ye olde republicke

At the borders of three social classes

2012-02-16T10:22:00.000-06:00

Jason Kuzinicki, at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, links to a quiz [click here to read it, it's part of a sample of book by Charles Murray] that purports to show--or at least explore--how much the quiz-taker is in touch with "the common person." The lower the score, the less "in touch" one is. On a scale of 0 to 100, here are what the scores mean (hint: the points overlap):

48-99 points: A lifelong resident of a working-class neighborhood with average television and movie going habits
42-100 points: A ﬁrst- generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits
11-80: A ﬁrst- generation upper-middle- class person with middle-class parents.
0-43: A second- generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot.

I scored a 33, which places me pretty solidly in the "middle class" and potentially in the "upper-middle class." Now, since we live in a small-d democratic age, it's considered poor form not to have empathetic ties to something called the "middle class" or lower, and I could point out to certain assumptions inherent in that quiz that might serve more to stereotype working-class people than to illuminate affective class differences [I really do mean "affective" and not "effective"]. I won't dwell on those, except to say that I purposely biased my answers to make my score lower. For example,

I answered "no" to the question that asked whether I knew anyone in school who, no matter how hard they tried, couldn't get passing grades. (First, note the assumption that working people not only don't get passing grades, but cannot get them.) Now, one of my best friends in high school got very poor grades--I won't say he never got passing grades, but mostly they were very poor--and he ended up dropping out and joining the Navy (I think the navy at the time had a requirement that new recruits be at least high school graduates, but somehow he got around that). I answered "no" to the question because my friend was (and is) quite intelligent, and probably could have gotten very good grades if he had known how, or had the will to, apply himself. In fact, I hear that he has since gone to school and become a radiologist.
I answered "no" to the question "do you have a close with whom you have strong and wide ranging political disagreements" even though I disagree profoundly with the kind of liberalism most of my friends espouse. I answered "no" because I am probably coming from the same spectrum as they: like them, I do not support the Republican party and probably will not unless the party makes some pretty radical changes in the constituency it tolerates. (But unlike (a lot of) them, I don't think that party or Republicans in general are evil incarnate, it's just that the party is at a place that I cannot support it in good conscience.)
When the quiz presented a list of movies and asked if I had ever seen them, I almost said "yes" because "True Grit" was on the list. But then I realized the question was referring to the remake of the John Wayne classic and not the John Wayne classic itself, which my father watched, along with several other Wayne movies, almost whenever they were on television.
I said "no" when the quiz asked if I had ever been to a union local meeting because I don't think the Graduate Employees Organization I belong to necessarily qualifies as a union local in the sense that Murray intended it.
I said "no" when the quiz asked if I ever had a job where I hurt when I got off work. Fortunately, my jobs have never really caused chronic pain, and aside from grease burns and small cuts and sometimes aching muscles , I've never been injured on any job. Still, I have had jobs that were physically exhausting, but I didn't think that counted.

I biased my answers because it was as clear as day the point the quiz was aiming at, and I didn't want to claim an affinity to working-class or less-affluent-class culture that I didn't deserve.

Now, as for the score itself, which places me as a "first generation" upper-middle class person with "middle-class" parents or as a second generation or more upper-middle-class person: it's counter-intuitive in one way but very accurate in another.

It's counter-intuitive because it's probably fair to say that my family is working class and to some degree my upbringing was working class. My father was an electrician (a member of IBEW). My mother has worked a variety of office jobs in what some analysts would call the "pink collar" sector, a term that I personally find condescending but that underscores and underlying truth about the way some jobs are coded as "women's work": for example, she worked as some sort of information processer for an insurance company (this was before I was born), and while I was in school, she worked as a teachers aid for a local elementary school (although not the one I attended). For a long time, if I understand correctly, she was also a homemaker without a waged job, and took care of my siblings when they were young.

Most of the rest of my family is probably at least arguably working class, too. One of my brothers is also an electrician, although for a while he was a project manager for a company and for another while he tried to run his own electricians business (so maybe that history excludes him). Another brother is a truck driver. Another is in law enforcement (a profession that while perhaps not "working class" in terms of its members' relation to the "means of production" but which I think most people would identify as a "working-class" job). Both of my sisters have had a variety of waged jobs in retail and other locations, although now one is running her own business (she finds furniture in the alley, refurbishes it, and sells it) while the other now has a job that might qualify to some people as "middle class." I'm not sure I understand what she does, but as I understand it, it requires a lot of detailed oriented work and skill, and while some might consider it "middle class," I'd say it is working class at least in the sense that the job is waged labor and that its employees are subject to downsizing threats (she recently faced the prospect of a layoff, but fortunately has been kept on).

My siblings' spouses, too, tend to have working-class jobs. One worked in a nursing home and had her own housecleaning business for a while (i.e., she cleaned people's houses for pay; she wasn't a labor-farmer who contracted out the work of others). Another has worked various retail jobs and for while had a small cake-making business (it was of such a size that I'd say it was less entrepreneurial and more "working-class," but I can see how one might see it as "middle-class," at least in the petit bourgeois sense). Another also works in law enforcement. One, however, has a job in middle-management--and the upper-echelons of middle management, at that--of a very large, national corporation, so that her actual job is probably "middle class" by most standards, even though her own background is quite working class.

My working-class background therefore makes my low score seem counter-intuitive. Yet, it's more than it might seem given only the background I just noted. Before I go on, I should acknowledge a few things. First, most people have a very broad definition of what counts as "middle class." They seem to want it to mean something like "everyday people who are neither super-rich or super-poor." (In my less charitable moments, I sometimes think certain people use it to mean "that huge, inchoate mass of people who are not part of the undeserving rich or the undeserving poor, with 'undeserving' being defined as 'someone whom I look down on for being poor or whom I dislike for having more than I have'.") I personally would prefer a more precise definition, preferably one that stresses a combination of affluence, the ways one earns one's living, and the way one self-identifies as a "class." It is probably a mistake, however, to impose my conception of class on others. So, I'll just acknowledge that most people do not mean "middle class" and "working class" as mutually exclusive.

The real point to Charles Murray's quiz--and, I presume, the book it's extracted from--is not to conjure up a new, theoretically fine schema of class distinctions. Rather, he is trying to ask the reader to assess how he or she might fit in a spectrum between elite and non-elite. And now, following what appears to be the spirit of his quiz, I'll explore how my relatively low score has some merit.

First, although I was raised "working class," my upbringing reflected a lot of affluence. I imagine my parents had a lot less money when they raised my siblings, who are significantly older than I, and they probably had to scrimp and save. But by the time I came around, I was pretty much the only one they had to take care of, so the proceeds of that scrimping and saving often went to me. As I child, I was never concerned about whether I would have food or clothing or a place to live; and if my parents worried about such things, I never knew about it. I may have worn hand-me-downs, but if I did, wearing them didn't bother me, and my clothes were always in good repair, and don't remember ever being self-conscious that I would be made fun of for the quality of my clothes.

Second, my parents were quite avid readers. They didn't necessarily like much of what most people with a formal education might place onto the canon of what people must read to be educated, but I grew up with the habit of reading. (And my father read quite complicated stuff, primers on metallurgy and whatnot, that boggled my mind.) This propensity for reading in itself is not necessarily a marker of "elitism," but it did mean I grew up in an environment in which I would realize whatever aptitude I had for book learning. My mother got an old set of "World Book" encyclopedias, and I used to just browse them, reading whatever articles seemed interesting to me. There were counter-currents, too: my parents were upset that I wasn't into playing sports (for two years I played little league and hated it), and I think my father was disappointed that I was either unwilling to or lacked the knowledge to defend myself against bullies. (To be fair, I should say I was not always the hapless victim, and I sometimes provoked the bullies more than my parents or school officials caught on, and in some cases, I was a bully too). But overall, my scholastic aptitude was at least tolerated, and usually encouraged.

Third, I didn't have to work in high school and probably didn't have to work in college. Now, I did have jobs. With one major exception, my freshman year in College, from the end of my sophomore year in high school through the end of my senior year in college, I had a job at one of two fast food jobs. (In college, I worked one job at school, in Fort Collins, during the school year, and another job in Denver during summer and Christmas breaks.) Now, those jobs helped me in many ways: I saved money, gained working experience that gave me an entree to other jobs after I got my BA, and I met people who I might never have otherwise met or socialized with.

But I didn't have to work. In high school, my parents didn't expect me to contribute to rent or to my upbringing. My tastes were pretty tame, and they might have outright given me an allowance if I had asked for one. In college, working was necessary to offset having to take out loans, and I was fortunate to have scholarship that paid for most of my tuition, leaving me to cover only living expenses. Yet, there were three points. First, during Christmas and summer breaks, I stayed at my parents' house, rent free. Second, I knew that if things got really bad, I could ask my parents for help and that I would probably get it. Third, taking out student loans was always an option: it was easy and partially subsidized credit that was available to me. I'm not saying there aren't problems with the student loan system and that there is no exploitation in the way the system operates, but it is a resource provided at taxpayer expense, and it was open to me.

Fourth, I had the chance to go to graduate school. And that process acquainted me with people whose tastes definitely put them on the elite side of Murray's spectrum. I remember that in my MA program, I knew at least two people who had grown up with a maid in the house, and two people whose fathers were Harvard professors. In both my MA and PHD programs, I encountered that strange creature I'll call the "PLACA," or the private liberal arts college alumnus/-a. Almost all of these PLACA's, most of the time, have been almost nothing but nice to me and treated me almost as if I were one of their own and thereby gave me the social and cultural capital I might need to negotiate the rough waters of professionalism and middleclassness.

As my fourth example suggests (in what I hope is taken as a gentle, tongue-in-cheek nudge and not as a declaration of class war against my friends who graduated from private liberal arts colleges, not all of whom were from affluent backgrounds...I know one professor at such a college who said many of his students can't even buy books until their student loans come through), I think there are limits to my membership in the elite. Among my friends in academia, I usually feel self-conscious....not necessarily "inferior," but very aware that I went to a state school and that neither of my parents went to college. I of course knew and know other people in grad school who have more challenging backgrounds than mine ever was, so I risk claiming too much.

But I remember feeling a sense of alienation, jealousy, and envy when, as a MA student in Colorado who had never ridden an airplane, I heard people mention quite casually that they had friends in some part of the country (San Francisco, Georgetown, Chicago, New York City) and they might go visit them this weekend. I remember a similar feeling when my classmates criticized Coloradans as provincial hicks (at least, that was my interpretation of a lot of what they said....I freely admit 1) that I placed a certain chip on my shoulder and purposely over-interpreted what were innocuous statements and, probably, expressions of homesickness for wherever it is my friends came from and 2) that I can be just as prone as the next guy to regional bigotries.)

Even now, when I ought to know better, I think to myself as a non-elite person in an elite sea. For example, I find NPR annoyingly condescending, even to the point of getting angry when I hear someone listening to "All Things Considered" on the radio, even though I know I'm in the wrong there. I take certain statements that were not intended as insulting or as slights and interpret them as a remark against the class I allegedly came from. This may be one reason why I get very offended, very fast, when I hear people, especially professional, well-educated people, criticize evangelical Christians as if the latter were just some barbarous lumpen who can't be spoken at. (I used to self-identify, kind of, as an evangelical Christian, even though I was raised Catholic and never formally disavowed Catholicism until I became an agnostic, but that's story for another day....)

I do feel then, rightly or wrongly, that I'm on the border of something called "working class" and something called "middle class." I say this even as I realize the immense privileges I have enjoyed throughout my life, and they are more than I listed above, too. I say this even as I realize that some people who I consider more solidly in the middle class and who I know personally had or have even fewer resources than I am accustomed to.

Yet my low score on the quiz suggests that not only am I in the "middle class," but I'm also at the cusp of the "upper class." And in some ways I am. I know a few people who qualify (in my book, at least): the rentier capitalists who do worthwhile jobs and run their own charities, but who when push comes to shove would probably call in the army to protect their wealth. I say this not as a judgment and not solely as a statement of envy: these people seem unhappy, and if their wealth and status is not the cause of their unhappiness, it doesn't appear to help them.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from all this. Perhaps "class" as a construct is clumsy, too clumsy to make valid generalizations from. All I can really say is that I should be wary before I claim some sort of affective understanding or "authenticity" based on my background.

Rackets, protection and otherwise

2011-12-21T09:27:00.001-06:00

A while ago, Todd Zywicki at the volokh conspiracy linked to a paper he had written concerning what is commonly called "overdraft protection." In particular, he focuses on the recent regulations to control "overdraft protection," and proposals to regulate it further. (Click here to see his volokh conspiracy post, and here to get the link to the pdf version of the paper). Zywicki argues the regulations that have been enacted on "overdraft protection" and especially those that are currently under consideration actually harm those who make use of "overdraft protection." His argument, by and large, convinces me. But I have several reservations about it.

Anyone familiar with Zywicki's writings--or at least those writings that he advertises on the volokh conspiracy--knows that he rarely (to my ken, never) has met a regulation of the financial industry that he likes. The argument seems to be that all new regulations impose a cost, and that those costs are passed on to consumers. As a result, consumers, especially the less affluent and more marginal, have to pay more,and are priced out of credit markets either because they are now credit risks where they might not have been before or because they simply can't afford to pay for the new credit "products." In my less discerning moments, I'm inclined to believe that he starts from the assumption of what's best for the credit card company or bank and then looks long and hard for an argument that might show how a regulation affects some unfortunate class of people on the margin, and voila, he's now the champion of the poor.

In my more discerning moments, I avoid that ad hominem (note, however, that I included it in this blog post anyway). I realize that my argument against his conclusions must be more substantive than "Mr. Zywicki wrote that paper ON PURPOSE!!!" And reading his paper, I'm convinced that he's largely right insofar as he critiques regulation of what is called "overdraft protection."

A definition is in order before I explain his argument. "Overdraft protection" is the term now used for the way banks decide to honor or dishonor checks that are presented against an "overdraft," or against a checking account that lacks the funds to cover the amount of the check, almost always with a fee, per item paid or returned unpaid, in the range of $30, sometimes less, and usually more. I believe this use term is unfortunate and misleading: "overdraft protection" used to refer to lines of credit, usually unsecured, or to secondary accounts, usually savings accounts, linked to the checking account that would kick in to cover overdrafts, on the assumption that the customer would repay (in the case of lines of credit) the amount, in addition to a small amount of interest, or pay (in the case of a linked secondary account), a small fee, in the range of $3 or so.

I say the new use of the term is misleading because it feeds the fiction that the bank's practices in honoring or dishonoring checks presented against an overdraft is "product" the consumer purchases instead of an actuarial, risk management practice that the bank engages in. However, being a "fiction" doesn't make it false. "Overdraft protection" is a "product" in the sense that it is part of the set of practices that affect how a customer uses his or her checking account and that may conceivably influence which bank a customer chooses. It is also a "product" in the sense that customers end up paying for the practices, directly when it comes to being charged overdraft fees, and indirectly inasmuch as the aggregate risk assessments influence a bank's overall account-fee structure (minimum balance requirements, monthly or annual fees, fees for atm and other bank card transactions). I should say that while I wish Mr. Zywicki were more precise in how he uses the term (later in his paper he does discuss lines of credit and linked secondary accounts), I can't truly fault him for using it the way he does. Even federal regulators--the federal reserve and the FDIC--appear to have adopted that terminology.

What Zywicki is taking aim against is recent regulations that limit the way banks decide whether or not to pay against overdrafts. These regulations, if I understand them correctly, limit the number of overdraft fees a bank can charge per business day and requires customers to "opt in" to allowing a bank to honor checks against an overdraft (and thereby charge the fee). If a customer doesn't opt in, then any check or electronic item that is presented against an overdraft. Not opting in would also mean debit card authorizations would not--at least not in theory--be approved against an account with insufficient funds. For those who don't opt in, there is still a possibility of an overdraft: a debit card authorization might be approved while an account has funds, but will post a few days later, when an account might lack the funds, and my understanding is that in such situations, the usual overdraft fee would apply. Zywicki raises concerns about other proposed regulations that would, in effect, lessen the number of overdraft fees or somehow control the amount of those fees.

The ostensible reason for these regulations is to prevent what the pro-regulation side calls "abuses." Banks have to, or at least in practice they choose to, standardize the order in which items are paid against an account. Usually, banks will pay any debit authorization (once it's posted) first (because that can't be refused), then any electronic check (ACH/EFT), then paper checks or checks submitted via the normal clearing processes. (Electronic checks and paper checks are starting to meld into a new category, as some institutions are now processing paper checks as electronic items). When paper checks (or their electronic proxies) are submitted, banks follow one of three ways to clear them: by check number (usually from lowest number to highest, although conceivably the order might be reversed), by amount from lowest to highest, and by amount from highest to lowest.

The order of clearing correlates with the number of fees charged the customer. Clearing by check number has a relatively "neutral" (or perhaps "random" is a better word) effect. Clearing from lowest amount to highest amount tends to result in fewer overdraft fees because the lower amounts are more likely to be paid against posted funds before the first overdraft in a series of check presentments occurs. Clearing from the highest amount to the lowest amount tends to result in more overdraft fees because the higher amounts are more likely to induce an overdraft, and the remaining, and usually more numerous, lower amounts are likely to repeat the overdraft, incurring a new fee each time.

One of the "abuses" comes in when a bank chooses clearing by highest amount first, apparently in an attempt to gain a higher fee income. Banks tend to justify this change because 1) it gives them more money that allows them to offset the risks of defaults and charge-offs; 2) the price is born by those who overdraw; and 3) checks written for a higher amount are usually the most important checks, to pay for such necessities as rent, insurance, and utilities, and dishonoring those checks could lead to evictions, loss of coverage, and loss of access.

Zywicki argues that much of the new regulations works to impose costs on banks that will lead them to charge higher prices or to deny "overdraft protection" services to those customers that would need them most. He suggests that such regulations would be justified only if the practices they regulate represent a way for which banks to, in effect, gouge customers in a manner that's not disciplined by market competition or if customers simply don't know, and are in a position not to know fully, how the fees are charged and how much they are.

He finds such justifications lacking. He finds that the "overdraft protection" services prior to and after the regulations do not allow banks to collect "monopoly rents," the sort of unconscionable profit-seeking that harms the consumer. Although I don't fully understand what is meant by "monopoly rent," nor do I fully understand the economics behind his analysis, I'll take him at his word when he says that while banks might indeed make a profit off of overdraft protection, they do so in a largely competitive environment and from limiting their charges to those people who, by and large, use the service. That is, the people who overdraw or write checks against overdrafts are those who generally end up paying. (This is not to say that he thinks the financial industry, especially the consumer banking industry, is perfectly competitive--in fact, I seriously doubt that he believes this to be the case--only that he does not see the types of abuses that he would consider a justification for these regulations.)

Neither does he find that consumers are hapless and ignorant victims of "overdraft protection." He cites studies that suggest tentatively (and he admits the findings are only tentative and more research needs be done) that consumers to whom "overdraft protection" applies by and large are well aware of the fee structures and the procedure by which their bank pays the items that present to accounts, and that they are also grateful that the larger checks are paid against the overdraft.

Having excluded these two potential justifications for the regulations and even more severe proposed regulations, Zywicki finds what he calls paternalism as the primary reason for these laws. Like most libertarians, he share skepticism and not a little disdain for "paternalist" regulations, and offers that as an almost sufficient reason (absent the other justifications which he claims are not in evidence) to oppose these regulations. He cites the critique against "paternalist" regulations--that they essentially deny choices to people who acts affect primarily only themselves and in that sense make them worse off without benefiting anybody else. And he notes that as these regulations tend to increase the costs of managing overdrafts--by cutting off money that might be used to offset the risks of defaults and charged off accounts--certain people, particularly more marginal people, are priced out of these types of checking accounts and are compelled, sometimes, to use even more costly credit products, such as payday loan lenders.

Now, as I said above, I find Zywicki's overall argument convincing. I buy his claim that banks do not necessarily exact "monopoly rents," and I share his distrust of "paternalist" regulations, even if I do not distrust such regulations to the extent he does. Still, I have some reservations about some of what he says in his paper.

First, Zywicki hedges a bit about the "opt in" requirement. He is honest about this, and says that while his default preference would be for an "opt out" requirement--wherein the bank would decide to pay against overdrafts regardless of whether customers have given the bank prior permission to do so, but the customer could order the bank not to do so--the "opt in" requirement probably would not do much harm. He offers as a possibility, however, that even the opt in requirement would impose some costs on the bank and on customers who otherwise might have wanted to use the "overdraft protection" services in the time between when they opt in and opt out.

I said Zywicki "hedges" on this issue, and perhaps hedge is an unfair word. He's not on a crusade to combat the opt-in provision: he's simply noting some of its potential costs. I would, however, like to offer a more robust defense of the opt-in provision. Here it is: its tendency is to confirm that the customer knows what they are getting into. It's not an inexorable tendency, I acknowledge: the "opt in" notice that banks send their customers--or at least the ones that my two banks have sent me--tends to emphasize "protection against overdrafts" and not the fees or the fact that all items paid against overdrafts are done so at the bank's discretion. Still, it is a disclosure that the customer has to take an active step in accepting.

Another defense lies in one of the examples Zywicki gives to demonstrate that there are not true "information asymmetries" of the sort that would justify the types of regulations he by and large criticizes. He refers to an "overdraft protection" disclosure and notes how easy it is to read, and he reproduces the content of this disclosure (although apparently without any of the different fonts and bold type that might help the reader know to what extent the disclosure emphasizes some points in exclusion to others). One thing that his paper does not really mention is that such disclosures were, to my knowledge, almost unheard of before the new opt-in regulations. (If they were indeed "heard of," then the paper ought at least explain that.) In the deposit account agreements I read when I was an employee and customer of my banks, the "overdraft protection" policy was tucked into the larger account agreement (and if I recall correctly, it wasn't called "overdraft protection"), and one had to hunt it down just to read it and know the bank's policy. Also, the bank consistently reserved the right to change its overdraft policy at any time, although usually with notice. In other words the very clarity Zywicki praises was brought about, at least in part, by the requirement he has certain reservations about.

Finally, opting out of things is not as easy or simple as it sounds. Maybe it's my inner-paternalist here, but I wouldn't be surprised if, under an opt-out regime, telephone customer service reps be required to ask two or three times the equivalent of "are you sure?"--perhaps with a recitation of the long list of the "benefits" of opting in--when taking opt-out requests. In the cold light of day, that sounds harmless enough, but not all customers have an easy time saying no. I have a hard time saying no, and I should know better. (I even avoid calling my credit card company unless it's absolutely necessary because I know--or have good reason for believing--that the CSR is required to offer me some "credit protection" service I know I don't need and that the CSR is required to ask me at least twice and ask for my reason for not wanting the service. The main response that tends to keep them quiet is "I'm still trying to weigh my options.") Already, I'll note that the opt-in form the banks send out tend to be somewhat alarmist on the severity of the consequences of not opting-in. Even someone like me, who knows pretty firmly that I don't want to opt in, has second and third thoughts after reading those notices.

In sum, the opt in provision makes "overdraft protection" more obviously a product in the way that Zywicki wants it to be. I admit that it adds (probably) somewhat to the cost of managing overdrafts, but if it makes for a somewhat more transparent process, then I think it is a positive good.

Second, one thing Zywicki does not address fully is that when items are returned unpaid against an account with non-sufficient funds, they incur a fee almost as hefty as the fee incurred by paying items against an overdraft. At one of the banks I worked at, the difference was about $3 to $5. Although I don't remember the exact amounts, and they changed while I worked there, an item returned unpaid incurred a fee of $24 and an item returned paid against an overdraft incurred a fee of $27. Part of customers' preference for having items paid against an overdraft is probably attributable to the fact that the customers would get charged comparable fees by their bank. There are, of course and as mentioned earlier, other reasons customers might wish to have their checks paid against overdrafts: the potential consequences of, say, a bounced rent check, not to mention the fees for returned checks charged by most companies, which would obviously compound the bank's returned check fee.

Third, one thing that not opting into "overdraft protection" helps alleviate (but cannot, I imagine, eradicate completely) is overdrafts by use of a debit card. Under the older regime, banks could--and did--authorize debit card transactions, the dollar amount of which exceeded not only the ledger balance of funds in a person's account, but all funds in that person's account. (There's a distinction between the ledger balance--funds that were posted--collected balance, and available balance.) The rationale was that "it's embarrassing to try to purchase something with a debit card and have it declined and maybe the customer made a deposit at the branch today and it might show up on the system when the ledger balances are updated, or the customer will make another deposit before the authorized purchase actually posts." I admit that it can be embarrassing, especially if one tries to purchase a meal at a dine-in restaurant, after the meal is over, and has no other mechanism of payment....such a situation is not only embarrassing, it's also dicey. But the end result is that people could overdraw their account by making a debit card purchase. (To be sure, even under the prior regime, certain transactions--such as cash-back transactions or atm withdrawals--would generally be denied in cases where purchases might be approved.)

This result might not be so bad, especially if customers are by and large knowledgeable about the bank's policies, as Zywicki suggests they might be. All I can really say is that it would be a good idea for a customer to know what they are getting into when they use a debit card, and that these new regulations help ensure that. (Thus, here's another defense of the opt-in provision.)

Fourth, Zywicki under-appreciates the effects of "overdraft protection" on less affluent customers. Zywicki cites a New York Times article--which I didn't read so I take him at his word--that, he says, discusses the predicament of a college student who mismanaged his (or her?) account and got zapped with hundreds of dollars of fees by the bank. He suggests that these kinds of examples might demonstrate only that an impecunious young man overspent and did not pay attention to the consequences. Good enough, so far as it goes; and I'll add that my prejudices lead me to have less sympathy for the stereotypical college student whose parents might bail him or her out of periodic financial pecadillos. (All the while, I must admit that the "stereotypical" college student--white, privileged, affluent, child of college graduates--often does not exist, and can be a first generation college student, a parent, a full-time or part-time worker, child of working-class parents.) I'll finally admit that the "innocent college student oppressed by big banks" trope fits too neatly as a pro-regulatory prop, similar to the way that occasional (and as far as I can tell, rare) reports of police officers ticketing 8 year olds for operating a lemonade stand without a license fits too neatly into some libertarians' otherwise valid objections to the ill effects and perverse incentives of some licensing regimes.

It's not only the irresponsible college student who has lost a few weekends worth of beer money who suffers from the fees concurrent with mismanaged accounts. Sometimes it is, indeed, the single parent trying to make ends meet, or the person who is caring for an elder, or someone who is on social security disability and is barely scraping by. When I was a call-center customer service rep, I encountered several customers who claimed to fall into these categories and who often got hundreds of dollars worth of fees because of either overspending on certain things or because of a mistake in addition when balancing their checkbooks.

Now, I admit that my sample was especially skewed in favor of the conclusion I wish to draw from it. People who overdraw were probably very much over-represented among the people who called the call center (because people tend not to speak with a CSR unless they already have a problem with their account). Also, as a CSR, it was in my power to refund or waive fees up to a certain amount (although my bank had a "shaming strategy" for CSR's who did this too much, each month circulating a list of the three highest fee refunders, a list I was on almost every month...it's hard to say no when the person on the other end of the line is crying): therefore, customers are more likely to shade the truth or outright lie or claim ignorance of a bank's overdraft policies: in short, they are more likely to play the type of victim that the tentative study Zywicki cites suggests does not exist.

One doesn't have to insist that all or even most of these folks were hapless victims, ground beneath the wheel of a numbers-driven modernity. Maybe the single mother who cried because she just couldn't get ahead when I told her she had over $200 in overdraft charges really brought it on herself. Maybe she spent so much money on booze or or drugs or junk food. Maybe she wasn't even a mother. And maybe I'm a sucker. There have been times in my life where I've been taken in by people's hard luck stories, even when deep down I knew better. So anything is possible.

Still, one doesn't have to go so far and assign victimhood status to these people to acknowledge that someone who earns $2,000 a month and makes an error in addition will more likely overdraw and get more overdraft fees than someone who earns $5,000 a month. And some banks, as a general rule (at least this was true of the less than mega-sized bank I worked at as a CSR) were quite willing to refund more overdraft fees for "good customers" (that is, rich customers who overdraw only occasionally). (It's an interesting dynamic, and as Zywicki points out--if I recall correctly--a lot of repeat overdrafters are actually more affluent than; I have less sympathy for these people.)

If anything, what I want to get across is that it's these overdraft policies affect real people with real problems, not just the (largely stereotypical) slack-jawed trust fund baby who gets a write up in the New York Times. To deny that is to misread and, to some degree, belittle the urgency that some people attach to these regulatory reforms, even if the reforms themselves are misguided.

It is probably the case that the proposed regulations harms these people more than help them, and to the extent that these regulations are paternalist, they deny a little bit of dignity inherent in the ability to make choices on the market. Zywicki's under-appreciation thus does not disprove his argument, but it does, to my mind, signify a reason to be suspicious of the truth claims he makes about customer knowledge and to demand a more rigorous demonstration that "overdraft protection" does not operate in the shadows of information asymmetries.

Fifth and finally, it is these information asymmetries, which I think need further exploration, that constitute the basis for my last reservation about Zywicki's argument, an argument that I find, overall, compelling. The study that Zywicki cites suggests that customers are well-aware of their own bank's fee structures and are "grateful" that their bank pays against overdrafts. Assuming the results of this study are reproducible and generalizable, I would also like to know to what degree, if any, this ignorance results from some systematic obfuscations--the specific disclosure practices banks engage in, or even the disclosure practices mandated by law.

I would also like to point out something that, to my mind, constitutes an information asymmetry, although one that I can imagine a Zywickian analysis would account for easily. I refer to the "at the bank's discretion" proviso in most "overdraft protection" policies. To my understanding, banks used to have almost complete discretion on whether to pay a check that is presented against an account when there aren't enough funds to cover it. This makes sense. Whenever a bank pays against an overdraft, it runs the risk that consumers might not make good on the funds. Under the new regulations, my understanding is that the bank has less discretion, or at least a stronger incentive to return checks unpaid. But the principle remains valid: it's the bank's risk and it determines what risk it is comfortable with.

Therefore, the bank devises overdraft standards that are more or less rationalized based on a customer's average account balances, past history with the bank, income, and general creditworthiness. The bank at which I was a CSR observed the following procedure, which, adjusting for size, if probably in principle similar to what larger and smaller banks observe:

It placed customers in three default categories. The first allowed overdrafts up to a given dollar amount, say $500. The second tentatively allowed overdrafts up to a given dollar amount (again, let's just say it was $500). The third allowed no overdrafts.
A check that would overdraw the account of customers in the first category by less than the assigned dollar amount would automatically be paid by the bank. A similar check against the account of a customer in the second category would be flagged for attention by a bank officer who, the next business day, would review overdrafts and decide whether to pay it (the bank was small enough to make such a process feasible).
A check presented that would overdraw the account of a customer in the third category would be slated to be returned automatically, subject to final review by a bank officer.
Any check that exceeded the guidelines listed for customers in the first or second categories would also be slated for return, again subject to final review by a bank officer.

Other banks, I assume follow similar policies. Probably the larger banks that served more "national" markets had less personal officer review and more automatic decisions about payment and return of checks. And probably smaller banks had more personalized reviews of each overdraft. But the principle was the same: the bank determined ahead of time the excess dollar amounts of checks it would pay in order to speed up the process. That is how the system works.

The determination, as I said, is made along a variety of factors, but they boil down to the risk the bank believes it runs of a default or charge off of the overdrawn funds. Sometimes, that assessment of risk changes, and the bank finds it expedient to be less or more indulgent of overdrafts, and the bank changes the excess amounts accordingly.

All of this is opaque to the customer, and for understandable--and probably good--reason: if a customer knew ahead of time that the bank would automatically pay, say, a $500 overdraft, they might purposely overdraw their account by that much (and presumably pay the consequences), but if a bank did make available its assessment of an overdrawable amount, then it might have to notify the customer when it changed that assessment. Letting the customer know this information is too much of a risk for the bank.

What I'm getting at is that customers who would overdraw are writing checks in the hope that the bank might honor those checks. Sometimes--maybe even the majority of the time--such checks are written spuriously or irresponsibly to make purchases that aren't justified. Sometimes bad account management means an overdraft. But my point is customers cannot be sure in advance what the bank will pay.

I'm not sure this qualifies as an information asymmetry, or at least not one that represents a market failure. After all, the bank, in a sense, has a right to refuse payment against insufficient funds, and in practice, the per-customer assessment probably changes rarely, so an overdraft that was paid last month will probably be paid this month.

But it is something over which the customer has little control or knowledge, and if it is possible to devise a more transparent way for how this process works, while imposing only minimal costs onto the banks and to the customers they serve, then it would be worthwhile to pursue that. However, I have no idea what such a "transparent way" would look like or if it's even doable.

I have a partial solution to some of these problems, what I in another post called a "money order plus account," which is basically a savings account with money orders that operate more like checks. But it's only a solution in that it gives people another option, and this option is less convenient. Finally, I'm not certain that a critical number of persons would opt for such an account, although I might do so under certain circumstances.

