Institutions | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Apr

no man born with a living soul can work for the clampdown

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I struggled a lot with this post for several reasons. Chief among them is that not only do I know several first responders in Boston – EMTs, firefighters – I’m friends with one of the officials who conducted DHS emergency response drills in Boston for the last two summers. I’ve had beers and gone to weddings with these people; there are faces behind the badges. So not only does any post in which I’m skeptical of law enforcement feel like I’m slagging their jobs, it’s hard for me to write such criticism with a straight face. What, Lynn and DJ are gonna kick me out of my home? Like Mrs H. has a secret file on me because I wrote something nice about Occupy Boston once? G’wan, get outta heah.

watertown-mall Another stumbling block was that a lot of the critical writing I’d seen of the lockdown (Clark at Popehat being a widely cited example) focused on the financial cost of a day of lost labor. This sort of economic determinism always bugs me, whether from the right or left; it leads to bad policy and worse cable news. “Yes, three lives were lost and dozens horrifically maimed, but has anyone thought about the GDP?” It bothers me because, as soon as the debate is framed that way, the question becomes “how much did it actually cost?” Someone asserts it cost a billion dollars; Matthew Yglesias counters that no, it probably cost less. Frankly, I think that’s the wrong debate to have. So I struggled to find a way to voice my issues while distancing myself from that sort of bean-counting.

The last obstacle that kept me from publishing my first draft of this post is that the entire operation feels like such an unqualified victory. Especially in the greater context of the War on Terror, starting eleven and a half years ago with a horrific act of destruction, an act avenged by declaring war on every country except the ones where the responsible parties came from, wars that have cost thousands more lives, tens of thousands if you count non-Americans. Contrast this to last week: shocking tragedy on Monday, planes are in the air again by Tuesday, suspects identified on Thursday, caught on Friday. And we even got a day off work^*! A lone 19-year-old bringing a major American city to a standstill may seem like a Pyrrhic victory, but compared to what nineteen hijackers brought us to, it’s a bargain.

But it’s that last observation that actually spurred me onward. I worry whenever people become inured to the use of power. Over the last ten years, American citizens have gone from outrage to discomfort to indifference at bag checks on the subway, gropings at the airport, and men with assault rifles and Kevlar meandering through public. Now a city gets locked down to find one man. It’s easy to cheer this as a victory. The hard part is playing with hypotheticals: what if it took longer than a week to catch him? What if they got the wrong man? What if this level of police coordination were used to crack down on protestors rather than terrorists? When we reach the point at which armored SUVs become objectionable to us, will there be too much precedent to object?

Seth Godin, in a much lighter context, wrote:

“You can’t argue with success…”

Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can’t argue with you, because it knows that it didn’t work.

The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail precisely because they refuse to do this.

American federal agencies and news bureaus^** pounce heaviest on perceived failures in counterterrorism and turn hagiographic eyes on successes. If progress were the goal, it would be the other way around, to keep success from creating blinders and to keep fear of failure from encouraging the wrong behavior.

This is why, in the face of what’s apparently an overwhelming success in the War on Terror, I remain reticent.

Everyone has their own image of “what makes America great.” You can almost picture the montage: Little League baseball, fast cars on mountain highways, construction workers building skyscrapers, business executives shaking hands, kids on field trips seeing historical landmarks. When a major American city gets locked down, none of that is on display. I fear a generation that, when asked what makes America great, answers, “the ability to deliver swift, overwhelming force.” And I hate having to choose between those visions.

_________________
* For knowledge workers, of course, there’s no such thing as a day off, not where wi-fi and 4G yet cast a shadow.

** But I repeat myself.

Mar

turn prisons into prisms of the self

Posted by Perich at 7:05 am

I talked about The Hunger Games (the movie) with the rest of the Overthinkers on this week’s podcast; check it out. But the podcast is (or tries to be) more of an objective analysis, less of a subjective review. So, for my own thoughts:

Several friends of mine have complained recently about the injustice of Bully, a documentary about actual problems with actual teenagers, being rated R, while The Hunger Games, a fictional movie about teenagers murdering each other, is rated PG-13. The argument is that children need to see movies like Bully in order to put a face on a problem that they might otherwise ignore.

While I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of The Bully Project, it is just as important that every teenager in America sees The Hunger Games on the big screen. They need to see a world where people accept income inequality as the just outcome of wrongdoing two hundred years ago. They need to see a world where young adults are marched off to death with no objection. They need to see a world where the voices and faces of media are tools of social control. They need to see a world where it’s the villains who call ritual slaughter a “sacrifice” that needs to be “honored,” not the heroes.

