Blocking Keystone Turns Out to Be a Win for Railroads

Robert Bryce dissects the recent protests and arrests in Washington D.C. over the Keystone Pipeline Project. Blocking the oil pipeline from Canada to the US hardly slows the flow of oil. Instead, oil traffic via rail has exploded over the past two years, and Canada is swiftly building  terminals for shipping their oil around the world, including to our Gulf Coast refineries, via oil tanker. 

While opponents of the pipeline have been rallying their supporters, U.S. and Canadian railroads have been hauling record amounts of oil. Last year, the volume of oil delivered by rail in the United States jumped by about 46 percent compared with 2011. According to the Association of American Railroads, oil-related rail traffic increased in Canada by 30 percent. In December, U.S. and Canadian railroads were hauling about 1.9 million barrels of oil and refined products per day, double the volume moved in 2009. Of that total, about 1 million barrels per day is being railed in the United States.

The Keystone XL is designed to transport 830,000 barrels per day. Over the past two years or so, domestic railroads have increased their transport capacity by an amount equal to about 55 percent of what Keystone is supposed to provide.

And that gap between potential Keystone capacity and rail transport will surely close in short order. So the question is not so much, “Should we allow more Canadian oil to flow to the US by building a pipeline?” but rather “What is the most efficient and environmentally friendly way to get it here?” Because it’s coming, and if not here, where environmental controls are in place, then to places in the world that care much less about damaging the environment.

The Rise of the Robots

Here’s a counterpoint to my previous post. We hear much about growing income equality, but generally in terms of greed and class warfare. We also hear much about the decline of manufacturing jobs in the US, but we rarely hear that our manufacturing output is actually increasing. What’s happening is that machines, including robots, are displacing human labor.

Christopher Mims has chronicled this process of displacement by machines in 

How robots are eating the last of America’s—and the world’s—traditional manufacturing jobs.

He describes the emergence of a new robot called Baxter that quickly learns to do simple tasks and costs only $22,000. Mims quotes Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business, who worries about the effect of increasing reliance of technology on the increasing income disparity that is emerging worldwide:

“As an economist, it’s not a bad thing when we get more stuff for less work,” says Brynjolfsson. “That’s what the system is designed to do. The issue is, can we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with this change so not all of the benefits accrue to a very small slice of people?”

Here’s an example of displacement of human labor by technology that everyone over the age of about 15 can remember. When we moved to our small town eleven years ago, there existed about 6 video rental stores. Each of these stores employed several people. I have no statistics, but let’s suppose the number was about 8 per store. That’s 48 jobs. 

None of these video stores remain. What happened? Principally, Netflix. Netflix exploited a number of weaknesses of the bricks-and-mortar approach to video distribution. First, they eliminated the need for travel entirely. Renting a video from a store required a trip there to pick it out (and usually not with the opportunity to browse availability online beforehand), and a trip to return it. Netflix disassociated travel from video rental.

Second, that return trip generated a great deal of revenue for the video stores due to late fees. I hated, loathed, and despised late fees. They often more than doubled the price. Netflix ingeniously exchanged this for a subscription. I could keep the video as long as I wanted. There was still a penalty; I couldn’t get the next video until I returned the one I had, and I still had to pay the subscription fee. But because the subscription happened automatically (i.e., by software robots rather than by an attendant swiping my card or my cash), it was less painful.

Not only did Netflix somehow figure out how to get the post office to deliver movies on time, they eventually eliminated the need for any wait at all for large swaths of their content via online streaming.

I got convenience and easy access to the world of fine video content, but it was at the cost of roughly forty-eight jobs locally, a number that must be astronomical when multiplied to every city and community across the country. We’ve seen this happen in many other retail fields; think Amazon.

What to do about this? All the cries about the evil one percent are doing nothing to slow the process. In fact, I don’t want to slow the process of technological innovation. But I also don’t want to see millions, perhaps billions of people robbed of the opportunity to do meaningful work, to be productive. I’m skeptical of governments’ redistributive policies. The benefits of these policies accrue mostly to government — the hiring of bureaucrats searching for ever-more-intrusive ways to restrict human liberty. Nor do direct payments to individuals lift them out of poverty, and certainly do not provide them with productive work, in most cases. Instead, they promote the development of generations of free riders. I’d like to believe that Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek vision of a future in which technology meets the basic needs of all people displaces the need for money, and people are free to pursue their interests. I can’t, however, see the pathway that gets us there.

