New Atlantic column: The case for a Federal University System

My new column in the Atlantic makes the case that we should establish a Federal University System in parallel to the state and private systems we already have. Excerpts:

[T]he price of college is high. And attendance has been growing...When you have increasing price and increasing quantity sold, Econ 101 tells you that what you're seeing is a shift in the demand curve. Lots more people want to go to college, and they are willing to pay more. The reason for the increase is not surprising -- it's the college wage premium, combined with low unemployment among people with a college degree... 

And we can only expect demand to increase, especially if we do what we ought to do and let in a lot more high-skilled immigrants. Those immigrants will be great for the economy, but their kids are going to be competing with native-born kids for college spots. Unless we do something, that competition could cause a xenophobic backlash among the high-skilled native-born, as well as driving up tuition even further. 

What do you do when you have a big increase in demand for a product? Well, if you're a company, you probably ramp up supply... 

So here's my idea for increasing the supply of college: A system of federal universities...
Federal university systems have been very successful in other countries. One prime example is the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT)...Another example is Japan's federal university system... 

A system of national universities would (1) fight the rise in tuition, and (2) accommodate all those smart second-generation kids whose parents we should be recruiting to our country in droves. But it will also help the nation in a 3rd way by giving us an outlet for higher research spending. The U.S. has been spending less and less on R&D as a percentage of our GDP, even as R&D becomes more and more important. In part because of this, there are legions of PhDs being forced to take private-sector jobs in which they have no expertise. These trends need to be reversed in order to maintain America's status as the leading technological nation. And a system of federal universities is the perfect vehicle to increase research spending and provide an outlet for all those PhDs... 

Federal universities are an idea whose time has come.

   

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Public perceptions of freshwater macro

Cato scholar and Forbes writer Timothy B. Lee is hardly what you'd call a liberal. Nevertheless, he's written a scathing column on conservatives' "Reality Problem". He mentions Nate Silver denialism, climate change denialism, and evolution denialism, but this part especially caught my eye:

On macroeconomics, a broad spectrum of economists, ranging from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman, supports the basic premise that recessions are caused by shortfalls in aggregate demand. Economists across the political spectrum agree that the government ought to take action counteract major aggregate demand shortfalls. There is, of course, a lot of disagreement about the details. Friedman argued that the Fed should be responsible for macroeconomic stabilization, while Keynes emphasized deficit spending. 

But rather than engaging this debate, a growing number of conservatives have rejected the mainstream economic framework altogether, arguing—against the views of libertarian economists like Friedman and F.A. Hayek—that neither Congress nor the Fed has a responsibility to counteract sharp falls in nominal incomes.

Basically, Lee is saying that freshwater (or "New Classical") macro is essentially a political shibboleth - an intellectual excuse for conservatives to oppose government action, rather than a serious attempt to model economic reality.

This is a point of view I hear expressed more and more frequently, not just in liberal circles, but in libertarian ones as well. It is an accusation that I myself have been unwilling to make, though I don't rule it out either. If this is becoming the conventional wisdom, it represents serious trouble for freshwater macro. Supporters of that school of thought should sit up and take notice.

What's interesting is that conservatives have long viewed Keynesianism as a thinly disguised Trojan horse for socialism. Suggestions that money is non-neutral, that recessions are caused by demand shocks, that the Fed should try to stabilize output, or that Congress should use fiscal stimulus to fight recessions are often waved away as excuses to redistribute wealth. Now, it seems that mainstream American opinion is concluding the exact opposite - that the modeling of recessions as supply shocks is the more politicized assumption.

The financial crisis probably has a lot to do with this, as does the recession. Prices fell in the crash and grew only slowly afterward, making it very hard to portray the recession as a shortage. The financial crisis itself made it difficult for the current generation to accept the idea - central to freshwater analysis - that markets run smoothly when left to their own devices.