But, of course, it’s fantasy. It’s a world where children are told that they need to conform to recognizable roles as early as they can or they’ll be picked off at the fringes of the herd. It’s a world where kissing the boy that society approves of gets you rewards. It’s a world from which there’s no escape – from which the idea of running away, living off the land and ignoring the arbitrary annual bloodletting, is laughed off. It’s bizarro science-fiction; look at the haircuts.

Yes, the setup is brutal, and depressing, and pointless. But what are you going to do when they start pulling names out of slips? Not send a tribute to the Capital?

Feb

but big heads with soft bodies make for lousy lovers

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Whenever a group of people do something terrible enough to make the news, whether it’s taunting a child into suicide, lying about the creditworthiness of mortgage-backed derivatives, or adopting the SS logo for their Marine Corps squad, I see a common reaction. As the news is being passed around, wall to wall and tweet to tweet, someone asks, “How can anybody act this way? How come nobody spoke up?”

My question: “why would you expect them to?”

At what point in the curriculum do we teach children to call bullshit on people in power? I know most course loads have a few sections devoted to critical thinking, but, as I recall, that’s mostly reading comprehension and word problems. The only lessons I got in resisting peer pressure came in the drugs and alcohol section of Health class. And compared to tormenting a kid until he hangs himself, weed is harmless.

In each of these newsworthy cases, here is what happened:

Someone with a bit of authority, earned or granted, suggests doing something questionable (e.g., “let’s get drunk and drag race!”, “let’s sell credit default swaps to pension fund managers!”, “let’s adopt the logo of a Wehrmacht unit for our squadron!”).
A bunch of people agree that it’s a good idea, either because they genuinely believe it to be – they followed the same chain of reasoning the originator did – or because they like power and want to be seen supporting it.
One or two brave souls realize that this might not be a good idea (e.g., “what if we crash?”, “what if a statistically unlikely number of mortgages default?“, “hey, didn’t the SS implement the Reich’s ‘final solution’?”).
Here we fork: these dissenters either keep their objections to themselves or voice their concerns. I couldn’t say what the breakdown is, but call it 50/50.
If they voice their concerns, the originator and his supporters either shout them down (“pussies!”) or, even worse, acknowledge the logic of the objections and then water down their suggestion slightly, in bad faith, in a way that doesn’t address the core harm (e.g., “let’s only sell the derivatives that Moody’s rates AAA”).
Everyone goes along with it.
They get caught.
A fraction of them feel no guilt for what they’ve done; a sizable portion are “sorry they were caught” and grapple with guilt for a while; the fraction who recognized the issues earlier and [did/didn't] speak up are mentally broken.

There’s no solution in the existing pedagogy. You can’t teach a lack of respect for authority: even if power-worship weren’t wired into the human genome, skepticism and iconoclasm run counter to the principles of instruction. “Never take anyone’s word at face value, except mine, and only about this!” Perhaps the solution is to stop teaching, or to teach a different set of skills that will grow into independent thought, or to accept these occasional outbursts of group monstrosity as the price of a civil society.

Jan

the clock’s ticking, I just count the hours

Posted by Perich at 9:52 am

I’m happy my corner of the Internet has risen in unison to protest SOPA. I really am. I’m happy people seem to recognize, today, finally, that putting powerful weapons in the hands of the powerful only serves the interests of the powerful. I’m glad people are doing whatever they can, even if it’s within a rather narrow band (writing their Congresspersons, rewriting their .htaccess files), to check the effects of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money.

My only hope is that today makes an impact. Not on Congress, but on everyone else.

My sincere, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-this-time hope is that people investigate the process that led to SOPA being written in the first place and realize that it’s not an accident. Nothing this big is an accident. SOPA emerged from a deliberate confluence of factions conspiring to protect their power. Congress isn’t endorsing a bill that expands the already draconian provisions of the DMCA because no other option appears available to them to stop piracy. They’re not idiots. Congress is endorsing this bill because people with millions of dollars, such as the MPAA (and their chief lobbyist, former Senator Chris Dodd), want it to happen. And the MPAA wants it to happen because they want to turn third-party filesharing into a revenue stream through a constant barrage of torts.

Does your average member of Congress care about lobbyists and campaign contributions more than they care about their constituency? ~~Obviously~~ Perhaps not. But they know that you’re going to vote for them anyway. Most people are. Your Congressional representative knows that he has an eighty percent chance of keeping his job whatever he does, slightly less if he’s a Senator. You aren’t going to turn your back on him over one trivial bill. But the MPAA might. And when the MPAA takes a member of Congress off their list, that’s a thousand-dollar haircut. More if he has a valuable committee seat.

