BY Jacob Sloan
http://www.disinfo.com/2011/09/is-less-reading-fiction-making-us-less-empathetic/
14 September 2011
The Guardian discusses research on the powerful link between empathy and reading fiction — a novel is a singular experience in terms of being immersed in the interior life of another person, forcing us to undergo events through the protagonist’s eyes and placing us amongst their thoughts. Studies have pointed to a stunting of empathy in young adults over the past few decades — could one reason be the decline of reading of novels for pleasure?
Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities.
Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer’s Twilight or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to read. The study’s authors, Dr. Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, then applied what they dubbed the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale, which saw the students asked questions designed to measure their identification with the worlds they had been reading about.
Published by the journal Psychological Science, the study found that participants who read the Harry Potter chapters self-identified as wizards, whereas participants who read the Twilight chapter self-identified as vampires. And “belonging” to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups.
The psychology of fiction is a small but growing area of research, according to Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist himself, who details the latest findings in the area in his online magazine, OnFiction.
One of his own studies, carried out in 2008, gave 166 participants either the Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Little Dog, or a version of the story rewritten in documentary form. The subjects’ personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading, with those who were given the Chekhov story in its unadulterated form found to have gone through greater changes in personality – empathizing with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them.
“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”
The findings could, Oatley believes, have significant implications, particularly in a climate where arts funding is under threat. “It is the first empirical finding, so far as I know, to show a clear psychological effect of reading fiction,” he said. “It’s a result that shows that reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding, but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education. In an era when high-school and university subjects are evaluated economically, our results do have economic implications.”
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Texas Justice
Texas Justice
What Rick Perry has in common with Clarence Thomas.
Jeffrey Rosen
For the past generation, if you wanted to understand the legal philosophy of the leading Republican presidential contenders, the best person to look to was Antonin Scalia. And, on the surface, that would appear to be true again this year. After all, the current Republican front-runner, Rick Perry, has plenty in common with Scalia—namely, a professed aversion to judges who legislate from the bench or broadly interpret the Constitution.
But, once you read Perry’s manifesto, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Perry represents a sharp break from the recent tradition of Republican presidential candidates when it comes to constitutional issues. In fact, Perry’s ideas about the law are so outside the mainstream of judicial thought that they cannot really be said to align with Scalia’s views. Instead, Perry’s legal proposals place him much closer to someone with a very different set of constitutional ideas: Clarence Thomas.
OF COURSE, REFERRING to Perry’s constitutional vision may be something of a misnomer. He acknowledges that Fed Up! was written with the assistance of Chip Roy, “an outstanding legal scholar who previously served as senior advisor to the U.S. Senator John Cornyn in his Senate leadership office and on the Senate Judiciary Committee.” And, in an interview with Newsweek last fall, Perry seemed to possess a shaky grasp of the constitutional arguments featured in his book. When asked to elaborate on why the Seventeenth Amendment should be repealed and why the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution didn’t authorize Congress to pass Social Security and Medicare, he responded with evasions and then silence.
Still, Fed Up! is unusual among presidential candidate manifestos for the intensity of its focus on constitutional issues. And, though his campaign has tried to distance Perry from the book, there can be little doubt about Perry’s commitment to pursuing its agenda: He is donating all profits from the book to the Texas Public Policy Foundation to support its Center for Tenth Amendment Studies, an organization devoted to challenging the constitutionality of the regulatory state.
Laws and government programs that Perry is “fed up” with include federal criminal laws, environmental regulations arising from the Clean Air Act, No Child Left Behind, Social Security, Medicare, congressional earmarks, the federal tax code, and the Department of Homeland Security. It’s not surprising that Perry would oppose these actions on policy grounds, but he goes much further, making the drastic argument that all but the last two of these initiatives are unconstitutional. He reaches this conclusion mostly by arguing that the Supreme Court wrongly held in the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn that Congress can regulate any activity that has a remote connection to the exchange of goods. On the current Court, only Thomas holds this belief; Perry excoriates Scalia for affirming that Wickard was correctly decided.
Thomas’s legal philosophy combines crusading social conservatism, an implacable hostility to federal power, and a willingness to overturn more than 50 years of jurisprudence undergirding laws he believes are unconstitutional. (Scalia has pointed out that, unlike himself, Thomas “does not believe in stare decisis, period.”) This description could equally be applied to Perry, who ridicules not only Roe v. Wade but also Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision recognizing the right of married couples to use contraceptives. (In their confirmation hearings, both John Roberts and Samuel Alito expressed support for Griswold.) Perry also endorses the Tea Party axiom, championed only by Thomas, that the original intent of the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion was to prevent the creation of a national church, not to disestablish state churches.
There’s more: Perry endorses the Arizona law challenging the federal government’s exclusive power to enforce immigration laws. (A federal court has rejected part of the Arizona measure, and Scalia, Roberts, and Alito—all proponents of executive power—may ultimately oppose it.) He says that the 2006 extensions to the Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional—a conclusion that George W. Bush, who signed the law, and all of the Court’s conservatives except for Thomas refused to embrace. Nor is Perry’s agenda limited to overturning federal laws: He also says the Court should strike down state and local laws regulating guns and endorsing affirmative action. (Needless to say, these ideas are completely inconsistent with one of the major themes of his book—the notion that the Court is a hotbed of out-of-control judicial activism.)