But I must say, freshwater macroeconomists have not gone out of their way to eschew political motivations. Casey Mulligan, a well-known labor economist who claims that government benefits caused the slump, entitled his book "The Redistribution Recession" - an obvious jab at liberals. Conservatives who cite "policy uncertainty" as the root of our woes routinely fail to identify the Debt Ceiling Standoff of 2011 as the high point of uncertainty (as serious scholarly analysis suggests), instead focusing on supposed anticipation of socialist redistribution by the Obama administration. And freshwater economists confronted with the question of "Why did the financial crisis of 2008 occur?" routinely state - in the absence of evidence - that the root cause was government policy encouraging lending to poor people.

All of this does not look good in the eyes of people who are not firmly wedded to the conservative movement. It looks like politicization. And while attitudes and statements like this don't prove that RBC models and the like are political sales pitches for laissez-faire policies, they certainly don't do much to discredit the growing ranks of critics who, like Timothy B. Lee, speculate openly that this is the case.

Freshwater macro has an image problem that it really needs to address. People are whispering, but they're not giggling.

Update: A commented asked "Who are the freshwater people?" I had written a big explanation of this, but deleted it because I felt it was pedantic. Briefly, they are mainstream macroeconomists who think that supply shocks are the main cause of business cycles. This includes RBC theorists like Ed Prescott, Charles Plosser, and much of the Minnesota economics dept. Other famous New Classicals include Robert Lucas and Robert Barro. New Classical thinking appears to be strong at Wash U (Steve Williamson, for example, is there, and his work has a freshwater flavor). Tim Kehoe, Robert King, and Randy Wright are some other prominent New Classicals I know of. The freshwater school is also generally held to include Casey Mulligan and other labor economists who argue that labor supply shocks caused the Great Recession. All in all, the New Classicals are a very powerful faction within macro these days, though not quite as influential as the dominant New Keynesians.

Update 2: I'm definitely not saying that all the people listed above are politically conservative. Some are (Mulligan, for instance). Others may not be; people tell me Steve Williamson is politically liberal. But the image exists...to say the image doesn't exist, I'd have to deny reality. Also, I struck Robert King from the "freshwater" list; he did a lot of prominent work in the RBC field, which is the only work of his that I knew, but it has been brought to my attention that he's done work in the "New Keynesian" area as well. It's very difficult, and usually inaccurate, to assign individual people to these "schools".

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Murphy's Law? or, Follies of a Finite Physicist

"Murphy was an optimist." - Unknown

It's two years later, and I'm still being linked to Tom Murphy's famous blog post, "Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist." The header reads "1787 views this month; 0 overall," which I assume is a coding glitch rather than an existential conundrum; the point is, the post continues to receive a lot of attention. And, as you should know by now, it is in my basic nature to critique things that receive tons of attention while at the same time being less than fully brilliant. Usually, I gleefully support the trolling of economics by physicists; today, it's time to troll my own side.

Tom Murphy, a physics professor at University of California San Diego, writes a blog called "Do the Math", in which he attempts to show that every single alternative energy source is going to fail, and hence economic growth is soon going to either grind to a halt (in the best case scenario) or go into full reverse. But his most famous post, if my Twitter feed is any guide to fame, is "Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist." Because in this post, he purports to show that economists' most basic ideas about growth are inconsistent with the laws of the Universe. 

The post is structured as a sort of Platonic dialogue, in which Murphy recounts a dinner conversation between himself and "An Established Economics Professor from a Prestigious Institution," a mild, bumbling individual who begins the exchange with utmost confidence in a rosy future of unlimited growth, but - after a thorough thrashing at the hands of Murphy - is forced to reexamine and recant most of his ideas.

Murphy's basic argument is this: Exponential growth can't continue forever, because of A) waste heat, and B) energy limitations. If we keep energy usage growing at a 2.3% annual rate, waste heat will boil the Earth in 400 years. Keep that up for 2500 years, and we'd be using the entire energy output of the Milky Way Galaxy. Hence, economic growth must halt.