One of the ways that people get confused about evolution – even the people who defend evolution against creationists – is that they think it’s “accidental.” It’s not. There’s a difference between undesigned and accidental. Evolution produces speciation through the forces of natural and sexual selection, with a healthy dose of mutation thrown in at random intervals. While there is no divine intelligence behind it, that doesn’t mean the process is a complete roll of the dice. Humans (and other animals) fit so well on the planet Earth because an animal that didn’t fit well wouldn’t have survived here. Evolution is a product of forces. It’s no more accidental than a waterfall.

Similarly, the convergence of money and power in the form of destructive regulation is not accidental. It’s not like Lamar Smith woke up one morning, found a monstrous censoring blade on his desk and decided to start swinging it before reason overtook him. It’s not as if Eric Cantor hates Google and wants it destroyed. Rather, you have many unrelated actors – filesharing sites, search engines, content aggregators, members of Congress, the MPAA – and a vast institution that notionally connects them – the law. The law is not a bulwark against the powerful. It’s a giant, flashing beacon. It tells the powerful, “If you want your voice to be heard, make your checks out to this address and no other.”

I have to stress that SOPA and PIPA are a natural outcome of the regulatory process, not some accidental aberration. I have to stress it because every law is like that. All of them. Even the ones you like. Especially the ones you like. Every bill whose passage you’ve ever cheered has been the result of either a multi-million dollar lobbying effort or, rarely, a massive coordinated push by an obstreperous faction that decided results were more important than tact.

If you object to SOPA, you object to the system that created it. If you don’t object to the system that created it, you don’t really object to SOPA. And don’t tell me that you understand the potential for corruption, but you hope that by electing “more and better” Ruling Party members that you can get good results, etc, because you can’t. It doesn’t work. You want a super-intelligent shark that’s not going to eat Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I’m sorry, but the super-intelligent shark will always eat Samuel L. Jackson.

GIFSoup

Dec

2011: the year in review

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

The astronomer raised his head from the eyepiece of his giant telescope and rubbed his eyes. He had checked all his figures and couldn’t escape the obvious conclusion.

“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth,” he said.

Picking up the phone, he called 911. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

“Out of our jurisdiction,” said the dispatcher. “Please stay on the line.”

He called FEMA. After several hours of transfers, he got a voice mail. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said. Then he hung up.

He called his representative in Congress. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

“Your Congressman shares your concern,” said a junior staffer. “He’s working with the other members of the Ruling Party to keep America strong. He’s grateful for your support in the next election.”

I need to think bigger, the astronomer thought (bigly), dialing the metro desk of his local newspaper. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

“Okay,” came the reply. “Let me schedule an interview for you next month. Also: do you know any people we can quote for opposing viewpoints? Just for a sense of balance.”

“There aren’t any opposing viewpoints,” the astronomer said. “The asteroid is actually going to hit. And is it my job to get these people?”

“I’m not really sure. I’m an intern. We’ve laid off, like, a lot of writers.”

Realizing that traditional means wouldn’t work, the astronomer set off to make a spectacle. He made the biggest sign he could comfortably carry and a thousand pamphlets and headed downtown to City Hall. Once there, after negotiating for space between the LaRouchies and the homeless guys, he hoisted his sign in the air.

“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

An asteroid is going to hit the Earth.

Tens of thousands of people passed him on their way to work. Most dismissed him as crazy, because most people with signs outside City Hall are crazy. But a few stopped to listen. Those who did were treated to a quick but informative rundown of the astronomer’s observations. A few people joined him.

“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” they said.

By now, the astronomer and his friends were a big enough crowd to draw hecklers. “If there’s a real asteroid, why isn’t NASA doing anything about it?” someone yelled.

“I don’t know,” the astronomer replied. “I’m trying to make sure NASA hears about it!”

“Then why don’t you go to Houston, or wherever the hell NASA lives?”

“I can’t afford to! Could you go?” But the heckler had wandered off.

A few people believed the astronomer, but got offended at what he was saying. “So what if an asteroid is going to ‘hit the Earth’?” said one. “Screaming about it in the streets isn’t going to do anything. This country survived the Revolutionary War, the Great Depression and Bud Selig as commissioner of baseball. It can survive an asteroid.”

“An asteroid’s nothing like the Great Depression,” said the astronomer. “It’s an asteroid. And it affects the whole Earth. And I’m not screaming.”

