The center cannot hold

Economist blogger E.G. wonders why Democrats/liberals are more apologetic and defensive about their beliefs than conservatives:

In broad strokes, Republicans, especially of the tea-party stripe, are typically proud, at least unapologetic, and sometimes belligerent about their beliefs. Democrats, in contrast, seem to adopt the defensive position by default...

Why are Democrats more anemic? One thought comes from the liberal journalist Thomas Frank. Writing in Harper's, Mr Frank argues that while Republicans respond to their base, Democrats have a misbegotten faith in a "Magic Middle" of centrist ideas that are tolerable, at least, to most Americans:

Democrats, for their part, tend to do the opposite, dreaming of bipartisanship and states neither red nor blue and of some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future in which the culture wars cease and everyone plays nicely forevermore under the smiling, benificent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries.

A couple of other theories: Democrats are constrained by their insecurities, a holdover from being made fun of by George W Bush and Fox News. Democrats are undermined by deeper, historical anxieties; with the Republicans having co-opted the rhetoric of being the "real America", Democrats feel that they have to explain themselves before they can proceed. Or, there's something cultural going on: there are temperamental traits that draw a person to the Democratic or Republican parties, and those same traits, aggregated, are manifested by the parties themselves.

To me, the phenomenon in question seems very real, and the explanation seems rather obvious. I'm not sure why E.G. didn't think of it.

Conservatives are less apologetic about their beliefs because conservative beliefs have a stronger base of support. Whereas 40% of Americans identify as conservatives, only 20% identify as liberals, with the rest identifying as moderates. These numbers have been very stable over the past two decades. That means that if you are a Republican, hoping to win in a Republican primary, you are appealing to a much more ideological median voter than your Democratic counterpart. And in the general election, trumpeting conservative beliefs will probably alienate fewer of those moderates than trumpeting liberal ones. Case closed.

The more interesting question, and the one E.G. should really be asking, is: why are more Americans conservative in the first place? Since people tend to define their ideology relative to the national average, you'd expect a symmetric distribution of ideology; instead, we have a rightward skewed distribution, with a "long tail" of right-wing conservatives and a short fat tail of liberal-leaning moderates.

My guess as to the reason for the skew is: tribalism. Politics is generally an exercise in coalition-building between tribal blocs who vote for their "team". The "team" can be determined in many ways - race, language, religion, region, or socioeconomic class - and people can identify more strongly or less strongly with any given team. Teams can also overlap. It is these divided loyalties, and the shifting and changing of the coalitions, that make politics so complex.

Who are the "teams" in America? Well, the Republicans are composed of the "white" team (not whites, but rather, people who think of whiteness as their key characteristic), the "Christian" team (again, not all Christians), the "Southern" team, and the "business class". The first three of these overlap a great deal, and those three are very strong affiliations with lots of members. Democrats, on the other hand, are a hodgepodge of disparate little groups and blocs - blacks, gays, union workers, Hispanics, intellectuals, Asians, Jews, schoolteachers, etc. While some of these factions are very strongly unified (blacks most of all), the interests of the various Democratic support groups diverge wildly.

Hence, while the Republican Party is basically a simple deal - deregulate the economy and lower taxes, in exchange for excluding and disenfranchising nonwhites and non-Christians - the Democratic Party has to strike a much more careful (and much more changeable) balance. This accounts for the "defensive" and apologetic tone that E.G. wondered about. The fact is, Democrats' hopes for victory rest on their ability to convince everyone-who's-not-a-Republican that together they form some sort of political "center", while Republicans' hopes for victory rest on their higher voter turnout and on the fragility of the Dems' coalition.

(Note that this entire dynamic can be understood by watching the movie "Revenge of the Nerds". The white jock fraternity loses out when they find they are outnumbered by the combined mass of nerds, blacks, gays, Asians, Jews, and traditionally excluded folks in general.)

The really interesting moment in American politics will come if and when the Republican base shrinks in relative size such that it is no longer big enough to win just by turning out in greater numbers. This will happen if/when immigration outpaces Republican efforts to convince Midwestern whites to act like Southern whites. On that day, the Republicans will have to either forge a new coalition - which will be hard, since they'll be so out of the habit - or try for a military coup. I wonder what they'll do.

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Self-guarding guardians

Plato (inventor of the plate!) suggested that society's safety and virtue be preserved by a class of powerful "guardians," enlightened souls entrusted with a monopoly on violence. "But," someone asks, "Who will guard the guardians?" Plato's answer was that the guardians will guard themselves, being persons of superior moral fiber. This, incidentally, was Confucius' answer to the same question.

James Madison begged to differ. In The Federalist #51, he argued that self-interest was too powerful a force for virtue to overcome. This may be because power corrupts, or because power attracts the already-corrupt, or simply because the corrupt are more aggressive about pursuing their self-interest. Madison suggests a new solution: checks and balances. Through good institutional design, different self-interested individuals could be pitted against each other; these individuals, working within the system, would balance each other out to approximately represent the will of the nation at large. Thus, we have democratic elections; we have a division of powers between levels of government; we have the three branches of the federal government; etc.

Modern political theorists have offered many similar takes on the problem. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's models of political power struggles conclude that institutional design is very important; democracy and separation of powers increase the degree to which competing political factions are forced to provide for the public good in order to maintain power. Many others believe that it is no accident that the rich countries of the world are almost all democracies.

Some American libertarians, however, take issue with Madison's solution to the guardian-guarding problem. One of these skeptics is Will Wilkinson:

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation...So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power. But it really isn't the Citizens United decision [that allows government officials to get cushy jobs in the finance industry]...Well-connected wonks can get rich on Wall Street only because Washington power is now so unconstrained...So, what is to be done? Summon a self-bottling genie-bottling genie?

The [libertarian] answer is to make government less powerful. The monstrous offspring of entangled markets and states can be defeated only by the most thorough possible separation.

For Will, checks and balances are not enough. Institutional design cannot create a self-bottling genie-bottler (or a self-guarding guardian); the government must be shrunk as much as possible without destabilizing markets to the point of ruin.

I find this notion highly objectionable. In a way, it is a cop-out worthy of Plato and Confucius; libertarians throw up their hands and say "Just get rid of the damn guardians!" But this begs the question of who will toss out the guardians, and who will guard against the guardians' return. Presumably, the guardians will be ejected by a wave of individuals inculcated with strong personal libertarian values...and hey, we're back to calling for personal virtue.

So much for the American experiment.

