Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Joseph Heller once said the effect he was striving for in his second novel, Something Happened, was for the reader to feel like a piece of metal banged into a new shape by the repeated blows of a ball-peen hammer.
I don’t recall feeling that way after reading the novel, but the far more than 400 blows delivered in this book Continue reading
Understanding American Domestic Terrorism: Mobilization Potential and Risk Factors of a New Threat Trajectory
Robert A. Pape and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats
We live in binary times.
We also like to think that’s unique.
I’m not so certain. Roundheads and Cavaliers. Sans-culottes and aristocrats. Montagnards and Girondins. The Wobblies and the AFL. Pick a period, pick a place and I’ll show you two teams.
That, and a good stern talking-to by an anthropologist friend who cares, has enabled me to maintain use of the word tribal in its proper context. Because what we see in our current politics is not, I submit, rooted in the dynamics of small closely-related homogenous groups. What it more closely resembles, at least to me, is the rabid passions exhibited by the fans of sports teams.
Organized athletic competitions started in antiquity. It’s not a stretch to picture the earliest hominids foot-racing. Organizing teams, traveling between cities and campuses, selling tickets, paying players and generating fan loyalty that can extend to painting one’s face or torso in the team colors? You need modern society to create and sustain that sort of commitment.
The fans of each team-nation may have a unique language. But they share a common approach to pronouns I associate with rabid fandom: the use of the first person plural. “We need better pitching.” “We better pull it together in the second half.” “We’re having a rough season.” The boundary between the entertainer-athletes and the fans is blurred, at least in the minds of the fans. I’d be surprised if anyone on the pitch, field, gridiron, floorboards or ice thinks the fans are part of the athletic, as opposed to the commercial, enterprise.
Some folks (click the image to see an example) think Chuck Jones was aiming for comedy or commerce. I think it was a send-up.
For some people–and in an earlier time, I’d have counted myself among them–politics serves as a spectator sport. Except that the barrier between the fans and the players has always been more porous. The more fervent one’s political beliefs, the more the idea that opponents could oppose each other and yet be friends was as improbable as, well, the post-workday friendship of Chuck Jones‘ Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf.
In politics, though, the fans vote. That means they pick the players. Consequently, the line between the two has faded to virtual nonexistence.
One result is January 6.
That day, a significant number of people who had come to believe the officials had been bought off decided they needed to remind everyone who really controls the game. That these folks were a subgroup of a larger polity hardly mattered. They knew the rules. They knew only their team was capable of winning. They knew something had to be done about the obvious tampering. So they acted.
The question thus arises: was the reaction to the 2020 election a unique set of circumstances? Or has something happened in our society that we need to worry about in the next election cycle?
You don’t have to look very far to find countless numbers of people answering the second question in the affirmative. The Bulwark, started after the demise of The Weekly Standard, was early to the game from the conservative side. In the January 2022 issue, The Atlantic weighs in from the center-left. Neither picture is pretty.
I’d recommend Barton Gellman‘s cover story in The Atlantic as a place to start thinking about the question of our near political future. Or if you have a commute and podcasts figure in it, listen to his conversation with The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes. He covers the same ground. It was in his article that I first learned of Robert Pape’s work.
It’s really worth your time to read this. Just click the image above.
It’s not that I didn’t find the journalism compelling; I found it disturbing. In general, I think it’s a good idea to check sources. When those sources are social science and involve the methods and subjects I’ve studied, I feel obligated to dust off the old toolset. Besides, the dry language of social science might soothe my concerns.
Fat chance. The document (linked to here) is actually a PowerPoint presentation that summarizes three specific studies. It contains more than one sentence like this one, presented as Specific Finding #3 from the first study:
“Storming the US Capitol was an act of collective political violence, inspired by a leader, President Trump, and not merely vandalism or trespassing for other purposes. ”
Slide 41
While I’d welcome the opportunity to dive deeply into the collected data, the summaries, examples and methodological statements presented here provide more than enough to chew on. The work is solid and inarguable. Would I have liked to see a journal-style results table or the ANOVA? Sure. Do I need to? No.