Perry’s constitutional vision blooms into full nuttiness in the concluding chapter, which offers a blueprint for the resurrection of states’ rights. He endorses the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax, and a constitutional amendment endorsed by Robert Bork that would allow Congress to override the Supreme Court by a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate. Previous Republican presidential candidates, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have thrown some rhetorical bones to the legal far right; but, until now, no serious Republican presidential candidate has embraced a constitutional vision quite like this. The fact that Perry is leading the Republican pack shows just how close the GOP is to leaping off the constitutional deep end.
What Rick Perry has in common with Clarence Thomas.
Jeffrey Rosen
For the past generation, if you wanted to understand the legal philosophy of the leading Republican presidential contenders, the best person to look to was Antonin Scalia. And, on the surface, that would appear to be true again this year. After all, the current Republican front-runner, Rick Perry, has plenty in common with Scalia—namely, a professed aversion to judges who legislate from the bench or broadly interpret the Constitution.
But, once you read Perry’s manifesto, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Perry represents a sharp break from the recent tradition of Republican presidential candidates when it comes to constitutional issues. In fact, Perry’s ideas about the law are so outside the mainstream of judicial thought that they cannot really be said to align with Scalia’s views. Instead, Perry’s legal proposals place him much closer to someone with a very different set of constitutional ideas: Clarence Thomas.
OF COURSE, REFERRING to Perry’s constitutional vision may be something of a misnomer. He acknowledges that Fed Up! was written with the assistance of Chip Roy, “an outstanding legal scholar who previously served as senior advisor to the U.S. Senator John Cornyn in his Senate leadership office and on the Senate Judiciary Committee.” And, in an interview with Newsweek last fall, Perry seemed to possess a shaky grasp of the constitutional arguments featured in his book. When asked to elaborate on why the Seventeenth Amendment should be repealed and why the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution didn’t authorize Congress to pass Social Security and Medicare, he responded with evasions and then silence.
Still, Fed Up! is unusual among presidential candidate manifestos for the intensity of its focus on constitutional issues. And, though his campaign has tried to distance Perry from the book, there can be little doubt about Perry’s commitment to pursuing its agenda: He is donating all profits from the book to the Texas Public Policy Foundation to support its Center for Tenth Amendment Studies, an organization devoted to challenging the constitutionality of the regulatory state.
Laws and government programs that Perry is “fed up” with include federal criminal laws, environmental regulations arising from the Clean Air Act, No Child Left Behind, Social Security, Medicare, congressional earmarks, the federal tax code, and the Department of Homeland Security. It’s not surprising that Perry would oppose these actions on policy grounds, but he goes much further, making the drastic argument that all but the last two of these initiatives are unconstitutional. He reaches this conclusion mostly by arguing that the Supreme Court wrongly held in the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn that Congress can regulate any activity that has a remote connection to the exchange of goods. On the current Court, only Thomas holds this belief; Perry excoriates Scalia for affirming that Wickard was correctly decided.
Thomas’s legal philosophy combines crusading social conservatism, an implacable hostility to federal power, and a willingness to overturn more than 50 years of jurisprudence undergirding laws he believes are unconstitutional. (Scalia has pointed out that, unlike himself, Thomas “does not believe in stare decisis, period.”) This description could equally be applied to Perry, who ridicules not only Roe v. Wade but also Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision recognizing the right of married couples to use contraceptives. (In their confirmation hearings, both John Roberts and Samuel Alito expressed support for Griswold.) Perry also endorses the Tea Party axiom, championed only by Thomas, that the original intent of the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion was to prevent the creation of a national church, not to disestablish state churches.
There’s more: Perry endorses the Arizona law challenging the federal government’s exclusive power to enforce immigration laws. (A federal court has rejected part of the Arizona measure, and Scalia, Roberts, and Alito—all proponents of executive power—may ultimately oppose it.) He says that the 2006 extensions to the Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional—a conclusion that George W. Bush, who signed the law, and all of the Court’s conservatives except for Thomas refused to embrace. Nor is Perry’s agenda limited to overturning federal laws: He also says the Court should strike down state and local laws regulating guns and endorsing affirmative action. (Needless to say, these ideas are completely inconsistent with one of the major themes of his book—the notion that the Court is a hotbed of out-of-control judicial activism.)
Perry’s constitutional vision blooms into full nuttiness in the concluding chapter, which offers a blueprint for the resurrection of states’ rights. He endorses the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax, and a constitutional amendment endorsed by Robert Bork that would allow Congress to override the Supreme Court by a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate. Previous Republican presidential candidates, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have thrown some rhetorical bones to the legal far right; but, until now, no serious Republican presidential candidate has embraced a constitutional vision quite like this. The fact that Perry is leading the Republican pack shows just how close the GOP is to leaping off the constitutional deep end.
Gene Chizik - All In (4)
In Chapter 4 the Coach says that he does not read newspapers or listen to media commentaries about his program. He has people in the athletic dept. who keep him apprised of any damaging reports he needs to be aware of as a head coach. His relationships with writers is strictly professional.
He says he was truly shocked when Jay Jacobs called him about applying for the Auburn job. He had no idea it was coming. After all, he was 5 & 19 as a head coach!
You read this chapter and you see that Gene Chizik truly loves Auburn. He talks about Tiger Walk and the eagle flying and the stands full of orange and you know that his affection for Auburn is real.