This is correct. And in fact, Murphy didn't even need to mention waste heat or anything like that to make his argument; he could have just said "Hey, eventually the Sun will explode, and then the whole Universe will degrade into heat, and where will your economy be then?" So what if that happens 500 million years in the future, or 10^100 years? What's the difference? One way or another, the human race is kaput!

Are economists ignoring this basic fact? Do economists' models crucially hinge on the idea that economic growth will continue forever and ever and ever? No. The "long term trend growth" that is used in growth and business cycle models is only meant to represent a trend that lasts longer than the business cycle - so, longer than a decade or two. No economist - I hope - thinks that currently living humans are making economic decisions based on what they think is going to happen in 400 years, or 2500 years, or 500 million years.

The fact that Murphy's interlocutor fails to point this out tells me that either his existence is partially apocryphal, or hiring standards at certain "Prestigious Institutions" have fallen.

Murphy does make an attempt to argue that 2500 years (and hence 400 years) is not a very long time. Here is his argument:

2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence. 

Does anyone else think this is complete gibberish? Does the fact that we have history from X years ago imply that we should be able to forecast the future X years in advance? And the idea that "we know what we were doing 2500 years ago" makes 2500 years a short amount of time...does that make any sort of sense? I mean...we also know what we were doing 2 billion years ago. Is 2 billion years "not that long, from a historical perspective"?

In "Act Two: Salad", the possibly-apocryphal economist comes up with a pretty good retort: What about virtual reality? With awesomely powerful computers, we can simulate whole worlds. Virtual apples, piped directly to the pleasure centers of your uploaded mind, are just as yummy as real apples, and a heck of a lot cheaper to create in terms of energy. That's quite a lot of economic growth, right there.

To which Murphy replies:

[N]ot everyone will want to live this virtual existence...I suspect many would prefer the smell of real flowers—complete with aphids and sneezing; the feel of real wind messing up their hair; even real rain, real bee-stings, and all the rest. You might be able to simulate all these things, but not everyone will want to live an artificial life.

Oh really? Well, that's settled then...and while we're at it, who'd want to spend a third of their waking life in front of a glowing screen? Oh wait...

Anyway, Murphy continues:

And as long as there are any holdouts, the plan of squeezing energy requirements to some arbitrarily low level fails. Not to mention meeting fixed bio-energy needs.

See, this is true, but it doesn't help Murphy's point at all. Suppose there are 100 holdouts who refuse to upload into a virtual world. Suppose that these people's standard of living doesn't increase at all, but the standard of living of the uploaded people in the virtual world keeps going up and up (say, as new virtual stuff gets invented inside that world). In that case, economic growth is still positive, even though the 100 physical people aren't seeing any of the benefits! Economic growth does not necessarily benefit all people equally (as America has recently learned). Murphy seems not to realize this at all.

In the third act, "Main Course", Murphy asserts that energy can't become arbitrarily cheap. He supports this contention with a truly eye-popping piece of bad economics:

But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt. Food would stop arriving at the plate without energy for purchase, so people would pay attention to this. Someone would be willing to pay more for it. Everyone would. There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP. 

What?! What about the air, dawg? Air is arbitrarily cheap right now. There is a finite, fixed amount of it. And without air, no economic activity could happen. Do you see anyone trying to corner the air market? No. So why should energy be different? The answer: It shouldn't. Because if someone started buying up all the air in the world, the price of air would rise until he had to quit; he could then sell off the air he had bought, but he would be unlikely to make a profit. This is why market corners nearly always fail.

The fact that the "Established Economics Professor" fails to point out this obvious howler, and instead meekly concedes Murphy's point, only further convinces me that his existence has been a bit...colored by embellishment.

OK, after much verbose meandering, Murphy concludes with the following:

The conversation recreated here did challenge my own understanding as well. I spent the rest of the evening pondering the question: “Under a model in which GDP is fixed—under conditions of stable energy, stable population, steady-state economy: if we accumulate knowledge, improve the quality of life, and thus create an unambiguously more desirable world within which to live, doesn’t this constitute a form of economic growth?” 