Worse than the hecklers, though, were the well-intentioned critics. “It’s important that you’re bringing this to people’s attention,” said one science blogger. “But by protesting like some crazy hippie …”

“I’m not protesting,” said the astronomer.

“… you discredit the whole scientific community. You make us look irrational. What you need to do is publish your list of grievances as a letter in a reputable journal …”

“I don’t have grievances!”

“… and then submit a study for peer review.”

“Anyone can look at my data,” said the astronomer. “It’s on the web at anasteroidisgoingtohittheearth.tumblr.com. I’m not doing this because I want publication; I’m doing this because I fear for the future of life on this planet.”

As more people reviewed and corroborated the astronomer’s data, the crowd outside City Hall grew. Frowning, the mayor put in a call to the Police Commissioner, who deployed a SWAT team.

“We respect your right to criticize the government,” said the Commissioner.

“I’m not criticizing!”

“… but local statutes forbid interest groups from occupying this privately-owned plaza immediately in front of City Hall without a permit.”

“I’m not an interest group,” the astronomer said. “Unless the entire human race is an interest group, because the entire human race might be in danger from this asteroid that is going to hit the Earth!”

The SWAT team drew their Tasers.

The violent crackdown on the astronomer and his two dozen followers got some media attention. “Scientists are taking to the streets,” said an Opposition Party candidate, “holding the Mayor accountable. And it’s about time. Our nation has lagged behind China, India and other shoe-producing countries in science education for far too long. Unless we make our children a priority, the 21st century is going to hit America like an asteroid!”

“The asteroid isn’t a metaphor,” the astronomer said. “It’s an actual asteroid that will hit the actual Earth.” But he wasn’t on camera, so nobody heard him.

Members of the Ruling Party were harsher. “In this time of economic crisis,” said a prominent Senator, “it’s irresponsible for anyone to suggest spending taxpayer dollars on some anti-meteor laser or giant force field. These are the sorts of boneheaded ideas that ivory tower academics produce all the time. The moral depravity of America’s universities continues to sicken me.”

“Who said anything about a laser?” the astronomer said. “Or a force field?” But a quick search uncovered similar protests in other cities, protests with very specific lists of demands. “Who are these guys?” he wondered.

As the circle of “Kum-Ba-Yah”-chanting protesters linked arms to prevent the SWAT team from dispersing the camp with non-lethal shotguns, a FEMA coordinator struggled through the crowd. He had played the astronomer’s voice mail from a week earlier and had finally caught up with him.

“I believe you,” he told the astronomer. “I checked the data with NORAD and it all makes sense. So now what?”

“I don’t know,” said the astronomer.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Aren’t you the leader of this movement? What’s your agenda? What’s your platform? Where are your bullet points?”

“It’s not a movement,” the astronomer said. “I don’t have an agenda.”

“Then what are you even doing here?”

Having delivered this speech several times over the last week, the astronomer was able to control his patience. “Look,” he said, “I’m an astronomer. I’m not an engineer or a civil defense coordinator or a paramedic. Those are the people who need to know about this asteroid that’s going to hit the Earth. But I can’t make them act.”

“I don’t think a paramedic will know how to deal with an asteroid hitting the Earth.”

“Probably not. But someone out there will, and if I keep saying this loud enough and for long enough, that person will hear this and think about it. And then they’ll come up with a solution. Failing that, if everybody accepts the fact that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth – because it is – then maybe people will start doing what they need to do to minimize the damage, instead of passing it off or pretending that traditional institutions are capable of dealing with it. I can’t make anyone do anything. All I can do is tell people what I know: that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth.”

“Makes sense,” the FEMA coordinator said. “Have you called your Congressperson?”

The astronomer started crying.

Meanwhile, the SWAT team had just received the order to move in. “It’s too bad,” said one officer, checking the non-lethal rounds in his non-lethal shotgun. “I sympathize with these guys, I really do. I mean, who wants to get hit by an asteroid?”

“I’m with you,” said his sergeant. “But we live in a society of laws. If you want someone to do something about an asteroid, you line up and vote like the rest of us.”

“Amen to that. Me and Sully are grabbing some beers after; you want in?”

“Nah, I’m gonna head home,” the sergeant said, looking up at the sky. “It got dark awful early today.”