His hiring at Auburn was hectic and messy. It was messy because there were hard feelings that exist to this day at Iowa State. But we Auburn people are certainly glad he's at our place now.
He says he was truly shocked when Jay Jacobs called him about applying for the Auburn job. He had no idea it was coming. After all, he was 5 & 19 as a head coach!
You read this chapter and you see that Gene Chizik truly loves Auburn. He talks about Tiger Walk and the eagle flying and the stands full of orange and you know that his affection for Auburn is real.
His hiring at Auburn was hectic and messy. It was messy because there were hard feelings that exist to this day at Iowa State. But we Auburn people are certainly glad he's at our place now.
Leftists of Yesteryear
A Eulogy for Carl Oglesby, the Man Who Inspired the New Left, Then Was Abandoned by It
by Todd Gitlin
In 1965, when Carl Oglesby threw himself into the New Left—“the movement” was the more intimate term, meaning life-force, energy, motion—he was a 30-year-old paterfamilias with a wife and three small children, living in a nice little Ann Arbor house on (he relished the memory) Sunnyside Street, making a solid living as a technical editor-writer for a military-industrial think-tank called Bendix. He golfed, drove a snappy little sports car, wrote plays, and smoked good dope—a damn fine life for the son of an Akron rubber worker and the grandson of a coal miner. He’d been a champion debater in high school and at Kent State University, and for a time an actor. Pretty much an autodidact, he was reading Cold War revisionist scholarship in an effort to figure out why America, the only country on earth he could ever have hailed from, was burning up peasants on the other side of the world.
At high velocity, as people did then, he “went through changes.” One minute he was writing against the Vietnam war for a Democratic congressional candidate (who refused to deliver the speech); the next, he was writing it up for the University of Michigan literary magazine; the next, he was turning it into a pamphlet for Students for a Democratic Society, which was organizing a national demonstration against the war but didn’t yet have any antiwar “literature” on offer. In June 1965, Oglesby, the evident talent of the hour, was elected president of the organization, and as the antiwar movement burgeoned, he was much in demand. Whirlwind tours ensued. In November, as SDS president, he was the token radical at a Washington Monument rally, placed late in a program of moderates. Many had drifted away when he stole the show with the finest piece of oratory ever to emerge from the white New Left.
It was a dream moment for an unabashed moralist skilled in the dramaturgical arts. The moral stakes of the moment, he insisted, rested on both an intellectual and an existential choice between “two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.” The bad one was “illiberal” and “corporate.” The alternative, “in the name of simple human decency and democracy,” was nothing less than “a humanist reformation.” “We radicals,” he said, asked liberals to “risk a leap. … Help us build. Help us shape the future in the name of plain human hope.” Can you imagine a time when a radical orator spoke like this?
Idealistic he was, but not naive: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. … It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam is a complex and vicious war.” He was all-American, Midwestern, and original: “We have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.” Was Soviet Communist not a rotten system? Of course. But “my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or that this one’s shame deposits in that one’s account the right to shamefulness. And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
People heard this intense American voice rising in indignation, and patriotic disgust, and “plain human hope,” and felt spoken for. They joined SDS. Thousands of young people, on fire, imagined that they could change the world. Here was a man old enough to be their older brother, a man of neither their generation nor their parents’, an accomplished man who had thrown in his lot with the big new thing that was happening—who had picked himself up and transformed his own life. His passion and persuasive power were infused with the sense that he poured his whole self into the new possibilities that the movement stood for. He was at stake. He wasn’t playing a role; he was living a life.
He had found a world where words mattered, drama mattered, and intellectual life was neither arid nor necessarily credentialed. Words counted. Whether from the podium, or face to face, or over the kitchen table, he loved putting words together. He spoke in whole sentences, often enough in great rolling cadences, accelerating with Faulknerian momentum. (When I was working on my first book, which would consist mostly of narratives from Southern whites—“hillbillies”—living in Chicago, he told me to read As I Lay Dying.) He was pungent, not showy. To say he was a master of rhetoric would be to cheapen his achievement, now that we live in an age when the word connotes windy clichés and the art of communicating in 140-character bursts is more highly prized. On paper, he dazzled. SDS reprinted the text of his Washington speech in many thousands of copies.
A lot of restless, estranged, disgusted young people who read him or heard him speak felt—still feel—that he changed their lives. Years later, Newsweek wrote about one Wellesley student in particular who subscribed to a Methodist student magazine called Motive, where she had read a piece of his—or anyway, Newsweek reported in 1994, “a Methodist theologian, Carl Oglesby.” “It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam war,” she said years later. The student was named Hillary Rodham, and the misattribution wasn’t far off. Oglesby preached. His theology was an improvised search for a political faith, riddled with doubt as it had to be, offering something deeper—more spiritual, indeed—than either liberal or Marxist clichés about the inevitability of progress.
At the time, his high art was the art of intellectual dismantling. He delivered to the crackpot Cold War theories of the time—especially the one about dominoes flopping over, ostensibly at the behest of China, which in fact had been Vietnam’s enemy, not leader, for a thousand years—the scathing demolition they deserved, and helped make it respectable to unearth the imperialism that formed the unspeakable part of America’s Cold War self-righteousness. But his analytic equipment wasn’t capable of laying a new intellectual foundation. (No one’s was.) Sometimes the drama he conjured was too bare, stripped down to caricature. Corporate liberalism was too shaky a concept to hold the intellectual weight he wanted to place on it.
