Over the past few days there were a few things I wanted to comment on, but I wanted to stay happy over the holiday weekend.
Cultural Change
Frequently one gets the sense that culture is changing, but it is hard to prove this point. Therefore, it’s always helpful to know if someone else also sees what you see. I nearly ignored Bob Herbert’s column because Michael Jackson was in the title.
I’ve always thought of W. as our first post-modern president. However, Herbert sees the traces of this starting much earlier.
In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. We let New Orleans drown.
This increasing disconnect has consequences.
Krugman Doesn’t Know
Well, it seems that I don’t need to feel lonely about a couple of other points. The other day, Krugman asked a question that I’ve wondered many, many times about prominent intellectuals of the conservative persuasion. The most recent prompt for this question was the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.
I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth — one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.
The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?
In addition, I would like to add that many of them must want what they believe is good for the country and the world. That a poor, little pleb like me wouldn’t have a clue about what they really think doesn’t surprise me, but I thought someone like Krugman would be less puzzled by it.
Though I just had a discomfitting thought; maybe there is nothing behind it.
I Hope They’re Happy
A headline on MSNBC.com caught my eye: “Car Guys retrain but downshift to lower pay” . It reminded me that just a few short months ago our congress was upset and outraged over the high pay and gold plated health insurance of the auto workers. The article describes how the former auto workers are taking classes to get new jobs that pay significantly less and have fewer benefits. Some adults have even had to move back in with their parents. So our elected representatives can rest easy.
My store of received wisdom contains a nugget which associates the auto workers with Reagan Democrats and Rust Belt Republicans. If that’s right, apparently the result of eating prolefeed is living in your parent’s basement when you turn forty.
Much Maligned Malthus
Krugman has a couple of recent blog posts about Malthus. Unless I’m missing something, he doesn’t seem to be saying anything I haven’t heard before: “And here’s the sense in which Malthus was right: he had a fundamentally valid model of the pre-Industrial Revolution economy, which was one in which technological progress translated into more people, not higher living standards. This homeostasis only broke down when very rapid technological change finally outstripped population pressure for an extended period.” However, Krugman’s conclusion, although by no means unique, is worth highlighting, “Technological takeoff was the product of a newly inquisitive, empirically-minded, scientific culture — the kind of culture that could produce people like Malthus.” This is exactly why I can’t stand people who, for ideological or religious reasons, refuse to confront the cold, hard facts.
Tipping Points
Speaking of cold, hard facts, you’ve probably heard about tipping points a lot within the past few years due to that book buy Malcolm Gladwell. According to Mark Thoma:
Its original application was to racial segregation. Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling developed a beautifully simple model for this. Suppose that whites have different degrees of racism – some would “tolerate” higher shares of nonwhites than others. Schelling showed that the less racist whites would still wind up exiting during tipping because of a chain reaction. At first only the most extreme racist whites exit. But their departure causes the white share to go down, making the second most extreme racist whites uncomfortable, so they also exit. The white share goes down some more, and so now even less racist whites will be uncomfortable being a white minority, and they will wind up exiting too. So the remarkable prediction of the tipping point model is that just a little bit of integration that directly bothered only the most racist whites wound up causing ALL of the whites to exit.
I’ve taken this for granted since I first heard about it, despite going to high school in a stable, integrated community. Well, here’s the fun part:
The tipping point stories are fascinating, but do we observe them in the real world? I got intrigued with this question a while ago, and eventually published a paper testing the predictions of the tipping point story. . . for its original application: racial segregation of US neighborhoods. . . The basic prediction is that mixed neighborhoods are unstable but segregated neighborhoods are stable. Data on American neighborhoods from 1970 to 2000 rejected these predictions – it was the segregated neighborhoods that were unstable.
We need models, ideas and abstractions to understand the world, but we must not fall so in love with these ideas that we can’t change or abandon them when stubborn facts contradict them. If we don’t, reality will certainly bite us.
