Politics

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

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There haven’t been any book reviews on this site before, but Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is something of a special case.  This is a political book with a message that doesn’t quite fit into the current political environment, and it includes a large body of relevant history.  Not surprisingly, Pinker finds Trump antithetical to the Enlightenment precepts he is defending.  But he also finds plenty of guilt to go around.

To start with, the book seems to have two competing objectives:

  1. Validating the fact of human progress and documenting how it has been achieved. This is really a call to action based on humanistic goals.
  2. Providing reasons for optimism about the future. This is different—good things that are going to happen for reasons such as demographics, outside the scope of specific human actors.

On the face of it, a reader expects the first subject to be primary, if only because (at this point in time) you expect any political book to end up with recommendations for what to do.  But that’s not quite where Pinker is going.  He’s trying to view history not just as a demonstration of what works, but also as a way to understand where things are going longer term.  Since the two objectives are different, it helps to treat them one-by-one.

On the first subject, Pinker does a remarkable job of demonstrating the successes that humanity has achieved—In the longer term, in the last century, and in the past few decades. This involves health, security, standard of living, and many other quantitative measures of human welfare.   Much of this is unfamiliar because, as he says, this kind of thing just doesn’t make news.  The book is worth reading for this part alone.  Pinker does a good job of demonstrating progress and what is responsible for that progress:  science, rationality, and a broad-based desire to create a better world for everyone.  It is hard to argue with the historical fact that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

In passing Pinker tries to dispose of past arguments against enlightenment humanism.  As examples:  Humans are inherently irrational (except when they want to make a point).  Humanism is a white racist production (its advocates were on the anti-imperialist side).   Science ignores human values (just plain not true).

Predicting the future is harder, and overall I’d say that Pinker is not well-served by his desire to make things look positive.  He tries to say that nuclear war is improbable, but we know that just one outlier is bad enough.  He treats the climate change movement as a kind of hysteria, because science will just take care of it in time (based on mostly anecdotal evidence).  He views the populist phenomenon as a brief episode of backsliding until more liberal generations take over from the ones now on the verge of dying out.

So in the end it seems a shame that the future predictions tend to dominate discussions of the book, when it’s the first part—the defense of progress—that is its greatest contribution.

And then there is the question of the call to action.  What Pinker espouses is humanism—the broad-based, rational process that has delivered progress.  The problem is that humanism doesn’t have a political party.

Pinker points out that much of the political process just doesn’t work:  Issue-based movements systematically deny progress for fear of losing momentum (even though that means they frequently get caught in the bind of asking for more money to continue going nowhere).  Discussion of issues is based on faulty statistics and dishonest patterns of argument.  Democracy as a whole is not as rational or responsive as we would like to think (the chapter on that subject is well worth reading).  He gives plenty of examples of bad behavior on both the left and the right.  Both sides contributed to the grim view of reality that was instrumental in producing Trump.

So where do we go from here?  Individuals can learn to be more rational in their behavior and in their evaluation of what they see and read.  They can work with the flawed organizations that are fighting bad actors such as Trump.  They can involve themselves with specific issues and help to push them along.  All told—incremental change but no miracle solution.

That’s actually the optimism of the book.   There’s no silver bullet, but the process has worked thus far.  And hopefully we will keep it going.

Fake News

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Someone has to come out and say it.  Why does Trump keep screaming FAKE NEWS?

Trump is a salesman.  What does a salesman do if there is a flaw in his product:  claim the competition has it.  Puts them on the defensive and hides the real issue.  Fake news is a cover.

That’s all there is to say about fake news.  Contrary to some speculation, Trump is not stupid and not all that delusional.   He knows he’s lying, and he handles it the way he always has.  It’s the other side that’s lying—fake news.

That’s what he’s doing with Mueller, and taxes, and Russia ….  He knows what he is doing, he’s good at it, and he’s got Fox News and lots of other people willing to toe the line and lie for him.

It won’t help to take the bait and play defense.  That’s basically assuming there is misunderstanding and goodwill—which there isn’t.  The only way to fight it is to show that all the real examples are on the other side.  Take a few good ones from the thousands of deliberate factual errors and force his defenders to match them.