“Why the New Left? Why not the current Left?” he asked, trying to find out. Well, the political generation that followed him, two or three years on, under pressure of war and revolutionary delusions and their own shallowness, decided it no longer wanted to be a New Left at all. They wanted to be The Left, meaning an all-or-nothing, go-for-broke, Leninist-based left. Carl was in shock when they accused him of having “bad politics.” How could he have bad politics, he asked, when he didn’t really have politics at all—or rather, when he was trying to find what an actual American left-wing politics would be? He flirted with libertarians and they flirted with him. He flirted with liberal businessmen. But clarity didn’t take shape, neither for him nor his most trusted colleagues, and in the meantime, the cocky revolutionists were in a hurry. Self-infatuated revolutionists with no talent for clear thinking but plenty of melodramatic impulse drummed him out of the movement that had become his whole life. At 35, he was dumped on the ash-heap of history.
The implosion of the New Left hit Oglesby especially hard—inner Pascalian that he was, he had wagered everything on a movement that had now gone berserk. Nothing could follow but burn-out. Having entered the movement as l’homme revolté, in Camus’ sense, he was now equally revolted by the revolutionary “solution” that had become, itself, part of the problem. His flair for both high and low drama led him down the path of conspiracy theories. His best work after the ’60s was lyrical. Even when melancholy, he smoldered, ever unreconciled to conquerors of all stripes. You catch a whiff of his force in these brief PBS interview excerpts. There’s a fit trace of his lyrical melancholy in this song from his second folk album. (A vinyl of the first, Carl Oglesby, is hard to find but deeply worth the effort.) “No more illusions could begin,” he sang. One song, “Cherokee Queen,” he wrote upon discovering that he had a Cherokee grandmother.
No one I ever met loved America so much as to feel such anguish at what it was becoming. We shall not look upon his like again.
by Todd Gitlin
In 1965, when Carl Oglesby threw himself into the New Left—“the movement” was the more intimate term, meaning life-force, energy, motion—he was a 30-year-old paterfamilias with a wife and three small children, living in a nice little Ann Arbor house on (he relished the memory) Sunnyside Street, making a solid living as a technical editor-writer for a military-industrial think-tank called Bendix. He golfed, drove a snappy little sports car, wrote plays, and smoked good dope—a damn fine life for the son of an Akron rubber worker and the grandson of a coal miner. He’d been a champion debater in high school and at Kent State University, and for a time an actor. Pretty much an autodidact, he was reading Cold War revisionist scholarship in an effort to figure out why America, the only country on earth he could ever have hailed from, was burning up peasants on the other side of the world.
At high velocity, as people did then, he “went through changes.” One minute he was writing against the Vietnam war for a Democratic congressional candidate (who refused to deliver the speech); the next, he was writing it up for the University of Michigan literary magazine; the next, he was turning it into a pamphlet for Students for a Democratic Society, which was organizing a national demonstration against the war but didn’t yet have any antiwar “literature” on offer. In June 1965, Oglesby, the evident talent of the hour, was elected president of the organization, and as the antiwar movement burgeoned, he was much in demand. Whirlwind tours ensued. In November, as SDS president, he was the token radical at a Washington Monument rally, placed late in a program of moderates. Many had drifted away when he stole the show with the finest piece of oratory ever to emerge from the white New Left.
It was a dream moment for an unabashed moralist skilled in the dramaturgical arts. The moral stakes of the moment, he insisted, rested on both an intellectual and an existential choice between “two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.” The bad one was “illiberal” and “corporate.” The alternative, “in the name of simple human decency and democracy,” was nothing less than “a humanist reformation.” “We radicals,” he said, asked liberals to “risk a leap. … Help us build. Help us shape the future in the name of plain human hope.” Can you imagine a time when a radical orator spoke like this?
Idealistic he was, but not naive: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. … It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam is a complex and vicious war.” He was all-American, Midwestern, and original: “We have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.” Was Soviet Communist not a rotten system? Of course. But “my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or that this one’s shame deposits in that one’s account the right to shamefulness. And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
People heard this intense American voice rising in indignation, and patriotic disgust, and “plain human hope,” and felt spoken for. They joined SDS. Thousands of young people, on fire, imagined that they could change the world. Here was a man old enough to be their older brother, a man of neither their generation nor their parents’, an accomplished man who had thrown in his lot with the big new thing that was happening—who had picked himself up and transformed his own life. His passion and persuasive power were infused with the sense that he poured his whole self into the new possibilities that the movement stood for. He was at stake. He wasn’t playing a role; he was living a life.
He had found a world where words mattered, drama mattered, and intellectual life was neither arid nor necessarily credentialed. Words counted. Whether from the podium, or face to face, or over the kitchen table, he loved putting words together. He spoke in whole sentences, often enough in great rolling cadences, accelerating with Faulknerian momentum. (When I was working on my first book, which would consist mostly of narratives from Southern whites—“hillbillies”—living in Chicago, he told me to read As I Lay Dying.) He was pungent, not showy. To say he was a master of rhetoric would be to cheapen his achievement, now that we live in an age when the word connotes windy clichés and the art of communicating in 140-character bursts is more highly prized. On paper, he dazzled. SDS reprinted the text of his Washington speech in many thousands of copies.
