...and they are us.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Is "Political Correctness" to Blame for Orlando Massacre?
Well, well, the dear old National Rifled Assholeciation has weighed in with its theory. Assault weapons don't kill people, "political correctness" does.
"The National Rifle Association (NRA) on Tuesday defended gun rights, two days after a gunman killed 49 people and left 53 others injured at a gay nightclub in Orlando," Jesse Byrnes at The Hill reports:
"In the aftermath of this terrorist attack, President Obama and Hillary Clinton renewed calls for more gun control, including a ban on whole categories of semi-automatic firearms," Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in a USA Today op-ed.
"They are desperate to create the illusion that they’re doing something to protect us because their policies can’t and won’t keep us safe. This transparent head-fake should scare every American, because it will do nothing to prevent the next attack," he said.
Cox said "political correctness" allowed for the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history to take place, noting that the FBI had interviewed the shooter multiple times since 2013 and that he maintained a government-approved security license.
"Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s political correctness prevented anything from being done about it," Cox wrote.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who the NRA has endorsed, also attacked "political correctness" in a speech following the shooting.So what exactly is the connection between "political correctness" and mass murder? Let's ask an expert: mass murderer Anders Breivik (the following is reposted from August 2015)
"...voters crave the anti-status-quo politician. They want results. They need a fighter. They need someone to fire all the political-correct police." -- Sarah Palin, interview with Donald Trump
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| Anders Breivik |
In turn, the "cultural Marxism" thesis of Lind's "history" can be traced to a 1992 article, "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness," published in a Lyndon Larouche cult magazine, Fidelio The article's author, Michael J. Minnicino, subsequently disowned his work as "hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained world-view."
Along the way, "conservative" Republican stalwarts Ralph de Toledano and Patrick J. Buchanan have recycled those crack-brained conspiracy theories, documented by abundant footnotes that typically lead either to a source who didn't say what they were credited with saying, to some other hack propaganda recycler or to an "authoritative" emigre like Victor Zitta or Lazlo Pasztor relying extensively on official histories published by the Axis-allied Horthy regime. Martin Jay traced the strange trajectory of this propaganda meme in "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe."
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| Roger Kimball |
In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, Walsh argues that the current obsession with politically correct speech began with a group of Marxist academics at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, who would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The scholars, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, developed a wide-ranging, if often contradictory, critique of the principal tenets of "bourgeois" Western culture—from the centrality of reason and individuality to Christian sexual mores.As Barkley and I have discussed, the term "politically correct" probably was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by left-wing student activists wary of the self-righteous dogmatism displayed by self-styled Marxist-Leninist political grouplets. But that's not the way the conventional mythology goes.
At the end of December 1982, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, "The Shattered Humanities" by William Bennett, who at the time was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bennett's complaint was that "matters of enduring importance" -- "the true," "the good" and "the noble" -- had been abandoned because "we have yielded to the bullying of those fascinated with the merely contemporary." By the early 1990s, Bennett's lament about the decline of traditional values in the humanities had swelled into a moral panic about the alleged tyranny of political correctness on campus, fueled by best-selling books such as Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The politics of race and sex on campus.
Even President Bush I had to get into the act with a commencement address at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in which he railed against "political extremists [who] roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race."
Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.Isolated anecdotes and broad generalizations can only get you so far. The elusive scourge of political correctness needed to be explained by theory of its origins. Thus the Minnicino/Larouche conspiracy theory, taken up by Lind, Buchanan, de Toledano, Breivik and now Walsh.
In spite of being called out more than two decades ago by a President of the United States, those political extremists liberals on the left have allegedly persevered in their "unrelenting demands... for increasingly preposterous levels of political correctness over the past decade." This, according to S. E. Cupp explains Donald Trumps popularity: "Trump survives -- nay, thrives! -- because he is seen as the antidote, bravely and unimpeachably standing athwart political correctness."
Meanwhile, "A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 71% of American Adults think political correctness is a problem in America today, while only 18% disagree. Ten percent (10%) are undecided."
National Survey of 1,000 American Adults
Conducted August 25-26, 2015
By Rasmussen Reports
1* Do Americans have true freedom of speech today, or do they have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble?
2* Is political correctness a problem in America today?
Hey, if they keep repeating it, it must be true, right?
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| Three Stooges: Lyndon Larouche, Roger Kimball, Anders Breivik |
Problems with Perspectivism
Totally out of it old white straight male that I am, I have to figure out my relationship to perspectivism. This doctrine, which many of my students fervently believe in, holds that one’s understanding of the world is determ ined largely by identity. I see the world as, well, an old white straight male, and therefore I am incapable of understanding the experience of those who are marginalized for not being old, white, straight or male. I should just shut up and listen.
First of all, the advice about shutting up and listening is pretty good most of the time. I should follow it more than I do.