James Madison, and most or all of our Founding Fathers - the libertarians of their day - would almost certainly disagree with the modern variety. They had just seen 3000 years of attempts to elevate virtuous individuals to positions of power. It was called the "dynastic cycle," and it was decidedly suboptimal. They knew that if they played the part of the Virtuous Men of their day, and overthrew government in the name of liberty, a new government would simply rise in the future and undo all their efforts. And so they saw only one way out of this trap: the design of self-sustaining political institutions that would maximize effective liberty. Only government can guard against government power, they realized; to let the perfect be the enemy of the good would simply mean the return of the despots.

So, tweaks like campaign finance reform might be small potatoes compared to the vast amount of corruption that still exists in the system, but they represent progress toward greater liberty, which libertarian admonishments to "just shrink the government" do not.

This is just one more instance of modern libertarianism's fatal flaw. When they come to a Gordian Knot of a problem (optimal public good provision, for example, or optimal institutional design), they reach for a sword. They want to hack through thorny engineering questions with the pure, clean, steel of unwavering ideology. That their solutions are unworkable is hardly a deterrent; ideological self-consistency takes precedence over real-world consequences. Hard problems, it seems, are just too hard.

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Why we run deficits

Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum notes that liberals have been far more willing to cut the deficit than conservatives over the past 30 years:

At the federal level, center-left types fought an entire national election in 2000 based largely on the idea that times were good and the federal government should be accumulating surpluses. It was a pretty big deal, and as you'll recall, we center-lefties lost that election and George Bush proceeded to piss away the surplus and run up more debt than any president in history. On the spending side, center lefties recently passed a big healthcare overhaul that was largely funded by cuts in Medicare spending, and instead of applause for their fiscal sobriety they got hammered for it by Republicans during the 2010 midterms. In other words, on the federal level center-left types have proven over and over that they are willing to be pretty responsible on spending and budgetary issues despite getting clobbered for it. But the opposite isn't true of conservatives and taxes. One need look no further than the national-level dogfight going on right now over the expiration of the deficit-busting tax cuts that originally got George Bush into the White House. No conservative who wants to win reelection even dares consider taking a responsible position on this.

But how are things at the state level? What happens when center-lefties try to restrain spending and build up surpluses during good times? They very quickly learn a harsh lesson: if you accumulate money in a rainy-day fund, conservatives will promptly demand that it be "returned to the taxpayers." That happened here in California as far back as 1978 and was a big reason for the passage of Proposition 13. And if you allow a temporary tax cut to expire, your career might be over. This happened here in California as recently as 2003, when Gray Davis got tossed out on his ear for allowing the car license fee to automatically revert to its old level when the state budget got out of balance.

Nobody is an angel in this fight, and certainly liberals could do a better job of speaking out for spending restraint during boom times. But conservatives have made it largely pointless to build up federal surpluses or state rainy day funds even when lefties are feeling in a responsible mood. At the same time, conservatives have also made it career-threateningly dangerous to allow even temporary tax cuts to expire. It's true that there's always a steady hum of background pressure from interest groups to maintain spending levels, much of it from the left, but for the most part the really pointed incentives come from the conservative side and simply aren't symmetrical: they always run in favor of tax cuts and against spending restraint.

The whole idea of trying to balance budgets over the business cycle is practically a center-left platitude. The fact that it doesn't happen very often is attributable in small part to basic human nature (nobody likes to restrain spending when money is available) and in very large part to the fact that conservatives flatly won't let it happen.

This is very true. But Drum ignores the question of why. Do conservatives support big deficits because the conservative philosophy of government says deficits are good? Is it because naturally irresponsible human beings are drawn to the Republican party? Or is it because the outcome of some political bargaining game (the "two Santas" theory) forces Republicans to promise more goodies than Democrats?

I'm not sure, but here is an important point that many Americans fail to realize: All rich countries have run huge deficits in the past 30 years, from socialist France to conservative Japan. The U.S. is in no way unique. There appear to be no fiscal hawks in power anywhere in the developed world.

To me, this is a signal that the root cause of rich-world deficits goes far deeper than the vagaries of a single nation's politics or the ideology of any one faction. Something happened to the world that made it impossible for rich-world governments to balance their budgets. That something, I am guessing, is capital mobility.

In the branch of economics called "public choice theory," a well-known result is that there are only two ways to pay for public services (i.e. public goods whose costs depend on the number of people using the good): 1) make the rich people pay more than they'd offer to pay, or 2) run a big deficit. This is called the "Groves-Clarke" result. When a government pays for its services by holding a gun to rich people's heads, it's called an "AGV mechanism," and when it runs a deficit, it's called a "Groves-Clarke mechanism". See here for the math if you're interested.

Before 1980, we basically held a gun to our rich people's heads and said "Pay up." Top marginal tax rates were over 90%. Corporate taxes were high. This situation was essentially the same in Europe and Japan. But around 1980, something big changed: capital mobility. Global rules changed, and financial markets opened, allowing rich people to move their money wherever they saw fit. This basically gave rich folks an outside option; if taxes were too high, they could move their money elsewhere.

If the rich people have an outside option, AGV doesn't work - the only way to pay for government is to run deficits (Groves-Clarke). Thus, when world capital markets opened, deficits appeared in all rich countries and have persisted ever since. Naturally, this is a problem, since it logically ends in all rich countries defaulting on their debts, after which they will either drastically slash government services ("austerity") or close their capital markets and go back to forcing the rich people to fork over the loot.

This is a rather depressing explanation for why rich countries run big deficits, but I think it is the right one. Republicans have been more willing to run deficits, but that is probably just because they represent the rich people who will move their money out of the country if taxes are raised to balance the budget. We probably confront a devil's choice between closing our capital markets (and thus hurting international trade) or deeply cutting public services like roads and schools - things that are a net positive for the country, but that aren't worth the price to the rich.

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The red badge of bad economics

Though Brad DeLong is, far and away, my favorite econ blogger out there today, there are times when I disagree with him. In an article in Foreign Policy, Brad reminds us of the origins of many of the bad economics ideas making the rounds among the political right today:

There was silence in the seminar room. Richard Kahn broke it. "Do you mean to say," he asked, "that if I were to go out tomorrow and buy a new overcoat, that it would increase unemployment?"

"Yes," said the man in the front of the room, Friedrich von Hayek, "but it would take a long and complicated mathematical argument to explain why."...

In [Hayek's] thinking, [depressions] were righteous karmic payback for past sins against the gods of monetary orthodoxy. Any attempts to cut them short or make them shallower would produce only temporary palliation, at the cost of a fiercer, deeper, and nastier further depression in the future.

Hayek's fellow countryman, Joseph Schumpeter, went further: "Gentlemen!" he announced to his students at Harvard University (there were no ladies). "A depression is healthy! Like a good ice-cold douche!" If depressions did not exist, Schumpeter thought, we would have to invent them. They were "the respiration of the economic mechanism."

