Monthly Archives: October 2007

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

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    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. — Some historical artifact hanging in the Rotunda that Republicans might want to read sometime

Yesterday I linked to an NRO post by Mark Hemingway that attacked the parents of Bethany Wilkerson. Among other insinuations, Hemingway wrote,

While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. While USAction and a labyrinthine maze of leftist activist groups prepare to rally around images of Tampa Bay’s Most Photogenic Baby holding up a crayon sign that says “Don’t Veto Me,” Dara and Brian Wilkerson are real poster children — for irresponsible decisions.

On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was “unmanageable.” From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix. But not knowing about future health problems is the reason we have insurance in the first place.

Blog reaction to Hemingway was, um, strong. Bill Scher:

In the conservative vision for America, the only people who should choose to have children are people that can afford health insurance. Or in other words: “Pro-Life (If You Can Pay For It).” …

… The honest conservative response to seeing the struggles of working class Americans is to mock them.

And the more honest conservatives are about their cold and callous vision for America, the easier it will be for American voters to make informed decisions about where we should go as a nation.

The Carpetbagger:

Hemingway left out a pertinent detail: Dara left that job seven years before Bethany was born. The implication in the National Review piece is that Dara should have stayed at her job in order to provide for her family. The reality shows otherwise. (And Hemingway’s decision to leave this fact out doesn’t reflect well on his argument.)

Digby:

Implicit in all of this is that every parent in this country has an obligation to either work for someone who provides health insurance for their families —- or be rich. The alternatives — entrepreneurial risk taking, working for retail employers like Walmart or restaurants which fail to provide health insurance, is something that no responsible parent would do. Therefore, that sector of the economy is completely off limits to middle class families. And that is the only sector of the economy that’s actually growing.

(Oh, and by the way, those health insurance providing companies which all responsible middle class should work for are under no obligation to these employees with kids who indenture themselves for the benefit. They are allowed to pull back this coverage any time they want, raise the contributions and fire the employees at will. That’s what Republicans call “liberty.”)

Today Hemingway is whining that he’s been misunderstood:

I suggested that the Wilkersons might have sacrificed by working less-desirable jobs, if that choice (or those choices) meant they could more adequately provide for their daughter. I said that a married couple that has been talking about having kids for years, but has failed to sacrifice financially or make basic economic preparations to pay for their first kid, is acting irresponsibly. That’s hardly “anti-life.” It’s common sense. How many people are in less than optimal jobs because of good benefits for their dependents?

Dude — we heard you the first time.

Life shouldn’t be something you put up with. Certainly, all of us deal with less-than-optimal situations every day; that’s life. But when the big stuff, the stuff that eats most of your time and concern — like your job or your marriage — become something you are just enduring year after year because you don’t have a choice, your life can seem like something you’re just waiting out.

I’ve had jobs that were so miserable I sincerely wondered if I wouldn’t be happier living in a cardboard box on the street. Once I bailed out of an insufferable work situation and found a new job that was even worse. And yes, I do ask myself if it’s me, but I have also had pleasant jobs that I’ve had to leave for reasons unrelated to the job. I think I have bad job karma.

We don’t know what Dara meant by “unmanageable.” Maybe the job required putting in unreasonable hours, which is not compatible with being a parent. Maybe the boss was hitting on her, or was abusive in some other way. I had one boss once who expected me to cheat the vendors and customers to save her money, which I found intolerable. There are some things nobody should have to put up with.

Let’s say Dara enjoys her current job and likes her boss and co-workers. What kind of “free” society would force her to choose between a job she likes and having children?

Freedom is about making your own choices, so let’s talk about choices. President Bush and other right wingers warn us that if we switch to “socialized medicine,” we’ll lose the freedom to choose our own doctors, which is bogus on two levels. First, citizens in most countries with universal health care can choose their own doctors. Second, under our current “system” workers all over America already have been forced to switch doctors by their employer’s managed care plan. And they can’t shop around for a new employer with a better managed care plan, because if they have pre-existing conditions they won’t be insured at all. So what choices do they have?

