I’ve been dutifully reading the op-eds and campaign essays by people opposing I-732, Washington State’s carbon tax initiative, trying to understand what they’re missing. Obviously, emotions are running hotter because of the state’s budget crisis, ultimately a product of its horrible revenue system. And there is no question that 732 is flawed in fundamental respects, mainly because of its misguided attempt to return carbon revenues via tax cuts. But the issue opponents of 732 have seized on is not the inefficiency of using the tax system for returning carbon money, but the principle of revenue recycling itself. They view the carbon tax as a necessary and valuable new revenue source and accuse 732 supporters of being enemies of social justice for trying to return it. If their public statements are to be believed, returning carbon money is no more than a cynical play for the votes of pro-business conservatives and serves no other purpose. How to explain their inability to understand the case for recycling?
Well, I think I may have figured it out, or at least I have a hypothesis. It goes like this:
For PR purposes, environmentalists have sold carbon taxes on the basis of a moralistic interpretation of the “polluter pays” principle: companies that generate carbon emissions should pay for their sins. I can understand why they do this, and I’m sure it polls well and comes out favorably in focus groups. Nevertheless, it’s based on an incomplete representation of how the price mechanism operates. Yes, a tax on manufacturers or energy companies will initially be paid by them, but most of it will be passed along to consumers, as logic dictates it should be. After all, it is not just a few companies, but all of us whose economic choices need to be shifted. You can see this already in the taxes levied on various “sin” products. Cigarette taxes, for instance, are not paid out of reduced tobacco profits; they are passed along to smokers in the form of much higher prices on cigarettes. That’s exactly how the system ought to work, too.
Carbon taxes operate the same way. The general public will end up paying virtually all of it through higher prices, and the argument for recycling the revenues is that doing this protects our real income and living standards. The social justice dimension is about the progressivity of the recycling mechanism, especially since consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive. The true incidence of eco-taxes and the consequent role of recycling are not emphasized by green activists, however, for obvious political reasons. Nevertheless, I had thought that, being informed people, they would know how taxes function.
Maybe I was wrong. Absolutely nothing in the argumentation of the anti-732 crowd conveys an awareness of who will actually pay the carbon tax. These people claim to defend their communities, but their logic depends on ignoring the fact that their communities will pay the freight. Defending them, from their point of view, therefore does not include defraying their higher living expenses. Could this interpretation be correct? It’s believable if you think these “left” groups are uninformed about economics and actually believe the rhetoric that it is only the corporations that will pay carbon taxes. (I have noted this misconception in the writing of Naomi Klein, who has gone on record against 732.) Or, perhaps, it is more devious than this—perhaps the opponents of 732 understand their constituents will pay the tax but believe they will come out ahead by asserting a claim on the tax revenues generated from other communities in the state. Between not understanding and understanding but dishonestly manipulating, I prefer the first.
I could be wrong about all of this, of course. The easiest way for me to be proved wrong would be for committed “social justice” opponents of 732 to explain out loud why they are not concerned about the regressive payments imposed on their own communities by a carbon tax, and therefore why defraying them is not part of their agenda.
Monday, November 7, 2016
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Guns for All
The fracas at yesterday’s Trump rally in Reno shows why we need gun rights now. A man was seen carrying an anti-Trump sign and someone else shouted out that he had a gun. In the confusion, Trump was hustled offstage by his security detail, and meanwhile the crowd was in turmoil as people tried to figure out what was going on.
Obviously, the problem is that this crowd was unarmed, which is why they were afraid of a possible shooter. If everyone had a gun they could go after whoever they thought was threatening them, and they would all be equally safe.
Obviously, the problem is that this crowd was unarmed, which is why they were afraid of a possible shooter. If everyone had a gun they could go after whoever they thought was threatening them, and they would all be equally safe.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
The Hard Core of Neoclassical Economics
There has been an ongoing debate over whether the very notion of a mainstream, neoclassical economics is still valid. As many commentators have pointed out, various departures have been embraced by portions of the profession which, by sociological standards, have to be considered mainstream: these include game theory and interactive expectations with multiple equilibria, behavioral departures from homo oeconomicus, importation of biological and psychological measures of well-being, and so on. So where are we now?
First, note that each item on this list constitutes a relaxation of a default assumption that other economists, not directly engaged in that departure, typically rely on in their own work. Those who are not themselves behavioral economists generally invoke “U-max” unthinkingly, those who are not personally constructing game-theoretic or similar models invoke convexity assumptions to ensure stable, mono-equilibria, etc. The violation of the core axioms coexists with the default status of those same axioms. I think in this paragraph I am simply describing what currently takes place, not theorizing or explaining it.
Second, here’s a hypothesis. Neoclassical economics has evolved to serve an ideological function which is promoted through incentives, the selection of new adepts, and a conceptual hegemony: the purpose of economics is to solve economic problems with minimum, and ideally no, recourse to politics. Thus welfare economics in particular plays a central role, since it is the basis for proposing economic solutions that don’t depend on a political deliberation or selection process. What the theoretical departures that don’t migrate to the core have in common is their incompatibility with welfarism. The exception proves the rule here. Consider the case of the new institutional economics largely centered on transaction cost theory. This has arguably entered the core of the discipline despite having once taken the form of a departure. Is it coincidental that practitioners in this field have no difficulty modifying welfarism to account for institutional frictions?
Reinforcing these ideological pressures are the network externalities associated with core doctrines: like computer programs they gain in value as more users employ them. (I’m indebted to a manuscript I’m currently reviewing for this insight.) That said, the example of NIE convinces me that pure lock-in is not the only consideration in the inertia at the heart of economic doctrine; ideology is also important.
UPDATE: Google is not indexing this post! I wonder if it's because of the header? Poor Imre Lakatos must be turning over in his grave.
UPDATE^2: Imre can relax. Google, after a long hiatus, hoovered me up.
First, note that each item on this list constitutes a relaxation of a default assumption that other economists, not directly engaged in that departure, typically rely on in their own work. Those who are not themselves behavioral economists generally invoke “U-max” unthinkingly, those who are not personally constructing game-theoretic or similar models invoke convexity assumptions to ensure stable, mono-equilibria, etc. The violation of the core axioms coexists with the default status of those same axioms. I think in this paragraph I am simply describing what currently takes place, not theorizing or explaining it.
Second, here’s a hypothesis. Neoclassical economics has evolved to serve an ideological function which is promoted through incentives, the selection of new adepts, and a conceptual hegemony: the purpose of economics is to solve economic problems with minimum, and ideally no, recourse to politics. Thus welfare economics in particular plays a central role, since it is the basis for proposing economic solutions that don’t depend on a political deliberation or selection process. What the theoretical departures that don’t migrate to the core have in common is their incompatibility with welfarism. The exception proves the rule here. Consider the case of the new institutional economics largely centered on transaction cost theory. This has arguably entered the core of the discipline despite having once taken the form of a departure. Is it coincidental that practitioners in this field have no difficulty modifying welfarism to account for institutional frictions?
Reinforcing these ideological pressures are the network externalities associated with core doctrines: like computer programs they gain in value as more users employ them. (I’m indebted to a manuscript I’m currently reviewing for this insight.) That said, the example of NIE convinces me that pure lock-in is not the only consideration in the inertia at the heart of economic doctrine; ideology is also important.
UPDATE: Google is not indexing this post! I wonder if it's because of the header? Poor Imre Lakatos must be turning over in his grave.
UPDATE^2: Imre can relax. Google, after a long hiatus, hoovered me up.