I titled this post "Rackets, protection and otherwise" with the initial purpose of doing a pun on "overdraft protection" and "racket." See, "overdraft protection" + "racket" = "protection racket." Of course, if Zywicki is right--and I think he is if one accepts, as I do, most of his starting assumptions, and if one stipulates, as I do tentatively, to some of his empirical claims about customer knowledge--then "overdraft protection" is not a racket by any commonly accepted definition of the term. If I plead that consumers--even the knowledgeable ones that Zywicki claims constitutes the large majority of them--see "overdraft protection" as a racket, and if I can prove that claim, then that plea, once established as fact, only discovers that people can sincerely believe two things the logical implications of which are contradictory.

But I do think there is an opportunity for better understanding, for realizing that touting certain practices as per se good might blind us to other ways to enable people to have more choices and in effect to be more free. Maybe the answer is indeed to have minimal regulation to let loose the entrepreneurial energy that Willard Hurst discussed in his legal history scholarship. Maybe, on the other hand, we need to reconsider our values: what is the value of "having choices"? are there other ways to construct "choice" and "freedom"? is paternalism, while always suspect, therefore always necessarily bad? I won't offer the answers to these questions in this post. In fact, I'm not even sure I have the answers. But it's all worth considering.

Look on my work, ye Mighty, and despair

2011-12-16T16:51:00.008-06:00

Yesterday, I finished the essential parts of a two and a half-year project. I'm not talking about my dissertation. I'm talking about an archiving project I've been working on as a graduate assistant. I helped organize a large collection from an organization that had donated its records to a library. (I'm being purposefully vague so as to protect my privacy and the privacy of the organization; needful to say, however, anything I write on this blog post or other blog posts reflects my personal views only and not the views of anyone at that organization or the entity that hired me or the library I worked for.)

In a real sense, it was not "my" project. There were several other people who worked on it, both before me--it was a three-year project and I was hired on four months into it--and with me. By my count, there were at least 5 (probably more) undergraduates, 8 graduate students, and at least 3 administrators who served the project. At least a few other undergraduates helped me do some important--and mostly thankless, although I thanked them--aspects of the project, mostly involving moving large and heavy boxes from one location to another.

On the other hand, it feels like "my" project, because I stayed on it the longest and probably am the one most familiar with the collection. For what it's worth, that does not mean I am the person the most familiar with the organization or with the types of matters the organization handled, but as far as the collection--what exactly it contains--I am probably the person who knows most, at least for now; a serious scholar who wanted to devote a few months to researching it would probably gain a more intimate and credible knowledge of the collection than I have now or will ever have.

An archival collection is something that is meant to preserve a piece of history. Preserving records supposedly has inherent value. Even if no one ever looks at the collection, the fact that it is "preserved" represents a good in itself. I should say, however, that a few people have already consulted the collection, and a couple more have expressed interest.

I realize that "piece of history" is quite a contestable term, and I am under no illusions that this collection reveals the "true" history of its donor organization.

I am also aware that in the process of organizing the collection, I have changed it and the history it represents, almost in a Heisenbergprinzip sort of way: I've changed the history by organizing it. I've made mistakes, only some of which I know about. Even if it's not a question of "mistakes," my very decisions in the organization process have set this particular documentary history of the organization on a somewhat inexorable path. The original collection was in a largely indeterminate order, and I and my colleagues made more "executive decisions" than is usual for processing similar-sized collections. But even records that come fully organized by the donor, there is a re-ordering that takes place, if only in that the holder of the records change.

I do feel that I and my colleagues have accomplished something. However, this accomplished thing will not endure forever, even if we can assume that the collection is a static "thing" that has been created. As sure as the United States will some day fall, the archives might someday fall in disrepair. With the possible exception of China, all the great empires have died, and even China had a rough 300 years or so during the warring states period (ca. 200 ad to ca. 590 ad) a rough 50 years or so in the transition from the Tang to the Song dynasty, periodic invasions and about 100 years of European and Japanese domination.

But it is a contribution, and I'm excited about it.

The death penalty: a clarification

2011-11-30T07:39:00.008-06:00

In my previous post [click here to read it], I stated the grounds / argument / reason I oppose the death penalty, namely,

The state should not kill a person once that person no longer poses an immediate threat to society.

I also stated why this "argument" wasn't much of an argument, and I identified what I thought were some obvious problems. The chief problem was that I believed (and still believe) it to be a "question-begging" argument: if one already agrees with it, then one probably does not need to be convinced that the death penalty is wrong.

What I didn't do is explain further why I don't try to convince people of it. What are the reasons behind my saying that the state ought not kill those whom it has neutralized? I could cite some of the reasons that Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry tries to "demolish" or at least offer rejoinders for--the near certainty that some mistakes will be made (he did, after all, write this in response to the outcry over Troy Davis's execution) and that the death penalty might not operate as a deterrent (although I personally find this argument unprovable and based on assumptions about the purpose of punishment that I do not necessarily share). I also would add the alleged--and to my knowledge well-backed up by statistics--race, class, and (I suspect) sex discrimination* when it comes to who gets executed. There may very well be other reasons, some of which boil down to "I don't want to trust the state not to mess it up." As reasons, they have a certain force, and if true, might lead anyone to oppose the death penalty as a practical matter even if they support it in theory.

The truth is, however, that none of these reasons constitute my true rejection. All of them could be shown to be based on false premises--or could be stipulated to be false--and I would still oppose the penalty. In short, to adopt those as the reasons I oppose the death penalty--even though at least some of them might be sufficient reasons in themselves--would be dishonest on my part.

In short, my "argument" is not an "argument." I cannot use it to convince someone who doesn't already agree with me. I do not expect someone who is pro-death penalty to hear my "argument" and change their minds because of it. I might try to convince them that they already believe, deep down, that the state shouldn't kill people that do not pose an immediate threat. But such convincing would be a different feat, an act of showing that my opponent is actually someone who agrees with me already, not someone whom I could convince.

*When it comes to this point, I know nothing for certain. I suspect--and it's only a suspicion, founded on nothing--that if a similarly situated man and woman commit the same type of capital crime, then the man would most likely receive the death penalty. Again, I have no evidence, and I acknowledge two points. First, women often are and have been executed. Second, I understand that men tend to commit more violent crimes than women do, so establishing a way to test my suspicion systematically is quite hard.

A rejoinder to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

2011-11-29T10:52:00.000-06:00

About two months ago, Pascal-Emmanual Gobry wrote of his admittedly reluctant support for the death penalty. (Click here to read his blog post in full.) His chief purpose is to "demolish" the anti-death penalty arguments and to explain why he supports the death penalty. I believe his argument for the death penalty is ultimately unworkable and unconscionable (which is not to say that it is not well-thought-out) and his attempt to demolish anti-death penalty arguments partially neglects an important argument against the death penalty, albeit one I do not believe I have heard others use and that I confess is almost a question-begging argument.

I share Mr. Gobry's reluctance to endorse some of the anti-death penalty arguments, although sometimes for different reasons from what he offers:

Like him, I'm suspicious of the claim that "the death penalty is not a deterrent," not necessarily because I believe, as he does, that the sole purpose of "justice" is not to deter crime, but because I admit that even if it is a deterrent, its deterrent effect would not salve my opposition to it.
I actually disagree with his argument that the death penalty is not vengeance--I think one function of the state undertaking to punish someone is to exact something I cannot call by any other name than "vengeance"--but at the end of the day, I submit that even if we stipulate the death penalty to be '"vengeance," then its essence as "vengeance" does not disqualify it any more than it would disqualify any other punishment exacted by the state.
His argument against the claim that "the state should not kill people" works to the extent that his characterization of that claim is valid. His argument, quite simply, is that all societies allow some sort of state-sanctioned and state-implemented killing. I'll return to this argument later because my opposition is closely related to the claim that Mr. Gobry "demolishes" here. But again, if one accepts his characterization of the claim, then his counterargument at least lends food for thought to those who advance the claim.
He addresses, but by his own admission does not "demolish," the argument that there is a real possibility of a miscarriage of justice. He his very honest that he has no perfectly good answer, other than to make the following points in mitigation against that argument: it is hard to truly compensate someone who, say, loses 10 years of their life in prison after having been found innocent of what they were convicted of (one might also add that compensation in such cases is in some states non-existent and in others very small); the assertion that "[p]unishment of the innocent is terrible to contemplate whatever the punishment, and yet society must punish and will always be imperfect"; the hopeful claim that [w]ith increasing prosperity and improving evidentiary science miscarriages should only become less likely, not more." I personally find these points woefully inadequate by themselves. First, it may be hard to "truly" compensate someone for 10 lost years--or even 10 lost days--but at the end of the day the person comes out of it alive. Second, the claim that society must punish and will always be imperfect strikes me as a bit of a dodge, almost the same as saying "it has ever been thus, so why change it."Third , I question the extent to which "evidentiary science," and the jurisprudence to accommodate it, will actually advance to cover most claims of wrongful imprisonment (I'm unclear how DNA evidence can even exonerate persons in most cases, and it seems to me that the appeals process does not always acknowledge such evidence as conclusive when it comes to ordering new trials). Despite my objections to this point, I'll concede him this argument if only because the underlying claim is not my true rejection of the death penalty. (I do think this "anti" argument, along with the argument that the death penalty is disproportionately assigned to persons of color, to poorer people, and (I suspect) to men, can be a true rejection for someone who otherwise might approve the death penalty.)

Mr. Gobry's "pro" argument seems sincere, and I hope to present it fairly. Namely, he seems to argue that extended prison sentences are cruel and amount to "torture," and that the death penalty, at least in cases of long prison terms, is the less cruel option. He cites the reports of prison rape and violence as examples of this cruelty. He also finds it a skewed set of values to say that life is more important than liberty, whereas he would prefer liberty to be more important than life, at least when it comes to punishment. To be clear, he is emphatically not saying that life is to have no value, but that rescinding all liberty is an ultimately more severe and cruel punishment than taking life (bold in the original):

Prison is immoral, cruel and unjust, and particularly life imprisonment. If we want to talk about what punishments are too cruel and beyond the pale, and we should, extended prison terms strike me as much more cruel than the death penalty.
A free society should reflect in its laws the judgement that liberty is a higher value than life, though life is very important.

He goes on to say that his is not an argument for prison reform per se. In fact, his despair of the likelihood of effective prison reform--"everywhere, the way politics work ensures that they will remain this way, because there will never be strong coalitions in favor of making prison 'livable', if that were possible"--supports his assertion that the cruelty of prison is well nigh inexorable. He does concede the possibility of "short and 'medium' prison terms as punishment and rehabilitation." Still, the taking of liberty for life or for very long terms shocks, or should shock, the conscience of a putatively free "democratic" society.

Unlike Mr. Gobry in relation to his efforts against the anti-death penalty arugments, I cannot claim to "demolish" his own argument. But I have several reservations after which I find his argument wanting:

As I note above, he concedes the possibility of "short and 'medium' terms" of prison, presumably in in minimum- and medium-security facilities, which (or so I've heard) have fewer of the features that lead Mr. Gobry to characterize prison as "torture." However, given this concession, I don't understand how finely he would draw the line between "short and 'medium' terms" (or likewise minimum- or medium-security facilities) and the longer terms (and harsher facilities) that are allegedly more cruel than death. At what point--10 years? 20 years? 30 years?--is death the less cruel option? My understanding is that recidivism is sometimes ipso facto justification for putting someone in a higher-security facility and for longer terms, even if the crime itself would not otherwise justify it. It shocks my conscience for a third-time petty drug dealer who has been convicted of no other crime to be put to death rather than be sentenced to 20 years in a maximum security prison (I'll confess that I do not know the drug laws well enough to know punishments). Of course, my shocked conscience is no answer to Mr. Gobry's argument, relying as it does on the premise that extreme deprivation of liberty for long periods of crime is more cruel than death. (And perhaps he might suggest that the penalties for violations of drug laws ought to be revised downward. He does not claim the US justice system is perfect or ideal.)
To elaborate my shocked conscience reservation, I'll point out that Mr. Gobry's argument relies to some degree on the question of "how do we punish those horrible murderers" who do horrible things to people--at one point he says as much when he writes "there are evil, inexcusable murderers in the world. The question is what to do with them and, again, how far we are willing to go in terms of cruelty toward them?" What about the long prison sentences administered to white collar criminals or (sometimes) to non-violent drug offenders or to admittedly violent recidivists who nonetheless do not rise to the level of "evil, inexcusable murders"? It seems like Mr. Gobry would like to have it both ways: prison cannot be made better and we cannot justify the "torture" that is prison even when it comes to murderers, but when it comes to other criminals, well, we just won't talk about what happens to them. Of course, I must concede that a lot of criminals, especially white collar criminals, probably have minimum security sentences. But my point is, that if Mr. Gobry is going to call prison torture, and be consistent with his advocacy for, or at least acquiescence in the existence of, the death penalty, he needs to address this wider problem.
Mr. Gobry despairs of a political coalition that would reform the prison system to such a degree as to make American prisons more "livable." Yet the same quasi-privatized prison industrial complex (to use a loaded term) and the incentives among police officers and prosecutors to arrest and convict (and sentence to long terms) large numbers of people are (arguably at least) largely responsible for the continuance of long prison terms in conditions that Mr. Gobry probably accurately describes as torture. Why would that same complex be any more amenable to re-establishing the process that is due to alleged criminals that would prevent the false positives and miscarriages of justice that Mr. Gobry, in another section of his blog post, is so hopeful for? Again, my point here is not a full answer to Mr. Gobry's argument, relying as it does on a quasi-conspiratorial vision of a "prison industrial complex" (obviously, I'm sympathetic to the charge that it does exist and is pernicious, but I confess that if someone were to call me on it, I don't have at my disposal the evidence to prove it) and counteracting only a portion of Mr. Gobry's larger argument about extreme deprivations of liberty.
Whose to say that extreme deprivation of liberty is indeed worse than death? For what it's worth, I believe the horror stories about prison are at least sometime true, and I fear that they are chronically true, and I think it's an outrage and would prefer that something be done. It is also facile of me to claim that a life in prison is a life worth living. But maybe there is something valuable to maintaining life, even in a place as hellish as the worst stories of prison. Again, maybe not. But unless I'm the product of reincarnation--and if so, then my memory has been duly erased--I have never died and don't know what it's like to die and on some level I confess to being afraid of dying even though I know that it is inevitable.

Again, none of the preceding reservations actually "demolish" Mr. Gobry's argument. But they are strong enough to convince me, at least, to reject it.

Finally, I'll say that Mr. Gobry's efforts to "demolish" the anti-death penalty arguments rejects another argument, the one akin to the claim that "the state should not kill people" and the one I promised to return to. As I said above, he has quite a powerful point when he says that the state already approves of and takes part in killing in at least some circumstances that most opponents of the death penalty would probably accept (a police officer shooting a suspect in self defense, a soldier shooting a soldier in the army of a country with which the US is at war). Therefore, it is hard to advance this argument. Moreover, Mr. Gobry is not setting up a straw man. There are, apparently, people who make this argument, and if you read his post, he links to one of them.

But there is a related argument, albeit more qualified and perhaps also a bit question-begging (in a similar way that the argument he "demolishes" is also question-begging: if one accepts that "the state should not kill" it's a 360 degree leap to get to the conclusion that of course, the death penalty is not right). Here is the--and my--argument:

The state should not kill a person once that person no longer poses an immediate threat to society.

In other words, it is, at least in theory, okay for the state (e.g., a police officer) to kill in immediate self-defense (one hears certain anecdotes and wonders how many such killings are, in fact, self defense), but not after the state has detained or otherwise neutralized the alleged criminal.

I acknowledge that my "argument" is almost no argument at all; it almost completely begs--i.e., assumes as evidence--that which I intend to "prove" with it. Someone, having accepted my formulation, must in most cases probably also deny the death penalty. The burden on me is to prove the validity of my formulation--the question that I beg--and not the almost perfectly valid conclusion I draw from it.

I say it "almost completely" begs the question because there are still some gray areas. There is (probably) no such thing as pure immediacy when it comes to threats or anything else outside the "approaches to zero" we find in differential calculus: how mediated does the immediate have to be before it's no longer "immediate"? I don't know exactly. I draw the line at the time the suspect is handcuffed. But what about the possibility of escape? Ted Bundy apparently escaped, and to kill again. What about the possibility of an "extremist martyr"? At least some argument is to be made that had the architect of the Oklahoma City bomber not been killed, he as a "political" prisoner might prove a rallying point for like minded extremists in a more violent way than he would not otherwise have been. (Maybe not; his co-conspirator was not sentenced to death, if I recall, and however such extremists might revere him, he doesn't seem to have been the focal point of more violence.)

And here I see the insufficiency of my "rejoinder" to Mr. Gobry. It boils down to this: he did not address my argument, and there are certain points he left unexplored (how to account for the way the prison system is) or assumed a priori (liberty trumps life when it comes to extreme punishment). But there I do see our differences.

In search of the libertarian / liberal divide, part V

2011-11-28T13:53:00.000-06:00

A few observations after considering a series of proposed policy changes that are representative of one person's vision of "marginal libertarianism."

First, in the future, I will think real hard before promising "a series of posts" about anything. It's a hard promise to honor with my attention span and with my other obligations. (Compared to people with full time jobs or with children to raise, my appeal "other obligations" may sound suspect, since my principal obligations are working a relatively stress free, but well-paying part time job and "writing" a dissertation. But it's my blog and I'll whine about what I want to whine about.)

Second, it is much, much easier to criticize someone else's ideas than it is to come up with one's own. My objections to most Mr. Hanley's ideas, could be boiled down to: "Here are the nits I pick, but the current state of affairs is bad, and I can't think of anything better to improve them."

Third, almost all of my objections to Mr. Hanley's ideas are what I call "libertarian-friendly." Focusing on what will work is not a necessary or sufficient attribute of libertarianism, but most of the libertarians who I've read online seem very concerned about how policies will be implemented and whether they will bring about any "perverse incentives" or create a class of "rent seekers" (rent seeking is a concept I understand only imperfectly, but I understand it as the attempt to attain or maintain special privileges or unearned income from the state). Therefore, I cannot claim my decision not to be a libertarian to be distinguishable on the grounds of my differences with most of these policies.

Fourth, on the issues in which at least some of my objections rest on non-libertarian concerns, I think I see a kernal of my differences with libertarianism. I would support or at least acquiesce to government coercion for a conception of the "public interest" that seems to be defined along lines somewhat different from those that libertarians seem to define it.

Libertarians seem to define the "public interest" as "that which affects non-participant parties" where participant is defined as "someone who knowingly and willingly takes part" in a action. If, for instance, two people decide to do something that affects someone else negatively, then there is reason to restrain those people from acting, or at least require them to redress the "negative externalities" they create, all in the name of a "public interest." Conversely, if a policy would enable someone to do something that either does not affect non-participants negatively, or that benefits non-participants (or creates "positive externalities"), then that policy is probably good and serves a "public interest."

I think I differ in that I would enlargen (a real word? my spell check doesn't think so; maybe I should say "embiggen"?) the notion of "public interest" to include some an "obligation by those who have done well by the way things are to support others who have not done so well and the state ought to enforce this obligation." I see two problems with this view, neither of which I am yet able to resolve:

It is mere assertion. I think that deep down, I agree with it, but I have no proof other than "that's what I believe."
It allows for a potentially expansive state, with little check on state powers, for measures that check individual liberty, or at least by most definitions of "liberty." (Too often, I see people use the word "liberty" as self-evident, as if there might not be competing definitions of liberty.)

Regardless of the problems, I think this is where I differ from libertarianism. The difference doesn't necessarily have much to do with disagreement on policy, but rather on my higher tolerance of and acquiescence to state intervention by way of a more expansive justification for that intervention.

In Search of the libertarian / liberal divide, part IV

2011-11-28T12:35:00.000-06:00

To continue with my series of posts on libertarian proposals: I am now going to cover those two items I said I "mostly opposed" of Mr. Hanley's policy proposals: for summary's sake, and for the sake of adding yet another colon to this sentence, here they are:

Pass a constitutional amendment that bans subsidies to any for-profit corporation.
Repeal the corporate income tax. It gets passed on to consumers anyway, so it’s just a way of pretending we’re making corporations pay their fair share, rather than substantively doing so. And it would reduce accounting costs and diminish the incentive to engage in rent-seeking in looking for special exemptions to it.

First, I'd like to change my vote from "mostly opposed" to "I'm so confused about the matter and what it would entail and how it would be implemented that I don't quite know where I stand but I think I'm opposed at least for that reason along with some others."

Here are my reservations about a constitutional amendment to ban subsidies to for-profit corporations:

I'm unsure about the effect of an actual amendment. What would the amendment look like? How would it define "for profit" corporation, as opposed to some other entity?
What would count as a subsidy? Would it be a simple transfer of money to a corporation? Would it be a tariff designed to protect a certain industry?
Such an amendment would seem to run counter to the original mechanism used to create corporations. Now, it is probably open for debate whether corporations themselves are creatures of the state--it is possible that there is an organizing tendency among people to participate in joint enterprises and that such enterprises tend to act as a "body" in a way we might vaguely call "corporate"--but in practice, what we call corporations are indeed entities created by the state, either as a tool for people in business to use or, in their older form, as a special organization granted certain special rights to achieve a desired public end (I'm thinking of corporations created in the early 1800s to promote internal improvements). These types of corporations, and the privileges they enjoy, have had a long and evolving history. (Limited liability for shareholders was not necessarily an attribute of the corporation as it was originally conceived, for example.) Either way, it seems unclear to me how the creation of a corporation is not in some way a "subsidy" of those who choose to incorporate. How would an amendment take this into account?
Would such an amendment apply only to state governments, or only to the federal government? If the restriction would be only on the federal government, would that prevent the federal government from issuing incentives to encourage overseas corporations to open up shop in the U.S.? (If so, maybe preventing such incentives is not a bad thing in itself, and therefore it might be a good thing altogether to have such a restriction.) If the restriction apply to the states, I imagine it would make illegal the disgusting spectacle we see in Illinois, wherein the governor and the legislature are falling over themselves to give various tax breaks to companies that threaten to leave the state. But I imagine that such a restriction would reduce the flexibility of state governments to act in such matters. Again, maybe that's not a bad thing, or at least not necessarily, but I wonder what the practical effects would be.

As to repealing corporate income tax, again, I'm unclear on what to make of it. I should plead ignorance and say that I don't know how a corporate income tax operates. My main concern is whether the correlation with prices is necessarily 1:1. If a tax of 1% is added to a corporation's income, then do prices increase by 1%, or by a lesser (or larger) percentage? I guess my main reservation is that I'd want to know more about what these taxes pay for, how much they are passed on to the consumer, and how capable they are of enforcement. I do imagine that in Illinois, the spectacle I described above would be lessened by such a repeal, but at the same time I find it hard to believe the legislators would have had the courage to impose a higher personal income tax to make up for the corporate income tax (of course, that issue is complicated, for at the time the legislature raised the corporate tax, it also raised individual income taxes "temporarily"; there is also the question of whether raising taxes at this time of recession is the right thing to do.)

In search of the libertarian / liberal divide, part III

2011-11-16T07:30:00.000-06:00

Continuing with my series of posts on "marginal libertarian" policies and my hope to define further the distinguishing features of libertarianism and liberalism [click here to see the first post, and click here to see the second], here is a discussion of those policies which I support, but with reservations. Of these, some reservations are libertarian-friendly and others are probably more "liberalish," or at least non-libertarian (notice that I haven't defined liberalism, or liberalishism; suffice it to say that I'm "working on it").

The only one policy about which I have reservations solely on grounds that I might call "libertarian" is the radical reduction of the armed forces. Of course, my reservations probably depend at least in part on what counts as "radical" reductions. In the abstract, I'm all for ending the warfare state and the militarization of the US society and economy. In practice, the US does have a lot of commitments abroad that would be difficult to disentangle even in ten or twenty years time. Such issues are well beyond my pay grade, and I'm too ignorant. I just fear that a precipitous and "radical" draw down might be dangerous.

I call this a "libertarian" reservation not because there aren't libertarian reasons to support demilitarization: indeed, one might argue that the original antipathy to government violations of civil liberties in the Anglo world--an antipathy from which I think it's possible to trace modern libertarianism--arose in reaction to England's warfare state (I'm thinking of the "country Whig" constituency that arose in England during the 18th century and whose thinking, at least according to historian Bernard Bailyn, provided some of the ideological basis for the American Revolution). I call this reservation "libertarian" because I believe it is located closely to a notion of national defense, so that a strong military can, or at least might, deflect or at least channel the rise of local hegemons that might divide the world into separate "power spheres." In short, I fear a return to the 1930s, which depending on the circumstances might be an even greater threat to liberties than our current standing army and military industrial complex.

Now, I'm open to the notion that I'm entirely wrong on this fear. I should stress that my reservation--resting as it does on a hypothetical and on an imperfect historical analogy--is a weak one, and I would welcome a demilitarization of our economy and society the moment and to the degree that it is shown to be feasible in our current world system.

My reservations against vouchers and against a constitutional amendment to overturn the Kelo decision (the 2005 court decision that upheld a state's taking of private property and transfer to a private developer on the ground that the resulting development would increase the local tax base and provide jobs, etc.) are both liberalish and libertarian.

As for vouchers, I'm not in principle against programs that broaden people's horizons and give them options to go to schools different from the public school to which they would otherwise be assigned. The rent seeker, however, is in the details, and I'm concerned about how vouchers would work and do work in practice.

First, I would need to know if the vouchers are merely rebates of property taxes. If so, I imagine they would effectively price out those who do not own real property because there cannot be a rebate to such taxes when the taxes are not paid directly in the first place (they are paid indirectly, of course, through rent). Second, I am concerned that regardless of the basis for the rebate--or grant of money, as I imagine some voucher systems might simply be a grant of money that people may use for non-public schools--the poor will still be priced out of using vouchers and would be warehoused in public schools that now would have fewer funds available. (Perhaps this concern is less valid than I stated it: maybe money for vouchers does not imply necessarily a loss of funds for public schools, and perhaps money is only one of many problems that some public school districts face so that merely giving more money does not necessarily mean improvements.)

Now, these concerns are liberalish in the sense that they rest on the implication that it is better to compel people to pay for public education, which is in a sense a state-supported, partial monopoly. Libertarians tend not to like state-supported monopolies unless there is no other way to provide the service. I understand the libertarian support for vouchers has to do somewhat with the competition that they would allegedly introduce. Therefore, inasmuch as I would strengthen the public schools' monopoly on primary and secondary education, my reservations against vouchers is non-libertarian.

My concerns are also libertarian-friendly, however, in that I believe a voucher scheme, again, depending on how it operates, could be just a way of funneling money from one group of people to another, particularly if the voucher program is based solely on giving a rebate for property taxes. This funneling might create a class of interested, relatively more affluent people who are strongly subsidized at the expense of poorer people. Again, I must stress that this objection, like my others, comes from my ignorance of how these programs operate in practice or would operate if implemented on a wide scale.

My reservations about an amendment to overturn the Kelo decision are based more on the means of a constitutional amendment than on the prospect of overturning Kelo itself. I belief that the decision of New Haven, Connecticut, to take Ms. Kelo's property was based on a wrongheaded policy. (I have heard that the private developer ultimately did nothing with the land acquired. I don't know if that claim is true, but even if it is false, I think the policy was a bad one.) I also believe that any takings that involves a transfer of property to a private entity should be subject to the strictest scrutiny, so that the type of policy pursued by New Haven could not have survived a constitutional challenge. I disagree with a constitutional amendment for two reasons, one liberalish and one libertarian, and I admit that in some ways the betray an internal contradiction in my own thinking on the matter:

Liberalish: as my invocation of a "strict scrutiny" test above might suggest, I can imagine, but only in the abstract, situations in which a taking for a purpose to transfer to a private entity might be justified. I say "in the abstract," because I cannot think of anything off hand. Also, and perhaps this is only a minor reservation, would such an amendment bar any transfer of land to a private entity if that land had been acquired by eminent domain? Perhaps this question represents a misunderstanding of Kelo (I have not actually read the decision, and I do not know if the private developer in question paid for the land that was condemned). But say the state acquires land for a public purpose through eminent domain: could it transfer the land 10 years later? a 100 years later? (I will say that the libertarian skepticism of eminent domain is well founded, especially because "just compensation" is not necessarily, in practice, fair compensation.)
Libertarian: a constitutional amendment, depending on how it is worded, might do what it's supposed to do, but it might also either be redundant or, worse, might enable more Kelo-style takings in the future. It might seem strange to say that an amendment to overturn a Supreme Court precedent be redundant when the precedent has been set, but I would not be surprised if the Court in the next 20 years or so will start distinguishing Kelo almost out of existence. (I'm not a Court watcher or otherwise an expert on the law, so take my prediction with several large grains of salt. I have no evidence, just my "hunch.") My main fear--that it would enable future takings--rests on my belief that introducing a ban into the constitution might be interpreted as "now you can do, provided you don't violate this rule." The fifth amendment allows the federal government (and the state, through incorporation via the 14th amendment) to take property "for public use." The new amendment would, I imagine, put a further qualification on "for public use," that would likely follow a format similar to the following "shall not be construed as to permit a transfer to a non-public entity." I wouldn't be surprised if such an amendment only makes it incumbent upon the state to claim and to prove to the satisfaction of the Court that the private entity is actually, really, and in all truth, in a matter of speaking, for purposes of this taking, a "public entity." And then we'd be back at square one. (Of course, I might be wrong on all this. And maybe an amendment would introduce in practice the type of strict scrutiny I favor.)

For the remaining policies that I support, but with reservations, my reservations are probably more liberalish than libertarian. These concern Mr. Hanley's prescription for reforming health care provision, his desire to end agricultural cartels, and the negative income tax idea.

Re: his prescriptions for health insurance reform: I like the idea of decoupling health insurance from employment and introducing a competitive market for insurance. I also favor government intervention to help the poor and for "catastrophic" coverage (I confess, I'm ignorant enough about insurance to have a firm grasp on what is meant by "catastrophic" coverage and whether it includes, for example, pre-existing conditions). My reservations, such as they are, rest on a skepticism, or at least an ignorance, of how well the government intervention would help: how intrusive and cumbersome the means testing requirement would be and wide the gap between what coverage one can get on the market and one can get from government provision.

Re: ending agricultural cartels: Any consideration of whether farmers should be allowed to form cartels must take into account the effect such cartels have on the prices of foodstuffs. In short, I, as a non-farmer, find it hard to sympathize with practices that at least in the short term raise prices of necessary food to the consumer, and I also find it hard to sympathize with the massive subsidies provided farmers, especially when those subsidies seem to work more to encourage small- (or medium-, or sometimes large-) scale farms on land that would otherwise be farmed any way than to encourage farming on land that wouldn't be farmed at all without them. Therefore, I would support ending government support for agricultural cartels, but my reservation rests on my ignorance: does the government merely tolerate such cartels, or does it enforce them? If it's only the former, then I might be inclined to support them or at least their legality.

Re: the negative income tax. I confess to not knowing much about the negative income tax, and most of what I do know I learned just a few days ago when I read this post by someone who has studied the idea. There are, as the author of this post notes, some problems with implementing such a plan, but I think it sounds like in general a good idea. I would not like to end all other forms of support, however: I think I would support a robust food stamp program (with all its problems), for example, in addition to a negative income tax, largely because I fear that any version of the negative income tax likely to be implemented would not be sufficient to ensure what I would like to consider a minimum standard of living (note that my "minimum standard of living" is probably higher than what might be considered subsistence level).

In my next post, I'll discuss briefly the policies that I more or less oppose, although I'm not entirely opposed to the motivations behind enacting them.

In search of the libertarian / liberal divide, part II

2011-11-14T07:45:00.000-06:00

In my previous post [click here to read it], I listed a series of policies advanced by a self-identified "marginal libertarian" and promised to examine why I support, support with reservations, or oppose these policies. In this post, I'll start with those policies that I almost unequivocally support: ending the war on drugs and legalizing same sex marriage.

First, ending the war on drugs:

I'll say that whatever other reason I might have for opposing the war on drugs, I'm convinced by the libertarian argument for ending the "war." Here is that argument as I understand it: the "war" is an excuse, and provides a mechanism, for the state to exercise a broad authority over its citizens in a particularly arbitrary way. The "war" subjects people to constant governmental oversight, crowds our prisons, and ruins the job prospects for millions of people who are caught for "possession." It also acts as a sort of "prosecutors' insurance": if the prosecutor "knows" someone is guilty of something serious, but can only prove possession, then the he or she can leverage that possession into a plea deal that increases his or her conviction rate. The "war" also creates a broad constituency for its own perpetuation: the prison guards union in California, owners of privatized prisons, prosecutors, the vast networks of funding streams for federal, state, and local efforts to eradicate the drug trade, to name a few.

