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path dependence, unions, and health care

Jonathan Cohn’s piece about auto workers in the New Republic talks about both the major gains that unions won, and the way that right-to-work laws closed off opportunities for further union organizing. Union efforts developed the modern American welfare state: because union wage and benefit gains altered the market for labor, other companies had to offer better wages and benefits, and Americans became accustomed to the idea that they would receive health and retirement benefits through their employers. But globalization (which allowed manufacturing to take place in other countries) and the decline of unions changed that situation.

As Ezra Klein points out, weakening unions leads to a collective action problem:

a dilemma in which the rational actions of individual actors make everyone worse off. What's smart for the one proves to be dumb for the many. Imagine, for instance, that you are a new business entering a field where the major players are decades old. Over time, they've bargained with their workers, raised their pay, offered good health benefits and retirement packages. The rational thing for you to do is undercut their labor costs. Then you can sell the good more cheaply and take away their market share.

Klein and Cohn both point out that countries which provide their welfare state benefits directly through the government don’t face this collective action problem. Every firm both receives benefits and pays taxes to support them, so there’s no empty market space in which a firm can evade costs that others bear. This is changing to some extent as manufacturing and services both go global, but since countries are sovereign entities that have substantial control over their borders (especially over legitimate cross-border transactions), they have far more options for mitigating the collective action problem than any individual firm.

What Klein and Cohn both ignore is how things got to be this way. Why does the US, unlike every other wealthy country, rely largely on private employers for its welfare state services? The answer is complicated, but one part of it is union co-optation. In most countries, unions pushed for national health insurance; in the US, unions made what looked like a temporary, tactical decision to push for an employer mandate to provide health insurance, and to negotiate individual agreements with employers that offered union workers health insurance. The Taft-Hartley act, which Cohn notes allowed right-to-work laws and made union organizing much more difficult, combined with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to give unions substantial control over multi-state health and welfare funds. It didn't just limit organizing - indirectly, it limited activism.¹

Just as union ability to organize was declining, and as the percentage of workers who were unionized dropped, unions were handed control over health and welfare funds, which they viewed (correctly) as a major potential source of continued influence and as a potential recruiting tool. National health insurance, which would make the Taft-Hartley funds obsolete, would deprive unions of one of the best reasons for employees to join a union. In other countries, unions focused on winning guaranteed health benefits, vacation time, and retirement security through the political process, rather than through bargaining with a single employer at a time. In the US, partly because of the arrangement of institutional incentives but also for other reasons (which I think I used to know more about), unions negotiated an expansion of the private welfare state. It doesn’t look like such a good bargain now: we’re losing those benefits one employer at a time, and we never did get maternity leave. I have some hopes that the slow-motion collapse of private benefits will generate the political will for an expansion of public, guaranteed benefits, as seems to be happening with health care. We still need to remember, while we do it, that today’s temporary, tactical decision can radically change tomorrow’s incentives and possibilities.²

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1. I know about this stuff from reading Marie Gottschalk (in college, and again today): "It's the Health-Care Costs, Stupid!" and The Shadow Welfare State.
2. Shout-out to Paul Pierson!

a manoeuvre!

My first reaction to Rick Warren being selected as speaker was something like this:

Listen, it's my right to marry that Rick Warren wants to take away. I hate the man, for his sexist opposition to women in positions of authority, his stand for forced pregnancy, his homophobia.

But I find it pretty persuasive when a Balloon Juice commenter points out that anointing Warren as the next evangelical leader puts Dobson out in the cold and means that we'll have some evangelical leaders who aren't dead set against all progressive politics. We'll peel some evangelical votes off by emphasizing poverty and the environment, and we'll get more Democrats in Congress and more progressive programs on those issues. We'll get better policy out of it, so I'll swallow that symbol.

Ezra is right about the use Warren will make of that power, but that's only a concern insofar as Warren giving the invocation will give him a larger audience. I'm betting not. I'm betting he already has the audience and congregation he's going to get - that the major effect of tying Warren to Obama will be to make the Democrats more acceptable to evangelicals rather than the evangelicals more acceptable to the Democrats. So ok. I'll trust Obama to make that decision right now. If we start getting bad policy out of the deal, that'll be the time to get mad.

I've changed my mind, partly. I believe Amelia that there are other, real progressives out there on the evangelical scene - people for whom poverty isn't an afterthought, but same-sex marriage is. And I also find Amelia's argument compelling: that Obama is supposedly someone for whom scripture has some real meaning, and that choosing Warren suggests either that he cares rather less about theology than he has claimed, or that Warren is in line with his theology. So I don't think this was such a great decision anymore: this wasn't his only option, or even his best option, and it suggests that he is not serious about things which he claimed to be serious about. Like gay rights, women's rights, and science.

(I'm not saying, by the way, that Obama should never talk to Warren. Just that delivering the invocation is a much larger public honor than inviting him to dinner at the White House. Though the day when Warren's views are considered as socially unacceptable as David Duke's cannot come too soon.)

I also, in thinking that this was a clever piece of triangulation, had argued against being angry about the pick. I was wrong. We should be furious. One, having all these straight people online being angry about queer issues cheers me up. I love knowing that queer issues are not peripheral for my straight friends, but something that actually is close to their hearts - and I'll say that I was surprised and warmed by the reaction to Prop 8, even among people I'm close to. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight mentioned the increasing engagement on queer issues earlier this week as well, and points out that we're seeing a rapid transformation in public opinion. Eight years ago, neither candidate for president favored civil unions; this year they both did.

Second, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the person who really has it right on this.

My job isn't to make Barack Obama's job easier. And--as I'm sure he knows--his job isn't to his marching orders from the bloggers who have no political capital to lose. Jelani talks about Adalai Stevenson putting segregationist John Sparkman on the ticket. I think about Lincoln promising to unite the country, blacks be damned. And now Biden defending the Warren pick. I want to be clear--in the context of who they are, national politicians, these people are not "wrong." I think Biden, like Stevenson, and like Lincoln make a solid, political case.
But that doesn't make Frederick Douglass wrong either. That doesn't make black leadership wrong for denouncing Stevenson. And it doesn't make those of us who believe that a man who bans gays from his church should not be giving the invocation, wrong. Obama and co. have the job of building national consensus. We have the job of expanding the boundaries of that consensus. We are in conflict, and this is as it should be. Seriously, what is one without the other?

And not just that, true as it is. Obama just pissed off a lot of queer people, and a lot of our already pissed off straight allies. He owes us. And he just burned up all his queer-friendly cred: not just because he chose Warren, but because people - some of them straight - made a gigantic fuss about it. Because we expected something better. So now Obama owes those of us who care about queer rights. We have the chance to get better policy precisely because people got mad about Warren. There's more about gay issues on the Change.gov site than there was on the campaign website. Baby steps. But now he's got something to prove. I have to say, I don't mind that as an outcome.

choice schmoice

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks, about the whole gay marriage thing, "What if it is a lifestyle?" The argument (as often publicly made) for letting us queers do our thing rest on the idea that we didn't choose to be gay, and thus can't choose to be straight, so it's just mean to try to force us into a role that won't work. Ta-Nehisi says,

"Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don't, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would chose?"

This has bothered me for a long time - last night, I watched Jon Stewart going after Bill O'Reilly about gay marriage, and Jon Stewart's framing, as it was to Mike Huckabee, is that he didn't choose to be straight, people don't choose to be gay, and you shouldn't be harassed for something that's not your fault. There's a sense that if you could help it, you should - that being gay is bad, but you're forgiven because you can't help it.

I don't think my relationship is bad. I don't wish I were dating a man. And - here's the tricky part - I could help it.

The science, for whatever it's worth, is mostly done on men. And I think that many gay people do experience their sexuality as something fairly immutable that has been the case for a very long time. But I don't. Gender doesn't seem to be a particularly important constraint for me. Not that I'm not picky, just that I'm not at all picky about that. I'm particular about politics, and I like my gender presentation a little outside the mainstream, and I like people who have a critique of capitalism. No investment bankers, thanks. But the thing is, I've dated guys, and it's not like I'm never attracted to them. I could, in a different world, probably choose to be straight. But I chose to be in a specific relationship with a specific woman - I chose a same-sex relationship. And I'm really, really happy about that choice. But it does mean that the idea that queers are alright because we didn't choose it is a bad fit for me. I did choose it. Am I still alright with Jon Stewart?