As for the doctrine itself, while possessing a kernel of insight, I think it rests on three interrelated misconceptions. I would think that, wouldn’t I? Anyway, here they are:
1. Assumptions about between-group versus within-group variation in perception. To the extent that each of us has various blind spots, an important question is what are their sources and how important are they? Assume for the moment that the main claim of perspectivism is true: one’s identity does delimit what one can understand. One could then say, yes, but how consequential is this? After all, there is a lot of variation in the ability to understand at the individual level. Some people work hard at it and others just suck in the stereotypes of the moment. Within any given group there will be a range of openness to and capacity for understanding others. So the question arises, how important are identity-based differences in understanding versus individual ones? If most of the variation is at the identity group level, then we are justified in making sweeping generalizations and looking for solutions primarily by addressing group-related factors. But it may also be possible that group level factors play a minor role relative to differences across people within groups, in which case our time is better spent dealing with barriers that show up in individual thinking and behavior. From a purely speculative point of view I could see it going either way: this is an empirical question! But where is the empirical evidence? My first criticism of perspectivism is that it simply assumes its own premises, when their validity depends on the facts and may differ in different contexts.
2. Assumptions about internal versus external perspectives. What is knowledge about the circumstances of human life, and who is in a position to acquire it? Some knowledge is purely subjective: how something feels or what something means to the individual who experiences it. Other knowledge has more of an objective character, such as the social processes that cause events to occur or influence how people feel or make sense of them. There is something to be said for both: surely there are aspects of subjective experience that can’t be fully communicated to someone who hasn’t had the experience. In a society in which non-whites experience racism and whites don’t, there is a core set of experiences that non-white people, and only non-white people, have access to. At the same time, sometimes we are too close to an experience or event to understand what causes it or what alternatives to it are possible: an outsider, less captive to the moment, may have a better vantage point. This is well known at the level of individual emotion: no one really knows how I feel but me, but I need friends and sometimes relative strangers (like therapists) who can look at me from the outside and see things I can’t. The same kind of problem arises in anthropology. People in a local culture understand themselves in ways the anthropologist is likely to misunderstand (and therefore need to speak for themselves), but the foreign scholar who lives in their midst for a year or two can tell them some things about their culture they could scarcely have imagined on their own. Both perspectives are not only valid, but necessary. What perspectivism seems to say, however, is that only the first is valid, while the second is counterfeit and even an instrument of oppression.
3. A theory of belief versus a theory of truth. Perspectivism is very close to the classical theory of ideology. Marx’s view was that one’s class position strongly influences how one interprets the social world, and in recent decades we’ve come to understand that it’s not just about class. Ideological processes can be seen in any division or stratification of society—in gender, nationality, age, physical ability, sexual orientation, anything. Contra the claim in the previous paragraph, there is no true “outside” perspective, since all of us are inside some social position or set of experiences. To put it another way, there are relative outside vantage points but no absolute outside position. It’s all impure.
But ideology is a theory of belief, not truth. It’s a theory of why a person in a given social circumstance is more likely to believe one thing rather than another, not what belief is more likely to be true. The criteria for truth have never changed, and they never will: it’s all about reasoning and evidence. (These criteria have been refined over the centuries, but they can still be summed up as reasoning and evidence.) As an old white straight male I am more likely to believe some things than others because of my social position, but that has no bearing on whether what I believe is more or less justified. Or it might in a statistical sense, but you won’t know it aside from the criteria derived from reasoning and evidence whose validity is separate from and above all ideological divisions.
Yes, I realize some peope have ideologies that cause them to reject what I’ve just proposed as unarguable criteria for validity. No, I can’t argue with them, because my arguments are based on reasoning and evidence, so they only work with people who accept these criteria. Most perspectivists, I suspect, are unwilling to go that far—but then they have to distinguish between factors that influence the likelihood of belief, which absolutely include the identities they center on, and those that govern the likelihood of truth, which don’t.
As an old white straight male I believe lots of stuff because of my relationship to the world around me. Whether that brings me closer to or further from a valid understanding, or both in various respects, can be determined only by applying the criteria for validity that are the same whatever identities you are slotted into.
First of all, the advice about shutting up and listening is pretty good most of the time. I should follow it more than I do.
As for the doctrine itself, while possessing a kernel of insight, I think it rests on three interrelated misconceptions. I would think that, wouldn’t I? Anyway, here they are:
1. Assumptions about between-group versus within-group variation in perception. To the extent that each of us has various blind spots, an important question is what are their sources and how important are they? Assume for the moment that the main claim of perspectivism is true: one’s identity does delimit what one can understand. One could then say, yes, but how consequential is this? After all, there is a lot of variation in the ability to understand at the individual level. Some people work hard at it and others just suck in the stereotypes of the moment. Within any given group there will be a range of openness to and capacity for understanding others. So the question arises, how important are identity-based differences in understanding versus individual ones? If most of the variation is at the identity group level, then we are justified in making sweeping generalizations and looking for solutions primarily by addressing group-related factors. But it may also be possible that group level factors play a minor role relative to differences across people within groups, in which case our time is better spent dealing with barriers that show up in individual thinking and behavior. From a purely speculative point of view I could see it going either way: this is an empirical question! But where is the empirical evidence? My first criticism of perspectivism is that it simply assumes its own premises, when their validity depends on the facts and may differ in different contexts.