This presentation gathers data collected in the first months of 2021. The researchers have regularly updated their initial study, which focuses on individuals arrested for their activities in January. Those data have been regularly updated though July. That most recent update ought to be read in conjunction with the April release. For skeptics, it’s a demonstration of how to define all the information incorporated in the study, and of how to address factual changes as data are updated.
The survey data presented in Studies 2 and 3 are intended to help understand the prevalence of beliefs such as those held by the people arrested on January 6. Those are of forward-looking interest. But I found myself dwelling on Study 1, which focuses on the arrested folks. Like many others, I’ve wondered who these people are, sometimes if we even inhabit the same country.
Outside the US Capitol, 1/6/2021
Photo by Tyler Merbler from the USA
CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Fact is, the group these people least resemble is the typical person arrested for political violence in the first 19 years of the century. These were not young unemployed men playing dress-up with their militia friends. They were unaffiliated, educated, established professionals and corporate managers from small and mid-sized cities and the fringes of bigger cities.
I didn’t find it strange that states and counties that voted for Donald Trump were less likely to have been home to a protester who turned violent. Such places are secure. In fact, the most impactful variable is how much change was seen in the non-Hispanic white population of the detainees’ counties.
I won’t say it’s race so much as fear of change. Rural origin turns out to be unimportant. Living in a second or third-tier city worrying about when it becomes the next Chicago may well be the best marker of who’s likely to be susceptible to the Lorelei of political mayhem.
I wish I could say the conclusions the researchers draw are a stretch. The best I can do is muster a half-hearted protest at the possible size of the population willing to take up arms on behalf of their political beliefs. The low-end figure, 3.6 million, is troublingly high, but almost any significant fraction of it is equally so.
“What Doctor, what do we have, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
The higher-end estimate is unimaginable. Were a force of such size to mobilize, the United States as I’ve known it in my lifetime and through my reading of history, would cease to exist.
That’s not a pleasant thought and not just because I have kids who will inherit this mess. The United States is a flawed country that has made mistakes both within and outside its borders. At its best, though, the promise, the ideals and the actual quality of life here have been a beacon to millions.
That I’ve accepted such hackneyed thinking is not just a result of my age. It’s to accept that there’s some truth in even the hoariest of cliches.
Benjamin Franklin said we have a republic if we can keep it. The choice is ours.
Midsummer 2021
If I’m unable to finish a book I ought to at least prove I keep reading.
What better brain food for a Sunday morning, then, than a sociological take on just what’s going on with folks refusing Continue reading
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and
the Birth of the People’s Economy
Stephanie Kelton
The only social science that sees its contributions recognized with a Nobel Prize, is economics. So you can forgive the practitioners for mistaking their field of study with chemistry and physics.
If you pause for a moment, though, and consider that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is not, in fact, one of the prizes established by the inventor of TNT despite all the energy Continue reading
Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
Michael Lewis (ed.)
When is a story not a story? And when should an author, like children of yore, be seen and not heard? And when is modern insanity not terribly different from historical insanity?
I might answer those questions and I might not because I’m not entirely certain what to think about this book, which I selected to distract myself from this year’s Continue reading
The Retreat of Western Liberalism
Edward Luce
Reading shouldn’t be a performative act. Peruse the list of titles on my Books page and you’ll find scant evidence of a grind, totally focused on the great ‘work’ of reading.
Truth is, I read plenty of high carb, low protein junk. But just like someone on the cookie diet, in the deepest recesses of my mind, where the truth lives, I know I’m cutting corners and taking the easier path. So you might not be surprised that the serious-looking title pictured nearby is a well-disguised byway of that ramble.
Don’t take my word for it. Our author tells us as much:
‘The West’s crisis is real, structural and likely to persist. Nothing is inevitable. Some of what ails the West is within our power to fix. Doing so means understanding exactly how we got here. It would also require a conscious effort to look at the world from unfamiliar viewpoints and admit the West has no monopoly on truth or virtue. … My guess is it will take you roughly three hours.” (p. 16)
That’s quite a promise. Hemispheric/structural/political crisis. Globally-informed solution. Three hours. It’s practically guaranteed to make a person who considers themselves a thoughtful citizen of planet earth find a quiet place and dig in. The rewards beckon.