Dec

screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

In light of the pending passage of SOPA, several friends have circulated a VICE article titled, “Dear Congress: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How the Internet Works“. I was about to work up a good head of steam and post a counter-rant, but Marie C. linked me to a great response: “Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works” that says about 75% of what I would have said:

What you have to understand is that Congress is saying that they don’t understand the Internet isn’t a failure of Congress. You may think these guys in Washington are foolish — even too stupid to really understand the “mysteries of the Internet.” but look at how our members of Congress talk about the biopharmaceutical industry: I haven’t used the word “biosimilar” once in my life, but Congress used it 70+ times in a single month.

If Congress is complaining that they don’t know about something that you care about, the right answer isn’t to tell them to go get educated. The right answer is to educate them. Congress mentioned the word “biologics” 75 times in a month because a lobbyist spent a long time doing their job: educating members of Congress on the needs of its industry.

Right now, if you want effective legislation around your industry, then you need to pay the right lobbyists, make the right campaign contributions, and write the right legislation at the right time in order to get it out of Washington.

To which I have nothing to add save this:

The complaint, as I understand it, is that legislators in Congress are not experts on the Internet. They are, in fact, extraordinarily ill-informed on the subject and have no desire to get smarter. Now if your message is that “members of Congress are brutish failures living unexamined lives,” I’ll sign your petition and buy you a drink. But among my more outraged friends, I sensed this growing chorus of enraged disappointment. There was a consensus that Congress could, or should, do better.

Guys, Congress is not comprised of experts on any subject. That’s the point. That’s how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. Rather than letting the experts on health care (doctors) determine the cost of health care, or the experts on engineering (engineers) decide where bridges are built, or the experts on logistics (generals) decide where the army gets deployed, the people elect a series of stand-ins to make these decisions instead.

The fear was that if you leave the experts in charge, they will arrange affairs to benefit themselves. And that’s not an unreasonable concern! Quoting James Madison in Federalist #10:

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are the different classes of Legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?

So no, legislators are not experts on the subjects they write laws about. That’s the whole idea. Legislators are separate from the factions they govern, in order to preserve objectivity. What the VICE article is describing is not a bug, it’s not a feature, it was the god-damned selling point.

And lest you think I’m taking silly outdated ideas like “bicameral legislature” out of context, consider the healthcare reboot that rammed its way through Congress in 2010. Back then, the concern was passing the bill before the Opposition Party could bog it down in committee. Nancy Pelosi advocated for “passing the bill so that you can find out what is in it” (her words). Sam Baucus, one of the principal architects, proudly claimed not to have read every page (“it’s statutory language [...] we hire experts”). The Ruling Party urged the passage of a bill known to be imperfect through “prompt, decisive leadership,” and letting adjustments to the law come later. Everywhere the emphasis was on speed, not on results.

In other words, the goal was not to craft an ideal piece of law, but to hurry a bill through the process as quickly as possible.

Well, congratulations! This is what you wanted. This is the process you championed: a process where MPAA lobbyists can bring about the end of unregulated Internet speech by rushing a bill through Congress. This is what happens when a body of legislators is invested with immense power: they might use it to do stupid things. Every law that you think is a good idea is the result of a bunch of uninformed self-promoters taking lobbyist money, trading favors and slapping each other on the back. All of them. The bad ones, too.

The problem is not that power is being used for evil. The problem is not that power is in the wrong people’s hands. The problem is that the power exists at all.

Nov

this is your payback, moneygrabber

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Radley Balko is probably the best blogger publishing today. Not only does he write insightful stuff on important issues of criminal justice and civil liberties, he actually goes out and gets shit done. Take a look at his work on the Cory Maye appeal, or shedding light on Mississippi’s questionable medical examiner Steven Hayne. He’s the model of what 21st century citizen journalists should be, the ideal made manifest.

Which is why it’s distressing¹ when he links to shit like this:

# The Nation laments the plight of an Occupy Wall Street protester who can’t find a job and has $35,000 in student loan debt after earning a degree in . . . puppetry.

Haw haw, right? The unspoken punchline being of course you can’t find a job, hippie. Who’s going to pay you to play with puppets all day? Look at those protesters, buncha losers, etc.

While I don’t want to discredit the notion that people who get degrees in puppetry have a hard road ahead of them – they do, and the degree isn’t helping – why is the protester the butt of the joke here?

For those of you who are still snickering, let me propose a slightly different text and see if the reaction is the same:

The Nation laments the plight of a single mother who invests her life savings in a startup company … only to find that the “startup” was a fraud run by a two-time ex-con

Now a few of you jackasses would still be laughing (“serves her right for not doing her due diligence! high-five, bro!”), in which case congratulations at having never been scammed. You must be so proud of your charmed lives. The rest of us, however, would find at least a modicum of sympathy for the woman. Depending on context, we might parcel blame in different ratios. If she fell for a contract written in Comic Sans on Kinko’s stationary, we might judge her more foolish than if she fell for a slick pitch by a pro whom she trusted. But we know that con games exist. Even the most doctrinaire libertarian recognizes the need to protect against fraud. And in these circumstances, we sympathize with the victim.