My only quibble with "end the war on drugs" is not a particularly anti-libertarian one, it's one of definition. At its base, the "war on drugs" is a metaphor for a wider array of policies that function as a large power shift of the state over everyday citizens. In other words, there is not one single "war" policy that needs be overturned, but several other steps that probably include decriminalization, ending funding streams, ending the Drug Enforcement Agency. (Note, ending the "war" does not, to my mind, necessarily imply legalization, although it probably implies a radical decriminalization. Also, some ways that might be proposed to end the war, a "focus on treatment," for example, might have some very bad collateral consequences: in my more dystopian moments, I can imagine a judge saying to someone "well, you haven't committed a crime--and therefore this is not an adversarial process and you don't have the right to a lawyer--but you appear to be an addict, and I therefore "invite" you to spend 5 years in a treatment facility, and because this is for your own good, you must accept the invitation or be guilty of violating law wxyz-1234.")

The policy goal of allowing same sex marriage is also one I support largely on libertarian as well as personal grounds. The personal: I know several gay couples, and I would like them to have the option to marry if that's what they want to do. The libertarian: I find it unfair to deny some couples the right to marry simply because they are of the same sex. With the exception of, perhaps, a (probably very slight) increase in government spending or decrease in tax revenues because more people would, with gay marriage, be in different tax and social security benefits categories, and with the exception of knocking straight marriage from its position as "the only marriage contract allowed," I don't see how legalizing gay marriage affects others' rights at all. Even if the affect on taxes and government spending be enormous, I hope I would still support ssm because it's the right thing to do.

In my next, probably most boring post of the series of posts, I'll discuss the policies I support, but with reservations.

In search of the libertarian / liberal divide, part I

2011-11-14T07:34:00.002-06:00

I often have a hard time explaining to myself why I am not a libertarian. Well, in some ways, I suppose I am, but I do not choose to identify myself as one, and the policies I tend to prefer are generally not endorsed by people who call themselves libertarians.

In part, my refusal to identify as a libertarian comes from a reluctance to be identified with the popular caricatures of libertarians: according to one of these caricatures, libertarians are minarchist extremists who support policies that would take us to a new feudalism where the owners of property rule over all in a sort of survival of the fittest world. This caricature--as well as others I could mention--is unfair to what I understand most self-proclaimed libertarians to believe. Still, that doesn't answer really why I don't identify as a libertarian. (For what it's worth, I don't identify as a Democrat, either, even though my preferred policies seem to be more congenial with what Democrats advance.)

However, when I read what consistent libertarians believe (there are always libertarians of opportunity, just as there are fellow travelers of opportunity to any ism when what what that ism advocates is congenial to them), I am sometimes at a loss to explain my differences with them. In one post, I listed things I have learned from libertarianism (click here to see it; and to that list I'll add that libertarians place a value on "choice," such that policies that tend to enlarge the number choices available to people tend to be better than policies that limit the number of choices). But although I appreciate these lessons and indeed must take them into account when I think about any of my policy preferences, they leave me at a loss to explain why I don't identify as a libertarian. This "loss to explain" is further highlighted by other (perhaps over-broad) statements about what libertarians believe, as in the explanation provided by libertarianism dot org [click here to read it in full]:*

Libertarianism is the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property. In the libertarian view, voluntary agreement is the gold standard of human relationships. If there is no good reason to forbid something (a good reason being that it violates the rights of others), it should be allowed. Force should be reserved for prohibiting or punishing those who themselves use force, such as murderers, robbers, rapists, kidnappers, and defrauders (who practice a kind of theft). Most people live their own lives by that code of ethics....[the definition elaborates a bit further, and I invite you to click onto the above link to see what I leave out, but I think what I've quoted here represents it fairly.]

This definition, as far as it goes, is something I could probably sign on with. I would, and do, quibble with the claim in the last sentence inasmuch as I believe we all have an inner authoritarian that out of spite or pride would forbid others from doing something which harms us not (at the same time, I believe a lot of libertarians suppose anyone to be corruptible, which is one reason why they are suspicious of concentrations of power into the government). I also believe that in the right circumstances we all are or would be tempted to resort to it. But quibbles are a fact of life, and in broad outlines much of this definition seems congenial. I do think it is over-broad because I imagine a very large number of people who are not libertarians would claim to be willing to embrace it. (Note, for example, how opponents of same sex marriage often frame their opposition in terms of how ssm would damage traditional marriage, not in terms of denying someone the right to do something that otherwise respects the rights of others.)

Too often, when I think about such things as "libertarianism" or "liberalism," I tend to focus too much on first principles and starting premises. And that focus leads me into vague, unsupported assertionism (see my claim that we all have an inner authoritarian).

Something I read recently at League of Ordinary Gentlemen, however, gives me the chance to explore further why I am not a libertarian. James Hanley, in the comment thread of a guest post at League of Ordinary Gentlemen (click here to read the post) gives a list of some policies that he, as a libertarian, would support. He calls these "marginal improvements" in order to underscore that they are doable and that libertarianism does not necessarily represent some pie-in-the-sky attempt to remake society completely de novo. Here is a concrete instance where I can say I support, oppose, or support with reservations a specifically libertarian policy and whether I support, oppose, or support with reservations out of respect for principles that might be considered libertarian or out of some other principles, or a combination. In short, examining this list will give me the opportunity to explore why I don't consider myself a libertarian and to explore what I see as some of the distinguishing features of liberalism and libertarianism. Here is the list Mr. Hanley provides, in brackets is a notation of whether I mostly support, support with reservations, or mostly oppose the given policy (click here to read the original comment):

1. End the war on drugs. [mostly support]

2. Radically reduce the armed forces (ok, that might be beyond marginal, but I think changes at the margin there are unlikely to stick). [support with reservtions]

3. Eliminate our current welfare programs and shift to a negative income tax. [support with reservations]

4. Pass a constitutional amendment that bans subsidies to any for-profit corporation. (I’m not a fan of subsidies for not-for-profit ones, either, but I don’t want to get rid of the tax deduction for contributions to non-profits, which is a de facto subsidy.) [mostly oppose]

5. Repeal the corporate income tax. It gets passed on to consumers anyway, so it’s just a way of pretending we’re making corporations pay their fair share, rather than substantively doing so. And it would reduce accounting costs and diminish the incentive to engage in rent-seeking in looking for special exemptions to it. [mostly oppose]

6. Promote the expansive use of school vouchers. [support with reservations]

7. Eliminate the federal law that allows for the creation of agricultural cartels. [support with reservations]

8. Change our health care system so that it’s actually more of a market system, reserving government’s role primarily for catastrophic care and the very poor. At a minimum this requires severing the link between employment and health insurance (which is what is actually blocking most unemployed/self-employed people from getting health insurance), and making it easier to set up inter-state buying networks. [support with reservations]

9. Allow same-sex marriage. [mostly support, with no reservations]

10. Constitutional amendment to overturn the Kelo decision. [support with reservations]

In the next few posts, I will examine each of these policies to explain why I take the position on them that I do and what role properly "libertarian" justifications play in my assessment of these policies. I will then follow up with a more general post on what this all means for defining the distinguishing features of libertarianism and liberalism.

*I do not read that site regularly and only stumbled on it a few days ago. I also cannot claim that it speaks for all or most libertarians. My very brief perusal of the site suggests to me that it relies on a question-begging, one-size-fits-all notion of liberty that amounts to preaching to the choir.

We are the 99%, we are the 1%

2011-10-16T16:07:00.002-05:00

The "Occupy Wall Street" movement has figured prominently in the BCM (Blogosphere as Consulted by Me) and, I assume, in the mainstream media, although I haven't looked much at the MSM in the last weeks. This movement appears to be largely a protest against what its participants believe to be the corporate greed and the unfair advantages enjoyed by the wealthiest of the population at the expense of most hardworking Americans.

One of its rallying cries is "We are the 99 percent," as opposed to the rent-seeking, greedy 1 percent who oppress us all and get government bailouts. One website that claims to speak for the movement explains what it stands for:

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

Who, then, are the 1 percent?

They are the 1 percent. They are the banks, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry. They are the important ones. They need help and get bailed out and are praised as job creators. We need help and get nothing and are called entitled. We live in a society made for them, not for us. It’s their world, not ours. If we’re lucky, they’ll let us work in it so long as we don’t question the extent of their charity.

I do not wish to dismiss this movement or the concerns expressed by its adherents out of hand. There are real problems out there and reading that website--which, from the first of its (so far, as of a week and a half ago when I wrote the first draft of this post) 67 pages, seems to be a series of posts by people who explain their personal plight, such as high debts, poor health, and joblessness--is quite sobering. It's one thing for someone like me to contemplate, in the abstract, others' statements about what is important to them. It is quite another to put a human voice to the person making that statement. Many of the problems voiced there remind me of some of my own challenges. Others of the problems are (thankfully, knock on wood, etc.) are, so far, beyond my ken.

I also do not wish to claim that this movement is saying something it is not. It is easy to chide the proponents of the "we are the 99%, and they are the 1%" formulation as both naive and potentially dangerous, indicative of a mentality that sees conspiracies in everything perceived to be unfair or simply unsatisfactory or unfortunate. It is also easy to point out that the 99% formulation is over-inclusive. The top 10%, for instance, probably benefit more than the remaining 90% by orders of magnitude comparable to that enjoyed by the top 1% over the 99%. I in fact made a comment to that effect in a post at the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog. One commenter there thoughtfully rebuked me, saying in part (the rest, along with my original comment you can get by clicking on the link),

Personally, I think it’s somewhat misleading to think of “the 99%” as a demographic group; it is, rather, a political designation, more akin to a declaration of faith and principles than a reference to one’s factual income. To declare oneself as part of the 99% is not to say that I make less than X amount of money; it is to declare that I am in opposition to the existing order of things, which has effectively written out large percentages of the population as not really relevant to the political community. Thus, for instance, I think that Warren Buffet could declare himself too to be of the 99%, and I would welcome it. So while its true that the 99% don’t share a common interest, it is equally true that the one core purpose of the movement is to transform things, to bring into being a new political subjectivity, which in theory at least, could contain anyone and everyone.

Now, I think this commenter has a point, and it's a check on my own smugness (and against what another commenter at that site, in another post, called being "a pedantic a***ole). At any rate, I reject the facile characterizations of the movement by such people as Charles Krauthammer, who, in his appearance on a recent episode of "Inside Washington," criticized the protesters for their alleged hypocrisy in owning I-phones and wearing designers jeans while declaiming against corporate America. (That's not the only time I've seen the "they use I-phones" trope....I questions, by the way, how many of those people actually do use I-phones.) Another casual dismissal comes from Tom Van Dyke at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Noting one protester who says he or she has $70,000 in debt:

I feel you, brother. $70,000 in hock to the Educational-Industrial Complex and still no job to pay off your medical bills, the ones you ran up spending your cash on clubs and sushi and gadgets instead of insurance. Now you’re streetcamping, trying to figure out how to make a meal out of Cup O’Noodles and a can of Red Bull.

I don't see how Mr. Van Dyke knows that this person actually eats sushi or went to the clubs or didn't even have insurance, just as I don't know how accurate is Mr. Krauthammer's assessment of the protesters' fashion capabilities.

These detractors might have a point. Young college educated people--and the protesters are at least portrayed as mostly young and college educated, although I suppose those assumptions might be a bit overwrought--might have it rough in this economy, but it appears that the lesser educated have it even worse. At any rate, I'm not sure we really know the demographics enough to make such a general statement about the protests. But no number of studies in comparative oppressions and no accusations of hypocrisy necessarily answer the protesters' arguments.

Another point from the the detractors, a la Mr. Van Dyke, is that these protesters are in the situation they are in largely because of choices they made, some of which might have been improvident or at the very least ill-considered. There's probably some truth to that point, and that truth oughtn't be denied. But there is also a point, I believe, where it is important to have empathy for others, regardless of how much they owe their position to their own improvidence. Who among us hasn't made at least some poor choices? Of course, what the common solution should be, can be, and is, is a different question. I'm not sure, for example, that a onetime student loan bailout, is the way to go (although, to be fair, I don't see a lot of people seriously arguing for a student loan bailout as much as I see them arguing for expanding the categories by which people can earn forgiveness or otherwise have their debts discharged or reduced). But if someone is in distress, sometimes it is helpful to listen to them. We might see ourselves.

Still, I feel constrained to reject the "we are the 99%" formulation. My rejection comes, in part, from the criticisms I mentioned above: the conspiracy-theory mentality the formulation plays into and the formulation's (what I and and at least one other person sees as) over-inclusiveness.

My rejection also comes from the way I believe that formulation mischaracterizes the beneficiaries of the bank bailout. Those who benefited the most are probably the investment bankers and jet-setting insurance executives, at least I am going to assume that to be true. But in the very short term, at least, other beneficiaries were probably the people much lower on the food chain who worked for those firms--the clerks and the janitors and the tellers and the couriers. My point isn't that the bank bailout was wise or that it was primarily an effort to help those folks. Rather, my point is that when protesters criticize "Wall Street" or "Bank of America" (in Chicago, the protests are taking place on LaSalle Street and Jackson, where the main Chicago branch of Bank of America is located), they often elide the distinction between those they call the "1%" and those who are trying to get by on more modest incomes at more modest jobs at these places. (In this sense, my rejection is based less on the protest movement's alleged "over-inclusiveness" and more on its "under-inclusiveness.")

Finally, my rejection comes from that formulation's rejection of what I take to be basic truth. We are all essentially just as greedy, corruptible, and rent-seeking as the next person. The difference between the "99%" and the mythical 1% is that the 1% are better positioned or better able, or both, to make their greed work for them. This assertion--that humanity is inherently greedy and corrupt(ible)--is of course not very original. Even if you don't agree with it (maybe in a later post I'll explain my theory of greed, which I have stolen from C. S. Lewis and now claim as my own), you have to admit that the idea is out there and reasonable people advance it. You don't even have to agree with my broad generalization to acknowledge that to the 1%, but for the grace of God, go the 99%. (I hope that makes sense.) Who among us can honestly and with certainty say we would, if we could, abrogate all the privileges we enjoy that give us an advantage over others? I can't, and I don't think the 99% can either.

At the same time, to demand such and honest and certain avowal from another human being is unfair. And I hope it's clear that my rejection is to a particular slogan--"we are the 99%"--and not necessarily to the movement itself, what the movement represents, or any solutions the movement advocates.

Squirreled Away

2011-10-05T08:19:00.005-05:00

From the Chicago Better Business Bureau's weekly Report of 2 April 1931 (p. 3):

The use of the trade name "Squrlpelt" to brand materials not made from the pelts of squirrels, is prohibited by the Federal Trade Commission in their order to H. Ernstberger and Carl Rosenkranz, co-partners, New York, trading as H. Ernstberger & Company.

The [FTC] order also forbids the use of labels picturing a squirrel, or the words "Squrlpelt" or other words of similar import.

The complaint charged that this company advertised "Squrlpelt" as "The genuine and original importation of the squirrel effect in fabrics." There was a picture of a squirrel and a picture of the label under which was quoted, "This label identifies the genuine."

With all due respect to the fashion tastes of the Great Depression era, my impression is that squirrels are pretty low on the chain of sought after pelt animals. If this company wasn't using squirrels, what were they using?

On misosophy

2011-09-04T23:31:00.000-05:00

I've never been much good at philosophy, and I tend not to like it, at least when it comes to the formal study of it. The best explanation for this is that I am probably too lazy to devote the time necessary to appreciate it. Reading philosophy can be hard, and I only do it anymore for its historic relevance. So, for example, I will read and have my students read (when I teach) parts of John Locke's treatise on civil government because of its historic importance, even though, I suppose, one cannot know its historicity without knowing its "philosophy."

But the other reason for my dislike have more to do with its seeming inscrutability. I get tired of puzzling through a treatise--actually, more like the 4 to 6 page excerpt from a treatise that is reproduced in an introduction to philosophy reader--only to find that the next treatise (do a quick "ibid" on the 4 to 6 page excerpt idea) that pokes holes in the first treatise, usually with the observation that "X philosopher's system of ethics is all well and good, unless your name is...........HITLER!"

In the introduction to philosophy course I took and the one or two other non-introduction to philosophy course(s) I took I ran into this phenomenon quite a bit. Does Kant's categorical imperative make sense? Well, not to Bentham? Does Bentham make sense? Well, not to William James.

I get that the point is to teach students to think, and to realize that there are not easy, uncomplicated answers, and to introduce them to answers that have been proffered in the past and, to identify fallacies and whatnot. But in the end, I'm just not good at it.

I freely confess that this is a failing in me. I realize that philosophy--i.e., the formal study and formal pronouncement of what is called philosophy--is important. I just don't understand it.

What I've learned from libertarians/libertarianism

2011-06-12T12:33:00.000-05:00

Well, for starters, it's not my sense of humor. I suspect that if a libertarian had to listen to my jokes all day, even he or she would support, "for the good of society," some restrictions on speech.

But I have learned a lot from them. First I should clarify what I mean by "libertarians" and "libertarianism." By libertarians, I mean those who call themselves libertarians and appear (to me) to be sincere. In other words, I have not read most of the intellectuals credited with being "libertarians," like Hayek or Friedman, although I have read Locke, who might be a proto-libertarian. I have also read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations--the whole thing, although I can't claim to have understood it or to remember it. By libertarians, I mean, for the most part, those who I have met on the blogosphere, either at the belated Positive Liberty site and its successors or at the Volokh Conspiracy.

By libertarianism--well, I guess I should clarify what I mean, but I don't know what I mean, so I'll just assume I know what I mean.

Finally, when I say "I have learned" x, y, or z "from libertarians," I acknowledge that perhaps what I have learned has something to do with things that aren't essentially "libertarian" but are consistent with what I've observed libertarians support or believe in. In short, I am not a libertarian, but I have learned a lot from people who claim to be.

Here's my list:

Acti0ns have unpredictable consequences.
Government regulations usually (maybe always?) impose costs, and even the best regulations usually (maybe always?) get us something good at the cost of something else that is also, although not necessarily as, good.
Government regulations can and often do create "perverse incentives."
The state is coercive, and coercion of any sort is something we should be at least wary of. Even if it's necessary.
Fraud is a form of coercion.
The morality and efficacy behind antitrust laws is, to say the least, problematic. (I've actually probably would have come to this conclusion without the aid of libertarian bloggers of the libertarian scholars who I've read on this subject--my dissertation research has in some ways led me to this conclusion--but they have helped me in affirming this conclusion.)
Torture is not only wrong (which I either learned or "knew" on some level for a long time), its effectiveness is highly questionable. Its effectiveness being highly questionable gives yet another reason why it is wrong.
The notion of what many libertarians call "economic liberty" deserves respect. ("Deserving of respect" does not, in my view, have any obvious implications about the role of the state, and I certainly remain comfortable with, for example, only rational basis review by the courts over restrictions on economic liberty. But I have more respect for the argument that economic liberty is an important thing for people.)

On disliking Sarah Palin

2011-06-08T14:59:00.007-05:00

I have sometimes complained to my friends about Sarah Palin's (Gov of Alaska, retired) critics. These complaints are often taken to mean that I like Palin (Gov of Alaska, retired) or that I think it is wrong to criticize her. I believe neither: her policies, such as I understand them, are ones I cannot support; her fitness and ability to be president is something I question; her populist demagogy I find distasteful.

I say the preceding just to be clear. My beef with her critics, especially those from the 2008 election, is the quickness to which they are willing to resort to some of the most invidious and condescending tropes possible. (I should also be clear here that I refer mostly to those critics who are friends of mine; I have little to say about the punditrocracy or strangers who criticize her.) Within days of McCain announcing her as his choice for running mate, I heard the following "critiques" of her fitness to be VP:

She had a special needs child. (One friend of mine actually said, and I quote almost verbatim, that "she needed to have an abortion.")
She speaks with a funny accent.
She is a mother.
She was in a high school beauty pageant (or maybe it was a post-high school thing).

Now, I admit that Palin (Gov of Alaska, retired) plays off of tropes that perhaps implicate the preceding: she paints herself as the poster-advocate for pro-life politics; she uses her accent in what appears to me to be a down-home style of "hey, I'm just like you"; and she trades in on her physical beauty. In a sense, then, her campaigning style makes her fair game for certain of the above "critiques" (although the abortion remark is over the top by any standard, I think).

Still, there's so much more to criticize, and at least some of the criticisms have a hope of actually commanding a respectful response from people who are otherwise inclined to support her. Instead, so many of my personal acquaintances have resorted to misogynistic, even hate-filled statements when they should be criticizing her policies.*

And just to be clear, I'll repeat something that I hope is obvious by what I have written, but at least a few of my friends have misunderstood me**: I do not claim that people dislike Palin (Gov of Alaska, retired) because she is a woman; instead, I claim that even though there are a lot of reasons to dislike and oppose her, my friends and acquaintances choose for some reason to resort to mysoginistic tropes to express their displeasure with her.

*For the record, I don't count Palin's (Gov of Alaska, retired) misstatements about Paul Revere as particularly cause of concern. If she wants to praise one of the principals involved in instigating an unjust war (imagine killing people over a tax on tea!), then she's on her own.

**To be fair, the misunderstanding has arisen at least in part because I myself have not expressed myself as clearly as I ought to have about why I disliked many of the criticisms of Palin (Gov of Alaska, retired) I have heard.

And now, for my Spanish speaking readers.....

2011-06-03T08:47:00.001-05:00

Question: What kind of clothing rocks the world?
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Answer: San Andrea's falda

Law & Order

2011-06-03T08:46:00.001-05:00

Question: What do you call it when a police officer takes a nap?
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Answer: A rest.

Left behind

2011-05-22T08:35:00.037-05:00

In December 1999, I went to a grocery store in Boulder, the town where I lived at the time, and bought a box that had four 1-gallon jugs of water. They were on sale, on a special pallet in a prominent aisle. The store, of course, was trying to capitalize on the "Y2K" scare. My preparations for the coming calamity didn't extend much beyond this purchase, but I spent whatever amount of money I spent to get it. The following summer, there was still a box with four 1-gallon jugs of water in the room of my apartment--it served as a nice little table--and I had to empty the water when I moved out.

There was a certain amount of ridiculousness to all this. On most levels, I didn't believe the Y2K scare was much more than a scare, or I thought that, at most, maybe ATM's wouldn't work for a day or two, or perhaps the wrong date would appear on my bank statements, or my television, reverting to an earlier, double-digit aught-aught, would show only reprisals of Mr. Dooley or old "Mutt and Jeff" cartoons (okay, I made the last one up).

My purchase of water was also ridiculous for another reason: if things were going to be so bad that I needed 4 gallons of fresh water on stock, I would probably need a lot more than just 4 gallons of water. One can, I have heard, go without food for weeks and still survive. But without water, it is hard to survive (again, so I've heard) for much longer than a day or two. Four gallons likely would not have lasted me a week, and I'd probably feel obliged to share that with my roommates. One final point: I had water bottles and mason jars and the like--probably more than a mere four gallons worth, especially if I had sanitized old milk jugs that we saved for recycling--and could have stocked up on good ole tap water without paying whatever price the grocery store charged for what was probably also tap water.

The changeover to Y2K had no noticeable, direct affect on me personally or on anyone I know. I imagine some things stopped working as they should, but I either didn't notice them or if I did, they were so insignificant that I have since forgotten them.

Now, I hear that the much anticipated (by some) "rapture" of Christians has failed to materialize. The "rapture," as I understand it, is the notion that as part of the beginning of the end of this dispensation, Christ will take up the last remaining generation of Christians before the world undergoes a series of "tribulations" that will result in the second Kingdom of God. I suppose there are variations on the theme and although I think I have gotten the gist right, my description may fail in certain particulars. Anyway, apparently, some reverend somewhere has anticipated that the "rapture" would come yesterday, and it either failed to come or the number of Christians taken up was so small, and the Christians apparently so humble and so unworldly, that the remaining coterie of mammon worshipers has not noticed their absence.

This prediction has elicited at least some commentary (but then again, what prediction never elicits any controversy whatsoever?), most of it humorous or mocking. At Ordinary Gentlemen, Jason Kuzinicki has a quite funny post--followed by an amusing comment thread-- about the rapture predictions. And Alex Knapp, author of a "sub-blog" at Ordinary Gentlemen, has his own, more pensive, commentary on it. Other such commentaries abound. One facebook friend, for example, suggested that this was an essentially American phenomenon (if she meant that this particular prediction and instance of hand-wringing were mostly American, then I agree; if she meant that only Americans are susceptible to such millennialist anxieties, then I disagree). Most of the commentary I have seen (I have read nothing by those who purported to believe yesterday was THE DAY) embrace one or more of the following themes or ways of looking at the issue:

The people who believed that the rapture would happen yesterday are stupid.
The people who believed that the rapture would happen yesterday are/were so caught up in the narrative of their religion and are so willing to discount disconfirming evidence that their faith--or at least the faith of most of them--will remain, if shaken, largely unchanged.
These people are rightly objects of our mockery.
These people are rightly objects of our pity.
These people are different from us, who are rational and not so subject to such wacky epistemological claims as those made by the true believers.
The belief that the rapture would happen yesterday represents to some degree an absence of faith.
The belief that the rapture would happen yesterday represents a misreading of the scriptural authority on which the notion of the rapture is based.

Perhaps humor is the right way to comment on these things. I have done and believed some wacky things in my life and sometimes the price of believing and doing wacky things is to be made fun of. And if one has even a modicum of a sense of humor, one can, hopefully, laugh at oneself after the sturm und drang is over.

Still, I hesitate to think that I or my more rationalist friends, are really all that free of such millennial or otherwise incredible (to others) thinking. Of course, maybe I'm an outlier--not everyone bought 4 1-gallon jugs of water, just as not everyone believes that if only we have a workers' revolution we will usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and widgets for all--but at the same time, maybe I'm not.

I don't know what lies in people's hearts,. what others secretly fear. And for what it's worth, especially if the notion of a "rapture" is untrue, we are all probably going to die someday and will worry about our final end, especially because probably none of us has complete certainty about what will happen afterward, or if some claim to have certainty, that certainty will not necessarily ease every and all anxiety:

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore.

It also seems to me that most branches of Christianity that accept at least some of the claims of the miraculous--even if it's only the incarnation--at least leave open the possibility, in the abstract, that something like the "rapture" might happen. Having been raised Catholic, I have never, or at least do not remember ever having heard, a priest expound on this possibility, but I have trouble believing that the notion of a rapture is so contradictory to Church doctrine that it is not at least debatable. I was, in a large chunk of my life, involved with what I will call evangelical faiths on at least some levels, and there I heard about the "rapture" in much more explicit and credulous terms. My point here is only that the most recent rapturists perhaps have committed an error (of faith? of timing? of hermeneutics? of hubris?), but they have done so drawing on beliefs that are not necessarily much different from those of some of their detractors.

It is easy to mock. It might even be necessary to mock. Still, I can't forget that I once bought 4 gallons of water.

Joe has much, but at least he's got his pride

2011-05-21T11:01:00.005-05:00

The long (1 week) awaited (by me) "part 2" of the travails of Joe the exactly $250,000 before taxes income recipient/earner has now been published. You may recall part one (here), and my critique (here). In part 1, "Joe" talked about how hard he worked to get his $250,000. In part 2, he talks about where he spends it. It is short and easy to read, so I won't summarize it. Still, here are a few thoughts on both parts 1 and 2:

First, I'm open to the possibility that Enrico, the author, may have intended these columns as a parody. I have read nothing else he has written. But some of the statements--especially in the second essay, when he says that if he lived in the "very expensive city" in which he works, he would have to live "in a high-rise apartment with a doorperson, because otherwise, I would need to carry an Uzi when taking the garbage down the hall to the incinerator"--likely is not meant to arouse any sympathy from people who actually live in that city.

Second, it is very unclear to me how "Joe" can claim to earn exactly $250,000 before taxes. In my last post, I wondered whether the tax increase proposed by Obama et al. was based on adjusted gross income or based on some prior income consideration. Is the $250,000 before or after the AGI is figured? More to the point, in part 2, "Joe" mentions how hard it is to put away anything for retirement, which suggests that he puts at least something away. Now, there are various ways to save for retirement, and many ways involve tax-deferred mechanisms, such as 401(k)'s and IRA's.* He probably, therefore, earns at least some money that is not taxable, so the claim he earns "$250,000 before taxes" is probably more an approximation. (I am not certain if there is an income level beyond which one may enjoy tax-deferred contributions, and if there is, perhaps that challenges my point here.) Finally, I assume he has at least 1 interest bearing account--either taxable or non-taxable--and for the interest to add up, plus his other income, to exactly $250,000 is quite a feat, especially if it happens more than one year in a lifetime. [see update below]

Third, I'm sympathetic to the claim, implicit in both of his posts,** that he is a net-taxpayer (i.e., that he pays more in taxes than he receives in services). Yet he receives at least some services and benefits. In one of "Joe's" hypothetical scenarios, his children go to a public school in an "affluent" suburb. In most of his scenarios, "Joe" drives a car on roads that are maintained in part by public funds (yes, I know some of the roads are probably toll roads). Take, also, social security and medicare. It is possible that they are not involved, yet, in the proposed tax increases on "the rich."*** I won't mention the temporary relief given on social security taxes this year (actually, I just did mention it, but I'm not sure if there's an income requirement that would make "Joe" ineligible for the relief). I will even grant that maybe those programs won't be around by the time "Joe" retires. But if he has a parent or parents who depend on social security and / or medicare, it is just possible he is therefore an indirect beneficiary.

Fourth, Joe has more choices. He need not live in an expensive high-rise apartment: he can probably rent out a good room with the owner of a two-flat, like my girlfriend and I do. And I'm sure the landlord would be much happier to have a low-maintenance middle-aged man with a stable income than a slack-jawed (almost middle aged) grad student like myself.

Fifth, it is true that in one of the hypothetical scenarios, "Joe" has a skillset the demand for which is in decline. In other words, if he loses his job, it would be very difficult for him to find a comparable job at the same or similar salary. Indeed, he might even be priced out of less remunerative jobs because, as a former senior level management person, he might be seen as too overqualified for, say, a barrista post at Stardollars (a job that he might find is hard in its own right). I also acknowledge that as someone who is presumably middle-aged, he would probably face the very real prospect of age discrimination on the job market (as someone who is approaching middle age myself, I am becoming much more sensitive to the possibility). But in those cases, he will be earning far less than $250,000 and therefore will no longer be one of the oppressed rich.

As I argued in my last post on the plight of "Joe," I have much sympathy--even empathy--for Enrico's apparent effort (if he's not writing a parody) to challenge the facile assumption that "people who make $250,000 a year have it easy." In some ways ways, they have their own challenges and worries and concerns, and their life might attain a level of stress, ennui, and unhappiness that others who make less might be more in a position to avoid (the key word is "might"....they might very well have other stressors, ennuis, and unhappinesses, too, but I'm not dismissing outright the possibility that "Joe" has it worse than he might if he made, say, only $50,000 a year). But in some important ways, "Joe" has choices, and he appears, largely, to deny it.

Update: 5-21-11: The reason I harp so much on the difficulty of claiming that "Joe" makes exactly $250,000 a year before taxes is because that claim is meant to have a lot of persuasive force. The reader is lead to believe that, but for the arbitrary imposition of a penny (or, more likely, a dollar) in his salary, "Joe" would evade the terrors of the tax increase. The persuasiveness of his claim about the apparent arbitrariness of the line-drawing would not be as strong if "Joe" made, say, $255,000 before taxes. Also, and as an aside, I suspect many people would draw the line at which one becomes ~~rich~~ well-to-do at a point somewhat lower than $250,000, say, at $200,000, or at $100,000. Such people would likely see the arbitrariness as extending in the other direction: too many of "the rich" are getting by without the increase, they might say.

*My understanding of Roth IRA's is that the income invested is taxable, but the interest/earnings on the investment are not, or are at least tax deferred.

**For example, in the first essay, he complains about people raising his taxes for "federal budget deficit I had nothing to do with," and in the second essay, he complains about property taxes raised to support local schools, etc.

***I have heard the claim, the truth of which I don't know, that these programs are actually funded by unique funding streams and are not really included in what is officially counted as the budget deficit....again, I don't know if that is true, but I have heard the claim.

Gingrich might win the presidency

2011-05-15T12:59:00.002-05:00

Newt Gingrich has announced that he is running for president and he might win it. I say this in the "stranger things have happened" sense: if he wants to run for president, this next year is his best chance to win. Here's why:

Obama, at least right now, seems unbeatable. Such things and seemings can change at the drop of a hat, but while it the seemings do truly so seem, they prevent others from entering the race.
Because Obama seems the candidate to beat, and because incumbent presidents have a strong history of winning reelection, other Republicans who are more electable will set their sites on 2016. If a Democrat wins that year, the best Republican options will set their sites on 2020. If a Republican wins that year, the 2020 spot will presumably be taken. Gingrich would have to wait until 2024 before he has as good a chance as he does now.
Gingrich might be the "Goldwater of 2012": the throw-your-vote-away candidate.
Who knows, if the economy continues to do poorly, or is seen as continuing to do poorly, Gingrich could pull an upset.
Gingrich's past and his character would be issues in any campaign, but he wouldn't be the first candidate to win with such questions about his character. (Of course, in his case, the character issues are largely verified: the Gennifer Flowers incident was largely denied and gainsaid whereas the specifics of what Gingrich did are much more stipulated to.)

