The Debate Over the Cause of the Debt and Evolution

Dean Baker says yet again what, sadly, needs saying yet again.

The Debate Over the Cause of the Debt and Evolution

The NYT had an article discussing President Obama’s plan to set up a commission to propose recommendations for reducing the deficit. At one point the article refers to the debate: “over the nation’s rising debt and its causes and solutions.”

There really is not much basis for debate over the cause of the debt. The debt has grown rapidly in the last two years because of the recession created by the collapse of the housing bubble. The debt would be much lower today if the deficit hawks had not been dominating public debate and distracting attention from the housing bubble in the years when it was growing to dangerous levels.

Over the longer term, the deficits are projected to be unsustainable due to the growth of health care costs in the United States. Since the United States pays for more than half of its health care through public programs like Medicare and Medicaid the failure to fix the health care system will also lead to serious budget problems.

As with evolution, there really is not much room for debate on the factors driving the deficit (the big rise in military spending also was an important factor in the deficits). It is misleading to imply that there is.

—Dean Baker

Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens

Glenn Greenwald.

Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens

… Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. …

Dead metaphor department: running tide

On NPR this morning, of President Obama in advance of tonight’s SOTU: “the tide is running against him”.

This is one of those metaphors that most listeners, if pressed, could explain. I think. While it’s dead, it’s not yet returned to dust. But how many of us have any experience of a “running tide”? We in the SF Bay Area have a nearby dramatic example, four times a day, and I’ve even watched it run from a blufftop overlooking the Golden Gate. But it’s never been running against me.

If our experience of tides comes from our visits to the beach, we know something about the ebb & flow of the tide, but not its running. (It was relatively late in life that I made the connection between “flow”, ebb & flow, and “flood”, ebb tide and flood tide. Duh.)

The sense of “tide” as “time” (eventide, Eastertide) predates its related application to the timing of the sea. We can hear an (unintended) echo of that sense in “the tide is running against him”.

Catastrophe tears us apart

Amen, Brother Ezra!

Catastrophe tears us apart

“It is amazing that some people here in Congress still don’t get it,” says Sen. Evan Bayh, who’s counseling Democrats to move to the right. “For those people it may take a political catastrophe of biblical proportions before they get it.”

I’ll just note that the “catastrophe of biblical proportions” that Bayh is referring to is not that health-care reform doesn’t pass and hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessary deaths. It’s not that the Congress is unable to pass a second stimulus and millions of Americans are jobless, anxious and uninsured for years longer than necessary. It’s that Democrats lose a bunch of seats in the midterm elections.

Politicians have a tendency of talking about the consequences of elections as if they’re very real and the consequences of policy as if they’re very abstract, and as we’re seeing with the stalling of the health-care bill in the aftermath of Martha Coakley’s loss, they legislate that way, too. And then they wonder why voters don’t trust them and their initiatives.

Is China a Bubble?

Over at Angry Bear—it sounds plausible, doesn’t it? But what do I know…

Is China a Bubble?

A friend of mine who does just about all of his business providing a very specific service to selling to companies who do business with China. (And yes, that is as specific as I am willing to be, except to say that right at this moment, the service he provides is extremely tailored toward China.) My friend tells me he believes “China is a bubble” which very much resembles the dot com bubble and the housing bubble. According to him, this is the resemblance – there is no due diligence to speak of on any deal involving China, not from the Chinese and not from the Westerners dealing with them, and all the deals are being done with “other people’s money” and heavily leveraged. …

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google

Bruce Schneier. Emphasis mine.

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google

… China’s hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won’t be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it into a massive spam-sending network? Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement can mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?

These risks are not merely theoretical. After September 11, the NSA built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the U.S. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and notables such as President Clinton.

…

And surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens and Nokia built Iran’s surveillance. U.S. companies helped build China’s electronic police state. Just last year, Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents, anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

In the aftermath of Google’s announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don’t understand that their own government is on the list. …

Civil unions and straight marriage

“But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police…” —Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque.

Civil unions and straight marriage

Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight), as this chart shows.

contracts.jpg

The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship. While you would obviously need more finely grained data to establish this properly, the obviously intuitive interpretation of this (at least to me) is that the pacs have grown both by providing an option for people who would probably not have gotten married in the first place, and attracted a number of people who otherwise would have gotten married, but who prefer the pacs’ lower level of formality (it is much easier to cancel a pacs relationship than to get divorced). …

What the Supreme Court got right

Glenn Greenwald, thoughtful as always.