Agreeing with Schumpeter was Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon...Hoover quotes Mellon: "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

Anyone who has been following the economics press over the past two years will find these ideas very familiar - they are the ideas advanced by conservative-leaning economists and other conservative intellectuals. From Glenn Beck (who hawks Hayek's books on his show) to well-respected economists like Robert Lucas, Robert Barro, and Greg Mankiw, the Right has embraced the idea that depressions like our current one cannot be mitigated by government policy.

But why? Why, in particular, have so many eminent macroeconomists rushed to embrace the notion that their discipline has produced no new useful policy recommendations in the last 75 years? Here is where DeLong and I differ. He believes that the culprit is resentment - the Nietszchean idea that people in a bad situation will come to believe that their suffering is noble, and will try to force their plight on others. DeLong writes:

Nothing has changed in the past few years to make Hayek's, Schumpeter's, and Mellon's arguments stronger intellectually against the critiques of Keynes and Friedman than they were 60 years ago. On substance, their current victory is inexplicable. But their triumph, epitomized by the Tea Party movement and its hostility to government action, can be explained by our fourth horseman: Friedrich Nietzsche...

Nietzsche talked about the losers -- or rather, about those who thought they were the losers. He looked at those who saw themselves as weak and poor -- rather than strong and rich -- and saw trouble. "[N]othing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment," he wrote. It drives us to madness.

Think of that when you consider this: The U.S. unemployment rate is stubbornly high, yet aid from a federal government that can borrow at unbelievably good terms could allow states to maintain their levels of public employment, and those public workers would then spend their incomes and so boost the number of private-sector jobs as well. But the voters are against that. No, they say. We have lost our jobs. It is only fair that those who work for the government lose their jobs as well -- never mind that each public-sector job lost triggers the destruction of yet another private-sector job. It's the underlying logic that has led to a wave of austerity across Europe that is now headed for America's shores. And it's the same logic that says, "It is only fair that homeowners lose their money" -- never mind that everyone's home prices will suffer...

Because some are unemployed, unemployment is good -- we need more of it. Because some have lost their wealth, wealth destruction is good -- we need more of it.

Although I am, in general, a big fan of Nietzsche's psychological insight, I just don't think it applies here. After all, none of the eminent economists who have railed first against stimulus spending and then against quantitative easing have lost their jobs - or even seen their wages cut! - as a result of the depression. They cannot possibly envy the good fortune of the construction workers who were employed by the stimulus. Additionally, studies have shown that Tea Parties, on the whole, are better off than most Americans; they are less, not more likely to be experiencing resentment over losing their jobs.

My guess is that the culprit behind Zombie Economics (as John Quiggin calls it) is simply the same devil that is currently plaguing every other aspect of American public life: identity politics.

American politics right now is all about identity. At the grassroots level, it's about race, with the Tea Party trying to convince poor whites that their interests lie with people of the same skin color - that the tribal threats of immigration and welfare are more dire than macroeconomic mismanagement. At the elite level, it's about the clash between the Business Class on one hand, and academics and lawyers on the other.

As both grassroots and elite America have separated themselves more and more (the so-called "Big Sort"), they have become ever more eager for markers to distinguish their two tribes - cultural flags around which to rally. In other countries, and in times past, identity markers included what church you went to and what accent you spoke with. Nowadays, there are the obvious material symbols, like whether you drive an SUV or a Prius. But in addition, people declare their allegiance by the ideas they accept and promulgate.

If you are a conservative, how do you communicate to fellow conservatives that you are on their side? Being white is not enough, since plenty of whites (about 45%) vote Democratic. Having an SUV and talking with a Southern accent might do it, but that's expensive and difficult. But denying global warming is easy, costless, and instantly and effectively communicates that you are part of the conservative movement/identity/army.

It's the same thing with Zombie Economics. If you are an economist or public intellectual, saying "stimulus doesn't work" or "we're in danger of inflation" or "the economy is being held back by uncertainty over Obama's policies" is just an easy way of saying "I stand with the Business Class against the forces of academics and lawyers." Never mind that the Business Class doesn't really believe we're in danger of inflation - otherwise, the TIPS spread, which is a market measure of inflation expectations among the investor class, would be much higher than it is. Never mind that policy uncertainty is not cited by businesses as a major concern. The purpose of these theories is not to guide policy, but to assert allegiance.

For Nobel laureates and other distinguished economists, it is important job-wise and prestige-wise to stand with the Business Class, who provide demand for the services of the econ profession. For grassroots Tea Partiers, mouthing support for Hayek is either a way of saying "don't give my money to nonwhite people", or simply a way to make conservatism seem like more of a coherent ideology than it is. Resentment need not have anything to do with it.

And if policy is paralyzed by the bad ideas that are used as ideological markers? Well, that's just collateral damage, but if you think about it, it's mild compared to the absolute political paralysis that America's identity rift has already brought about. Americans are more focused right now on dividing the pie than preventing the pie from shrinking. So shrink it shall continue to do.

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Why Microsoft Wants Novell's Patents

On Monday, Novell let it be known that it would be acquired by Attachmate Corporation in a deal worth $2.2 billion. Meanwhile, in a Form 8-K filing with the SEC, Novell stated that it "will sell to CPTN all of Novell's right, title and interest in 882 patents ... for $450 million in cash." CPTN Holdings LLC is a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft.

Immediately, people began to speculate that the reason Microsoft would bid such an enormous amount of money to obtain Novell's patent portfolio (which, by the way, comes to only 462 issued U.S. Patents; the 882 figure represents applied-for patents as well as issued patents) is to get its hands on the intellectual property around UNIX. (Novell acquired UNIX from AT&T in the 1990s.)

But it now appears that Novell will not be selling UNIX patents as part of the CPTN deal. So the $450 million question is: What, exactly, is Microsoft (via CPTN) paying all that money for?

I'll offer my own speculation. (Disclosure: In 2006 and 2007, I was a member of Novell's Inventions Committee -- the company's internal patent-oversight board. I don't maintain "special connections" with the Committee, however, nor do I pretend to speak for Novell.) If you look at Novell's patent portfolio as a whole -- and in particular, if you look at the bulk of the work done in the past five years -- you can't help but notice that the single largest category of inventions has to do with security.

If you go to the USPTO website and so a search on patents with "security," "trust," or "authentication" in the Abstract, where Novell is the Assignee, you'll come up with 60 hits. The search query I used was:

(((ABST/security OR ABST/authentication) OR ABST/trust) AND AN/Novell)

If you do a search on ABST/encryption, you'll get another 12 hits. That's 72 hits out of 462 granted patents (roughly 16% of the total) having to do with encryption or security.

Microsoft is well aware of its lagging reputation in matters involving security. And the company well knows that the success of its initiatives in cloud computing, collaboration, and social networking will depend, in large measure, on whether it can present a credible security story to customers. There's a lot at stake (to put it mildly). Compared to the size of the cloud computing, collab, and social markets, $450 million is a pittance.