I hope none of this is taken as an endorsement of Gingrich. It's just an observation.

Historians' ethics and the search for salt and pepper

2011-05-15T10:45:00.003-05:00

My dissertation topic--antitrust policy as it may or may not have applied to coal dealers in Toronto and Chicago from 1880 through 1940--is about as dull as it gets for the hapless non-specialist who, for some inexplicable reason, might decide to read my dissertation. So it's always nice to find an amusing anecdote to spice things up a bit. I have found one, but using it presents some ethical problems.

The anecdote--actually a series of anecdotes--is the doings, mostly correspondence, of a coal dealer in Toronto. This dealer is unusual first because she's a woman. Among the better established coal dealers, women were exceedingly rare, and this woman was quite well-established in the city's coal trade even if she wasn't one of the major overall players. She is unusual, second, because she made her voice heard. A lot. She corresponded frequently with government officials, and the records of the Ontario Fuel Controller, the legislative assembly of Ontario, and the Toronto City Council, have copies of her actual letters and multiple references to other "communications" that I haven't yet been able to find.

So far, so good. But she is also unusual because of what and how she wrote and the things she did. In fact, and I say this with respect, she appears to have suffered from some form of mental illness. There is a record of her complaining to a Toronto governing body that oversaw the regulation of telephone lines about how Nazis were using the phone lines in her office to pump in natural gas and asphixiate her. (This was in the late 1930s.) Many of her letters, at least the ones I have uncovered, are rambling and suggest she perhaps wasn't thinking clearly when she wrote them. It is not so much that she may have lacked education in proper business letter writing etiquette; it's more that what she writes borders on nonsense.

What good would come of using her letters in my dissertation? Well, there is one thing she did in the winter of 1922-1923 that made life very difficult for Ontario's Fuel Controller. The controller had been appointed as an emergency measure to deal with a severe shortage of coal that winter (a huge strike in the United States drastically reduced most of Ontario's coal supply), and the controller had to do all he could to convince the US government not to embargo all coal from the US. Some in the US, especially New York and New England, protested that Ontario already had more coal than it needed, and they were clamoring for just such an embargo. Well, in this context, the coal dealer in question put an inquiry into the Boston market for coal, offering to sell her supply at a very high price, which added grist to these protesters' mill when it came to their claim that Ontario had more than enough coal. (This is all relevant to my dissertation because it shows the ways in which Ontario and Canada tried to manage competition in a period of a coal shortage: the short answer is that in Canada, government officials were more likely to work with the coal dealers while in the US they were more likely to prosecute them for "profiteering" or for "restraint of trade."

Here are the problems with using this coal dealers' letters as a source:

The actual letters are not necessary to discovering the controversy. There is enough evidence from the government documents for me to say "one Toronto-based coal dealer's tender to sell coal in Boston fed the outcry in the US for an embargo on coal to Canada" without mentioning even this coal dealer's name. My footnote would refer to the letter of the Fuel Controller where he complains about this coal dealer.
There is the "middle way" of citing this coal dealer's letter but redacting her name. But if I did this, it would pique the curiosity of the reader, and every instance I include references to her would be one more invitation for the reader to go to the Ontario Archives and find out for herself. [See update #2 below]
Our society has a lot of ways of approaching the issue of mental illness: avoidance, institutionalization, out-patient treatment. One of these ways is humor, often caustic humor, that treats those with mental illnesses as someone to be made fun of, to be "othered." My inclusion of any more information beyond the fact of the coal tender, mentioned above, could only plausibly serve to put her in a bad light, to make fun of her, for her difficulties.
Aside from the controversy over her Boston tender, She was not Charles Guiteau; she did not kill anybody or do anything so horrible that her her mental health is legitimately an issue for a historian to ruminate on [see update #1 below]. All she ever did that was "bad" was violate a few coal ordinances and face prosecution as a "public nuisance." It would be arrogant of me, a non-specialist (to put it mildly) when it comes to diagnosing others' mental health. Even if I were a specialist, it would be further arrogant and irresponsible of me to make such a diagnosis from what amounts to, at most, 20 pages of typewritten documents (and that includes the references to this coal dealer that do not come from her letters). Maybe she had no mental illness, or had only rare episodes.
My including her correspondence still puts her in a bad light personally. I doubt she would want to be remembered, or her family would want to remember her, as a crank who wrote embarrassing letters to government officials.

I should say that this question does not appear to be a legal issue. All the sources from which I have found her letters or other references to her are public, probably on the assumption that the governments of Ontario and Toronto have decided that anyone sending such letters to them had to expect that they would be made available to the public. I will shortly consult some "restricted" documents from Toronto in the 1930s--assuming I can get clearance--and if any of her letters are in those--and if they are not redacted--the issue of whether to use those would, presumably, be of legal import.

Update #1 5-15-11: I suppose there could be legitimate reasons to study this coal dealer in such a way that would have to deal with her eccentric behavior. A biography of her, for instance, could be interesting for a lot of reasons: she was one of only a few women in a male-dominated trade in which membership in male-dominated trade associations was an invaluable form of social capital. Someone doing research, for example, on how eccentricity or "mental illness" was handled in the public sphere might find this coal dealer's situation enlightening: she was brought up on charges of being a "public nuisance" (although I do not know the disposition of the case), but before then and afterward, she continued to show up to city council meetings and write letters, and as far as I know she wasn't ever civilly committed. These exceptions prove my rule: a biography of her, if thoughtfully written in accordance with what is considered the elements of the historian's craft, would be sensitive to all the nuances, problems, challenges, and contradictions of this coal dealer's life. A historian studying the history of how mental health ought to be aware of the ethical issues involved in protecting others' privacy. The topic of my dissertation, however, really doesn't require me to touch on most of what she did, outside of the 1922-1923 stunt and, maybe, an incident that happened during World War I.

Update #2 5-15-11: Even if the reader of my dissertation isn't interested in finding out who this coal dealer is, my inclusion of sufficiently redacted information does not answer one of the other objections to including this evidence: it feeds the notion that mental illness is something to be made fun of or something to be dismissed with eye-rolling glances and quite chuckles.

What did the lady clown say to the airplane pilot?

2011-05-14T19:30:00.001-05:00

"Yes, my name is Shirley, and don't call me 'serious.'"

Why so glum, Joe?

2011-05-14T17:35:00.055-05:00

At creators syndicated, you can find a column written by Cliff Enrico, called "A Rich Guy Speaks Out Against Higher Taxes (part 1 of 2)." In this column, Enrico creates a hypothetical narrator ("Joe") who makes exactly "$250,000 per year before taxes" and works any one of a number of hypothetical jobs:

I [Joe] may work for a large company as a midlevel or senior executive. I may run a successful small retail or service business. I may be a professional — a doctor, lawyer, accountant or architect.

And he, apparently, works hard, sometimes as much as 60 or 80 hours a week. He has little free time and even on Saturday afternoons when he "(or, more likely, my spouse) [might be seen]...trying frantically to get the household chores done that we can't do during the week. But we have no time for small talk — we have to get back to work." He studied hard in college, working at menial jobs and not enjoying the fabled "undergraduate experience" of alcohol, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. "I'm actually," he says, "having a lot less fun than you are." He is either what amounts to an at-will employee, or a professional who has to worry perpetually about malpractice suits, or an independent business owner who lives his business 24/7. His ability to find other work if he is laid off is severely limited, especially if he is a senior managers whose skills structural changes in the economy have made obsolete.

In part 2, which I haven't found or read yet, he'll explain where his income goes. But "Joe" offers the following teaser: the money doesn't go "for luxury yachts, McMansions, sports cars, or fancy parties."

The tragedy (or comedy?) of this column is that Enrico raises an important issue. We (by which I guess I mean "people in general and on the news and politicians) target "the rich" and believe they live a life of luxury whereas many of them lead lives full of stress and worries and uncertainty (and, I suppose, quiet desperation).

The "rich" are not nonhuman drones; they are people just like you and me. In many ways, many of us are also the rich, even if we are far from the $250,000 a year threshold that "Joe" has attained. I have more than what a lot of the poorer people I meet on the street have, for example, and even more than what some of my graduate student friends, with whom I am in other ways (e.g., social class, access to opportunities) similarly situated, have. Yet, I would feel very put upon and resentful if (and when) I be accosted simply for my privilege. I would probably be upset if my tax rate were increased significantly. In fact, there was a recent issue that involved a very dramatic change in the way Graduate Assistants at my university are taxed. When I found my and others' paychecks were reduced by more than 50%, I was quite shocked and resentful. (At the same time, for reasons I won't go into now, I'm not sure the change is the rank injustice that some of my colleagues feel it to be.)

The "$250,000 per year before taxes" is of course a reference to the taxation plan that President Obama campaigned on in 2008 and that Democrats have been threatening to implement. (Curiously, the financial destiny of "Joe" and similarly situated comrades appear to have dodged that bullet until at least 2013.) Obama's plan was to ensure that people who made less than $250,000 would see either a decrease in their taxation or no change. (I'm not sure if the tier that Obama refers to includes original income or adjusted gross income (AGI). If it's AGI, "Joe" will still be off the hook by taking the standard deduction or donating about $50 dollars to a charity to put him into the next lowest tax bracket.)

Part of the appeal of Obama's plan is emotional and is attributable, I think, to the fact that a large majority, even most, even almost all, Americans make less than $250,000 a year and to the notion that such $250,000 a year pluss-ers have it so well off that they ought to share the wealth.

Enrico, through "Joe," points out that whatever the merits of this taxation scheme--and he concedes that "everyone should pay his or her fair share of taxes"--singling out hardworking, hard-worrying people like "Joe" is "not 100 percent fair." In fact, "Joe" is resentful that "now you want to raise my taxes so I can pay for YOUR health insurance or the federal budget deficit I had nothing to do with? Excuse me, but why should I pay for your — ahem — failure to achieve what I have in life?"

Again, I'm on board with the argument that I see as implicit in Enrico's column. I believe we should use utmost humility and caution when we become righteously indignant at how easy the rich supposedly have it. (For a recent example of me waxing indignant and forsaking humility, see my rant about tenured professors in this post.) We should remember how the lines we draw for tax purposes between "rich" and "poor" are drawn much more because a line has to be drawn somewhere than because the placement of the line represents a sharp moral distinction. Finally, we should beware of how facile it can be to say that the problem is members of group A have more money and are much less numerous than members of group B, and the solution to the problem is to take money away from group A. If that is indeed the problem--and I think, to some extent, it might be, although I have seen credible arguments claiming that most of us in America, regardless of our income, are materially better off than we would have been in, say, 1960--it is not the whole of the problem and such "solutions" are never so simple.

What I disagree with is way Enrico fashions his argument. He makes out his "Joe" to be too much the ideal type and more importantly he ignores certain important questions.

"Joe" is a bit too good to be true. He worked a menial job, or took extra classes to graduate early so as to save his parents money. He didn't, as he accuses his unnamed, imagined, and redistributionist-loving interlocutor of doing, engage in the college practices of "getting snoggered at fraternity or sorority parties or chasing each other around the dorms dumping buckets of water on each other while wearing only your underpants (you know who you were)."

"Joe"'s upright fastidiousness is hard to believe. He may have worked a menial job and took extra classes, but does that mean he never took any time off for himself whatsoever, even to watch a re-rerun of MASH on his TV or to take walks to settle his thoughts and enjoy the spring air? Did he never eat a candy bar or pay $5 for a fast food meal in lieu of a healthier meal that he could have made at home for $2? Did he never socialize beyond "networking with alumni, trying to land the entry-level job that would propel me into the upper-middle class"? Sad life, but I suppose it's possible.

But Enrico / "Joe" also neglects ways in which he was probably helped by more than just his pluck and abstemiousness. Did he have student loans? If so, he benefited from easy access to credit and, depending on the loan, credit that might have been subsidized by the government or at least has interest rate caps. If he had some sort of scholarship, even if it was merit based, that was help that might not have been available, and the money had to come from somewhere. If he went to a public university as an in-state student, a good portion of his tuition was subsidized by the state. If he went to a private university, his institution benefited from non-profit status. If his parents helped--which he suggests might have been the case--he benefited from having a family in a position to help him.

My objections here have something of an ad hominem flavor about them. If I am right, even on all these points, that doesn't disprove what Enrico is arguing. It does, however, call into question of who is likely to be convinced by his argument. I knew at least a few dedicated undergrads; in fact, I was one, although not as perfect as, and perhaps had more assistance than, "Joe." The list of people who have worked hard in life and yet still don't make $250,000, or even $30,000 a year is probably very long. Are they, upon hearing of "Joe's" abstemiousness and virtue, likely to agree to stop all calls for raising taxes on people in his income bracket? Are they going to abandon readily the facile assumption that "Joe" has it easy? Probably not, even though the actual facts Enrico sets out, if they are true, ought to lead the reader to that conclusion.

No, I suspect Enrico's target audience is either those who make $250,000+, or those who make, say, $100,000 +. The most likely effect of Enrico's argument, it seems to me, is to assuage the guilt that some in the higher income levels might feel about their own income and their relative privilege.

That is my guess and it's only a guess. And as a guess, it's only important if Enrico's goal is to reach others beyond merely his economic peers.

What bugs me more is the questions Enrico declines to address. What about people who work 60 to 80 hours a week and make, say, minimum wage or even a higher wage than minimum that does not, even with OT, make up the $250,000? Do these people cease to have chores and other things to take up their free time if they have less money? If the tax increases are unfair because they are targeted at the $250,000+ brackets, what would be a fair line? (One of his asides--"Millionaires and billionaires should pay more income tax than average folks because they can afford the 'hit' and still live the lives they've become accustomed to"--suggests that he favors merely ratcheting up the line at which people are considered justifiable targets.)

None of the issues I raise invalidate what appears to be Enrico's point about not demonizing the $250,000 crowd. I'll also acknowledge that doing what it takes to earn $250,000 is probably not worth it, for a lot of people, and that working less and earning less can be its own reward. I acknowledge also that columns have strict limits on the number of words an author can use--Enrico simply doesn't have enough space to go into the nuances of his arguments or the possible objections one might raise. Columns also function more as thought-pieces, meant to provoke discussion or convince people to look at issues in a different light. And in these senses, Enrico column "works."

And yet there was such a lost opportunity. I haven't read his part 2, so I don't know exactly how it will come out, but I regret Enirco's failure to acknowledge that we just might all be in this together. Maybe "Joe," instead of being the abstemious and self-denying business major, is someone with his own faults as well as virtues, someone who has committed his own mistakes and maybe made a certain share of wrong turns. He did a lot of things right, and he worked really hard, maybe even harder than many of his colleagues. But perhaps "Joe" might be human enough to regret the fact that some people find it difficult to make ends meet, even if they "had it coming." Such acknowledgement would not resolve the ever present problem of what the tax rate should be, what the best health insurance reform would be, or a variety of other issues. But it would edge us all close to the realization that, as one of S. E. Hinton's characters said, "things are tough all over."

What's sympathy got to do with it?

2011-04-29T10:12:00.007-05:00

The people I am studying for my dissertation are, mostly, coal dealers, and they are not especially a sympathetic bunch. The key word is "especially." They were not evil or vicious (most of them), but like almost everyone else on this planet, they have not sacrificed their lives for the well-being of others without asking for anything in return.

They enjoyed more privilege than not relative to most of their neighbors and to other workaday Americans and Canadians. (I should point out that I am studying the "established" coal dealers and not the more marginal coal peddlers, whom the established dealers derided as "snowbirds" but who probably provided a service to many a consumer.) Some, of course, like Elias Rogers and his son, Alfred Rogers, in Canada and Francis Peabody in the U.S., enjoyed vast wealth (and even owned their own mines) and undoubtedly own their share of the blame for the sometimes violent labor disputes in the mines they owned and profited from.* Others, like the less famous small coal retailers, were more like the modern day convenience store owners who find themselves competing with grocery store chains and Walmarts, while still others fell somewhere in between.

A recurring theme in what I am studying are the ways in which these coal dealers engage in practices to limit competition and the ways in which the state exercises "competition policy"--with a focus on antitrust (U.S.) or anti-combines (Canada) policy, although I am also looking at licensing regimes and older policies such as laws against "forestalling the market"--to punish them for these attempts or to regulate the way in which they make these attempts. Here are the types of practices most of these coal dealers engage in:

Monopolizing local markets by cornering the market on coal within a very few hands under the command of a single firm. (Here I use "monopolize" to mean "gain control of all or most of the commodity in a given market," and not "to secure an exclusive right from the state to trade in the monopoly.")
Collusion with wholesalers to limit bulk sales only to "legitimate" retailers, legitimate being defined as "membership in local coal associations predicated on abstaining from 'price cutting' and from other 'trade abuses.'"
Setting prices, either outright through price-setting conferences (more common in the 1880s and 1890s), or through some form of what by the 1910s became known as "open prices associations," where information on prices and costs was pooled in some central publication that factors in the industry could then use to determine how to set their costs.
Labor-management agreements that regulated coal prices indirectly by standardizing labor costs. These agreements ranged from industry-wide (or almost industry-wide....West Virginia was a major exception until the 1930s) contracts ("joint agreements") between operators and the United Mine Workers, to local-market specific contracts between coal dealers and the local teamster's union(s). These local contracts usually involved some sort of exclusivity: dealers pledged to use only union labor while the workers pledged to work only for "fair" coal dealers.

The first practice almost never happens. In the soft coal industry, it was almost impossible to attain anything like a monopoly and only in very rare, very exceptional circumstances, and then only in a single (and small) market, could anything like a local monopoly on soft coal exist. In the hard coal industry, "monopolies" (using my looser definition) were a bit more common. Even then, they usually depended on the cooperation of wholesalers and retailers who were not owned/licensed by the anthracite operators; and even then, there were some hard coal operators (the "independents") who were not part of the monopoly. More to the point, hard coal had to compete with soft coal, with fuel oil (after 1900, and especially after World War I), with natural gas, and with hydroelectric power. I should say that attempts to use antitrust policies against these "monopolies" usually failed to meaningfully end them; but such policies were not necessary anyway to this end: these "monopolies" usually fell apart within a year.

For the other two practices, which, as the antitrust laws evolved, became increasingly "per se" violations--actions that by definition were violations of the antitrust laws and not subject to what became known as the "rule of reason" jurisprudence--antitrust laws were used much more aggressively and much more "successfully," if success is measured by conviction rates, having those convictions upheld in higher courts, and preventing at least the most flagrant violations.

The fourth practice--labor agreements--were sometimes subject to antitrust and other actions, and sometimes not, but they were more durable and enjoyed, sometimes, more state support.

(The New Deal is an interesting exception to all these points. The National Industrial Recovery Act not only legalized many cartel agreements, but made them legally enforceable. And even after the Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional (and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England, which had jurisdiction over Canadian laws, declared a similar program, proposed by Prime Minister Robert Bennett, "ultra vires," or beyond the lawmaking powers of the Canadian government), new laws in the U.S., like the first and second Guffey Acts, as well as labor laws, like the Wagner Act and Ontario's Industrial Standards Act, had the effect, sometimes, of tolerating, if not imposing, cartel-like behavior.)

Now, back to my original point. The dealers involved are not especially sympathetic people. The workers--the coal handlers/teamsters who delivered the coal and the miners who extracted it--traditionally evoke more sympathy, probably because their circumstances were presumably more marginal and because their livelihood depended on a boss and on the vicissitudes of a labor market. (Some of this has been challenged. Fishback's Soft Coal, Hard Choices explores some of the options of geographic mobility that at least some workers enjoyed. My point is that traditionally, the workers have evokee more sympathy.)

One of the many criticisms of antitrust laws, at least the criticisms that rely on sympathy for the targets of the laws, focuses on the apparent unfairness of how these laws affect the most marginal peoples. In the case of the coal industry, this would be the miners and the drivers, and their unions' subjection to the laws. One thinks of the incarceration of labor leader Eugene Debs in part under authority of the Sherman Act** and of the Danbury Hatters' Case, in which the Supreme Court held each individual member of the hatters' union individually liable for all the damages caused by the union boycott, held to have been an action "in restraint of interstate commerce." Sometimes, small business owners and farmers are also viewed sympathetically as hapless--and presumably unintended--"victims" of the laws. But outside of the coal trade journals, hardly anyone seems to have had much sympathy for the coal dealers and coal operators, even though some of at least the smaller retail coal dealers were the sorts of proprietary capitalists people sometimes have in mind when they talk about "small business owners."

Now, I'm not trying to uplift the coal dealers from the coal dust bin of history and say yes, they, too, need sympathy. But I am bothered by the apparent arbitrariness of antitrust policy. It's not just that the policy outlaws things not normally considered crimes, at least not if we take a step back and think about them for a while.*** It's that many business transactions people might consider legitimate could be a violation of antitrust policy, and violators are often prosecuted only when they do something that offends people's moral sensibilities.

These "moral sensibilities" are offended usually in one of the following circumstances: when people believe the price of coal is too high; when people believe the supply of coal is inexplicably low; when people believe the employees of the coal operators and coal dealers are getting a raw deal and need to be paid more (but not so much more as to raise prices too much). Added to the "moral sensibility" was the fact that coal was such a necessity, especially in colder climes. It seems to me, albeit only on impressionistic evidence (because I have not studied it systematically), that only eggs, bread, and especially milk--their prices, supply, and quality--evoked more emotion than coal. Newspapers recounted sufferings of especially poorer people during times of coal shortages of high prices, and these accounts, while probably sensationalized, were also probably true.

But here's my question, something I'm trying to wrap my head around: is it "just" to have a law predicated on the notion that someone could be prosecuted at any time for its violation without any showing of intent or mens rea? This question is, of course, a question-begging question (what my college logic teacher might have called a "complex question"). It assumes that my characterization of the law (that it outlaws what people out of necessity are always going to do anyway and therefore is enforced only when people's sensibilities are implicated and an "example" is to be made of someone) is accurate. My also assumes that my characterization is exceptionally accurate [see update below]: all human-made laws, to some degree, have a certain amount of vagueness and arbitrariness to them: if lines are to be drawn, they have to be drawn somewhere; if offenses have to be defined there are always going to be cases that don't clearly fit within the definitions; if laws have to be enforced, limited resources dictate that they will be enforced with at least some degree of selectivity: is the case of antitrust laws just a problem inherent in all human-made laws, or are these laws exceptionally bad, even taking into account the weakness of our fallen nature?

I hope to write, in another post, on the justness of such a law, assuming, of course, that my characterization of it is accurate. In particular, I will want to write, if/when I have the time, on what circumstances would be necessary to prevail in order for such a law to be just.

Update 4-29-11: Ugh! I wrote that the question was partially whether my "characterization" of the law was "exceptionally accurate," when I meant and should've wrote something more like: if the law is as I describe it, to what extent are its faults unique to it, or to laws in general? Of course, if any characterization I make is indeed accurate, such an accuracy would, with my convoluted writing, be indeed exceptional.

*I am not trying to deny the culpability of miners who killed or injured strikebreakers in such depressing debacles as the "Herrin massacre," but I am saying that the mine operators share some non-trivial responsibility for putting people (strikers and strikebreakers) in such desperate circumstances.

**The appeals court upheld Debs's incarceration partly on the ground of violating the Sherman Law. The Supreme Court, in upholding the appeals court decision, declined to opine (nice rhyme, mine and not thine!) on the Sherman Act, preferring to rest its decision on Debs's purported interference with interstate commerce and the federal mails.

*** Price-setting seems pernicious, with a whiff of conspiracy and backroom deals among portly, cigar-smoking, mustachioed men in suits about to down some brandy to celebrate foreclosing on an orphanage. But if one accepts that a business owner may set his or her own prices, then it is at least a bit challenging to decide why, in principle, two or more people may not agree to set the same price. I'm not saying such behavior necessarily ought to be legal, but only that the case for the oughtness of its illegality is not necessarily so clear cut as it might seem at first.

Do I "need" a TV?

2011-04-29T08:47:00.014-05:00

As I've said earlier, I've been reading the letters of C. S. Lewis. Writing around 1953, he explains, in one of his letters, why he chooses not to buy a TV (it causes people to spend so much of their time huddled in front of it, to the exclusion of doing other things, like reading or taking walks), and he wonders at the way in which such items as TV's become seen as "necessities." He mentions a current cost-of-living survey that included the cost of financing a TV as part of one of life's necessities (again, this is c. 1953, when TV's were still in their infancy, and at a time when some more basic articles, like sugar and stationery, were still subject to a post-World War II rationing regime).

I am now in the situation where I "need" a new TV, assuming I need one at all. My current TV, a hand me down from a friend from a couple years ago, now turns off at random moments and needs to, I guess, cool down or something for 5 minutes before I can watch it again. It turns off more frequently when I watch DVD's (apparently the DVD technology is too much for this 1997 television).

But do I "need" a TV? There were times of my life where I was without a TV and although I sometimes missed it, I survived and thrived. In fact, to the extent that I "need" TV to stay informed, I could watch most of my news programs online (the Newshour, Chicago Tonight, Washington Week, Inside Washington, etc., are almost all available for free).

Of course, this is the internet age. Some times in the past when I had no TV were, at least for me, pre-internet. There were still, of course, newspapers, but I didn't read them that much. I remember one day in April, 1993 seeing headlines in a local Fort Collins paper (where I was an undergrad) with a huge complex and a companion picture of Janet Reno claiming "responsibility" for it. It was still only days later that I learned about what had gone on at Waco, even though the stand-off had been going on for weeks.

All that, of course, is prelude to saying that I have access to the internet now and that the added expense of a TV is even less arguably necessary for me (I would know about the next Waco within minutes of it happening; of course, I hope it never happens again). Whether access to the internet is a "necessity" is a trickier issue. I probably get as much of my news from reading blogs as from the news shows I mentioned above. (I also get an undisclosed proportion of my news through yahoo! links and AP releases, although I do not always look at them with an appropriately critical eye.) Also, access to email is, if not a "necessity," something that is very helpful for an aspiring yuppie like myself (how old does one have to be before one is no longer a young urban professional?) Finally, my dissertation-writing process is helped by regular access to the internet: I do a non-trivial amount of my primary source research online (through databases of newspapers that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to access here in Chicago); I also have, through my university's library website, access to a wealth of articles from academic journals (previously, I would have had to spend valuable dollars making copies of articles that I would never read; now I can skip a step in the process and simply download those same articles as pdf files before I don't read them).

The short answer (now that I've given the long answer) is that I really don't "need" a TV.

On taking a position

2011-04-28T12:22:00.004-05:00

Somewhere in my blog-reading career--I think it was on a thread at the Volokh Conspiracy or at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, although I don't remember exactly--one commenter wrote that atheism and theism were not "arguments," but positions that one takes. I think I agree, and I would add (heck, I will add) that agnosticism can/should be viewed in the same light. What I mean is, that each of these ism's takes a certain position for which it tries to argues or through which it processes evidence. (I am using "it" as a shorthand for those who believe in the athe- / agnostic- / the-ism). Here are the essential positions I see each ism taking:

Atheism: there is no god.
Agnosticism: it is impossible to know if there is a god or the jury's still out on whether there is a god.
Theism: there is a god.

Now, this brief summary of positions leaves unanswered and undefined certain terms and questions: what kind of "god" are we talking about? what does one mean by "know"? who is sitting on the jury?

There are facts and arguments in support of each of these positions, and I tend to believe that these positions are not so hard and fast. Most atheists I have known, even the strident, proselytizing ones, admit that it's logically possible that a god of some sort might exist and that there might come a day where they might be proved wrong. Many theists I have known, although not necessarily the proselytizing ones, admit, on some level, that they might be wrong. Agnostics, perhaps by definition, seem to admit of the possibility of knowing one way or the other.

I am basing the preceding assertion based on what people of "goodwill" who take these positions would say. ("Goodwill" is a hard thing to define, and I'm not even a Kantian! I imagine that by "goodwill" I mean some question-begging definition that identifies "goodwill" as being willing to acknowledge discomfirming evidence.)
tend to believe that knowledgeable and curious people of goodwill who take such positions will acknowledge the discomfirming facts and arguments as well as the ones that tend to confirm the argument.

I'm not sure where I'm going with these thoughts, but I thought I'd put them out there.

Public service really is (at least sometimes) service to the public

2011-04-28T12:21:00.002-05:00

I am a graduate research assistant at the university where I am a graduate student (there's a redundancy in there somewhere, but I've a cold and don't feel like correcting it or making this already-too-long sentence as pithy as it ought to be). My job involves processing a collection of papers from a local governmental agency and as a result, I run across a lot of papers from the Cook County government. (N.b.: 1) I am not saying I am processing the official papers of the Cook County government papers, just that I run across some such papers in the course of my processing; 2) for those who don't know, Cook County is where Chicago is; so it's a pretty important county.)

Almost nothing that I see is particularly interesting. Indeed, much of it is quite boring: I'm talking land deeds, legal descriptions of property, workaday correspondence about such exciting matters as plats of wells and highway easements. There really isn't anything incriminating, either, despite that county's reputation for corruption. (I don't deny the corruption was there, but I am saying that the evidence for it hasn't made it into the collection I am processing.)

My point is this: much of the work is tedious [see update below], but it's work that someone has to do, and it is work that helps our economy move along. A multitude of things would be much more difficult, or even impossible, if we did not have people, including elected officials, take care of such mundane things.

I write this because I occasionally hear about how public officials really don't perform a public service at all, but simply leech off the public. Their jobs are hard, and not one I would enjoy having. What I mean is, for all the sturm und drang about who's hiring who, who's breaking what election laws, who's caving in to which special interest, there's a lot of hard work that these people are doing and it should at least be recognized.

Of course, there are qualifications: county commissioners and county presidents have lawyers and accountants and deputies at their disposal who are civil servants and who do a lot of the grunt work. I realize that when the county president signs a report on property lines, he or she did not necessarily read or understand it fully. But he or she has to deal with this stuff all day long and is held (rightly) accountable for signing off on it. A lot of government work is dreary and grim.

Of course, also, there are problems. I'm not denying that some very bad things happen. Even without corruption, not all benefit from these practices of government (just ask anyone whose property has been condemned and who didn't receiving anything like a "just compensation," or worse, whose property has been declared a "blight" and received even less). If we factor in the corruption, well....things just get really bad for a lot of people (but pretty good for a few). Finally, even without the corruption or the perverse results and differential benefits of government policy, there's the megalomania of the local politician who wants his or her hands in everything and who wants to advance....to mayor? to governor? to president?

But there is a real service provided.

Update 4-29-11: When I wrote above that "much of the work is tedious," I was referring to the paperwork performed by the county-level government officials and not to the work I was doing. Similarly, when I said that such work was "is work that helps our economy move along," I definitely wasn't referring to my job. I'm grateful for it, but it's not the most pressing need of the ages.

Stupid survey answers

2011-04-24T10:41:00.004-05:00

There's a survey organization for which I fill out online surveys from time to time. (In exchange, I receive "points" that I can accumulate to get a gift card to some local restaurant or retailer.) Most of the questions are based on my choices as a consumer, asking questions like how many lawn mowers or automobiles or power saws I've bought in the last 6 months.

Sometimes the questions are attitudinal (again, mostly related to consumer choices). So, for example, they might give me the name of a fast food place and a statement regarding that chain, like "X restaurant has my best interests at heart" or "X restaurant is the type of place I want to be seen at." The answers are multiple choice and are put on a scale, for example, and sometimes they are expressed in terms of whether I "agree" with the statement:

Strongly agree
Slightly agree
Neither agree nor disagree
Slightly disagree
Strongly disagree

What I dislike about this choice is that "slightly agree" and "slightly disagree" are meant to be the next step to the "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree." However, in everyday conversation, if I say I "slightly agree" with something, I usually mean that I almost don't agree with it at all; and if I say I "slightly disagree" with something, I usually mean that I agree with it almost completely except for, say, one or two qualifications.

What's up with that?

TuhRAHnuh ay

2011-04-12T06:59:00.007-05:00

Not that I've written much in the past couple weeks, but I'm writing now to say I'll be out of town for about a week and a half because I'm going on a research trip to Canada.

I hope that this will be the last major research trip for my dissertation. I've done one trip already to Toronto, and have done 3 trips to Ottawa. Even though the Canadian part of my topic is focused on Toronto, the Ottawa archives have a wealth of Toronto and Ontario newspapers as well as being a warehouse of federal records relevant to my topic. I was tempted to go to Ottawa a fourth time (it's a pleasant town, with enough but not too much hustle and bustle), but there are some municipal and provincial documents that I could find only in Toronto.