It's also hard on young queer people, because it suggests that being gay is so awful that you'd never choose it if you had an alternative. I used to think that, actually. A gay friend thought, when she was in middle school, that if she were gay she would never ever tell anyone. (Fortunately for us all, she changed her mind.) Similarly, I was looking through a diversity curriculum for activities, and there was one in which the participants were asked to imagine a gay person's life and go through all the moments where that person is rejected, harassed, and hurt for being gay. The idea was to convince straight participants not to be mean to queer people, but put one queer kid in the mix, and that poor kid gets to spend the activity thinking of how bleak the future is, and struggling to choose not to be gay. And that's what's really crazy-making about the "it's ok because you can't help it" rhetoric: how do you know if you can help it or not unless you try? It suggests that every decision about being attracted to or involved with someone of the same sex ought to be run through a screen of "do I have to?" It almost needs the oppression there, because without the oppression, maybe people would just choose to be queer and you wouldn't know who can't help it.

It reminds me a little of the way women are encouraged to ask ourselves, "do I need that?" about food and, well, really about most of our desires that are for ourselves. It's kind of a crap way to approach your life, and I worry that the language of the current 'tolerance' fight for queer people perpetuates that kind of approach instead of accepting that queer relationships don't need more justification than straight ones.

(I know I promised some thoughts on education policy. I'm working on it!)

this post brought to you by the New Jersey Transit news stand

Dear Vanity Fair,

Perhaps you commissioned Maureen Dowd to write about Tina Fey knowing only that she was a New York Times columnist, and never having read any of her columns. I’ve actually read those columns, though, and the profile she turned out was exactly what I would expect. You did a disservice to Tina Fey, and to your readers. We learn little about Tina Fey’s childhood, nothing about her philosophy of writing, nothing about her transition to acting – nothing about the substantive development of her personality and career. Instead, we hear endlessly about her German father and German work ethic, her Greek mother, her weight gain, weight loss, frumpy dresses, mousy appearance, thrift store sweaters, worries about her body. The weight and body image angles are particularly upsetting, since Dowd uncritically accepts the idea that thin equals beautiful, and thus that thin equals successful. But the cumulative effect really says it all: after reading that article, I was bored, offended, and self-conscious about my ass. Tina Fey’s talent deserves better. So does my reading time.

Better luck next time,

North

education reform and junk analysis

Shorter David Brooks: "I know nothing about the subject I'm writing on, and would like to display my ignorance for the world to see."

I don't have time to write a full analysis right now. I'll do it on Sunday or Monday. But I just want to say. People who don't know shit about shit should stop talking about schools and education reform. Of course, if that were the standard, David Brooks wouldn't get a column at all.

nerd!

You know you're a sustainable farming nerd when you get all engrossed reading the Organic Valley farmer profiles. This one made me happy: the farmers switched to grazing from row crops, and from Holsteins to Jerseys, and went to seasonal dairying, and they're happier and have a better family life and the cows are happier too. If you, too, are a sucker for little stories about the world getting better, you can get a few minutes of enjoyment here.

I'm in love

If you haven't seen the dancing walrus video, you owe it to yourself to spend the next 49 seconds watching it. Especially if you're too busy. Then, if you have a couple minutes, you should read the Natalie Angier article about walruses. Sample: "Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts." Attention walruses: you are amazing. Please come visit.

just in time for the holidays!

I hope none of the three children in my generation ever has occasion to send a letter like this to another sibling.

The Gingriches are going to have a fun Thanksgiving.

traveling; home

I've been in Chicago for the last two days. It's cold and windy, and my grandmother is crazy; otherwise great. At the coffee shop this morning, the cashier asked where I'm from.¹ I don't know if I look out of place - in Hyde Park? it's full of dressed-up pseudo-hipsters! - or if my voice, which is ridiculously scratchy, makes me sound like I have an accent.

I claimed Philadelphia, because I'm not there. In Philadelphia I would have claimed Des Moines. In Des Moines? I guess I would have said, "I grew up here," which is not quite the same as, "I'm from here." I always claim the last place I was, which means I can never be home. Next year I'll probably be from Philadelphia full time.

Anyway. When I told him I was from Philadelphia, he said congratulations. The Phillies win, which seemed like such a big deal at the time, is such ancient history that he had to remind me why Philly got congratulations. After the Phillies won, there were riotous celebrations; for days afterward, Philadelphia was full of irritable, slightly hungover fans who wandered around shrieking "Go Phillies!!!!1!" every time they saw anything red. They were kind of like grumpy, overtired bulls.

Election day was totally different. I wouldn't have been anywhere else. After they called the election - at 11:01 pm - people poured out into the streets and danced, banged pot lids, chanted, sang, shouted, hugged each other, drummed. The church on the corner near my house has a tiny school, and on Wednesday morning all the kids, ages 4 to 13, were out there waving home-made "Honk 4 Obama" signs and screaming and dancing. People smiled at each other on the street.

I know Obama's bound to disappoint us. I know it. And I'm ready to leave Philadelphia, because if I don't do it soon I never will. But that day, I wouldn't have been anywhere else.

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1. He and the woman barista, who had an amazing voice, both seemed to be flirting with me. Do they flirt with all their customers? Do I just look that queer?

words we'll be done with after Tuesday

It's like this election has its own vocabulary: double down, vetting, surge, in the tank, rogue, close the deal.

Conspicuous by its absence is the most useful phrase to describe the last several months: jump the shark.

(See This. Fucking. Election for a last-minute replay of this. fucking. election.)

on the phone with Barack

Because I'm really, really cool, I was getting some coffee ice cream and Nutella (with bonus roasted almonds on top!) together to eat while I watched the Daily Show. And the phone rang. And it appears that Jon Carson, Obama's voter contact guy, decided, why don't we just call everyone? And put them on a conference call with Obama?

I feel slightly suspicious of my telephone, and absolutely validated in feeling that this election is just like a sports game. What is going to happen next?

[I am not a hard-core volunteer - I volunteered once and signed up for 3 days of GOTV - so I'm curious who else got that call.]

election lost on a technicality

Godwin's Law

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

John McCain, on the LA Times's refusal to release (per its promise to its source) a tape of Obama at a fellow professor's going away party from Chicago:

"I'm not in the business of talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?"

According to internet tradition the first person to make such a comparison loses.

Can this election please just be over already?

"They spent 6 times my yearly income on her wardrobe"

Look, I want to be sympathetic to Sarah Palin spending $150,000 on new clothes. I buy that she needed new clothes, even though she wasn't "a beet farmer last week" (if you want to see how she dressed before, there's a set of photos on the Seattle PI website; a lot of what she wore in Alaska would have been savagely mocked if she wore it in front of a national audience). The demands of the national stage are intense, and much more so for women: no female political figure (and I include Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain) could follow the Obama strategy of wearing a rotating set of identical dark two-button suits, white shirts, and variably colored ties. I also buy that those clothes have to be not only varied, but high quality, expensive, and fashionable, and that people will notice and mock her if they are not. And she needs a lot of them, because she can't wear the same thing every day, or even twice in the same week - and even then she needs far more clothes than seems normal, because she doesn't stay in one place long enough to get everything cleaned and sent back to her before she leaves, so they probably have to get shipped by her post-event team.

But $150,000! That's a different $2000 outfit every day of a 2.5 month campaign. It's just, just.. it is just not reasonable. I have been to fancy department stores! There are very nice outfits available for much, much less than $2000, and her standard outfit of femme skirt with jacket is completely amenable to mixing and matching. (I'm not the only one who can't figure out where the money would go: the editor of Glamour magazine basically agrees.) If it had been some smaller, seemingly unreasonable amount of money, like $50,000 or $75,000, I could have seen defending Palin. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.

(post title from the Political Schmientist)

crazy pills

The whole scrap about Ayers and ACORN in the debate the other night (if you missed it, the short version is that McCain said he didn't care about some washed-up old terrorist and then talked about him ad nauseam, and Obama said this is ridiculous) reminded me of some of the more totally insane things about this election: namely, that people are willing to believe all kinds of terrible things about Obama and vote for him anyway. Ben Smith at Politico has the best examples: a canvasser in Fishtown, a Philadelphia neighborhood, finds people who are outright racist, but "they would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

And then, well, this kind of speaks for itself, although you should click over and read the whole thing: after watching a no-holds-barred ad for a focus group, the kind that throws Wright and Ayers and everything at Obama, this happens.