I am here to remind you, in cliché-drenched terms, that there are no free lunches and that hard work is its own reward.
Mr. Luce is a former speechwriter in the Clinton Administration‘s Treasury Department who went on to write for The Financial Times. He has an easy, comprehensible style backed by an Oxford education. He avails himself of the trappings of scholarship such as a ‘Notes’ section that’s also the bibliography.
Nowadays, authoritarians come dressed in a well-tailored suit. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
I know, I’m carping on small details. But they aren’t. What I’m holding, bound between hard covers, is not a weighty tome. It’s a highly competent–if scantily documented–senior project delivered in the Honors section of an esteemed university. Maybe the alums of such schools are the intended audience.
Again, lest you think I am making too much of a small point, contrast the above quote with this one from a source Luce credits, Francis Fukuyama‘s The End of History and the Last Man:
“This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest….” (p. xviii)
See, professor and student. Sure, Luce did the reading. He even appears to have understood the reading. But why, I flail myself, did I waste the three-plus hours on Luce when I could have invested them in Fukuyama?
(Full disclosure, I avoided the Fukuyama book upon publication though I’ve read articles and papers since. I grabbed the quote off Amazon because I knew I could find an appropriate one quickly. I suspect that’s how many students not wearing hairshirts approach their work these days.)
The right isn’t always male and isn’t always authoritarian. But it is usually nationalist. Marie Le Pen (& Marianne).
Okay, I’m done complaining. What has Mr. Luce come to tell us? First, we are witnessing an assault on tradition. Here he makes an important distinction that is often lost in the current continuum of moderate → liberal → progressive. Liberal democracy is rooted in the concept of liberty, more specifically in how individual freedom is retained and maximized in spite of the necessary formation of a state.
Poli Sci students should recognize that idea, which goes back to John Locke, though it seems sadly missing today. It is also distinctly Western in the sense of “Western Civilization” being a real thing and not just a construct that serves as a whipping boy for more enlightened perspectives.
Both political extremes forget this. America’s most conservative Conservatives have reverted to a Hobbesian worldview of all-against-all requiring an absolute sovereign to overcome threats while the most liberal liberals are quite happy to employ the power of the state to control individual behaviors.
That internal tension–maybe division is a more appropriate word–is exacerbated by the economic rise of new players. I use ‘new’ merely in terms of the modern global economy. Both China and India, as Luce demonstrates, are ancient civilizations, far older than our Western liberal tradition and not built on the same ancient intellectual foundation. The great mistake Prof. Fukuyama made in the early 1990s was extrapolating too far into the future.
The Left can be no less absolute. Do we really need to mandate how we use pronouns?
As far as this analysis goes, I don’t disagree with Luce at all. I’m not even sure I disagree with how he ties this into the current state of the West. The Right, embracing the metaphor of battle, has identified the external threats and is ready to render democracy a quaint curiosity that can’t be preserved if the people are to be saved.
There ‘s plenty of evidence for that. Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Recep Erdoğan in Turkey. Marie Le Pen‘s National Front in France. Even, arguably, some supporters of the Trump Administration. Luce quotes Didier Eribon on LePen’s supporters, “ I’m convinced that voting for the National Front must be interpreted, at least in part, as the final recourse of people of the working classes attempting to defend their collective identity, or to defend, in any case, a dignity that was being trampled on.”
(P. 110)
The problem is not local. Nor is it only of the right. Luce is nothing if not even-handed. My Progressive friends will recoil at this statement: “But by giving a higher priority to the politics of ethnic identity than people’s common interests, the American left helped to create what it feared.” (P. 97) As I read this book I thought about Mark Illa’s, and I couldn’t be sure that a return to New Deal or even JFK pre-Great Society politics was possible.
This isn’t a picture of what Locke had in mind. It is political assembly. And the nationalist trappings are, of course, present.