And don’t back down.  No matter how preposterous the charges, in this case there is no substitute for offense.

Yet Another Gift to China

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The first point to make is that the current hysteria about a trade war with China is parallel to what happened a few months ago with North Korea.  Then we had weeks of unhinged bluster that kept the press busy around the clock.  Finally it dissipated without a trace when Trump gave in to Kim’s request for a meeting—ignoring all of his and other Presidents’ demands for preconditions.

Trump had his weeks of media-certified toughness and was on to the next photo op.

(It’s not clear what will come out of the meeting, but if the South Korean trade deal is any model—it takes very little to put on a media show of triumph.  Also, it’s hard not to wonder what would happen if the two Koreas got together and decided to keep the nukes.  After all, Trump campaigned on a platform of forcing allies to take full responsibility for their own defense!)

A trade war with China is a God-given opportunity.   The Chinese have already announced as yet unspecified trade openings for the West.  So the punch line is already there—all that’s necessary is the prelude.  We’re currently getting our full-scale dose of Trump toughness on trade.  Every time the stock market goes up or down it’s just that much more publicity.  And the conclusion will be a triumphant proof of Trump’s populism for the mid-term elections.  But since Trump needs a deal, that means—as with Kim—that the Chinese are running the show.

As we’ve noted here before, this is a critical time for negotiation with China.   The West needs to be united in setting the stage for what could be a major period of international growth.  By definition this needs to be done within the framework of the WTO.  Instead of that, however, we have Trump claiming a “national security” exemption for every act of his trade war—thereby undermining the whole notion of WTO-based standards for trade.

There’s just nothing that won’t be sacrificed to a photo op.

DACA is Not a Sideshow

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The language around DACA has made it a lot more polarizing as an issue than it should be.  There’s a reason for that, so we need to talk through the basics.

The DACA program involves people who came here at an age when they had no control, who have lived their lives here, who haven’t done anything wrong, and who have enough education to be (as much as can we can tell) on a path to contributing to the economy.  Obviously that just talks about the people, not the issues surrounding them.

The primary issue is what this says about immigration.  The answer is actually not much.

– This isn’t saying anything about open borders.  No one on any side is supporting that.

– This isn’t letting the parents on or off the hook.  That’s a tricky question, but no one is making them citizens.  The parents are not the issue.

– This isn’t giving future waves of immigrants a reason to come here.   By now this is anything but a sure thing, and there are plenty of other reasons for people to come.

– This isn’t an attack on the rule of law.   It’s a case of clemency like any other, where there are arguments for and against.  They didn’t deliberately break the law and have thus far been decent people.

– Most of the stated concerns about foreign immigration don’t apply here.  They’re not culturally different, they speak English, they haven’t taken anyone’s jobs away, and they personally haven’t broken the law.  Their departure is not going to make other peoples’ lives better.

– As for the most basic argument—that’s 700,000 more immigrants we don’t need—the fact is that most of the population fits the category of people whose ancestors came from places where they weren’t on the top of the heap.

What is true is that deporting them is enough of a moral issue that we ought to think about it.  We are talking about sending people to a country they don’t know with a language they don’t speak and washing our hands of the whole affair.  There is no actual hurt from these people.  Most of the country doesn’t seem to want that, but it seems we’re doing it because we can.

What kind of a country does that?   There’s an answer to that question, step-by-step:

– It’s a country where immigration officials have been encouraged to treat anyone who comes through their hands as a potential criminal without rights.

– It’s a country that’s doing everything possible to give up on support of the poor.

– It’s a country actively backing away from support of education, healthcare, social security, and the middle class just generally.

– It’s a country moving toward a level of inequality unheard-of since the 19th century—where slogans about benefits for everyone are as false now as they were then.

It’s no accident that such a country would want to demonize the DACA people.   The less people think about human consequences the better.  Let the others think it’s still their country.

 

We should think carefully about the DACA people.  They’re not the right targets for outrage.  And it’s not just about them.