How good are Novell's security patents? That's another question. Many (not all) of them are genuinely clever. Exactly which ones Microsoft has its eye on, though, is a secret probably only a few people in Redmond know.

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Thoughts on the rise of Asia

David Pilling has a long, rambling, but good column in the Financial Times about the rise of Asia. It's all over the place, but basically it says:

1) Asia is growing much faster than anywhere else.

2) Since Asia is really just a silly European word for "everything on the Big Continent to the east of us," Asia is enormous, and hence it's not particularly unusual for them to be a big share of world GDP.

3) There are still dangers that could stop the rise of China and India, e.g. environmental or political problems.

4) Asia's increasing economy will give Asian countries increased political importance.

All of these are good points. However, let me make a few points that, I think are less commonly made.

First of all, the rise of China may be a return to historical norms, but the rise of India is not. China, historically, was usually one single political unit, while India was always divided between north and south. And while China was the world's technological leader for about 700 years, India has never led in technology. Also, though China often dominated its neighborhood, India rarely did. India had a huge GDP, true, but this was back in the days when everyone's GDP came from farming, and India simply had more farmers and richer farmland. The fact is, India is poised to become a technological, military, and economic superpower for the first time ever. This, it seems to me, is a more momentous shift even than China's rise.

Second, "Asia" will probably never return to its historic share of world GDP, for the simple reason that lots of people live in the Western Hemisphere now. The rise of the U.S., and now Brazil, Mexico, etc. permanently shrinks the relative weight of every other region. And, even more than the rise of India, the rise of the Western Hemisphere is historically unprecedented.

Third, a region's "rise" no longer means what it used to. Namely, powerful countries used to go out and conquer weaker ones (think: Europe in the 1700s, Mongols in the 1200s), but that is no longer an economically advantageous thing to do. The rise of the U.S. led to a smattering invasions and occupations (Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq), but few real conquests or colonizations. We can expect the rise of Asia to entail even fewer.

And finally, the big danger from Asia's rise (besides wholesale exhaustion of the planet's resources) is that Asian countries will fight each other. I humbly submit that Noah's Law of Competition states that competition is more common among things that are similar than things that are different. Or, in this case: Neighbors fight. Europe's rise was accompanied by centuries of internecine warfare; no less than 8 continent-wide wars raged from 1618 through 1945. Asia has already been through a period of war in the 20th Century, so we know that Asians are no more peaceful than Europeans. And Asian states are arming themselves at a furious pace.

Like Pilling's column, this blog post is a collection of tangentially related observations. But the main thrust is this: The possibility of internecine Asian warfare is the scariest political threat facing the world in the next 50 years. And the rise of the Global South, not China, will be the most significant historical event in the next 100.

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Getting Started with Adobe AIR

It seems I'm always late to a good party. Yesterday, I finally did something I've been meaning to do for, oh, at least two years: I compiled and ran my first Adobe AIR application. And in typical masochistic fashion, I decided to do it with Notepad as my code editor and command-line tools for compilation. It's not that I can't afford Dreamweaver or Flash Builder, mind you (I have both products and recommend them highly); it was more a matter of wanting to get dirt under my fingernails, so to speak. That's just how I am.

The whole process of downloading the AIR SDK, reading online code examples, and getting my first example up and running took a little less than an hour from start to finish. There were only a couple of rough spots (both easily resolved). The first was creating my own self-signed security certificate. I did this with the ADT tool that comes with the AIR SDK. The magic command-line incantation that worked for me was:

adt -certificate -cn SelfSign -ou KT -o "Kas Thomas" -c US 2048-RSA cert.p12 password1234

Naturally, you'll want to change some of the parameters (e.g., the ones with my name and initials, and the password) when you do this yourself. But running this command should produce a certificate named cert.p12 on your local drive, assuming adt.bat (Windows) is in your path.

For example code, I turned to the text editor example described here. I compiled the code with:

..\bin\adt -package -storetype pkcs12 -keystore ..\cert.p12 TextEditorHTML.air application.xml .

(running a command console from a location of C:\AIR\TextEditorHTML, with my certificate stored under C:\AIR). The first time I did this, I got an error of "File C:\AIR\TextEditorHTML\application.xml is not a valid AIRI or AIR file." If you get the "is not a valid AIRI or AIR file" error, it means you left the trailing period off the foregoing command line. (Note carefully the period after "application.xml" at the very end.)

And that was basically it. My first AIR app: done in under an hour. Now, as Shantanu Narayen says, "let the games begin!"

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Tens Unit and Muscle Stimulator

I have been going to Physical Therapy for back problems for the last three weeks. I have one more week to go and I am done. They have been using a tens unit and muscle stimulator along with a heat pack on my back. That and the exercises are helping ease up the pain in my back.

When I get there they do a deep tissue massage on my back. Then I have to lay down and do some exercises to stretch my back and leg muscles. I also do them at home to keep my back from stiffening up. After all that I sit with the tens unit and muscle stimulator on my back for 20 minutes.

I have been thinking of getting a tens unit and found a website online where they can be purchased for a lot cheaper than they would normally be. The website is Lgmedsupply.com and their prices compared to the original price are unbelievably cheap. The original price for a Tens Unit and Muscle Stimulator is $569 but Lgmedsupply.com's price is only $109! Wow that is pretty cheap!

A tens unit and muscle stimulator works by putting little pads on your back where the pain is, I am sure you can put it on other body parts as well such as the legs and arms too. You set the time on the machine and turn it up as high as you can stand it and then you feel little electric shocks in your back. It is like an electrical massage.

If you have been having severe back pain and are in the market for a tens unit or muscle stimulator then check out lgmedsupply.com and check out their cheap prices!

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Disabled Shop Blogging Contest Entry

Living with Social Anxiety Disorder

I was always a shy kid and my mom and family and even I thought I would outgrow it. When I became a teenager I was somewhat normal. I hung out with friends, went to the movies, and even went to school with no problem. Of course I was pretty much stoned all the time too so maybe that is why I thought I was somewhat normal.

My Life Changed

As soon as I hit my early 20's my life changed. I was working for the Summer Youth Program and when I first started I thought things would be great. It was a cleaning job which was no big deal to me. There really wasn't that many people working there either. Then the panic attacks started happening. I started calling off work almost every day with the excuse that I was sick. My husband and I started fighting because he wanted to go to family get-together's and I didn't want to. Yeah my life changed big time.

I was the shy little girl again. I wouldn't even go to my own family get-together's and my mom was getting annoyed with me. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I eventually starting going to family get-together's to keep everyone happy but I was not happy. I would sit in the corner and try to avoid everyone which was rude but it wasn't my fault. I still didn't know what was wrong with me.