I had to concede that yes—it does. This often falls under the title of “development” rather than “growth.” I ran into the economist the next day and we continued the conversation, wrapping up loose ends that were cut short by the keynote speech. I related to him my still-forming position that yes, we can continue tweaking quality of life under a steady regime. I don’t think I ever would have explicitly thought otherwise, but I did not consider this to be a form of economic growth.

So, here in the epilogue, Murphy basically concedes the whole argument. "Yes," he says, "Growth as defined by economists can continue indefinitely, but I don't really consider that 'growth'. My entire argument about finite 'growth' was based on me using my own Tom Murphy definition of 'growth in energy usage', rather than the definition given in any undergraduate economic textbook." All concepts "fall under the title" of what Murphy instinctively feels they ought to be called.

Nice to clear that up.

OK, now, as a physicist-turned-economist, let me hit you with this one: Murphy's "still-forming position" probably isn't right. What he calls "development" (i.e. what economists call "growth") will also probably halt. Why? Because we will eventually satisfy ourselves. Modern economics is based on the idea of "local nonsatiation" - the idea that no matter how much you have, you always want more of something. But local nonsatiation is not necessarily true in the real world. Actually, given the fact that human motivation arises from physical processes, local nonsatiation must fail in some situations. Rocks are completely satisfied. Dead people are completely satisfied. 

So as soon as humans completely satisfy ourselves, economic growth will stop. This probably won't mean "getting all the stuff we want". It'll mean changing our desires directly, through the application of Desire Modification technology. This is far easier than creating a virtual world to give us ever-increasing amounts of virtual stuff. Instead, we just change ourselves to like the world we have, more and more. When we like the world so much that we don't want anything to change, then we will have no more reason to grow the economy.

In fact, many economists know this. When I took my second-year grad macro course, my teacher (Miles Kimball, of course) started the class with a list of the various time scales at which economists model the world. A few months was the "very short term". A few years was the "short term". A few decades was the "long term". And 100 years was the "very long term". Next to the words "very long term", Miles wrote "(all human problems solved)". At this point, he noted, all our models would become beside the point.

So Tom Murphy thinks he has found an epic gotcha. He thinks that with a few moments of thought, he has managed to expose the concept of "long-term economic growth" for the fraud it is, and thus undermined the foundations of much of economics. But he is wrong. He - and his not-very-credible dinner-discussion foil - have merely pretended that economists believe things about the far, far future that they do not actually believe. And in the meantime they have failed to say anything useful about economic growth over then next 100 years.

Look, I am all for physicists barging in and busting up the cozy world of economics. I welcome this. I encourage it. It's a good thing. But stuff like "Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist" just falls under the title of...well...let's just say it doesn't fall under the title of trenchant critique.


(Note: Just so readers don't get the wrong idea, I do think Tom Murphy generally does good analysis regarding alternative energy technologies; I do think oil scarcity is a source of economic stagnation and that the government should be pouring funds into alternative energy research; and I do think that there are economists out there who don't take energy scarcity as seriously as they should...)

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Why war might really be over (and why it might not)

In his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steve Pinker demonstrates that war and violence have declined worldwide, and speculates as to possible reasons why this has occurred. Many people have criticized this conclusion: for example, see Nicholas Taleb. The thrust of all the criticisms is the same:

"Sure, war has declined recently, but the decline may not be structural. A new bout of war could occur any day now. In fact, the very factors that have suppressed war in recent decades may just make future wars more catastrophic."

And this is of course true, as far as it goes. Past performance is never a guarantee of future results; even if there has been a deep structural change that has led to a drop in war, what's to say there won't be another deep structural change that brings war back? And of course it's possible that the current decline in war is just as much an illusion as the macroeconomic "Great Moderation" turned out to be.

Then again, maybe not. Sometimes, structural changes happen that are, for all intents and purposes, permanent. For example, smallpox is now really and truly gone from the planet; it declined and never bounced back. Nor is there any sign of a return to high rates of infant mortality.