The EBT Blues

Today on the way home from work I stopped by the local market to pick up a bottle of wine to share with my honey for a quiet Valentine’s Day evening. The fellow running the cash register was a newbie, and not a particularly young one. In front of me was a young mother wearing frayed sweats and flip-flops, with a toddler in a stroller. She was buying a pile of Valentine’s Day candy and cookies. Because the register screen faces the customer, I could see that her bill was $21. As I was pulling out my debit card, I heard the cashier say, “It says insufficient funds.” I glanced again at the screen: It said EBT card, foodstamps balance $9.20.

The customer began returning the couple of bags she had already stuffed into the stroller, and the cashier called for help. His trainer came and asked the lady, “Do you have cash to pay the balance?”

“No,” she replied, “just what’s on the card. My husband…” and her voice trailed away.

She returned most of her items, keeping just a couple packages of candy. The cashier, with the help of his trainer, cancelled the original transaction, and rang up the $2.58 for the remaining items, leaving a small balance on the EBT. When my turn came, the cashier apologized for the delay. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “It just makes me angry with the government. People have no idea that they’re being locked into poverty when they sign up for these programs.” The cashier, rightly, didn’t comment, efficiently processed my debit card, and I was on my way.

This got me to thinking about similar encounters I’ve had recently right here in town, some at the same store. A few weeks ago a couple, perhaps in their thirties, were trying to purchase a large can of beer. They apparently didn’t have an EBT, or it was already out of funds, because they were laboriously counting out coins. It took them an eternity to figure out how to make their pile of coins match the price on the screen.

A bit longer ago I was on my way into a take-and-bake pizza store. A disheveled woman, again thirty-ish, I suppose, placed herself between me and the door, and offered to use her EBT card to buy my pizza, if only I would give her cash. She was willing to take less cash than would have been drawn from her card. I rather huffily said “No.” Later I realized that this was a woman who needed rescuing, but that I didn’t know from what or how.

I sometimes get into arguments about these issues on Facebook. It’s a fascinating fact that the most vehement protestations come from people I don’t know… our only contact is a discussion on the timeline of a mutual friend. This one fellow was saying that it is always wrong to blame the poor, that the poor are always justified in receiving government benefits, and that it is cruel to suggest otherwise. The only problem is that we are too stingy with our benefits. We should guarantee everyone everything they need. Not surprisingly, this fellow never directly responded to any of my points or questions of him. He would just move on to the next talking point. But I wonder about such people. How is it that they don’t see what I see?

There was the couple I saw a few weeks ago in a local store. The woman had the EBT card. She paid for their stack of stuff until the card was depleted. Then he pulled out a wad of cash and paid the balance. She looked to me like she had never held a job. He looked like he had just gotten off work. I wondered whether they were married. I doubt it.

Just a couple weeks ago I learned that a girl I know was told by her mother that because the girl has turned 18 she will have to move out. This is because whatever government benefit the mother was receiving by virtue of raising her own daughter in her home expired when the girl turned 18. She hasn’t even graduated from high school. The girl approached a mutual friend, asking if she could move in, because if she could find a place to stay she could qualify for food stamps. The mutual friend, who has a good job, as does her husband, said, “No way!”

Though I know that this is a true story, I am still astonished. This is all your children mean to you, an opportunity to increase your welfare check? Really? When the money dries up you’re out of here? And you’ve trained your daughter that the way to survive in life is to leech off of other people?

One more story. A person I have known all my life has a mental illness. It is all the rage today to claim that the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has been disastrous. I’m here to tell you that the institutionalization of this person was disastrous. It absolutely sapped him of all sense of initiative. He came out much more disabled than when he went in. In his thirties he mustered the will and stamina to earn a bachelor’s degree. But that’s where his initiative and determination stopped. As far as I know he has never applied for a job. He got himself on Social Security disability, and is now approaching his seventies with a total income, provided by Uncle Sam, of $640 per month. He once said to me, “The last concern of the welfare system is customer service.”