Even if you have insurance there’s no guarantee you’ll keep it if you develop a major medical problem. Get cancer, lose your home. Some choice.

In America, once upon a time, most people who weren’t slaves or servants were, in effect, self-employed. The whopping majority of free people were farmers. A young person might work for someone else for a while to learn a trade, with the expectation that he would strike out on his own when he was ready. In the 19th century, as the industrial revolution pulled people off farms and into factories, having to work for someone else was derided as “wage slavery.” Now, holding a job is not only respectable, it’s expected. A job isn’t slavery if you can walk away from it, right? But for growing numbers of Americans the system is rigged so that they can’t walk away from it. Call it “insurance slavery.” Road to serfdom, anyone?

John McG of Man Bites Blog writes,

That many people are in jobs they hate for the sake of insurance is a bug, not a feature. … Does the GOP really want to be the party of forcing people into life-sucking 40 hour a week jobs for huge companies for fear that they won’t have insurance? Seems like a loser to me.

I don’t care what the lyrics to the national anthem say; we’re not “the land of the free” if Americans aren’t allowed to make reasonable choices about how to live their own bleeping lives.

Child Derangement Syndrome

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This morning I posted a video featuring 2-year-old Bethany Wilkerson in support of S-CHIP. Now Faiz at Think Progress catches us up on the right-wing smear of the Wilkerson family. Read and be outraged.

Rightie Rick Moran had written,

I note that this time around, the Democrats were careful to push a family forward whose choices regarding health insurance couldn’t be questioned. In that respect, if they’re waiting for conservatives to attack the Wilkerson’s, they are going to be sorely disappointed.

Um, guess again.

John Amato reports that even some of the talking heads on Faux Snooze are putting some distance between themselves and the attacks on the Frosts and Wilkersons. Neil Gabler and Jane Hall tried to talk some sense into Cal Thomas and James Pinkerton. As if.

Update: See also Hale Stewart.

The Time Is Now

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Christy writes,

Please make those calls on SCHIP today. These kids are depending on all of us. Let’s get to work…

PS — In case you’ve missed it, we’ve flipped two Bush Dogs. Three to go — you can help us keep the momentum going by donating to Blue America PAC. Thanks to everyone for all the hard work and support on this.

Here’s another child Malkin will claim we liberals are abusing:

From Politico, about Bethany’s parents:

For the record, the Bo and Dara Wilkerson say they make $34,000 in combined income from restaurant jobs in St. Petersburg, Fla. They rent their house and the couple owns one car, which Bo calls “a junker.” Malkin and other bloggers have revealed over the past week that the Frost family owned two properties, as well as a couple cars, and had a $45,000 income. The accusation against Democrats, and by extension the Frost family, is that they are too middle class to be granted any subsidized health insurance for their children.

The Wilkersons said they are fully aware of the possibility that their finances and personal lives may be investigated by opponents of the SCHIP bill.

“We rent a house, we have one car that is a junker. Let them dig away,” Bo Wilkerson said. “I have $67 in my checking account. Does that answer your question?”

Righties might answer that they aren’t opposed to TRULY NEEDY children getting S-CHIP. They are opposed to middle-class children who already have insurance getting on the public dole. The response to this comes in an editorial in today’s New York Times:

First, nobody who enrolls in S-chip would be living on government handouts. The families would all be paying appropriate premiums and co-payments. It is also highly unlikely that a lot of people would drop private coverage to enroll in S-chip. States already monitor such substitution and take a number of steps to deter it.

New York estimates that only about 3 percent of the children enrolled in the program came from families that dropped employer coverage to obtain S-chip. Mathematica Policy Research, in a report prepared for the federal government, looked at states across the country and pegged the typical substitution rate at less than 10 percent.

Using a broader methodology and peering into the future, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill vetoed by President Bush would increase enrollment in S-chip and Medicaid by 5.8 million in 2012. Of that total, 3.8 million children would otherwise be uninsured and 2 million would be children who could have gotten private insurance in the absence of S-chip.

Even if that 1-in-3 substitution rate should turn out to be accurate, it is still far better than denying insurance to millions of American children.