A lot of restless, estranged, disgusted young people who read him or heard him speak felt—still feel—that he changed their lives. Years later, Newsweek wrote about one Wellesley student in particular who subscribed to a Methodist student magazine called Motive, where she had read a piece of his—or anyway, Newsweek reported in 1994, “a Methodist theologian, Carl Oglesby.” “It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam war,” she said years later. The student was named Hillary Rodham, and the misattribution wasn’t far off. Oglesby preached. His theology was an improvised search for a political faith, riddled with doubt as it had to be, offering something deeper—more spiritual, indeed—than either liberal or Marxist clichés about the inevitability of progress.
At the time, his high art was the art of intellectual dismantling. He delivered to the crackpot Cold War theories of the time—especially the one about dominoes flopping over, ostensibly at the behest of China, which in fact had been Vietnam’s enemy, not leader, for a thousand years—the scathing demolition they deserved, and helped make it respectable to unearth the imperialism that formed the unspeakable part of America’s Cold War self-righteousness. But his analytic equipment wasn’t capable of laying a new intellectual foundation. (No one’s was.) Sometimes the drama he conjured was too bare, stripped down to caricature. Corporate liberalism was too shaky a concept to hold the intellectual weight he wanted to place on it.
“Why the New Left? Why not the current Left?” he asked, trying to find out. Well, the political generation that followed him, two or three years on, under pressure of war and revolutionary delusions and their own shallowness, decided it no longer wanted to be a New Left at all. They wanted to be The Left, meaning an all-or-nothing, go-for-broke, Leninist-based left. Carl was in shock when they accused him of having “bad politics.” How could he have bad politics, he asked, when he didn’t really have politics at all—or rather, when he was trying to find what an actual American left-wing politics would be? He flirted with libertarians and they flirted with him. He flirted with liberal businessmen. But clarity didn’t take shape, neither for him nor his most trusted colleagues, and in the meantime, the cocky revolutionists were in a hurry. Self-infatuated revolutionists with no talent for clear thinking but plenty of melodramatic impulse drummed him out of the movement that had become his whole life. At 35, he was dumped on the ash-heap of history.
The implosion of the New Left hit Oglesby especially hard—inner Pascalian that he was, he had wagered everything on a movement that had now gone berserk. Nothing could follow but burn-out. Having entered the movement as l’homme revolté, in Camus’ sense, he was now equally revolted by the revolutionary “solution” that had become, itself, part of the problem. His flair for both high and low drama led him down the path of conspiracy theories. His best work after the ’60s was lyrical. Even when melancholy, he smoldered, ever unreconciled to conquerors of all stripes. You catch a whiff of his force in these brief PBS interview excerpts. There’s a fit trace of his lyrical melancholy in this song from his second folk album. (A vinyl of the first, Carl Oglesby, is hard to find but deeply worth the effort.) “No more illusions could begin,” he sang. One song, “Cherokee Queen,” he wrote upon discovering that he had a Cherokee grandmother.
No one I ever met loved America so much as to feel such anguish at what it was becoming. We shall not look upon his like again.
Friday, September 16, 2011
The Ugliness of the Republican Party
FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC: It was an ugly moment at the September 7 Republican debate when the discussion turned to the death penalty. “Governor Perry, a question about Texas,” moderator Brian Williams began. “Your state has executed two-hundred thirty-four death-row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times.” Suddenly, Williams was interrupted by an outburst of applause and cheers from the audience. The point being made by the Republican spectators could not have been clearer: The death penalty was not just a policy they favored. It was something to celebrate. And Rick Perry’s answer to the question was about as thoughtful as the audience’s reaction. “I’ve never struggled with that at all,” he said—a boast that was especially unsettling because Texas almost certainly executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, on Perry’s watch.
The death penalty is unlikely to be a pivotal issue in the upcoming campaign, and it is certainly not the most urgent question that the country faces. Liberals long ago stopped making a big deal of their opposition to the death penalty, and in some cases they actually embraced it. Bill Clinton, for example, famously returned to Arkansas during the 1992 presidential campaign to preside over the execution of a man suffering from mental retardation. And, while not all Democratic politicians have been so crude in staking out safer ideological ground, many have nevertheless done their best to avoid the matter.
We are opposed to the death penalty—we think it is constitutionally, practically, and morally wrong, and we think it is important for liberals to say so—but that is not the sole reason we were concerned by the Republican applause at last week’s debate. After all, the death penalty is probably here to stay for the moment. And, at the national level, aside from appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court, there probably isn’t much that a president can do to hasten its demise.
But the applause at the debate reminded us that there was a time not so long ago when conservatives joined liberals in believing that compassion was an important societal virtue. Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, cheering about capital punishment is not exactly a compassionate thing to do. Even if you believe that executions of criminals are necessary, even if you believe that they serve justice, it is neither decent nor humane to glorify them.