This fellow has been locked into poverty his entire life. The government determines his standard of living. The government determines the nature and quality of his health care. He, and tens of millions of Americans like him, are locked into poverty by the very government benefits that purport to save him. He lives by very severe rules. He is not permitted to accumulate more than $2000 in financial assets. He is not permitted to supplement his government payments in any meaningful way. Even family members and friends cannot help pay for his rent or food, lest he lose his “benefits.”

Back now to tonight’s encounter with the EBT blues. I know nothing of this young lady’s history, or even of her present circumstances. All I know is that she has a child, some relationship with a man, and a tapped-out EBT card. I hope that tonight’s experience embarrassed her. I hope this for her sake, because she faces a crossroads. She can continue to submit herself to the government welfare grind, or she can cast it aside and become an independent, and possibly prosperous person. The first path guarantees that she will have some sort of roof over her head and money to spend on Valentine’s Day candy. It also guarantees that she will never own her own home, will never fulfill her potential as a human being, and will remain in the throes of poverty her entire life. This guarantee is good until the Congress decides it isn’t, or until the economy collapses, or both.

The other path does not carry this guarantee. It carries risk. She might find herself without income for a time. There is a possibility that she and her children could become homeless. A lot here depends on her ability to network, what is the nature and extent of her family, what communities she is connected to, etc. Still, the upside of NOT allowing herself to become permanently welfare-dependent is astronomical by comparison. She could discover the enormous psychological benefits of fending for herself, of making her own way in the world. She could discover her life’s vocation and do it. She could live free from all the rules and bureaucrats that now rule every corner of her existence. She could make a LOT of money. She could volunteer at the local food bank, and mutter, “There but for the grace of God go I.” And she could live free of the embarrassment of stopping a grocery line because her government dole had run out.

Benevolent Selfishness, or Why We Bought a New Car

My wife and I bought a new car. It’s the third new vehicle we have bought in our 31-year marriage, preceded by a 1991 Dodge van and a 2004 Dodge pickup. We still have the pickup. The latest addition is a 2013 Subaru.

I won’t go into the four-hour hell of actually purchasing the car, except to reiterate that it was four hours of hell. But apart from that, the purchase of a new car threw turmoil into my convictions.

First, we had decided awhile back that we were never going to take out a loan again for anything other than investment real estate (which so far has not happened). But we had decided to send our 2005 Prius with our daughter to college in the fall of 2013. (There are a number of sound reasons for this decision, which I won’t go into here.) We were not going to have the amount saved for the car we wanted by this fall. Plus, the dealer offered a 1.9% interest rate, lower than any of the financial institutions with which we do business. So we took out the loan.

Then there is the new-vs.-used decision. I’m aware that a new car loses a significant amount of value when it’s driven off the lot. The pundits of thrift advise that we let others absorb that depreciation, and go instead for the used car. This has worked well for us in the past. Still, there are nagging thoughts. How is there ever going to be a supply of used cars if no one ever buys new cars? Is it possible to know with any certainty how a used car was driven or maintained? (No.) What is the relative value of the longer time that we will drive a new car under warranty as opposed to a used car with little or no warranty? An important consideration was the steady improvement in fuel mileage year-over-year, as well as other incremental improvements.

The day after we bought the car, several of my Facebook friends posted quotes from people like Mother Theresa to the effect that we should always and only live for others, and that the life well-lived is one of self-sacrifice and giving. Of course, not one of them actually lives this way, but still: How did they know I had just bought a new car? Why were they hell-bent on making me feel guilty?

This conundrum returned me to an inner dialogue that I frequently suffer: What is the best way to help others? I was advised years ago by someone who ministers to the chronically homeless that the least effective way to help them is to give them cash. Surely they need to become self-sufficient, if this is at all possible. In other words, they need jobs. In our world, jobs, whether in the private or public sector, are created by the need for human productivity. At the base, someone  has to make something of value. The proceeds go to the worker, to the owners of capital, and to governments. We can argue until the next millennium whether the exact proportions of distribution are fair, but nonetheless productivity is the basis of employment.