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

She thinks he was a member of a terrorist group. She's voting for him anyway. Like other members of the focus group, she was willing to accept these racially motivated slurs, but she didn't think acting on them was in her own best interest.

The guy who organized the focus group said, "I felt like I was taking crazy pills."

This has a little to do with why I think having Obama as president would be amazing for race issues in this country. I mean yeah, the far-right crazies - the Patriot movement, the white supremacists, the kind of people David Neiwert at Orcinus keeps an eye on - will go nuts. Obama will need incredibly intense security. But most people will see a black man (biracial, yes, but in a lot of the country he just reads as black) being president, doing a pretty good job of it, and most importantly seeming like a smart decent guy, and it'll change their gut feelings about race the same way it happened for this guy:

"I’ve always been against the blacks," said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

It's not like anyone wakes up and suddenly things are fine, but it changes people's ideas of what's possible and what's normal.

McCain Watch '08: out of touch

Last night at the debate, McCain talked about his health care plan, explaining to the audience that it would let them shop around! Choose whatever insurance plan they wanted! He sounded like he thought people would appreciate the offer and be happy not to be locked into whatever plan their employer offers.

Which, frankly, is a nutty thing to think.

Buying individual health insurance is a painstaking, unpleasant process in which you are constantly trying to figure out exactly how screwed a particular plan will make you if you have a major health problem - this involves reading legalese in 4-point font - and exactly how restrictive the particular insurance company will be about the doctors you can see and conditions they'll cover. Not to mention that it's absurdly expensive - McCain's $5000 credit does essentially nothing for anyone with a major pre-existing condition. But even if it were free, getting health insurance for yourself sucks. I did it this year, and if it should be easy for anyone, that person is me: I am young, reasonably healthy, don't smoke, and have neither pre-existing conditions nor a family to worry about; I'm also over-educated and good with numbers. It still sucked. I was sure I was getting screwed, and I took a crappier plan than I would ideally like because at least I can afford the premiums.

Anyone who's ever had to deal with their own health insurance knows it sucks, and you're better off getting it through your employer, who by virtue of scale will be able to negotiate a better and less expensive plan (same argument holds for single-payer, not that I'm holding my breath). So when McCain talks about how great it's going to be to be able to find the best health care plan for yourself, all he's saying is he has no damn clue what getting health insurance is like. And he doesn't. He was in the Navy until April 1, 1981, and was elected to Congress in 1982, where he's been ever since. With the exception of one year of his life, he has had government health care immediately available; during that year, he worked for his father-in-law, a hundred-millionaire. Any guesses as to whether he was offered health insurance with that job? His insurance has always been taken care of. So he's trying to encourage the rest of the country to take on a complicated, onerous, confusing responsibility for managing their own health insurance - something he's never done himself, or showed any interest in doing, because it sucks. But he's fine with it sucking for the rest of us.

"But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

I read Rolling Stone's profile of McCain out loud to the Gardener (yes, the whole thing; procrastination > gravity). My first reaction was something like, that poor guy. He sounded like a miserable, obstinately angry, misogynistic child, desperate to live up to a standard he could never meet, always trying to make up for being a screw-off by getting his way. We hear that McCain tried to pick up girls as a high school sophomore; when they laughed at him, "he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge." In the story, McCain erupts in anger, crashes two planes, almost gets kicked out of school twice, acquires the nickname McNasty, and, constantly on the verge of failure, relentlessly returns to his family connections to bail him out. The man needs help.

By the time the article reached McCain's political career, all my sympathy had evaporated. He's a habitual liar, a corrupt, dishonest, dishonorable, deceitful politician. He needs help, but keep that man away from the presidency. "Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself."

Gross.

the vp debate

I don't understand the reaction to the VP debate. Biden had a lot of great moments: reclaiming the 'ordinary guy' mantle by talking about raising kids alone after his wife died, saying that McCain was no maverick on the things that count, saying on climate change that "if you don't understand what the cause is, it's impossible to come up with a solution." Palin kept it to no more than about three total melt-downs into incoherence, each of which came when she neither answered the question asked nor shifted entirely to a different topic, but rather talked around the question. Her attempt at telling us her Achilles heel was a notable example of this. Gwen Ifill was unbelievably tame, not pushing either candidate to give a straight answer to any question - though Biden actually did answer every question, at least briefly, so she could only have pushed Palin much.

So far so good, and nothing the blogs and newspapers aren't talking about. But for my money, Biden's best moment was his closing statement, which I'm putting below. It starts at about 1:38, and it hits all the right notes - a story about his dad in Scranton, an appeal to America to 'get up together', and 'may God protect our troops,' which coming from an observant Catholic with a son in the military sounds utterly sincere.



The most extraordinary moment in the debate, though, goes not to any of the absurd things Palin said about Obama's record (for a partial list of things she lied about, check here) or Biden dismantling McCain or even Palin saying how wonderful it is that "We both love Israel!", but to the same-sex marriage question. Here's Biden's response, in print, to whether benefits should be extended to same-sex couples:

"Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

"The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted -- same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.

"It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do."

Palin's response?

"Well, not if it goes closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. And unfortunately that's sometimes where those steps lead.

"But I also want to clarify, if there's any kind of suggestion at all from my answer that I would be anything but tolerant of adults in America choosing their partners, choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves, you know, I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue.

"But in that tolerance also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties.

"But I will tell Americans straight up that I don't support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman, and I think through nuances we can go round and round about what that actually means.

"But I'm being as straight up with Americans as I can in my non- support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage."

Despite Biden's slip - saying "same-sex marriage" when he meant to say unions or something like that - both candidates are basically arguing for same-sex couples to get approximately the benefits of marriage. Which, ok, why don't you just give everyone civil unions and get the government out of the business of marriage altogether? But the fact remains that five years ago, sodomy statutes could be enforced; now, both sides of the ticket support civil unions for gay couples, and it's essentially uncontroversial (at that level - obviously it remains tremendously controversial at the level of, say, referenda). That ain't peanuts.

speech!

The Secretary Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, a man in a position to do so, talks race and Obama. Got me all choked up. Ignore the video, basically - it's jerky and low-fi - but the audio is worth 7 minutes of your life.

skewer

Republicans are claiming that a 'partisan' speech by Nancy Pelosi (puh-leeze - read the speech yourself here and tell me what you think) made them not vote for the bail-out bill. Barney Frank counter-offers: "Give me the names of those 12 people and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are and maybe they'll think about the country."

tangible reasons the credit crisis matters

Farmers generally harvest on credit - no credit means they can't pay their employees or run their machines and, the year after record food prices, the harvest is at some non-negligible risk from the financial markets.

Which, by the way, is a time-sensitive issue. Warren Buffet also sounds worried, which always makes me nervous. I've also been thinking about what Obama should have said about how a potential bail-out package would affect spending priorities (**cough**Keynes**cough**) - Lawrence Summers mentions the case for Keynesian stimulus about two-thirds of the way through this article.

sentences you're not expecting

"Mainland China’s stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen are closed this week as part of a national holiday marking the establishment of China as a Communist country in 1949."
(Article here.)

problems with pricing schemes

I've always wanted to be able to subscribe to cable stations individually, because dude, $50 a month for a giant package including Lifetime? Not worth it. There's also the small problem of me not having a TV. However. That means I can't watch the Daily Show, and that's a problem. Because I almost did not see him say, in response to McCain's decision to 'suspend' his campaign, "John McCain: the only one who can impulsively overreact to something ten days old."

Later in the show he makes the moderator of the third, hypothetical debate laugh so hard he can't talk.

disconnected thoughts on campaigns and bailouts

McCain suspending his campaign seems kind of desperate to me: "I campaign and campaign, but people don't want to vote for me! If I stop campaigning, maybe they'll like me better?" Also kind of pathetic. Not to mention dishonest, since he's claiming he doesn't have time for the debate but he does have time to tape an interview with Katie Couric.

$700 billion is about $2,293 per resident of the United States. In case you were wondering what the bailout plan had to do with you. Zephyr Teachout (whoa 2004 flashback) has some more examples of what $700 billion actually means. I'm pretty appalled by the idea of giving any member of the Bush executive branch a blank check for that much cash.