Taking a Stand on Standpoint
This continues my process of thinking out loud about identity politics; previous posts looked at privilege and microaggression. The common theme so far has been the erasure of distinctions that serve a valuable social function. In a way, that is the message today, although the distinctions at risk are far less subtle.
Standpoint theory is based on the premise that the authority—the credibility and effectiveness—of arguments put forward in a social context depend on the identity of the speaker and the priors implicit in the dominant social discourse. A speaker who has a marginalized identity and whose perspective is at odds with the “ruling” priors will be discounted, “not heard”, unless the right of this person to be heard is successfully fought for. The realm of social discourse is defined by such conflicts between suppression and resistance.
A useful perspective on standpoint theory is that it is a contemporary elaboration of the theory of ideology initially promulgated by Marx. For Marx, the relevant identities were classes defined by their relationship to the means of production, such that class position predisposes a person to thinking about the world in one way or another. The dominant class in a given social formation would be in a position to “universalize” their particular perspective; class struggle would therefore extend to the realm of ideas as well as actions as dominated classes attempted to “think for themselves”, moving from the plane of an sich to für sich. In the twentieth century the theory opened out: it no longer depended on a particular analysis of social class, nor even on the primacy of such classes. Any differentiated social position, such as one’s national background, religion, subculture, age, etc., could be the basis for ideological proclivities. This wider conception of ideology begins to appear in Karl Mannheim and his program for a sociology of knowledge. What standpoint theory does, to a large extent, is place the emphasis on a particular set of social differentiations (race, gender and sexuality primarily) and on the interpersonal level of speaking and hearing.
But a giant problem arises from failing to recognize what all this theory is about. The theory of ideology was never properly about what is true about the world; it is a theory of belief, not truth. In his better moments, Marx recognized the validity of any particular analysis of the economic order depended on objective criteria—logical consistency and the weight of empirical evidence. The utility of a theory of ideology is to help us understand why societies typically labor under dominant ideas that are of questionable validity. To point out the function of ideology is to liberate thought from the presumption that, if a particular argument is widely believed, it should be granted some corresponding measure of respect. That’s obviously useful for a radical thinker like Marx or, I hope, me and you.
There was a form of vulgar Marxism that failed to recognize this distinction. It regarded ideological status as equivalent to truth status, or more crudely, claimed that there are no objective criteria for assessing truth claims, only the interests of different classes. If an argument could be shown to be consistent with proletarian ideology, it was “wrong” from a bourgeois point of view and vice versa. There was no higher court of appeals. This horrible philosophy, which gave us show trials and Lysenkoism, eventually fell into disrepute. Its error is not in claiming that there ideologies, which there clearly are, but in construing the theory of ideology as extending to validity and not just the empirical question of who tends to believe what.
The fundamental problem with standpoint theory as a successor to the classical theory of ideology is that, like vulgar Marxism, it denies the possibility of objective criteria for assessing validity. There is only the social arena of speaking and hearing and no reflective realm in which logical coherence and empirical support can be applied to assessing validity. But wait! I hear a voice say, “Of course there’s no reflective realm; that’s just your privilege speaking. All realms are social and governed by the authority, contested or otherwise, of dominant identities.” That’s an argument against the distinction between belief and validity, that there is no validity apart from the beliefs of those who claim to weigh it. My response is this is exactly the error that deservedly sank vulgar Marxism. Ideology, or standpoints, certainly cloud the process of assessing validity, but they do not require us to conflate validity and social authority.
On a practical level, it’s entirely justified for someone to stand up and say, “You’re not listening to me because you have not questioned a social framework in which my perspectives are ignored or even made unthinkable according to your unexamined assumptions.” There really is a struggle to be waged to expand the range of views that are heard and taken seriously, and to call into question assumptions based on the experiences and interests of those who are socially dominant. What is not justified is for the speaker to claim that being heard has anything in particular to do with being right. We are all fallible and often fail even to identify and express our own interior thoughts and emotions, much less claims about the external world.
There is a second problem with standpoint theory that also reflects past problems in vulgar Marxism. In the bad old days of the Third International, the theory of ideology was applied at the individual level: an author or political or cultural figure would be assigned an ideological label, and that was that. Having been exposed as a purveyor of bourgeois ideology, there was nothing that could be said in your defense. This primitive philosophy was rejected because its inherent reductionism became laughable when it wasn’t tragic. Ideological factors exist and can be examined, but human beings are not reducible to them.
To be precise, there are two aspects of ideological “non-reduction”. First, as an empirical proposition, the theory of ideology points to different distributions of belief. If you plotted probability density functions on various dimensions of belief, different social groups (such as classes) would have different functions, but they would overlap substantially. The second is that belief systems are not independent, separate components of human subjective life or behavior (including political participation and cultural creation). There are many influences on who we are and how we act, many of which we scarcely understand, and the role played by a given ideological element can vary enormously from one person to the next or even one social situation to the next. The field of mutual influence within a person is vastly greater than the field of ideological influences. It’s important to recognize that neither shortcoming of reductionism is removed by pivoting from single to multiple ideological spectra, i.e. intersectionality.
The problem of reductionism haunts the rhetoric of “voices”. Individuals are at risk of being reduced to the ideology or standpoint associated deterministically with their identity, and the content of their speech to this component. To point this out is not to argue against affirmatively reaching out to include underrepresented groups. Distributions of beliefs and perceptions really do exist, empirically, and these elements really do contribute to the content of what people say. But we are never simply instantiations of an identity (as implied by the locution “speaking as a....”), and our personal voices may be anywhere across the distribution of views associated with our “category”.
To sum up, standpoint theory is a contemporary elaboration of the classical theory of ideology. It shifts the emphasis to culturally defined differences, and it offers a more elaborate understanding of social process. But it falls back on problems that appeared long ago in the guise of vulgar Marxism: the failure to distinguish between a theory of belief (or social authority) and a theory of validity, and a reductionist exclusion of the many aspects of belief and action that cannot be explained by this particular theory.
UPDATE: Epistemological confusion becomes legal liability in a Virginia courtroom. Rolling Stone was found guilty of having deliberately published defamatory claims against a UVA associate dean; the article accused her of covering up a campus rape. RS’s problem was that it relied entirely on a single source, the presumed rape victim, without doing the additional research to confirm her story. As it turned out, a modicum of investigation would have shown the story to be false.
Pay attention to the mea culpa issued by the magazine:
Standpoint theory is based on the premise that the authority—the credibility and effectiveness—of arguments put forward in a social context depend on the identity of the speaker and the priors implicit in the dominant social discourse. A speaker who has a marginalized identity and whose perspective is at odds with the “ruling” priors will be discounted, “not heard”, unless the right of this person to be heard is successfully fought for. The realm of social discourse is defined by such conflicts between suppression and resistance.
A useful perspective on standpoint theory is that it is a contemporary elaboration of the theory of ideology initially promulgated by Marx. For Marx, the relevant identities were classes defined by their relationship to the means of production, such that class position predisposes a person to thinking about the world in one way or another. The dominant class in a given social formation would be in a position to “universalize” their particular perspective; class struggle would therefore extend to the realm of ideas as well as actions as dominated classes attempted to “think for themselves”, moving from the plane of an sich to für sich. In the twentieth century the theory opened out: it no longer depended on a particular analysis of social class, nor even on the primacy of such classes. Any differentiated social position, such as one’s national background, religion, subculture, age, etc., could be the basis for ideological proclivities. This wider conception of ideology begins to appear in Karl Mannheim and his program for a sociology of knowledge. What standpoint theory does, to a large extent, is place the emphasis on a particular set of social differentiations (race, gender and sexuality primarily) and on the interpersonal level of speaking and hearing.
