This Is Not News

In light of the number of Republican presidential candidates who argue that poor people should just take advantage of the opportunities in America to work their way up the economic ladder, it’s worth reading this New York Times story about a number of studies that suggest that it’s harder for children who grow up poor to move out of the bottom income level in the US than in many other countries that are considered to have more rigid class structures. There are a number of interesting causes suggested, including the overall wealth gaps that are growing in the US, access to education for our poorest citizens, and our incarceration rate. But it’s something we should be aware of; I’ve never really been a big believer in the idea that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, so this article tends to confirm my own beliefs. But if a lot of other people start to accept these claims and don’t see hope for themselves or their children to improve their lot in life, then you may see more repeats of social disturbances like the ones in Britain this past summer.

Labour Party leader Ed Milliband gave a speech a couple of days ago about the English riots and how the government should respond. The full text is available on Labour’s website, and it’s worth a read.

Milliband’s major proposal is series of hearings or town hall meetings or some other form of “national conversation.” I don’t know enough about British politics to know whether such inquiries have more impact than special commissions in the US. I hope so, or I don’t understand why Milliband would put so much effort into having one established.

But what I think is interesting about the speech is the way he tries to link this crisis with other crises Britain has faced recently.

Children’s ideas of right and wrong don’t just come from their parents.

And we can’t honestly say the greed, selfishness and gross irresponsibility that shocked us all so deeply is confined to the looters or even to their parents.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this kind of me-first, take what you can culture.
The bankers who took millions while destroying people’s savings: greedy, selfish, and immoral.

The MPs who fiddled their expenses: greedy, selfish, and immoral.

The people who hacked phones to get stories to make money for themselves: greedy, selfish and immoral.

People who talk about the sick behaviour of those without power, should talk equally about the sick behaviour of those with power.

Let’s not pretend that the crisis of values in our society is confined to a minority only at the bottom when we see the morality of millions of hardworking, decent people u nder siege from the top as well.

Let’s talk about what it does to our culture.

Too often we have sent a message from the top to the bottom of Britain’s society that says: anything goes, you are in it for yourself.

As long as you can get away with it, who cares?

We hear lots of talk now about role models for communities, but what role model has been provided by the elites of our society?

By linking riots with phone hacking and poor banking practices, he invites us to take a top-to-bottom look at our ethical fabric. Left unstated is the issue that, if greed, selfishness and immorality are rampant amongst the elite and the downtrodden, is there any way that society can punish those transgressions in an equal manner?

Antisocial behavior and society’s response to it is kind of my theme for the next few days, largely because I’ve been trying to reflect on the recent riots in England and the British government’s response. Via Matt Yglesias’ blog I found this commentary on Bloomberg by Edward Glaeser. Glaeser argues that large social forces like poverty or anger at the government are not the main reason that riots happen in democratic societies. Rather, the biggest ingredient is simply a large mass of people. The more people you have in an area, the harder it is for authorities to catch any one wrongdoer. So when a crowd gets large enough, like it did in Vancouver at the end of the Stanley Cup Finals, a small number of malcontents will use the larger crowd for cover and start acting out. Once this begins, other people will see an opportunity to act out without consequence and join in. At a certain point you reach a critical mass, lots of people get swept up in the passion, and you have a full scale riot that can only end with a massive deployment of forces to get the numbers back under control.

Toward the end of his article Glaeser points to how the New York police prevented any riots during the 2004 Republican National Convention – they staged mass arrests that got over 1000 people off the streets, and then let those people go. As Glaeser puts it:

But in the case of riots, it is awfully hard to actually prove wrongdoing and extremely important to clear the streets. Arresting widely and temporarily can be far more effective.

If you can’t prove wrongdoing and you’re just trying to clear the streets, it seems clear that you’re going to be arresting people who are doing nothing more than trying to make use of their right to assemble. Is that a price we should pay to avoid the chance of a riot? Benjamin Franklin’s quote about liberty and security starts running through my mind now, and I wonder what the appropriate balance point would be. My gut instinct is to say that I believe you should prepare for the worst, but not assume it. But those preparations may require some restrictions that we should find chafing in a democratic society.