It doesn't look like I'll have much time to volunteer for the Obama campaign, and I feel like I'm shirking my civic duty.

real != fake

After all those articles about how eating unprocessed, nutritious foods and being active are more important for your health than losing weight, the New York Times prints an article about how more people are eating unprocessed, nutritious foods that includes the following sentence:

"The real question, is whether better eating can translate into weight loss."

ISN'T THAT THE FAKE QUESTION?

The article also positions what it calls 'positive eating,' in which you choose to eat things that are good for you and taste good (usually organic, unprocessed, natural - real - food) as a diet fad, which, if you were really reductionist, it might be. But it's not. Why? Because unlike other diet fads, real food is sustainable: it feels good, it's reasonably affordable if you cook for yourself, it provides both pleasure and health, it does not rest on some bizarrely contorted idea of how to eat.

This is part of my view about how you change the world. It has to be sustainable, which means that whatever method of changing the world you choose, you have to be able to keep doing it. Virtue and pleasure need to be connected, which is my fundamental problem with all the non-profits that expect you to work for them all the time for practically no money because you're doing what my grandmother calls good works. That model is how people end up quitting their non-profit gigs at 28 to get a corporate job. The positive eating (positive working?) model is how people keep on doing good.

(Somebody call Aristotle! This is all shamelessly ripped from the pages of the Nichomachean Ethics.)

three unrelated sections

Oy, I seem to have dropped off the face of the planet. I don't have much to say about Sarah Palin, other than what a nasty sleazy dishonest politician she is, the kind of person I wouldn't call a bitch because what an insult to bitches. And McCain, with all that stuff about honor? And a campaign based on flat-out lies? I'd feel sorry for him, seeing his reputation destroyed like this, except he's doing it to himself. Voluntarily, too.

On the more funny end of things, here's a picture of something true:



Via Wronging Rights, which is the sort of gallows humor best appreciated by students of wartime atrocities. Political Schmientist, I'm looking at you.

Now I'll go back to thinking about how I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars and all year applying to grad school, and I won't get in because I have bad grades my first two years. In an utterly bizarre twist, the fact that I read a lot of old books as a kid seems to be my best hope for acceptance letters.

puppies and teddybears with big scary claws

Got this from Daily Kos, which I seem to be reading while I'm lounging around being sick. It's awesome footage of a grizzly mama and two cubs getting a little harassed by a wolf, which seems to want to play with the cubs. Two things I noticed: first, that wolf is big! Grizzlies are enormous, and the wolf looks not too much smaller than the mama: I guess they must have really different builds, because a large wolf is 150 pounds and a small grizzly sow starts at something like 250 or 300 pounds. Second, you can really tell that at one point the wolf wants to play - it looks just like a dog doing what's called a play bow with its shoulders and head low, hindquarters high, and tail wagging (right after minute four). The grizzly cubs are almost impossible for me to read - mama seems mostly interested in chasing the wolf away, but I can't tell what the cubs want at all. I think this speaks to the long human acquaintance (including, for many of us, personal acquaintance) with wolf relatives. We're pretty good at reading canine behavior; ursine stays kind of mysterious. Third thing, even though I said there'd be two: this is such a cool thing to do! The USGS is putting solar-powered motion-activated cameras in the Northern Rockies to videotape wildlife doing their wildlife thing. It's mostly to understand how effective their DNA collection efforts are, and whether there's sampling bias with respect to age and sex, but you can see a wide range of other applications for that kind of camera information.

Here's the video, and here's the link to the USGS site.

McCain Watch #4: oops, you guys care about that?

I haven't been doing much McCain watching, what with being out of the country and everything, but no sooner do I get back than the man does another foolish thing. It's not a dumb policy idea, necessarily, but it's a politically expensive thing to say. McCain said he wanted to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact of 1922.

You're now looking at me like I'm speaking a different language, unless you follow western water policy. The compact is an agreement - based, stupidly, on best-case water level predictions - about how much water the various Colorado River states get each year. It gets split evenly between the Upper Basin states (Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah) and the Lower Basin states (Arizona, New Mexico, and California). You might spot one problem right away, which is that the Lower Basin states have about 44.8 million people, compared to 10.6 million in the Upper Basin states. The other huge problem is that the compact is based on water levels measured during a particularly wet period, and thus promises what it can't deliver. A new version the compact wouldn't be a terrible idea, though in my personal view some of the most foolishly-situated cities in the world are the ones that would want more water in order to grow (Phoenix, baby, I'm looking at you); thus, renegotiation is unlikely to get us a more ecologically sensible agreement.

So. Anyway. This piece of water policy, which allocates a seriously disproportionate amount of water to some sparsely-populated states, is probably more sacred than the Constitution in Colorado, and I'm including the Second Amendment here. Everyone in Colorado is pretty sure that renegotiation would reduce the amount of water they get, and giving up water is not something you want to do in the West. It's like the caucuses in Iowa, where no candidate will come down too hard on farm subsidies. Except McCain just said he was all for renegotiating the compact. ColoradoPols (which I found via Daily Kos) puts their headline up as "McCain just lost Colorado," and the Colorado politicians quoted say variations on "over my dead body." Variations like, "over my cold, dead political carcass" that aren't too different at all. Who know what this will mean come November - I'm not going to start crowing just yet - but it can't be that great for McCain.

What really gets me about this is that McCain is an Arizona politician, so he ought to know how people feel about water policy.

full up on ruins

Every other building in Israel is some kind of excavated restored ruin with 4-foot thick stone walls and arched windows.

How we long for a bungalow.

the plan is planned

I missed my bus from Cairo this morning, so I'm going to fly to Tel Aviv. At 4 am, which means getting to the airport in the middle of the night (maybe 1 am) for security screening. Especially considering I have a last-minute one-way ticket on El Al. Think anyone might be jumpy about that? The good thing is that the flight takes an hour twenty, where a bus would be 14 hours at a conservative estimate.

Then: two days in Jerusalem (and maybe Bethlehem), and I go see my cousins in some little town between Tel Aviv and Haifa.

It's a good plan, I think, but either way it's the plan I've got.

egypt #2: interesting things about Cairo

A man weaving his bicycle in and out of Cairo traffic (worst I've ever seen) with a 12-foot tray of pita balanced on his head.

...

Every few blocks there's a juice place where, for 40-60 cents, you can get a glass of fresh pomegranate, guava, mango, or orange juice. I get one and then, ten minutes later, find myself thinking, "Is it too soon for another?"

...

Women wearing gloves (and black robes and face veils) for modesty in the Cairo heat.

...

I don't mind wearing long pants - or the heat itself - as much as I thought I would. To be honest I mind it less than wearing modest clothes for Shabbat at Orthodox homes.

...

Crossing the street is absolutely terrifying.

...

Cairo is the dirtiest place I've ever been. The city redefines air pollution, and it sticks to your body and makes you dirty whether you touch anything or not.

...

Bargaining for taxis is entertaining. You flag down a taxi by - well, really, if you're a foreign woman, by existing, and then state your destination and ask, "Bi-kam?" How much? Often the driver will shrug and say, "No problem, no problem," but in that case I won't get into the car, because I want an agreement before we get there. Other times the request is several times the going rate - it's worth trying, after all, and the fares are really cheap anyway - and then there's the counter-offer and sometimes a little "That's too much, you know it's too much" and then the agreement, or you wave the taxi on and wait for the next one. Which arrives in 2.8 seconds, or sometimes is already waiting.

...

Is it too soon for another pomegranate juice?

school of no: pyramids campus

The tourist hassle at the Pyramids is intense.

"Excuse me madame! Hello madame! Excuse me! Hey!"

Don't look don't look don't look.

"Would you like to buy a postcard/headdress/miniature pyramid/scarf/sphinx/camel ride/horse ride?"

La' shukran (no thank you).

"Maybe next time?"

La' shukran.

Direct methods have failed. Next tactic: pretend to be friends.

"Where are you from?"

America.

"I love America!"

Mmm.

"You look Egyptian."

Raised eyebrow.

Eventually I just started saying, "Soy de España." Luckily none of them spoke Spanish.

I almost didn't go to the Pyramids, because it seemed like a hassle (which it wasn't, really). But then I realized they're the Pyramids. So I went. And dude. They're pretty damn cool. Also, the boat museum there is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Seriously. Out of control. And it's just one boat.

egypt #1

Some photos I would have taken, but couldn't:

At Wadi Rum, a man in a white robe and a red keffiyah leads 8 camels, all saddled, on a string of leads through red sand desert in the slanting evening sunlight.