2. Assumptions about internal versus external perspectives. What is knowledge about the circumstances of human life, and who is in a position to acquire it? Some knowledge is purely subjective: how something feels or what something means to the individual who experiences it. Other knowledge has more of an objective character, such as the social processes that cause events to occur or influence how people feel or make sense of them. There is something to be said for both: surely there are aspects of subjective experience that can’t be fully communicated to someone who hasn’t had the experience. In a society in which non-whites experience racism and whites don’t, there is a core set of experiences that non-white people, and only non-white people, have access to. At the same time, sometimes we are too close to an experience or event to understand what causes it or what alternatives to it are possible: an outsider, less captive to the moment, may have a better vantage point. This is well known at the level of individual emotion: no one really knows how I feel but me, but I need friends and sometimes relative strangers (like therapists) who can look at me from the outside and see things I can’t. The same kind of problem arises in anthropology. People in a local culture understand themselves in ways the anthropologist is likely to misunderstand (and therefore need to speak for themselves), but the foreign scholar who lives in their midst for a year or two can tell them some things about their culture they could scarcely have imagined on their own. Both perspectives are not only valid, but necessary. What perspectivism seems to say, however, is that only the first is valid, while the second is counterfeit and even an instrument of oppression.
3. A theory of belief versus a theory of truth. Perspectivism is very close to the classical theory of ideology. Marx’s view was that one’s class position strongly influences how one interprets the social world, and in recent decades we’ve come to understand that it’s not just about class. Ideological processes can be seen in any division or stratification of society—in gender, nationality, age, physical ability, sexual orientation, anything. Contra the claim in the previous paragraph, there is no true “outside” perspective, since all of us are inside some social position or set of experiences. To put it another way, there are relative outside vantage points but no absolute outside position. It’s all impure.
But ideology is a theory of belief, not truth. It’s a theory of why a person in a given social circumstance is more likely to believe one thing rather than another, not what belief is more likely to be true. The criteria for truth have never changed, and they never will: it’s all about reasoning and evidence. (These criteria have been refined over the centuries, but they can still be summed up as reasoning and evidence.) As an old white straight male I am more likely to believe some things than others because of my social position, but that has no bearing on whether what I believe is more or less justified. Or it might in a statistical sense, but you won’t know it aside from the criteria derived from reasoning and evidence whose validity is separate from and above all ideological divisions.
Yes, I realize some peope have ideologies that cause them to reject what I’ve just proposed as unarguable criteria for validity. No, I can’t argue with them, because my arguments are based on reasoning and evidence, so they only work with people who accept these criteria. Most perspectivists, I suspect, are unwilling to go that far—but then they have to distinguish between factors that influence the likelihood of belief, which absolutely include the identities they center on, and those that govern the likelihood of truth, which don’t.
As an old white straight male I believe lots of stuff because of my relationship to the world around me. Whether that brings me closer to or further from a valid understanding, or both in various respects, can be determined only by applying the criteria for validity that are the same whatever identities you are slotted into.
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Monday, June 13, 2016
Still Pissed Off at Weatherman After All These Years
There’s a review in the New York Times of a new book about the radical times of 1969-70 that devotes a lot of space to recollections of the Weather Underground. The usual suspects are interviewed, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd. There is some contrition, some bombast.
But listen to this quote from the review by Jon Wiener:
Those of us who came from less exalted stock and still dreamed of a majoritarian, radical movement were simply plowed under. The media, transfixed by glamor and violence, ignored us, and before long we had become invisible even to ourselves.
Incidentally, in the mid-70s I had occasion to look at my (heavily redacted) FBI files. In it was a claim that I had harbored a Weather fugitive earlier in the decade. I can remember how upset it made me that I had been targeted on the basis of a supposed act that I never would have committed, since I regarded the Weather folk, pound for pound, to be more reactionary in their political effect than the most violent cop in riot gear.
But listen to this quote from the review by Jon Wiener:
Reading these interviews, it’s not hard to understand what you might call the Weatherman temptation. S.D.S. had held the first antiwar march on Washington in 1965, but four years later the war was bigger than ever. Over those four years, Bill Ayers says, “we had tried everything that we could think of: organizing, knocking on doors, mass demonstrations, getting arrested, militant nonviolent resistance.” None of it worked to end the war — and the Weathermen understood why, as one of its leaders, Mark Rudd, explained: Ordinary Americans, especially white workers, were morons — except that’s not the word he used.And this is the part that really, really got me at the time and gets me still. Many, maybe most, of the Weather honchos came from upper income, corporate families. They grew up thinking workers were stupid, and when they became “revolutionaries” they still thought this, although now they had new reasons. The apple doesn’t fall very far, does it?