A lot of people have used the metaphor of someone taking hostages to describe political standoffs such as the one that just took place over the debt ceiling or the one that just appears to have ended regarding the Federal Aviation Administration. One side (usually the Republicans) says that unless their desired policies are implemented, they won’t vote to do some basic thing that’s necessary to keep the government running. The other side (usually the Democrats) then has to figure out whether to agree to something that they don’t like or accept the consequences of the government (or part of it) shutting down. This tactic has been working fairly well for Republicans, so they’re fairly likely to keep using it. BooMan has a post over on his blog titled Get Used to Being a Hostage that outlines some of the upcoming situations. Not surprisingly, there’s a strong anti-Obama sentiment in the comments from progressives who feel that Obama’s willingness to negotiate with Republicans only encourages them to “take more hostages.”

I understand this position. I have found myself sharing it at various points since last November. But what I don’t think gets enough analysis from the “Don’t negotiate with hostage-takers” camp is, what happens to the hostage when you don’t negotiate? More likely than not, you wind up with a dead hostage. So every time there’s a hostage situation, you have to ask yourself if the price for keeping the hostage-taker from killing the hostage is a better outcome than a dead hostage. It doesn’t matter if the price is a worse outcome than not paying the price AND no harm to the hostage. That’s no longer an option once the hostage is taken. So you have to ask yourself is the dead hostage is really the best possible outcome. And remember, when there’s a dead hostage, there might be a lot of people applauding you for standing tough. But there are also going to be a lot of people mad at you for letting the hostage get killed.

Now, I will grant you that I am not an expert on hostage negotiations. But it seems to me like in a hostage situation, you often see the authorities take a two-pronged approach. Someone negotiates to try to keep the situation from getting out of hand, and in the hopes that the hostage-taker will change his mind and let the hostages go. Meanwhile, somebody else is getting into sniper position to try to take out the hostage-taker with minimum damage to the hostage, so that the hostage-taker no longer has the power to take hostages.

Now, if you take that part of the metaphor and reapply it back to the government, President Obama and Congressional Democrats are in the position of being the folks who negotiate to try stop the hostage from getting killed. So who’s the sniper? That would be the voters. Vote the Republicans out of power, the Republicans won’t be able to take any more hostages. One problem is, the voters won’t be able to take their shot for another 15 months. The other problem is, we can’t be sure that voters won’t decide they like the hostage drama after all. So I understand why some progressives don’t want to wait that long. I just hope they’re ready to deal with the consequences if negotiations stop.

One thing I’ve frequently wondered about is why poor and middle-class voters don’t use the power of their numbers to overcome the upper class’s power of money. Why wouldn’t the lower 80% of the wealth scale favor public officials and policies that would redistribute wealth from the top 20%? The recent showdown over the debt ceiling has been the most recent event to focus my thoughts on the question. President Obama and the Democratic Party have been pushing for a solution based on “shared sacrifice,” while the Republican Party has refused to consider plans that would require the public to make a greater contribution to paying for public services. A number of polls suggest that voters generally support the former position, but that polling support hasn’t translated to voters electing representatives who share that belief. Why doesn’t “shared sacrifice” create the same passion as “no new taxes?”

You could say that it’s because no one wants to pay more taxes, but I’m assuming here that if they wanted to, that bottom 80% could elect enough people to make sure that any tax changes would only affect the top 20 (or less). Whether it would be right or not, the majority should be able to soak the minority. So why don’t they?

I think that one reason is that the notion of shared sacrifice is a double-edged sword. Within domestic American politics, there’s a clear gap between haves and have-nots. There’s a gap between the wealthy and the rest of the population, and that gap is growing. But if you broaden out to a global perspective, suddenly many of the have-nots turn into haves. In the 1990s, the global poverty line was considered to be earning one American dollar a day. If you made $367 in a year, you were above the line. The World Bank seems to have updated the figure to $1.25, so let’s say that $500 would put you over these days. According to one report, someone in the bottom 5% of income-earners in America makes as much money as someone in the top 5% in India. This map from National Geographic shows how income is distributed around the world, and it should be pretty clear that a lot of that wealth is in America.