A Self Diagnosis

A few months later I saw a commercial on t.v about Zoloft and how the guy in the commercial had trouble in social situations. Then I talked to my mom and dad and found out that two of my aunts on my dads side had something called Social Anxiety Disorder. So I started thinking that maybe that was what my problem was since I had all the signs. At the time I didn't have any health insurance so I couldn't afford to go to a psychiatrist.So I let it go for a while but at least I knew there was a name for what was wrong with me and eventually I could get on medication.

Eventually, I talked to a case worker at the welfare office. She said I could sign up for SSI for Social Anxiety Disorder and get health insurance so I could get on medication. I didn't want to do it but I did. I went through all the hoops, got the insurance and got on the meds.

A Professional Diagnosis

I got diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder, Agoraphobia, Depression, Panic Disorder, Generalized Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder. When I was told all of this I felt like a giant outcast and I felt pathetic. I signed up for SSI and still haven't won my case. I have been to two hearings and have been fighting them for four years now. The meds work somewhat but I still have panic attacks when I am around too many people. I have trouble going to Wal-Mart still and sometimes have to go outside and leave my husband to do the shopping so I can get some air and get away from all of those people. I have to force myself to go to my niece, nephew, and great niece's birthday parties and then I can't wait to get home. I hate living like this. I also don't have a drivers licence because I am afraid of the other cars coming at me. When I am in the car with my mom or dad and I see the cars on the other side of the road coming at us I have to do my breathing exercises to avoid a panic attack.

I even have trouble talking on the phone. I don't have a problem talking to my family on the phone but I have a hard time bringing myself to talk to strangers and even some people I know from the welfare office and the social security office. I stutter and have panic attacks and have to hand the phone to my husband.

Living with all of this is horrible. I deal with it the best way I know how but it is really hard.

The above post is a competition entry for the disabled shop blog. If you would like to enter this competition, please click here.

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The Strength of Weak Ties

Hydrogen bonds (dotted lines) are only about
5% as strong as covalent bonds (solid lines).

Last Saturday, there was a fascinating discussion on Twitter about the power of weak connections. It was a real-time Tweetup held under the banner of #ideachat, the latter being a monthly Twitter Chat focused on the process of ideation, held every second Saturday of the month at 9:00 a.m. EST. (Ideachat bills itself as "a Salon for Twitter Thinkers About Ideas." It is founded by Angela Dunn, Idea Designer and Digital Consultant, aka @blogbrevity.)

The discussion was loosely grounded in the work of Mark S. Granovetter, whose 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" (American Journal of Sociology, May 1973, pp. 1360-1380) is one of the most widely cited papers in sociology. (See also Granovetter's 1983 followup paper in Sociological Theory, "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited.")

I won't try to recap the whole discussion here, since you can read the full transcript online elsewhere. Suffice it to say that in little more than an hour, 92 people contributed 695 tweets on the subject of how weak ties contribute to the spread of ideas in social networks. The discussion seemed particularly apropos given that almost none of the discussants knew each other except through the casual, transient contact afforded by Twitter and TweetChat (the tool used by most participants in the discussion).

My main contribution to the discussion was to draw a parallel between weak social ties and the physical chemistry of hydrogen bonding. I pointed out that in chemistry, weak links (viz., hydrogen bonds) are responsible for much of what makes biomolecule behavior interesting. It's a hard point to try to make in 140 characters or less. But it's worth spending a minute thinking about.

In chemistry, there are several types of chemical bond. The strongest type is the covalent bond: This is the kind of bond that connects the various atoms in a molecule (such as the hydrogens to the oxygen in water). About 5% as strong as the covalent bond is the hydrogen bond, which represents the weak electrostatic pull between electron-rich atoms and electron-poor atoms of different molecules. About an order of magnitude weaker still is the van der Waals force between atoms. Hydrogen bonds and van der Waals interactions are transient in nature, whereas covalent bonds are (for all intents) permanent, or at least long-lasting.

It turns out that a lot of interesting chemical behavior arises from the short-lasting weak interactions that go under the name of hydrogen bonding. The concept of surface tension arises from it. Protein folding happens the way it does because of hydrogen bonding. The stickiness of adhesives is due to hydrogen bonding. (Epoxy, on the other hand, owes its strength to covalent bonds.)

At one point in the #ideachat session, I asked (rhetorically) which is more useful, Scotch tape or Krazy-Glue? Someone later suggested a better analogy would have been duct tape, or even PostIt notes (which famously rely on an adhesive that is almost -- but not quite -- ineffective). You can do a lot of useful things with Krazy-Glue (which relies on covalent bonds to get the job done), but I can think of at least 100 times more things you can do with duct tape. Tape is incredibly more versatile, even though the mechanism by which its adhesive works is fundamentally at least 20 times weaker than the mechanism behind Krazy-Glue.

In the same way, I tend to think that the weak ties engendered by things like Twitter tend, in the aggregate, to produce effects that are surprisingly far-reaching -- causing many tipping-points to be reached long before they otherwise would be.

Whether you agree with my physical-chemistry analogies or not, I encourage you to take part in the next #ideachat, which is scheduled to happen on the eleventh of December at 9:00 a.m. Eastern U.S. time. Mark your calendar. I'll see you there.

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One way or another, Medicare is going to go

It is becoming more and more apparent that the U.S. government has two choices: A) drastic cuts in health care expenditure, or B) a sovereign default, followed by drastic cuts in health care expenditure. Don't believe me? Look at this graph:










As you can see, though Social Security spending is projected to increase only slightly (as the Baby Boomers retire), but Medicare/Medicaid is projected to explode as health costs soar, sucking an ever-larger amount of our nation's GDP down the toilet of useless health "care." Other much-discussed deficit remedies - higher taxes, lower defense spending, and freezes on discretionary spending - will help only marginally and only for a few years, before the rampaging monster of health costs eats our government whole.

Now, a few points. Point the first: most of our excess health care costs, relative to other countries, go toward keeping fat elderly and middle-aged people alive (also known as "outpatient care"); the fact that our life expectancy is the same or slightly lower than that of other rich countries indicates that our nation is using high-tech expensive medical treatments to (imperfectly) cancel out poor health choices in early life. It's not working, and it is bankrupting us.

We are thus in a political bind, because seniors are disproportionately powerful in our electoral system. It was seniors, angry at Obama for cutting their Medicare to pay for expanded health coverage for the poor, who propelled the Republican Party to its historic landslide victory last week. Seniors fear and revile Obama's plan for socialized medicine for all, because it would necessitate cuts to the socialized medicine that seniors already enjoy.