Am I saying that an institution which takes thirty-five thousand dollars of a young man’s money and hands him a piece of paper saying he has a Master of Fine Arts in Puppetry is equivalent to a con artist? Frankly, yes.

Look, I know a few puppeteers². The work they do isn’t easy: sculpting plastic and foam rubber, creating cartoonish yet expressive faces, simulating a range of movements and emotions with lifeless textiles, keeping the attention of six-year-olds, etc. It’s not hard like coal mining is hard, but you couldn’t master it in a weekend. It’s not trivial. But it doesn’t take an MFA. There is not a master’s degree’s worth of material in puppetry. Extend the field to encompass every possible medium in which you could sculpt a puppet, the history of puppetry from Sumeria to the present, and several hours of apprenticeship in the field, and you would have, at most, a two-year associate’s degree. That’s it. I feel confident saying this because the puppeteers I know are successful despite not having MFAs in puppetry, despite not having MFAs at all. Like the overwhelming majority of college graduates, they went to work in a field aside from their major.

To take thirty-five thousand dollars from someone and give them an MFA in Puppetry is like taking thirty-five thousand dollars from someone and giving them the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge. It requires either unnatural malevolence, an indifference to the suffering of strangers or a cultivated ignorance of the consequences of your actions. And institutions thrive on ignorance. They lick the bowl. The bigger an institution gets, the less the left hand knows what the right is doing, and the easier it is for the whole thing to work mischief.

It’s not a faculty adviser’s job to dissuade Thierren (the victim of this con) from getting an MFA in puppetry: the kid’s just following his passion! It’s not an instructor’s job to dissuade Thierren: he’s just one face out of twenty-four in the crafts seminar. It’s not the registrar’s job to dissuade him from taking useless classes: in fact, the registrar will help him get into whatever classes he wants if the seats are available. It’s not the treasurer’s job to dissuade him from signing over a check: they’ve got administrators begging them for more funds every day. And it’s not the loan officer’s job to dissuade the kid either. And so the buck keeps getting passed, thirty-five thousand times.

You want to talk about riskless investments? Since student loans can not be discharged through bankruptcy³, Sallie Mae will see every penny they ever lent returned, with interest. They have no incentive not to issue loans and universities have no incentive not to take them. And an institution isn’t ten people conspiring to do evil: it’s ten thousand people with no incentive to do good.

Joe Thierren, I’m sorry to say, got conned. He bought a pig in a poke. And while it’s easy to laugh at him for making (to quote Marge Simpson) a terrible life choice, shaming those protesters off the street won’t make us better off. The institutions that perpetuate these unsustainable debts – the iron triangle of banks, universities and legislatures – need to be brought to account as well.

To his credit, Balko also recognizes the insanity of the student loan quandary:

None of which is to say the Occupy folks and others upset about student debt don’t have a point. College has become insanely expensive. But federal loans, grants, and subsidies are a big reason why. They’ve created a lopsided seller’s market for higher ed. When you have way more applicants than you need, there’s zero incentive to control costs.

He links approvingly to a suggestion that makes some sense to me, an idea proposed by Glenn Reynolds⁴ in the New York Post⁵: allow students to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy and put the university that issued the degree on the hook for 10% of the outstanding debt. I suspect we’d see a lot fewer universities taking thirty-five thousand dollar checks and handing out MFAs in puppetry in return.

_________________
1. I know, I know: just because someone shares your ideology on one aspect doesn’t mean they share your ideology in all aspects. This shouldn’t shock me. But we long for perfection in all things.
2. Which I never thought I’d be referencing for street cred.
3. Are they even discharged in death? Who inherits a dead person’s student loans?
4. I know.
5. I know!