What the Supreme Court got right

The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for “electioneering” purposes.  The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I’m deeply ambivalent about the court’s ruling.  There are several dubious aspects of the majority’s opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising ”judicial restraint” through a narrower holding).  Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture.  But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints. 

I want to begin by examining several of the most common reactions among critics of this decision, none of which seems persuasive to me. …

Update: in a follow-up, Greenwald points out that, while the case was decided 5–4, all nine justices agreed on two matters: that corporations have free speech rights (the question of personhood doesn’t arise, I think, in the speech clause) and that restrictions on spending do infringe on those rights:

… To the contrary, the entire dissent — while arguing that corporations have fewer First Amendment protections than individuals — is grounded in the premise that corporations do have First Amendment free speech rights and that restrictions on the expenditure of money do burden those rights, but those free speech rights can be restricted when there’s a “compelling state interest.” In this case, the dissenters argued, such restrictions are justified by the “compelling state interest” the Government has in preventing the corrupting influence of corporate money. That’s why the extent of one’s belief in the First Amendment is outcome-determinative here. Those who want to restrict free speech always argue that there’s a compelling reason to do so (“we must ban the Communist Party because they pose a danger to the country”; “we must ban hate speech because it sparks violence and causes a climate of intimidation”; “we must ban radical Muslim websites because they provoke Terrorism”). One can have reasonable debates over the “compelling interest” question as a constitutional matter — and, as I said yesterday, I’m deeply ambivalent about the Citizens United case because that’s a hard question and I do think corporate influence is one of the greatest threats we face — but, ultimately, it’s because I don’t believe that restrictions on political speech and opinions (as opposed to other kinds of statements) can ever be justified that I agree with the majority’s ruling. There are reasonable arguments on all sides of that question. …

How to believe

New to me: How to believe is a series in the Guardian (“Join our experts as they blog great works of religion and philosophy”). Here’s a summary of the topics so far (follow the link for more detail); looks good to me. Next up: Giles Fraser on Wittgenstein.

How to believe

Franklin Lewis: Rumi’s influence has long been felt throughout the Muslim world. Will his recent success in the west prove as long lasting?

Paul Helm: Calvin’s influence is still being felt today. But the reformer was a complex man, with a dark side.

Mark Vernon: Plato increasingly looks not just like a generator of footnotes, but a philosopher whose time is coming again.

Simon Critchley: The most important continental philosopher of the last century was also a Nazi. How did he get there? What can we learn from him?

Mary Midgley: How to believe: Thomas Hobbes invented, in Leviathan, the modern idea of the individual. It has been hugely politically liberating. But is it realistic?

Julian Baggini: The most pressing and telling critiques of religion not only cannot, but should not, attempt to deliver any fatal blows.

Jane Williams: Acts tells the story of a disparate group of men who, against the odds, came to spearhead an international movement.

Giles Fraser: Nietzsche thought religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was a corruption of the human spirit.

via Andrew Brown

The Poverty of Economics

Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy — Chapter 2.1

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production — are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal.

via bourgeois economist Brad DeLong

A series of tubes

I most sincerely hope that it’s possible to get a look at this system. I’m completely fascinated.

Gone with the wind: Tubes are whisking samples across hospital

tubes3-011110.jpgEvery day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can’t match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye.

In four miles of tubing laced behind walls from basement to rooftop, the pneumatic tube system shuttles foot-long containers carrying everything from blood to medication. In a hospital the size of Stanford, where a quarter-mile’s distance might separate a tissue specimen from its destination lab, making good time means better medicine.

“Approximately 70 percent of the information on a patient’s chart is lab data,” said David Myrick, quality coordinator for the hospital’s clinical labs. “We conduct about 8 million tests a year, serving thousands of patients. We are going full blast, 24-7, at the highest level of testing. The tube system is part of a complex chain of events that ultimately give doctors the essential lab results they need to make decisions about our patients.”

…

Andrew Brown, Will Self, Sebald, the holocaust

Andrew Brown:

Will Self, Sebald, the holocaust

… It seems to me that the moral significance of the holocaust is not so much that Jews were the victims, as that Germans (mostly) were the perpetrators. In many ways, the German-speaking world in 1913 was at the summit of Western culture. If all that civilisation could not withstand a world war, a plague, inflation and then a slump, what civilisation can?