So I don't understand the critics of Pinker. Simply pointing out that Pinker does not have a well-verified scientific theory of what drives the grand sweep of history should not blind us to the real phenomenon of declining global violence. Instead of saying "Oh, the Great Moderation was an illusion, this must be too!", we should recognize the reality of the violence decline, and dig deeper in order to root out the structural causes (or lack thereof).

Why might war have declined? The common theories include:

1. MAD: The threat of devastating nuclear retaliation makes war too risky for any major power.

2. Commerce: Global supply chains are just too valuable to disrupt with a war.

These two ideas are often criticized. MAD might simply shunt all the risk of war into the heavy tails, leading to a brittle standoff that eventually snaps and results in a holocaust that more than makes up for all the decades of peace. Commerce has proven to be a flimsy peacemaker in the past, since global trade networks didn't forestall WW1 and WW2.

I agree with these criticisms. But I also see some other possible structural reasons why war might be on the way out. To wit:

3. Low reward of war: Economically, the main benefit of war (other than a stimulus to get one's economy out of a slump!) is seizing of natural resources. But nowadays, natural resources are just not a very valuable prize. Countries with very few natural resources - Japan, Germany, France, etc. - tend to be the richest, while most resource-rich countries are poor. And the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, widely thought to be motivated by a desire for oil resources, ended up not paying for itself via oil. It just wasn't worth it! In the modern economy, wealth comes mainly from physical and human capital, not from land - and you just can't easily seize and exploit an opponent's factories and PhDs (as the Nazis discovered). There's just no benefit to be had from fighting anymore. Of course, this was probably true in WW2 as well, but perhaps now nations have had enough experience losing money on wars to realize that there's no profit in smashing up the means of production.

4. The information age: In the past, countries going to war were highly uncertain about what kind of threat they faced, and so it was much more possible for two opponents to each believe they had a very good chance of victory. Nowadays, with the advent of the internet and other vast sources of free public information, countries probably have a lot more realistic assessments of how likely they would be to prevail in any given conflict. And since countries will tend not to choose war when they think it likely that they will lose, this will mitigate against military adventures. Look how extensively the Bush Administration had to deceive itself and isolate itself from reality in order to persuade themselves that Iraq would be a cake walk!

5. Low fertility rates: There is a clear and well-established correlation between high fertility rates and violence. Yet fertility has declined dramatically in most regions of the country since the 1970s; at this point, only some parts of Africa and a few scattered small countries elsewhere have fertility rates in the 4+ range, which used to be ubiquitous. Fewer surplus "angry young men", more cautious old people, more grandparents to take care of...it all adds up to reduced impetus to war.

6. High monetary costs of war: Weapons are becoming more and more expensive, and so is the energy required to power them. Missiles and drones and ships cost insane amounts of money, but it is no longer possible for great powers to fight wars without these things. This raises the cost of war.

These are structural factors that usually go overlooked in discussions of the "end of war". But I think they're real. Of course, to be fair, I should mention some structural factors that might work in the opposite direction:

1. Nuclear terrorism: If people get the ability to build nukes in their basements, as in the Vernor Vinge story "The Ungoverned", then all bets are off, because it will be possible for personal rather than national grievances to start very high-casualty conflicts. The same goes for home-made super-viruses.

2. Resource scarcity: We've hit the age of "peak everything", and some resources are getting scarce. Food, in particular, has gone way up in price, and water is becoming scarce in many parts of the world. This will act against Reason 3 above, and raise the return to war, especially for poor countries.

3. Cyberwar combined with automation of nuclear arsenals: This risk should be pretty obvious.

So in conclusion, I see lots of structural factors lining up against war, and only a few lining up in its favor. This doesn't mean that the former will win, and it definitely doesn't mean that we won't see any more big wars. But it points us in the direction that I think we need to look if we want to confirm whether the trend observed by Steve Pinker is structural and durable.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Pro Writing Aid: Ready for Prime Time?