Inequality

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Inequality is a term so apparently self-evident that it shows up everywhere in political discourse on both the left and the right.  Much of that discourse, however, is so simplistic that it is easily dismissed by the other side:

– For the left, inequality is morally wrong—despite the fact that it can accompany rising living standards even for the people on the short end of the stick.   A fair number of the 238 cities vying for Google’s second headquarters would probably see a rise in both inequality and the general standard of living if they won (just based on an influx at the high-income end).

– For the right, inequality is good since rich people are the “job creators”, so the happier they are the better—despite the fact that there is no evidence for that logic at all. It also seems rather odd to assert that businessmen are so incompetent as to make hiring decisions based on personal satisfaction rather than opportunities to be staffed.

Despite those points, the effects of inequality are neither uncertain nor hard to understand—it’s just easy to be sloppy about it.  This note is an attempt to be more real.

First one must acknowledge that inequality itself is neither bad nor good.  What matters is the well-being of the population, including in particular those on the lower end of the scale.  For people like Steve Jobs (always the first example) personal wealth is the result of creating an economic engine with benefits to many.  It’s hard to argue with that.   And you can push it one step further and say that the incentives for innovation in the US economy are an important reason why the US has been able to stay ahead of the technology curve.  You can even say that the potential for success is an important part of well-being for many people, so that an economy of pure equality—even in the abstract—is not necessarily a good thing.

None of that, however, tells you very much about the effects of growing inequality in the US.  First of all let’s be clear that the increase in inequality is well-established and true for any definition of wealth (income, assets, …) you might want to use.

Further rising inequality here has been no obvious driver of innovation—on the contrary with increasing inequality the US economy has become more and more dominated by large entrenched companies, with less and less room for new companies to succeed.   And no one can argue that the inequality has improved opportunities for people to succeed—on the contrary US society has become less upwardly mobile by every measure.

As for the effect on peoples’ finances—for that there is no ambiguity.  Some of the most telling statistics came in a recent paper examining per-adult income growth for the bottom 50% of the US population.  It turns out that since 1980 there has been no per-adult income growth for the bottom 50%!  That is compared with a 64% increase for the upper 50%, and vastly more for the top 1% (see the chart at the beginning).  Note this was a period when women entered the workforce in large numbers.  Since we’re dealing with per-adult statistics, we’re saying that for the bottom half of the population the net effect of women working was just to keep things from getting worse!  As another example of the same thing—essentially all the benefits of the 2008 – 2015 recovery went to the top 1%.

So what is going on with inequality and what should we think about it?  In broad terms there is no secret.   We can start with the usual three inter-linked suspects:  automation, globalization, and de-unionization.  All of those decrease the power of lower-skilled workers in dealing with management, so growing inequality is no surprise—and the effects are continuing.  While those effects have been felt everywhere, the response of government to that situation has been different in different countries.  In most countries government has attempted to cushion the blow.   That has not been wildly successful, but intervention has at least damped the situation.

In the US the exact opposite has happened.   Perhaps because of the horrendously expensive electoral process here (assisted by Citizens United), we have seen a precipitous rise in the political power of the increasingly rich top.  And political dialogue has naturally evolved to reflect their interests.  Even previously sacrosanct services such as education have suffered loss of public financing; the student debt crisis is an obvious sign.  If you make a list of the public services that the ultra-rich don’t need, e.g.

– Education

– Healthcare

– Retirement

– Social welfare

– Broad-based infrastructure,

it is obvious that all of it has become controversial.   That is contrasted with an area such as defense, where we’re looking for a buildup.

While Trump’s tax plan has been sold as a job creator, that’s not where it came from.  No one is hiding that fact that it is the Republican donors’ tax plan, and its benefits to anyone else are ancillary—and to say the least unproven.  Trump himself came on-board late in the game and conveniently seems to believe that whatever is good for him personally is best for everyone else.  The tax plan shows inequality as a self-reinforcing trend:  more money => more power => even more money.

The bottom line is that inequality in the US is in the process of making this a very different country.  For the poor it means simply less support, though the US has never been very good at that.   The big difference is for the middle class.   Services that they have traditionally relied upon are becoming problematical, and the tax system is increasingly skewed to benefit the rich.  Furthermore the ongoing effects of automation, globalization, and de-unionization have made the threat of falling out of the middle class very real.   It should be emphasized that automation in particular is accelerating as an issue, with artificial intelligence pushing the threat up the income scale.  A recent report predicts almost one-third of existing US jobs could be lost to automation by 2030.

And there’s another problem as well.   Adam Smith himself pointed out that the private sector cannot be trusted to provide the proper environment for its own success.   He saw both policing the private sector (e.g. anti-trust, free entry) and education (to sustain the private sector) as tasks for government.   So growing inequality—with the ultra-rich running the government for their own sake—is not only a threat to the well-being of the population, it is a threat to the vitality of the economy itself.

While solutions are outside the scope of this note, we must recognize that rising inequality puts us on track to become a second-class power with few rich and many poor.  That, as noted last time, is our future as banana republic.

The Foreigners Threatening America

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25700577124_b9b3d89b92_kRepublicans are good at hateful, manufactured stereotypes.  “Welfare queens” worked pretty well for a while.   Now we have snobbish, nose-in-the-air elitist liberals.  They’re all like that right?  Just like shiftless blacks and Mexican rapists.  Who needs reality when you can tell who to hate based on skin-color, clothing or even the music they listen to.

Let’s get some reality.  Maureen Dodd did us a service last week with her annual piece presenting her brother’s comments from the other side of the political fence.   There was surprisingly little of substance—just breezy support for Trump’s “delivering on his promises to shake things up” and dissatisfaction with the Republican Congress for not getting the job done.  Nothing on actual policy beyond a hint of racism with the kudos to Bannon for “holding Republicans’ feet to the fire”.  All told this was another confirmation that the Trump core will follow wherever he leads.  It wasn’t different from the content of the Trump rallies or from any of the many recorded interviews with Trump supporters.   Just a reminder that after a year of Trump sell-outs nothing has changed.

It’s time to get over the white racism of the left—that the core Trump supporters are ultimately our people who need to be brought back into the fold.  They may be perfectly okay in normal life, but so were the Nazis who saw the Jews being rounded up in their neighborhoods and thought it was okay.   Fascism will do that to people.  Financial reverses plus a skilled demagogue, and reasonable, intelligent people can succumb to it.  And it’s not going to change any time soon.

It’s also clear what Trump and his supporters are doing to this country.  In their assertion of ultimate white privilege, they are undermining what has made this country great—the opportunity for everyone to succeed.  The fascist denial of objective reality is undermining US economic success, denying educational opportunity, and crippling the worldwide response to climate change.  Like Britain, we are on the way to becoming a second-rate power.  However the dangers here are worse—from another economic crash, from a war, or from our uncritical buddy-buddy relations with the Russians.

Two books in particular have shaped ideas about Trump core supporters:   Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land.   Both tried to be sympathetic, describing the people, their views, and their reasons.  But the second is particularly relevant because it described Louisiana—a state where they’d won.   It was a disaster of epic proportions:   an environmental catastrophe and an educational system gutted to provide tax breaks for oil companies.  The whole business kept running by tax revenues transferred from the north.

The Trump campaign liked to say the last election was the last chance to protect the country from a Latin American takeover.  We now know he may have been right—we are well underway to becoming a banana republic where the ultra-rich control everything (through Citizens United and the Koch Organization) including how little they are taxed.   Public services, including education, are not priorities.  Hannah Arendt (quoted by Michelle Goldberg) talked succinctly about the collusion between the Nazi economic elite and the fascist-inspired masses they controlled, “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.”

That is what is foreign to America.   That is what must be pushed back before it is too late.

 

Big Brother

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The big story today is the Koch-financed purchase of Time Inc.  While this did make the NY Times—in a rather innocuous, long-winded article—you have to go to the Guardian to get a notion of what is going on.  There are three points:

– Most obviously this gives the Koch organization a direct mouthpiece in print media. To be clear—the Koch organization does not represent just Koch money.   It channels money from the richest people in the US and distributes untraceable billions of dollars through a political organization of 1600 staffers.   It quite literally owns the Republican party (Pence is their creation) and is the source (and explanation) for the current tax bill.

– Also this month, the FCC with its new Trump-appointed head, “eliminated protections against monopolies in local broadcast news, a move widely seen as clearing the way for the expansion of a Trump-friendly local broadcasting network”.  This is the Sinclair Media Group, which forces all local subsidiaries to broadcast centrally-prepared Trump agenda propaganda.

– Finally we have the much-discussed FCC ruling last week rolling back net neutrality.  This action has not gone unnoticed, but its impact has been discussed primarily in terms of network providers’ ability to block competitors for their own services.   In the current context however, it is equally important to recognize this amounts to oligarchic control of internet content.

So there you have it.  Print media, television, and internet all at risk of coming under control.  It can happen here.

Why Isn’t the Tax Cut Bipartisan?

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In previous posts we’ve talked about possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on the federal budget and the tax plan.   There were obvious possibilities for that to happen.   The biggest cuts after all are to the corporate income tax, and Obama already discussed his interest in that in the 2015 State of the Union.  Other Democrats talked to Trump about bipartisan options prior to the announcement of the tax plan.

Why didn’t that happen?  Let’s look at the primary provisions.

  1. The Corporate Tax Cut

First of all, as many have mentioned, the average effective corporate rate in the US is not 35% but more like 24%, which is not so far from the international average.   Real tax reform would bring the effective and nominal rates in closer line with each other–with the advantage of removing artificial lobbyist-created inequities in the tax plan.   That, with adjustments to assure parity with other countries, would not break the bank.  It would help the country and could have bipartisan support.

We have instead chosen to close few loopholes, insist on a nominal 20% corporate tax rate, and incur a massive revenue shortfall.  That choice gives us the deficit as well as the middle-class tax increases.  The connection to jobs is weak at best, so most of this additional corporate saving going to investors.   Since it isn’t a matter of competitive parity—why are we doing it?

  1. The Pass-Through tax cut

The stated target of this tax cut was small business, but in fact few small businesses would be helped.   Further, as was recognized early, this tax cut opens opportunities for wealthy people to avoid personal tax rates.   The current form of the tax cut has rules that attempt to limit that.  However many loopholes remain, and the rules are strangely targeted.   Manufacturing and real estate can benefit, but not services.

Since most of this money is going to people who can exploit the loopholes—not to the stated targets—why are we doing it?

  1. The Estate Tax cut

This is of course the most problematical of all.   Only rich people with estates over $10 million are involved, and the benefit increases with wealth.  It is worth emphasizing that we don’t just raise the tax-free limit, we completely abolish it and with no unpaid capital gains taxes on the heirs!

As to why we’re doing it, the explanation is the most transparent of self-serving nonsense—“making rich people richer is good for everyone”.

 

These tax cuts are not bipartisan, because their logic has nothing to do with the welfare of the country.   Donors are complaining they haven’t gotten what they paid for, so it’s time to get the job done.  Bipartisanship is not on the agenda.   These tax cuts are delivered as ordered.

It is important to recognize that there is nothing mysterious about the small, ultra-rich donor community (with the Koch organization as primary mover channeling money from others) and also nothing ambiguous about their demands—both money and power.  You might even argue—though it’s a stretch—that perhaps the stock market is rising not on business prospects, but on all that extra money the ultra-rich donors will have to invest somewhere!

And there’s another twist to this too.   Trump and the Koch brothers have much the same motives, but Trump is the President after all.  How can he get away with a tax program that has been precisely engineered for his own benefit?

Trump was born for this job.   He actually believes that whatever is good for him personally is by definition the best possible thing for the country.

So we are left with a philosophical quandary.   Is a crook who uses his office to pocket more than a billion dollars from the country excused if he is too self-intoxicated to realize what he’s doing?