge in applications at the ‘exchanges’ — the special insurance marketplaces the law set up. And the original target of seven million signups, widely dismissed as unattainable, has been surpassed.”
“This is a very big deal indeed,” he adds.
Krugman’s argument is pretty straightforward: Obamacare was always going to be overly complicated and a bit messy, largely due to the fact that it was a complex political solution to what, in policy terms, is a rather simple problem.
“Remember, giving everyone health insurance doesn’t have to be hard; you can just do it with a government-run program,” Krugman writes. “But it wasn’t politically possible, for a couple reasons,” mainly the power of the health insurance industry as well as the fact that most people like their employer-provided insurance.
Because of Obamacare’s “Rube Goldberg” nature (as Krugman puts it), it was always possible that its technical hiccups would be seized upon by its opponents as proof of its fundamental unworkability. “And last fall,” Krugman writes, “that nightmare seemed to be coming true.”
Yet now Obamacare’s surpassed its 7 million sign-up goal and, as far as Krugman sees it, happy days are more or less here — finally. “[T]he nightmare is over,” Krugman declares, “This thing is going to work.”
So what’s next? Krugman advises Obamacare fans enjoy this long-elusive moment vindication — and needle a few Obamacare-doubting conservatives while they’re at it, too:
And, yes, it’s also a big political victory for Democrats. They can point to a system that is already providing vital aid to millions of Americans, and Republicans — who were planning to run against a debacle — have nothing to offer in response. And I mean nothing. So far, not one of the supposed Obamacare horror stories featured in attack ads has stood up to scrutiny.
So my advice to reform supporters is, go ahead and celebrate. Oh, and feel free to ridicule right-wingers who confidently predicted doom.
Clearly, there’s a lot of work ahead, and we can count on the news media to play up every hitch and glitch as if it were an existential disaster. But Rube Goldberg has survived; health reform has won.
The Justice Speaks of His Reading Habits
Sunday Book Review
John Paul Stevens: By the Book
APRIL 3, 2014
The former Supreme Court justice and author of “Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir” and, most recently, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” feels indebted to Norman Maclean, who taught him poetry at the University of Chicago.
What books are currently on your night stand?
“The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?
Leo Tolstoy for all time; Edward Rutherfurd or Ruth Rendell for living authors.
What books on the law would you most recommend to the general reader? And to a student of law?
Ken Manaster’s “The American Legal System and Civic Engagement” to the general reader; Leon Green’s “Judge and Jury” for law students.
Who are the best people writing about law today?
Probably Stephen Breyer and Richard Posner.
What are your literary guilty pleasures? Do you have a favorite genre?
MAY 3, 2012 Writings about the authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?
The King James edition of the Bible, and mysteries by Georges Simenon.
What was the last book to make you laugh?
Dave Barry’s report on last year’s news events.
The last book that made you cry?
I don’t remember.
The last book that made you furious?
“Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” by Gilbert King.
What kind of reader were you as a child? And what were your favorite books?
Both of my parents loved books and encouraged my brothers and me to read a great deal. Among my favorites were: “Winnie-the-Pooh”; Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Men” and “Little Women”; Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”; Count Felix von Luckner’s account of his raids on Allied shipping during the First World War; and dozens of books about Tom Swift.
What were the most influential books you read as a student?
Aristotle’s “Poetics.”
Whom do you consider your literary heroes?
The author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare; I am also a great fan of A. Conan Doyle.
Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?
I don’t know what novels may have motivated any of my writing, but the teacher to whom I am most indebted was Norman Maclean, who taught the course in poetry at the University of Chicago.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Six Amendments.”
You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
Samuel Clemens, Charles Dickens and the author of the Shakespeare canon. If they decline, I would invite Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet.
What kinds of books do you like to read before you go to bed?
History.
And what kinds of books do you read when you travel?
Supreme Court opinions.
What’s the worst book you’ve ever read?
I didn’t finish it and don’t remember it.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
“Remembrance of Things Past,” by Marcel Proust.
What do you plan to read next?
Reviews of “Six Amendments.”
John Paul Stevens: By the Book
APRIL 3, 2014
The former Supreme Court justice and author of “Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir” and, most recently, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” feels indebted to Norman Maclean, who taught him poetry at the University of Chicago.
What books are currently on your night stand?
“The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?
Leo Tolstoy for all time; Edward Rutherfurd or Ruth Rendell for living authors.
What books on the law would you most recommend to the general reader? And to a student of law?
Ken Manaster’s “The American Legal System and Civic Engagement” to the general reader; Leon Green’s “Judge and Jury” for law students.
Who are the best people writing about law today?
Probably Stephen Breyer and Richard Posner.
What are your literary guilty pleasures? Do you have a favorite genre?
MAY 3, 2012 Writings about the authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?
The King James edition of the Bible, and mysteries by Georges Simenon.
What was the last book to make you laugh?
Dave Barry’s report on last year’s news events.
The last book that made you cry?
I don’t remember.
The last book that made you furious?
“Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” by Gilbert King.
What kind of reader were you as a child? And what were your favorite books?
Both of my parents loved books and encouraged my brothers and me to read a great deal. Among my favorites were: “Winnie-the-Pooh”; Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Men” and “Little Women”; Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”; Count Felix von Luckner’s account of his raids on Allied shipping during the First World War; and dozens of books about Tom Swift.
What were the most influential books you read as a student?
Aristotle’s “Poetics.”
Whom do you consider your literary heroes?
The author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare; I am also a great fan of A. Conan Doyle.
Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?
I don’t know what novels may have motivated any of my writing, but the teacher to whom I am most indebted was Norman Maclean, who taught the course in poetry at the University of Chicago.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Six Amendments.”
You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
Samuel Clemens, Charles Dickens and the author of the Shakespeare canon. If they decline, I would invite Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet.
What kinds of books do you like to read before you go to bed?
History.
And what kinds of books do you read when you travel?
Supreme Court opinions.
What’s the worst book you’ve ever read?
I didn’t finish it and don’t remember it.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
“Remembrance of Things Past,” by Marcel Proust.
What do you plan to read next?
Reviews of “Six Amendments.”
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