There's no shortage of online "readability checkers" that claim to show how readable your text is via this or that metric. But few online tools (especially free ones) attack the readability problem with as much gusto, or in as many ways, as Pro Writing Aid.

Sadly, that's pretty much where the good news ends. My test-drive of Pro Writing Aid didn't find it to be much of an aid. But I give the creators an 'A' for effort. They're on the right track, at least.

The way the tool works is, you paste a bunch of text into PWA's online form and click the Analyze button. About ten seconds later, you'll see a summary report, with a column of links down the left side having names like:

• Overused words
• Word cloud
• Sentence variation
• Grammar
• Adverbs/passive
• Sticky sentences
• Clichés and redundancies
• Repeated words and phrases
• Phrases summary
• Diction
• Vague and abstract words
• Complex words
• Alliteration analysis
• Pacing
• Consistency
• Sentiment
• Time
• Dialog
• Homonyms

You can click on any one of these to see potential problems highlighted in your text. Unfortunately, "potentials" outnumbered actuals quite a bit in the testing I did. (I used several pieces of my own writing for testing, as well as sample chapters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. You'd think the latter would've thrown a lot of flags and warnings, but oddly enough, "it warn't that terrible bad.")

Different writers will get different mileage from this kind of tool, so go ahead and try it yourself: You may very well find it useful. For me, it was like using a spellchecker in that I spent the vast majority of the time dismissing things that a computer would flag as wrong but that a human would know were right.

The Adverbs/Passive tool was puzzling. It flagged every adverb (including every occurrence of "only"), but highlighted few or no instances of passive voice in any of the five writing samples I tried (each sample averaging 1,700 words).

The Word Cloud feature makes pretty pictures but is otherwise useless.

The Overused Words report flagged 47 instances of "it" in Chapter 3 of Huck Finn, saying that about 26 instances could be removed. In point of fact, I couldn't find any instances that warranted removal.

That's not to say the Overused Words report is useless. But as I say, it tends (like many of the other tools) to report far more false positives than it reports good catches.

A fundamental problem with utilities of this sort is that they don't make allowances for the (huge) differences between dialog and narrative, in a piece of text that contains both (such as a chapter from a novel). The reason this is a big problem, obviously, is that spoken English is quite a bit different from written English: It's different as to vocabulary, diction, syntax, word length, sentence length, sentence variety, pacing, use of clichés, constructions based on slang, and probably two or three dozen other particulars. You can't treat dialog and non-dialog text as one and the same thing. They're distinct. What works for one won't necessarily work for the other. I saw this when I passed a piece of dialog-intensive sample text through the Pro Writing Aid analyzer and noticed many more flags in areas of spoken English than in areas of expository English.

Another potential problem with utilities of this type is that they make no distinction between writing aimed at adults and writing aimed at children or young adults. (Or for that matter, writing aimed at a professional audience vs. writing aimed at a lay audience.) It would be nice if there were a way to specify the intended age group for the writing sample in question, so as to get an age-appropriate readout of things like diction and "sticky sentences." 

Long story short: Pro Writing Aid was a disappointment, for me. But I recognize that it might well be a boon to others. So by all means, try it out yourself. And let me know what you think.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Evil Writing Prompts

• Write a query letter and ten sample pages for a novel about the dismal state of the publishing industry and send it to two hundred literary agents.

• Write a synopsis for a time-travel vampire romance set in the fantasy kingdom of Twillador and hand it out to every speaker at a writer's conference.

• Write a query letter for a young adult novel called H. Finn, about "a boy, a raft, and a runaway nigger." Sign it S. Clemens, and send it out to 100 literary agents. Publish the rejection letters in a blog.

• In your latest manuscript, do a global search and replace, putting the name of a well-known literary agent in place of your novel's villain's name, then send it to publishers that deal with that agent.