But a giant problem arises from failing to recognize what all this theory is about. The theory of ideology was never properly about what is true about the world; it is a theory of belief, not truth. In his better moments, Marx recognized the validity of any particular analysis of the economic order depended on objective criteria—logical consistency and the weight of empirical evidence. The utility of a theory of ideology is to help us understand why societies typically labor under dominant ideas that are of questionable validity. To point out the function of ideology is to liberate thought from the presumption that, if a particular argument is widely believed, it should be granted some corresponding measure of respect. That’s obviously useful for a radical thinker like Marx or, I hope, me and you.
There was a form of vulgar Marxism that failed to recognize this distinction. It regarded ideological status as equivalent to truth status, or more crudely, claimed that there are no objective criteria for assessing truth claims, only the interests of different classes. If an argument could be shown to be consistent with proletarian ideology, it was “wrong” from a bourgeois point of view and vice versa. There was no higher court of appeals. This horrible philosophy, which gave us show trials and Lysenkoism, eventually fell into disrepute. Its error is not in claiming that there ideologies, which there clearly are, but in construing the theory of ideology as extending to validity and not just the empirical question of who tends to believe what.
The fundamental problem with standpoint theory as a successor to the classical theory of ideology is that, like vulgar Marxism, it denies the possibility of objective criteria for assessing validity. There is only the social arena of speaking and hearing and no reflective realm in which logical coherence and empirical support can be applied to assessing validity. But wait! I hear a voice say, “Of course there’s no reflective realm; that’s just your privilege speaking. All realms are social and governed by the authority, contested or otherwise, of dominant identities.” That’s an argument against the distinction between belief and validity, that there is no validity apart from the beliefs of those who claim to weigh it. My response is this is exactly the error that deservedly sank vulgar Marxism. Ideology, or standpoints, certainly cloud the process of assessing validity, but they do not require us to conflate validity and social authority.
On a practical level, it’s entirely justified for someone to stand up and say, “You’re not listening to me because you have not questioned a social framework in which my perspectives are ignored or even made unthinkable according to your unexamined assumptions.” There really is a struggle to be waged to expand the range of views that are heard and taken seriously, and to call into question assumptions based on the experiences and interests of those who are socially dominant. What is not justified is for the speaker to claim that being heard has anything in particular to do with being right. We are all fallible and often fail even to identify and express our own interior thoughts and emotions, much less claims about the external world.
There is a second problem with standpoint theory that also reflects past problems in vulgar Marxism. In the bad old days of the Third International, the theory of ideology was applied at the individual level: an author or political or cultural figure would be assigned an ideological label, and that was that. Having been exposed as a purveyor of bourgeois ideology, there was nothing that could be said in your defense. This primitive philosophy was rejected because its inherent reductionism became laughable when it wasn’t tragic. Ideological factors exist and can be examined, but human beings are not reducible to them.
To be precise, there are two aspects of ideological “non-reduction”. First, as an empirical proposition, the theory of ideology points to different distributions of belief. If you plotted probability density functions on various dimensions of belief, different social groups (such as classes) would have different functions, but they would overlap substantially. The second is that belief systems are not independent, separate components of human subjective life or behavior (including political participation and cultural creation). There are many influences on who we are and how we act, many of which we scarcely understand, and the role played by a given ideological element can vary enormously from one person to the next or even one social situation to the next. The field of mutual influence within a person is vastly greater than the field of ideological influences. It’s important to recognize that neither shortcoming of reductionism is removed by pivoting from single to multiple ideological spectra, i.e. intersectionality.
The problem of reductionism haunts the rhetoric of “voices”. Individuals are at risk of being reduced to the ideology or standpoint associated deterministically with their identity, and the content of their speech to this component. To point this out is not to argue against affirmatively reaching out to include underrepresented groups. Distributions of beliefs and perceptions really do exist, empirically, and these elements really do contribute to the content of what people say. But we are never simply instantiations of an identity (as implied by the locution “speaking as a....”), and our personal voices may be anywhere across the distribution of views associated with our “category”.
To sum up, standpoint theory is a contemporary elaboration of the classical theory of ideology. It shifts the emphasis to culturally defined differences, and it offers a more elaborate understanding of social process. But it falls back on problems that appeared long ago in the guise of vulgar Marxism: the failure to distinguish between a theory of belief (or social authority) and a theory of validity, and a reductionist exclusion of the many aspects of belief and action that cannot be explained by this particular theory.
UPDATE: Epistemological confusion becomes legal liability in a Virginia courtroom. Rolling Stone was found guilty of having deliberately published defamatory claims against a UVA associate dean; the article accused her of covering up a campus rape. RS’s problem was that it relied entirely on a single source, the presumed rape victim, without doing the additional research to confirm her story. As it turned out, a modicum of investigation would have shown the story to be false.
Pay attention to the mea culpa issued by the magazine:
In our desire to present this complicated issue from the perspective of a survivor, we overlooked reporting paths and made journalistic mistakes that we are committed to never making again.In a nutshell, they confused the claim of an individual from a victimized group to be heard with the empirical validity of her claim. It was not only acceptable, it was right for RS to aggressively pursue this lead, but the objective criteria of validity still apply. If you don’t think there’s any such thing as objective validity, try out that argument in court.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
The Biggest Disjuncture Ever Between Public Opinion And Professional Economists?
I just heard on Anderson Cooper that the issue on which the public most trusts Trump over Clinton is on who would manage the economy better. This is in spite of the fact that he would have made more money if he had just put his inheritance in index funds rather than doing what he has done, that he has declared numerous bankruptcies, been sued numerous times for violating contracts and fraudulent dealings, and has refused to release tax returns that apparently contain all kinds of border line or over the border misbehaviors, along with a lot of other stuff not making him look the good businessman people think he is.
OTOH, if one defines "professional economists" as those with PhDs in economics (I grant that this can be debated, but I am going with it for now), then it appears that we have never seen such a lopsided ratio of these people supporting one of the major candidates over the other, with the balance just the opposite of the public. If one looks at former Chairs of the CEA or Secretaries of the Treasury who worked for Republican presidents, not one has come out for Trump. Now, most of them have not come out for Clinton, which is a contrast with former GOP National Security Advisers and Secretaries of State, quite a few of whom have come out for her. But it remains that this is an unprecedented situation.
More to the point is to actually go looking for PhD economists who are supporting Trump. Now I suspect that there are more than have been publicly identified. But in terms of publicly released petitions or publicly released statements, the number is abysmally low, on the order of five or six to the best I can determine, and, frankly, they are by and large not a group to write home about. The one who has gotten the most attention and was by all reports the main author of the main economic policy statement put out by the Trump campaign, is Peter Navarro of UC-Irvine (I confess to not having heard of him prior to his recent appearance as a Trump economic adviser). Most economists have viewed that policy statement as barely coherent and full of falsehoods and contradictions. I do not usually play credentials games, but Navarro has had very few publications in refereed journals in recent years, and his work has not been heavily cited. Of the five or six others, only two do I know anything about. One is John Lott, the favorite economist of the NRA, who once had a sock puppet by himself praising himself called "Mary Rosh," has been frequently accused of using fraudulent or misleading data in his papers, and has been unable to hold an academic job, even in conservative departments, despite his extensive and heavily cited publication record (with many of those citations being in papers criticizing his work). Lott is currently at a think tank he founded whose funding sources are not known to me. The other is probably the most respectable in my eyes, Svetozar Pejovich, now emeritus at Texas A&M. The most well-known of his papers have been about property rights in the former Yugoslavia. These have been respectable, but he has not done much recently, and probably the only reason I know his work is that comparative economics is one of my fields of research. The bottom line is that this is both a very skimpy and unimpressive list.