The death penalty is hardly the only topic on which conservatives seem to have surrendered their compassion. Take immigration: However one feels about immigration—and it’s an issue where reasonable people can disagree—it seems fair to say that an element of empathy has been missing from the loudest Republican rhetoric on the subject. Just this summer, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, declared he would “do anything short of shooting” illegal immigrants to get them to leave the country. Iowa Republican Steve King, vice chairman of the House’s immigration subcommittee, has described the influx of undocumented immigrants into America as a “slow-motion holocaust” and “a slow-rolling, slowmotion terrorist attack on the United States.” Meanwhile, Republicans remain, by and large, resolutely opposed to the DREAM Act, which would provide legal status to many illegal immigrants who were brought here as children. The measure is really less a proposal about immigration policy and more a common-sense idea intended to protect people who were not responsible for having been brought here and who have tried only to make the best of the circumstances they were handed–in other words, people who have done nothing wrong and everything right. Forget whether you are liberal or conservative. Any decent person ought to be able to understand that it is cruel and unjust to punish people who find themselves in this predicament.
Throughout American history, voices on both the left and the right have played a vital role in reminding their own sides when they have gone too far or betrayed their ideals. As liberals, we can’t play this role for the right. But it would be nice to see some principled conservatives step forward and make the case that conservatism need not be so starkly incompatible with human empathy. Applauding executions or directing hateful rhetoric toward immigrants are the marks of a political philosophy that is drifting toward a certain nastiness. There must be conservative intellectuals or politicians who worry about this phenomenon in private or in silence. Now would be a good time for them to loudly repudiate it.
The death penalty is unlikely to be a pivotal issue in the upcoming campaign, and it is certainly not the most urgent question that the country faces. Liberals long ago stopped making a big deal of their opposition to the death penalty, and in some cases they actually embraced it. Bill Clinton, for example, famously returned to Arkansas during the 1992 presidential campaign to preside over the execution of a man suffering from mental retardation. And, while not all Democratic politicians have been so crude in staking out safer ideological ground, many have nevertheless done their best to avoid the matter.
We are opposed to the death penalty—we think it is constitutionally, practically, and morally wrong, and we think it is important for liberals to say so—but that is not the sole reason we were concerned by the Republican applause at last week’s debate. After all, the death penalty is probably here to stay for the moment. And, at the national level, aside from appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court, there probably isn’t much that a president can do to hasten its demise.
But the applause at the debate reminded us that there was a time not so long ago when conservatives joined liberals in believing that compassion was an important societal virtue. Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, cheering about capital punishment is not exactly a compassionate thing to do. Even if you believe that executions of criminals are necessary, even if you believe that they serve justice, it is neither decent nor humane to glorify them.
The death penalty is hardly the only topic on which conservatives seem to have surrendered their compassion. Take immigration: However one feels about immigration—and it’s an issue where reasonable people can disagree—it seems fair to say that an element of empathy has been missing from the loudest Republican rhetoric on the subject. Just this summer, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, declared he would “do anything short of shooting” illegal immigrants to get them to leave the country. Iowa Republican Steve King, vice chairman of the House’s immigration subcommittee, has described the influx of undocumented immigrants into America as a “slow-motion holocaust” and “a slow-rolling, slowmotion terrorist attack on the United States.” Meanwhile, Republicans remain, by and large, resolutely opposed to the DREAM Act, which would provide legal status to many illegal immigrants who were brought here as children. The measure is really less a proposal about immigration policy and more a common-sense idea intended to protect people who were not responsible for having been brought here and who have tried only to make the best of the circumstances they were handed–in other words, people who have done nothing wrong and everything right. Forget whether you are liberal or conservative. Any decent person ought to be able to understand that it is cruel and unjust to punish people who find themselves in this predicament.
Throughout American history, voices on both the left and the right have played a vital role in reminding their own sides when they have gone too far or betrayed their ideals. As liberals, we can’t play this role for the right. But it would be nice to see some principled conservatives step forward and make the case that conservatism need not be so starkly incompatible with human empathy. Applauding executions or directing hateful rhetoric toward immigrants are the marks of a political philosophy that is drifting toward a certain nastiness. There must be conservative intellectuals or politicians who worry about this phenomenon in private or in silence. Now would be a good time for them to loudly repudiate it.
What"s Really Going on with Our Politics
NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist
Free to Die
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 15, 2011
Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.
But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”
I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”
And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”
The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.
The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.
So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!”
Think, in particular, of the children.
The day after the debate, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates on income, poverty and health insurance. The overall picture was terrible: the weak economy continues to wreak havoc on American lives. One relatively bright spot, however, was health care for children: the percentage of children without health coverage was lower in 2010 than before the recession, largely thanks to the 2009 expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.
And the reason S-chip was expanded in 2009 but not earlier was, of course, that former President George W. Bush blocked earlier attempts to cover more children — to the cheers of many on the right. Did I mention that one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation?
So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics.
In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.
Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.
Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.
And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we’ve all grown up in? I guess we’ll find out next year.
Op-Ed Columnist
Free to Die
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 15, 2011
Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.
But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”
I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”
And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”
The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.
The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.
So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!”
Think, in particular, of the children.
The day after the debate, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates on income, poverty and health insurance. The overall picture was terrible: the weak economy continues to wreak havoc on American lives. One relatively bright spot, however, was health care for children: the percentage of children without health coverage was lower in 2010 than before the recession, largely thanks to the 2009 expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.
And the reason S-chip was expanded in 2009 but not earlier was, of course, that former President George W. Bush blocked earlier attempts to cover more children — to the cheers of many on the right. Did I mention that one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation?
So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics.
In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.
Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.
Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.