(click)

At Petra, a Bedouin family packs up for the evening. An old woman and a young woman are putting away the trinkets they've been selling; a young man and two little boys have brought up the donkeys they rent to tourists; a toddler sits beside the path.

(click)

The minibus from Taba - loosely packed with me, an 18-year-old Austrian, one world-weary 20-something each from Moldova and Ukraine, two quiet Jordanian men, and a security guard in a purple tie and mirrored sunglasses - careens down the middle, the actual center, of the Sinai desert road.

(click)

The Austrian, the Moldovan, and the Ukrainian haggle the poor bus driver into accepting shekels, dollars, and euros rather than the previously agreed on 100 Egyptian pounds. People! There is an ATM in the Egyptian arrivals hall, and the charmingly named Israeli 'Change Place' will change your money as well. Use these services!

(click)

One of the quiet Jordanians makes sure the minibus stops where I can get a taxi to where I'm staying and offers to let me use his phone to call the person I'm staying with.

(click)

A houseboat on the Nile at dusk, ashtray upon ashtray on the table. A guitar. Radiohead on the speakers. Just like you'd think it would be.

(click)

Sunlight through the high windows at the Egyptian Museum. Most of the display cards look like they were made on a typewriter in the card catalog era by someone who spoke good English but was only a fair typist. A few of the cases have cards written on lined notebook paper in ballpoint pen - these are only in Arabic.

(slideshow over)

I haven't spoken to anyone all day, except for some stilted efforts at telling a taxi driver where to go. Traveling alone is weird. Also, as a solo woman in a place with a lot of harassment, I'm not willing to talk to men at all unless I start the interaction (i.e. I hail a taxi). Mostly, this has been very very easy to enforce. It also means I'm not willing to sit and have tea when it's offered, even though that kind of hospitality is something for which the Arab world is (justly, as far as I can tell) famous.

I'm glad to be adventuring, but I still kind of want to go home.

where can you see lions?

Only in Cairo! and that's where I'm going today. I predict awesomeness and exhaustion. Thanks to everyone who gave me thoughts and advice.

good and bad

Petra is incredible.

I don't like my travel partner. He's a fine person, but we're not compatible. He's much more price sensitive than I am (and would probably sleep out in the desert if he were alone) and kind of hard to communicate with.

Petra is amazingly beautiful. Remind me to write about the Bedouin later. I think I'm going to go to Egypt alone.

grumble grumble grumble bah

My traveling partners have both bailed on me, so if I go to Egypt I have to go by myself (which I don't want to do). I can't reach the person I'm trying to call in the United States and it's too early to call anyone further west. No one has answered my beg for information. I don't know where I'm going to sleep tomorrow and all my clothes are dirty. I might want to come home earlier and it might cost $250 to change my ticket.

Harrumph.

israel #2 + bonus request

Now I'm in this crazy Orthodox mystical artists' community called Tsfat. A couple three quick observations before I let the 15 people behind me get on the computer, and then a plea for you to find information for me.

1. It is actually damned impressive that the Jews are still around. Not so many peoples with thousands of years of more or less recorded history who still have not only their genetic material here, but their culture. And that didn't happen because of secular humanist people like me. The Kabbalah artist who talked to us said, basically accurately, that until a couple generations ago the (or some of the) physical ancestors of the people in the room prayed daily that they or their descendants could someday return to Israel, and here we are, and that's crazy. To him it's the fulfillment of prophecy and prayer. To the Arab inhabitants of this land, it's the Nakba, the catastrophe. To me?

2. Whoa I'm so exhausted. There's much more to digest than I can possibly do before I leave. I'm looking forward (already, less than halfway through my trip) to getting back home where I can drink a cold beer in a hot shower and then sit down for a few hours and write and think.

3. Group dynamics with 40 people for 2 weeks - even when all those people are pretty chill - are still kind of intense.

4. Quick bleg: There's a new warning out for Israelis to not travel to the Sinai and to come back if they're there for fear of kidnappings, and there are tons of rumors going around about Iran. Does anyone know anything about the political situation in the Middle East over the last two weeks and want to send me some articles or a quick digest of what's going on (in comments or by email)? Also, does anyone know if the warnings are confined to Sinai or include Egypt proper? And finally, does anyone know how the status of American tourists with Israeli stamps on their passports fits in to these warnings? And finally finally, how should this affect my chosen mode of transportation (air/bus/service taxi) to Cairo?

israel #1

Two days ago: flew to Israel. Rode a bus with 40 other people to Jerusalem and got talked at about Abraham and this being the Jewish homeland. Walked through the Old City to a place where we could see the Dome of the Rock; more talking about the First Temple, the Second Temple, Nebuchadnezzar, the diaspora, and this being the Jewish homeland.

Yesterday: got up at 4:45 to take a bus with 40 people to walk up a mountain to a fortress in the hot desert (breezes feel like they just drifted out from a furnace) and get talked at about Herod and this being the Jewish homeland. Floated in the Dead Sea: it's bouncy! and warm! Weird! An attempt at discussion with 40 people.

Today: got up at 3:30 to walk up a different mountain in the slightly less hot (because earlier) and get talked at about David and this being the Jewish homeland. Then one of the most unearthly lovely places ever: an oasis. Trees moss water waterfalls caves swimming! Swimming! In the desert! You have no idea how good it feels (unless you do). Then took a bus to Jerusalem with 40 people to a hotel that connects to the intertubes. Tonight we will get talked at about Shabbat and this being the Jewish homeland.

Is anyone starting to see patterns here? Also I am having a lovely time and will write much more when I get home.

gone

I'm traveling in the Middle East for the next month. Wish me luck and give me suggestions, unless you're one of the fifty people I've already hit up for luck and suggestions.

stupid

Three guys showed up in the alley by my house today with a ladder, banging around and knocking over the trash cans, so I stuck my head out the back door to see what was up. They're taking down this big tree in the back of the house, which is covered with poison ivy. Covered. All the way up. These guys are not arborists: all they've got is some work gloves, a rattle-trap ladder, a chainsaw, and a rented moving truck. No protective gear of any kind. So I tell them about the poison ivy, and one guy starts freaking out, but another, who seems to be in charge, says naw, it's just regular ivy. Off they go. I told the guy who was worried about it to scrub himself in the harshest soap he can find when he's done, but they're still going to be absolutely covered with it. But what kind of person hires three dudes who don't know how to identify poison ivy - or much else about trees, from the looks of their work - to take out a big tree covered in a vine?

At least they're not going to burn the slash. Poison ivy in the lungs is nothing to mess with.

conditional ocd

If you know me, the idea that I could be obsessively organized about anything is kind of laughable. My room's a mess, my 'files' are stacks of paper in cardboard boxes or on the floor, and my strategy for keeping people from breaking into my car is to have so much random, essentially valueless crap in there that it's not worth breaking the window to see if there's something valuable under there.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty damn organized for any backcountry trip. It's not a conscious decision, but I'll take it - as far as places to get a little OCD, backpacking's a good one. Turns out that a month of travel in the Middle East gets me feeling the same way. I leave for Israel on July 7, and I won't be back until August 7. I'm making lists and trying to remember absolutely everything I could possibly need. It's spilling into grad school planning: I just made an excel spreadsheet to track my applications.

Maybe someday I'll fold my laundry.

driving up to New Hampshire

Some people like driving alone. It's a thrill. Good for thinking, with the red line of taillights like a guide to your thoughts, and the whole country linked up through the Eisenhower interstate system, and you're alone with your rattly engine and some meditative work. Not me. I want someone there to change the tape and read the directions and pass me a water bottle. But I can do it, and I take a certain grim pleasure in the doing - mostly in my ability to do it. The apex of that particular masochism came in 2006: 2500 miles over 5 days, one of them the 14-hour haul from Des Moines to Vail. That spring I put over ten thousand miles on my car, including 1500 in one particular weekend, almost all of them driven alone. It's exhausting work, strangely, to sit in one place and stare, carefully, ahead and behind and to the side while making small adjustments to a wheel and some levers.

Sunday night I left home at 5 pm and drove more or less north until 1:38 in the morning. Up through New Jersey and over the George Washington Bridge and across the Bronx. I stopped at a little gas station in northwestern Connecticut, did jumping jacks while I pumped gas, and laughed at some teen-ager who told me he liked my car. Got sweaty and exhausted and that feeling - does anyone else get this? - that my eyes are something like the robot's in Wall-E: set way back in the middle of my head and taking up half of it, maybe more.