Of course his supposed top economic advisers are not fully professional economists. While Lawrence Kudlow has intoned on economic issues for many years on TV and elsewhere, his academic education ends with an undergraduate degree in history, and his economic forecasting record has been so bad that one can expect to make money by assuming that what will happen economically will be just the opposite from what he forecasts. Another is Stephen Moore, who does have a masters degree in economics, but his forecasting record is not much better than Kudlow's (we are still waiting for that hyperinflation both forecast so vigorously). He currently carries the title "economist" at the Heritage Foundation, so maybe I should count him as a "professional economists" too.The rest of his supposed board is basically a lot of hedge fund traders, maybe mostly rich people, but not professional economists.
So, there we have it. I do think that sometimes when conventional views of professional economists disagree with public opinion, that the latter may be closer to the truth than the former. But I must say that this particular situation seems to be the largest such disjuncture that I know of, and on this one, I am with the vast majority of professional economists against apparently widespread public opinion. I can only hope that this strongly held public opinion does not result in us having to suffer through policies pushed by the pretty pathetic set of professional economists Trump has backing him.
Barkley Rosser
OTOH, if one defines "professional economists" as those with PhDs in economics (I grant that this can be debated, but I am going with it for now), then it appears that we have never seen such a lopsided ratio of these people supporting one of the major candidates over the other, with the balance just the opposite of the public. If one looks at former Chairs of the CEA or Secretaries of the Treasury who worked for Republican presidents, not one has come out for Trump. Now, most of them have not come out for Clinton, which is a contrast with former GOP National Security Advisers and Secretaries of State, quite a few of whom have come out for her. But it remains that this is an unprecedented situation.
More to the point is to actually go looking for PhD economists who are supporting Trump. Now I suspect that there are more than have been publicly identified. But in terms of publicly released petitions or publicly released statements, the number is abysmally low, on the order of five or six to the best I can determine, and, frankly, they are by and large not a group to write home about. The one who has gotten the most attention and was by all reports the main author of the main economic policy statement put out by the Trump campaign, is Peter Navarro of UC-Irvine (I confess to not having heard of him prior to his recent appearance as a Trump economic adviser). Most economists have viewed that policy statement as barely coherent and full of falsehoods and contradictions. I do not usually play credentials games, but Navarro has had very few publications in refereed journals in recent years, and his work has not been heavily cited. Of the five or six others, only two do I know anything about. One is John Lott, the favorite economist of the NRA, who once had a sock puppet by himself praising himself called "Mary Rosh," has been frequently accused of using fraudulent or misleading data in his papers, and has been unable to hold an academic job, even in conservative departments, despite his extensive and heavily cited publication record (with many of those citations being in papers criticizing his work). Lott is currently at a think tank he founded whose funding sources are not known to me. The other is probably the most respectable in my eyes, Svetozar Pejovich, now emeritus at Texas A&M. The most well-known of his papers have been about property rights in the former Yugoslavia. These have been respectable, but he has not done much recently, and probably the only reason I know his work is that comparative economics is one of my fields of research. The bottom line is that this is both a very skimpy and unimpressive list.
Of course his supposed top economic advisers are not fully professional economists. While Lawrence Kudlow has intoned on economic issues for many years on TV and elsewhere, his academic education ends with an undergraduate degree in history, and his economic forecasting record has been so bad that one can expect to make money by assuming that what will happen economically will be just the opposite from what he forecasts. Another is Stephen Moore, who does have a masters degree in economics, but his forecasting record is not much better than Kudlow's (we are still waiting for that hyperinflation both forecast so vigorously). He currently carries the title "economist" at the Heritage Foundation, so maybe I should count him as a "professional economists" too.The rest of his supposed board is basically a lot of hedge fund traders, maybe mostly rich people, but not professional economists.
So, there we have it. I do think that sometimes when conventional views of professional economists disagree with public opinion, that the latter may be closer to the truth than the former. But I must say that this particular situation seems to be the largest such disjuncture that I know of, and on this one, I am with the vast majority of professional economists against apparently widespread public opinion. I can only hope that this strongly held public opinion does not result in us having to suffer through policies pushed by the pretty pathetic set of professional economists Trump has backing him.
Barkley Rosser
Sunday, October 30, 2016
JFK and the Reagan Revolution
I decided to watch Meet the Press which had Lawrence Kudlow on as a panelist. It seems he has written a book with Brian Domitrovic, which fellow wingnut John Tammy reviewed:
In writing their book, the authors set out to remind readers that life – and by extension economic growth – isn’t that complicated. It’s as basic as a low tax/sound money policy mix. Years ago Kudlow’s teaching of the correct policy mix was broadened to include free trade and light regulation, and that hasn’t changed ... The authors assert that “Both Kennedy and Reagan identified substantially cutting income tax rates and getting the dollar strong and stable as the specific policy mix that would let the private sector, which is to say the real economy, thrive.” ... Broken down to the individual we can easily see that no individual is made more prosperous if more and more of his income is confiscated through taxation. And as individuals take money in return for their production, their prosperity is surely not enhanced by devaluation of the very dollars, Pounds, euros, yen, and yuan they earn. Economists in the discredited economics profession have for the longest time believed in high taxes, and they still believe devaluation is great.I’ll stop right there as I cannot bear to quote Tammy’s claim that the supply-siders are economic geniuses and that the member of Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers know nothing about macroeconomics. Tammy seriously misrepresents the economic discussions of the 1960’s, which I presume he drew from this book. That Kudlow believes tax cuts for the rich is the source of all good things on earth is nothing new but this obsession with dollar appreciation is just appalling. Of course this fits in nicely with the economic stupidity of Donald Trump. But let’s remind these supply-siders of the 1982 recession. The 1981 tax cut may not have directly caused this disaster but it certainly appalled the Federal Reserve enough to go for a second round of tight monetary policy. The toxic mix of fiscal stimulus and tight monetary policy led to a massive dollar appreciation which severely reduced net exports. Does John Tammy and Lawrence Kudlow not remember this?
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Diana Furchtgott-Roth – Trump Economic Adviser or Complete Hack?
Brad DeLong informs us that Diana Furchtgott-Roth has a blog:
"How national pollsters are helping Hillary Clinton." IIRC, back when Glenn Hubbard hired Diana Furchgott-Roth for the CEA, I asked, "Why is Glenn hiring that wingnut?" Various people assured to me that she was not a wingnut. Yes she is. This is highly, highly unprofessional. Any time your list of those putting their thumbs on the Democratic side of the scale includes Fox News and theWall Street Journal, you have lost any standing to appear in polite societyI’ll leave this issue of whether the polls are rigged to others but I did address her hackery with respect toObamacare. Let’s turn to a complete contradiction of hers with respect to the labor market and the implications for monetary policy. Her August 8 post argued:
the job market is not quite as strong as it looks.I have also argued we are not at full employment but I am not arguing for higher interest rates. Donald Trump is so she also wrote:
The unemployment rate stands at 4.9 percent, and the latest inflation data show that the Consumer Price Index rose by more than 2 percent over the past year. The Fed should not depend on employment data, which will be revised several times, to decide when to raise rates. Rates have been too low for too long, and it is time for them to rise — regardless of what the jobs report shows.In other words, the labor market is strong so we must use monetary restraint now. OK, some people might but actually believe that but Diana Furchtgott-Roth is just echoing the inconsistency and stupidity of Donald Trump. The classic definition of a hack. Oh wait – she continues:
Current low rates are impeding economic growth, discouraging saving, and increasing inequality. An increase of 25 basis points in September will still leave the Fed in a position of very loose monetary policy. The Fed's near-zero interest rates have caused massive distortions in equity and real estate markets. Investors who would have had funds in savings accounts or Treasury bills are seeking returns in these sectors. This is a recipe for a bubble, which will cause a crisis when it pops.Brad was right – this is wingnut insanity. Diana Furchtgott-Roth may be even worse than the three stooges – Art Laffer, Lawrence Kudlow, and Stephen Moore. And no Presidential candidate would bring any of them on as economic advisers. Oh wait!