Now I can either give money to a charitable institution or to government. Or I can use my money to buy stuff that I have persuaded myself that I need. When I give money to a charity, some of it gets skimmed off for administrative expenses, such as my pastor’s salary and the mortgage on the church building. Some of it will find its way to a person whom some earnest person has found deserving, who in turn will use it to buy stuff. By the way, the pastor will also buy stuff, and the mortgage institution will, I hope, lend some of the mortgage payment out to people who will buy stuff. Stuff is still bought, but in a diffuse and haphazard way.

If I donate to government, apart from certifying myself insane, I will be donating to an institution that engages in wars and in spying on its own citizens, making laws which are often irrational and counterproductive, and donating to people and causes that earnest people in government have found deserving. Eventually some of that money is used to buy stuff. It helps sustain government jobs, and government employees buy stuff. I get aggravation, the umbrella of military protection, and a society that is governed, however imperfectly, by law administered by generally reasonable people.

This is, apparently, the meaning of self-sacrifice: give your resources away so that others can buy stuff, or decide who is most worthy of buying stuff. And either don’t buy a car, or buy one that costs much less, i.e., an older used car.

But if I selfishly buy a new car for myself and my family, perhaps this is also helping others. It helps the manufacturer of the product, its employees, and the entire supply chain that goes into creating the product. It supports the dealership that has just put me through four hours of hell for the privilege. (No, I won’t fill out the survey that they pressured us to fill out with all tens while insisting that they weren’t pressuring us.) It supports my insurance company, its agents and employees. It supports jobs. These employees use some of their money to buy stuff. Some of the money goes to government. Some of it might even find its way to a charity. My purchase of a new car also eventually puts a well-maintained if not perfectly clean used car on the lot sometime down the line, so that someone of less means than I can get some further use and enjoyment out of it.

There was, ahem, another little conundrum. I had decided that I wanted to support one of the American car manufacturers, the one that didn’t want or receive any bailout money (although they benefitted from a supply chain that was almost certainly saved by bailout money). We looked at some of their vehicles. But there was a problem. My wife and I had two criteria (among others) that we wanted combined: a manual transmission and all-wheel drive. We wanted this combination in a sedan with decent fuel mileage. Unfortunately, my preferred manufacturer does not make such a car (as far as I could figure out), at least not in my price range. So we purchased a Subaru.

I love my country. Some of the proceeds of our purchase flowed toward people in the US. Some of it went to Japan, and some probably also to other countries. In all of these places jobs were supported, taxes were gleaned, governments supported. I love my country, but if my country doesn’t produce the product I want to buy for a price I am willing to pay, I will look elsewhere. It’s called the free market.

My admittedly self-serving conclusion: Although it may well be better to give than to receive, the purchase of a well-made product produces a lot of good in the world, helps a great many people, and supports governments, while also allowing us to enjoy some of the fruits of our labor. It’s not a zero-sum transaction.

Thoughts about Newtown

Two thoughts struck me today as the news remained saturated with speculation about how we might prevent ever having another mass killing again… more gun laws and regulation, better access to mental health care, armed guards in schools and shopping malls, less media and gaming violence. First, no one persuaded me that any of the measures being proposed could have stopped Adam Lanza. I suspect that those who interview these experts know this, because they never ask the obvious follow-up question: How would what you propose have stopped Adam Lanza?

Second was the thought that our desire to stop these disasters stems not only from our compassion for the victims. It is that we who have not been directly affected don’t want to have the news of these outbursts of the darkest side of our human nature interrupt our dreamlike faith in our own goodness. We know at some level that there is no way to stop some nut-case from going ballistic. Yet we want someone to do something to help us to feel better about ourselves: more access to mental health care, less access to guns. Thus we give up a little more freedom in order to keep the dream of our own goodness alive.

Bailout, Bankruptcy, and Cultural Revolution

Six weeks after the flailing labor movement helped Obama win a second term, the US Treasury has announced its intention to divest itself of General Motors shares. The Detroit News reports that if GM share prices remain constant at current levels, taxpayers will sustain a loss of about $13 billion.