It's so awful but it feels good.

worst. columnist. ever.

The David Brooks approach to social commentary:

1. Identify two opposing stereotypes.

2. Use them to describe a situation which is manifestly irreducible to stereotype.

3. Claim that using these stereotypes gives you special insight into the situation in question.

4. Ignore any inconvenient facts, which is to say most of them.

Tim Burke is correct that this is calculatedly dishonest. See Sasha Issenberg for further details.

last day

Two years ago, I was getting drunk with the entire Teach for America South Dakota corps in Valentine, Nebraska, after the last day of school.

Last night, I was playing ultra-competitive flip cup with a good chunk of the TFA Philadelphia corps after the last day of school. Earlier in the evening, people had been drinking and smoking cigars on someone's back patio when one of the people there called the principal and got her to come. She stayed for one drink and tried to get some of the teachers there to come work for her.

It was totally fun. I got home at 1:30. Now I have to go to school to be professionally developed. I'm not sure I'm going to make it.

expertise

There's an entertaining anecdote in one of the American political science books - I think it's John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies in which a transportation researcher arrives at a conference on public transit by bus. All the other transportation experts gather around him and pepper him with questions about the bus. They are experts on buses who have no experience of buses.

It's the kind of thing that actually happens all the time - happened to me last weekend, at a party where I met an education researcher who wanted to ask me questions about teaching - but it reached perhaps its lowest state in the absurd situation of Chris Matthews claiming that Obama didn't understand diners. It's old news, over two months old, in fact, and too stupid to be worth resurrecting, except that goddammit it makes me mad.

The situation: Obama is at a diner in Indiana; he's offered coffee; he says he'll take orange juice. According to Chris Matthews, this is something that is not done in diners, and based on this fact alone I will guaran-goddamn-tee to you that I spend more time in diners than Chris Matthews does. Obama asked for orange juice for crying out loud, not pomegranate white tea or whiskey or something else you shouldn't expect a diner to have, and not for chicken-fried steak or something else you shouldn't substitute for , and he did not launch into a tirade about how coffee is bad for you. He asked for another drink which is usually available at diners, which is a completely normal response to being offered a cup of coffee.

Chris Matthews blathers about this violation of diner etiquette at length. He appoints himself as an expert on diners, and in doing so makes it blindingly obvious that he doesn't know what he's talking about. No experience whatsoever.

And then, icing on the cake, Matthews tells his correspondent, "You could do this. Shake hands at a diner. What a regular guy."

Recap: Chris Matthews - TV personality, estimated income over $5 million/year, married to an executive at J.W. Marriott, graduate work in economics - is telling us who counts as a regular guy.

Not him.

end of an era

It's the end of the year - end of 2 years, end of my time as a high school teacher - so I'm going to write a little about my students. It'll probably be cheesy. I'm writing it for myself, so don't read if you don't want to.

failure
Selene said, when I talked to her about her disruptive shouting and insistence that she wanted to go to the principal, that she hated failing my class, and particularly hated that she felt unable to stop failing. "Sometimes I want to fail myself, so I know I did it and it's not just you failing me."

So human. Also such an incredible thing to be able to articulate.

happiness
There was a little awards assembly and I gave two girls - the only ones there who had earned anything particular in my class - achievement awards. They hugged me: I was the only teacher to get a hug (I was also the youngest by about 30 years). Later, one of them came to talk to me in my class. She was practically glowing. She wanted to tell me something but didn't have the words, so I told her to say it in French. "I want to say - sorry, pour tout mal que j'ai fait."¹ It was probably the loveliest most heartfelt apology I've ever received.

being cool
I played spoons for about an hour with 8 of my favorite students this morning. I dealt and they were all impressed by my shuffling skills and fought madly over the spoons whenever the scuffle started.

A girl who is, as my mother would say, the glass of fashion saw me a few weeks ago with my glasses and said, "What is this?! It's not cute!" Monday and Tuesday she wore her glasses to school.

I am all over the yearbook, including one absolutely characteristic photo of me standing in front of a full class of students with my finger on my lips.

but not that cool
Speed Scrabble was a poor choice of game for people who don't speak English fluently.

statistical self-congratulation
84% of the students in my senior class are going to college or community college. The rate schoolwide is 30%.

Graduation is tomorrow.

McCain Watch: Taxes

McCain's tax plan is, ahem, bad.

Here's a handy graph (stolen from The Reality-Based Community showing the benefits to each income quintile of the McCain and Obama tax plans.

The benefits from Obama's plan are in blue, the benefits from McCain's are in red, and if it costs a quintile something that appears as a downward bar. It's clear that Obama's plan benefits lower- and middle- income taxpayers while costing the top 1% and top 0.1% quite a bit (all this is measured relative to 'current policy' - i.e. extending the Bush tax cuts - rather than 'current law,' which includes a sunset for the Bush tax cuts.) McCain's plan give everyone a little bit, but gives the top 20% more (and the top 1% and top 0.1% do even better); Obama actually costs the top quintile something, but is superior for everyone else. In addition, Obama's plan increases revenue (again, relative to current policy rather than current law) by 2%, while McCain loses 2% (not to mention his non-tax policy of maintaining troops in Iraq indefinitely, which will be very expensive and contribute to large deficits). The Tax Policy Center, which is a center-left, definitely academic, generally reliable entity (partnership of Brookings and the Urban Institute, gives this analysis of economic effects:

McCain's reduced individual and corporate rates would improve economic efficiency and increase domestic investment, but the larger deficits he would incur to do so would reduce and could completely offset any positive effect. In contrast, Senator Obama's proposed new tax credits could encourage desirable behavior, particularly if the childless EITC and payroll tax rebate encourage additional labor supply among childless low-income individuals. However, he would also direct new subsidies at an already favored group - seniors - and an already favored activity - borrowing for housing-which could probably be better directed elsewhere.

I think it's worth pointing out that it is not pro-business to cut taxes and increase deficits, which McCain is essentially inevitably proposing.

Obama does not get a pass here from me. Subsidizing home equity borrowing has been way overdone, and, like the Tax Policy Center, I think there are better ways to use that money. However, his proposals are far more fiscally responsible than McCain's 'cut taxes on the rich in war-time' plan.

The bottom line is that McCain isn't even good for business interests, just for (maybe) the top 1% who benefit so dramatically from his tax plans that it offsets the damage to the overall economy. And in fact his plan is so skewed that Obama's plan is prima facie better for the bottom 80% of the income distribution. If, as economists like to believe, we are all constantly making economically rational choices, I expect to see an 80 - 20 vote split this November.

negritude

There's a very interesting article about African immigrants in France, something I'm particularly interested in because I have several Malian students who grew up in Paris. The article describes both Obama's rock star status and his effect as a catalyst for conversations about race in traditionally race-blind France, as well as the growing movement among black immigrants to France to address race.

Personal note: My students have said, very clearly, that it is better to be African in Paris than in Philadelphia. My mother's response to that was: the deepest racism in France is against Arabs.

The article is worth reading not only for its fascinating look at race somewhere else - where race officially does not exist, but where far-right xenophobes were second in the 2002 presidential election - but also because it contains some excellent snippets.

For example, a summary of the trouble with ignoring race:

"The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal," he said. "But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal."

France does not have particular trouble with educational inequity, but economic inequality persists:
The percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

And for sheer color:
Youssoupha ... [a Sorbonne-educated Congolese French rapper] was nursing a Coke recently at Top Kafé, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant in Créteil, just outside Paris, where he lives. Nearby, two waiters in yarmulkes sat watching Rafael Nadal play tennis on television beneath dusty framed pictures of Las Vegas and Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. A clutch of Arab teenagers smoked outside.

That's right, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant just outside Paris. Beat that! (No seriously - what does beat that?)

dead past

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been writing about trying to survive in Europe around 1000 AD with a secondary question about other time periods, still in Europe. Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East have obviously come up - people have suggested, wisely in my view, that someone whose primary skills are academic might do better in the Middle East or East Asia around that time.