Trump: Repeal and Replace Obamacare
Repeal or Replace was Romney’s 2012 health care theme even if ObamaCare was RomneyCare and the Republicans have no replacement plan. It seems Donald Trump has dusted off this line even if he has no clue about health care economics at all. So who is he turning to?
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist of the US Department of Labor, is an unpaid adviser to Donald Trump. She has a blog that gave us Insurance Companies Wise Up to Obamacare
“In a well-functioning insurance market, such as for automobile accidents, insurance carriers craft countless plans to meet exactly the needs of millions of different individuals. Typically, only catastrophic unexpected events are covered, not the predictable oil changes.”Let’s stop right here. #1 – one’s health is not the same things as one’s car. And this bit about well-functioning ignores the monopolization of the health insurance market. She continues:
Insurance companies are making losses because fewer Americans are signing up for Obamacare than were predicted, and these Americans are sicker than average. Premiums rose in some markets by 20 percent in 2016, leading to more healthy people dropping out of plans or not enrolling, accelerating the financial imbalance. Premiums are expected to rise by a similar amount—or more—in 2017.Premiums may be going up but part of this is due to the monopolization of health insurance which likely is driving up profits as noted by Brad and Michael DeLong:
As Berkeley economics professor Aaron Edlin has pointed out, consumer abstention is the ultimate competitor. Companies cannot purchase or contrive a solution to consumers who say, “I’m just not going to buy this.” But the ACA requires individuals to purchase health insurance, thus creating a vertical demand curve for potential monopolists. Under these conditions, profits – and consumer abuse – can be maximized through collusion. It is not surprising, then, that in 2015 some of the largest private American health-insurance companies – Anthem, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana – began exploring the possibility of merging. If they could reduce the number of national insurers from five to three, they could then increase their market power and squeeze more profits from consumers.Furchtgott-Roth continues her right wing rants:
Fewer than 13 million people signed up for Obamacare in the 2016 enrollment period, compared with 22 million predicted by the Congressional Budget Office in May 2013.Young, healthy people are not signing up in great numbers for the expensive policies, even with the threat of penalties. Insurance companies and politicians thought that the premiums from these young people, who do not use much health care because they are rarely sick, would be used to pay for the care of the old and the chronically-ill. Rather, young people are either on their parents’ plans, or on employer plans, or going without insurance and paying the penalty.If young people are getting insurance via their jobs, then counting them as not getting insurance is a bit dodgy. I’m no expert on these matters, but I’d trust Kevin Drum over spin from Team Trump.
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Donald Loves TrikiLeaks
"I love WikiLeaks," gushed serial sex pest Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally two weeks ago. Make no mistake, though, Mr. Trump does not approve of whistle-blowing. He only loves WikiLeaks so long as it operates as a Roger Stone dirty-tricks apparatus on behalf of his campaign.
The minute it turned against him, whatever it published would be election-rigging filth. He would sue the liars. He would jail the crooks. He would execute the traitors.
A case in point is the following selection of Trump's tweeting between June 2013 and May 2014 on Edward Snowden's revelations about ILLEGAL NSA spying on American citizens.
So what words in the DNI Election Security Statement must we beware of because they mean something other than what they mean? "Confident"? "Consistent with"? "Methods and motivations"? "Tactics and techniques"? "The Russians"?
Not to cast aspersions, but who else might have both the capability and motive to "interfere with the US election process"?
I mean who else besides the Russians or the U.S. Intelligence Community?
What if the NSA, CIA etc.wanted to discredit WikiLeaks and whistle blowers in general? What would be a smart way of doing it? How about a sting operation in which WikiLeaks itself promoted its allegiance to an unsavory, home-grown demagogue, Trump, on the one hand and a foreign adversary, Russia, on the other with Assange's deep antipathy toward Clinton being the blinders that prevented him from seeing the trap?
The minute it turned against him, whatever it published would be election-rigging filth. He would sue the liars. He would jail the crooks. He would execute the traitors.
A case in point is the following selection of Trump's tweeting between June 2013 and May 2014 on Edward Snowden's revelations about ILLEGAL NSA spying on American citizens.
So what gives with WikiLeaks's one-sided campaign against Hillary Clinton -- and objectively in favor of Trump and the summary execution of Edward Snowden? Clinton and the Democratic National Committee attribute the hacking of Clintonista email accounts to "the highest levels of the Kremlin," a claim backed by an October 7th statement from the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper.
Not so fast. This Clapper is the same Director of National Intelligence who on March 12, 2013, directly lied -- "allegedly" -- to Congress, under oath, about whether the NSA "wittingly" collected data on "millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." The inoperative word in Senator Wyden's question and subsequently in Clapper's answer was "collected," which, in NSA-speak, semantically means something other than collected. (Q & A at 6:00 on video.)
Not to cast aspersions, but who else might have both the capability and motive to "interfere with the US election process"?
I mean who else besides the Russians or the U.S. Intelligence Community?
Update: How WikiLeaks Dies
I didn't really know how to end this post, so I ended it in mid-thought with a question. But I've been thinking, wondering what the game would be if U.S. intelligence was the source of the hacked emails. A hypothesis occurred to me. It is only a hypothesis.What if the NSA, CIA etc.wanted to discredit WikiLeaks and whistle blowers in general? What would be a smart way of doing it? How about a sting operation in which WikiLeaks itself promoted its allegiance to an unsavory, home-grown demagogue, Trump, on the one hand and a foreign adversary, Russia, on the other with Assange's deep antipathy toward Clinton being the blinders that prevented him from seeing the trap?
Friday, October 21, 2016
Reforming Bullfighting
The Spanish Constitutional Court has ruled that Catalonia cannot prohibit bullfighting because it is part of Spain’s cultural patrimony. But they did say it could be regulated, so here is what I propose:
In order to minimize animal cruelty, bullfighting should be permitted so long as the bull is first stunned and rendered unconscious. Then, as it lies limply on the ground, the matador can jab all sorts of sticks and spears into it. This would be a more civilized way to demonstrate that human beings have the ability to kill bulls.
In order to minimize animal cruelty, bullfighting should be permitted so long as the bull is first stunned and rendered unconscious. Then, as it lies limply on the ground, the matador can jab all sorts of sticks and spears into it. This would be a more civilized way to demonstrate that human beings have the ability to kill bulls.