Now, this is obviously unsustainable. Eventually, the big light-blue wedge on the graph above will force our government to either drastically cut Medicare or default on its sovereign debt. The latter would be an unmitigated disaster for the U.S. economy, and the austerity reforms that would be implemented in its wake would kill Medicare just as surely. However, seniors, with only a decade or two left to live, are perhaps less concerned about the nation's long-term sustainability than I am.

It would be nice to turn this point into a partisan one. I wish I could, as Paul Krugman and Kevin Drum do, simply point out that Democrats are willing to cut Medicare and Republicans are not, and wave my flag and say "Vote Democrat, and America will be saved!" But, although not yet a senior myself, I am old enough to remember 1996, when Bill Clinton pilloried Bob Dole for daring to have suggested cuts to Medicare. I am forced to conclude that, as un-serious as the Republican party is about deficit reduction in general, pandering to seniors is the game that everyone plays.

Our political economy now looks something like this: The party in power, realizing that Medicare is the Death Star, meekly and quietly suggest small and marginal cuts in the program, disguising their suggestions in a thick blanket of technocratic jargon and hiding the cuts inside much larger bills. But the loyal opposition dutifully sifts through the mountains of obfuscation, locates the Medicare cuts, and screams about it until blue in the face. The seniors, quaking in their slippers, turn out in a mighty horde to throw the incumbents out; wash, rinse, repeat, while wages stagnate, the deficit spirals upward, and American power declines.

What do we do about this sorry state of affairs? Sad and painful as it is for me to say this - because I really do have a lot of sympathy for old people - the answer has to be "age war." Unless younger and middle-aged voters unite in grim resolve to "throw Grandma from the train," she is going to leap off anyway and drag us onto the tracks with her.

There are only two ways to smash rising health costs. Either our government must socialize the entire health-care industry and implement draconian rationing ("death panels") to cut costs, or Medicare/Medicaid must be ruthlessly slashed, and as costs continue to rise, slashed again, until brutal market forces stop health providers from raising prices for services that fail to prolong our lives. And what this will mean, I am fairly sure, is a partial return to the culture of the multi-family home, as children are forced to take on some of the job of palliative care for their elders that hospitals now provide. In the long run, of course, a government-spearheaded public health campaign to reduce unhealthy lifestyles (fat, smoking, malnutrition) will help to bring down health costs, but it will not bear fruit in time to save us from fiscal disaster.

In any case, I wish there were another way, but political events have made it clear that Medicare is going to die. The only remaining question is whether it will kill our economy as it goes down.

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On "libertarians"

Regarding my last post, an anonymous commenter asks:

Why do you insist that Angus is a conservative? Are you unable to make a distinction between conservatives and libertarians?

Hint: they are quite different.

Two questions here. The first is easy; I insist that Angus is a conservative because he says a lot of the exact same things that self-described conservatives say. Political ideology is defined by consensus, not by a dictionary. If you are marching in an army, and you point around you and say "I'm not with these guys," I'm going to have to be a little skeptical of your claim. (Yes, I realize that there is a substantial possibility that Angus did not leave the anonymous comment; hence, I realize that saying "your claim" is not entirely appropriate in this situation; it is a figure of speech).

The second question is harder: What is the difference between self-styled "conservatives" and self-styled "libertarians"?

The common answer is: Social issues. Though many conservative politicians and writers call themselves "libertarian," their stances against gay marriage, immigration, and drug use give them away as closet authoritarians. True libertarians, we often hear, agree with conservatives on economic issues (lower taxes, less regulation) and with liberals on social issues (legal marijuana, gay marriage, more immigration).

I do not buy this distinction. As I see it, the American "conservative" ideology is not a rigid and unified canon, but a diverse set of interest groups held together by an unusually stable alliance of convenience. From reading conservative blogs and magazines, watching Fox News, and talking to self-described conservatives, I have grokked that the groups that make up the alliance we call "conservatism" are three: 1. businesspeople and other well-to-do folks who want lower taxes and regulation, 2. ethnic tribalists who think that white, Christian, and Southern/rural people and groups should have political and social primacy, and 3. militarists who want our military to be really big and to go kick peoples' butts. These are known in the press, respectively, as "economic conservatives," "social conservatives," and "neoconservatives." Militarists are the smallest group, so I'll ignore them for now.

What do these groups have to do with each other? Why has this coalition-of-the-willing endured for so long? In a word, socialism. The conservative movement as we know it is an alliance of two groups that felt threatened by the socialist (or "leftist") movement of the 20th Century - economic conservatives because socialists wanted to take their money, social conservatives because socialists wanted to diversify and liberalize their culture. As Wooldridge and Micklethwait document in The Right Nation, economic conservatives had to hold their nose a bit to join with a bunch of moralizing Bible-thumpers, and lower-income social conservatives had to do a bit of doublethink to avoid noticing that conservative economic policies mostly benefit rich people. All this is well known. The difference in priorities between the two main conservative constituencies is undoubtedly why conservatives spend so much time demonizing liberals; they want to keep the focus on the common enemy.

Which brings me to the question: What the heck is the difference between an "economic conservative" and a "libertarian"? Apparently, whether or not that individual publicly endorses the big-tent alliance described above. A true libertarian, we are told, holds true to his ideological self-consistency, and either votes libertarian or not at all.

Which is absurd, of course. On election day, most libertarians hold their noses and vote Republican, exactly as many "greens" and Naderites and assorted other leftists hold their nose and vote Democrat, because at the end of the day, people are not fools, and they understand the two-party system and how it works. In other words, when push comes to shove, libertarians behave exactly like the economic conservatives with whom they are identically one and the same. A few snarky throwaway protest votes do not constitute a separate movement.

And economic conservatives (including many who routinely refer to themselves as "libertarian"), far from being marginalized or disaffected within their movement, comprise the intellectual and ideological leading edge of that movement. It is think tanks like the "libertarian" Cato Institute and publications like the National Review who create and/or promulgate all of the economic ideas that later get parroted at Tea Party rallies and on Glenn Beck's talk show. Why do you think that a bunch of anti-immigration, anti-gay marriage, anti-drug-legalization fire-breathers are snapping up copies of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom? Hint: it's NOT because "libertarians" and "economic conservatives" are quite different.

It is "libertarians" who have created and promulgated the idea that Obama is a leftist, despite his very middle-of-the-road attitude toward business. It is "libertarians" who have given the legions of social conservatives, who hated Obama from Minute 1 because he was black and weird and intellectual, an excuse to associate Obama with Hitler without sounding like the racist tribalist reactionaries that they really are. "Big government!", the Tea Partiers shriek, when in fact they are dog-whistling "Nigger hippie outsider!" The "libertarian" enablers of this little pretense smile behind cupped hands, knowing that when tribal animus propels the Republican Party to power (as it will this evening), they will get their lower taxes and their deregulation. And if gay marriage and immigration take a hit, well, not optimal, but not catastrophic; those issues were never top priorities for economic conservatives anyway.