• Include the first ten pages of Flowers for Algernon as a writing sample in a query letter. Send to 100 agents, claiming you are a mentally challenged adult seeking representation, and mention that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires them to write you a detailed, personalized letter back, lest you sue.

• Create a fake newspaper clipping about your unfinished novel, scan it, and paste the image directly into a fake bio. Hand it out at writer's conferences.

• Using Google Translate, translate the first ten pages of your novel into Hindi, then have Google Translate translate it back into English. Use the resulting hysterically mangled text as your writing sample. Send it under an Indian pen name to your least favorite literary agents.

• Find the personal e-mail addresses of ten literary agents who accept snail-mail proposals only. Send each one a Word attachment containing the full text of Moby Dick and include in the subject line "REQUESTED MATERIAL."

• Write 25 queries containing 25 random sentences and send them all to one literary agent, from 25 fake e-mail accounts.

• Write an e-mail marked "URGENT" to fifty literary agents, claiming you have gotten offers of representation from multiple agencies for a work you never submitted to anyone. Use weird fonts and font colors.

• Write a fake interview with yourself in which you talk about having won fake awards. Include the interview's URL in queries sent to fifty overseas agents.

• Come up with 25 fake "Praise for" quotations to put in the front of your book. Be sure to quote dead authors. Include with your manuscript.

• Write your own first page for a (real) bestselling book that's on the shelves now. Print it out. Go to the bookstore, find that book on the shelves, and paste your first page over the first page of the book.

Disclaimer: Folks. Folks. This all meant in jest. For heaven's sake don't actually do any of this shit.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Asian-Americans destroy the "maker/taker" narrative

The absurd outburst of Nate Silver Denialism was just the most egregious example of the alternate reality bubble that the American conservative movement has been constructing over the last decade-and-change - the phenomenon that used to be called "epistemic closure." In this devastating analysis, Conor Friedersdorf lays out just how monumentally stupid is is for a movement to divorce itself from extant reality:

I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

Since the election, I've been reading The Corner, the group blog of the National Review, a publication which probably still represents the intellectual forefront of the conservative movement. I've seen some very intelligent and thoughtful discussion there, and also some absolute head-in-the-sand denialist comfort-food. But one thing I don't see anyone challenging is the master narrative of modern American conservatism: the "maker/taker" story.

The "maker/taker" story is exactly the "47 percent" story that Mitt Romney told at that fund-raiser. It's the idea that the Democrats' core constituency is a bunch of lazy and/or untalented "takers" who want to use the government to steal from the hard-working "makers". Here's The Corner's David French summing up the idea:

To tens of millions of American voters, a conservative message of self-reliance and individual economic freedom is, quite frankly, terrifying. 

First, each of Obama’s core constituencies (single women, African-Americans, and Latinos) is seriously — and disproportionately — economically disadvantaged compared to the classic paradigm of the white, college-educated Republican voter. The rates of poverty and near-poverty among these groups are much greater, thus causing a critical mass of both populations to suffer — even if they’re technically middle class — from a greater degree of economic insecurity...Ideologically and historically they are pre-disposed towards statism as the means of alleviating economic insecurity and distress.

As you can see, the "maker/taker" narrative has a strong ethnic angle; the "takers" are supposed to be mostly minorities and single women. White men and their wives produce things; blacks, Hispanics, and sluts single women live on the dole. Naturally, this ethnic angle plays well with the conservative "base", i.e. Southern and exurban working-class whites for whom politics is ethnic and tribal. Here's Fox News' Bill O'Reilly reinforcing that racial version of the narrative:

The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?

So, here's the problem: The narrative is wrong. Completely, utterly, wrong. The Democrats' appeal is not based on people "wanting stuff". And how do I know this? I know it because Asian-Americans voted for Obama by a 3-to-1 margin. Check this out:

Much has been made of the Latino vote and its crucial role in boosting President Obama to victory, but it was Asian Americans who made the most dramatic shift in support for the president Tuesday. 