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
The P/E Ratio and the Gordon Growth Model
Antonio Fatas suggests that stocks may be undervalued:
The P/E ratio shows that the end of the 90s bubble was by far the period were stocks looked the most expensive relative to earnings. What do P/E ratios look like today? On the expensive side. With a ratio above 26 it stands right at the level before the 2008 crisis and a lot higher than previous similar historical episodes. Most tend to compare it to 16, as the average P/E ratio in recent decades, to signal that the stock market is very expensive. Without going back many decades, we could say that the stock market today looks as expensive as it has been since 1981 with the exception of the bubble of the late 90s. But that cannot be the end of the analysis as we know that the P/E ratio depends on several macroeconomic variables, in particular the level of real interest rates. And we know that real interest rates are at very low levels today and likely to say low for a long period of time.While I agree with this, I must take exception to his use of the Gordon growth model:
Let's go back to the basic finance equation that links the P/E ratio to macroeconomic fundamentals. Start with a simple expression of the price of stocks as the net present (real) discounted value of earnings. Under the assumption that current earnings are expected to grow (in real terms) at a rate G and using R to denote the risk-adjusted discount rate we can write: P = E / (R-G). In other words the Price-to-Earnings ratio can be written as P/E = 1 / (R-G).I have no problem using steady state models but earnings are not the same as cash flow. This was part of the problem with the DOW 36000 claim by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett as noted a long time ago by Paul Krugman. There are several ways of correcting for this slip up but my favorite way of doing so is to think about a steady state model of the value of the assets (V) of a company that sets cash flows equal to profits (P) net of the necessary increase in tangible assets (A) dictated by growth. For now just imagine a debt free firm. Let’s also assume G = 2% and consider Antonio’s sensible statement here:
And let's express the risk-adjusted discount rate as the sum of a risk-free rate (RF) and a risk premium (RP). E/P = RF + RP - GLet’s consider a range for this risk-adjusted discount from 5% (says a 1% risk-free rate plus a 4% risk premium) to 8% (say a 3% risk-free rate plus a 5% risk premium). Let’s also consider two very different kinds of firms: a brick-and-mortar company that owns no valuable intangible assets versus a pure intangible firm. For the latter, V/P is given by the Gordon growth model as A = 0> For the former, however, V/P = 1/R. If the risk-adjusted discount rate were 8%, the V/P ratio for the brick and mortar company would be 12.5 while the value of the pure intangible company would be 16.67. Of course most companies own both tangible and intangible assets to their V/P ratio would be in between these two extremes. If the firm were levered in the sense of issuing debt, their P/E ratio would be less than their V/P ratio. Antonio closes with:
In summary, unlike the strong warning signals we get when looking at record-level nominal stock prices or even at the P/E ratio, a simple adjustment of P/E ratios by current levels of interest rates paints a very different picture of the stock market. Adjusted for current levels of real interest rates, P/E ratios tell us that the stock market today is on the cheap side relative to previous similar phases of the business cycle.He is right that we should consider a lower risk-adjusted discount rate so let redo our discussion by assuming this discount rate is only 5%. In this case, the value of our brick and mortar company is 20 times profits while the value of the pure intangible company is 33.33 times earnings. If a company is purely equity financed with half of its value coming from intangible assets and half from tangible assets, we might be able to justify a P/E ratio near 26. But again the P/E ratio for a similar company with debt would be lower.
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Always Higher Wages? Efficiency Wage Theory at Wal-Mart
My dissertation thirty years ago used efficiency wage theory, so I’m always interested when it pops up on the radar again. According to today’s New York Times, Wal-Mart has apparently made a U-turn in its management philosophy, going from a labor-cost minimizing strategy to one that emphasizes internal labor markets. More training, more predictability in scheduling and tenure, and climbable job ladders—this is the key, they hope, to reversing a long-term deterioration in performance.
Any blue-blooded social democrat wants to cheer them on and urge them to go even further. The article clearly takes this view and asks whether an efficiency wage approach, one that sees workers as assets and builds relationships with them rather than just squeezing work out at the lowest possible cost, could address national problems of income inequality, slow growth and productivity stagnation.
I too am a fan of making work more rewarding and meaningful and enhancing the role of workers in enterprises, but I think there are system-level factors that affect how the efficiency wage mechanism operates at the enterprise level—factors the article ignores when it turns to Wal-Mart’s share price as the arbiter of success near the end.
The motivational factor of treating workers well is certainly important, but its effect on overall performance depends on the importance of local and tacit knowledge in the production process. If workers know details about the firm’s operations from actually being on the front lines and having a hands-on relationship with the work, the firm can benefit from the initiative they take in solving problems as they arise. No directives from the front office can substitute for that. In effect, Hayek’s knowledge problem, which he envisioned at the level of an entire economy, also exists at the level of a firm.
At the same time, the argument against Hayek, that system-level aspects have to be taken into consideration as well, also applies to the firm. The firm’s financial situation, the impact of its competitors and other matters probably beyond the purview of front-line workers also have to be acknowledged. And especially, the effectiveness of an organization is more than the sum of the effectiveness of its parts; synergy and coherence of strategy are crucial. Thus every enterprise faces a tradeoff between decentralized initiative on the one hand and centralized “herding” on the other. You’ll find a schematic of this dilemma in Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model.
Finding a sensible balance is difficult, something firms can do only through trial and error. But my argument here is that the general location of the balance depends on systemic factors beyond the control of an individual enterprise. For instance, a country’s education and training system affects the availability of different types of labor and plays a large role in determining the return to internal training and job ladders. Since there will be movement of workers into and out of individual firms, the payoff to investment in labor depends on whether there are industry- or economy-wide institutions that overcome the resulting collective action problem. Culture, the prevalent attitudes toward different types of work and the people who do them, affects work organization. Above all, what constitutes performance in the first place depends on where the economy lies in the shareholder-stakeholder spectrum.
This is because the value of worker commitment and initiative depends on the extent of alignment between what workers think success means and what those running the firm think it means. Inevitably, workers lean in a stakeholder direction. For one thing, they are stakeholders themselves. One aspect of success from a worker point of view is a more meaningful and less onerous work process. Some of that might be monetizable (turned into profit), but not all of it. In addition, because they are on the front line, workers interact directly with other stakeholders, like customers or clients and those who experience the firm’s impact on the environment. Given enough autonomy, retail workers are likely to want to make customers happy and not just get them to spend more, and they are likely to spend time on work that improves the environment inside and outside of the store whether or not it shows up on the bottom line.
In economic terms, the difference between a purely shareholder and a purely stakeholder orientation is that the first seeks to maximize expected profits, the second the likelihood of being profitable. This is about means and ends: profit under the first approach is the end, with everything else serving as a means, and it’s the reverse under the second. In the real world we see hybrids, but it’s well known that the US lies well to the shareholder side compared to other capitalist countries, and has tilted even further that way in recent decades.
From this perspective, the critical moment in the Times story comes near the end, when we read
Any blue-blooded social democrat wants to cheer them on and urge them to go even further. The article clearly takes this view and asks whether an efficiency wage approach, one that sees workers as assets and builds relationships with them rather than just squeezing work out at the lowest possible cost, could address national problems of income inequality, slow growth and productivity stagnation.
I too am a fan of making work more rewarding and meaningful and enhancing the role of workers in enterprises, but I think there are system-level factors that affect how the efficiency wage mechanism operates at the enterprise level—factors the article ignores when it turns to Wal-Mart’s share price as the arbiter of success near the end.
The motivational factor of treating workers well is certainly important, but its effect on overall performance depends on the importance of local and tacit knowledge in the production process. If workers know details about the firm’s operations from actually being on the front lines and having a hands-on relationship with the work, the firm can benefit from the initiative they take in solving problems as they arise. No directives from the front office can substitute for that. In effect, Hayek’s knowledge problem, which he envisioned at the level of an entire economy, also exists at the level of a firm.
At the same time, the argument against Hayek, that system-level aspects have to be taken into consideration as well, also applies to the firm. The firm’s financial situation, the impact of its competitors and other matters probably beyond the purview of front-line workers also have to be acknowledged. And especially, the effectiveness of an organization is more than the sum of the effectiveness of its parts; synergy and coherence of strategy are crucial. Thus every enterprise faces a tradeoff between decentralized initiative on the one hand and centralized “herding” on the other. You’ll find a schematic of this dilemma in Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model.