And those who cast snarky throwaway protest votes on election day will shrug and say "Don't blame me; I'm not a conservative, I'm a libertarian. Don't you know the difference?"

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What gets conservatives' goat

Over at Kids Prefer Cheese, blogger Angus (after merciless heckling from Yours Truly in the comments section) relents and gives me his reasons for thinking Obama is an "uncompromising" far-leftist:

So I started to wonder exactly why I had the perception that Obama was "pretty far left".

Hence this Top 10 signs Obama is a lefty list:

10. His incessant pandering to unions

9. His child-like love for high speed rail

8. His pushing for subsidies for solar, wind, & ethanol (i.e. uneconomic boondoggles).

7. His refusal to understand that electric cars actually burn coal in many parts of the country!

6. His firm belief that a small group of experts can competently run the economy

5. The amazing growth in the Federal budget under his watch

4. His habit of flip-flopping like a boated marlin

3. His inability to consider issues of moral hazard or unintended consequences in policymaking

2. His belief that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid or evil or both

1. His overall superior, moralistic, and condescending attitude

Not much evidence for the "uncompromising" part (what's the difference between "flip-flopping" and compromise, again?). But I'll take what I can get. At last we know what makes someone a leftist in conservative eyes.

Two big points here.

Point #1: Attitude speaks louder than actions. Reasons 1, 2, 3, 6, and 10 are all about attitude, mannerism, and rhetoric, as opposed to real policy actions. This reinforces something I've been slowly realizing over the past few years - in politics, what group or movement you seem to be part of is more important than what you actually do. I think this was behind much of the anti-Bush animus that liberals felt long before Bush launched wars, attacked civil liberties, or even got elected in the first place. And as I've mentioned, I think Obama is seen as anti-business despite his efforts to do things to help business mainly because of his rhetoric lambasting "multinational corporations" and "big business." In other words, politics is first and foremost about coalition-building and allegiance; policy is always and everywhere a secondary consideration.

Point #2: Conservatives really, really love oil and cars. Reasons 7, 8, and 10 on Angus' list are about Obama's support for alternative energy and alternative transportation. At first, this might be surprising - since when does wanting to build trains and support technological R&D make one an uncompromising far-leftist? But if you look carefully, you'll see that this is no oddity at all. Conservatives really dislike any thing that threatens America's dependence on oil or our use of the automobile. The blinding animus conservatives hold for rail is well-documented, as is their decades-long effort to kill alternative energy research. But why? Possible explanations include:

A) The oil industry is the main financial backer of the Republican Party (see: Koch bros., Halliburton, Exxon).

B) Promotion of alternative energy is seen as a backdoor to large-scale government regulation of carbon-producing activity (i.e. everything), which is seen as a backdoor to socialism.

C) Rail transport and dense urban areas both force white people into daily contact with nonwhites, which conservatives really really really don't want.

D) The car is seen as an instrument of individual empowerment and liberty, and hence "libertarians" think we should promote car transport.

I'd say there is some truth to all of these. But it's still sometimes astonishing how central the defense of the car/oil transport structure is to the policy priorities and worldviews of conservatives (and "libertarians"), especially considering how much government spending and regulatory policy has gone into creating that structure. Where social conservatives draw their battle lines on religious issues (abortion) or racial issues (welfare, affirmative action), economic conservatives' wedge issue is transportation and urban structure. Of course, the fact that lots of black people currently live in urban centers probably has a lot to do with the enduring strength of the conservative big tent.

Anyway, thanks to Angus for giving me his reasons for believing Obama is a leftist, and props for making it an honest one. I may never stop being surprised at how much A) attitude and B) transportation issues matter to conservative thinkers. But I suppose that is my fault, not theirs.

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Don't count Japan out yet

It is fashionable these days to speak of Japan as the "sick man of Asia," a country in severe and possibly irreversible economic and social decline. The list of Japan's ills is both familiar and daunting: two "lost decades" of slow economic growth, persistent deflation, massive government debt, ultra-low fertility, a sclerotic political system, technological and social isolation (called "Galapagos syndrome"), and - as if all that weren't enough - wimpy "herbivorous" men. Typically, China is held up as the example of what Japan could be (and once was!), but isn't - a high-growth East Asian economic powerhouse.

Now, perhaps I'm a natural contrarian, or a natural optimist, or just a tubthumping Japanese nationalist, but I think that rumors of Japan's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Almost all of these problems are either overstated, misunderstood, or common to most rich countries.

First, let's take a look at those "lost decades." In the 1990s, Japan's economy did indeed slow, but not disastrously so - per capita, annual Japanese growth was only 0.5 percentage points lower than that of America, whose economy boomed during that decade. And in the years that followed - the "second lost decade" of the 2000s - Japan's per capita growth actually outpaced that of the U.S. It was only because of Japan's declining population that the countries' total GDP diverged so markedly.

Then there's that public debt. Although scary headline figures put the government debt at over 200% of GDP, much of that is held by the Japanese government itself. Japan's net government debt is only about 100% of GDP - still way too high, but not that different from Europe or the U.S.

The ultra-low fertility rate - 1.27 children per woman by the most recent count - is indeed a big problem, as it will strain the pension system and raise the dependency ratio. But it's not a problem that's unique to Japan. South Korea's fertility is 1.24, Germany's is 1.36, Italy's is 1.38. Few people are talking about the terminal decline of Germany or Korea. Low fertility is just something that all developed countries are having to learn to deal with.

Japan's political system is indeed sclerotic. Both major parties are weak, riven by internal discord and beholden to the powerful bureaucracy. But at least Japan has a two-party system now! When the Democratic Party of Japan was elected to power last year, it was the first time that an opposition party had won a popular majority in over 50 years of "democracy." If Japan's politics are sclerotic now, they were simply tragic back in the 60s, 70s and 80s; one perpetually-ruling party, deeply corrupt, divided into internal factions that doled out government protection and largesse to favored companies and constituencies. Japan's political system is one of the institutions that has most dramatically improved over the past 20 years.

As for Japan's isolation, here too the doomsayers overstate their case. It's true, as many lament, that few Japanese students study overseas; this deprives Japan's professionals and scientists of valuable connections, experience, and perspective. But French students study mostly in France, German students in Germany, and British students in Britain, and little is said of it. In fact, the only large rich country that does send a substantial portion of its students overseas seems to be South Korea.