Oct

I went looking for some writing that I knew would not be there

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

So after an unending series of Presidents spur money into the housing market as well as institutional investing, to the point that the best investment for an exorbitant FY-over-FY rate of return is real estate, even above and beyond what the market could plausibly sustain – condos in the shittiest parts of Florida flipping four times before they’re even carpeted; fifty-story condos on the strip in Vegas – leading to a cottage industry of robosigners, skeevy lenders and unqualified borrowers that, shockingly, implodes, causing the destruction of several ancient banks, and inspiring their brother moneylenders to pick up the phone to their boys in Washington – you know them, their photos are in the international terminals of major airports – and say, hey guys, a little help, prompting an unaudited, multi-trillion dollar bailout of those same banks that created the implosion in the first place, said bailout flowing immediately back to the fever swamp in the form of T-bill purchases that buy no groceries, lay no bricks and fill no libraries (although they do help finance wars #4 through 7) but instead pad the account books of several investment managers and allow the banks to claim that they’ve repaid their graft in full, prolonging a recession and destroying what little wealth the debtor caste has accumulated, leading a few souls to timidly say, “Hey, maybe we might voice our displeasure at what’s been done to us, provided we fill out the proper land-use permits and don’t raise a fuss if the cops (illegally) shut off our cameras or spray noxious chemicals in our eyes, and so long as we don’t shoot any of the people who deliberately conspired, both among themselves and with those in power, to sell each other shitty investments and inflate their numbers, those shitty investments being our houses and their numbers being wealth that somehow failed to trickle down, thus creating an entire mandarin class that can profit off of our misery but never suffer off of our loss,” and after this idea catches on, as it might in a country with 20% unemployment, resulting in a nationwide movement that has so far produced fewer injuries than the audience at a Raiders game, your objection is they don’t have a clear policy?

For pity’s sake, man. Policy got us into this mess.

Anyhow, quit your fretting. These unemployed electrical workers, college kids and perpetual punks aren’t going to do anything. The Ruling Party is already figuring out how to co-opt their movement. They’re already forming general assemblies and voting on (ugh) resolutions. Peter Finch has already been called into Ned Beatty’s office and had the nature of the cosmos explained to him. Sorry for the delay in your commute.

But come on, people. If policy will accomplish anything – and I remain skeptical – that’s later. Dissent comes first. Dissent always comes first. And when you’re up against a system so pervasive that even the protesters are documenting its abuses on iPhones, dissent may be all that you get.

Sep

what I stand for, I mostly stand behind

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

So I saw this snippet of text about a squillion times last week, either in writing or in a video or in the image below:

click for larger version

Excerpting the important parts, in case you can’t see the image:

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory—and hire someone to protect against this—because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

I don’t want to unpack everything that goes into that sentiment. I’m not going to take sides on its accuracy or its implications. Right now, I just need to raise my hand from the back of the classroom and ask: this transactional theory of government? This notion that people get something out of the State and therefore they have to pay something back? You know that’s not how it actually works, right?

Yes, I know what social contract theory is, and I sat through civics class like the rest of you. I mean how the actual process works. The actual payment of taxes and the production of infrastructure.

Look: if I want to talk about how the Gap does business, I can do it a couple different ways. I can talk about the microeconomics of supply and demand. I can talk about the effect of advertising and marketing on stimulating demand for a product. I could talk about the macroeconomics of managing inventory at walk-in locations, or about the cost of domestic labor vs. sweatshop labor, or about the Fisher family’s strategy of maximizing market coverage by selling clothing under multiple retail brands (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, etc).

But if I say the Gap is undermining the quality of American clothing, I’m no longer talking about the economic process of how shirts get onto shelves. I’m advancing a theory. Different people can interpret the same set of facts (the Gap company’s cost of labor, target audiences, profit margins) and come up with different conclusions. Maybe the Gap is undermining the quality of American clothing. Or maybe they’re liberating the casual “boater” style of the country club set of the 50s and 60s by disseminating it to the masses! Either works! If this were hard science, we could test whose theory were truer by making predictions and seeing which came to pass. Since retail is a soft science, and poly/cotton blends a softer science yet, all we can really do is yell at each other in academic quarterlies and obscure blogs.

(TL;DR: positive vs. normative analysis; for more, see my friend Jodi B.)

Elizabeth Warren, in the above quote, is making a normative statement. She’s saying, “People who benefit from infrastructure ought to pay to support it in a level commensurate to their benefits.” This is a great theory! I don’t object to it, stated that far and no farther^*. But I worry that several of the people who’ve quoted her so enthusiastically do so not because she’s stating a great theory but because they think she’s stating some obvious fact.