From the standpoint of a child’s health, it is often a good thing to substitute S-chip for private coverage. If the available private policy has skimpy benefits or is so costly it devours a family budget with large premiums and cost-sharing, the child may not get needed medical care.

Some critics of S-chip like to cite substitution estimates that are much higher. Mathematica found that so-called “population-based studies” estimated the substitution rate at 10 percent to 56 percent, depending on the approach and assumptions used. These studies capture not only families that dropped private coverage to go into the S-chip program but also families that had an opportunity later to take out private insurance yet stayed on the public program.

The problem with these studies is that they assume that all parents that dropped or decided not to go with private coverage did so because of the availability of S-chip. They ignore other very possible circumstances, such as when families lose their private coverage because a parent dies or loses a job. These studies also take no account of whether a private policy, though theoretically available, was too costly to be affordable for a low-income worker.

Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that House Republicans are getting heat from their constituents on S-CHIP:

On television and radio, in phone calls and e-mails, proponents of the five-year, $35 billion increase are pressuring about 20 Republicans to switch sides and help override President Bush’s veto. The full-court press includes preachers, rock stars such as Paul Simon and sick kids in an effort to sway the result — or the next election.

The odds are against us, folks. But if the veto stands, that doesn’t mean the fight is over. It means a lot of right-wingers are going to be clobbered by S-CHIP in the next election. Representatives need to think hard about who they represent — the military-industrial complex, or the people?

Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor

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Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.

There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?

Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.

Arrogance in Action

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In Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, who call themselves “proud atheists.” But this post is not so much about their atheism as it is about language, concepts, and misunderstandings —

You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect.

PINKER: That’s right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the door open, we say, “John opened the door.” If John opens the window and a breeze pushes the door open, we don’t say, “John opened the door.” We say something like, “What John did caused the door to open.” We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on “Law and Order,” where you have to figure out if the person who pulled the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the same model of causation.

I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an assassin’s bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, “I just shot him. The doctors killed him.” The jury disagreed and he went to the gallows. It’s an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.

Rebecca, you’ve written a great deal about competing philosophical theories of language. Do you think our mind can function apart from language? Or does language define our reality?

GOLDSTEIN: Obviously, much of our thinking is being filtered through language. But it’s always seemed to me that there has to be an awful lot of thinking that’s done prior to the acquisition of language. And I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I’m thinking. So there’s something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind.

As a novelist, this must be something you think about.

GOLDSTEIN: Very much so. My novels begin with a sense of the book, a sense of the place, and then I have to find the language that does justice to it. Strangely, I find that in my philosophical work as well. And in math; I’ve done a lot of math. I have the intuition, I’ll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. So I’ve always had a keen sense that thought does not require language.

The understanding that “the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect” has been integral to Zen Buddhism for 15 centuries, and in Buddhism generally for a thousand years before that. I believe it originated in vedanta, a movement of Hindu that began ca. the 6th century BCE, possibly earlier. And of course it’s central to philosophical Taoism as well. I’m very happy to see that “America’s brainiest couple,” as Paulson calls Pinker and Goldstein, are finally catching up.

I wrote about the limitations of language in the Wisdom of Doubt series, but the Paulson article has inspired me to revisit the topic and take it a little further. And to do that I’m going to go out on a limb and discuss Chao Chou’s Dog, which is the first koan of the Mumonkon. (Please note that I’m not a Zen teacher, just a rather slow student, and will not provide anything approximating the answer.) Rinzai Zen students spend years meditating on this koan; it’s said that if you can resolve it, the other 800 or so koans aren’t so hard. Here is the case:

    A monk asked Master Chao Chou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”

    Chao Chou answered, “Mu.”

And that’s it. Some explanation: Non-Chinese speaking Zennies are told that Mu means “No thing.” Chao Chou was a famous Chinese Zen master ca. 9th century, who sometimes shows up in literature as Joshu, his name in Japanese. “Buddha nature” is the reality that enlightened beings are enlightened to. It’s said that Buddha nature pervades the universe — that’s a line from common Zen liturgy. So, one might assume, Buddha nature pervades dogs, right? So, a dog should have Buddha nature.