Exit polls show that 73% of Asian Americans backed Obama, an 11-point increase since 2008.  Asian Americans came out in such force for Obama that they topped Latinos as his second-most supportive ethnic group, behind African Americans... 

While Asians accounted for just 3% of the electorate – up from 2% in 2008 – their overwhelming support made them a key component of the Obama coalition, especially in swing states like Virginia, Florida and Colorado.  

And their numbers are increasing rapidly. They were the fastest-growing ethnic group from 2000 to 2010... 

73% [of Asian-American voters] supported Democrats in congressional races.

So, for those of you who don't know this, Asian-Americans make more money than white Americans. Thus, they pay more income tax. And Asians are half as likely as the average American to be on welfare.

Thus, Asian-Americans, by the Romney/O'Reilly/French definition, are "makers", not "takers". Even more than whites. They're also more likely to be married. And to start businesses.

And yet Asian-Americans broke for Obama 3-to-1. David French should definitely be including them in his list of Obama's "core constituencies". The fact that he doesn't do so is a telling sign of "epistemic closure" - of conservatives not seeing what is plainly in front of them, preferring instead to repeat to themselves a pleasant, soothing, but false story.

If they're not "takers", why did Asian-Americans break so strongly for Obama? The answer is pretty clear: Conservative ethnic identity politics. The American conservative movement has made it abundantly clear that it sees America as a "white people country", and views Asians - like blacks and Hispanics - as guests (at best) or interlopers (at worst). The blood-and-soil white ethnocentrism of the conservative movement makes Asians feel like permanent foreigners in their own country, and they don't like feeling like that. Who would?

I'm pretty sure this is the right answer. Why? Because I myself am a member of a group that is demographically and electorally similar to Asian-Americans - namely, Jewish-Americans. Jews are America's second-richest religious group (behind Hindus), and yet Jewish voters broke almost 3-to-1 for Obama this year, and more than 3-to-1 in 2008. Why do Jews vote Democratic? Simple: for all their talk of "Judeo-Christian values" and support for Israel (as if anyone cares about that!), the Republicans make it clear that they think the ethnic core of America is not just white, but Christian as well. Jews don't want to have their schools lead them in prayers to Jesus. We don't like it when Bill O'Reilly demands that stores put only "Merry Christmas" on their holiday banners, and not "Happy Channukah". 

We Jews are not stupid; we know that the grassroots of the conservative movement, at least in its present incarnation, will never accept us as true "sons of the soil". The liberal movement will. It's as simple as that. And I'm pretty sure Asian-Americans are thinking along similar lines.

So if conservative intellectuals really want to turn their movement away from the self-destructive path that they're on, they need to face up to one overwhelmingly important piece of reality: White (Christian) ethnocentrism is turning everyone else against them. Getting rid of that ethnocentrism will take more than putting some Hispanics, or some Asians, or some Jews on the speaker's podium. It will take more than pretending to vote for - or even actually voting for! - Herman Cain or Marco Rubio or Bobby Jindal.

What will it mean? It will mean no longer talking about a "culture war". It will mean no longer talking about the "real America". It will mean rejecting race-baiters like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart - not grudgingly, but wholeheartedly. It will mean rejecting nativist groups like the Minutemen. It will mean admitting that the Civil War was all about slavery, and that the Confederacy were the bad guys. It will mean disavowing the whole stupid narrative that blacks and Hispanics are a bunch of lazy "takers".

In other words, it will mean doing a lot more than the conservative movement is currently prepared to do. But guys, at least face up to reality. At least open your eyes and see what the rest of America really thinks about you. The Asian-American vote is an unmistakable sign that your master narrative is wrong.


Update: Lots of other people are saying the same thing. For example, here's Chris Hayes. Also, here's Paul Krugman with a nice graph.

Update 2: In a new article, Charles Murray says much the same thing as this blog post. Which is interesting, given Murray's prominent role in promoting the general white-supremacist overtone of the conservative movement.

Update 3: Richard Posner is with us too.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad