Cogitamus

50th Anniversary of March on Washington and Open Thread

 

"Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" - The Roots

(Thanks to big bad wolf for pointing this clip out to me -- what a great performance.)

So tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is typically shortened to the March on Washington.  I like the official name because it highlights the economic aspects of the civil rights struggle, and the leftward vision of those behind the March -- Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin and their great ally and benefactor, Walter Reuther, the then president of the United Auto Workers and the most powerful and visionary American labor leader of the era.  I am pleased to see that Reuther's role in the March seems to be getting more attention this year than it normally garners.     All Things Considered had two stories related to the labor movement's role in the March this evening -- one from the perspective of three Detroit natives who attended the March and one detailing the historical relationship between the civil rights and labor movements. 

The attempts to co-opt King's vision and to try and make him something other than a man of the left -- and the March as anything other than a left-liberal event -- despite how much this irritates the right wing brethren -- are ahistorical and a false narrative.  MLK was not some libertarian, but rather a social democrat, one closely allied with Reuther, the greatest American social democrat of his day.  Alas, they both left us far too soon.  One hopes that their broader vision of not only equality and opportunity, but also economic dignity and security, will experience a rebirth in the years to come. 

Update:  Harold Meyerson has an outstanding column about the motivations for the March and the emphasis on economic justice that lay at its heart.   It is well worth reading.  He stresses that the event going on today that is most evocative of the March is the one-day strike being engaged in by fast food workers in 35 cities.  (It is always worth remembering as well that Martin Luther King Jr.'s final act was in support of striking sanitation workers.  King viewed the freedom to organize as an indispensable aspect of achieving freedom and justice.)   

 

Dana Milbank Demonstrates His Worthlessness, and Open Thread

Dana Milbank is bummed because there was no defining cause for his generation, like Vietnam and civil rights were for his parents, and presumably World War II was for his grandparents.  He's "afraid that my generation will someday be called the weakest."

One, two, three: awwwwwwwwwww.

There were causes to be found.  Milbank was born in 1968.  That means for practically his entire adult life, the threat of global warming has been visibly looming.  How big a cause do you need?

It's only been in the past year or so that the tide has clearly turned in the battle for gay rights.  That one's been there his entire life, too.

Rising economic inequality.  The increasing imbalance of power between employers and workers, as union membership has cratered and legal protections of union organizing have proved worthless.  More recently, massive unemployment, the enormous expansion of the surveillance state, and the apparent ability of rich corporations to basically write their own laws and be subject to none of the legal limitations that apply to the rest of us as they dump oil in our waters and kick people out of their homes.

Causes are there in abundance.  And you, Mr. Milbank, have had a terrific platform to promote a cause or three of your choosing.

I won't speak of your generation.  But you, sir, are weak because you have chosen weakness.  So kindly STFU.

Open thread.

Why I Disagree With Paul Krugman About the Causes of Bubbles

First of all, let's get the obvious part out of the way: Krugman's a Nobel economist, and I'm just this guy, you know?  There's an awfully good chance that he's right and I'm wrong.

But if I'm wrong, I want the hole in my reasoning pointed out, because I'm not seeing one.  And one of the things you learn en route to being a mathematician (which I am) is how to go over your reasoning for holes in it, because nothing's more professionally embarrassing than claiming you've proved something when you haven't.  Not to mention, for once his reasoning's kind of weak: his argument's more "everybody says X, but here's why X is wrong.  The only other thing I can see is Y, so I think it must be Y."  But if there's Z out there also, that argument falls apart.  So here goes.

Krugman asks, "why have we been having so many bubbles" over the past 3 decades?  The answer he frequently hears is: low interest rates.  But a simple chart of interest rates over the past several decades causes that explanation to fall apart immediately: it's only been in the past few years that interest rates became significantly lower than those of the 1950s and early to mid 1960s.  If it was interest rates, where were all the bubbles back then?

