Unhappy childhoods

Here's Bryan Caplan complaining that liberals try to keep the masses in blissful ignorance of 19th century French economics pundit Frederic Bastiat (the broken windows fallacy guy). Bastiat was apparently a revelation to the teenaged Caplan, and he posits that if the rubes ever got wind of the stuff that blew his mind in high school, they would all need economics degrees before they ever consented to support stuff like Social Security which currently owes existence to a thin gruel of naivete and greed.

Every teacher and book I ever encountered treated naive populism like the Law of Gravitation.  Evil businesses aren't paying workers enough?  Raise the minimum wage; problem solved.  The elderly are poor?  Increase Social Security payments; problem solved.  Evil businesses are selling people bad drugs?  Impose more government regulation; problem solved. 

If you favor these programs, you can call these arguments straw men.  But I assure you: These "straw men" were never presented by opponents of these policies.  On the contrary, these "straw men" were invariably presented by people who favored these policies.  How is that possible?  Because during my first 17 years of life, I never encountered an opponent of any of these policies!  You might assume I was grew up in a weird Berkeley-esque leftist enclave, but bland Northridge, California hardly qualifies. 

What was going on?  The best explanation is pretty simple: I only heard straw man arguments in favor of populist policies because virtually everyone finds these straw man arguments pleasantly convincing.  Regardless of the merits of the minimum wage, Social Security, and the FDA, economic illiteracy is the reason for their popularity.  If someone like Bastiat convinced people that the pleasantly convincing arguments are inane, proponents would have to fall back on arguments that are intellectually better yet rhetorically inferior.

Boy, conservatives really do have different childhoods than the rest of us, don't they? What kind of stuff do you have to be into at 16 so that your big revelation about how everyone is a phony and the world is rigged against you has to do with Social Security perverting market forces? Is this just another case of uncorrected Randism?

Take the minimum wage.  Normal people like it because the government waves a magic wand and makes mean employers give helpless workers extra money, with zero blowback.  So inane, yet so convincing to a psychologically normal human.  An intellectually serious argument, in contrast, begins by conceding the theoretical possibility of a disemployment effect, then defends low estimates of labor demand elasticity.  This is a huge improvement in intellectual substance, yet persuades only wonks.

Yeah. The real problem here isn't that people are greedy and economically illiterate. It's that age-old problem of conservatives thinking equations from freshman economics should be our first order concern in making policy decisions that affect the welfare of millions of real human beings. I actually think "normal people" are doing just fine as far as "conceding the theoretical possibility of a dis-employment effect" goes. PhDs or no, "normal people" get that McDonald's business model doesn't really permit them to pay burger assemblers $50/hr, hence the conspicuous absence of a widespread movement to raise the minimum wage to untenable heights. 

NSO plays Matthews, Mackey, Sibelius

Saw the NSO with violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu last night, in the DC-premiere of a captivating violin concerto by the composer Steve Mackey composed, Sibelius' 5th, and orchestrations of selected Debussy Preludes by Colin Matthews.

The Mackey piece, "Beautiful Passing," was composed with Josefowicz in mind in 2008. Josefowicz played some of the key themes before the performance and explained their provenance in Mackey's experience of his mother's death. I can appreciate this as a way to get an audience to identify with a new work--its hard to expect even the most open-minded concert-goers to develop much rapport with a complex piece the first time out. Premieres end up being "that new thing" between the overture and symphony. Some framing and a story, live from the musicians or composer, helps ensure listeners walk away with a lasting association, even if they can't hum the tune.

Yet, as Robert Reilly notes here, a work like this should really stand on its own as a piece of abstract music and learning about the "program" in this way can be a bit distracting. For instance, the work opens with a violent contest between wild percussive gnashing in the orchestra and the exuberant, almost desperate violin solo--it ends softly, the violin exhausted, the orchestra at a quiet drone. We are told this is Mackey's mother resigning herself to die, but such information seems so terribly reductive when applied to this rich, evocative music. Words and stories fail, as they should, to describe the experience. While inspired by a specific experience for the composer, the music becomes more universal, in the hearing, transcending its subject matter. Which is all to say, my hope for this worthwhile piece is that it is still played in 10 years but that the majority of audience members without the initiative to check out its history are none the wiser about its context.

Josefowicz was quite stunning in the solo part, embracing the raucous dance figures that reappear throughout with diabolical gusto and imbuing the closing section with a devastating sense of collapse.

After the half was a bravura performance of Sibelius' 5th symphony. Lintu goaded along the rollicking rhythms of the first movement with swift, intense precision, culminating in an ecstatic climax that was hard not to applaud. The winning final movement (I swear to God that theme is ripped off in a tearful Don Bluth-animated animal reunion somewhere) was urgent but suitably majestic. Lintu clearly has that great intangible conducting skill of maintaining momentum while allowing the audience to appreciate the "vertical" harmony and texture in a work. The NSO sounded agile and rich throughout, though some shrillness in the winds and scattered coordination problems in the strings were popped up.

The concert opened with a series of five Debussy preludes, as orchestrated by the composer Colin Matthews, apparently best known for his role in Deryk Cooke's performance version of Mahler's 10th. This may be a personal bias, but I have difficulty seeing the point of these sorts of projects. The Preludes are quintessential creatures of the piano, and, not having particularly memorable tunes, much of their appeal is bound up in the way Debussy's colors play on that instrument. Why one would want to hear an orchestra try its hand is unclear. Moreover, it is exceedingly grating to hear Debussy's music orchestrated in a way that is far removed from how Debussy's orchestral music actually sounds. Not that I would find it particularly worthwhile to hear someone fake Debussy's style, but there is some deep cognitive dissonance in listening to the composer's music via a sensibility far more obvious and schmaltzy than anything we would expect from Debussy himself. Not saying all orchestrations are bad ideas, but it doesn't work for all material.