Regarding the technological "Galapagos syndrome" that has supposedly deprived Japan's export industries of international competitiveness, I don't deny that some of this is happening, especially in mobile computing and communications. But Japan still runs a substantial trade surplus, despite its currency no longer being undervalued. And plenty of Japan's once-heralded industries - cars, construction equipment, machine tools, cameras, video game systems - are still just as world-beating as ever. Furthermore, small and medium-sized Japanese companies have increasingly captured market share in parts and components, the un-sexy back end of the value chain that nevertheless makes Germany an export powerhouse. Conclusion: Galapagos syndrome is an annoyance, but it is not bringing down the Japanese economy.

Deflation is a thornier problem. Here is one issue where I agree with the consensus view, which is to say that a long deflationary spiral has sapped much of the vitality from Japan's economy. This is the problem that is most unique to Japan, and is something that will continue to plague the country for a long time, as high-paid Baby Boomers retire and are replaced with lower-paid youngsters.

That about covers my list. As for the much-ballyhooed "herbivorous men," well, sorry to say this, but Japan, welcome to the club. Rather than some kind of collective loss of civilizational pride and will, I blame internet porn.

All this, I want to stress, is not to shrug at Japan's difficulties, or to claim that Japan is cruising along. The country has real problems. But look around - Europe and the U.S. are in much the same boat on many of these points, or else have equally vicious problems all their own. Japan needs serious reforms and bold experiments, but it does not deserve its reputation as a sick, exhausted society in a slow, terminal downward spiral.

Why, then, is this meme of Japanese decline so popular, both in the West and in much of Japan itself? I believe that the main culprit is expectations. After all, Japan was experiencing China-like levels of growth as recently as a few decades ago. And it is similar, in its economic model and (though few mention this aloud) its racial composition to countries like South Korea and Taiwan and China that have been on a tear of late. We look at the other Asian tigers, and expect Japan to be an Asian tiger too - and when it's not, we assume it must be some special sclerosis.

But Japan is not another "Asian tiger." It did its rapid catch-up growth a long time ago. Japan was the first East Asian country to join the ranks of the developed nations, and so it naturally was the first to hit the wall of slower growth that inevitably puts the brakes on any country that reaches the technological frontier. This is just economic destiny. In fact, don't look now, but Korea is hitting this wall as well, as is Taiwan.

So how well is Japan doing, really? Its per capita GDP, measured at purchasing power parity, is very close to that of Germany, the UK, and France - countries with roughly similar populations and natural resources - and a bit ahead of South Korea and Taiwan. It has nearly the lowest murder rate and the highest life expectancy of any country on the planet. On the downside, its suicide rate is extremely high, and its inequality is a bit worse than Europe's.

Not the best-off country in the world, therefore, but no slouch either, and in some areas still a world-beater. And those who claim Japan is a society in stasis should look again. In recent years, Japan has shown a (relatively) bold willingness to tinker with its institutions, instituting a jury trial system, for example. Once-respected (and thus deeply corrupt) institutions like prosecutors and police have deservedly fallen from grace. Service industries like retail, once the cozy sinecure of politically-connected firms, are being challenged by entrepreneurs like Tadashi Yanai of Fast Retailing. the flip side of Japan's "Galapagos syndrome" is that many Japanese customers are opening their eyes to the innovation and quality of foreign brands like the iPhone. Even Japan's famously paleolithic gender roles are changing.

Japan is not (yet) in the middle of a Renaissance, nor can it recapture the economic "miracle" of the 70s. It assuredly has a hard road ahead. But the country is neither as sclerotic nor as badly off as pessimists and critics allege. This is one country that may surprise you on the upside.

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La la la, I can't hear myself

"Angus" at the blog Kids Prefer Cheese gives us a post called "one reality, many interpretations?":

The progressive drumbeat that the Dems are in trouble because Obama was too conservative continues.

Mark Thoma gives a clear articulation of the view:

"I don't know if the centrist, bipartisan seeking, compromising Obama we have seen to date can actually embrace an encompassing vision. He seems afraid to be a Democrat.."

It's hard for me to understand this sentence coming from a person (i.e. Mark) who I like and respect. From my perspective, Obama is pretty far left and uncompromising.

Ah, I think, a conservative blogger. Expecting a list of reasons explaining why Obama is "far left and uncompromising," I instead get the following:

So let me invoke Robin Hanson and try to list things Obama has done that qualify as evidence for Mark's view.

I would say on economic policy the closest thing to centrist & compromising that he's done is appoint Summers and Geithner.

Can you count not pushing for single payer as bipartisan seeking or compromising?

Then there's Guantanamo, renditions, wiretaps, and the like. I view the continuation of these policies as wrong, but are they being continued as a compromise? Or out of bipartisanship?

Oh and then there are the wars. Do they count?

Oh my, there's also no action on immigration reform and the monstrosity that is DADT.

Holy Crap! Maybe Mark has a point.

Ah, I think. An open-minded conservative! Rare breed these days. But here, again, I expect a list of counterarguments; reasons why, despite this well-articulated (though by no means comprehensive) list of evidence for Obama's centrism, the President is actually "far left and uncompromising." I mean, the title of the blog post is "one reality, many interpretations?", right? It sure would be weird if I only got evidence for one of those interpretations, wouldn't it?

But instead I get this:

I see Obama as the worst possible policy mix. Wrong on economic issues, wrong on foreign policy and wrong on social issues too. A Dem should at least get the social issues right!

That Robin H. sure is a smart fellow.

And that is the end of the post. No, I haven't left anything out; the quotes above represent the entirety of the article.

So what we have here is a conservative blogger stating his opinion (that Obama is "far left and uncompromising"), listing a bunch of evidence why he's dead flat-out wrong, and then concluding that there are "many interpretations of reality." Well, heck. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but what he seems to be saying is: "Even if all the available evidence is against me, I choose to trust my pure instinct as the best guide to what's really true."

This is, in a nutshell, what I see as the big problem with the modern conservative movement. They have left the "reality-based community" for good and all. Instinct is viewed as a proper substitute for facts; a conservative is free to list evidence against his viewpoint ad infinitum, with the blithe and comfortable certainty that none of it really counts.

And where does the instinct that "Obama is far left and uncompromising" come from? It comes from a whole bunch of other conservatives and Republicans saying that he is. And where do they get their certainty that Obama is a leftist? Uh-huh. Yet other conservatives and Republicans. The feeling of consensus is powered by a whole bunch of people repeating the same things back to each other over and over. Conservatives have declared that the communal will of their tribe is more powerful than any outside reality.

Some call this "epistemic closure." I would call it "tribal secession from the intellectual life of the nation."

Update: In the comments thread for Angus' post, I try to press him on why exactly he thinks Obama is an uncompromising far-leftist. He repeatedly refuses (fails?) to state one single fact or piece of evidence that he thinks supports his chosen interpretation of reality. Sigh. It's actually pretty sad. Not that I'm surprised, though; like I said, it's not about evidence, it's about tribal instinct.

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