Finding a sensible balance is difficult, something firms can do only through trial and error. But my argument here is that the general location of the balance depends on systemic factors beyond the control of an individual enterprise. For instance, a country’s education and training system affects the availability of different types of labor and plays a large role in determining the return to internal training and job ladders. Since there will be movement of workers into and out of individual firms, the payoff to investment in labor depends on whether there are industry- or economy-wide institutions that overcome the resulting collective action problem. Culture, the prevalent attitudes toward different types of work and the people who do them, affects work organization. Above all, what constitutes performance in the first place depends on where the economy lies in the shareholder-stakeholder spectrum.
This is because the value of worker commitment and initiative depends on the extent of alignment between what workers think success means and what those running the firm think it means. Inevitably, workers lean in a stakeholder direction. For one thing, they are stakeholders themselves. One aspect of success from a worker point of view is a more meaningful and less onerous work process. Some of that might be monetizable (turned into profit), but not all of it. In addition, because they are on the front line, workers interact directly with other stakeholders, like customers or clients and those who experience the firm’s impact on the environment. Given enough autonomy, retail workers are likely to want to make customers happy and not just get them to spend more, and they are likely to spend time on work that improves the environment inside and outside of the store whether or not it shows up on the bottom line.
In economic terms, the difference between a purely shareholder and a purely stakeholder orientation is that the first seeks to maximize expected profits, the second the likelihood of being profitable. This is about means and ends: profit under the first approach is the end, with everything else serving as a means, and it’s the reverse under the second. In the real world we see hybrids, but it’s well known that the US lies well to the shareholder side compared to other capitalist countries, and has tilted even further that way in recent decades.
From this perspective, the critical moment in the Times story comes near the end, when we read
The profit landscape is less sunny. Operating income for Walmart’s United States stores was down 6 percent in the most recent quarter, reflecting higher labor costs and other new investments. The company’s stock has underperformed the overall United States stock market and an index of major retailers since the program was announced, suggesting investors are not convinced that these investments will pay a lucrative return anytime soon.As long as that’s the determining question, and in the absence of major social initiatives to support a worker-oriented economy, efficiency wage strategies alone will produce only marginal gains.
Microaggression
Last time it was privilege, this time microaggression. It’s another word that plays a pivotal role in current debates about racism, sexism and other structures of inequality. On one side lie the activists who demand action to prevent acts of disparagement, whether intentional or unintentional, or to punish those who engage in them. On the other are those who feel this has gone too far, constituting an egregious example of political correctness. I see language used strategically in a way that erases the distinction between behavior that violates the rights of others versus just rudeness or insensitivity.
People should treat each other with respect and thoughtfulness, but they often don’t. We act in ways that hurt each other, sometimes on purpose but usually because we aren’t thinking carefully enough. We don’t consider our behavior from the perspective of others, or we do and then forget. No one is perfect, but it’s fair to say we have an obligation to do our best.
I would go a step further and say this obligation is even stronger when the demeaning follows lines of race, gender or other social hierarchies. In this case we are not talking about a random distribution of moments of thoughtlessness, but a piling on, a steady diet of inconsiderate comments and actions that, taken together, constitute an important aspect of social inequality. Since demeaning behavior in these cases tends to adhere to recognizable patterns, it’s absolutely appropriate to have workshops, written guides and other measures to combat it. I’m an optimist; I think most of us want to treat everyone fairly and will welcome guidance that helps us do it.
So what’s the problem? It’s that word “microaggression”. The key part is aggression—an invasive act that violates someone else’s rights. That’s strong language: no one is allowed to infringe the rights of others, which is what it means for someone to have rights. My rights set limits to your freedoms, and vice versa. Many acts of disparagement are in fact rights-violating, but others aren’t. To the extent we use rights-invoking language to describe all disparaging behavior, we are eliding an important distinction.
Here is an example. Once upon a time—just a few decades ago—women had almost no rights over how they were treated by men in public contexts. They could be openly insulted or made the victim of thinly veiled threats. Men could deliberately try to embarrass or silence them. They could make unwanted sexual advances and use economic or simply physical power to coerce them into sex. This was on top of the normal dose of thoughtless behavior, like the male tendency to interrupt women or not hear them as readily as they hear other men. Because of the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s, women gained the right to be free of behavior that denied them equal participation in all aspects of life. A category of sexual harassment was created, and equal opportunity case law came to recognize actions that produced a hostile environment such that other rights couldn’t be enjoyed. It would not be twisting language in the slightest to say that a range of hostile and demeaning actions were defined as aggressions, since, by establishing rights we also established types of behavior that infringe on them.
But not all acts of disparagement or thoughtlessness by men are recognized as violations of women’s fundamental rights. An imbalance of interruptions, where men interrupt women more often than women interrupt men, is not an actionable violation, provided it is not motivated by the intent to prevent women’s participation or deny them equal opportunities for success at work, in school, etc. This doesn’t mean it’s OK for men to interrupt, just that we distinguish between bad behavior in general and rights-violating behavior in particular. The line is certainly fuzzy and may well move over time (perhaps it should as the excuses for thoughtlessness gradually become less tenable), but the distinction remains useful.
So my brief against the tendency to extend microaggression to cover the full range of behavior that demeans or hurts is based on the value of retaining a language that helps us make distinctions. In practice, defining all poor behavior as rights-violating needlessly invokes limitations on various freedoms. That in turn has made the valuable effort to promote thoughtfulness and respect, especially in ways that undermine social hierarchies, controversial. It conflates the discussion of how we should behave with how we are allowed to behave. The second has its place, but the first covers a much larger terrain.
People should treat each other with respect and thoughtfulness, but they often don’t. We act in ways that hurt each other, sometimes on purpose but usually because we aren’t thinking carefully enough. We don’t consider our behavior from the perspective of others, or we do and then forget. No one is perfect, but it’s fair to say we have an obligation to do our best.
I would go a step further and say this obligation is even stronger when the demeaning follows lines of race, gender or other social hierarchies. In this case we are not talking about a random distribution of moments of thoughtlessness, but a piling on, a steady diet of inconsiderate comments and actions that, taken together, constitute an important aspect of social inequality. Since demeaning behavior in these cases tends to adhere to recognizable patterns, it’s absolutely appropriate to have workshops, written guides and other measures to combat it. I’m an optimist; I think most of us want to treat everyone fairly and will welcome guidance that helps us do it.
So what’s the problem? It’s that word “microaggression”. The key part is aggression—an invasive act that violates someone else’s rights. That’s strong language: no one is allowed to infringe the rights of others, which is what it means for someone to have rights. My rights set limits to your freedoms, and vice versa. Many acts of disparagement are in fact rights-violating, but others aren’t. To the extent we use rights-invoking language to describe all disparaging behavior, we are eliding an important distinction.
Here is an example. Once upon a time—just a few decades ago—women had almost no rights over how they were treated by men in public contexts. They could be openly insulted or made the victim of thinly veiled threats. Men could deliberately try to embarrass or silence them. They could make unwanted sexual advances and use economic or simply physical power to coerce them into sex. This was on top of the normal dose of thoughtless behavior, like the male tendency to interrupt women or not hear them as readily as they hear other men. Because of the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s, women gained the right to be free of behavior that denied them equal participation in all aspects of life. A category of sexual harassment was created, and equal opportunity case law came to recognize actions that produced a hostile environment such that other rights couldn’t be enjoyed. It would not be twisting language in the slightest to say that a range of hostile and demeaning actions were defined as aggressions, since, by establishing rights we also established types of behavior that infringe on them.