And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we’ve all grown up in? I guess we’ll find out next year.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Wall Street Income Inequality
Brooks Brothers Bolshevism: Wall Street Discovers Income Inequality
Timothy Noah
September 14, 2011
If you want to read a radical critique of twenty-first century American capitalism, skip the Daily Worker and go straight to Wall Street. A 2005 report by three Citigroup analysts coined the term “plutonomy” to describe an economy in which only the rich matter. In a follow-up report (cited in Don Peck’s excellent new book, Pinched), the analysts explained that the United States was “powered by the wealthy, who aggrandized larger chunks of the economy to themselves.”
Not to be outdone, Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year (in a clients-only newsletter obtained by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson) that “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” (Cembalest printed the latter quote in boldfaced lettering.) “US labor compensation,” he explained, “is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”
Cembalest and the Citigroup analysts see the American postindustrial economy’s abandonment of fair play as an interesting fact to consider in formulating future investment strategies, not an occasion to march down Broad Street waving some Fortune 500 chairman’s bald head atop a bloody pike. By contrast, the Wall Street maverick traders profiled in Michael Lewis’s razor-sharp 2010 narrative The Big Short see it as both. “The upper classes of this country raped this country” is one of the more polite things that Morgan Stanley money manager Steve Eisman has to say on the eve of the 2008 sub-prime fiasco. A Spartacus Youth clubber might judge Eisman’s rhetoric a trifle overwrought. A few pages later, Eisman concedes that, by shorting the sub-prime market, he helped create the liquidity that kept it going: “We fed the monster until it blew up.”
Then there’s Dan Alpert. As managing partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital, Alpert hasn’t lost interest in making money. But, when he describes his view of how joblessness and stagnating middle-income wages relate to the debt bubble of the aughts—as he’s been doing more and more in the financial press and on the Washington policy-wonk circuit—he sounds like Robespierre. (He’s actually more of a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. Alpert and I were grade-school friends when Humphrey lost his presidential bid in 1968; we fell out of touch soon after. This past winter, our mutual interest in income inequality, about which I’m writing a book, brought us together.)
Once upon a time, Alpert explains, American capitalists paid American laborers with something called a “salary.” Henry Ford famously boosted his workers’ pay to $5 a day so they could buy the Model Ts they were assembling. The better part of a century passed, and, by the early aughts, globalization had created a world oversupply of free-market labor—a hiring hall now housing about 2.6 billion recruits from emerging nations, together with roughly 550 million in the developed world. It no longer made financial sense to pay American workers high wages when you could pay Chinese workers low wages to do the same work. On the other hand, if American workers lost their spending power, who would keep the U.S. economy afloat?
The rise of cheap credit provided the answer. American labor effectively got paid in a different currency: debt. Instead of Model Ts, the latter-day working class bought overpriced houses and all sorts of other stuff it couldn’t afford. The beauty for the capitalists was that, when laborers got paid with debt, they had to pay it back with interest. Alpert calls it “middle-class serfdom.”
Alpert doesn’t believe there was a capitalist conspiracy; his point is that had there been a conspiracy, the outcome wouldn’t look much different. During the past half-century, Alpert explains, there were two large debt bubbles. The first one, during the late ’80s, saw real median incomes increase along with debt. Not a lot (inflation-adjusted median income hasn’t seen much growth since the early ’70s), but enough to ease the pain when the bubble burst in 1987. When plotted in a graph, the ’80s debt bubble looks like a big hill (debt) on top of a little hill (income). The second bubble, during the aughts, was a different story altogether. It occurred while real incomes went down. The aughts’ debt bubble looks like a big hill on top of a big valley. This time, there’s nothing to ease the pain.
Alpert isn’t the first person to suggest that our current economic troubles resulted from people buying with debt what they could no longer buy with wages; Raghuram G. Rajan has made a similar case in this magazine (see “Let Them Eat Credit,” August 27, 2010) and in his 2010 book Fault Lines. But Rajan is an economist. Alpert is a banker. Bankers buy, sell, and securitize debt. Banks are essentially debt stores, right?
No, Alpert says. You might call a commercial bank a debt store, he explained in an e-mail, or a foreign bank, or “the post-Glass-Steagall mega-monstrosities.” But an investment bank is (or at least is supposed to be) more of a capitalinvestment store. Alpert has, he concedes, created his share of “products” over his career, including the first pooled commercial-mortgage-backed securities to be graded by any of the big three ratings agencies. His firm got out of mortgage-backed securities “when the business became both irresponsible and commoditized. There was no value for us to add, because we don’t have a checkbook of other people’s money to fritter away.” They don’t have such a checkbook because Alpert’s firm is an old-fashioned partnership, not a publicly held company.
Why is Alpert so vocal? He says his clients benefit when “we channel our firm’s expertise, and America’s ingenuity in general, toward obtaining solutions to the current economic predicament.” A similar motive likely drove Warren Buffett to point out recently that, far from simplification, what the income tax really needs is the complication of two new tax brackets above $1 million and $10 million to keep up with growing income concentration at the top. “We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and Mexico,” a Proctor & Gamble vice president told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, referring to a measure of income distribution. Since when do marketing executives keep track of the Gini index? It seems that no one making an honest effort to diagnose the economy can avoid the topic of growing economic inequality. The rhetoric sounds alarmist because the situation is a genuine cause for alarm. Maybe that’s why even Democratic politicians have almost nothing to say about it.
Timothy Noah is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the October 6, 2011 issue of the magazine.