I think that, at a gut level, many Americans realize this. They understand why so many jobs are being outsourced overseas – there are so many people who are so much poorer than we are that it is almost inevitable that they will be able to offer their labor for lower wages. They understand why so many people try to make their way into this country – even a difficult life here can lead to a higher standard of living than it is possible to achieve in many other countries. So, if you agree with the notion that a majority of have-nots should redistribute wealth and income from a minority of haves in America, you will at least have acknowledge that a majority of have-nots around the world have a good case for redistributing wealth and income from the minority of global haves. And all of a sudden the American poor and middle class find themselves on the opposite side of the redistribution argument.

I honestly don’t know if there’s any way around this. I don’t know if there’s a way for this nation of 300 million to maintain its standard of living without subjecting billions of people around the world to lives of poverty and suffering. I hope there is, but I don’t know if we’re ready to face up to the question yet. People tend to be more passionate about protecting what they have than about gaining something in the future. If Matt Yglesias is right in this post about Globalization and the Progressive Dilemma, the Democratic Party is going to have a tough time generating support for any call for sacrifice in the future.

This is the sort of story that drives me a little bit crazy, because my natural impulse to believe that people have reasonable explanations for their decisions runs headlong into my inability to imagine what those reasonable explanations are.

Philadelphia has been running a program for years where if a school has a large population of poor children, the district won’t require the families to fill out paperwork to apply for free breakfasts or lunches – they’ll just provide the free meals to the entire school. The thinking is, you save time and administrative costs, you avoid kids falling through the cracks, and you don’t place the responsibility for kids being in the program on the kids or their parents. The program began as a pilot program 17 years ago, and last year the Bush Administration suggested that it was going to wind down the program. In the last few weeks, an Obama Administration official has suggested that they plan to continue the phaseout – leading, incidentally, to some botched communication about when it’s ending.

Now, in fairness, there is some disagreement in the article about the documentation for the program, but it seems to me that the major objection people are bringing up is that 17 years is too long for a pilot program, and other districts want to know why Philadelphia’s special and doesn’t have to do all this paperwork. These actually strike me as legitimate concerns. Now, what is the reasonable way to handle them? Well, if it were me, I’d say that you should expand this successful program and take it out of the pilot stage so that other cities get to enjoy the benefits. But apparently that’s not the way the Department of Agriculture rolls.

Now, besides the fact that having students be well-fed is kind of critical to their success, this is important to me on a larger scale. If you believe, like I do, that human beings are capable of coming together, looking at the world around them, learning new ways to interact with that world, and then putting that knowledge to use, this story is a shovel to the face. Because we carried out an experiment here, we got the data, and we’re refusing to implement the good idea that came as a result.

That’s not a good change, and that’s not pragmatism. But that’s a post for later.

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell proposed today that PA begin planning to consolidate school operations across the state, cutting the number of districts from 501 to somewhere near 100. The article’s well worth a read, since it also talks about school funding in the current economic climate. Obviously the devil will be in the details, but this sounds like it could be a very smart idea. I know “local control” is often touted as an absolutely essential component of education and other policies, but this is one case where I wish the “run it more like a business” advice would get followed – it’s a lot easier to make changes and get the most for the money when there’s not duplication of effort and numerous competing administrations creating inefficiencies. One thing I will want to see is how the target number was attained – too much consolidation could make districts a little too sprawling and hard to control. But here in the Northeast US, I definitely think we err too much on the side of numerous small municipalities and districts – I’ve read ridiculous stories from New Jersey, for example. So I’ll be interested in seeing if a governor with two years left in his term can get this done.

After the 2000 election, I was pretty strongly in favor of electronic voting. Of course, what I was in favor of was an idealized form of electronic voting, one that I would describe as “functional.” Instead we wound up with many instances of buggy, non-secure machines that sometimes failed to operate and often could not be verified. And I began to wonder what had ever possessed me to support the idea in the first place. The Minnesota Senate race has reminded me. For starters you have the problems with paper ballots and scanning machines where the machines don’t properly count some votes. Then you get the ambiguous ballots where you have to figure out voter intent from a bunch of markings that don’t quite follow the instructions. (And let me just say how much confidence these exercises give me in all the standardized tests I’ve had to take in my life.) And now on top of that we’re seeing the inevitable result of a process that depends on taking hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and moving them around: stuff gets lost. If I’m following the story correctly, one Minnesota precinct has lost an envelope containing over a hundred ballots, so those ballots can not be recounted and Norm Coleman’s campaign wants to prevent Minnesota from using the original count.