I want to draw attention to two political details in the article. First, we all recall the derision Mitt Romney met for his advocacy of saving GM through the bankruptcy process. I recall Romney chiding Obama during one of the debates that bankruptcy is precisely the process the administration followed. David Shephardson, the author of the Detroit News piece, confirms Romney’s version of the administration’s GM bailout.

The Treasury initially owned nearly 61 percent of GM as part of the bailout as it swapped about $42 billion of the loans for stock in the reorganized company after it exited bankruptcy in July 2009.

The Obama administration forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy as a condition of getting additional government aid.

So yes, the Obama administration forced GM into bankruptcy, and yes, the way they did it ensured that taxpayers would foot the bill.

The second political peculiarity is in the choice of words GM CEO Dan Ackerson used to describe cultural changes necessary at GM in a 2011 Detroit News interview:

“Whoever comes after me; it’s going to be a more important appointment than mine because he or she will have to carry on a cultural revolution here. It’s just like the Communist Party in China in the 1960s, there has to be a cultural revolution here,” he said.

So GM henceforth must act “just like the Communist Party in China in the 1960s.” Here’s a little tidbit from Wikipedia on that lovely episode:

The most gruesome aspects of the [Cultural Revolution] campaign included numerous incidents of torture, murder, and public humiliation. Many people who were targets of ‘struggle’ could no longer bear the stress and committed suicide. In August and September 1966, there were 1,772 people murdered in Beijing alone. In Shanghai there were 704 suicides and 534 deaths related to the Cultural Revolution in September. In Wuhan there were 62 suicides and 32 murders during the same period

Torture, murder, public humiliation. suicide. Why, that’s an excellent business plan, don’t you think? I trust that Mr. Ackerson is simply displaying his total ignorance in this ill-chosen simile. Still, this is a chilling image coming from the government-chosen CEO of “Government Motors.”

Dr. No

It finally happened. A doctor told me to stop running.

I’ve been running for 37 years, since I slinked back into my parent’s home after three years as a nightclub musician. I don’t remember why I started; I just remember that I ran around the block and limped back wheezing. I kept at it, six blocks, eight, a half mile, a mile, two miles. Within a year I was running around the hills of Yakima, Washington.

Running is the perfect exercise for me. I’m built for it, small-framed. It doesn’t depend on a schedule or a building or a club membership or a partner/competitor. I just lace on my shoes and run. It gets me outside, and I go wherever I want, whenever I want.

I’ve run in a few races; the Tacoma Narrows; the San Francisco Bay to Breakers (where I finished in the top three percent); the Spokane Bloomsday. But running for me was never about competition. It was about exhilaration. I have never felt so well or so utterly alive as during and after a run. It has something to do with endorphins, the “runner’s high.” There is nothing that can lift me out of a black mood more reliably than a good run. Running keeps me fit, so I can help neighbors move and do whatever else I ask my body to do. It keeps my blood sugar, my blood pressure, and my weight down. At my last biometric screening, the nurse said, “You’re going to live forever!”

Lately I’ve been running trails near my house with my two dogs. I’ve lived in this little valley for more than a decade, and just this last summer I found another trail not a quarter mile from home. Sometimes I run through residential neighborhoods, sometimes through parks, sometimes along country roads.

A little over two years ago I started running in Vibram five-finger shoes, otherwise known as barefoot or minimal runners. I like running with these best of all. I can feel the road or the trail. The only problem is that my toes freeze when they get wet at temperatures below 50 degrees.

Sometime over the last decade, I can’t remember when exactly, my big toe on my right foot began to ache, just a little. I ignored it, and fiddled with my shoes, with over-the-counter orthotics. Running both seemed to aggravate and relieve it. It would ache at the beginning of my run, but feel great by the end. I figured life was a race to see how long I could keep running before my toe wore out. I never mentioned it to my physician; it seemed trivial, and I suspected that any physician who looked at it would tell me to stop running.