Timothy Noah
September 14, 2011
If you want to read a radical critique of twenty-first century American capitalism, skip the Daily Worker and go straight to Wall Street. A 2005 report by three Citigroup analysts coined the term “plutonomy” to describe an economy in which only the rich matter. In a follow-up report (cited in Don Peck’s excellent new book, Pinched), the analysts explained that the United States was “powered by the wealthy, who aggrandized larger chunks of the economy to themselves.”
Not to be outdone, Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year (in a clients-only newsletter obtained by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson) that “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” (Cembalest printed the latter quote in boldfaced lettering.) “US labor compensation,” he explained, “is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”
Cembalest and the Citigroup analysts see the American postindustrial economy’s abandonment of fair play as an interesting fact to consider in formulating future investment strategies, not an occasion to march down Broad Street waving some Fortune 500 chairman’s bald head atop a bloody pike. By contrast, the Wall Street maverick traders profiled in Michael Lewis’s razor-sharp 2010 narrative The Big Short see it as both. “The upper classes of this country raped this country” is one of the more polite things that Morgan Stanley money manager Steve Eisman has to say on the eve of the 2008 sub-prime fiasco. A Spartacus Youth clubber might judge Eisman’s rhetoric a trifle overwrought. A few pages later, Eisman concedes that, by shorting the sub-prime market, he helped create the liquidity that kept it going: “We fed the monster until it blew up.”
Then there’s Dan Alpert. As managing partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital, Alpert hasn’t lost interest in making money. But, when he describes his view of how joblessness and stagnating middle-income wages relate to the debt bubble of the aughts—as he’s been doing more and more in the financial press and on the Washington policy-wonk circuit—he sounds like Robespierre. (He’s actually more of a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. Alpert and I were grade-school friends when Humphrey lost his presidential bid in 1968; we fell out of touch soon after. This past winter, our mutual interest in income inequality, about which I’m writing a book, brought us together.)
Once upon a time, Alpert explains, American capitalists paid American laborers with something called a “salary.” Henry Ford famously boosted his workers’ pay to $5 a day so they could buy the Model Ts they were assembling. The better part of a century passed, and, by the early aughts, globalization had created a world oversupply of free-market labor—a hiring hall now housing about 2.6 billion recruits from emerging nations, together with roughly 550 million in the developed world. It no longer made financial sense to pay American workers high wages when you could pay Chinese workers low wages to do the same work. On the other hand, if American workers lost their spending power, who would keep the U.S. economy afloat?
The rise of cheap credit provided the answer. American labor effectively got paid in a different currency: debt. Instead of Model Ts, the latter-day working class bought overpriced houses and all sorts of other stuff it couldn’t afford. The beauty for the capitalists was that, when laborers got paid with debt, they had to pay it back with interest. Alpert calls it “middle-class serfdom.”
Alpert doesn’t believe there was a capitalist conspiracy; his point is that had there been a conspiracy, the outcome wouldn’t look much different. During the past half-century, Alpert explains, there were two large debt bubbles. The first one, during the late ’80s, saw real median incomes increase along with debt. Not a lot (inflation-adjusted median income hasn’t seen much growth since the early ’70s), but enough to ease the pain when the bubble burst in 1987. When plotted in a graph, the ’80s debt bubble looks like a big hill (debt) on top of a little hill (income). The second bubble, during the aughts, was a different story altogether. It occurred while real incomes went down. The aughts’ debt bubble looks like a big hill on top of a big valley. This time, there’s nothing to ease the pain.
Alpert isn’t the first person to suggest that our current economic troubles resulted from people buying with debt what they could no longer buy with wages; Raghuram G. Rajan has made a similar case in this magazine (see “Let Them Eat Credit,” August 27, 2010) and in his 2010 book Fault Lines. But Rajan is an economist. Alpert is a banker. Bankers buy, sell, and securitize debt. Banks are essentially debt stores, right?
No, Alpert says. You might call a commercial bank a debt store, he explained in an e-mail, or a foreign bank, or “the post-Glass-Steagall mega-monstrosities.” But an investment bank is (or at least is supposed to be) more of a capitalinvestment store. Alpert has, he concedes, created his share of “products” over his career, including the first pooled commercial-mortgage-backed securities to be graded by any of the big three ratings agencies. His firm got out of mortgage-backed securities “when the business became both irresponsible and commoditized. There was no value for us to add, because we don’t have a checkbook of other people’s money to fritter away.” They don’t have such a checkbook because Alpert’s firm is an old-fashioned partnership, not a publicly held company.
Why is Alpert so vocal? He says his clients benefit when “we channel our firm’s expertise, and America’s ingenuity in general, toward obtaining solutions to the current economic predicament.” A similar motive likely drove Warren Buffett to point out recently that, far from simplification, what the income tax really needs is the complication of two new tax brackets above $1 million and $10 million to keep up with growing income concentration at the top. “We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and Mexico,” a Proctor & Gamble vice president told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, referring to a measure of income distribution. Since when do marketing executives keep track of the Gini index? It seems that no one making an honest effort to diagnose the economy can avoid the topic of growing economic inequality. The rhetoric sounds alarmist because the situation is a genuine cause for alarm. Maybe that’s why even Democratic politicians have almost nothing to say about it.
Timothy Noah is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the October 6, 2011 issue of the magazine.
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