The solution, though, is not necessarily clear. The fear that drives the growth of more authoritarian government is economic insecurity. In this telling, corporations face an existential threat because they must be subordinated to the maintenance of the civilization if not the country. How do you unwind a quarter century’s worth of integrated, intricate supply lines?
You have a headache, right? It is a maddening situation. The authoritarians appall me, the kumbaya crowd strikes me as hopelessly naive, and we’re all at each other’s throats anyway.
I have no crystal ball, though I do like to think I take our civic and civilizational life seriously. If you feel similarly, but are intimidated by shelves full of books by professors, this might be the book for you.
If you’re looking for a blazingly new insight that had eluded you until now, I’m afraid you’ll have to keep looking.
The Art of Possibility
Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
One of the more entertaining, if inconsequential, arguments I ever entered into started about 10 PM one late-April evening in the final decade of the last millennium. What began as a simple disagreement on how to manage creative development soon expanded to encompass the entire advertising business. No cow was sacred and by the time my debating partner and I had worn ourselves out at 2 AM, a century’s worth of discarded advertising truths lay scattered about the office along with rejected layouts and revised copy decks.
One of the more contentious points, I recall, was the USP, a concept created and promoted by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates advertising agency. A variant of that approach states that every brand–personal or otherwise–can be reduced to one inarguable, ownable attribute. Timex offers an apt, though dated, example. The watch that takes a licking and keeps on ticking is durable.
None of this has anything to do with the book at hand, mind you. But I’d suggest it provides an explanatory framework for just how I came to be in possession of a book in a genre I typically avoid. I’ve come to believe, you see, that possibility lies at the heart of my personal brand.
Despite my encounter with this book, I see no reason to walk away from that belief. I’d suggest you run away fast, though, if someone recommends you read the book.
Found in every book store and library,
coast-to-coast.
Why do we even have self-help books? From the supply side, the answer is simple: there’s money in misery. From the seeker side, well, it’s more complicated. Needs, we marketers believe, are never far from wants and the interplay of the two is where we work. In a nation that likes to fancy itself full of strivers, improving the self practically commands investment.
How about two other factors marketers love: fear and greed? What if the key to your material success is lying right before you, bound between covers? Fourteen bucks is nothing compared to the rest of your life. The ROI could be incredible.
If you think I’m being unfair here, remember that Penguin, the publisher, has a marketing department. And they considered everything from the visually arresting bright yellow cover to the price to even the category: business/creativity. Someone sensed a profit in sharing the Zander’s worldview.
My mind turns naturally to commerce as a social artifact. Yet my recurring thought as I made my way through this book had little to do with consumption and everything to do with social psychology. I realized, at a fundamental level, these books ask the reader to behave the same way members of cults or charismatic political movements do.
It’s a neat rhetorical trick, really. It also strikes me as self-serving and abusive of the very people all those entities are arguing they serve. But whether the venue is Jonestown, a Trump rally or this book, the initial transaction sets the terms of the deal.
I’m not sure survival and scarcity are great analogs when their reality is widespread and dire
Early on the Zanders present two dichotomous worldviews: survival/scarcity versus thriving/abundance. Almost immediately, they protest that interpretation of what lies right there on the page, saying “It may seem this chapter sets up a simple dichotomy between being successful and living a kind-hearted, feel-good life. Nothing could be further from our conviction.” (p. 21)
A bit further down the page, though, they introduce survival-thinking and scarcity thinking. Modes of thinking like these seem to abound in self-help writing, often serving the role of an internalized boogeyman who must be vanquished in the course of transformation ( a keyword in the genre and this book).
I’m not a fan of Abraham Maslow, but even he understood that survival and scarcity were so fundamental as to drive all other considerations understandably aside. Our authors reject that without ever even acknowledging it. Instead, they state Survival-thinking is an “undiscriminating ongoing attitude.” Scarcity-thinking, they helpfully note, is a “prevalent” “fatalistic outlook.” (p.21) Thus the trap is baited. On the next page, it’s sprung.