Those of us who came from less exalted stock and still dreamed of a majoritarian, radical movement were simply plowed under. The media, transfixed by glamor and violence, ignored us, and before long we had become invisible even to ourselves.
Incidentally, in the mid-70s I had occasion to look at my (heavily redacted) FBI files. In it was a claim that I had harbored a Weather fugitive earlier in the decade. I can remember how upset it made me that I had been targeted on the basis of a supposed act that I never would have committed, since I regarded the Weather folk, pound for pound, to be more reactionary in their political effect than the most violent cop in riot gear.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Doctrinaire, Uninformed Ideas in Economics Never Die: The Mankiw Edition
Greg Mankiw, that guru of Econ 101ism, displays his art in a wave-of-the-hand dismissal of that old bugaboo, rent control today. I've already had my say here and here.
When I count my blessings in life, one of them is that I never had to be a student in Mankiw's class in "thinking like an economist".
When I count my blessings in life, one of them is that I never had to be a student in Mankiw's class in "thinking like an economist".
Saturday, June 11, 2016
An Ethical Debate about Robots, Shorter Workweeks and Unemployment
I was delighted to receive a cordial and thoughtful reply from Omar al-Ubaydli to my open-letter blog post to him about his "counterpoint" piece on shorter working time and unemployment. The purpose of this post is both to reply to Omar and to recap and contextualize the exchange to make it accessible to the general reader.
A few days ago, I was writing a blog post about the significance of the "first use" of the expression, "lump o' labour" in an 1843 novel by John Mills. Mills's use of the expression would appear to faithfully reflect what its common meaning and context of usage would have been to ordinary working people in the mid-19th century -- at least there is no reason to suspect otherwise. That meaning would have been concrete and definite: the expenditure of just so much effort to perform a given task. The context would have been the idea of a appropriate, proportionate compensation for the amount of effort expended.
In the midst of writing that post, I heard about the point-counterpoint exchange on shorter working time and employment between Dean Baker and Omar al-Ubaydli. Dean's piece was titled Shorter Workweeks Will Defeat the Robots and Omar's was titled, Shorter Workweeks Will Increase Unemployment. Omar's counterpoint waved the red flag of the fixed amount of work:
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions," Thomas Pynchon warned in Gravity's Rainbow, "they don’t have to worry about answers." In this case, the question they don't want to worry about answering has to do with proportions, not quantities.
A few days ago, I was writing a blog post about the significance of the "first use" of the expression, "lump o' labour" in an 1843 novel by John Mills. Mills's use of the expression would appear to faithfully reflect what its common meaning and context of usage would have been to ordinary working people in the mid-19th century -- at least there is no reason to suspect otherwise. That meaning would have been concrete and definite: the expenditure of just so much effort to perform a given task. The context would have been the idea of a appropriate, proportionate compensation for the amount of effort expended.
In the midst of writing that post, I heard about the point-counterpoint exchange on shorter working time and employment between Dean Baker and Omar al-Ubaydli. Dean's piece was titled Shorter Workweeks Will Defeat the Robots and Omar's was titled, Shorter Workweeks Will Increase Unemployment. Omar's counterpoint waved the red flag of the fixed amount of work:
A glaring red flag is how simple the proposed solution seems to be: Proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people. High unemployment, they contend, is due to allocating too many hours to current employees. A more equitable redistribution of work hours, according to this logic, may diminish unemployment: Instead of Alex and Chris working 45 hours a week and Jo being out of a job, each can work 30 hours, eliminating unemployment.
...
In contrast with an elementary work-sharing analyses, the real world reveals that there isn’t a fixed amount of work to be done. The total demand for labor depends upon how it’s restricted or divided.Much of the discourse about robots -- and, before that, about automation or machinery -- has revolved around the question of the amount of work that will be left for people to do. This is asking the wrong question. But it is the question they want you to ask.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions," Thomas Pynchon warned in Gravity's Rainbow, "they don’t have to worry about answers." In this case, the question they don't want to worry about answering has to do with proportions, not quantities.
Friday, June 10, 2016
The Purging Of Pablo Picasso
That is the purging from the most public place his political views. This has happened at the Picasso Museum in Paris as a result of its renovation, with its reopening in 2014 after several years removing any hint of Picasso's political views. As it was, he joined the French Communist Party in 1944 and remained a member until his death in 1973 at the age of 92, although there is evidence his enthusiasm waned somewhat after 1968. NevHe admired them for their resistance to the Nazis and also because of their position in the Spanish Civil War. And at the end of WW II, they were the largest political party in France, even if today their support is in the neighborhood of 2% or less.