I find this particular question totally fascinating, but the discussion makes me scratch my head. First of all, there's a blind assumption that the traveler in question is male and white. Much discussion of how much taller and stronger than everyone you'd be (I doubt I'd be taller than most of the men), little discussion of the relative rape risk, assumption that the obstacles will be those faced by an ill-informed foreigner, not by a woman who may legally be property. Similar for race: if you look dramatically different from anyone the people there have met (not just taller/stronger/healthier/better teeth, but completely different skin color) you might have some interesting reactions.

Second, most of the advice is about how to take over the world. I find this kind of laughable, especially when people assume that some small piece of knowledge would be immediately influential, or that you'd be able to somehow leverage your vastly! superior! knowledge of marketing! or your basic understanding of something very technical like telescope lenses in order to revolutionize the society. My favorite might be the person who suggests posing as a wizard (which in and of itself might get you killed) by using 'a magnet, some wire, and a water wheel' to produce electricity (where will you get a magnet and some wire? also, educated people may already know about electricity: the Greeks did) or by using a lighter (basically a fancy flint and steel, which is a very old technology). Also foolish is the idea that a modern person with no fighting expertise or reputation would be able to convince the nobility that your military strategy would be better than theirs. Still, there are some pretty good ideas in this category: selling boiled water, working on camp sanitation for your local ruler's military (reduce disease casualties in wartime? very useful), bookkeeping, a few simple technologies.

All of them ignore the most important thing. I think most of us would find that we have a lot of potentially usable information, but it's not going to do you a damn bit of good if you get killed (as a witch, as a heretic, just by pissing someone off). Since the original question was about what to do to prepare, here's my advice. Start by learning wilderness survival stuff: shelter-building, basic navigation and time-telling, how to build simple snares, gutting small game, edible plants, fire-building (flint and steel is your best bet here - bowdrill is a royal pain). Most people of the time will probably be much better at it than you, but it'd be nice not to look like a total fool; also, I think people are likely to be the most dangerous condition you face, so being able to ditch people for a while would be pretty useful. Second, learn as much self-defense as possible. In both situations, don't concentrate on our stereotypical ideas about what knights and other nobility do (swords? not your friends): instead, learn knife and hand fighting for self-defense, focus on small game in hunting, etc.

Remember that people don't have the scientific method as an integral part of their culture yet, so even if you start doing something that improves health outcomes or whatever, they may not be able to fully notice or understand those improvements. That's a real liability if you're trying to develop a sanitation infrastructure or do medical work: it's not going to be 100% effective, and the first failure may call your entire work into question, depending on the explanatory model people are using. These kinds of cultural differences probably cannot be overstated, though of course human commonalities remain.

Personally, my only real skill is medicine. And not just boiling water or basic anatomy, where the benefits are not immediately obvious: because I have some wilderness medicine training, I'm pretty decent at treating sprains, breaks, cuts, and other day-to-day emergencies where the pay-off is fairly immediate and not just epidemiological. Depending on where I landed, that's probably the type of work I'd try for; if I were in Christian Europe, I might also head for a convent.

I do not think it means what you think it means

Stephen Dubner, on the Freakonomics blog argues in favor of specialization and against eating local. The argument makes some sense: transportation costs, according to some recent work, don't account for that much of the carbon emissions created for food. Here's where my understanding breaks down. Dubner describes making orange sherbet, which was expensive and produced crappy orange sherbet: unsurprising. He concludes from this that growing one's own food is likely to be resource-intensive in money, labor, and waste, and that therefore specialization is a better deal. Which, fine, but it's based on some fundamental misunderstandings of the local food movement.

1. Eating local doesn't necessarily mean growing your own. I certainly grow fairly little of my own food (the Gardener of course has a garden, with lettuce and greens and tomatoes and herbs), but I eat mostly local, including items like eggs and milk that are totally impractical for me to raise myself.

2. Specialization can mean different things. The farmers I buy from have a specialized job as farmers, but they maintain the ecological health of their farms by growing a variety of crops which they rotate, and by incorporating animals into their farms. So their job is specialized, but they are generalists within that specialty: being a true specialist as a farmer means planting a monocrop, which then exposes your crops to greater disease risk and reduces your ability to let the ecology do the work of keeping the land healthy. Dubner conflates specialization of labor with specialization of crop, and they're very different.

3. Bizarrely, Dubner argues that growing your own will rarely be cheaper. This is just untrue overall, although there will always be exceptions. Herbs are a great example: a window box with marjoram, sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, etc will run you something like the cost of 2-3 bundles of each herb. There are certain things where that's not true, obviously (eggs and milk are easy examples, but corn is expensive and takes a lot of land), but Dubner doesn't really investigate the costs: he just assumes that it's similar to his orange sherbet. What's particularly funny is that the NYT food section has a current article about how people are gardening to reduce their food costs, which does include some actual information.

4. Growing your own means using excess capacity. Walk around any city: there's tons of space to grow food, including patios, vacant lots, roofs, windowboxes. Because this increases the net food growing capacity of the planet, growing your own, especially for city dwellers using it as a supplement, is a pretty clear benefit for overall efficiency. Similarly, Dubner claims that people are bad at growing their own food, but this isn't a fixed point: the best way to get better at gardening is to do it for a few years.

As an aside, if I were trying to do what Dubner did with the orange sherbet, but in an efficient way, the first thing I would do is abandon the idea that it needs to be orange sherbet, and instead make something with some excess: this week, that'd be strawberry-buttermilk ice cream with jam strawberries that you can sometimes get at the Farmstand and the buttermilk that's left in our fridge from making butter out of cream that was going to go bad. Part of the point of eating local and being ecologically efficient is turning waste into food. Compost, buttermilk, yogurt, jam, dried tomatoes: take what you have too much of and make it useful.

small success

Weeks ago, one of my students, an extraordinarily dedicated girl from Sierra Leone, was in class when the rest of the students on a field trip and said, "You have to help me with my spelling homework. I don't understand it and my mother doesn't know how to read." I told my dad this story and he said that lots of Americans don't know how to read, but as far as this girl knows her home language doesn't have a written form. Not just, has trouble understanding Dickens. This is, has trouble with using symbols to represent sounds in order to communicate.

Last week, she got a B on her math final.

you know it's hot

1. I bought an air conditioner after 4 summers in Philadelphia.

2. I've been wearing skirts for the last 4 days. In fact, I bought a dress last night because the idea of wearing pants to school today made me want to vomit.

3. They let school out at noon yesterday and today.

McCain Watch #4: Less jobs, more wars

1. McCain called his wife a trollop and a cunt. Sixteen years ago, but yowzah. In front of reporters and everything, because she teased him about his thinning hair. Actual quote: "At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you cunt." Hello, impulse control. You can read about it, apparently, in The Real McCain.

2. Speaking of the same pun, please watch the video below, from The REAL John McCain: Less Jobs, More Wars. This is what I meant when I said the anti-McCain ads practically write themselves.



Then you can watch the second one:


My favorite part is at the end, right before he starts falling over his own feet talking about the tax cuts, where he says he thinks the US is better off than we were 8 years ago and then says we aren't. Please watch them both. It's worth 6 minutes and 4 seconds of your life.

half right

California is denying water permits to development projects that don't have an adequate water supply, which turns out to be quite a few of them. While this NYT article, as usual, omits some important information (where are most of the permits being denied?) and is a short newspaper article so you don't get much background (have I told you to read Cadillac Desert? I'll tell you again), it's still pretty interesting. Adequate water supply in this case means meeting a 2001 rule that you need a 20-year water supply: California already relies heavily on water imported from the Colorado basin, so it's not clear where any new water is going to come from, especially since climate-change predictions have the Colorado basin and California both getting dryer.

The problem, as the article does mention, is that agriculture - mostly though not entirely heavily subsidized, environmentally devastating, corporate agriculture - uses much more water than residential and office uses. So the water boards are absolutely right to prevent developments - especially developments with golf courses! which should never exist west of the 100th meridian! - that lack an adequate water supply, but at some point agriculture will have to pay too. It's a sign of the lunacy of our agricultural system that we have dammed rivers and exterminated salmon in order to grow and heavily subsidize crops that destroy the topsoil, pump chemicals into the Pacific, and end up with land whose inadequate drainage concentrates selenium and other heavy metals and chemicals in swamps that then kill migratory birds and are essentially permanently unusable. And then we have to refrigerator-truck those crops across the country, exacerbating global climate change and further reducing the available water for California.

Smart.