Now, given all the problems we’ve discovered with the actual implemented version of electronic as opposed to my idealized version, maybe we need to accept these drawbacks. Or maybe we should be looking for a way to combine electronic voting with paper documentation and backups to ensure that when we have an election, we can actually figure out who wins.

(Then again, if I’m truly honest, this Minnesota election looks like it’s so close that any human error might change the result. This seems to me like the kind of situation that calls for a run-off election. It might be failsafe you only have to use once in a lifetime, but boy wouldn’t it come in handy once you do need it?)

This post is a short thought that I’ve been trying to develop into a larger one for a while, but I was finally moved to just start typing based on a couple of things I saw the other day. One was a Daily News column questioning the amount of money that Philadelphia spends on overtime pay for police officers who are summoned to court to testify on days off or when they are working nights. The other was the number of Eagles stickers I saw on cars while walking home. Bear with me a minute.

It has long seemed to me that we underpay police officers, firefighters, and combat troops. There are ethical and practical reasons for this. On the one hand, you are asking people to possibly run into a burning building or get shot or otherwise put themselves in harm way to protect you. It is all well and good to say “Thank you, we value and honor your service and your sacrifice,” but when it comes time to put our money where our mouth is, as a society I think we collectively fall down. And from a practical standpoint, if people feel underpaid and underappreciated, that does bad things to morale and effectiveness and makes it harder to attract people who can do the job exceptionally well.

And as a point in comparison I often ask myself why someone can get paid $10 million to play first base when that job is so much less essential to our well-being. (If we had no professional sports teams, we could still have viable public safety units like the police and fire departments. If we had no police and fire departments, I doubt we’d be able to support professional sports teams for very long.) And the answer is that the sports team has the $10 million to give to the first baseman but the city or the federal government don’t have the money to give to police and firefighters and soldiers. (I grant you there are many more police officers than first basemen, but I’m not saying every officer needs $10 million either.)

But it’s not just that we are more willing to buy tickets to games than we are to pay the taxes that would fund higher salaries. Sports teams and entertainers get big bucks from the merchandise we buy to show our support, like those car decals or the Phillies t-shirts I buy or the half dozen movie posters behind me right now. I don’t have any police officer action figures or firefighter T-shirts. And maybe I should. I mean, I’m totally willing to buy into the pro-sports-as-city-unifier thing. I loved all the red T-shirts I saw as the Phillies won the World Series. I still smile when I see ’em. But let’s get real – those teams are full of part-time residents who represent our city for a while and them move on elsewhere. Police officers and firefighters (and other municipal employees whose job descriptions don’t involve lethal danger) are the city – they don’t just represent us, they make our existence as a city possible. Likewise with soldiers and other federal employees making our existence as a nation possible. And I can’t help but wonder why I don’t get the same thrill of showing loyalty and support to them as I do to a baseball team.

Following up a little bit on the thought from my Letter to the Editor:

I am well aware of the fact that Bill Clinton and many of his financial advisers went along with the deregulation push, and I don’t absolve them of that. I do think that the overall Clinton economic record of rising income and declining inequality is a goal worth re-attaining, but it sure does look like revising and re-instituting some regulation and oversight of the financial industry is gong to be vital. This is especially true since it seems to me like finance and investment is very dependent on belief creating reality – there has to be something to keep everyone’s faith intact.

In that light, I’m heartened to see that it looks like NY Times writer Paul Krugman believes that Senator Chris Dodd’s proposal has some real teeth in it to make corporate behavior more accountable to the country at large. I’ve already called one senator’s office to voice my support – although the staffer I spoke to seemed pretty disinterested; I’ll probably follow up with an e-mail after the hearings close today.