The sign of this shift is the disappearance of his 1951 "Massacre in Korea" from display in the museum, a protest against US actions in Korea modeled on a famous painting by Goya. Prior to the renovation, it was the culmination of a visit to the museum, the last thing one saw as one went through the museum, and an obvious indication of his political views. It is now not to be seen, nor is there any other overtly political painting or sculpture in the museum, much less any mention of his political views on any of what one reads on the walls as one goes through. Picasso's political views have been purged from the museum. Instead there is now a massive amount of his sculpture, almost more than there are paintings, much of this not well known and also very impressive.
Of course there was always a problem regarding Picasso and the Communist Party, a great big contradiction. They, or at least the Soviets, hated his modern art, which they considered to be bourgeois western decadence. Picasso was fully aware of this, but it never seemed to bother him. He even painted Stalin in a way he thought complimentary, but the Soviets hated it. I do not know where this painting is. And he was also quite wealthy in his older age and very much involved with selling his painting to wealthy capitalists and all that. But that Picasso had this contradiction, this is no longer to be seen or known in the museum where the greatest amount of his art work is located. Whatever one thinks of his views, something has been lost.
Addendum: Let me relate this to the current situation in France, where indeed the Communist Party may be making its last stand as a power in French society and economy. As many of you may know, the Socialist government of Hollande has proposed a labor "reform" removing many rights of workers that is supposed to raise employment. The more leftist labor group, the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), closely linked to the French Communist Party is strongly opposing this and has been engaging in strikes, and is calling for a general strike in a few days. It is not being supported by the more conservative Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail (CFDT). While CGT union members are only 2 and 1/2 percent of the French labor force, a percentage about matching support for the Communist Party, they are in some crucial sectors, especially transportation, so if they all go out on strike, they can really shut the nation down, and the European soccer tournament has just started. Despite their low membership, many in France are sympathetic. This is a big showdown, but if they lose, they may go the way of people recognizing Picasso's membership in the French Communist Party.
Barkley Rosser
The sign of this shift is the disappearance of his 1951 "Massacre in Korea" from display in the museum, a protest against US actions in Korea modeled on a famous painting by Goya. Prior to the renovation, it was the culmination of a visit to the museum, the last thing one saw as one went through the museum, and an obvious indication of his political views. It is now not to be seen, nor is there any other overtly political painting or sculpture in the museum, much less any mention of his political views on any of what one reads on the walls as one goes through. Picasso's political views have been purged from the museum. Instead there is now a massive amount of his sculpture, almost more than there are paintings, much of this not well known and also very impressive.
Of course there was always a problem regarding Picasso and the Communist Party, a great big contradiction. They, or at least the Soviets, hated his modern art, which they considered to be bourgeois western decadence. Picasso was fully aware of this, but it never seemed to bother him. He even painted Stalin in a way he thought complimentary, but the Soviets hated it. I do not know where this painting is. And he was also quite wealthy in his older age and very much involved with selling his painting to wealthy capitalists and all that. But that Picasso had this contradiction, this is no longer to be seen or known in the museum where the greatest amount of his art work is located. Whatever one thinks of his views, something has been lost.
Addendum: Let me relate this to the current situation in France, where indeed the Communist Party may be making its last stand as a power in French society and economy. As many of you may know, the Socialist government of Hollande has proposed a labor "reform" removing many rights of workers that is supposed to raise employment. The more leftist labor group, the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), closely linked to the French Communist Party is strongly opposing this and has been engaging in strikes, and is calling for a general strike in a few days. It is not being supported by the more conservative Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail (CFDT). While CGT union members are only 2 and 1/2 percent of the French labor force, a percentage about matching support for the Communist Party, they are in some crucial sectors, especially transportation, so if they all go out on strike, they can really shut the nation down, and the European soccer tournament has just started. Despite their low membership, many in France are sympathetic. This is a big showdown, but if they lose, they may go the way of people recognizing Picasso's membership in the French Communist Party.
Barkley Rosser
Californians, Your Votes Don't Count!
Update: It is hard to tell exactly what is going on here. According to a pdf from the Secretary of State, as of 9:10 a.m. today, approximately 2,640.855 ballots remain uncounted. The total I gave below of 873,242 is based on the total reported number of presidential ballots cast minus the vote totals for all of the candidates. As Bruce Webb mentions in comments, Los Angeles and Orange counties do indeed have a large share of that 2.6 million -- some 822,000 + but that still leaves a half dozen or so counties with over 100,000 uncounted ballots each, etc.
According to the California secretary of state's office, as of 11:04 a.m., June 10, 2016, a total of 873,242 votes from the June 7 presidential primary -- about 13.7% of the votes cast -- remain uncounted. A little more than 68% of the votes already counted were in the Democratic primary. If the party affiliation of the uncounted votes are proportional to those already counted, approximately 570,674 Democratic primary votes remain uncounted.