For a slightly longer period, I have also had toenail fungus. (I think I know where I picked it up, in a slimy steam room in Juneau, but that’s another story.) Two weeks ago I saw my GP for a physical. I mentioned my toenail fungus. The fungus has survived the standard medical procedure and everything else I could throw at it. The good doc referred me to a podiatrist I’d seen before.

The day before I saw the podiatrist, I ran about six miles in my “five fingers.” My feet were a little achey. The bad knuckle on my left big toe was swollen and the skin was red. Before treating my toenails with a nifty laser gun, he pointed at the swollen knuckle and said, “That’s arthritis. You should have that checked out.” Of course I knew it was arthritis already. My wife’s a nurse, and that makes me an expert. So I reluctantly made an appointment.

The nice young lady that took my vitals and x-rays was just getting over a bout with bronchitis. I used to get bronchitis before I started running. As she was crawling around on the floor positioning my feet for the x-rays, I pointed out to her, paraphrasing a famous book title, that everything she needed for life she learned in kindergarten. She laughed and coughed.

The good doctor, and he really is a very good doctor, solemnly pointed out the bone spurs, the misshapen bones, and the utter lack of cartilage in the joint. He said I should start with orthotics, that if that didn’t work it would be a clean-out operation, and if that didn’t work it would be a fusion operation. He also said I should stop running.

I died.

So what is the difference between my toe the day before and the day after the podiatrist examination? A diagnosis. I have believed for a very long time that far from promoting life and health, too often a diagnosis kills. One of my neighbors was struggling with a recurring sinus problem. He was getting polyps. The doctors would remove them, he’d feel better for awhile, but they’d come back. He called in about his next appointment and the scheduling person told him, “You don’t have to come in. You have cancer.” That night he dressed up, walked out into the woods behind his house, and shot himself to death. The diagnosis killed him.

A few years after I started running, I worked for a few days picking fruit in an orchard. My back started aching and spasming. I  saw a specialist, a very smart, older man who had worked at the Mayo clinic. After examining me, he said, “You know, we could spend thousands of dollars investigating whatever it is that is making your back ache, and we would wind up telling you you have a problem you have to live with. So why not just tell you that now? You have a problem you have to live with.” I liked that. I can live with a problem, I can do things about it. It is not a diagnosis. A diagnosis controls, limits, and restricts. It is subject to medication and surgery. Ick.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try out the orthotics. I’ll refrain from running through most of the winter. It’s too wet anyway, and I never run much in the winter here. I’ll buy an elliptical machine for cardio workouts. My wife wants one, and I’ll reluctantly use it, preferably during football games on TV. And I’ll let the doc examine the toe again in a few months. Then I’ll ask him to tell me how I can minimize damage to the toe when I resume running. After all, I have what, 20 years max left running? I don’t know any octogenarian runners. My toe will probably fall apart, but at least I’ll be happy.

A moral foundation?

I’ve just taken Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations survey. Haidt is an academic psychologist who, along with his colleagues, has come up with a schematic for how humans come to their moral positions. Briefly, there are six moral foundations:

1. Care/harm

2. Fairness/cheating

3. Liberty/oppression

4. Loyalty/betrayal

5. Authority/subversion

6. Sanctity/degradation

Haidt has recently written a book about this, The Righteous Mind. On the website for the book he writes a blog. In one of the blog posts he rebuffs a critic of the book, Chris Hedges, who, according to Haidt, unfairly characterized Haidt as personally believing the following statements:

People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.

Haidt protests, “I’ve never taken a journalism class, but I don’t think it was appropriate for Hedges to take that last sentence out of context and present it as though it was my personal belief.”

I got to thinking about this. I honestly can say that I cannot think of a single person, including Haidt, who does not believe this statement insofar as it concerns him/herself. Let’s consider Haidt: he has worked hard, earned a Ph.D., published books, and is becoming famous. I cannot believe that he rejects the proposition that he has worked hard and deserves to keep the fruits of his labors. Note that the proposition he putatively rejects does not include the word all as a modifier of “fruits.” Thus one can, for example, happily pay a portion of those “fruits” as taxes, and still keep [most of] the fruits of his/her labors.