Krugman says, "So what was different [about the past three decades]? The answer seems obvious: financial deregulation, including capital account liberalization. Banks were set free — and went wild, again and again."

I think there's a case for deregulation being part of the story, but not the driver of it. 

Here's what I think: it's a simple matter of supply and demand, the result of what I call TALOMSAATT - "There's A Lot Of Money Sloshing Around At The Top" - an acronym that, in my opinion, explains a hell of a lot more these days than Heinlein's TANSTAAFL ever did.

You have a lot of spare money in the hands of rich people, who want a good return on investment - ROI - on their money.

And you have less money than you should in the hands of everyone else - the people who would spend most of the money they get on goods and services, creating demand - and thereby creating investment opportunities that would have a payoff supported by that demand.

What should we expect when the money in rich peoples' bank accounts substantially outstrips opportunities to invest in new businesses (and expansions of existing ones) that consumer demand will support? 

Rich people are still going to want to find some sort of investment vehicle that will produce a decent ROI, and such vehicles will be created because there is demand for them.  But because rich people's demand for investment vehicles way overshoots demand that the rest of us are capable of generating for goods and services, a bunch of these vehicles are going to be without foundation.  There's your bubbles.  Supply and demand.  End of story.

The role played by deregulation is more one of keeping some of the bubbles from being created.  But some, like the dot-com bubble, were going to happen anyway, even if we had the regulations of 50 years ago in place.  And we'd have probably had more bubbles along the lines of stock-market bubbles under those regs, rather than bubbles based on complex financial instruments.

And the means of preventing such bubbles is simple (technically, if not politically): make sure the 99% get enough of the pie so that the 1% will have a sufficient supply of investment opportunities that can be supported by consumer demand.

Now, if an economist will stop in and explain why my simple and clear theory is clear, simple, and wrong, I'd genuinely appreciate it.  Because I don't want to convince myself of the truth of wrong things.

And who knows - maybe I'm right.

Egypt - No Good Answers

The recent coup -- yes, I boldly think it can be declared as such -- and subsequent eruption of horrifiic repressive violence by the Egyptian military strikes me as an extraordinarily destabilizing event.  The Egyptian military appears to be staking all on the destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood, a strategy that at best will lead to the kind of violence that characterized 1990s Algeria, at worst to a Syrian-style civil war played out on a stage four times larger in the epicenter of the Arab world.   Carnage and chaos seem a certainty.

Much of the discussion domestically centers on whether the U.S. should cut off aid to Egypt.  It seems to me that we must -- as a minimal gesture to decency if nothing else.  But I don't think it will make any difference or prove to be meaningful leverage in terms of promoting a peaceful end to this conflict.  Although I am sure that the Egyptian military enjoys siphoning off its billions in U.S. taxpayer-funded bribery, I suspect that in the end the money pales in comparison to the institutional imperative of re-seizing and holding power in the wake of the Morsi interregnum.  The question is how much blood will be spilled in this quest and whether this violence will spread elsewhere in a region already beset with sectarian strife. 

To top off all of this misery, the battered Egyptian economy is likely to tank further as tourism virtually ceases in response to this unrest.

As for the U.S. role in things, I remain pressimistic.  I think both the coup and the violent repression should be denounced and that aid should be cut off, but these are largely gestures -- necessary but ultimately empty.  They will not change the facts on the ground because, in the end, the United States, for all its power, is simply not central to this struggle.  It seems almost impossible to get American commentators to comprehend this fact -- that all events in the world are neither about us nor controllable by us.       

Monday Miscellany and Open Thread

 

"Bus Stop" - Fountains of Wayne"

Eerily accurate Hollies cover by FOW.  These guys are amzing mimics -- in every show I've seen they usually break out a medley of cheesy 70s hits -- Steve Miller, ELO, you name it -- and do it with uncanny note-for-note precision.

So I finally get something halfway done and Internet Explorer decides to shut down -- very aggravating.  For once I don't think I can play Typepad for my woes.