Given Hillary Clinton's lead of 456,699 among counted votes, it is unlikely the final count will affect who "won" the state but since delegates are assigned proportional to votes, it may well affect the number of delegates each candidate received from California.
AP already made it clear that Californians' votes don't count by proclaiming Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee the night before the California primary.
According to the California secretary of state's office, as of 11:04 a.m., June 10, 2016, a total of 873,242 votes from the June 7 presidential primary -- about 13.7% of the votes cast -- remain uncounted. A little more than 68% of the votes already counted were in the Democratic primary. If the party affiliation of the uncounted votes are proportional to those already counted, approximately 570,674 Democratic primary votes remain uncounted.
Given Hillary Clinton's lead of 456,699 among counted votes, it is unlikely the final count will affect who "won" the state but since delegates are assigned proportional to votes, it may well affect the number of delegates each candidate received from California.
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| Nothing to see here, move along. |
Thursday, June 9, 2016
A Possible Perfect Economic Storm For Donald Trump
Right now Donald Trump is down in the polls, with his remarks about the judge on his Trump University case reverberating and Hillary Clinton getting a bounce from having finally captured the Dem nomination (I know, I know, Bernie still has a chance if she gets indicted before the convention, but... ). But it was just quite recently that they were nearly even in the polls, and that condition could return. Nobody should forget that at this time in 1980, Jimmy Carter had a double digit lead in the polls over Ronald Reagan and Dems were just salivating at the chance to run against that "extremist." But, well, heck, there we go again.
So the problem is that it looks like the US may be weakening. Last month's job report was simply dismal, and most are writing it off as a one month wonder. I hope so. But there have also been reports that the US job market has been weakening since January. We may be on a trend here that may be hard to reverse.
Janet Yellen has been still talking up interest rate increases, but even she recognizes "four uncertainties," and a concatenation of more than one of these could easily tip a weakening and fragile world economy downwards even into a recession, possibly with a market crash this fall. The obvious near term shock could be positive Brexit vote, and while I think some have exaggerated the near term badness of this for the UK economy, even a small shock at the wrong time can push things over, as old chaos theorist me knows all too well, and we may have such a fragile situation.
Once things get going down this can easily spread. Parts of Latin America, especially Brazil, are not doing well. Europe has interest rates as low as they can go pretty much, even though all of the EU except Greece currently has positive GDP growth. Concerns about China have retreated somewhat, but its property market remains way overvalued, and its growth has decelerated. All this is fragile. And one of the uncertainties is oil, where a shock of one sort or another could show up with little warning.
In short, the probability of the US economy actually going into a decline prior to the November election is higher than many think, I think. All it probably takes is a couple of those uncertainties hitting, and the Fed is pretty limited in what it can do in the short term, and, of course, there will be no fiscal policy stimulus. Heck, the Republicans in Congress would welcome such an event, given its likely political result.
Throw on top of this the non-trivial possibility that terrorist groups will make a major attack shortly before the election in an effort to get Trump elected (having an overtly Muslim-hating US president would be great for their recruiting), and, well, I shall be holding my breath all the way, whatever others may be doing.
Barkley Rosser
So the problem is that it looks like the US may be weakening. Last month's job report was simply dismal, and most are writing it off as a one month wonder. I hope so. But there have also been reports that the US job market has been weakening since January. We may be on a trend here that may be hard to reverse.
Janet Yellen has been still talking up interest rate increases, but even she recognizes "four uncertainties," and a concatenation of more than one of these could easily tip a weakening and fragile world economy downwards even into a recession, possibly with a market crash this fall. The obvious near term shock could be positive Brexit vote, and while I think some have exaggerated the near term badness of this for the UK economy, even a small shock at the wrong time can push things over, as old chaos theorist me knows all too well, and we may have such a fragile situation.
Once things get going down this can easily spread. Parts of Latin America, especially Brazil, are not doing well. Europe has interest rates as low as they can go pretty much, even though all of the EU except Greece currently has positive GDP growth. Concerns about China have retreated somewhat, but its property market remains way overvalued, and its growth has decelerated. All this is fragile. And one of the uncertainties is oil, where a shock of one sort or another could show up with little warning.
In short, the probability of the US economy actually going into a decline prior to the November election is higher than many think, I think. All it probably takes is a couple of those uncertainties hitting, and the Fed is pretty limited in what it can do in the short term, and, of course, there will be no fiscal policy stimulus. Heck, the Republicans in Congress would welcome such an event, given its likely political result.
Throw on top of this the non-trivial possibility that terrorist groups will make a major attack shortly before the election in an effort to get Trump elected (having an overtly Muslim-hating US president would be great for their recruiting), and, well, I shall be holding my breath all the way, whatever others may be doing.
Barkley Rosser
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Hoisted from Comments: Omar al-Ubaydli Replies
Here is Omar's response to my blog/letter addressed to him. I will have a follow up post either tomorrow or over the weekend but I just want to say I think this is a genuine breakthrough, facilitated by the Rapoport ethical debate prescription. There is a lot of additional context but the immediate context can be gleaned from the series of posts commencing with Pain for Profit on June 6 and including As Common as Ditchwater and the aforementioned Dear Omar al-Ubaydli. See also my posts back in April on game theory and Rapoport.
Dear Tom
Thank you for taking the time to provide a comprehensive response, and your position is much clearer to me than before. Here are some of my thoughts.
1) In retrospect it was sloppy of me to imply that all the proponents hold a certain position when the reality is clearly that only some of them do.
2) Your summary of my position is satisfactory but it omits the most important part, which is what the data from Europe show.
I was asked to take a position on the expected effect of shorter work weeks on unemployment as part of a point counterpoint. My position is primarily based on what the data show, which is mixed effects, but never a substantial decrease in unemployment.
Given the position of the other contributor it made sense to cast me in the "more unemployment" role. While many of the other outcome variables that you consider are important they are not part of the brief, and one can only consider so much in 750 words. Also in the EU unemployment is unquestionably the overriding impetus behind work sharing schemes, assuming that one takes politicians at face value.
I then use economic theory to explain these empirical findings, and to explain why simple models may underlie the position of some proponents.
3) The goal of my contribution was not to provide, or claim to provide, the final word on the issues at hand. Point-counterpoints are supposed to engender constructive discourse. I think that your contributions are valuable, but they seem to regard my contribution as verging on the conspiratorial, or reeking of ignorance. I think that you should lower the bar on what you expect to be delivered by such pieces, and refrain from accusing contributors of lying, especially since you are clearly not just a troll, but that's a minor point.
4) If I was to repeat the exercise, it would have been useful for the brief given to the authors to be disclosed openly to minimize confusion over the goals of the contributors.
Best
Omar
Dean Baker on Australia’s 25 Percent Corporate Tax Rate
Dean is right about a few things here:
As Australia’s election campaign heats up, it seems that one of the central issues is likely to be a plan to cut the country’s corporate income tax from 30 percent to 25 percent. The argument is the same that proponents of corporate tax cuts make everywhere; it will cause companies to invest more money in Australia. This is great children’s story, but it has little basis in reality. There actually is a great deal of research on this topic and it finds very little relationship between corporate tax rates and investment. In the case of my country, the United States, the investment share of GDP peaked in the 1970s when corporations faced a 50 percent tax rate, considerably higher than the 35 percent rate they now face. Of course since U.S. corporations have become quite adept at avoiding taxes, their effective tax rate is close to 20 percent.His main theme, however, is very misplaced (even if the last sentence in the above quote is quite right):
One of the ironies of proposals to reduce Australia’s tax rate is that the U.S. Treasury would be a major beneficiary. The logic is straightforward, even if seldom advertised by proponents of the tax cut. Under tax treaties, the U.S. credits it multinationals with tax payments to the Australian government on a dollar for basis. This means that if a U.S. multinational has its Australian tax bill cut by $10 million then its U.S. tax bill likely increases by the same amount. The money saved by the company in Australia will go straight to the U.S. Treasury.This statement not only contradicts his claim about U.S. multinationals having an effective tax rate near 20% - it forgets about permanent deferral of repatriating foreign based profits. Dean may have been misled by the Australia Institute:
It’s important to understand that the US is the largest foreign investor in Australia accounting for over a quarter of all foreign investment. All of those companies will pay the same tax as before, only less to the ATO.The Australian Tax Office (ATO) is actually much better than the IRS at enforcing transfer pricing. The UK government actually cut its tax rate from 30% to 20% but is putting pressure on its tax authority to step up its game with respect to transfer pricing enforcement. We Americans should learn from the Aussies and the Brits. Also note that if only 25% of Australian foreign investment is from U.S. based multinationals, then the other 75% is from other nations which often have tax rates that may be lower than 30%.
Hung Out to Dry: "Democracy" in the U.S.A.
This is a "polling station" in Long Beach, California at Super Suds Laundromat.
Let's not quibble about AP "calling" the Democratic Party nomination the day before the primary voting or whether the broken machines and fouled-up voter registration rolls were a conspiracy to suppress votes.
Just look at the picture. This is a picture of official contempt for the voting process. The polling place is only in a laundromat because they couldn't fit all the paraphernalia into a portable outhouse. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared, in Citizens United, that only money counts as speech. The on-the-cheap dysfunctional voting system in the U.S.A. is more of that same speech.
It says: "your votes ain't worth shit."