McCain Watch #4: Candidate Rundown

Clinton: I can't believe she didn't withdraw from the race. I don't want to hate her - some of my first political memories are of the sexism in '92, and I want her to be the person we were so excited about then - but damn. She's making it hard.

Obama: While, like a friend who said this, I'm weary of being excited about Obama, I'm still really excited that he actually got the nomination.

McCain: In his speech last night, he committed one of the classic blunders, right up there under "never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line." (Come to think of it, McCain does want to get/keep us involved in a land war in Asia, so I guess more blunders are unsurprising). He criticized Obama extensively, and at the end of many paragraphs said, "That's not change we can believe in." It's a mistake to do that: it reminds his audience of Obama's slogan, in the same way that telling someone not to stick beans in their ears would bring up the idea in the first place. Moreover, when you hear an instruction like that, your brain has a tendency to edit out the 'not.' All McCain is doing is giving Obama a bunch of free publicity.

As an aside, it's pretty impressive that Obama's slogan is now so well-known that McCain can use it freely in his speech and assume his audience will know it. The other candidates certainly don't have that kind of recognition for particular phrases.

McCain Watch #3: small and scary edition

McCain's staffing decisions are one of the least impressive things about his campaign. The guy who claims to be against lobbyist influence hiring mostly lobbyists? Check. The guy who claims to be deeply experienced in foreign policy and "need no on the job training" being corrected about basic strategic facts in the Middle East? Check.

Now, we learn that McCain's Deputy Communications Director, Michael Goldfarb, believes that the president has "near dictatorial powers in foreign policy and war." Aside from that pesky bit where the right to declare war is reserved to Congress by the US Constitution, along with raising, governing, funding, arming, and disciplining the military; not to mention that the president's powers in foreign policy are to be exercised with the advice and consent of the Senate. Constitution? What constitution? Now, it's true that Goldfarb said those things before he joined the McCain campaign, but there's no indication that it was not his true belief - or what passes for belief these days. I expect - well, I hope - that this sort of thing will catch up with McCain. If he can't choose decent staff for his campaign, why should he be allowed to pick federal government staff?

McCain: now with even more terrification.

disc!

My brother and I are looking at getting Obama discs printed: good discs, 175 g, white with the blue and red logo in the middle, printed pretty large. Half the profits would go to the campaign.

I need to know, though, if anyone wants the damn things before I put in an order. So - do you want an Obama frisbee? Do you want it enough to pay $15 for it? Would it be cooler with plain red and blue or with sparkle red and blue for the logo?

surreal

Teaching is consistently surreal, but Tuesday might have set a record. A senior - Mon, who asked me out in all apparent seriousness last winter - was walking by my car when I got to school with a three-year-old, a little boy in one of those adorably adult jacket and floppy hat combinations, holding onto his left hand. It was his son.

Mon was there to give his senior project presentation on gangs, which he managed to do around 1:40. Most of the presentation consisted of a history of the Crips and their relationship to the Black Panthers, along with some pseudo-academic filler and quite a bit about gang signs and symbols. I sat in my classroom watching him draw gang signs on my chalkboard and explain which ones were for Crips and which for Bloods, and at the end he gave a rather incoherent plea to keep kids out of gangs through better parenting.

Afterwards, I asked him about it. Let's get real - you're in a gang, or you've said you are, and you have a son. Are you trying to keep your son out of the gang? Do you actually think gangs are bad?

No, he said. Around my way, it's more like a family - we look out for each other. And it might have some bad things to it, but it's a way for people to come together and I really don't see nothing wrong in it.

Then he went upstairs to collect his son from the ELECT office where he was napping, and I emailed him and the other teacher his grade.

glass houses; stones

Today, Bush called for a "culture of responsibility."

After you, Mr. President.

problems with industrial farming, in brief

The New York Times has an op-ed out about industrial animal farming. It's actually very good - it hits, briefly, all the major problems with the meat system, from rural impoverishment to labor exploitation to antitrust issues to environmental damage to antibiotic resistance. You might not actually know what all of the problems were from reading it, but any given sentence could act as a starting point to learn more about why, exactly, our food system is so totally fucked.

flabbergasted

I appear to have stepped into bizarro-world somehow. My students came up from lunch screaming and crowding around my door - I don't have a class right now - because, get this, they were arguing about whether someone had done a math problem correctly. I opened the door and 8 students flooded in and started screaming at me and each other - just trying to be heard, not aggressively - to demand that I a) referee the dispute about this particular order of operations problem and b) listen to the 10th and 11th graders claim mathematical superiority over the 9th graders. Following which a number of students demanded copies of the final review packet with which to demonstrate their claimed prowess.

Students are sneaking out of class to get math problems! The world has gone mad!

when cultural distance is horrifying

A student of mine - a really really nice Jamaican kid - said, "He's homo!" in class. Which, of course, triggered the predictable lecture on how there's nothing wrong with being gay and the real problem is that the other kid is touching him without his permission, which no one should do, gay straight female male etc.

"Where I'm from, it's different. If you have two brothers, and one is gay, they kill him. No one act gay because they know they'll be killed."

What do you think about that?

"I think it's good to kill them. It's the rule and I follow the rule. Besides they give you money."

As an afterthought, he adds, "We don't have no problem with lesbians, though."

a new way to waste time.

Go play Budget Hero.

In addition to being totally entertaining - if, like me, you're easily entertained - it's surprisingly instructive to see the costs of various things in context. Arts education? Small change. A good example of how a game is a great way to communicate some kinds of information.

My personal budget reduced debt from 38% of GDP to 16% of GDP, provided universal health care, capped carbon emissions, and generally made the world awesome. Somebody call the White House. Actually, scrap that, better wait til they care.

(from the Freakonomics blog)

more inherent problems with poverty

While I was home last weekend - digression: it was so great - a friend saw the post about stress causing asthma and pointed me to this Financial Times article which discusses the effects of stress via low social status on developing brains. Quick summary: it's bad. This suggests to me that if Teach for American and other education policy people are interested in eliminating the gap between rich and poor in educational attainment, they're going to have to eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) the low social status and stress associated with poverty.

This also suggests one possible source of the Scandinavian 'bumblebee economy' (discussed, very briefly, in the Iceland article - basically, high taxes and high growth!): the Scandinavian states - with their excellent social services, low inequality, and strong safety net - more efficiently use and develop the increasingly valuable mental capacity of their citizens. This could also explain some of the findings on Sweden that Lane Kenworthy recently discussed.

As an aside, he writes about school choice in Sweden being a surprise for the left - I'd argue that Sweden in this situation doesn't hold lessons for the US, because inequality is so much lower that the risks of school choice are correspondingly lower. My concern about school choice is that it will leave low-income/low-status students stranded in schools that get worse and worse; if there is less social inequality, I would similarly expect less inequality in educational options.

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how to mock Clinton without being sexist

This is clever, hilarious, and depressing. In other words, Saturday Night Live at its best.

(from the Monkey Cage)

new life plan

I'm moving to Iceland. Next week, if possible. Who's in?

micro music review

Almost a month ago at probably the best yard sale ever - fancy little bowls, champagne flutes, lamps for $2, and two weeks later a free Kitchen Aid - I bought a box of tapes for the last tape player in the country, which lives in the dashboard of my car. One of them was Lucinda Williams Lucinda Williams, from 1988. She's up there on my list of all time favorite musicians (and in fact is my stock answer when my students ask, on the bet that they haven't heard of her and in the hope that maybe someone has) and the whole album is great because you can hear where her sound is going but it's more straightforwardly country, not how she sings now. Also it turns out that she wrote two songs I first heard other people sing: Passionate Kisses, which is on Mary Chapin Carpenter's Come On Come On and is a staple of family road trips, and Crescent City, which Emmylou Harris sings on Cowgirl's Prayer and which I have always loved. I love it even more now - partly because the way Lucinda sings it you're practically living the whole song, Crescent City and zydeco right up ahead and the first thing you do is go to your mama's house in Mandeville and then your brother takes you out to the bar and the weather's hot but the beer is cold. Emmylou sings it more like a party, no homesick ache underneath to tell you that even if you make it home, it's never really the same. And that's the other reason I love Crescent City more than I did when I was a teen-ager itching to get out of town.

Everybody's had a few,
Now they're talking about who knows who,
I'm going back to the Crescent City,
where everything is still the same.

I go home to the Midwest on Friday. I know exactly how Lucinda feels.