Bear in mind that Haidt’s labors have brought him other “fruits” besides monetary remuneration. They have brought him a modicum of fame, a secure academic post and all the perks of power and privilege that accrues to such a post. Am I to believe that he does not believe that he deserves, by virtue of his labor, to keep these, that they might just as morally be commandeered by someone else?

How about the second half of the statement he professes not to believe: “People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.” Note that the sufferers here are not the unfortunate, the poor, the sick, the intellectually incapable, or anyone else but those who are “lazy and irresponsible.” Does Haidt perhaps believe that lazy and irresponsible persons should be awarded Ph.D.’s, academic tenure, and book contracts in the absence of hard work? Of course not. It is inconceivable that anyone should think so.

Haidt’s problem here is that he identifies himself as a liberal democrat, and in his book (which I have not yet read but intend to buy on Monday), he says he was trying to understand and articulate the values of Republican critics of his work, and so far as I can tell, in this instance he has correctly identified at least a portion of those values. But as a self-identified liberal democrat living and working among people of like mind, whom he is trying to teach how to defeat said Republicans in political debate, he cannot appear to identify with their values. so he rhetorically rejects them.

As is often the case in human discourse, I suspect that Haidt has not really articulated what he meant. I suspect that what he means to say is that he thinks Republicans imagine that anyone who is “suffering the consequences,” i.e., not successful in measurable ways, is “lazy and irresponsible.” Perhaps there are some Republicans who believe this, but I don’t personally know of any. But as I have said above, I also can’t think of anyone who doesn’t believe about him/herself that they have the right to keep the fruits of their own hard work and that they may very well rightly suffer consequences should they behave lazily and irresponsibly. I do know persons who, although they recognize their right to keep the fruits of their labors, nevertheless freely give them away. but that is an entirely different proposition.

A Girardian explanation of politics and business

This essay, based on notes from a lecture by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and now a hedge fund president and venture capitalist, uses Rene Girard’s mimetic theory to analyze the founding of businesses and nations. Inexplicably Girard is not mentioned. Among the many things Thiel explains is an answer to the question, why does the Occupy movement focus its wrath on the one percent? Why not the top five or ten percent? Why not the top .01 percent? The answer relates to the movement from monarchy to democracy: from a unitary leader, who is simultaneously very powerful and dangerous and at mortal risk through the mechanism of scapegoating, to the mob, who wants to depose him/her. According to Girard, cultures learned to avoid the war of all-against-all by focusing their wrath on a single victim, who was at once an extreme insider and an extreme outsider. This scapegoat was charged with sole responsibility for all of society’s problems, making him/her very dangerous. At the same time, his/her execution brought about temporary unity, for which the scapegoat could be recognized as having god-like powers. The monarchs were those who figured out how to postpone their own sacrifice and seize that god-like power.

The 99% vs. the 1% is the modern articulation of this classic scapegoating mechanism. It is all minus one versus the one. And it has to just be the one. 99.99 people or percent is too granular. Scapegoating 0.1 doesn’t really work. You need a whole person to play the victim. Similarly, 98-2 doesn’t quite have the same ring to it either.

This might also explain why the Occupy movement seems to have so much trouble gaining traction. The number of people in the unitary “one percent” is quite large and diverse, and includes many individuals against whom the activists are reluctant to focus their wrath, such as Warren Buffett, who accumulates for himself vast fortunes and power, while seeming to support some of Occupy’s positions. Buffett would seem to be an expert in evading the scapegoating process.

At any rate, this is an excellent primer on Girardian analysis and its implications for the modern world. Read the essay here.

 

Who should moderate political debates?

Had this thought while reading about Newt’s dust-up with a journalist during a debate: Why are all political debates moderated by journalists, and journalists alone? Journalists report and shape “the news”; why does this uniquely qualify them to moderate debates? I can think of much more interesting choices: a team of economists from academia and enterprise; a group of philosophers; representatives from various religious faiths and atheists; the heads of the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce; even the heads of various political parties. Journalists have had more than their chance; time to let people from other walks of life enter the debate.

Help me brainstorm about other points of view that might be invited to moderate political debates.