“You look for thoughts and. actions that reflect survival and scarcity, comparison and competition, attachment and anxiety.” (p. 22) So, the problem is you, too concerned with thoughts that are merely attitudes and outlooks. But wait, there’ s more.
“See how easy it is to argue that you are an exception, that you personally are not governed by any such set of assumptions. This, of course, is another example of the measurement world at work” (p.22)
There you have it: the great circularity of true-believerdom. A world, which may or may not be exactly how you experience the world, is posited. Steps are taken to explain why this is the way things are. Then you are promised release from this prison once you see clearly and accept the gift you’ve been offered by your guide. Having been freed you can never look back.
It’s exactly the same, every time. The People’s Temple. The Branch Davidians. Erhard Seminars Training. Even Make America Great Again rallies. What amazes me is that it works.
All questions are answered and problems overcome when the proper frame of mind is adopted.
Though I had plenty of good reasons to walk away early on, I persisted. I didn’t want to negate the possibility that there might be some good here. That openness to possibility was not rewarded.
The work is a mess. The primary mode of instructing is the anecdote. I’ve nothing against that. The last time I looked, Christ did a pretty good job with the form. But the stories here are rarified, comprehensible on a deep level only by very privileged people. The Zanders are not just folks. He leads a symphony orchestra, she is a therapist, they attend Davos.
When they observe the form of seriousness, for example, using footnotes, it’s apparent doing so helps maintain a veneer of rigor. And then there are the leaps that defy reason. This book was published in 2000. After so much has passed, would any editor print this passage today?:
“If we want to increase the community’s strength against inhuman
forces, let’s include the terrorist in the discussion (emphasis added),
along with the families and the townspeople and the security forces
and the government. Let’s hear what he thinks about why this has happened…” (p. 191)
I have no truck with trying to understand yourself better. If you want great material success go for it. If you seek comfort and security I hope you find it. But the path to those things, I think, doesn’t lie in this book or any charismatic movement.
But what do I know? I’m. just a spirit in the material world.
A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar
Math can be maddening.
That’s one lesson you might draw from this biography of noted mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. It might even seem of a piece, if you’ve read the biographies of any other major math figure, for instance, Georg Cantor, who has quite a story of his own.
I wonder, though, how many people really read such Continue reading
South to a Very Old Place
Albert Murray
The first time I encountered the idea that prose could mimic music was during my Jack Kerouac obsession. Time and again I’d come across the assertion that his goal was to capture on the page the rhythms, textures and fluidity of a Bop solo.
I didn’t, couldn’t really see it. The jazz I knew was the music of the Swing era, and its purpose was dancing. If I held any opinion about the jazz of the 1950s it was second-hand, acquired from Chuck Berry.
My ignorance and obsession have long since passed. Some days, though, Chuck still seems wise and I have a hard time finding music on the page. When I do, it’s usually in a poem. Prose is not without rhythm and melody, it’s just harder to find, though I count myself a part-time searcher.
If that describes you, and you’d care to take a break from looking, this book offers a perfect example of what the fruits of your search should resemble.
Albert Murray is the real deal. Around here that phrase always means the same thing: a writer of immense talent who has invested time in honing their craft and whose erudition is apparent. That last bit is important because, for me, erudition goes beyond an ability to quote Classics or 19th Century German philosophers at will.
Robert Penn Warren
1905-1989
While either of those examples might impress me, I take an expansive view of knowledge. A student of the streets is no less knowledgeable than a PhD and often in a better position to attest to truth. Nor does a writer need to be deeply immersed in one subject. Synthesis is what really bowls me over again and again.
Allow me to sketch a quick biography of the present author. Born in Mobile County, Alabama, in 1916, Murray was of the same generation as Rosa Parks, born into a segregated society soon after the birth of the NAACP and the death of Booker T. Washington. Murray attended Tuskegee Institute, from which he graduated in 1939, where he became lifelong friends with Ralph Ellison.
Murray joined the Army Air Force and served during World War II and remained in the reserves after the war ended. Though he tried to earn his living teaching he returned to active duty in the 1950s and rose to the rank of major before retiring, about the time I was born. He then moved to New York, completed his education with an MA from NYU and took up writing.