(And dere's Downey's original take at Ionarts.)

Santorum on Citizenship

Santorum, at a NH townhall Saturday:

The job of a citizen is one that was essential--our founders believed was essential. They limited, as you know, initially, the rights of citizenship from the standpoint of voting to a small group of people because they were concerned that all Americans wouldn't take the responsibility seriously, wouldn't be educated enough to make an informed decision. Over time, though laws passed and amendments passe to the constitution, that opened up and more and more people. But with that freedom to be a participant in the electoral process comes responsibility.

That's right. The exclusion from the franchise of women, minorities, and poor dudes didn't have anything to do with a preponderance of influential 1700s politicians people believing they were classes of human being that didn't belong in public life, or in some cases, subhuman. Those infalliable Founders just didn't think they were "ready" yet, but boy would they have been pleased to learn that with a century or two of hard work they'd show they were worthy of getting a vote.

Why has a fetishization of the "founders" so characterized the current right-wing resurgence? What necessitates such an extreme whitewashing of history when surely there would be no face lost in claiming that these extraordinary men were nonetheless products of their time in some respects, or even, that their impeccable morality exists outside of space-time but they lived in a democracy after all and their co-generationalists forced these positions on them?

But of course, neither of these questions would get at the real objective here: rationalizing conservatives' deep discomfort with the principles of egalitarianism that liberals, and the modern society they have shaped, hold dear. That discomfort, a result of deep aesthetic and sentimental attachments to authority (be it the ancien regime or Christian white male privilege), can be suffocating to the emotionally and intellectually incurious who make up much of the conservative base. Santorum's bed-time stories at once absolve these folks of a responsibility they can't bring themselves to bear while reinforcing a truth they really do cherish deep down: that people "like them"--really know what's best for the country.

More Republican Problems

This is good:

I’d say the main reason wingnut mythology gets increasingly complex is that as each euphemism for an odious belief becomes denotative, they need to shift gears a little. Mere mortals can’t keep up. We, after all, aren’t being fed a daily diet of right wing talk radio to make the connections for us.

Conservatives are hitting a wall right now...the "we don't actually have real policies to endorse" wall. The mantra of low taxes, small government, get enemies, etc. aren't actually "policy proposals" in the sense of an actual plan, they are more pithy rallying cries which allow people that are part of the movement to demonstrate their fealty to the cause. Now that all those things are being called into question after 8 years of Bush souring the American people on them, the party is realizing that they don't actually have any policies enjoying broad based consensus which would actually, you know, suggest a course of action.



Democrats, by contrast, have a big book of real policy proposals that enjoy general consensus at any given moment. And they are actually legitimate propsoals. "Universal health care" and "Diplomacy" are real things backed up by reams of options for implementation. The challenge of course is figuring out the mix around which to build a coalition. But that's a far cry from the Republicans scrambling to get people to rally behind things that are really just words tied to a lot of cultural resentment and passion, but not so much to actual ideas ready to put into practice.

No More Fixing Social Security

Atrios calls out this line in the NYT coverage of the summit business:

But any solution, budget analysts said, must include a mix of both approaches, though current beneficiaries would see no change.

Seriously though. Instead of budget analysts it should say "centrist fetishists who think everything is better split down the middle regardless of the actual policy tradeoffs involved". That's a purely political opinion, no budget analysis about it.

Tea Parties

Nice sensible editorial about bank nationalization in the NYT today. It's hard to tell sometimes just how much the "fundamental abhorrence of nationalization" meme is actually felt or just generated by the press as the natural countervailing theme to the suggestion that the government is considering going down that road. In fact, this is where the whole "tea party" nonsense should really be directed. (Speaking of, 'tea party' sounds vaguely like it should be a euphemism for some kind of trendy sex party which only some people understand right? "Jamie is going to another tea party this weekend. He really needs to slow down." "Oh, yeah, sure, that's disturbing...I think")



But anyhow. While the outrage over the stimulus and the foreclosure stuff is pretty misguided, if a bit more for the former than the latter, the outrage over the bank bailouts is legitimate and should be felt by both conversatives and liberals alike. Conversatives claiming any sort of populist bearing SHOULD be pissed about sloppy turnovers of taxpayer money to megabanks which, if they weren't feeling the moral hazard before, almost CERTAINLY are in the brave new world of endless TARP. But we're not going to do nothing. Temporary nationalization should be held up as the way for taxpayers to punish the leadership of these institutions for their profligacy rather than feeding it.



Of course the cynical money might say that conservatives are using this as an opportunity to use the bank bailout to tarnish the stimulus bill, which clearly wasn't really succumbing to their critiques taken alone. Never you mind the past 8 years of stunning and unprecedented complicity between the Bush government and the country's elite financial interests, reject Obama's culture of bailout! Yeah, that sounds about right, actually. Crafty bastards, aren't they.

Strategizin'

Nate Silver points out the thinking behind the Obama administration's willingness to go after agenda critics, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, the crazy CNBC guy, directly in press conferences. As Silver says, it does provide a nice foil for the administration, but it also does something more: it aligns the craziness of the commentators with the similar craziness of actual elected Republicans, without going after the minority directly.