Let's not quibble about AP "calling" the Democratic Party nomination the day before the primary voting or whether the broken machines and fouled-up voter registration rolls were a conspiracy to suppress votes.
Just look at the picture. This is a picture of official contempt for the voting process. The polling place is only in a laundromat because they couldn't fit all the paraphernalia into a portable outhouse. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared, in Citizens United, that only money counts as speech. The on-the-cheap dysfunctional voting system in the U.S.A. is more of that same speech.
It says: "your votes ain't worth shit."
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Dear Omar al-Ubaydli:
Yes, Omar, I would be delighted to elaborate. Thank you for asking.
The point I am trying to make was stated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that." The truth of that maxim is illustrated by the claim, in your counterpoint to Dean Baker, that "proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people."
Not only is that assertion untrue, but it has been repeated ad nauseum for two hundred and thirty-six years without any effort by claimants to ascertain what "proponents of work-sharing" (etc.) actually believe.
Not only is the claim unfounded, but it has been refuted half a dozen times or more by notable economists. Those rebuttals have never been addressed by the antagonists who repeat and repeat the fixed amount of work mantra.
Not only is the claim untrue and unfounded, but it is rote -- a monotonous, mechanical repetition of the same catchwords and phrases that have been recited a thousand time over the span of more than two centuries.
The Rise Of Negative Interest Assets
An article buried deep in the Weekend Financial Times reports that the total of public bonds bearing negative yields has now passed US $ 10 trillion. I have made an effort to check on the current global size of such issues. I found a 2012 number that put it at 56 trillion, so maybe this number has now risen to 70 trillion of higher. But I am sure it is still well below 100 trillion. So, this total of negative yield public bonds is well over 10%, whatever precisely it is. It is now a non-trivial portion of the total.
The article also reported that there is also a noticeable, if much smaller, amount of privately issued such bonds, now at about US $ 380 billion. This is certainly a miniscule portion of those bonds, but most people probably think that this total is zero or barely above.
I am one of those who early on became aware that we might have nominal negative interest rates (as well as negative prices) with these first appearing momentarily publicly in the mid-1990s in Japan, even as the vast majority of economists declared such a phenomenon to be impossible. As a a matter of fact I know that the federal funds rate went negative during intra-day trading on Dec. 31, 1986, the last day of the old tax code prior to the implementation of the Reagan tax simplification. The rate also went as high as 18% during that day of wild trading, obviously an extreme case. I have this from the person who handled Fannie Mae's trading account with the Fed and is not public informiation. But it happened.
I have been someone not all that bothered by this phenomenon and have even welcomed moves by central banks to use them. However, I confess that seeing a rising portion of public assets bearing such negative yields, I become concerned about longer run if this continues. Yes, boring annuities and insurance companies and such entities, and all that, but they have trouble doing what they are supposed to do if there are not some positive interest rate assets around out there. I imagine that the vast majority will remain positive, so probably this is not a big deal. If the world economy will just get growing more solidly, these negative yield bonds will disappear, and I am not a fan of some of parts of the insurance industry, such as the US health care part. But if in fact positive yield bonds become scarce, there will be a lot of things society will have to do, such as taking over insuring against fire, theft, and many other things. This is probably silly paranoia, but then I was aware of the reality of negative interest rates long before most thought such were even remotely possible.
Barkley Rosser.
The article also reported that there is also a noticeable, if much smaller, amount of privately issued such bonds, now at about US $ 380 billion. This is certainly a miniscule portion of those bonds, but most people probably think that this total is zero or barely above.
I am one of those who early on became aware that we might have nominal negative interest rates (as well as negative prices) with these first appearing momentarily publicly in the mid-1990s in Japan, even as the vast majority of economists declared such a phenomenon to be impossible. As a a matter of fact I know that the federal funds rate went negative during intra-day trading on Dec. 31, 1986, the last day of the old tax code prior to the implementation of the Reagan tax simplification. The rate also went as high as 18% during that day of wild trading, obviously an extreme case. I have this from the person who handled Fannie Mae's trading account with the Fed and is not public informiation. But it happened.
I have been someone not all that bothered by this phenomenon and have even welcomed moves by central banks to use them. However, I confess that seeing a rising portion of public assets bearing such negative yields, I become concerned about longer run if this continues. Yes, boring annuities and insurance companies and such entities, and all that, but they have trouble doing what they are supposed to do if there are not some positive interest rate assets around out there. I imagine that the vast majority will remain positive, so probably this is not a big deal. If the world economy will just get growing more solidly, these negative yield bonds will disappear, and I am not a fan of some of parts of the insurance industry, such as the US health care part. But if in fact positive yield bonds become scarce, there will be a lot of things society will have to do, such as taking over insuring against fire, theft, and many other things. This is probably silly paranoia, but then I was aware of the reality of negative interest rates long before most thought such were even remotely possible.
Barkley Rosser.
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