Because she’s not. And I think we all know she’s not. You do not pay a tax bill itemized for services rendered. Citizens pay taxes, yes, and the revenues from those taxes (as well as capital on bonds) pay for infrastructure. But to suggest that one causes the other simply because one came before the other is bad science. Anyone who follows the statutory process with cursory interest knows that big projects are often – one might cynically say usually – agreed to before the revenue is obtained to pay for them. Anyone who follows the electoral cycle knows that rarely – one might cynically say never – are the regulators, government employees and contractors who lay out infrastructure the ones to get fired if it fails, barring some tragedy (the Ted Williams Tunnel collapsing on a commuter, etc). And a true crank might say that it’s not infrastructure that demands taxes, but in fact the other way around – that taxes demand infrastructure, that the machinery of taxation looks for ways to justify its existence, that the urge is to collect revenue first and then plan massive projects to validate the need for their revenues, thus proving to the constituency how great a representative you are (“Three new schools and two hundred new cops under my first term, and with YOUR help …”) by laying out ever more glorious projects that need ever more exorbitant levies to support them, to which no one dare object since the results can be documented in black and white numbers (“whaddaya, against schools or something?”), in an ever-increasing cycle of taxes and projects until we’re voting for Two Vast and Trunkless Legs of Stone for state Senate.

Of course, now I’m theorizing myself. You see how tempting it is! So let me limit it to what can be said for certain: taxes come in, capital flows out, but any accounting link between the two is spurious.

“The law isn’t justice,” wrote Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye. “It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.” The relationship between tax revenue and infrastructure should be taken with similar skepticism. I know we all want a government process that’s equitable and fair and transparent, but we should never let that distract us from the convoluted, brittle and wheezing mechanism that governs us already.

_________________
* Though even if we stay within the garden of classical microeconomics 101, there are problems with this theory, first among them: in no other transaction is a person asked to pay exactly according to their benefit. Traditional price theory holds that, in a free exchange, I’m going to pay less than the benefit I expect to receive. I pay the orange farmer a quarter because I want the orange more than I want the quarter: I’ve got lots of money that I can’t eat. He sells me the orange because he wants the quarter more than he wants the orange: he’s got lots of oranges but he needs mortgage money. Both of us profit because we’ve made an exchange that benefits us both.

If the farmer were to track me down later, discover that I’d derived a dollar’s worth of satisfaction from his juicy orange and then demand another seventy-five cents, I’d slap him on the ear. And yet the social contract theory Professor Warren espouses suggests that, if I benefit more from a piece of infrastructure than I paid for it, I haven’t paid nearly enough.

Of course, marginal utility theory has Warren’s back on this, because if I get a dollar’s worth of satisfaction out of an orange and I only paid a quarter, that’s a lot of consumer surplus going uncaptured. In an evenly rotating economy, supply and demand should even out such that prices will reach an equilibrium where the benefit of an exchange is minimal. So maybe I’m not paying enough.

Of course of course, textbook economics is bullshit anyway. But it’s a useful bullshit. We are at least speaking a common jargon to each other.

Sep

well is it over now, do you know how

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I took Sylvia up to Salem for an afternoon on Labor Day, just to wander around and see the tourist areas. If you’ve never been, think of the one association you have with Salem, MA – first word that pops into your head – and spray it in every corner. Every other storefront is a witch museum, a psychic reader, a pagan bookstore or a haunted house. Essex Street reeks of incense.

spellbooks

I came late to Dungeons & Dragons, so I never got to witness the Satanic panic of the 80s first hand. It always struck me as an artifact of an older generation and more than a little ridiculous. Sure, the boxed game with the funky dice contains real magic spells; got it, Padre. But looking at the rotating wire rack of spell books in a downtown Salem tourist trap, I could start to see where Jack Chick was coming from. Not only do the “real” spell books use the same colors, designs and artists as the “fake” RPG supplements, they use the same fonts. It looked like the well-thumbed corner of White Wolf splatbooks you’d find in any comic book store in the early 90s.

We took in an exhibition at the ~~Witch History Museum~~ Salem Witch Museum, just off the Salem Common. It begins with an unrelentingly grim wax figure show in an auditorium. Spotlights on alternating tableaus depict the history of the Salem witch hysteria, while an angry British narrator recounts the scenes in increasingly hopeless terms. It’s a dark experience, impossible to dismiss or disregard, recalling the things that mobs will do once they can use and enjoy power.

It’s odd how Salem got its massive influx of Wiccan and pagan believers in the eighties based on its association with people killed there three hundred years earlier who weren’t even witches. I would not expect a concentration of Cherokees in Talladega today, though I might visit there and be surprised. But were it not for the witches, there wouldn’t be much to Salem. Five minutes outside of town in any direction, you find bedroom communities and light industry. There’s nothing else there. I’m glad the association has stuck with Salem for three centuries and I hope it sticks longer. While we object to easy analogies in most arguments – comparing people to Nazis or our fights to World War II – “witch trial” isn’t something that gets used often enough.