This is not in any way to diminish the horror of what happened under the Nazis. But to make it the synecdoche of every evil is to dehumanise and distance it. If the holocaust is taken to be the most evil thing that humans ave ever done, and we didn’t do it, then we feel when we consider the horror as if we have passed some important exam in being human. We haven’t. We were spared the question, and that’s a very different thing. …

Quoting “William James”

Not long ago, Sister Juliann called my attention to this line, attributed to William James:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The attribution is all over the web, but with no source, and it doesn’t really sound like him, does it? Hard to prove the negative, but you’d think that someone would mention where he had written it, or when he had said it. The same source (again via Sr J) produced another:

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

Even less Jamesian, wouldn’t you say? But this time The Google was more helpful, and it turns out that it is Jamesian—just not William Jamesian. It’s from Clive James, q.G.

There are historical figures that seem to be (mis)attribution magnets: Shaw, Churchill, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde. James, not so much, I wouldn’t have thought. But there you are.

Making lemonade in advance

This from Adam B at DKos. In the long run (hopefully not that long), the answer must be public campaign finance.

SCOTUS Set To Overturn Corporate Speech Restrictions

It’s anticipated that the Supreme Court of the United States will be handing down its long-awaited opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission tomorrow morning.

…

D.  But corporations aren’t people!  

Sure, but the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause isn’t limited to people, though the assembly and petition clauses are.  (Other amendments are limited to “citizens,” for what it’s worth.)  One need not recognize corporations as “people” to respect their speech as “speech” which the First Amendment forbids Congress from interdicting without a compelling state interest.    

The AFL-CIO is a corporation. So’s the ACLU. Both support Citizens United in this litigation.

E. And is this the end of the world?

Not necessarily, but there will be a real potential for corporate-funded advocacy to distort the current market for political speech.  And we’ll talk about that as well as ways to balance against it.

What’s not at issue, by the way, are direct corporate financial contributions to candidates for public office — currently illegal under federal law, but legal in a good number of states.  That’s another potential battle years down the road.

Google in China

Wow.

A new approach to China

… These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

The Vicious Cycle of Stagnant Wages

Kevin Drum:

The Vicious Cycle of Stagnant Wages

Here’s my capsule view of the great financial meltdown of 2008: For the past couple of decades, the benefits of economic growth have gone almost entirely to the rich. But the middle class still wanted to prosper, so the rich loaned them money to continually improve their lifestyles. That worked for a while. And then it didn’t. …

Drum goes on to preview an upcoming book (Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy) by Raghuram Rajan. Amazon says May 20. Here’s the blurb:

Economist Raghuram Rajan warned about the global financial crisis long before it hit, but few listened. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it’s tempting to blame the crisis on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren’t fixed. Can we risk not listening to him a second time?

Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown—made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners—were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a system overly dependent on American consumption to power the world economy and stave off a global downturn; a system where America’s thin social safety net has created tremendous political pressure to keep job creation robust, because jobs are the primary provider of health and other benefits; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.

Rajan demonstrates how inequalities in U.S. incomes, education, and health care are putting all of us into deeper financial peril, and he outlines sensible reforms to ensure a more stable world economy and to restore lasting prosperity.

Should We Jettison GDP As an Economic Measure?

Richard Posner considers its shortcomings (interesting reading) and ends up saying, “No, but…”:

Should We Jettison GDP As an Economic Measure?

… But it is necessary to emphasize that it is just a starting point. I disagree with economists who say the “recession” ended in the third quarter. The depression (as I think we should call it if only because of its enormous potential political consequences) has caused massive unemployment with all the associated anxieties and hardships, has greatly reduced household wealth, has caused private investment to turn negative, has cost the government trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and recovery expenditures (TARP, the fiscal stimulus, the mortgage-relief programs, the auto bailouts, etc.), has undermined belief in free markets and altered the line between government and business in favor government, and is threatening a future inflation while deepening our dependence on foreign lenders. To view a change in GDP from negative to positive as signifying the end of a depression (by which criterion the Great Depression ended in 1933 and again in 1938) is to misunderstand the utility of GDP as a measure of economic activity.

Blaspheming in Ireland

…will apparently cost you €25,000.

Irish atheists challenge new blasphemy laws

… The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).

It defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted”.

The justice minister, Dermot Ahern, said that the law was necessary because while immigration had brought a growing diversity of religious faiths, the 1936 constitution extended the protection of belief only to Christians. …

Near as I can tell, it’s not a joke. But media coverage, blogs excepted, appears to be nil. At least that’s what a search on Google News suggests.