Always a music lover, his beat included writing about jazz and he moved in an orbit that included Duke Ellington and Count Basie, whose biography he would later write. The present book emerged from an assignment he accepted from Willie Morris, the legendary editor of Harpers in the 1960s. Morris, a man who brought Mississippi with him when he moved north and who later returned home, had a simple request: Go home to the post-Civil Rights Act South and see what’s really going on.
William ‘Count’ Basie
1904-1984
You and I, faced with such a task, would probably hop in the car or book a flight to Hartsfield. Murray caught the New Haven Railroad and headed further north. It’s really no small act of genius to begin an inspection of the contemporary South with a visit to the precincts of Yale.
But Robert Penn Warren was there ensconced. And what better place to begin than with an apostate apologist for segregation–a man who not only changed his mind but became an advocate for civil rights? That Warren wrote one of the classic novels set in the South–based loosely on one of the South’s real, larger-than-life characters–was icing on the cake.
The book–I’ve no idea if it was ever published as an article or series of articles–reminds me, structurally, of a jazz number. There is a head (the prologue and New Haven section) that sets the theme, and a coda (the New Orleans, Greenville, Memphis section). In between, it’s all riffing, a term I use in the best sense of the word. For a jazz player, composing riffs and melodies out of raw material is the name of the game.
Murray hits his stride in those middle choruses named Greensboro, Atlanta, Tuskegee and Mobile. The first two represent different battlegrounds of the Civil Rights movement. If Greensboro is famous for the sit-ins, Atlanta, home of Morehouse College and Dr. King‘s family, was famously the self-declared ‘City too Busy to Hate.‘
The John A. Andrews Memorial Hospital at the Tuskegee Institute
Much of the book is dialog, placed in the mouths of locals, some Murray has known since boyhood. The closer he gets to home, the more the words fly, the rhythms pound and the truth flows. I never find it difficult to identify a writer whose background is lower than middle class. You can’t fake your way into the knowledge and trust of people just like you who stayed at home. That the truths revealed may be uncomfortable to those who would establish the proper narrative is part of the fun.
In an epigram, Murray warns us “Not everything in this book is meant to be taken literally” a point he immediately undercuts by saying he has changed names. The best way to convey the language, and the insider honesty, is with an extended quote sure to piss off almost everyone with an ax to grind on the subject of race relations. The speaker is an unidentified Mobile resident who has known Murray since boyhood:
“I’m talking about the goddamn white folks now. They come up and figure out how they can let a lot of loudmouth hustlers in there that don’t belong in there. Because they know good and well these the ones ain’t going to study. So that’s what we got now. We send them up there to learn what them white boys learning about running the goddam world and they up there out marching and wearing all that old three-ring circus stuff and talking about how they got to study about Africa. Now what I say is if that’s all they want to know they ain’t got no business up there. That’s what I say. Because the white man only too glad if they rather learn about Africa instead of how to run the world. I say them Africans already known about Africa, and what good is it doing them?” (pp. 182-183)
I can’t be certain if a transcript or recording of this, or any of the other reported conversation, exists but I don’t think that’s the point. This is Joseph Mitchell reportage and if the truth on the page is a work of artful construction rooted in fact I can live with that.
That last sentence used the words art and truth and I selected neither lightly. By the time you reach this quote you’ve traveled quite a ways with Murray. Your BS radar would have, should have pinged if you found him less than truthful. Was the above speech excerpt, with its accelerating rhythm and rising frustration, spoken verbatim? I’m not sure it matters because it has the same ring of truth as conversations I hear when I return to the neighborhood of my blue-collar youth.
I can offer no higher accolade than Albert Murray, great American writer.
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
Paul Collier
Turn with me now to serious things.
For some, the sky is falling, what with talk of 70% marginal tax rates. For others, the glorious socialist future is only a moment away.
Some of us, who can remember when things seemed less anxious, may wonder why there are only two choices. Continue reading
An Honest Con 