Research trips are expensive, but I like them (I guess that's like saying "expensive luxuries are expensive, but I like them"; however, some expensive things, like sushi or cars, I don't like at all, so it doesn't follow that being expensive means ipso facto that it is to be liked). There's something nice about having a reason other than tourism to be where one is traveling, about being able to tell the customs person that I'm coming to their country "for business," even if it's the pathetic "business" of researching a law that most Canadians don't seem to know exist. (I recently talked to a law professor from Canada who didn't realize that her country had an "antitrust policy"....that's in part because in Canada, the relevant laws are called "Combines legislation." Once I said that, she knew exactly what I was talking about.)

Of course, I've been a tourist before, and I'll do touristy things this time around. My girlfriend has graciously agreed to spend her vacation there with me, and it'll be nice to have the company, and we'll probably do some of the touristy things there.

It will be interesting to be in the country now that Canada is about to have a round of parliamentary elections. I know someone who has the same last name as the current prime minister, so it'll be interesting to watch the political ads pro and con about "Mr. Harper."

On reading C. S. Lewis's letters

2011-04-02T09:54:00.007-05:00

I have begun reading a compilation of C. S. Lewis's letters. There are three volumes, and I have started with volume 3, which covers the years 1930 through, I think 1963 or so, because that is the time period that interests me the most: that was when he wrote the Narnia chronicles and when he met Joy Davidman-Gresham, whom he later married. I have only read through the first year or so of the letters (they are ordered chronologically) through March 1951, and here are some observations:

I probably should've started with volume 1.
One very interesting thing is that as late as 1950/1951, the UK economy was still suffering from wartime scarcities, and many commodities were still being rationed, even though the war ended in 1945. (This shouldn't really be a surprise. In my own research on World War I, the US federal government control over the coal industry continued up to the beginning of 1921, more than 2 years after the armistice. Als0, from what I know about the "reconversion" process in the US, it, too, was very fitful and as late as 1948 or so, if I'm not mistaken, either the federal government continued to ration at least some goods, or at least there were wage and price controls in some sectors of the economy.)
Letter writing is a hard and time-consuming art to engage in.
Lewis occasionally reveals personal and moral weakness in ways that one doesn't see in his published writings. I have read most of his published fiction and most of his published Christian apologetics, as well as some of his unpublished work (I have read none of his literary criticism). And in those works, while he never claims moral perfection, one doesn't see specific examples of his personal challenges. In these letters--obviously mediated several times through by the fact that this compilation is edited and that he is speaking to a particular audience and writing in a particular form--he confesses to times, for instance, when he was too tired and stressed to help a student who had just received a poor showing on his examinations.

I hope none of my readers are fortune tellers

2011-03-26T10:24:00.001-05:00

Q. What do you call a seer who is neither too tall or too small?
A. A medium.
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Q. What do you call a group of seers who tell you about current events?
A. News media

Another revised sample amendment to reform the Senate

2011-03-26T10:17:00.003-05:00

This amendment is almost identical to the one I posted here, but I'm taking out the provision for a house of representatives override of the Senate veto of the executive order. I have also changed some of the other wording:

Section 1: All bills shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may concur in any bill passed by the House of Representatives. If the Senate concur, the bill shall be presented to the President for his or her approval or disapproval, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the seventh section of the first article. If the Senate do not concur after one hundred eighty days shall have elapsed, the bill shall be referred again to the House of Representatives. If the House of Representatives shall approve said bill, without amendment, before three hundred sixty five days shall have elapsed from its original passage by that house, the bill shall be presented to the President for his or her approval or disapproval, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the seventh section of the first article. But nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution shall be so construed as to permit the Senate to propose amendments to any bill.

Section 2: The Senate shall have power to remove any officer of the United States, appointed by the President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such removal, provided that nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution be so construed as to deny the term of service during Good Behavior of Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, and provided also that nothing in this article or in any article, of the Constitution be so construed as to deny the power of impeachment to the House of Representatives or to deny the power to try all impeachments to the Senate, according to the rules prescribed for impeachments and trying all impeachments.

Section 3: The Senate shall have power to nullify any executive order or any order issued by the President when engaged in his or her official duties as President, or any order of any officer of the United States, appointed by the President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such nullification, provided, however, that nothing in this article shall be so construed as to permit the Senate to nullify the decision of any Judge, of the supreme court or any inferior courts, when done in the exercise of his or her office; and provided, further, that the failure by the President to obey the Senate's order for nullification by voiding the order or by offering a replacement for said order that be substantively different from the nullified order shall be considered a high crime or misdemeanor against the United States.

Not quite a Badger yet

2011-03-23T18:39:00.009-05:00

Over at Stanley Fish's blog, this week's entry (click here) has a "conversation" between Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels. Fish used to be an English professor and dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Michaels is currently an English professor. Their "conversation," which is actually a series of alternating paragraphs, discusses the recent public employees union debacle in Wisconsin. This "conversation" revolves mostly around the idea of faculty unions and not really the larger question of unions for public school teachers or for other public employees.

During this discussion, Michaels has this to say:

But what amazes us [the pro-union faculty at UIC] is the idea that somehow a faculty can’t be both unionized and, to use the word invoked by [Naomi Schaefer] Riley in her USA Today piece and by our own provost in his communications to the faculty, “elite.” This would come as a shock to the Rutgers philosophy department, which works on a unionized campus and which is nonetheless ranked as one of the two best in the U.S. And it’s even a bit of a shock to the UIC English department, which isn’t as elite as Rutgers philosophy but is (according to the National Research Council) among the top 20 in the country, and which almost unanimously supports unionization. Riley may think that only the “laziest” want unions, but our ranking is based largely on the strength of faculty productivity — it’s the hard-working ones who want the union most.

He goes on about a paragraph later:

Why [unionize]? Because we think that the people who actually do the teaching and the research should have more of a say in how the teaching and the research gets done

What amazes me about the attitude represented both these quotations and in the "conversation" as a whole is the refusal to recognize that tenured faculty at universities--especially at "tier 1 1/2" research universities--used to, in what some (e.g., Stanley Fish) have called the "Golden Age of being a professor" (c. 1950-1980), be a guild-like "union," a gate keeping boys-and-sometimes-girls club. Now they are losing power. Gone (or more accurately, going, and slowly, at least for the ones who already have tenure) are the days when they had to put up with "the bureaucrats who run the university" and whose job it was to make sure that the professors live up to such onerous job requirements as actually showing up for class or reading from lecture notes instead of from textbooks.

The why's and wherefore's are simple: the faculty are losing wealth and, especially, power and prestige. And they want it back, or at least not to lose it so quickly. They want keep their professional prerogatives and get back those prerogatives they have lost. They also would prefer to teach, say, two classes a semester rather than four (after all, that's what they have adjuncts and TA's for).

And now for all the caveats and qualifications: Yes, it probably is better for those who teach a class to have a say in how the classes are run or taught. Yes, professors at tier 1 1/2 research universities do work hard at publishing, which for some reason is valued over teaching even though the universities in question might be overrated in the rankings because of high-profile professors. Yes, most tenured faculty probably really do care about the adjuncts and TA's and some might even volunteer their time (without an increase in pay) to help the adjuncts and TA's in their duties. Yes, some professors sometimes take on extra classes to save their departments money. And yes, the caricature of the professor who doesn't come to a lot of their own classes or who reads from the textbook probably represents only a very small minority of the faculty. And maybe the biggest caveat: just because one has tenure doesn't mean one's life is easy; job security is great, but there are ways to make the money worth less and less (by, for example, doubling the number of classes someone must teach); and what seems like a lot of money to someone in my position would not necessarily be enough for a person who has to support a family.

I don't really know the vision that Fish and Michaels are advocating here. Is it a grand alliance of faculty unions, adjunct unions, staff unions, and graduate employees unions? If so, is there any account taken of the opposing interests involved? Tenured professors have much different interests, and much different kinds of work prerogatives and wealth at stake from the ones that non-tenured faculty and, especially, adjuncts do. A cynic might wonder if the function of faculty unions is to reassert themselves as the true elite, the true masters of their world.

The system is probably dysfunctional and something probably needs to be done, and perhaps unionization (even the unionization of tenured faculty) is one of those needful things. But let's keep in mind that these struggles are questions of power and retaining privileges as much as they are questions of justice, the fate of higher education, and the good of the Republic.

Update 3-23-11: I have edited this post to correct some typos and make a minor addition to the last sentence.

What if Munich had happened differently?

2011-03-19T11:31:00.007-05:00

In history, as with most things, the "what if's" are difficult. We don't really know what would have happened when it did not happen. To a certain extent, any statement of causality is based on a "what if": when we say x caused y, we are saying "what if x never happened....would y not have happened, too?" But historians are admonished not to go too far on that track, lest they be trapped in a series of mutually reinforcing hypotheticals.

That is the difficulty that those who appeal to some variant of the "Munich syndrome" flirt with, and it is also the difficulty I am about to flirt with in this blog post. For those who aren't familiar, here's the story of Munich:

In 1938, Hitler threatened to take over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. This was an area that had a large number of ethnically German inhabitants and was the part of Czechoslovakia that, being mountainous, was militarily most defensible, and Hitler's saw this as one step in his attempt to dominate eastern Europe. The major European powers at the time that could have stopped Hitler--the UK and France--met in a a conference with Hitler, and they foolishly declined to invite the other major European power that might have stopped him, the Soviet Union. The British and French conferees, led by Neville Chamberlain, agreed to let Hitler take over the Sudetenland on the promise that he would take no other territory. Early the next year, Hitler ordered the invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in August, he set his sights on Poland. The Soviet Union, ostracized by the western European powers, made an alliance with Hitler, and thus did not stop--indeed, took its share--when Germany invaded Poland in September.

The lesson that people, in hindsight, are to take from this is that Chamberlain et al. should have stopped aggression when they could and not coddle it to the point where it was unmanageable. The idea was that Hitler might have been stopped much earlier, or at least might have been forced to play his war card when Germany was in a less strategically favorable position.

Here's my take--my "what if"--on what might plausibly have happened if Chamberlain had done all that he in retrospect was supposed to have done (invite the Soviet Union to the conference (and the Czechoslovaks, who had been excluded from the actual conference), stood firm against Hitler's position, and gone to war if he had insisted on invading the Sudetenland). Here are what I see as the most likely scenarios:

Faced with the possibility of a two-, even three-front war (Russia on the East, Czechoslovakia to the southeast, and France and UK to the West), Hitler might have backed down, and war would not have only been diverted, but effectively prevented. Yet at the same time, a brutal dictatorship would be kept in power for x number of years, maybe to fall at the hands of a liberal-democratic revolution, maybe to fall to a succession of aggressive military juntas, maybe to lead to a bigger war in the 1950s or 1960s.
Hitler might have invaded the Sudetenland, making World War II start 1 year earlier than it actually did. In this scenario, the war might have ended more quickly because the Soviet Union would not only have been in the war to prevent the invasion, Hitler's army would have to fight first in Czechoslovakia and not later in Poland. Or, the war might have dragged on and been something like a replay of World War I. Or, of course, some other possibility....

My point here is not merely to replay the "what if" game with all its potential "what if" fallacies and rough guestimates. In truth, other than the World War II books I used to read as an adolescent, I have done no real research in 20th century European diplomacy when it comes to World War II. My point is, rather, to ask how we might have perceived Munich.

If scenario 1 had happened, Munich might have seemed a success but also as part of a balance-of-power politics that kept in power, even as it checked, a brutal dictator who oppressed hundreds of thousands of his own people with his racist regime. If scenario 2 had happened, it might have been seen as the same thing, if the war ended quickly, or it might have seemed like 1914 all over again, leading to a long war of attrition. Of course, other things might have happened as well; we don't know.

My larger point is that if Chamberlain et al. had stood firm and Munich had "worked" like it was supposed to, we would not have known it with the certainty that some of us claim to know it now that it happened differently. I guess I have merely rediscovered the aphorism that "hindsight is 20/20," but it is helpful to know that our mistakes are more apparent than our right decisions.

Won't be fooled again....part II

2011-03-19T10:53:00.002-05:00

In the preceding post (click here to see it), I chastised Mr. Kopel at the Volokh. Conspiracy for what I considered his "rah rah let's go to war and isn't it splendid" attitude in a post he wrote on the U.N.'s resolution that can be interpreted as authorizing almost any military action short of occupation to assist the rebels in Libya.

I should note that Qadaffi has at least made a gesture in response to this UN resolution, claiming to have instituted a cease fire. There is much skepticism about this: he has publicly said he is issuing a cease fire, but as of yesterday evening, it appears that he either really hasn't or that his military hasn't gotten the memo or that, maybe more or maybe less disturbingly, "his" own factions are not obeying him and he doesn't have control over his own army (the latter I have not heard anyone mention, but I find it at least possible).

To the extent that I believed--and I think I did, although I did not say so in that post--that the UN resolution would lead to nothing but bloodshed and a quagmire, I might have been wrong, although events still need to bear out one way or another. And to the extent I believed that early and more expeditious US intervention would have done the same thing, I also might have been wrong, although that proposition, remaining a hypothetical, isn't something I'd bet my apartment lease on.

But this I do not recant: war, even when necessary and the right thing to do, should never be entered into or considered joyously, but with somber deliberation, and not with slogans and chants from the French Revolution.

Won't be fooled again.....

2011-03-17T21:07:00.006-05:00

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Kopel, staunch and valiant defender of freedom, is celebrating the decision by the United Nations to authorize limited intervention in Libya. In an updated to one of his posts (click here to read the post in its entirety), Mr. Kopel says:

Wall Street Journal reports that Egyptian army is shipping arms to the Libyan “rebels.” Which is to say, to the legitimate government of Libya. As the Declaration of Independence affirms, the only legitimate governments are those founded on the consent of the governed. Accordingly, the Gaddafi gang was never a legitimate government, merely a large gang of criminals who controlled a big territory. The French government’s diplomatic recognition of the legitimate Libyan government reflects this fact. @liamstack reports that France says it will be ready within hours to fly over Libya. @lilianwagdy says that Libyans in France are chanting “Zanga Zanga, Dar Dar, We will get you Muamar!” Vive la France! Vive Sarkozy! Vive les droits de l’homme!

Now, I'll admit that Qadaffi probably doesn't have the consent of the governed, or at least a significant portion of the governed, to claim legitimacy, and maybe he never did. Maybe the rebels are part of a grand humanitarian plan a la "droits de l'homme" (an unfortunate allusion....look at how that revolution turned out), but surely we--by which I mean myself and Mr. Kopel, although not necessarily someone with a deeper knowledge of North Africa--don't know that the rebels have the consent of enough of the governed, or that they will not fall apart in factions, or that they will not go on murderous rampages.

Who knows where this will lead. If I've learned anything from studying history, it's that it's almost impossible to learn from history: the guns of August were not Munich was not Vietnam was not Gulf War I was not Gulf War II is not Libya. And who knows, maybe if the American empire should last for another 30 years, people will look back and still say "this was one of its better hours."

For some reason, I keep thinking of a passage from the novel Catch-22 (and I quote almost verbatim):

Colonel Cathcart had courage. He was never afraid to volunteer his men for any assignment.

For what it's worth, I am not a pacifist--I'm not even a "functional pacifist"--but before we start polishing off our dusty copies of the Declaration of Independence and Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, maybe we should realize that war, even if it's for the best and engaged in to prevent even greater evils than may already be happening, comes at the cost of suffering and the cost of being the ones to inflict suffering.

There are none righteous, no, not one. There's only us, and we're all too human.

Random observations....

2011-03-14T17:22:00.005-05:00

Mail that says "IMPORTANT ACCOUNT INFORMATION ENCLOSED" has no importance, other than that it must be shredded as soon as possible to prevent identity theft. Truly important account information--such as a replacement card, a pin number,* or an account statement--is usually discreetly labeled because misuse of such contents represents a more direct liability to the company that sent the envelope.
A "courtesy call" from a telemarketer is not particularly courteous to the one receiving the call.
In Chicago, cars don't slow down at the red octagonal stop-suggestion signs, but they're more likely to slow down to avoid splashing a pedestrian who walks by a flooded gutter. This increased likelihood is in direct proportion to driver's wish not to splash his or her own car and thus not have to clean it again.

*Yes, I know "pin" stands for "personal identification number" so that saying "pin number" is redundant. Deal with it.

Revised sample amendment to reform senate

2011-03-06T14:10:00.009-06:00

Here's my revised sample amendment to reform the senate:

Section 1: All bills shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may concur in any bill passed by the House of Representatives. If the Senate concur, the bill shall be presented to the President for his or her approval or disapproval, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the seventh section of the first article. If the Senate do not concur after one hundred eighty days shall have elapsed, the bill shall be referred again to the House of Representatives. If the House of Representatives shall approve said bill, without amendment, before three hundred sixty five days shall have elapsed, the bill shall be presented to the President for his or her approval or disapproval, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the seventh section of the first article. But nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution shall be so construed as to permit the Senate to propose amendments to any bill.

Section 2: The Senate shall have power to remove any officer of the United States, appointed by the President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such removal, provided that nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution be so construed as to deny the term of service during Good Behavior of Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, and provided also that nothing in this article or in any article, of the Constitution be so construed as to deny the power of impeachment to the House of Representatives or to deny the power to try all impeachments to the Senate.

Section 3: The Senate shall have power to nullify any executive order or any order issued by the President when engaged in his or her official duties as President, or any order of any officer of the United States, appointed by the President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such nullification, provided, however, that nothing in this article shall be so construed as to permit the Senate to nullify the decision of any Judge, of the supreme court or any inferior courts, when done in the exercise of his or her office; and provided, further, that the President may, with the advice and consent of the House of Representatives, reinstate the nullified order for approval by that House within ten days of such nullification, including Sundays; and provided, further, that in the case that the House of Representatives do not consent to the reinstatement of the nullified order, the failure by the President to obey the Senate's order for nullification by voiding the order or by offering a replacement for said order that be substantively different from the nullified order shall be considered a high crime or misdemeanor against the United States.

Sample amendment to reform the U.S. Senate

2011-03-05T10:36:00.003-06:00

Here's the text of my proposed amendment to reform the Senate. The goal is to give the Senate the power to replace its power to veto legislation with the power to provide a suspensory veto and to oversee the executive branch's cabinet level and sub-cabinet level officers and executive orders:

Section 1: All bills shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may concur in any bill passed by the House of Representatives. If the Senate so concur, the bill shall be presented to the President as stipulated in the second clause of the seventh section of the first article of the constitution. If the Senate do not concur, the bill shall be referred to the House of Representative which shall approve or disapprove of the same bill, without amendment, after one hundred eighty days, including Sundays, shall have elapsed, but before three hundred sixty days, including Sundays, shall have elapsed. If the president disapprove of said bill, the bill shall become law only if two thirds House of Representatives repass the bill, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the case of a bill. But nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution shall be so construed as to permit the Senate to propose amendments to any bill.

Section 2: [see update #2 below] The Senate shall have power to remove from any officer of the United States ,appointed by the President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such removal, provided that nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution be so construed as to impeach the tenure of Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts.

Section 3: The Senate shall have power to nullify any executive order or any order issued by the President when engaged in his or her official duties as President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such nullification.

Update 3-5-11: I already notice something I want to change. I should modify the phrasing of section 2. I do not mean to state that the Senate shall not have power to try impeachments when it comes to article III judges (or anybody), but only that if the Senate wants to remove a judge, the judge needs to be removed by the impeachment process described in the Constitution.

Update #2, 3-5-11: Here is how I would re-write section 2:

Section 2: The Senate shall have power to remove any officer of the United States, appointed by the President, if three-fifths of the Senate concur in such removal, provided that nothing in this article or in any article, of the constitution be so construed as to deny the term of service during Good Behavior of Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, and provided also that nothing in this article or in any article, of the Constitution be so construed as to deny the power of impeachment to the House of Representatives or to deny the power to try all impeachments to the Senate.

Lessons from the Great War

2011-02-27T08:35:00.000-06:00

I have finally finished the major draft of my dissertation chapter on World War I. I shall have to revise it extensively (and shorten it.....it's an unwieldy 112 pages), but the hard work of getting the story straight and putting virtual ink to virtual paper is over. The rest is honing my argument, fitting it within historiographical traditions, correcting certain errors of fact and interpretation, supplementing what I have with additional sources, and integrating the chapter in my larger project. But all that is relatively easy.

Now, I can reflect on what I've learned about the First World War. For what it's worth, I don't claim expertise on the war. If anything, the only "expertise" I can claim, involves only anti-monopoly and antitrust agitation against coal dealers in Toronto and Chicago and what the city, state/provincial, and federal governments did about it. The lessons I have taken, however, are both general to the war and specific to my topic:

Woodrow Wilson should not have gotten the country into that war. War is, I believe, sometimes justified, but U.S. entry into that conflict was avoidable and, with some qualifications, did the U.S. no good.
War is a big waste, and war is disruptive.
Government management of the fuel and food supply in what was arguably a command-economy system is wasteful and can last, if at all, only during a short amount of time. Even Canada, which entered the war in August 1914 shortly after Great Britain did, did not really tighten its national control on the economy until after the 1916-1917 winter when it now had to coordinate its war activities with the U.S., which entered in April 1917.
For most intents and purposes, coal merchants in the United States considered the Canadian market for coal as an adjunct to American market. When they talked about using the war to expand into "foreign markets," they meant Latin America and Europe (and sometimes Asia), but not Canada.
Going through my notes on the war and doing research on it, there is a sense of the perpetuity of war, the sense that "this is all there is and nothing else can be imagined." The U.S. was in the war for "only" 20 months (at least the fighting part of it....peace was not formally declared until 1921 or so), but it seemed to drag on. I as a researcher (who has, by the way, never served in the armed forces, let alone in an armed conflict) knew the war would end in November 1918, and still, I had the sense that it would never cease. I'm not referring to the amount of time it took to write the chapter; but the overall sense of weariness I saw from reading the governmental and newspaper sources. The weariness, perhaps not surprisingly, was more evident in my Canadian sources, for that country had been at war for a much longer amount of time.

What would success look like?

2011-02-05T10:54:00.010-06:00

In my most recent posts, I have tried to assess and address the arguments about the constitutionality of the health insurance mandate, and I must admit a couple things. First, although I do not concede that the mandate is unconstitutional, I admit that in my view, the balance of the argument is tilted in favor against its being constitutional. (I must be clear that by "constitutional," I mean consistent with a good faith reading of the constitution, and not necessarily the case law or the ultimate decision the Supreme Court will hand down.) Second, in what might plausibly be described as a "declaration of closed-mindedness," I favor the mandate regardless, at least insofar as I believe that if it is struck down, the rest of the health insurance reform will be struck down as well, even though I am moving toward supporting an alternative to the mandate to avoid the constitutional problems.

I do so largely on the assumption that the reform might "work" and on the rationalization that in this case, the just ends that I envision for the law exceeds the arguably unconstitutional means used to acquire those ends. I do think it would be a bit facile for me to argue that this is a monumental choice between two competing goods and that in this case, it is clearly obvious that the systemic good of adherence to constitutional limitations on governmental power must give way to the speculative good that the health insurance reform will bring about, providing that it succeed. Simply put, it would be offensive if I were to analogize this particular compromise I make on my principles with, say, opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which, while probably constitutional, was deeply immoral by any standard of morality that I would care to adhere to. (As an aside, there is an argument that that act was unconstitutional because although the constitution allowed the federal government to pass a law about remanding slaves, it put so many impositions--"mandates," if you will--on state-level officials to act and because it denied due process to the "fugitive" slaves.) I write this to disclaim that I am raising the stakes to where they will not go.

I am indulging in a political compromise and stand to be called out if in the future similar reasoning is used to support a policy I find objectionable. I do, however, and perhaps this is an attempt to have it both ways, reserve the right to criticize those objectionable policies to the degree in which the spirit of those policies violate the rights and autonomy of others beyond what the health insurance reform will do. In other words, if Congress enacts a law mandating every American to buy a pound of broccoli a week, I willingly submit to be hoisted on my own petard, but if Congress again mandates a peacetime draft, I reserve the right to question its constitutionality.

Still, what do I mean by "success" when it comes to the health insurance reform? To start, I do not think this law is a panacea, and even if it "succeeds" or works well, some people will be negatively affected. Much criticism--and it's a just criticism--is lobbed at President Obama for saying that if you like your health insurance now, you will not have to change it. I offer only in mitigation, and not justification, of Mr. Obama's claim that 1) it is not unheard of for politicians to promise a whole loaf of bread when they know full well they can at best delivery only half a loaf; and 2) the falsity of this particular claim was so painfully obvious that I have a hard time believing any one's mind was swayed, even though at the time I would have preferred he be honest. All this is by way of saying that I will consider the health insurance reform to have been a success if the following positive things happen and the negative things are kept in check:

Premiums would be affordable to all who want insurance. Premiums for the very sick who would otherwise be uninsurable or cut off from benefits would be limited to at most a certain portion of their income.
The insurance companies somehow find a way to rein in some costs and perhaps move away from the "fee for service" model of reimbursement. (I offer this only as a speculative possibility.)
The health insurance exchanges give customers a clear view of what they are purchasing.
The negative effects of the bill would be limited to 1) people paying slightly higher premiums and co-pays, but well within range of what is affordable (I realize that "affordable" is a term of art and even paternalistic....what I deem affordable to me may not be affordable to thee); 2) non-urgent services might require longer waiting periods; 3) compensation for doctors remain commensurate enough with the cost of their education (I say this not so much because I don't think doctors can't take care of themselves, but that one possible perverse incentive of this law would be to create a disincentive for people to enter medical school).

The reform will have been a failure if the following happen (there may be others, but these are the potential downsides that I foresee):

People simply don't get timely coverage for urgent care (I suppose "urgent" is a term of art).
Insurance companies go bankrupt and doctors are unsure of payment.
The employer mandates become too onerous and, maybe worse, difficult enough to understand that job growth will be impeded on a huge scale. (I anticipate a decrease in some job growth, but if it is too large, this will be a bad result.)
The obvious gaming of the system that will go on might become so severe as to overburden the health insurance industry with costs.
The law might entrench the health insurance industry in the government in such a way that any future corrections to the system that will be needed would be impossible to implement.

Again, when I say the health insurance reform is speculative, I do mean that. But I do hope it passes Supreme Court review and I hope that it succeeds.

Toward a limiting test for the health insurance mandate

2011-02-05T09:11:00.029-06:00

One of the chief concerns raised about the mandate in the health insurance reform law is the reductio ad absurdum possibilities about where the mandate might lead. The argument is that any logic used to justify the constitutionality of the mandate can be used to justify just about any action by the federal government, and however one interprets the constitution, one must concede that it creates a federal government with limited powers, otherwise, it's not much of a constitution.

This objection is sincere. And those who offer it raise the possibility that if certain constituencies win over a coalition in the Congress and the presidency, a law might be enacted that would mandate behavior that liberalesque people like me would find morally or otherwisely objectionable simply because the mandate would involve articles of interstate commerce or because the federal taxing power would be almost limitless. Here's a list of some of the possibilities I have seen raised:

The purchase of broccoli or wheat or other foodstuffs
The purchase of guns or other firearms.
The purchase of pornography as a marital aid.
The imposition of corvee style labor cutting stones in a quarry.

I have listed these, and there may be others, in the rough order ranging from what I see as least to most objectionable, even though I find all, on some level, objectionable.

To answer this objection, it does not suffice to state simply that a coalition in favor of such mandates are unlikely ever to form. Nary a one can foretell what may come.

Nor does it suffice to point out that some version of the first two are already in place: Our tax dollars subsidize the production of certain agricultural products (if not broccoli, then at least wheat or corn). Our federal government already reserves the privilege, and at times of national emergency (even when the emergency was a "cold war" when little if no fighting was done by American soldiers) has exercised the privilege, of forcing young men to carry guns and put their very lives in danger. I would see it as a welcome alternative to be forced to purchase, say, a $1,000 firearm (with a means testing provision for subsidizing the purchase by poorer people) for the defense of the homeland in lieu of forcing people to enter the military. One reason it does not suffice to raise this point is that it could very well be used against the health insurance mandate. One may say "see, the government has already arrogated to itself the right to do these things, and the logic behind the health insurance mandate would only make such power grabs easier and more blatant."

What we (by which I mean those of us who would prefer the mandate to be validated if only because we find it incredible that the rest of the new law would or could stand if the mandate is declared unconstitutional) need is some sort of constitutional test that would allow, say, the health insurance mandate and yet not allow the more egregious extremes to which objectors have pointed. Providing a workable test would, to the extent that it is workable and limiting, answer that particular objection, although I concede it does not answer the overall contention of the opponents of the mandate that it is not a "proper" regulation of commerce, which as I understand it is the principal constitutional objection when it comes to commerce clause grounds. (One has only to read the posts at the Volokh conspiracy on the mandate to see what I mean. Those who oppose the mandate--Messers. Somin, Barnett, and Adler--and those who think it is constitutional under existing precedent--Mr. Kerr--argue on what is considered "proper.")

Here is my stab at the key elements that such a test would have to include in order to be limiting:

There should be some assessment of the degree to which the object of regulation affects interstate commerce. I'm already in trouble here. Not only do I not know of any precedent that deals explicitly with "degree" of interstate commerce (the precedents I am aware of involve distinctions either between direct and non-direct effects on such commerce or between "production" and "commerce"--even Wickard v. Fillborn recognizes this latter distinction in theory), simply mandating the purchase of a private product will greatly enhance the degree to which it is involved in interstate commerce. Let's assume, for example, that the purchase of widgets is more or less a local matter, and in order to get one, you have to go to your local widget-smith. If the purchase of widgets is mandated, they will now be sold by a national chain known as "Widgetmart" and therefore make a leap in the portion of the market in widgets that affects interstate commerce. On a more immediate level, most of the items in the reductio ad absurdum are already, to a high degree, commodities in interstate commerce (rocks in a quarry, broccoli, pornography, guns).
To overcome, if only partially, the preceding difficulty, I would impose some sort of test comparable to "intermediate scrutiny." The mandate would have to be more than just rationally related to a legitimate, though not necessarily compelling, legislative end (and I am assuming that federal regulation of the insurance industry is per se legitimate as a legislative end), but not so linked as to be the most narrowly tailored and least intrusive means for accomplishing that end (I don't think the mandate could ever survive strict scrutiny.)
There ought be no provision in the constitution that forbids the action involved.

I am, in a sense, restating the "M'Culloch test" from John Marshall's 1819 decision:

Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional.

Of course, the key point at issue is whether the means, which are admittedly plainly adapted to the end of health insurance reform, are "proper" ("appropriate").

Indeed, after having written the above, I realize that any test I can devise is quite circular and comes out saying "the health insurance industry is unique" in a way that the others are not. Ido think that point 3 would at least avoid the corvee labor because the 13th amendment forbids involuntary servitude (although being compelled to pay a private company for a product is perhaps a form of involuntary servitude as well, and the claim that the IRS is not permitted to use criminal prosecutions to collect the health insurance penalty, if true, does not necessarily allay my fears.)

The best way to address the issue is to legislatively change the mandate and impose some other way of arriving at a similar goal, i.e., providing a way to offset the cost of insuring so many people. (It would be even better to reduce costs all around, something I'm not convinced the reform does in any large-scale or systematic way.) I am coming around to supporting something like an "open enrollment" idea, with exceptions for those who newly find themselves uninsured and with higher premiums that would have to be paid for a limited amount of time by those who wait to buy insurance.

Update 2-5-11: When I referenced the cold war above and said "American soldiers did not fighting," I did not mean that they never did any fighting, only that in addition to Korea, Vietnam, and some smaller conflicts, the U.S. still drafted people when the fighting was not going on.

The mandate and reconciliation

2011-02-03T07:08:00.010-06:00

One of the problems I have with the current challenges to the health insurance reform, and in particular the mandate, is that I am, to a large degree, convinced by the arguments of the challengers. I'm no lawyers by any stretch of the imagination, but I cannot find any precedent for the federal government to compel people to buy something from a private provider solely because these people have not chosen to buy such a product. I am also concerned by some of the reductio ad absurdum arguments that even if the "penalty" is a tax that can be rebated upon purchase of insurance, one still cannot "sortir de l'embrras." As Jason Kuzinicki points out, such logic might one day be conceivably used to justify corvee style labor (although one would hope the 13th amendment might prevent such an imposition).

There are counterarguments to these opponents, and I don't find them wholly non-compelling (neither without all the negatives I mightn't use in this sentence): namely, mandating such a purchase is a "proper" exercise of Congress's power to regulate interstate insurance markets, the latter power even most opponents of the reform do not seem to seriously contest. This counterargument makes enough sense to me that I won't concede the unconstitutionality of the mandate, but I must say that I am more convinced by the opponents' claims.