But not all acts of disparagement or thoughtlessness by men are recognized as violations of women’s fundamental rights. An imbalance of interruptions, where men interrupt women more often than women interrupt men, is not an actionable violation, provided it is not motivated by the intent to prevent women’s participation or deny them equal opportunities for success at work, in school, etc. This doesn’t mean it’s OK for men to interrupt, just that we distinguish between bad behavior in general and rights-violating behavior in particular. The line is certainly fuzzy and may well move over time (perhaps it should as the excuses for thoughtlessness gradually become less tenable), but the distinction remains useful.
So my brief against the tendency to extend microaggression to cover the full range of behavior that demeans or hurts is based on the value of retaining a language that helps us make distinctions. In practice, defining all poor behavior as rights-violating needlessly invokes limitations on various freedoms. That in turn has made the valuable effort to promote thoughtfulness and respect, especially in ways that undermine social hierarchies, controversial. It conflates the discussion of how we should behave with how we are allowed to behave. The second has its place, but the first covers a much larger terrain.
Friday, October 14, 2016
GILBERTHORPE!
Speechless. Rent-boy pimp vouches for Trump...
'I supplied underage rent boys for Margaret Thatcher's cabinet ministers'From Private Eye:
Mr Gilberthorpe’s Tory paedo files
Unreliable witness, Issue 1372
SIR Keith Joseph! Sir Rhodes Boyson! Sir Michael Havers! All senior Tories from the Thatcher era, and every one of them a paedophile – at least according to Anthony Gilberthorpe, billed as the “Tory child abuse whistleblower” by the Sunday Mirror, which has been running a string of sensational exclusives based on his allegations.
Gilberthorpe, a former Gloucestershire county councillor and party activist, says that in 1989 he sent a 40-page dossier to Margaret Thatcher (a friend of his, or so he claims) accusing several of her cabinet ministers of “abusing underage boys at drug-fuelled conference parties”. And he should know, for he was paid to recruit underage rent-boys for the orgies.
Other newspapers, especially the Daily Mail, have eagerly recycled the story. But none has taken the precaution of warning readers that Gilberthorpe – known to his few remaining friends as “Gilby” – is not the most reliable of witnesses.
Phantom engagement
In September 1987, for example, he announced his engagement in the Times to Miss Leah Bergdorf-Hunt, a fashion designer from California. The Gloucester Express reported the news on its front page under the headline “Gilby to Marry”. It quoted Gilberthorpe as saying: "Both our families are delighted… I hope this will explain to a few people about my recent visits to America.” But there was no engagement, and indeed no Miss Bergdorf-Hunt. As revealed in Eye 690, the whole thing was a fantasy.
In 1988 – the year before he claims to have sent Thatcher his dossier – he was awarded almost £50,000 libel damages against the Gloucester Citizen, Daily Mirror and Sun, all of which had reported that he was resigning as a councillor “amid allegations that he is a homosexual, has the killer disease Aids and has obtained £250,000 in cash and property from a disabled old-age pensioner”.
The odd feature of the case was that the local news-agency reporter who had supplied the story identified his source as Gilberthorpe himself. Mark Mitchell told the court that Gilby had phoned him from a London hotel to announce that he was quitting as a councillor because a national newspaper was about to allege that he’d had treatment for Aids at a New York clinic.
Egg on face
Gilberthorpe’s version was that he said he would return to Gloucester that day to answer allegations that he’d acquired £250,000 from a former patient of a nursing home he owned. It was Mitchell who mentioned Aids, asking if he had it – to which Gilby said no. This account was corroborated by his friend Piers Merchant, a Tory MP who had been in Gilberthorpe’s hotel bedroom when he rang the news agency and heard the conversation.
Gilberthorpe never collected his £50,000, however. The three newspapers appealed, and dug out new information which cast serious doubt on the Gilby-Merchant version of events. Gilberthorpe delayed and delayed, and eventually settled before the appeal came to court. The newspapers paid not a penny in damages and contributed only £5,000 to his legal costs – leaving him very much out of pocket and with egg all over his face.
Shopped his friend
And what of Piers Merchant MP, who had so gallantly testified for his chum? In 1997 he and his young mistress, Anna Cox, went to stay for the weekend with Gilberthorpe. Shortly afterwards they were amazed to see quotes from their pillow-talk and photos of them in bed splashed all over the Sunday Mirror. Gilby, it transpired, had fitted out the spare-room with hidden cameras and microphones and shopped his loyal friend to the tabloid for £25,000.
How much the Sunday Mirror has paid him this time is not known. He has no evidence to support his claims about Keith Joseph, Michael Havers et al – but at least they are all conveniently dead and in no fit state to sue.Fox News didn't notice the credibility issues:
Why Donald Gropes: "Alpha Male" Trump Does Liberace
Is there is something queer about Donald Trump's exhibitionist "locker room banter" and the widespread allegations of nonconsensual sexual touching and voyeurism? No, I'm not suggesting that Trump is a closeted homosexual and his hetero-predatory antics are a beard. He may be. Who knows? Who cares?
Two of Donald J. Trump's mentors were Roy Cohn and Liberace. Both men went to their graves closeted even though 'everybody knew'. My question, though, is about how the over-the-top womanizer image screens and countermands mannerisms and affectations that otherwise might alarm his homophobic constituency. It remains a liability for a conservative politician to be gay or to be perceived as being gay. Trump loudly advertises his testosterone-fueled impulses as testament that he couldn't possibly be... :
In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there.Donald J. Trump studied at Liberace U. His mother was a YUGE fan of the glitzy-kitsch pianist. When Liberace performed a 17-day engagement at Radio City Music Hall in 1985, Trump provided him a million-dollar suite in Trump Tower rent free in exchange for plugs during the concerts. Trump and Liberace shared a passion for professional wrestling. Most of all, Trump admired and emulated Liberace's relentless self-promotion and showmanship.
Noel Hodson, blogging at Future Fact & Fiction, reflected on his impressions of Trump from the first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton:
How does this man, with his ridiculous blonde toupee, seduce and command a large following of fellow Americans?
Donald has learned that words do not matter when communicating with the great American public. He writhes, he agonises, he weeps, he bullies, he gossips, he struts, he flounces, he flicks his peroxide wig, he flaunts his sparkly, shiny wealth, he stabs, he needles, he spurns the establishment, he cries all the way to the bank, he preens, he twinkles and sympathises and empathises with the mute, impoverished, ignored masses. He seduces millions with his empty, meaningless banter and antics.
The gestures that most struck me were his peculiar hand and finger movements which he employs to emphasise a point when he runs out of words and simply repeats whatever slogan enters his mind at that moment, while cricking his head sideways and grotesquely puckering his lips. When caught out in debate or challenged personally, Trump goes through these gyrations and responds very waspishly. ...there was an older memory that was nudging through from the past - particularly when Donald turned his grimace into a lip-smacking winning smile for the cameras. In the 1950's my mother liked to watch Liberace on our little black & white TV and I sometimes watched that King (or Queen) of showbiz performers, draped in white furs, jewels and sequins, crooning and grinning at us from Behind the Candelabra.
He was doing Liberace.
Editor:
When you think about it, Donald Trump is really the Republican Party’s answer to Liberace.
The furnishings in his apartment; his 1950s DA hairdo; the hand motions with the tip of his index finger attached to the tip of his thumb; the bevy of "fashionable" women he hangs around with; he is in the “fashion” business; his strange outfits with the tie hanging down to his crotch; his exclamations like "disgusting" and “disgraceful!!”; he sends off “tweets” every morning from his “twitter” account; his tiny hands.
If Donald Trump is really the honest politician he says he is, he would call a press conference seated at a piano with a candelabra on it and spill the beans.
H. Wayne Judge, Glens Falls
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