Well finally settled back in at home and work after several days on the road took me to Oakland, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Philadelphia. Bethlehem PA, Woodbridge, NJ, and back to DC.  Two coast to coast flights, about 500 miles of driving, and a train ride for good measure.  My goal this week is to not leave the DC city limits.   

- Raacists?!! We all know that is liberals who are the real racists.  Really.   (Conservatives seem to think that we liberals are actually never around living, breathing right wingers, that we are never privvy to the casual racism of the family get-together or the business meeting where these attitudes are manifested matter of factly and without the faux decorum generally demonstrated at places like NRO.) 

- Speaking of racism, I am really happy to hear that NYC's incredibly offensive stop-and-frisk policy has been held unconstitutional by a federal district judge in what sounds like an appropriately scathing ruling.  As the linked article notes, what is in many ways the most amazing thing about the policy was the unabashed ways in which Mayor Bloomberg and Chief Ray Kelly admitted to the profiling and insisted it was perfectly fine.  Bloomberg's reaction to the decision strikes me as hysterical.

- Fuck Dylan Matthews.  Erik Loomis takes the little neo-liberal turd to task.  Yeah, unions don't have a great track record on matters of policy, Dylan.  The 40 hour week, the FLSA, Social Security, pensions, health insurance, OSHA, mine safety, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid -- not a decent idea in the bunch.  Not like those well meaning geniuses at AEI.  (Were I commisar for a day, I would sentence young Matthews to a 60-hour week of laying cinder block in the DC heat at a sub-minimum wage -- he'd last about four hours.  I'm pretty confident I could outlast him even at my advanced age.)

-  I often find the New York Times treatment of women as reflected through the lives of an impossibly small elite to be deeply annoying and misleading -- you know, the old "trends" that exist in a handful of U.S. zip codes only.  Still, I thought yesterday's magazine piece looking at the lives of a small group of women who a decade ago were said to be part of a trend of accomplished women opting out of the work force and who were now trying to return to work to be worthwhile in a cautionary tale kind of fashion.  The thing that struck me was that even with all of the advantages that most of these women had in terms of education, credentials, and connections, most of them found a return to professional life to be extraordinarily difficult and characterized by much lower levels of economic attainment than once would have been possible for them.  To me, the article suggested the folly of ceasing to be an economic actor for an extended period in a society in which this is the only truly valued activity.  These women sacrificed untold career earnings, became utterly dependent on their husbands -- which was destructive to them and their marriages in a variety of ways -- and made their families more vulnerable to the vaguaries of today's economy, all the while trying to live up to some strange oppressive notion of perfect motherhood that is in many ways more stultifying and self-defeating than anything that 1950s ideal ever dished up.  There is something so disturbing about hyper-achievers reducing their talents to planning the best birthday parties, school auctions, and home renovations. 

What is going on with all of you?  Hopefully Typepad will allow you to tell me.    

 

Sunday Open Thread

 

"Places That Are Gone" - Tommy Keene

- This piece by "Bowling Alone" professor, Robert Putnam, about the marked contrast between the small Ohio town of his youth versus today, and the distinct lack of economic hope for most of its current citizens is worth a read.  Nothing revelatory I guess, but this is a case where anecdotes actually do start adding up to data.

- Speaking of which, when it comes to economics, the Washington elite, never really needs to master data or techincal knowledge.  Conventional wisdom, however, unwise, will suffice. 

- Sullivan linked to this New York times article about a commencement address by writer George Saunders emphasizing the importance of kindness -- it's a lovely speech.  I would say that if I tended to regret things in life it has less to do with failing to be kind -- although I have certainly had those moments -- and more to do with losing my temper.  As I observed to a client recently, I've never regretted not losing my temper.

Alright, need to walk Stan, pick the kid up at the airport, and collapse on the couch.

Let us all pray to the internet gods that typepad restores the comments soon.