But what I am more convinced of is that the mandate requirement is so inextricably bound with the bulk of the health insurance reform that if it is unconstitutional, the rest of the bill (or most of it, in particular the pricing provisions and bans against lifetime caps and restrictions based on pre-existing conditions) ought to be as well. In other words, Judge Vinson's opinion, which I have actually read (okay, I "skimmed" it), makes more sense to me than Judge Hudson's opinion, which I haven't read but have read summaries of. Both judges find the mandate unconstitutional, but Mr. Vinson would strike down the entire law and Mr. Hudson would strike down only the mandate.

The problem with all this is that I support the health insurance reform and even the mandate, although I would welcome changes that would do away with the mandate in exchange for another policy (an open-enrollment window with higher premiums for those who fail to enroll during that period seems the most doable politically, but something like a public option, or as I have argued for elsewhere, an interim public option, might work, but maybe not, as I'm no expert). I have a hard time, however, justifying its constitutionality even to myself. I do not follow any particular mode of constitutional interpretation--some amalgam of originalism, textualism, and "living constitution" and the kitchen sink appeals to me and makes more sense than strict adherence to one or the other--but I cannot come up ex nihilo with some theory to justify a mandate and defend it to justify Mr. Kuzinicki's specter of corvee labor.

More than my desire for intellectual consistency and overcoming my own [warning!!!! I'm about to use a buzz word] cognitive dissonance, I should say I am a partisan in favor of the bill. I have taken my position and even very early on acknowledged these constitutional difficulties (and others too, see here, here, and here.)

My only real rationalization--I cannot call it a justification--rests on a factual claim not (yet) in evidence, namely, that the mandate and the broader health insurance reform will achieve its goal of making decent health care affordable to almost everyone: the rationalization is that the mandate, for all its constitutional difficulties and for all the dangers that pushing the limits of the constitution imply, does not scare me. If the federal government really embarks on a corvee labor scheme (as opposed to, say, merely trying to draft striking railway workers into the military as Mr. Truman threatened to do when he was president), we have bigger problems than whether the district courts will uphold such a measure. (As an adhominemish aside, I might imagine some of the very opponents of the health insurance mandate writing in the case of a Truman style draft law that "in order to preserve the dignity of labor and railway workers' liberty of contract, we need to approve drafting the entire nation's labor force to guarantee their right to a steady job." But I should be chary of criticizing anyone for a hypothetical in order to deflect my very real-life support of a policy.)

As another, related rationalization, other nations have some version of a mandate, and the walls haven't come tumbling down. But to paraphrase Christopher Marlowe, "that was in another country, and besides, the insurers are all non-profits."

Why is World War I so difficult?

2011-01-13T21:33:00.004-06:00

I'm in a what seems to be interminable process of writing a chapter on World War I, and specifically coal and competition policy during the war. I started writing this chapter in August 2009, and it's still not done.

For some reason, I just can't get excited about it. All I can really say is that people didn't have enough coal, and they sometimes blamed coal dealers and operators for the shortage, but they also sometimes blamed the government and the fact that the county was at war. That's it. That's all. I mean, the war sort of served as a prologue to what came after, but my chapter on the 1920s will actually begin by looking at the antitrust reforms in Canada and the US that began around 1909 and ended (more or less) in 1914, which is the year the war started. [*****warning*****RETROACTIVE SPOILER ALERT****warning]

On backpacks and getting older

2011-01-08T12:03:00.007-06:00

I love my backpack. It enables me to carry a lot of stuff with me wherever I go and I can keep my hands free while I walk. It's an everyday backpack (not some mammoth hiking lover's thing), and it serves the same function as a purse does for others. I realize that wearing a backpack probably fixes me as the real-life caricature of your beer-loving, slack-jawed thirty-something graduate student who is "still working on my dissertation." (Cf. Bart Simpson's disturbingly apt take on the lifestyle.) But as long as it is professionally feasible and I am physically able, I'll continue to wear it.

The "physically able" part might, someday, be a challenge. A certain professor (probably in his 60s) I know and who I've TA'd for a couple times once commented on all the students who wear backpacks that they're taking their ability to wear backpacks for granted. This professor has back pains that prevent him from carrying anything too heavy, and he couldn't probably sport a backpack if he wanted to.

I'm not there yet. In fact, I have always (knock on wood) been physically healthy for the most part. But I can say that when I (at 37 years old) wear my backpack now, I feel it more than I used to. It doesn't hurt, and it's not too heavy, but I do feel it. I'm more aware of wearing it. As much as I like my backpack, I sometimes have a brief thought of "wouldn't it be nice not to have to put it on?"

By whom the offense cometh

2011-01-08T10:14:00.015-06:00

One common theme of Mr. Zywicki's at the volokh conspiracy is to point out how new financial regulations at the state and federal levels tend to harm the very credit consumers that they are intended to help. The gist of his arguments: while making it more costly to provide certain loans (either through limitations on such impositions as late fees or limitations on interest rates), these regulations prompt lenders to restrict credit to more creditworthy folks or to shift costs onto those who have less. (For an example of the latter, see his linking to an article about the trend away from "free banking." Click here to read it.)

His most recent post (click here to read it) is about an initiative in Montana which effectively outlaws payday loans by drastically lowering the interest rates that lending facilities can charge. Mr. Zywicki says he holds little favor for payday lenders, but putting them out of business effectively denies choices to people rather than helps them.

There's a counter-claim to his claim, namely that the "real" problem is that people are drawn into an ever oppressive system of debt and repayment and that closing down these lenders puts an end to the enticement to this trap. I think this claim is fundamentally an empirical one that could plausibly be tested. I think such a test would show that in at least some cases, the claim proves true.

But none of this really denies Mr. Zywicki's claim. If some are helped by no longer being exposed to the trap of payday lending (and it's unclear to me how many customers of payday lending find themselves in an irresolvable debt-repayment trap and how many have been able to use the services a few times when cash was particularly tight and repay everything before the cycle becomes oppressive), some are, in effect, "harmed" by no longer having the option.

What Mr. Zywicki argues goes against my instinctive sense of what's just. But I think he is right, as much as I am disinclined to want to admit it. He himself notes that he is "no fan of payday lending and auto title lending." I am beginning to think that the morality of payday lending is a distinct issue from whether the state ought to ban it. As Lincoln said, quoting a passage in the Bible, "if it must needs be that offenses come, then woe unto the man by whom the offense cometh." (I myself ought not be pompous in claiming who's to blame for the offenses. One summer, I gave brief but serious consideration to applying for a job at a payday lending post: I had the requisite banking and cash handling and probably had a chance at getting the job.)

I do wonder, however, if there is some other way to prevent or at least curtail significantly predatory lending schemes. I do think one partial solution would be to encourage banks to take on more customers. (I blogged about this a while ago, click here to read it if you're interested.)

Experiments in Entertainment

2011-01-08T09:47:00.007-06:00

I have an idea for a new TV drama that uses as its template the old Law & Order show. I'd call it "Original Order." The show's lead in would include a faceless voice saying:

In the library research system, historians are serviced by two separate but equally important groups, the graduate students who process the collections and the reading room staff who page the materials for patrons. These are their stories.

Danger, Danger, Ad Hominem!

2010-12-29T13:54:00.017-06:00

I dislike ad hominems. I think I have a bias toward believing that there is such a thing as "truth," or that things are objectively knowable. I admit that our own position--defined by our class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.--conditions how we see things, that it may be impossible to escape fully from this conditioned perception, and that language is not merely or simply a reflection of the way things are (the signifiers and signifieds never completely correspond, and there are connotations intermixed galore that befuddle any thing that can be called a "meaning"). But I do think what passes for logic and objectivity is the best we have for discussion beyond merely asserting what amounts to "I'm right; you're wrong" slogans. Criticizing others for their motivations or their (usually only alleged) hypocrisy is a step in the sloganeering direction.

All this is a prelude to saying that I don't like ad hominems, but I am about to indulge in one anyway. Specifically, I am referring to the tone adopted by some critics of the health insurance reform when they argue that it is unconstitutional. Primarily they focus on the mandate, but there are other elements of the reform that might be unconstitutional as well.

The "some critics" I refer to are those at the Volokh Conspiracy--primarily Messrs. Adler, Barnett, and Somin--who have advanced numerous and quite compelling arguments against the law's constitutionality, primarily focusing on the mandate. When I say compelling, I mean their arguments make sense and might be right, whether one is talking about "constitutionality" in the pragmatic sense (will the Supreme Court uphold the law?) or in the meta-sense (does the law conform to an honest and consist reading of the constitution, whatever such a reading may be?). I am not fully convinced by their arguments (for example, the mandate is hard to reconcile with any provision of the constitution, but it seems to me to be more a regulation of commerce than the school-zone-gun-ban struck down in Lopez v. U.S.; and the question, for me, focuses on whether the mandate is a "proper" regulation, not whether it is a regulation per se, which I think is the point that Mr. Kerr makes in his posts on that cite, which are pretty much the only posts there that argue that the mandate is constitutional, at least in the pragmatic sense).

I find it hard to argue against the anti-health insurance reform arguments: I am not a legal scholar; I find it hard to settle on one (or even several loosely compatible) mode(s) of constitutional interpretation; and by any measure, their arguments make a certain amount of sense to me. To take their arguments at face value--and there is really not much other way to take them--they are simply just intellectual arguments about an important issue and are part of the larger debate of ideas that represents the best of what the internet promises to provide.

But (and now, the ad hominem) they seem to take so much joy in the prospect that the law might be struck down. For all I know, at least some of them are personally interested in the ban against pre-existing condition discrimination or against lifetime caps on coverage (two provisions of the law that might very well be struck down, too, if the mandate is declared unconstitutional). But not knowing them, all I can see--or that I allow myself to see--is that they're professors, most of whom have tenure, at prestigious universities where they presumably have (1) good or at least serviceable health insurance and (2) a good enough salary to make up for any deficiencies in their health insurance coverage. Their arguments seem to be an intellectual exercise of the same sort that 17th-century French scholars might engage in when they discuss the tension between amour-devoir and amour-passion. But these Volokh scholars are cited (sometimes) in judicial opinions, and some of them volunteer their energies to write amicus curiae briefs to help overturn the law.

I would not like to make it a requirement for debate on the constitutionality of legislation (because at base, it's irrelevant to the exact constitutional issues at play), but I would greatly appreciate it if these authors wrote with more of a spirit of humility, with a realization that this law, for all its faults (and not all the faults are constitutional, some of the faults may even lead to people having worse health care and for all I know the very people it's designed to help might be negatively affected), is an attempt to provide people with that which they (the authors) already enjoy almost as a matter of course. They might be right that the law is unconstitutional, and it might even be harmful to boot. And maybe it is indeed their solemn duty as "truth-seekers" to do what they can to speed the law to its demise, but sometimes it's just hard to seem them enjoy it so much.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that one measure of whether you are guilty of pride is the degree to which pride among others bothers you. In that sense, I am guilty of the same lack of humility I am accusing those Volokh authors of, and since I am engaging in ad hominems, I might as well acknowledge the log in my own eye even if I do nothing to take it out.

Words I prefer people not use

2010-12-28T12:16:00.045-06:00

I'd like to preface this list with a few clarifications and disclaimers:

I am not claiming a false moral equivalence. For example, "WASP" is on my list, but I am not saying that it "is just as bad as the N-word." It's not; the N-word is much, much worse.
I realize and acknowledge that the words on this list reflect my own class, gender, race, sexuality, etc., and that for the most part they reflect that I am not, in most senses of the term, "marginalized" whereas other words (e.g., the N-word) are most commonly directed at other marginalized people and function as a way to further marginalize others. In most of the senses of the word, I am not marginalized, and I do not claim to be. I am, in fact, quite privileged.
As a corollary to number 2, I realize that most or all of these words are sometimes used by marginalized people as a defense mechanism or as a way to strike back at an oppressor class--a strategy/tactic that Robin D. G. Kelley refers to as "infrapolitics." I personally have doubts about the utility and advisability of such "infrapolitics," but I also acknowledge the issue is much more complicated than "I don't like these words and people shouldn't use them," even though I don't like these words and would prefer that people not use them.
I am not arguing for censorship (other than self-censorship). I am not even arguing that companies or employers ought to enforce rules against using these words, although I would posit in the abstract that in some employment situations it might be wise for management to encourage a degree of mutual respect, and that might entail forbidding the use of such words (even so, I suspect that simply devising an "index of prohibited words" is not, by itself, a wise management tactic). I am not arguing for political correctness; if anything, I am arguing for politic correctness: we all have to live on this earth with other people, and I am letting others know that certain words or terms they may not have thought of might function as a way to impede civility and understanding than as a way to foster it.
I have in the past, and maybe even now, sometimes used the words on this list unironically. I say this for the sake of disclosure, not to defend my use of the words or even to claim that I don't sometimes use these words.
There are other words that deserve to be on the list, but that I am omitting. Some of them are not necessarily widely accepted as offensive or derogatory (e.g., the word "gay" as a pejorative, a word that I have sometimes used myself in that way, even though I ought to know better). Others are so offensive (like the c-word or the n-word), that I would hope that anyone would have them on their list. I am including only the words that affect me personally.
(I don't like the number 6, so I wanted to end with "7")

Here's the list of words:

Breeder: I realize that this word comes as a counterpart to "queer" or the "fag" and as with a lot of words, is descriptively accurate (some people "breed" and some don't). Still, maybe there's a better way to say "straight person" or "person who decides not to have children." Also, this term assumes that all straight people want to "breed," although I have encountered at least one straight person who used it to describe herself.
The d-word: my sexual anatomy doesn't define me to any greater or lesser degree than it defines any one else (with all necessary qualifications about our "phallocentric" society, etc., etc., which, even if true, assume a lot that is contestable.)
(The faux "southern" accented word: e.g., "guvmint," "Jebus," "librul," "terruh"): these words are used to accuse other people (without actually accusing them, so it's hard even to answer the accusation) of being ignorant or uneducated simply because they are religious or challenge certain prevalent assumptions (most of which I share) about the power of the state or the threat that terrorism might pose. These terms also smear a large portion of the U.S. population by implication, drawing on the stereotype that southerners are uneducated and stupid while also assuming that all southerners speak with one voice on matters of state power, religion, and the "war on terror."
Sausage Fest: see "d-word." I encountered this word in grad school, used (mostly but not exclusively) by my lesbian friends [see update below], and its very hard to tell them how offensive I find it.
WASP: Not all "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants" are part of the power elite, and even if they were, it's not right to a priori assume that they are all like some vicious insect that "stings" the weak and powerless.
White boy / white girl: the use of this term, as a term, is probably the most defensible on the list, because it functions as a way to underscore that the racially "unmarked" person--i.e., the white person--does indeed belong to a "race" (socially constructed or otherwise...I won't enter into the Walter Benn Michaels debate now). Still, it would be nice for people (including white people, like me, and especially me, as I tend to think in these categories) to at least think twice before identifying people first, primarily, and only by their race. On a more personal note I can recall from middle school and high school non-white people who used it on me as a bullying word.

Again, I want to stress my qualifications and disclaimers at the front of this post.

UPDATE 12-28-10: The spirit of this post is to argue for restoring civility. By stating, above, that "my lesbian friends" tend to use a certain term, I have just resorted to the sort of labeling that most of the rest of this post decries. Therefore, I offer my apologies. I am leaving my original phrasing above because I believe that once I post something, I should take responsibility for having posted it. I haven't always followed that policy on this blog, but I have been trying to do so of late.

Are markets in any meaningful way "natural"?

2010-12-23T09:16:00.000-06:00

It is a common meme of our culture (and by meme I mean "something that I claim to be 'in the air,' but I abjure any responsibility for proving that people actually say or believe it") is that "markets" and "market mechanisms" are "natural" and that attempts to interfere with them by, say, government regulation, are "artificial" constraints on the natural. It's sort of a zen thing: the natural laws of, say, supply and demand are immutable, and regulations don't change those laws, they just frustrate and channel their operation in what are, in the long term, harmful ways. I simplify, of course: I suspect that I don't really understand the "laws supply and demand" and that at any rate they by themselves do not sufficiently explain what a market is.

What is a market? Wikipedia defines "market" (at least today it does) as " any one of a variety of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby businesses sell their goods, services and labor to people in exchange for money. Goods and services are sold using a legal tender such as fiat money. This activity forms part of the economy. It is an arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to exchange items." I'll work with this definition not necessarily because it is the right one, but because I'm too lazy to come up with my own or to research all the other possible meanings.

Those who speak of the market and "market mechanisms" as natural are, I believe, speaking metaphorically. The most literal construction to put on the difference between "natural" and "artificial" demonstrates that, literally speaking, markets are not natural at all. According to my Google master (which is the ultimate owner of this blogspot account and the Prime Mover behind the search engine I use, praise be its name), lists, among several definitions of artificial:

contrived by art rather than nature; "artificial flowers"; "artificial flavoring"; "an artificial diamond"; "artificial fibers"; "artificial sweeteners"
artificially - not according to nature; not by natural means;
Man-made; of artifice; False, misleading; Unnatural

It is the notion of "(hu)man-made" that I want to emphasize here. (I do not, however, want to emphasize "falsity," as is implied in the last definition I cited.) In the most literal reckoning, markets, because they involve, by Wikipedified definition, people, are "artificial." Without people, there would be no markets. (Probably. I don't know if people make the argument that non-people, say, dogs, cats, paramecia, or venus flytraps engage in behavior that can be properly labeled "market"-oriented behavior. I'll also concede, without knowing or even caring, that there is probably some species of chimpanzee somewhere whose members participate in some "market-like" behavior.)

Rather than claiming that markets are literally natural, the "market naturalizers," I think, are making a different claim. One variant of this claim is that people, left to their own devices, engage in market-like behavior and that a political economy that lessens obstacles to this market-like behavior encourages people, in effect, to do what they are "naturally" inclined to do. Conversely, a political economy that, through regulation, increases the obstacles to this market-like behavior discourages people, in effect, from doing what they are "naturally" inclined to do.

This claim and its converse have a corresponding normative claim that markets are good, first on the the ground that what is "natural" is good, but second on the much more tangible ground that markets lead to greater material and even non-material happiness: market competition leads to more "choice" and more goods and services (material) and allows each to develop his or her comparative advantage (material and non-material inasmuch as pursuing one's true calling is a "comparative advantage" and leads to personal happiness). The first ground is facially compelling but empirically unprovable: it's just assumed, and most people presumably share the assumption. The second ground is subject to quantifiable proof, and even though "happiness" is always tricky to pin down or to quantify, access to the goods one wants and to the ability to pursue what one does best can be easily measured.

One question that comes to mind, for me at least, is who or what enforces fairness in the market? If I cheat somebody on a sales transaction, how can someone get redress? I suppose that one would not patronize my business or services if I were known to be a cheater (and, for the sake of simplicity, I am speaking of a market as a center of distribution of goods and services and not the more hoary (because I don't understand it) notion of "public choice" theory that probably extends market behavior to other types of action....in other words, I'm sticking toward my working definition cited above). Would the person I cheated get their money back? How? It seems that there needs to be some arbiter that will prevent the person I cheated from resorting to challenging me to a duel, or paying protection to a bunch of thugs who will make sure I pay back that which I stole (but then we get into a feudalism thing, and that's usually not very pretty).

The type of example I just mentioned is not really all that damning. The market naturalizers recognize, usually, that there needs be some enforcement mechanism for a market to operate smoothly; they also mention the phenomenon of "market failures," in which goods and services are not really allocated all that well (the tragedy of the commons, and all that). In answer to my assertion that "there needs be some arbiter," a market naturalizer might claim that a distinction ought to be made here between "government" and "governance," and it's a distinction I don't understand fully. But to the extent that I do understand it, it merely begs the question (in the sense of "raises the question" and not in the sense of "assuming that which is to be proven") of what "government" is, or what the "state" is, or what is an "artificial regulation" and what is a "regulation in accord with the natural laws of the market."

I've written a lot here, and I don't have an answer to my own question, at least not an answer that would convince anyone not already predisposed to agree with me. Here's my tentative answer: markets, whether natural or not, are fragile things and need to be propped up by something and the something that props them up is part of what defines the state. Two objections to the preceding sentence: the first clause (about inherent fragility) is merely the confession of a bias that is not particularly provable; the second clause (about defining the state) merely begs the question (in the sense of "assuming that which is to be proven" and not in the sense of "raises the question"). But that is the starting assumption I am working with.

Why bother stating this assumption? I'm certainly not the first at questioning the naturalness of the market, nor is my questioning of it necessarily the most eloquent or even comprehensible. But I think, or at least hope, that looking at markets as fragile entities "demystifies" (a term I hate, because it would make me look like a Marxist who spends all his time whining about commodity fetishisms and the "alienation of labor from the product of labor") the notion that "darn it, markets just need to be free" and any governmental intrusion into the economy is a hindrance of that freedom.

There are, of course, wiser and less wise governmental intrusions into the economy, and some intrusions create perverse incentives that make things worse. The Health Insurance Reform, for example (which I support by the way), will, even if it works like it's supposed to and isn't declared unconstitutional, create certain challenges that can't be escaped from just by governmental fiat: will there be enough doctors to service the newly insured at the lower remunerations that will likely result from government controls on the prices of premiums? how much will the prices of premiums be lowered? how will smaller businesses bear the burden of having to provide insurance? how will people out of work find jobs now that it would be more expensive for even larger businesses to hire new employees? But the notion that the reform merely impinges on something "natural" would not be a good argument by itself to lodge against the reform. Any such argument needs to be supplemented by what would be better, by an assertion of a different kind of structuring of the health insurance and health care markets, and that assertion would either be the status quo (which no one, to my observation, claims to like) or something different, based on, say, tort reform or tax credits or decoupling (through new employment taxes) employment from access to health insurance.

One of the tags for this post is "libertarianism." By so tagging this post, I do not mean to imply that libertarians have no valid points when it comes to regulating or deregulating the economy, and I do not mean to build a man o' straw--I know their critiques of regulation are more sophisticated--but I do notice that they sometimes indulge in the "markets are natural" rhetoric, and it is this indulgence I am objecting to.

Cook County Board proceedings and the end of civilization

2010-11-24T07:38:00.003-06:00

The research I'm doing for my dissertation requires me to read the proceedings of the Cook County Board from around the mid 1880s through 1940. (Actually, I look through the indexes for subjects that I'm interested in....I don't read the proceedings page by page.) One thing I've noticed is unsurprising is that, as the years go on, the volumes get bigger and bigger so that, by the 1920s, they're about twice the size for the same time span (one year).

A lot of obvious things explain this increase in length, which I take to be rough proxy for an increase in the number of things the Cook County government did (as for the types of things, they were: managing the county court system, managing the county public service institutions, like the county hospital, its "psychopathic ward," etc., and providing for poor relief: all these duties required advertising for innumerable (well, I guess they're numerable, but I'm not going to count them) bids, issuing loads and loads of check letters, and receiving all sorts of "communications" from people in the county). One explanation is that the county population had increased at least twofold and probably threefold, so the board had to oversee more and more people. The demands of World War I required, or at least effected, a significant mobilization of the county's services, and the relief demands of the Great Depression required a significant expansion of the county's poor relief.

But I suspect at least some of the growth of the proceedings' content has to do with something inherent in government, that is, the tendency for most institutions to take on more and more duties and concern themselves with more and more things so that they expand, almost inexorably. One (for example, me) gets the impression that these volumes will just succumb under their own weight some day and implode.

I guess I've been working on my dissertation too long.

The myth of the immortal twenty-something

2010-11-22T06:45:00.010-06:00

There is much to be said for the claim that younger people tend to think themselves immortal, but the point ought not be pushed too far. Even though I once was a teenager and a twenty-something (I am now 37), I can't speak with much authority about what other teenagers and twenty-somethnigs think and any recounting of what I used to feel or believe or think when I was younger is inevitably bound with and obfuscated by my current biases.

I remember a philosophy of science class I took as a freshman in college. The professor asserted confidently that we--almost all of us were traditional aged college students--did not really understand our immortality the way he--a forty-somethingish (I guess) professor--did and, by implication, that we did not have as close of an understanding of death as he did. I remember resenting that claim, not because I thought it factually incorrect (even at the punkish and arrogant age of 18 or 19, I realized that an older person might actually know more than I), but because this professor simply assumed that his claim was true. It was true of me, but he had no way of knowing which students in that class, if any, had had parents or close friends died, or who had witnessed one violent or near fatal episode, or who had undergone their own life-threatening situations.

I at 37 have known at least one person much younger than me who had faced the prospect of an early death through childhood cancer, and I suspect (because I've never really talked to him about it) that he had and has a much more acute sense of mortality than I did at his age or than I do now.

I'm reminded of the poem by Billy Collins "On Turning Ten," which ends like this:

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

There is much we don't know about the consciousness of others, and there is even less that we have the right to assert.

How did Robo-Signing happen?

2010-11-21T09:48:00.000-06:00

When I worked as a loan processor for a local bank about couple years ago, there were two kinds of shortcuts I at least once took or played a part in when processing the paper work.

The first had to do notarized documents. Certain documents had to be signed by one, sometimes more than one, bank officer. I would take the documents to the eligible officer(s), have them signed, and then drop them off at the desk of a fellow employee who had the misfortune of being both nice and a notary. (Some of the nice people were not notaries, and some of the notaries were true grouches, so the nice people probably got more than their fair share of documents to notarize.) The notaries would look at the signatures because they recognized the signatures and notarized them, attesting to the fact that they had seen the officer sign the document, even though they really hadn't. I picked up the documents and continued to process them.

The second shortcut I did only once. I was processing a refinance loan for a person who was self-employed. Part of the refinancing process involves calling the applicant's employer. I either didn't know or was willfully ignorant that the "employer" I called was actually the loan applicant. And so I credulously wrote down his assessment of his own income, which is a big no no. The loan officer in charge of reviewing the loan application caught what I had done, and informed me of my mistake (I had only been on the job a few weeks and had no prior experience, so I wasn't punished). He simply told me that in cases where someone was self-employed, we had to use a different process (in this case, call his accountant to verify income) and made me correct my error.

These two types of shortcuts were different. The first was not technically the right thing to do, but was so close to technically the right thing to do that the officers of that bank and the notary(ies) would not face much if any trouble if a regulator had called them on it. Of course, if I, as a loan processor, had forged a bank officer's name on one of the loan documents (because, say, I was in a hurry to go home and couldn't find a qualifying officer), that would have been quite a different story, and by doing so I could have, would have, should have been fired. (This first type of shortcut reminds me of another shortcut taken when I was a bank teller. The tellers were divided into two groups of people, and the members of each group each had a set of keys to the vault unique to that group, so that, if someone wanted to open the vault or one of the protected lockboxes--such as the box that held blank traveler's checks--theoretically two people were needed. This was the concept of "dual control," premised in part on the notion that it's harder for two people to conspire to rob the bank than it is for one person. In practice, however, if a teller from one group needed to access the traveler's checks box, he/she would simply ask a teller from the other group for their keys.)

The second type of shortcut was simply wrong. I don't know precisely if it was a federal regulation, a state regulation, or an internal regulation (probably a combination of all three) that required us to verify income in certain prescribed manners. But simply taking the type of shortcut I had taken was wrong, and I should have known it.

I suspect that certain banks' alleged practice of "robo-signing" may have originated as a shortcut of the first category. "Robo-signing" was the practice of some large banks to process their mortgage and foreclosure paperwork without doing the appropriate verifications of income, etc. And the discovery/disclosure of this practice have prompted calls for moratoria, some voluntary others mandated, on foreclosures in some states. So many documents were being processed (probably) and certain things that had to be signed and verified took on a certain pro forma quality so that these large companies fell into the practice of simply signing off on things that had to be verified. The rules, technically construed, did not allow for this, but I suspect that the companies that engaged in this practice thought either that it was standard industry practice or that it was worth a risk: the increased "efficiency" from robo-signing was worth the risk that a foreclosed person's attorney would not find the error (and, more perniciously but probably never explicitly stated in order to claim plausible deniability, that people facing foreclosure were unlikely to afford the legal representation of their interests that would root out technical violations). The lapse into "robo-signing" was also, I suspect, made easier by the practice of bundling mortgages and selling them to different banks (a process I only dimly understand).

Although I suspect that "robo-signing" began as a shortcut of the first type, it obviously (to me) came to function as a shortcut of the second type, especially as the practice of foreclosures, at least by the banks implicated, is being called into question. (I have heard that a reader must beware when a writer uses the word "obvious" or "obviously," because such usage often signals that the point is not obvious at all. Still, this is my blog, and I'm making the claim.)

For what it's worth, I don't really have a problem with the fact that people facing foreclosure are challenging these allegedly robo-signed mortgages. These people would be on the hook for technically violating their mortgage agreement, and while banks often would prefer to continue accepting mortgage payments rather than resorting to foreclosure (banks probably don't make as much money on foreclosures as they lose by engaging in the process), banks would not hesitate to cite technical violations when resorting to foreclosures is convenient for them. Banks, after all, have lawyers on retainer, and the larger banks have legal divisions that advise them on this stuff, something actual homeowners usually don't have. I also think the "moral hazard" of a moratorium on such mortgages is almost nil: I can't imagine someone irresponsibly taking a mortgage in the future on the off chance that his or her bank will engage in improvident processing and that any subsequent foreclosure proceeding against them would be delayed for about three or six months.

Get out the vote: the shaming strategy

2010-11-06T08:40:00.010-05:00

I reject the popular notion that "if you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain."

For starters, I assume that people who make this statement exempt certain people, to wit:

Children who are not old enough to vote.
Someone who gets in some sort of accident on the way to the polls.
Military commanders who, as a matter of conscience and to remain "apolitical" choose not to vote.

For continuers, I assume that people who make this statement don't mean the following by "complain":

Any complaint that has nothing to do with government.

One radio talk show host I listened to on election day piously clarified to his audience why he believed that people who don't vote have abrogated the "right to complain": if someone complains and didn't do the bare minimum of voting, then he will discount that person's complaint. This talk show host then offered a hypothetical to a caller who said she wouldn't vote this time around: say Pat Quinn be elected governor and he run this state (Illinois) into the ground, and say that this caller complain: he would discount her complaint automatically because she didn't vote.

He needn't have been so hypothetical. As most people who follow politics know, the Illinois governor (re)elected in 2006 disgraced his office by, apparently and among other things, trying to sell Barack Obama's senate seat to the highest bidder. I suppose if someone who had not voted in 2006 made the complaint, this talk show host would have discounted that complaint. So far, so good. But the fact that the one who made the complaint hadn't voted in 2006 has nothing to do with whether Blagojevich tried to sell the senate seat and says nothing about whether his attempt to do so was a bad or illegal thing. The truth or falsity of the governor's actions, and the goodness/badness or legality/illegality of those actions, has nothing to do with whether the one making the complaint voted.

I think the talk show host would probably respond that, well, yes, he would exempt people who are blowing whistles or making fact-based claims, but wouldn't abide complaints about "politicians these days" from people who don't vote. In my observation, however, most of the time that people complain about "politicians these days," with election seasons excepted, they are doing so in the context of a certain policy debate, such as (choose your poison) the Iraq war, Cap and Trade, Health Insurance Reform. And the complaints here are not the general "politicians these days don't care about people like me"; they are "politicians favor and are enacting policy x but they neglect the very legitimate concerns of people like me."

The most charitable construction to put on the "if you don't vote, don't complain" aphorism is that the act of voting is the most minimal forms of political participation and puts the voter among the community of people who are making the basic decisions in a democratic republic such as we live in. It is, in that respect, the "least we can do" is participate in the electoral process and be part of the civil society that puts a check on governmental power and expresses the voices and concerns of "the people."

Fair enough, and this construction has a certain appeal. And that is probably one reason why I usually chose to vote in city and national elections, although I usually do not vote in the primaries. (In Colorado, at least when I lived there, one had to be registered with a party to vote in its primary, I was not. Now in Illinois, one needn't register to vote in the primary, so I have less of an excuse.)

But not voting does not preclude participating in other ways. And the complainer, by complaining, is participating, and usually more vocally, than if all he or she did vote. If one writes a letter to one's congressperson, that is a more direct form of participation (although I suspect a letter from someone who the record shows has voted might carry more weight.....who knows? I don't.)

I'm not saying, as I used to say by implication (click here and here and here for examples), that voting is an entirely worthless exercise. And I think one should vote in the same way that one should [insert logically appropriate, but preferably also witty and folksy, analogy here]. But voting is not the summum bonum of all things good in a person qua member of civil/civic society.

The five more minutes syndrome

2010-11-04T07:45:00.003-05:00

When I was a freshman in college, I took a "world history" class (actually, it was a history of the "20th century world"), and when the professor talked about Winston Churchill's disastrous Gallipoli Campaign--in which the British army, during WWI, tried to take control of the Dardenelles from the Ottoman Empire--I chimed in that I had read something, somewhere, to the effect that later evidence showed that if Churchill had held out for a few more days, the Turks would've surrendered. That professor chided me for what he called the "five more minutes syndrome," the notion that a failed policy will work if only it's given more time.

Well, I don't know if it's a failed project, but I just finished the rough draft of a chapter for my dissertation (it's rough indeed: it has no conclusion and is still 95 pages), and it took at least two weeks longer than I had anticipated. One reason was that I stumbled upon an interesting tidbit in the local papers that cover one of my case studies, and I took a 1 to 2 weed digression in researching the item. It was a true case of serendipity, and actually helped make whatever point it is I'm trying to make in my chapter (I'm not sure what that is.....when it comes to this project, I'm working rather inductively and am trying to draw conclusions as I go). Anyway, I might have spent even more time researching this tangent that turned out not to be a tangent but integral to what I wanted to do.

In my case, the "five more minutes" plea played out.

Ye seconde taste of crowe

2010-10-11T17:44:00.003-05:00

Several months ago, I blogged about my criticisms of the graduate student employees' union I belong to, particularly on the ground that the union was being unwarrantedly confrontational with the university. But, as I noted here, the union got at least a reasonable deal, certainly better than I had expected.

Now, the union has proven very helpful in a payroll issue that is affecting me and at least 15 or 20 other graduate assistants. The issue is not resolved yet, and is much too complicated for me to explain other than to say that what appears to be a new university policy means that I and several other graduate employees will not receive any money for the rest of the semester (three months' worth of paychecks). I will also point out that graduate assistants are a small minority of the union's bargaining unit (most are teaching assistants) and that it was the GA's who were most critical of the union during the contract negotiations that almost led to a strike.

The union has been very responsive to all our concerns and sprang into action the moment this payroll policy became clear.

I still have reservations about the union, but I appreciate all its assistance in this matter.

I hope it got better

2010-10-01T13:08:00.009-05:00

Yesterday, my girlfriend called attention to an internet campaign designed to tell high school students who are questioning their sexual orientation that "it gets better" if only they stick it out. This campaign comes in response to recent suicides by high schoolers who had been bullied for being gay or bi, and is an attempt to give perspective to people who might not see a way out of the bullying they undergo as teenagers.

This campaign reminds me of someone in my high school--I graduated in 1992--who was openly gay and who suffered much abuse. As far as I know, he was the only "out" student, and everyone made jokes about him. On at least one occasion that I know of, he was treated violently. On this occasion, he was apparently practicing for a school play as part of the school's theater group. He was in the auditorium and on stage, and someone hiding up in the upper row of the auditorium shot at him with a BB gun and hit him.

But this post isn't about him or about the one who shot at him. It's about me. I never did one thing to stop the jokes and verbal abuse. I realize now that I didn't even have to be a hero about it. I didn't even do the bare minimum, such as simply telling people that I didn't want to hear any gossip or jokes about anybody

Nor is it a defense that at that time in my life I believed homosexuality to be a sin and to be bad. Not that I believe that such a value system--that marks being gay as evil--can ever be a defense for the way he was treated, but my own value system at the time stipulated that one mustn't hurt another person for an arbitrary reason.

When we had heard that this student had been shot at by a BB gun, it was taken as a humorous thing by me and my friends. We had no role in the attack or in the planning of the attack, but we--and I would wager most people at the school--had a pretty good idea of who did it, and no one to my knowledge ever reported him. It was funny because, after all, the student who had been attacked was so openly gay he was "asking for it." Besides, BB guns are usually not dangerous and this student hadn't been physically harmed outside of a bruise that must have gone away after a few days.

A few weeks (or maybe a few months?) after the BB gun attack, one of the Denver newspapers--I forget if it was the Post or the Rocky Mountain News--published in its lifestyles section (if I recall correctly) on what it's like to be gay in the Denver Public School system, and this student was interviewed. His experiences with the BB gun attack were related. The publication of that story caused me to figuratively roll my eyes about the "liberal media" with their pro-gay agenda, and I probably thought to myself something like "why the hell do they give this f-- a story."

But then my aunt, who at the time was about 70 years old at the time (she actually just passed away a few months ago, at the age of 88), read the story. And she commented to me about how horrible it was that someone at my school had been shot with a BB gun just for being gay. The disgust with which she said it, with its obvious implication that it was inexcusable to bully people like that, filled me inwardly with shame that I, in my own way, had played a role in making this student's life at school at best miserable.

Incidents like that--my aunt showing me by her words and actions that it was wrong to abuse people for being gay--were part of a very slow process that started me thinking about homophobia and about why it was wrong to illtreat people just for being different and about my own complicity in perpetuating such treatment. There were other factors, too, and, again, the process, which I won't describe right now, was a slow one. But I gradually came to the realization that being gay is not bad and that it is wrong to abuse people for that reason or any other arbitrary reason.

But I do wonder sometimes, and again now, in light of the current "it gets better campaign": did it get better for this student? I do hope so. I know he had friends in the high school who stood up for him and offered him support, I hope they were strong enough to see him through to whatever he did after high school.

But again, this blog post isn't about him. I've done a lot of things in my life that I'm not proud of, and my failure to stand up for him, or at least offer him my friendship, is one of them. Now, from the safety of my desktop and my pseudonymous blogspot ID, I can write about the rightness, justice, and necessity of acceptance with almost no fear of negative consequences. If called in the future to take risks for others, I sure hope I would. But I know that in the past I certainly failed to do so.

Of archiving and tragedy

2010-09-13T07:17:00.005-05:00

I've been reading up on archiving for my job, and I have two observations about the relevant literature.

First, no matter how convoluted and unclear a writer I am, archivists, or at least the ones whose works I've read so far, are much, much worse. It's a combination of bureaucratic office-speak (in formal writing, "impact" should not be transitive verb!) and abstruse academic verbiage.

Second, there appears to be an inherent tragedy in what I understand to be (and what the books and articles I'm reading tell me is) the dual mission of archives: to preserve sources in perpetuity and to ensure access. It seems to me that it's almost impossible to do either and that it's impossible to do both.

Sources deteriorate, eventually, in a hundred years or a thousand years or 10,000 years, they will pass away and be forgotten. The sun also rises..... It would be the height--or at least one of the many heights--of hubris to claim that the library in which I currently have my graduate assistantship will survive over the centuries.

Every time a source is used, it is damaged, however imperceptibly. We can do a lot to forestall the damage. We can put documents in protective plastic coating, or we can photocopy "dummy documents" that patrons can consult instead of the originals. But eventually the plastic will wear out or break and have to be replaced, or the dummy document will wear down and another one will have to be made.

I'm not sure how true this is of digital collections, especially because I'm ignorant of how electronic files actually work. But I have trouble believing that the information technology of today will be compatible with that of tomorrow, or that they don't have their own elements of "wear and tear."

My reservations about three libertarianish policy preferences

2010-09-11T11:37:00.035-05:00

There are three policy preferences that, I imagine, libertarians tend to support and that I have reservations about. (So in other words, the contents of this blog post are more or less reflected in its title.) They are free trade, an "open borders" immigration policy, and what I call a "robust liberty of contract regime." Before I go further and define what I mean by these terms and my reservations, I'll add the following caveats: some non-libertarians probably support some or all of these policy preferences; I imagine some libertarians might oppose all, or at least some, of these policy preferences; I call them "libertarian" 1) because I've noticed that posters on libertarian-oriented blogs tend to advocate such policy preferences and 2) because they seem to me to be very consistent with the what I understand to be the fundamental assumptions or preferences of libertarianism (a preference for individual "liberty" as free as possible from state coercion and a preference for "markets" provided that "market failures" be managed or curtailed).

Free trade. I understand this to be the policy that nation states ought to permit its citizens/subjects/denizens to trade with the citizens/subjects/denizens of other nation states with minimal interference. In other words, a "free trade" regime would be one in which tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade are minimized. My understanding for the justification of this policy is that it enables each nation-state to develop its "comparative advantage" (a concept that I understand but dimly) and enables robust, welfare maximizing economic growth globally.
"Open Borders" Immigration Policy. I understand this policy to be a preference for more or less unrestricted immigration, or, put another way, a preference for labor to have the ability to be mobile. The justification offered for this policy preference is, in my understanding, similar to that offered for free trade: the benefits of free trade, which generally allows for the mobility of capital and trade goods, are enhanced with an open borders regime, in which workers can find work where their work will be valued at a price the workers will accept. A collateral reason for an "open borders" policy that I understand to be "libertarian" is that a closed borders, or highly restrictive, immigration policy puts the restricting state in the position of being an intrusive element in people's lives. A restrictive policy regime creates a class of people who are deemed "illegal" by their very presence, and yet their labor is valued enough that they can find work, but under the fear of arrest and eventual deportation (or worse, prison time).*
Robust "Liberty of Contract" regime. The term "liberty of contract," at least to the extent that I am familiar with it, stems at least as far back to the liberalizing reforms by the UK parliament in the 1840s and 1860s (reforms that, not incidentally, also promoted free trade and perhaps (I don't know, actually) welcomed immigration. The "liberty" is the liberty of any one individual to contract his or her labor as they see fit. (My use of the plural pronoun is deliberate, and I swap "he or she" and "they" without apology....but I will point out that "liberty of contract" was often interpreted androcentrically, see Muller v. Oregon, the US Supreme Court case that ruled maximum hours/ minimum wages laws could apply to women because of their special role as society's procreators; in other words, "liberty of contract" did not apply to these workers whereas other workers, like male bakers in New York City, in Lochner v. US, did have this "liberty" and could not have it taken away by maximum hours legislation.) One libertarian objection to the denial of "liberty of contract" is that legislation that sets maximum hours, minimum wages (i.e., working conditions in general) puts an artificial and competition reducing constraint on labor (in other words, doing so makes it harder, among other things, to get a job). A robust liberty of contract regime would, therefore, eschew as much as possible government regulation of workplaces and working conditions (although it might allow for some safety oriented regulations....I don't mean to characterize the pro-robust liberty of contract regime argument as completely heartless even if it might at first glance rub against people's sensibilities). Such a regime would also decouple the state's involvement with union recognition--in the US, the Wagner Act, as amended by the Taft-Hartley Act and subsequent legislation, compels employers to recognize and negotiate in good faith with unions that receive a majority vote of acceptance by the workers; in the US, this compulsory process is supplemented, in some states, by laws that make it legal for a union to negotiate what is called a "union shop" contract, in which membership in the union is a necessary condition for keeping one's job (in practice, this means that workers' paychecks received automatic deductions for union dues). I call this regime "robust" to distinguish it from the present "liberty of contract" regime that I believe, still characterizes the way the United States and, to a lesser degree, the other western democracies look at the individual's relationship to the state and to each other. I say this in spite of the disrepute into which this term has fallen since the New Deal court precedents overturned the more strident announcements of this doctrine and in spite of innovations in labor law and business regulation that have limited it.

Here are my reservations in no particular order:

Free trade and an open borders immigration regime may in the long run produce exactly the desired effects, but it seems to me that 1) the "long run" might be very long indeed and 2) the optimal effects, it seems to me under what I understand to be the theories that promote these policies, come about only when every, or nearly every, nation-state adopts these regimes. For example, if the US adopted a more open-borders oriented regime, such a policy would probably benefit the immigrants would otherwise be "illegal," the employers who need their cheaper labor, and, perhaps, even the national economy assuming a critical mass of labor is necessary, eventually, to create another strong economy. However, if the US adopts an open borders policy and other nation-states do not follow suit, the immediate benefits arguably accrue to the immigrants and their employers. (I say "arguably" because I am ignorant of the economics, of the facts, and haven't really researched any of the specifics), and those in the country legally might suffer displacement and have no easily attainable labor market to migrate to.
To continue the previous example (but to add another bullet-pointed paragraph in order to keep 'em short and readable), a free trade regime works best, I assume, when all or nearly all participate in it. A unilateral declaration of free trade means that goods can come into the country under low tariffs, but they enter other countries' borders presumably under higher, more protectionist tariff. (I'm not sure how many, if any, such declarations there are or have been, to be honest....even the UK's declaration of free trade policies in the 19th century might not necessarily have been so unilateral, especially given that they had reciprocity treaties with Belgium and Germany.) Therefore, such policies seem to work best when everyone adopts them, and there might be dislocation if a given nation-state adopts open borders or free trade unilaterally. (I'm not saying, by the way, that libertarians don't try to account for this nor that there aren't some benefits that accrue to the unilaterally acting nation-state regardless of what other states do. But I'm not as yet convinced that it's best for all, or most, people in the unilaterally acting nation state to adopt one policy without some reciprocity.)
It's probably better for workers to have the option of moving to a different labor market than it is for them to not have the option, especially if capital has the option to move. However, an open borders policy is only a partial solution. Moving is hard, even when there are not state-imposed obstacles in the way. It is well established in the literature on immigration history that most immigration occurs through some sort of "chain migration" phenomenon. In other words, it's not just a question of hordes of people simply choosing to make the journey to America (or anywhere else). It's usually necessary, or at least it makes it easier, to have some sort of connections to the place you're moving to in order to move there. Some of the more strident supporters of open borders immigration emphasize the benefits to workers and almost seem to suggest that it compensates for the problems posed by the mobility of capital. But my point is that if one loses one's job to a free trade regime or to competition from undocumented workers, the option of simply moving is not, by itself, going to remedy the situation. Time might, and so might "retraining," but that's a difficult prospect for someone approaching their twilight years. (In fairness to the libertarian perspective, I know of few libertarians who claim that open borders policies are the be all and end all. They mostly seem to claim that it's a better policy, in general, than a closed borders regime. But I think they--in particular I'm thinking of Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy--overemphasize the benefits and discount the potential costs.)
To my knowledge, we have never really had a regime that has fully followed all three of these policy preferences, and especially haven't had one in the recent past. The US did have something approaching an "open borders" regime in the late 19th century (yet even then, the US had nominal restrictions on immigration from East Asia), but since the 1924 Immigration Act, the policy has been closed. "Free trade" is in some senses a chimera. Even if a nation state reduces tariff barriers, it is unlikely to fully dismantle the multitude of regulations that in practice act as non-tariff barriers to trade. (For example, automobile safety standards in the US will have to be met on any automobile produced outside the US if the producer wants to sell in the country.) "Liberty of contract" has not been fully implemented, even in its supposed heyday of the late 19th century (not only did the US Supreme Court early on uphold some state-level workplace and hours regulations, such as Utah's 8-hour law for miners and smelter workers in Holden v. Utah (1898?), but states have traditionally inserted itself into its subjects' abilities to enter into contracts of most sorts.) None of this is a convincing argument that such libertarian-oriented reforms are bad, but we should be cautious of any unexpected consequences of such policy changes if drastically implemented, or even if they're implemented piecemeal. I do realize that if it is right to do something, it should be done or attempted regardless of the unintended consequences (otherwise, we'd still have separate lunch counters and bathrooms for whites and blacks), but it is necessary to keep in mind that some consequences are almost guaranteed to arise that won't have been expected.
A robust liberty of contract regime would weaken state enforcement of union agreements that limit competition. This alone is not reason to oppose such a regime, because one affect would be to open up jobs to people who are willing to work for less than a union wage (and in some cases, such as the skilled building trades, unions have a lot of say on who can even apply for certain jobs, although that control seems to be breaking down). But worker representation does have a valuable role, especially in lesser-skilled jobs** (although I'd add that unions, at least in Chicago, appear happy to avoid organizing some of the more obvious, to my mind, shops like fast food establishments). This role is to serve as a check against well organized management that often has its own interests. I'm not saying that "the interests of labor and capital are inherently incompatible" because there are points where workers, managers, and owners share similar interests (if the employer goes out of business, the workers have no one to employ them), but the interests aren't always the same. Sometimes, the only effective way of creating this check against management is through legally enforced union contracts, and one of the most effective ways of obtaining these contracts is for the state to compel employers of a certain size to recognize unions. I'm not convinced that this is the only way to have a check against management power, and I think that unions have often fallen into the trap of using the state as a crutch instead of building a strong pro-union culture. I also have a lot of personal animosity to the rah-rah pro-unions at any cost, which sometimes descends into an ugly vilification of anyone that dares question unions. But my personal views aside, I'm not sure that doing away with state enforcement of at least some union prerogatives.
A robust liberty of contract regime, even if in the long run it's the best option we can come up with, will favor those who already have a lot of advantages in society. A lesser skilled worker who does not speak standard English, for example, is at an obvious disadvantage in contracting his or her labor than someone who has the social capital of a strong education or the real capital of a highly desired skilled. Some people have the entrepreneurial spirit and some don't; some people have an aptitude for doing construction work and others will never be as good at it. Sometimes what someone is good at is not valued by the market, and while the market might be the best construct to maximize everyone's potentialities, there will still be winners and losers. (Again, I am expressing reservations about the robust liberty of contract regime and not claiming that my arguments against it are dispositive.)

I realize that this is a long, perhaps convoluted, blog post. I take these libertarian positions seriously and think they offer a potentially useful critique of the type of state action that I, as someone who leans toward liberalism, tend to favor. But I write merely to express some reservations about these policies.

*A restrictive immigration regime need not necessarily focus on the receiving state. Many states of Europe before World War I, such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France, put restrictions on emigration, usually in the form of restricting the right of labor recruiters to entice their subjects to leave. A similar phenomenon was practiced in the Jim Crow era American South, in which individual U.S. states took measures to discourage the emigration of blacks.

**I say "lesser skilled" to indicate that these jobs require few, or fewer, formally acquired skills (either through apprenticeships or formal education). I do not mean to say that these jobs don't require skills. They do require their own skill set and in my view it's an insult to those workers to say otherwise.

Random thoughts on moving

2010-08-29T08:35:00.016-05:00

I try to keep references to my personal life at an arm's length in this blog--both to protect my privacy and the privacy of my friends and loved ones, and also because I don't think people inclined to read this blog are necessarily interested--but I will say that over the past few weeks, my girlfriend and I have moved in together. This post will be random thoughts on moving, but I will say right here how happy I am to be living with her. There were times in my life when I thought I never would experience the opportunity to live with a partner who I love and care for. I am indeed a lucky guy.

Some observations about the moving process:

As a general rule, you'll use all the time you'll allow yourself to prepare for and execute the move. I've allowed myself one month, and that's pretty much what it took (I'm rounding out the last week of that month now). If I had allowed myself only two weeks, I probably would have taken only two weeks. In short, moving is a great way to procrastinate doing other things.
I've noticed that the process of actually finding a place and a landlord through regularized channels (i.e., through an apartment finder instead of through informal grad-school contacts, which is a different process altogether) is easier for a (heterosexual) couple than for a single guy or a gaggle of grad students looking to move-in together. I think it's a combination of the fact that the couple is dual income, but it has more to do, I think, with the fact that a couple seems to suggest, rightly or wrongly, that they are "stable" and won't tear up the place. In places I had to get as a single guy, I had to often overcome the view (perhaps most of this was in my head, but I think some of it was real) that I was somehow suspicious. I had one landlord who inspected our (my and two fellow students') place on a regular basis probably because she just was suspicious of students.
Moving is hard financially, especially if it's pursued through regularized channels that involve credit checks and large security deposits. Fortunately, both my girlfriend and I have excellent credit, so that part of the process was almost worry-free. Our security deposit was very large, the equivalent of one and one-half month's rent. Also, we each ended up paying double rent because the lease to our old places overlapped with the start date of the lease of our new place. (Although this was expensive, it did make the move itself very easy.) We hired movers, and this was the first time either of us had done so. It made moving itself very easy and less stressful (neither of us is comfortable driving, and it was a relieve not to have to be the ones who put the square pegs of the couches into the round holes of the doors that seemed twice as small). But for this convenience, we paid a lot.
Moving brings to light the importance of simplicity: it makes you (or, at least it makes me) realize how much happier one can be with fewer "things," especially when one has what one cannot possibly need or even use. The fewer possessions one has, the relatively easier it is to move. (Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy has made a similar point a while ago, but I have trouble finding the actual post. I think he is right, but he uses this point to make what I see as an argument that is much more problematic than he appears to acknowledge: that the poorer one is, the easier it is to "vote with one's feet.")

"Forum culture" in academic journals

2010-08-08T10:18:00.009-05:00

I don't read academic journals as much as I, a grad student in history, should. Journals are important because they acquaint scholars with the state of the field, often in a more comprehensive way than simply reading monographs. (In the historical profession, monographs are emphasized more than I understand them to be in, say, political science or legal scholarship, where journal articles are even more important than in history for tenure decisions, etc. Of course, I stand to be corrected.)

One characteristic thing about journals is the occasional "forum" issues, where several--usually three--scholars opine about a work--usually a monograph, but possibly a previous journal article--of another author. These forums (fora?) give readers exposure to a variety of viewpoints, and in that respect are quite useful and important.

But they also follow a vexingly predicable format. Consider a forum about the work of author A in which scholars X, Y, and Z participate. Here is the format that is usually, almost always, followed:

X writes a long, often 20+ page, thought piece on author A's work.
Y writes a shorter, about 5 to 10 page, piece.
Z writes an even shorter piece, usually only 2 or 3 pages.
A writes a "response" that usually runs like this: "X, Y, and Z bring up many good points, but in general I'm right and they're wrong, and here's why....."

Just once, I'd like to read a forum where author A says "I enjoyed reading the commentary of X, Y, and Z. Although I think my original work had made many valid points that need consideration, it appears I will have to fundamentally rethink what I wrote before."

Perhaps this does happen occasionally. As I've said, I don't read journals nearly enough. Still, it would be nice to actually see it happen.

"History is best, and historians are better people"

2010-08-07T11:54:00.006-05:00

In my prior post (click here to see it, or scroll down), I stated:

There was a time when I criticized students for what I assumed to be their fixation simply to get a job and make money. I'm not in this blog post talking about those types of criticisms. But I would like to state here that I now believe those criticisms were unwarranted and inappropriate.

Here are my reasons:

One, I didn't know any given student's hidden heart and desires well enough to believe that they were simply looking to be yes-men and yes-women. Sometimes, to paraphrase Robert Frost, it's necessary to be practical-minded in one's youth so as to be artistically minded in one's older age.

Two, even if I had known, it's not clear to me that looking for skills to get a good paying job is a bad thing.

Three, I'm not really so different, even though I chose, from early on, to major in studies--History and French--that, I knew, by themselves were not obviously conducive to job prospects, a fact which was reinforced when I graduated, looked for a new job that wasn't food service related, and found so many requests in the classifieds (this was the mid-90s....people still read the papers then) for accounting majors. I wanted and value--and still want and value--the security that comes with having steady employment. I'm not necessarily all that different from my colleagues in grad school, either. Beginning in my masters program, I encountered that strange breed of person who had devoted themselves to living the life of the mind and who solemnly declared to me that they preferred that to "working for Bill Gates." Yet that didn't seem to stop them for working for the computer industry when there was a demand for their programming and web skills.

Fourth, now that I study business history--although I have always been interested in political history, I used to approach it more from a labor history angle and now I approach it more from a business history angle--I have a greater appreciation for the fields of business study and realize they command their own aptitudes and even have something approaching their own aesthetics that, in theory, I imagine to be comparable to those of the liberal arts and social sciences.

Update 8-7-10: In the paraphrase from Frost, I changed the word "use" to "youth" because I meant "youth" and not "use" and, in a more metaphysical sense, because I didn't proofread.

"You'll need to know this when you get a job"

2010-08-07T11:05:00.030-05:00

In my career as an instructor and as a TA in history (usually American history), I grew increasingly usually reluctant to lecture students the virtues of studying history. In particular, I was always hesitant, and became even more so, to claim that the skills undergraduate history courses help teach were transferable to jobs.*

There were/are two main reasons for this. First, I have never been in a position to hire anyone, and I don't have firsthand knowledge of what employers look for. I know people who are or have been in hiring positions, and at least a few of them do state that such things like being able to write well, think clearly and logically, and know how to process a lot of information from various sources (skills which history courses, at their best, help inculcate or strengthen). But I have never been in a position myself to know how true this is. I suppose, without knowing, that the hiring process itself does not make it clear who has such skills beyond the normal things one looks at in an application, a resume, or an interview.

Second, every job I have had outside of academia--and I have had quite a few, although not as much, probably, as most people--has been in some degree entry level in that it did not nominally require any more than a high school diploma. One can be "only" a high school graduate and do well at these jobs, which is not to say that they are "unskilled." In fact, one of the things I noticed at my very first job--at a fast food restaurant--was how skilled one had to be in order to do what a lot of my high school and middle school teachers had derided as merely "flipping burgers." Just because those skills were not formally acquired in a university (or, for that matter, in an apprenticeship program for trades like plumbing or electrical work) does not mean that they do not have a value in themselves. I have a hard time telling my students, with a straight face, that when they graduate, they will "need to have these skills" when usually they did not apply in the type of jobs I used to have.

The reasons my experiences are varied, I admit, probably have at least as much to do with my own priorities as they do with whether the skills one learns as liberal arts major are marketable outside of academia. Simply put, I'm really not that ambitious, or at least haven't been in the past when it's come to looking for jobs. In my more idle moments, I like the idea of being an important person who works for the government, for an important firm, or for an ~~enterprise that is profitable to those who work there but that officially disavows a profit motive for tax purposes~~ nonprofit. But in practice, I have been, rightly or wrongly, content with more modest jobs. But who knows? Maybe I'll be ambitious some day.

I don't write any of this to say that the skills that history courses supposedly impart or help develop are not worth anything. Nor do I say, right here and now, that the value of learning history for the sake of learning history is not all it is cracked up to be by historians and even non-historians (even though I tend to believe that). But I think we should be more modest before we, especially those like me who have never been in a supervisory position, give our students another unhelpful lecture they won't pay attention to anyway about how they need to write this week's paper so they can get a job.

* There was a time when I criticized students for what I assumed to be their fixation simply to get a job and make money. I'm not in this blog post talking about those types of criticisms. But I would like to state here that I now believe those criticisms were unwarranted and inappropriate. I'll explain why I think so in another post.

Nom de plume, nom de moi: me revoici!

2010-07-26T20:28:00.002-05:00

This post is just to announce I have changed my display name, which used to be "theolderepublicke" to my current pseudonym, "Pierre Corneille."

Follow up on "Where is the state?"

2010-07-21T07:08:00.004-05:00

In previous post (click here to see, or simply scroll down), I suggested, to the extent that I wrote anything coherent at all, that the existence of voluntary organizations that exercise coercion in a matter that is more or less "legitimate" and with only limited connection to the state, pose a challenge to libertarianism. I should elaborate on what I meant.

First, I realize that non-state actors can be coercive and violent and the fact that there are such non-state actors does not make the state any less dangerous, although it might provide one argument for why we need a state, a point which I suspect libertarians recognize.

Second, I do not wish to deny the extent to which the state is implicated in coercive actions by putatively voluntary associations. The various manifestations of the Ku Klux Klan are an obvious example of violence being carried out supposedly independently of the state but existing largely because the state suffers them to exist. (And in some cases, I suspect, local state actors--members of the local police or sheriff's department, for instance--might have participated, further blurring the distinction between state and non-state actors.) The example I cited in my post below was less extreme, and the decision of the Canadian federal government to go after the coal "combine" through an intimidating hearing and, later, through a federal antitrust law suggests that the Canadian state did not, at least not officially, tolerate such an action.

Third, I think my conceptual difficulty with libertarianism is that I am not clear what libertarians are against. I know they are for "liberty," but it is unclear to me that they necessarily oppose non-state impediments to liberty, or at least they don't do so as libertarians. This is not a knock against libertarians, just a qualm I have with libertarianism, as I understand it. And of course, some libertarians, such as David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy, even support some positive action by government to redress certain infringements on liberty by non-state actors. I have in mind his essay on a libertarian approach to anti-discrimination laws. Click here to read it. Particularly, I'm interested in the following assertion:

Consistent with longstanding classical liberal suspicion of monopolies, many libertarians would allow the government to ban discrimination by such entities.

In the context of anti-discrimination laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this suggests moderate libertarian support for such laws. (I should note that Bernstein does not claim that his is the only libertarian-oriented position on the subject. See his post on the Volokh Conspriacy here for links to different takes on the same issue.)

Fourth and finally, I think my principal conceptual qualm with libertarianism, as I understand it, is that any action in which a "public" is affected is almost necessarily regulated somehow. (By "public" I mean what John Dewey meant in The Public and Its Problems: a person or group of people affected by the actions of others.) Any "free market" and any social interaction has a set of rules and deviations from those rules have consequences. The substance and contours of these rules may be defined by the state, or by convention, or by some supposedly non-state or quasi-state entity like a "board of trade." There are better rules and worse rules, and I suppose an argument is to be made that a state, arrogating to itself all the "legitimate coercion" under its jurisdiction (although in the final analysis, I'm not sure states actually do this, or that they don't do this without facing constant contestation if there is a strong civil society), might not always or necessarily be the best instrument for setting up these rules.

Again, I fear my post on the matter has become a bit incoherent. My "clarifications" just raise new questions about what I really mean here. (I'm sure glad I post these things pseudonymously!)

Where is the state?

2010-07-18T08:43:00.025-05:00

One of the conceptual difficulties that I have with libertarianism is that, as I understand it, it prescribes minimally invasive government interference with society or the economy and prefers, instead of such interference, a maximum of individual liberty consistent with the respect due to other's rights. My "conceptual difficulty" arises, in part, because I have a hard time distinguishing what is the state in contradistinction of other entities. It seems to me that without a "state," or entities might come into being or continue in existence, and these can be oppressive in a manner similar to the state.

For example, one of the items I am studying for my dissertation was a short-lived organization that was called the "Coal Trade Branch of the Toronto Board of Trade," or "coal section" for short, which lasted from about 1886 to 1889 or 1890. This was an organization of Toronto coal dealers that became, not surprisingly, given its name, an affiliate of that city's board of trade.

The goal of the coal section was, basically, to keep retail coal prices in the city at what its members considered a "fair" or "reasonable" rate (translation: they wanted to limit competition among themselves). If a retailer cut prices without permission, the coal section would fine him (to my knowledge, they were all male), and if he did not pay the fine, he would be declared in "default." Being in default meant that the retailer could not get coal from the wholesaler or from shippers in the US. (It's a complicated story, but the American coal operators and distributors were in on the deal; and it's important also to note that Ontario at the time--and for several decades thereafter--depended on the US for almost all of its coal.)

I'm studying the coal section because of its antitrust implications. It was one of the reasons that Canada enacted the first ever (that I know of) national-level antitrust law in 1889. (There were several state-level antitrust laws in the US before 1889; and some laws that might be construed as proto-antitrust--such as laws against forestalling--had been a staple of Anglo law since at least the 1600s, and other legal systems, such as the Napoleonic Code, had laws against "coalitions" that resembled antitrust laws. I should also point out that I'm using the word "antitrust" somewhat loosely.)

But this organization highlights what I take to be the conceptual difficulty I have with libertarianism. The coal section was in some ways a "voluntary association" and in other ways was a creature of the state. But its statelike actions--what I take to be its claim to "legitimate coercion"--were not seriously implicated in the state as people seem to understand "the state" (i.e., the coercive components of the section were not seriously implicated with Toronto, Ontario, Canadian, British, American, New York, or Buffalo "state" action).

It was a creature of the state, or at least implicated in state action, in a few ways. As a branch of the Toronto Board of Trade, it was part of a corporate entity that had its charter from (if I recall correctly) the Dominion (federal) government of Canada. Membership in the coal section required signing an official affidavit asserting that the affiant had read and understood and agreed to abide by the rules of the coal section (as I understand it, these affidavits were "legal" documents somewhat akin to what we might understand as a notarized document, and by virtue of being legally recognized, they were implicated in the state; however, it appears that the Board of Trade never signed off on the affidavit requirement of the coal section, so any legal import the affidavits may have had might be therefore nullified.) Finally, anthracite coal, until about 1887 or so, was imported to Canada under a duty, and so was "protected" in a way (but in another, more accurate, way, it wasn't "protected" because Canada had no significant anthracite deposits, and Canada's bituminous coal--at that time limited to Nova Scotia--was an poor competitor to US-based anthracite, both because anthracite and bituminous could not always be used for the same purposes, and because it was cost-prohibitive to ship bituminous coal much farther west than Montreal, the chief markets for such coal being the New England states of the US.)

The coal section was a voluntary association because its functioning rested upon the willing cooperation of several factors of the coal industry, from the anthracite operators in Pennsylvania (almost all the coal in question was anthracite), to the owners of the railroads with access to the anthracite mines (often the same as the operators), to the coal merchants in New York (particularly Buffalo) to the coal importers in Toronto, to the "small dealers" who bought from the importers. Its voluntariness is further highlighted by the fact that the coal section, while coercive, seems to have been an inefficient and not entirely effective way of coercing recalcitrant dealers who undersold the official prices: the minutes of the section disclose numerous repeat violators and deals the section made to accept previous defaultors back into the fold. Still, there is some evidence that some businesses were indeed severely hurt by the actions of the coal section.