But Master Chao Chou said “No thing.” Not ‘no,” but “no thing.” If a child had asked him the same question, he might have said “yes.” But a monk should be able to go beyond the words, to the meaning beyond the meaning.

The koan collection called the Mumonkon, which sometimes is called “The Gateless Barrier” or “The Gateless Gate,” was compiled by a Chinese master named Hui-k’ai (1183-1260) who also came to be called Wu Men (Chinese) or Mumon (Japanese), meaning “no gate.” Hui-k’ai/Mumon provided commentaries and capping verses to help the student along. The American Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi gives this translation of the capping verse to Chao Chou’s Dog:

    Dog, Buddha nature —
    The full presentation of the whole;
    With a bit of “has” or “has not”
    Body is lost, life is lost.

With a bit of “has” or “has not” — there’s that pesky verb. The way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect. It has a lot to do with the way we understand everything. If you think in terms of the dog having Buddha nature, then you’ve got two things — a dog, and Buddha nature — connected by the verb to have. But Mumon says no thing.

There’s a question being asked here, but as soon as you try to put the question into words, it’s wrong. You might be tempted to say, well, the dog doesn’t have Buddha nature, but what then is the relationship between the dog and Buddha nature? That’s still two things. The monk is being challenged to push beyond nouns and verbs and objects to directly perceive the nature of beingness itself, which cannot be explained with words. The koan is presenting something to be realized. It’s easy to come up with a conceptual answer — that the dog and Buddha nature are one — but just as the question cannot be conceptualized, neither can the answer, which is a matter to be resolved between teacher and student.

In the interview, Goldstein says, “I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I’m thinking. So there’s something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind. … I have the intuition, I’ll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. ” Once we can conceptualize whatever’s clanking around in our heads, we can describe it with language. But concepts are an interface; they aren’t the thing itself. Realization outside of the conceptualization/language filter is what Zen and other mystical practices are all about. The kind of head work Goldstein seems to think is cutting edge has been going on for millenia.

But, of course, when you start talking about eastern mysticism to some folks, they put up all kinds of “this is just New Age claptrap” filters, and they don’t hear anything you say.

Later in the interview, Pinker and Goldstein go on about Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza is celebrated as a great rationalist who helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment. Goldstein says of Spinoza,

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it’s through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that’s what it is about Spinoza. He’s just such a rationalist.

And that’s fine. But Spinoza was no atheist; he was a pantheist. His answer to the question of the existence of God was that nothing exists but God. “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived,” Spinoza said. “God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. All things which are, are in God. Besides God there can be no substance, that is, nothing in itself external to God.”

So, does a dog have God nature? And how close in understanding were Spinoza and Chao Chou? Not identical, I don’t think, but they were certainly pointing to the same thing.

This part of the interview pissed me off:

Steve, you recently waded into the controversy over Harvard’s proposal to require all undergraduates to take a course called “Reason and Faith.” The plan was dropped after you and other critics strongly opposed it. But the people who supported it say that every college graduate should have a basic understanding of religion because it’s such a powerful cultural and political force around the world. Don’t they have a point?

PINKER: I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. I didn’t like the idea of privileging religion above other ideologies that were also historically influential, like socialism and capitalism. I also didn’t like the euphemism “faith.” Nor did I like the juxtaposition of “faith” and “reason,” as if they were just two alternative ways of knowing. …

…But can you really equate religion with astrology, or religion with alchemy? No serious scholar still takes astrology or alchemy seriously. But there’s a lot of serious thinking about religion.

PINKER: I would put faith in that same category because faith is believing something without a good reason to believe it. I would put it in the same category as astrology and alchemy.

In his book Dynamics of Faith, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich wrote, very clearly, that “Faith is not belief and it is not knowledge with a low degree of probability.” He called Pinker’s definition of faith an “‘intellectualistic’ distortion of the meaning of faith.” This and other distortions of the meaning of faith have had a “tremendous influence over popular thinking” that “have been largely responsible for alienating many from religion since the beginning of the scientific age.” Tillich continued,

The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Somethng more or less probable or imporbable is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation. … If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than of faith.

So if believing that some supernatural thing is real or true even if it can’t be proved is not faith, then what is faith? Tillich said,

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. … Faith as ultimate concern is the act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. …

…Faith is not an act of any of his rational functions, as it is not an act of the unconscious, but it is an act in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of his being are transcended.

I want to do a post or two just on Tillich some day; I don’t have time right now to do his work justice. But as I understand it, faith is a means rather than an end. It’s a means of engagement with something, and that something may be tangible or intangible, true or false. The something does not necessarily have a religious nature.

The kind of arrogance and ignorance by which Pinker dismisses “faith” as something like believing in magic is disturbing. It was his own prejudice and ignorance, not rational judgment, that inspired him to oppose the Faith and Reason class. Too bad.

Update: Neil the Ethical Werewolf has a post up refuting an op ed by Lee Siegel called “Militant atheists are wrong.” There’s a lot about Siegel’s arguments that are, um, flaky, and Neil makes some decent points. But Neil’s argument is mostly based on an assumption that faith equals belief. I’m afraid both Neil and Siegel miss the boat here.

Gore Derangement Syndrome

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I think you’ll enjoy Paul Krugman’s column today — “Gore Derangement Syndrome.” I don’t entirely agree with this part of it, however.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

Maybe sorta kinda. The true believers never saw a stain of illegitimacy, of course. Righties don’t think much of elections, except as a kind of ritual; a motion that has to be gone through (one way or another) so that a government can call itself “democratic.” Righties never believed Bill Clinton was the “legitimate” president, even though he won two elections decisively. They spent eight years trying to take him down and nullify those elections, any way they could. And when the American people continued to support Clinton, William Bennett was all over media pushing his book The Death of Outrage and complaining the American people had lost their sense of morality.

In other words, to a rightie “legitimacy” is not something conferred by the expressed will of We, the People. It is conferred by decisions made behind closed doors in right-wing think tanks and disseminated to the true believers through right-wing media. And they’d been smearing and vilifying Gore for years before the 2000 elections.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

They won’t admit he’s right, of course. Their lips would fall off first. But yes, they are threatened. They want to look at the world and see their vision perfectly reflected back at them, as in a mirror. When the world reflects back something else, they can’t stand it. They’re like the evil stepmother in Snow White when the Magic Mirror told her someone else was more beautiful than she was.

This is why the Right wants to destroy Al Gore — they are jealous. All admiration and adulation belongs to them.

Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

Krugman himself has been the target of rightie search-and-destroy missions. Andrew Leonard writes at Salon, in a review of Krugman’s new book The Consciences of a Liberal:

For those who go the extra step of publicly making their living inveighing against conservative triumphalism, the reward has been ridicule and scorn. In “The Conscience of a Liberal,” Krugman recounts how after the 2004 election, some colleagues told him that it was time to ease up on his constant hectoring of George W. Bush. “The election settled some things.” …

…If they can bring themselves to skim through its pages, conservatives, naturally, will not find much to like in “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Perhaps one of the best things you can say about it is that Krugman will drive them mad with rage (kind of like Al Gore winning a Nobel Peace Prize).

See also Kevin Drum, Robert Parry, Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast, Skippy, the Carpetbagger, and Matt at Think Progress.

No Problemo

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George Will denying global climate change:

This illustrates what I’ve observed about how Democrats and Republicans deal with critical issues. Let’s say there’s a big honking Issue looming in the future — global warming, health care, whatever. Republicans will deny the problem exists until it bites their butts, then they blame Democrats for not having solved the problem sooner. The exception to this involves opportunities to undo some progressive program they hate, like Social Security; then they exaggerate the problem so they can spin their particular “solution.”

Democrats in general are better at recognizing an impending problem, and some of them can demonstrate considerable insight into what is causing the problem. They’ll make stirring speeches about how the problem needs to be addressed. But for the past several years, once they get to Washington their big ideas evaporate. An issue might cry out for a massive overhaul, and the Dems will offer band-aids.

Politicians of both parties are being influenced by Big Money, of course. They can’t do anything that will piss off big campaign contributors. So, nothing gets done.

But what’s Will’s excuse?

What They’re Not Telling Us

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I read in the Guardian that there has been a sharp drop in U.S. productivity growth since 2003. John Schmitt and Dean Baker write,

All the bad news about the bursting of the US housing bubble and the related meltdown in US share markets has deflected the world’s attention from what is arguably an even more fundamental problem facing the US economy: the sharp deceleration in productivity growth since the middle of 2004.

For Americans, the long-run implications of this little-discussed slowdown, if sustained, are actually more important to future living standards than any of the other events currently worrying world markets. For Europeans, long-encouraged to see the United States as the flexible economic ideal, the productivity slowdown sounds another note of caution about the US model. Europeans already know that the US economy generates substantial inequality. The last three years of slow productivity growth now suggest that all that inequality apparently doesn’t even guarantee faster growth.

Notice that this is not a decrease in productivity itself, but in productivity growth.

Economists define “productivity” as the value of goods and services produced per hour by an economy’s average worker, and agree that the growth rate of productivity is the single most important determinant of the long-run prospects for a country’s standard of living.

The deceleration in US productivity growth since the second half of 2004 is striking by historical standards. Between 1947 and 1973, the golden age of postwar capitalism, productivity growth averaged about 2.8% per year in the United States. At that pace, the output of the average worker was set to double about every 25 years, allowing roughly comparable increases in national living standards. From 1973 through 1995, however, productivity growth took a nosedive, with the average rate dropping to just 1.4%. At this lower rate, average worker output would take about 50 years to double, implying far slower progress in living standards.

From the mid-1990s on, however, official productivity growth again accelerated rapidly, returning to a 2.9% rate reminiscent of the golden age. Quite suddenly, though, in the second half of 2004, productivity growth dropped sharply. From the third quarter of 2004, productivity growth rate, at 1.3% per year, has not even managed to match the 1.4% growth rate of the productivity bust of 1973-1995.

But we’re still beating lazy ol’ socialist Yurp, right?

Meanwhile, how has Europe been faring? According to internationally comparable data from the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, between 1995 and 2004, the United States outperformed most of Europe, with productivity growing about 2.5% per year in the United States, compared to 1.7% in Germany, 2.0% in France, and 2.2% in the United Kingdom.

Between 2004 and 2006, however, the US lead all but evaporated. The US rate fell to 1.7%, not much different from the rates in Germany (1.7%), France (1.4%), and the United Kingdom (1.4%). If current trends continue, US growth rates may soon be trailing those of Europe (as was the case for almost the entire postwar period before 1995).

Well, damn.

I’m not an economist, but let me speculate anyway: Perhaps companies are not reinvesting in facilities and technology and “growing their people” as they did in the 1990s. “The driving force behind the 1996-2004 productivity acceleration … was massive investment in computers, software and related high-tech machinery, all of which become obsolete much faster than earlier generations of capital goods.” Now companies may be upgrading and replacing technology, but it’s not like in the 1990s, when PCs appeared on every office desk for the first time.

And then there’s the fatigue factor. Workers are worn out and stressed out. They’ve skipped vacations and worked way too much underpaid and unpaid overtime. They are not being rewarded. Their wages are stagnant, even as the cost of living rises. So workers subsidize their employer’s profits by going deeper into personal debt, struggling to maintain a “normal” middle-class lifestyle. (See also “Spherion Study Shows Less Than Half of U.S. Workers Are Satisfied With Their Jobs; Benefits and Compensation Inadequate to Retain Employees.“)

Back in the days of the Cold War we patriotic Americans were told, over and over again, that Communism is a bad system because it doesn’t provide a personal incentive for people to work. If everyone is going to be taken care of by the state, whether they work hard or not, then why bother? And I think that’s a valid criticism. You can’t deny that Communist countries produce piss-poor economies in the long run.

But I think King Capitalism is making the same mistake. If everyone is going to be pissed on by their employer whether they work hard or not, then why bother? What’s the incentive?

See especially “Our Sub-prime Economy” by Rick Wolff:

From 1973 to 2005, this is what happened to the 80 percent of US workers in non-supervisory jobs. Their hourly wages — adjusted for inflation — rose from $15.76 to $16.11. That is, over a 32 year period, most US workers enjoyed a stunning 2 percent increase in what their hourly pay could buy. Because their work weeks shortened over those years, their real weekly pay — what they could actually afford for a week’s pay — actually fell from $581.67 to $543.65, a decline of 6.5 percent. This means that workers’ wages could buy less in 2005 than in 1973.

Over the same thirty years, US workers produced 75 percent more. In the language of economics, that’s how much output per worker — “productivity” — rose. Corporations got 75 percent more goods and services produced per worker. They sold that extra output and thus got much more revenue and profit per worker employed. Yet what they paid those workers did not rise. Stagnant wages did not allow the workers to buy any of the extra output they produced.

Americans measure success by levels of consumption, Wolff writes. As the bumper stickers say, Whoever Dies with the Most Toys Wins. So as wages flattened, American workers compensated to maintain the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. First, in the 1970s, women entered the workforce in large numbers. This of course was partly because of second-wave feminism, but it also corresponded with the slowdown of the economy that occurred after 1972. Second, people got used to carrying larger and larger chunks of debt to pay for the stuff they believed middle-class people were supposed to have, but which they couldn’t afford. As I said, they’re subsidizing their employers’ profits by going into debt.

Wolff also makes this observation:

The numbers on productivity and real wages before then — from 1945 to 1975 — were very different. Productivity rose much faster then than afterward. But the big difference is what happened to real wages: hourly, they rose 75 percent from 1947 to 1972, while weekly they rose 61 percent. In other words, US workers wages then rose with their higher productivity — exactly what stopped happening after the mid-1970s.

The welfare state economy of 1945 to 1975 was driven by two interconnected fears: of lapsing back into the Great Depression and of succumbing to socialism. History reduced those fears enough so that, after 1975, business could undo the New Deal and go back to the pre-1929 gaps between rich and poor. Most paid commentators cheer the business reaction as if it were good for everyone, but workers suffering the new sub-prime economy may reckon differently. The explosion of workers’ debts has postponed that reckoning. So too have fundamentalism, escapism, and the noise from all those commentators.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Dear Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, which expounds on this theme big-time, but more colorfully. However, Bageant’s subjects are so used to being pissed on by The System that they don’t even question it.

Those of us who were children in the 1950s and 1960s got so used to economic times getting better and better that we assumed that was the way the world would always be. Any slowdowns were just temporary glitches. In the early 1980s, when mortgage rates went through the roof, lots of my contemporaries cheerfully took out balloon mortgages because of course in five years they’d be making a lot more money. But, as a rule, they didn’t. Now I think most people have stopped expecting. They’re just hoping to hang on to what they have.

I’ve believed for a long time that much of America’s prosperity — whatever’s left of it, anyway — has been floating on the wealth created in the postwar years. That’s when all those veterans got college degrees on the GI Bill and went out and started businesses or created new products. That’s when all those middle-class couples, booming with babies, bought their first houses with mortgages subsidized by the U.S. government. That left with them income to buy new refrigerators and cars and television sets, growing the refrigerator and car and television set industries in America. It was win/win for everybody.

Well, those days are gone, huh? And if you want to get really depressed, take a look at this episode of Bill Moyers Journal.

Also, this guy says that people who are even worse off than we are, are subsidizing us — “a good many developing countries are actually subsidizing U.S. consumers indirectly (by keeping their currency undervalued).” Face it; the world’s economy isn’t “trickle down”; it’s “trickle up.” American workers are middle men, passing the world’s wealth up the chain after taking our little cut.

I don’t know what the solution is. I understand that old-style protectionism isn’t workable any more. On the other hand, Ian Welsh keeps patiently explaining to me that globalization is not inevitable. He understands economic stuff much better than I do, so I’ll take his word on that.