A working definition of the state I am familiar with, even though I'm sure it has been theorized and "complicated" by further debate and analysis, is that the state is an entity that has "a monopoly of legitimate coercion."* I suppose it is not inconsistent with this definition that coercive entities might exist in a state's jurisdiction, and either that such entities are not "legitimate" in that they are not explicitly approved by the state, or that their existence is suffered by the state or enabled by the state and therefore does not challenge the state's claim to a "monopoly" of its coercive power.

The coal section was, however ineffectively, an organization that engaged in coercion. It, of course, did not pretend to exercise a "monopoly" of such coercion, although its minutes suggest that it believed it controlled a certain market, the Toronto market, defined as the city limits of Toronto and five miles outside those city limits. It would not have willingly suffered a rival organization of coal dealers, although there might not have been much it could have done if such an organization had an "in" with American-based shippers of coal. Much of its coercive power came of its own, and, I argue, not from the "state" as understood by the definition I cited above.

I'll admit that the history of Anglo law on trade restraints, in my limited understanding, might be read as affirming that the coal section offered at the sufferance of the Canadian state. Canada's enactment of an antitrust law (called an "Anti-Combines Law")--partially in response to the machinations of the coal section--might be read as a parable on the state asserting its monopoly on legitimate coercion by making such "combines" as the coal section illegal (as a practical matter, the law was so hard to enforce and even interpret, that it was not clear that such entities as the coal section were made illegal by the law). There were also prior common-law doctrines against unreasonable "restraints of trade," which might be interpreted as the state's claim to a monopoly on legitimate coercion. (The liberalizing laws in England in the 1840s and 1850s essentially repealed the more restrictive barriers to "restraints of trade," and one might argue that this was a voluntary cession by the government of its monopoly on coercion.....and such an argument would support the claim that the English state continued its claim on a monopoly of legitimate coercion. I'm unclear about how much this carried over to Canadian jurisprudence.)

Still, there's a circularity to the definition I cited above. If it's coercive, it's either legitimate or not legitimate. How do we know if it's legitimate? If the state approves it or suffers it to exist, it's legitimate; if the state does not, then it's not legitimate. I suspect this alleged circularity stems in part from the way I have defined the state; in other words, I fear I may be concocting a straw man.

My overall point is not that the coal section was wholly good or bad, but that it exercised coercion to some degree independent of the state. It's not clear to me what a proper solution was.

If you've read this far, thanks! I realize these are essentially random musings.

*I understand that Max Weber came up with this maxim, or something like it, although I have never read Weber. I got this particular phrasing from Gordon Graham's Against the Democratic State. I forget who he credited for this phrasing.

Multi-year contracts for faculty?

2010-07-18T08:27:00.008-05:00

In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education (click here to read it), Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus offer several things colleges and universities can do to improve the bang for the buck for students and to reduce costs. Some of them are nice, but hard to imagine how they'd be implemented. Others seem at least worth a thought.

One is to do away with tenure and instead sign on faculty with multi-year contracts. They don't go into much detail into how this would work. But I imagine there are some merits and demerits of the plan, some of which depend on how they are implemented. Merits:

It would open up opportunities on the academic job market and end the lifetime entrenchment of faculty.
It would both increase accountability of faculty members while at the same time reducing the pressure on non-tenured junior faculty.
Contracts, depending on how they are drafted and how they are offered, might open a way for people who are today adjuncts to sign on for a little stability.

Demerits:

It would potentially open the door to invidious discrimination against, say, older professors and against professors who have a lot of family obligations--people who may not be able to take on the tasks that younger people with fewer ties can take on. I would say, however, that the current system, at least at research oriented universities, already have such a bias against newly minted people on the job market who are older or who have a lot of family responsibilities. The pressure on junior faculty to publish and to serve on committees is, I hear, intense and carries with it no necessary guarantee of tenure.
It could make such items as student evaluations inordinately determinative in who gets a contract, or at least a second contract. I'm not against the idea of student evaluations per se, but they can be misused.

These are only a few thoughts. I'm still thinking about the issue, and there's a lot I still don't know about academic hiring or the idea of multi-year contracts.

Sometimes owning a car means you gotta make right turns

2010-07-13T07:51:00.006-05:00

I live in Chicago where the car/bicycle/pedestrian culture is one that approximates Lord of the Flies or some sort of social Darwinian struggle for primacy as people try to survive in one piece as they go to wherever it is they go. Because I own neither a car nor a bike, I'm in the pedestrian camp, but I have some empathy--although perhaps not sympathy--for the situation facing bike drivers and car drivers. I realize they, individually, are each trying to make their way within an aggressive street culture that pauses usually only when someone is seriously hurt. It's a be-aggressive-or-be-injured sort of world.

Still, there are a few basic things cars (and bicycles too....I'm an equal opportunity complainer, except when it comes to pedestrians), can do. One of them is to not insist on making left turns when it is so inconvenient to every other transportationist in view. One advantage of owning a car is that you can go long distances in relatively short time. (To me that, along with the ability to take others with you, are the only real advantages.) Cars can usually afford to drive a little circuitously by making a few right turns instead of insisting on making a bee-line for the lane they want as they turn from the Dunkin Donuts onto Ashland Avenue (at Grand) at 8:10 in the morning without looking to see which pedestrian they're almost running over.

Update 7-15-10: I made a correction above. I had originally written "I have some sympathy--although perhaps not sympathy...." I had meant to say "I have some empathy--although perhaps not sympathy." On behalf of Google and the rest of the blogging community, I offer my sincerest apologies.

The great crusade

2010-07-13T07:20:00.004-05:00

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy has devoted several recent posts (see them here, here, and here), in which he takes on an essay that historian Michael Bellesiles has written for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bellesiles, it will be recalled, was widely, and apparently accurately, criticized for (ahem) bending the truth or simply fabricating data in his book Arming America, which argued that the notion of a gun culture in the U.S. was a fairly recent invention. Lindgren, apparently, was the person who led the charge in calling out Bellesiles.

The essay Lindgren is now critiquing is some thought piece on Bellesiles's experiences with a student who, he says, had a brother injured in Iraq. The point of the essay is more or less that war is bad and that the US uses the patriotism of the least advantaged to fill its military ranks. Mr. Lindgren has noted several inconsistencies in Bellesiles's account and has tried to demonstrate that the student's brother Bellesiles has written about could not have had the experiences Bellesiles recounted in the essay. Mr. Lindgren, apparently, has researched the number of injuries and deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past year or so and found none that corresponds to what Bellesiles wrote.

I have very mixed feelings about this project. On the one hand, I haven't much sympathy for Bellesiles. His past performance probably rightly subjects him to higher scrutiny. And the decision to publish anything carries the implicit "risk" that one's facts will be checked. In that sense, what Mr. Lindgren is doing is entirely appropriate.

On the other hand, Mr. Lindgren seems to take an inordinate amount of glee in tailing Bellesiles. (I'm also not fully convinced that Lindgren has uncovered much of a damaging case because his refutations seem, to me, to be explainable, or at least potentially explainable and not in themselves particularly damning. Still, if Bellesiles's account is good, it should be able to withstand scrutiny. As my adviser once said, the "lying" strategy doesn't work.) It seems unbecoming, almost as if Mr. Lindgren has appointed himself the conscience of Bellesiles.

Still, motivations shouldn't matter. If Bellesiles's account is wrong, it is wrong regardless of whether Mr. Lindgren is a nice person. (While I'm making moral judgments, I should add that I have never met him personally, that he once courteously responded to a blog post I wrote about him, and that while he posts under his own name, I write my posts anonymously). And what better person to rely on to check another's facts than someone who has an interest in discrediting that person's facts? People who already agree with Bellesiles are likely not to devote sufficient time in calling him out. (I do, however, personally know one scholar who, early on, wrote about inconsistencies between Bellesiles's Arming America and what she knew of some of his source base. I don't know her views on gun control, but I suspect that whatever her views are, she doesn't have a lot of respect for the "oh-my-gawd-they're-gonna-take-my-guns" lobby.)

Getting your job back

2010-07-13T07:08:00.002-05:00

In "The Killing Floor"--a docudrama style film that discusses the experiences of blacks who moved to Chicago to work during World War I--the main character, Frank Custer, gets laid off for union organizing at his job at the packinghouses, but is reinstated because the wartime labor agreement forbade such firings. When he goes back to work, he says (I think the quotation is more less accurate), "One thing rich folks don't know is the joy of getting your job back."

I was laid off in September 2008 from my part time job as a loan processor due to the credit crisis. In January or February of 2009, they called me back to offer me another part-time job. I remember how nice it was to walk back into that bank and see the people I had used to work with. Although the job itself could be really dreary, the work environment quite jovial and we had all gotten along very well, so much that it was almost fun to be there. I just remember that first day, seeing people who I thought I'd never see again once I had been laid off.

I eventually "laid off" my employer, however, because I got a better job. (But I'll add that I gave them two weeks' notice, two weeks more than they had given me. Because I was only part-time and had worked there for just four months, I got no severance and was not eligible for unemployment.) But I remember how much I liked the people at that job, even if the job itself wasn't all that.

"Socially, I'm a libertarian, but economically...."

2010-07-10T10:21:00.013-05:00

One of the reasons I'm not a libertarian is that I have an incomplete idea of what, exactly, libertarianism is. My readings of libertarian authors are pretty much limited to libertarian leaning blogs and columnists, such as the OneBestWay (the successor to Positive Liberty), the Volokh Conspiracy, and Steve Chapman. I have read John Locke, who, at least according to some people, was a proto-libertarian. Otherwise, that's about it.

When I ask my (mostly liberal or left-leaning) friends about their views on libertarianism, I generally get one of two responses. The first is a long lecture about how libertarians are hypocrites because they use public roads and benefit from taxes more than most non-libertarians do. This seems a bit strawman-ish to me. I imagine thoughtful libertarians at least recognize the points at which their ideology/political orientation conflicts with daily practice, just as my Marxist friends recognize the conflict between their relatively comfortable middle-class status and their advocacy for the rights of the "proletariat" and my liberal friends recognize the conflict between, for example, using the government to aggressively promote the economic interests of the disadvantaged even though many of the same disadvantaged people might support a non-liberal political party for reasons that have little to do with economics.

The other response is something like this: "When it comes to social matters, I'm a complete libertarian, but when it comes to economic issues, I think there ought to be regulation." In a sense, this, too, is strawman-ish because most libertarians, in my admittedly somewhat limited observations, accept the need for at least some regulation of the economy. What bothers me most about this response, however, is the neatness of the distinction that the speaker is trying to draw between the putatively "social" and the putatively "economic." To me, the two are so interspersed that it is often, though perhaps not always, hard to separate them. Here are some examples:

Libertarians usually want an end to, or at least a de-escalation of, the War of Drugs. There is a social component to this--the freedom of consenting adults to use drugs--but also an "economic" component--the state would spend less money in enforcing drug laws and in incarcerating offenders (and, I suppose, drugs would be cheaper, both in price and in the "transaction cost" of being arrested).
Libertarians usually dislike state-mandated discrimination based on arbitrary categories. Therefore, while they may have qualms about state actions that encourage marriage, they or at least some, usually believe that the state should recognize gay marriages if it is going to recognize any marriage. And the issue of the legality of marriage is not purely social. For the parties involved, there are some very real economic benefits. For the state--federal and state-level--there is a question of allocation of resources. For example, the distribution of survivor benefits for social security, I imagine, would change if the federal government recognized gay marriage.
A "libertarian" political economy--one in which the government is minimally intrusive and does only that which the "market forces" cannot do, and in which each adult is assured of a "liberty of contract" to sell his/her labor as they see fit--has social implications. Dismantling the welfare state*--whatever its other effects--would probably force poorer people to be even more reliant on family and informal networks of similarly situated people than they already are. (Here and now, I make no judgment on whether this would be a good thing, except to say that there would be definite pros and cons.)

*I'm not suggesting that all libertarians want to dismantle the welfare state, or that those who do, would want to do it precipitously and with little regard the very real hardships such a dismantling would cause, at least in the short term. I can also imagine a more moderately libertarian argument for continuing the welfare state (perhaps on the assumption that there are bigger fish to fry than taking away resources from poor people) but modifying its incentives to make its operation more efficient and beneficial to recipients of welfare. But dismantling the welfare state is logically consistent with what I understand to be libertarian critiques of government.

Thought experiment: what if Kagan is a professional?

2010-06-30T07:14:00.013-05:00

President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, has undergone a lot of criticism for her lack of experience. One particular variant of this criticism is the fact--noted by Paul Campos in this article--that she has hardly made known her political views on hot button political/legal issues, such as campaign finance reform, to name only one. She apparently has held her cards close in her (apparently very sparse) publications and even in her conversations with colleagues. Campos writes

Her thin sheaf of academic writings addresses only a handful of very narrow technical legal issues in an especially cautious and non-revelatory fashion. She has never published a word not intended for an academic audience. Her work as a lawyer—that is, as someone who is professionally obligated to advocate the positions of her employer, whether she agrees with them or not—tells us nothing about her own views.

He goes on to say

Over the past two months, I’ve spoken to nine of Kagan’s former colleagues at the two law schools where she has taught. All of these people, some of whom support Kagan’s nomination and some who oppose it, insist they know nothing about Kagan’s views on any significant legal or political issue—and I believe them.

One (mostly unspoken) insinuation here is that Kagan might have, for a long time, been seeking the Supreme Court nomination and carefully crafted her writings and even conversations to avoid controversy. Another possibility is that she lacks intellectual curiosity, or that she has a too mechanistic (and therefore somewhat unrealistic) view of the American legal system and how it is supposed to work. All these points are at least plausible given what we now know about her, and if they have any validity, it is a cause for concern.

But there is another possibility. Maybe Kagan adheres to a standard of professionalism that commands one not to wear one's political views on one's sleeve. Much of her academic career, as I understand it, was as a college administrator (I believe she was president Harvard Law School, but stand to be corrected). In that position, one's political views are not always relevant or of first importance.

None of this necessarily vitiates Mr. Campos's argument. One of his biggest beefs about the Supreme Court nomination process is that nominees rarely, if ever, can honestly articulate their political views, even though the post to which they are nominated is overtly political. Indeed, part of his criticism of Kagan is that she once wrote about the process as a vapid exercise and now is engaging in the same vapidity.

I think I am ~~cynical~~ realistic enough to know that paucity of information on Kagan's political orientation is at the very least suspiciously convenient and that as long as the culture of selecting judges remains what it is now, we are to expect nominees with similarly sparse and uncontroversial histories. I also realize the difficulty of being "non-political" as an academic or even as an administrator (the "personal is political" and "the death of objectivity," and all that). And if Kagan really was a conscientiously minded professional who did her job as "neutrally" as possible because it was her job, then maybe we don't necessarily want that type of person on the court. (The culture of professionalism isn't all it's cracked up to be, and it's not necessarily a good thing: witness the way academic departments knowingly tolerate professors who have long since given up on even their most basic duties and who are simply going through the motions because they have tenure.)

Still, what if?

What I'd like to know about interchange fees

2010-06-29T07:45:00.000-05:00

There is much ado about whether or how much or in what way the government should regulate what are known as "interchange fees." These are the fees a merchant pays every time he or she charges a customer's credit card. So, to take some made up numbers, if a customer uses a credit card to pay for something that costs $10, the credit card company (or the bank with which the merchant has the credit card processing account) charges the merchant, say, 2%, or 20 cents, if my math is correct.

The controversy is that some merchants, presumably smaller merchants who operate on close profit margins, claim that the fees are so high that they often cut into the merchants' profits, especially when credit cards are used for purchases of small dollar prices. The contention, I presume, is that x% of a $1 pack of gum--or at least x$ on several single purchases of $1 packs of gum--takes away the merchant's entire profit margin. According to some merchants, credit card services require that merchants accept credit cards for all transactions. Therefore, some claim, smaller business owners get the short end of the stick. There are other arguments advanced for a more robust regulation of interchange fees: the price of the fees get passed along to consumers, even those who pay cash, in order to subsidize those who pay with credit cards; some credit cards allegedly command higher interchange fees than others, so there is a sense of arbitrariness and unpredictability of costs; the two dominant credit card companies--which I'll call Misa and VasterCard so as not to single anyone out--allegedly operate as near monopolists and unfairly negotiate with smaller merchants who individually lack bargaining power.

The justifications for unregulated/less regulated interchange fees range from arguments that robust regulation would be price fixing and government is generally less than competent to do price fixing, to more practical considerations, such as the assertion that individual merchants could, if they wanted to, negotiate with credit card companies to pass the fees on to customers or use one of the other credit card companies (which I'll call US Express and Uncover); the assertion that having a credit card is to mean anything, it means being able to buy anything at a merchant that accepts a card; and the assertion that interchange fees represent real costs to the authorizing banks and that handling cash and/or checks carries its own costs (the risk of checks bouncing, robberies, counterfeit currency).

I'm not sure where I fall exactly. And before I make up my mind, there are some things I'd like to know the answers to. Some are factual items--I just don't know a lot--and some are hypothetical (the "what would really happen if we did x, y, or z?"). I've heard assertions one way or another on a lot of these points. I assume they can't all be true, or at least not categorically true:

Are merchants currently forbidden by credit card agreements from allowing discounts to cash only customers? I heard assertions both ways and imagine it might depend on the context. (One would also have to look at the merchant's incentive to offer the cash-only discount. I probably wouldn't base decision to purchase a $2 cup of coffee on a difference of, say 5 cents.)
Do antitrust laws prevent merchants from organizing collectively to gain a credit card contract more to their liking?
What would happen if merchants were allowed outright to charge higher prices for credit card holders? Would they simply raise all their prices by x percent and charge cash-only customers what they charge now?
What would regulation of interchange fees look like? Would they simply be tacked on to the customer's credit card bill? Would there be a set percentage that merchants could charge? Would the government simply declare a "fair" fee? I know that Sen. Durbin has advanced an amendment to the currently pending finance bill that would do a variant of this latter scheme in respect to interchange fees on debit cards: in short, the Federal Reserve would set the rate. But I wonder if "price fixing," as the opponents label attempts to regulate interchange fees, is the only way to go about ending this practice.
How are interchange fees regulated or enabled by currently existing regulation? (Sometimes opponents of "new" regulations, especially those who benefit from the status quo, do not realize or fail to acknowledge the ways in which current regulations play an active role in buttressing their current interests.

As someone who uses cash for most purchases--even to the point of being willing to pay the fees charged by out-of-network ATM's instead of using my debit or credit card--my interest in interchange fees is more academic than not. I'm just outlining some of the things I'd need to know before making a decision on the matter.

Thoughts on Walmart and local merchants

2010-06-27T11:21:00.000-05:00

In Chicago for the last 6 years or so--perhaps longer--a debate has raged over whether to allow Walmart to build stores in the city limits. One of the many arguments against allowing Walmart an entree into the Chicago market is the claim that it chokes off smaller business that is locally owned and operated. The argument for Walmart hinges, at least in part, on the claim that the economy of many of the targeted neighborhoods in Chicago is so bereft of local merchants and the goods, services, and jobs they are supposed to supply that a Walmart would be a welcome addition.

I have heretofore expressed some reservations about the we-need-to-ban-Walmart-to-protect-local-businesses argument (see my post here, and a comment I made on a post at the Volokh Conspiracy here). In short, it is probably a good thing in the long run to have locally owned businesses in a neighborhood rather than larger, corporate owned businesses. With locally owned businesses, the money made locally is more likely to stay local, and locally located entrepreneurs have a stronger interest in investing in their communities. Still, and especially in the short term, it is the local entrepreneurs who benefit most. They want to be, and presumably still are in some cases, a local elite that wields considerable power over those in the community who lack the resources to start their own businesses. That these people are self-interested is no surprise, or even necessarily a bad thing, but they aren't the virtuous hoers of the soil that some who advance the anti-Walmart arguments would like us to believe.

The comment I made at the Volokh Conspiracy (linked to above) was answered very thoughtfully by another commenter (click here to read it in full). In part, she or he said the following:

Mom and pop companies are trying to make a buck like anyone else, but a huge factor in that is the first-person experience. The smaller the business, the more the business is truly human– the owners are more often in closer contact with employees and customers. It is much more difficult for most people to act in a cold and careless way towards other people they actually know and experience as other humans, than it is for them to act in a cold and careless way towards a set of numbers on a ledger. Thats not a solid rule, some people are simply bad people and will coldly treat other people badly regardless of how well they know them or how close their contact is. But I think they are the exception.

This commenter goes on to say

There are deeper social and cultural implications. A local economy being a network of families, reputation matters. Everyone involved knows that whether they are working for someone, employing someone, or buying from someone, they are participating directly in their community. No one wants to live in a bad community so doing good business (as worker, employer, or consumer)is a big part of maintaining a good community.

That is pretty much lost now, and National society being a massive network of smaller communities, is obviously suffocating and dying from lack of “good-business”. What we have instead is a media-market driven facade superimposed over the reality of a decimated, rotting society.

Aside from the claim that our society is "decimated" and "rotting"--no which I reserve judgment--there is little, in the abstract, that I disagree with. I would add that to some degree, however, it is a question of trade offs.

In a society where "reputation matters," there is huge incentive to do something deserving of a good reputation. But the "incentive" includes a certain amount of coerced conformity to social norms. Some of these norms might be benign or downright just. Some might be arbitrary or downright offensive to our sensibilities. What if the local community is homophobic? Does an openly gay person, or someone merely suspected of being gay, have as much of a chance as someone who does not? What if the local community is not-so-subtly racist? Does a person of color really stand a chance? (Conversely, would a white person stand a chance in a local community of color?)* What if someone has to move from one community to another? How easy is it to establish a reputation? (Short answer, I suppose, is, it depends how much money one has.) One (for example, me) is reminded of the old system of county poor relief that the US, to a large degree, inherited from England: the system where people without strong roots in the county were "warned out" if it was feared they'd become a charge or burden on the community.

The corporatization of our economy has few, if any, unqualifiedly good answers to the problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, or economic inequality. In fact, this corporatization has maintained and recreated a perverse form of "reputation" against which the system of "reputation" the commenter above talked about compares mostly unfavorably. (I'm talking of the quantification of "character" in the form of credit scores, credit reports, and criminal records for non-violent misdemeanors.**) Corporations' operations are notoriously opaque in certain ways, and in others are without accountability. See, for example, the difficulty of enacting and enforcing a workable system of campaign finance reform. See, also, the ability of large employers to "game the system" when it comes to bad faith negotiating tactics with employees, or even, more a propos, with Walmart's alleged "off the clock" work violations.

But corporate hegemony does offer some partial solutions. The laws that forbid discriminating against certain classes of people are perhaps more enforceable against corporations than against the small neighborhood employer. (Again, I don't want to wax kumbaya about this: there are plenty of allegations about unfair hiring practices and unfair treatment of customers by large corporation. All I mean to say is that such practices are more susceptible to redress. Or at the very least, a large corporate employer has much to gain, and little to lose, by appearing to be non-discriminatory.)*** As far unionization and workers' rights as workers (and not as members of a certain class designated by anti-discrimination laws) goes, the practices of corporate giants like Walmart are notorious for allegations of their antiunion activities and violations of workers' rights. And again, there are no easy answers, but worker representation seems to me much more possible in a large, "big box" store like Walmart than at the small mom and pop store.

Again, I cannot claim there are any easy answers. I just think we should think twice before opposing Walmart--or other "big box" stores--on the grounds that they supposedly ruin local businesses.

*I'm not claiming the two examples are precisely analogous. We live in a white-dominated society (for example, in my first example, the "unmarked category" was a white, racist community), and the social dynamics are different. But food for thought.

**Except, curiously (and usually), traffic misdemeanors. If people were made to answer for their traffic crimes, perhaps that would lead to a reconsideration of our car-centric culture. But that's another blog post.

***A few years ago, my university offered a screening of an anti-Walmart documentary (I forget the name of the movie), but a major motif of the film was that Walmart moved into local (mostly rural) markets and drove local businesses out of business. In the discussion that followed the presentation of this (very long) film, one young lady in the audience who was African American referred to one scene in a film where a white hardware store owner bemoaned the loss of his family's business. She asserted that there was no way that man would have ever given her a job, whereas Walmart would hire her. Of course, this is a lone example, and she speaks only for herself and not Walmart, the hardware store owner, or other prospective employees. But this anecdote at least qualifies what I sometimes find to be the unreflective celebration of locally owned businesses.

The China syndrome

2010-06-26T10:07:00.010-05:00

My undergraduate adviser in history (I had one for French, too), was a specialist in East Asian history, particularly 20th century Chinese history, with an emphasis on China's nationalities policy.* In some ways, this professor was one of the best I ever had. He introduced me to Chinese history (he taught all periods of Chinese history, not merely the 20th century) and his writing assignments were quite challenging and forced me to hone my thoughts.

In other ways, however, his teaching left something to be desired. His lectures at times, but only occasionally, contained apologias for some truly questionable practices that were done in Chinese history, such as the practice of footbinding, which resulted in the mutilation of countless numbers of women, and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the deaths of millions. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that he gainsaid the Tiananmin Square massacre, in which "only" hundreds of people were killed.

His goal wasn't malicious, and in some ways he was only trying to introduce us to seeing things from the perspective of those in power and those in the Chinese culture, on the very plausible assumption that someone growing up in that culture might have different conceptions of the state and human rights from those that Westerners might have. He also aimed at challenging some of the snobbery that, allegedly, has for a long time been inherent in Western scholarship on China.

Yet, he elided some serious problems. I now realize that he was a committed Marxist, although I wasn't quite aware of that at the time. Surely, Marxism had evolved by the mid-1990s to include serious discussions of "counter-hegemonic" cultural practices by the lower classes. What I mean is, even if Chinese culture encourages people to have a deferential attitude toward the state, that does not mean they do not "resist" this power in some ways.

That "problem," which I have undoubtedly oversimplified and only roughly explained, is only theoretical. There were specific items that in retrospect are questionable. On the subject of footbinding, the professor insisted that we ought not judge another culture by Western standards. After all, didn't the social norms of Victorian England virtually require upper-class and upper-bourgeoisie women to wear body-damaging corsets? In this case, he didn't particularly note the irony of comparing Chinese culture with Western culture in order to argue that we shouldn't compare Chinese culture with Western culture.

To this professor's credit, he did assign two textbooks from different perspectives. One was by Jacques Gernet (who, I believe, was a Marxist); the other was by John King Fairbank (who, I wager, could be considered an American liberal academic who had once been more left-leaning). The professor, however, made very clear which historian he agreed with. He derided Fairbank as an "elderly man" (indeed, Fairbank had written that book shortly before his death), as if the professor would have agreed with Fairbank if he had been younger. (My guess is that Gernet, in the 1990s, was no spring chicken either.)

Fairbank's crime? In a chapter section on footbinding, he criticized the tendency of mostly Western, non-Chinese historians (my professor was French) to adopt a "second nationalism" and write about China as if it could do no wrong. As an example, Fairbank humbly cited an article he himself had written decades earlier, in which he contended that the Glorious Revolution was one of the greatest things that ever happened to China.

I took four classes with the professor in question. I confess that I, too, developed a sort of second nationalism toward Chinese history, but on a more modest scale than my adviser had. In short, I ignored what should have been my better intellectual judgment and refused to challenge what even then I should have seen as holes in his statements.

This post is not meant as a diatribe against China or against my adviser. Perhaps my adviser's teaching style was defensible in many ways. It just gives me pause.

*China is approximately 90% ethnically "Han" Chinese, but the other 10%, while present in almost every province, are concentrated in strategic, sparsely populated areas that China would like to control, such as Tibet, northwestern China (the Xingjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region) and the land north central border (the Mongolian Autonomous Region.) China therefore had to develop a "nationalities" policy to prevent these people from revolting. Authoritarian regimes, no matter how brutal, cannot live on force alone.

Personalized business, or where to buy junk food

2010-06-16T07:15:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, I prefer to patronize local businesses in part because I feel something tending toward a "moral" obligation that I want to support locally owned businesses. For example, there is a convenience store near where I live that appears to be owned by a family who, I assume, live in the neighborhood. Right across the street, a corporate gas-station/convenience store has opened up as well. The main difference between the two is that the latter offers gasoline and can induce a greater number of customers with slightly cheaper prices and loss leaders. Whenever, on rare occasions, I wish to patronize a local convenience store, I try to use the locally owned one (I don't have a car, so gasoline is a moot point). The reason: they're always nice to me and I don't want to see them lose their business.

Now, nothing I buy there is important, and there is a grocery store nearby--in fact, there're three (3) grocery stores in walking distance--so anything I actually need I can get elsewhere. And I'm not some "hero of the local community" simply because I occasionally buy a bag of ~~Doritos~~ corn chips at a locally owned store. But I'm just expressing some of the thinking that enters into mind when I choose to patronize such a store.

I'm not one to jump on the anti-Walmart, anti "big box," bandwagons. I'm at the very least conflicted as to whether it really is better to have cheaper goods (produced under conditions that are harmful to the producers and the environment), at least in the short term, than very expensive goods at all. In Chicago, there are many neighborhoods that lack grocery stores and that depend on smaller retailers who, because of slim margins, must charge high mark-ups for low-quality goods.

There are various reasons alleged for this phenomenon, none of which probably tell the whole story and all of which probably have a grain of truth, and most of which are complicated enough as not to provide easy answers: the prevalence of unionization; high marginal tax rates; the legacy of de facto/de jure (it's not always easy to tell the difference sometimes) discrimination; etc. If the answer, at least in some neighborhoods (especially the "food deserts" of certain pockets of the city), is to introduce large companies that offer cheap, though still low quality, goods, and low-paying (and low quality)jobs, I'm inclined to think that's a better thing than the alternative.

I'm also not one to jump on the "all locally owned and small business is good" bandwagon. They're not, or at least not necessarily. First of all, they're not all really "locally owned" if by "locally owned" one means "owned by someone who resides in the community." I wonder how many convenience store owners in the south side actually reside in the community in which they ply their trade (I really don't know the answer, and perhaps I'd be surprised, but I assume that a significant number do not). Second, the small business owners I have known personally--with a lot of exceptions--tend to be, to put it mildly, unpleasant people, willing to exploit others at any opportunity. (Again, not all of them.) I once knew one who decried, repeatedly, illegal immigration, and yet, when he needed a few extra hands that he wanted to hire (without the inconvenience of social security taxes or other benefits) he went to the place in Denver where such folks congregate in what seemed to me like a "cheap labor meat market," and got a couple of choice workers. (To be sure, on the one occasion I was witness to this, he was nice to his worker--at least from my observation--and treated him with respect that belied his private denunciations of the perniciousness of "illegals.")

But for some reason, I don't want this family to be put out of business by the gas station across the street.

A world without children

2010-06-14T07:38:00.010-05:00

I have pretty much firmly decided that I do not want to raise children. I won't go into all, or any, the reasons, but I have thought long and hard about it, and I believe them to be good reasons. Still, I suspect that there is something lost in opting for this course. There is something gained, too, but also something lost.

What that "something lost" is, is to a large degree unknown by me, as someone who has never had children or played a significant role in raising children (I'm the youngest in my family and played no big role in my nieces' and nephews' upbringings). To a large, perhaps extravagant, degree, I don't know what I'm missing. As D. A. Ridgley said in a blog post on parenthood (click here to read; in fact, I recommend reading his entire blog; even though, to my knowledge he does not contribute to it anymore, I find it enjoyable reading):

The parent / child relationship is asymmetrical: you cannot understand what it is to be a parent merely by having been a child. I want all my children to be healthy and happy and harmless people who are loved and share love freely. Beyond that I am mostly indifferent about the particulars of how they choose to spend their lives and even less concerned about how they make a living.

And much of what I hear from parents is that they find being a parent, to paraphrase what a friend of mine once said, "both easier and harder than you can imagine."

One thing I've learned from reading C. S. Lewis, even though I'm not sure he phrased it in exactly these terms, is that almost everything, except perhaps, for him, the grace of God, comes with its corresponding dangers and corresponding virtues. Deciding not to have children comes with certain "virtues"--if one may call them that--but it also comes with the danger of being locked increasingly into oneself, making oneself as a God, or as an island entire unto itself. Raising children can, I imagine, be a strong antidote to that.

I imagine that deciding to raise children entails potential dangers that, like the virtues, I cannot, perhaps, fully imagine or appreciate, although in the news we see frequent (although perhaps anomalous?) instances of parents neglecting their children or abusing them. And my reasons for not wanting to have children relate, at least partially, to fears that these dangers would be realized; however, I promised not to go into my reasons.

But I should say that in most of the parents I know, I see loving people who have given, and who continue to give, love and nurturing to another being that, at least at first, is completely dependent on them. Perhaps such a role, for the parent, is heartbreaking. A friend of mine once said that you never love your parents as much as they love you. I don't know if that's true, but she had children and could at least speak from experience.

Now that Mother's day has passed and that Father's day is approaching, I guess I'd just like to give a shout-out to my friends who are parents.