I do think that we must begin to think in terms of investing in ourselves again. If workers and business were relieved of the burden of health care costs, wouldn’t that help the economy (except for the insurance industry, of course)? If a college education were a lot more affordable, wouldn’t that (in the long run) help the economy, as it did in the 1950s and 1960s? And if workers felt that their hard work was actually being compensated, that there was a reason to work hard beside not getting fired, wouldn’t that put a spring in their step, so to speak?

The “I got mine, so the heck with you” attitude is not just unfair; it’s strangling all of us.

Mighty Links

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What every loyal American should read today:

Frank Rich, “The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us.”

Rod Nordland and Mark Hosenball, “Blackwater Is Soaked.”

Kagro X, “Congress suckered on surveillance. Telco immunity, next?“; Glenn Greenwald, “The Beltway Establishment’s contempt for the rule of law“; and a New York Times editorial, “Spies, Lies and FISA.”

Rosa Brooks, “Too Much Cloak and Swagger.”

The new and improved Tom Friedman takes another tenuous step into Reality World — “Who Will Succeed Al Gore?”

On the other hand, George Will is still stupid after all these years — he complains in “Code of Coercion” that colleges of social work are dominated by liberals determined to promote “social and economic justice” as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Even worse, George says, students are required to learn to recognize “oppression and discrimination.” Wow, I’m so … not outraged. This column demonstrates why “conservative social work” is an oxymoron.

For more on why contemporary conservatism and the good of society don’t mix, see Christopher Lee, “Vote Nearing in Battle Over Kids’ Health Care.” See also Mark Trahant, “A subsidy so workers can start ‘winning.'”

Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin, “Untraceable e-mails spread Obama rumor.” This could be subtitled “Debbie Schlussel is the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy.”

This headline belongs in the “Irony Is Dead” department — “Rice Worried by Putin’s Broad Powers.” See also The Carpetbagger.

Something I didn’t know — the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Theodore Roosevelt.

Update: After you’ve read Frank Rich’s “Good Germans” column, read this right-wing rebuttal. Rich talks about Americans sitting idly by while our government embarks on a pattern of torture similar to that of the Gestapo. Rich presents several paragraphs of examples, with links.

So what’s the rebuttal? The rightie takes offense at the comparison to Nazis, then says,

I believe that when the history of this war is written, it will be seen that our nation waged it in accordance with some of the highest ethical standards ever observed in a major conflict. Yet Frank Rich paints our government as adopting Nazi tactics, and average Americans as akin to passive supporters of Hitler’s regime. Were it not ever-so-gauche to do so, you might call that unpatriotic.

And that’s it. He doesn’t refute a single fact presented in Rich’s column. He just says that comparing the actions of our government to the Third Reich is unpatriotic.

This is a perfect example of exactly what Rich is talking about, and also what Hannah Arendt was talking about when she referred to “the banality of evil.”

Update 2: After you’ve read today’s Tom Friedman column, you might — if you have a strong stomach — check out what that verbal pestilence known as “Jules Crittenden” says about it. Keep Pepto Bismol handy.

Among other things, Friedman wrote,

Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush each faced a crucible moment. For Mr. Gore, it was winning the popular vote and having the election taken away from him by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. For Mr. Bush, it was the shocking terrorist attack on 9/11.

To which the pestilence replied,

Friedman ventures deep into myth and legend in his latest, suggesting Gore was deprived of his crown by a Republican Supreme Court, failing to note that objective counts have in fact conceded that, according to the rules that govern our elections, Bush won.

Um, what courts would that be? Is he saying that lower courts somehow, in some mystical manner, affirmed the SCOTUS decision? I dimly remember that the SCOTUS expressly forbade lower courts from using Bush v. Gore as a precedent for anything. Am I forgetting something?

Well, never mind. I misread “counts” for “courts.” I’m sure I’m not the only 50-something who struggles to read on a screen.

But the “counts” is an even bigger laugh. The Supreme Court stopped the counts, and subsequent investigations all pretty much concluded that Gore won.