The deeper I get into Moral Man and Immoral Society, the more I realize that Reinhold Niebuhr was tremendously prescient. Or, perhaps, the world just hasn’t changed in the 70 years since he wrote the book.
For example:
“Thus, for instance, a laissez faire economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant believe that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political restraints upon economic activity. The history of the past hundred years is a refutation of the theory….The men in power in modern industry would not, of course, capitulate simply because the social philosophy by which they justify their policies had been discredited. “
And yet, since the Reagan presidency, we have seen nothing but deregulation and an emphasis on laissez faire economics. And even after the meltdown of the past two years, the Right is clinging more than ever to its free market mantra, following the siren song of Ayn Rand, letting the Howard Roarks of the world build their luxury highrises while the city crumbles around them (that was buildings as metaphors and as concrete examples (and THAT was using a word which is a component of buildings also as a descriptive (Thoughtbasket has layers, baby))).
Just yesterday the NY Times reported on how Congress is gutting the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, removing the post-Enron regulations that were meant to prevent corporate chicanery, succumbing to corporate and banking lobbyists at the expense of small investors. Were Niebuhr alive he would be knowingly, and sadly, shaking his head.
Categories: Business · Philosophy · Politics
Tagged: Business, economics, free market, Philosophy, Politics, regulation, reinhold niebuhr
If I am going to blog about anything as controversial as gay marriage, I should state at the outset that I fully support the right of gays to marry. Two people in love should be able to marry. Period. The claim that gay marriage will weaken traditional marriage is, in my opinion, ridiculous. Here in California, I have voted for gay marriage every time it has been on the ballot (which may only be one time…I can’t really remember) and will continue to do so.
Yet while I completely share the goals of the gay marriage movement, I am going to recommend a change in tactics: stop pushing on marriage, at least for a while, and focus on strengthening civil unions. I say this in the wake of Maine – flinty, individualist Maine, state motto: “I lead” – voting against gay marriage. As we have seen in state vote after state vote (including super liberal California), the populace of this country is simply not ready to support gay marriage. Gay marriage laws have been put to the vote in 31 states and have lost every time. As the graph below shows, this is changing, and over time will continue to change, but for now, gay marriage is a losing vote.
Gay marriage attitudes over time
While some might argue for continuing to push ballot initiatives until they win, I posit that strategy is counter-productive, because it riles up the opposition. As the NY Times reported, Maine’s vote attracted all kinds of outside money and support, including from the National Organization for Marriage and the Catholic Church. Civil unions, on the other hand, do not attract that kind of organized opposition. Marriage itself is the bright line that conservatives clearly intend to hold. The more we push gay marriage initiatives, the longer it will be until they pass, because we will continue to inspire the opposition.
Civil unions are clearly not as good as marriages. They don’t address federal laws like taxation and social security. But they do, or can, address many important issues: health care decisions, wills, community property, adoption, etc. And they can be made stronger because, as noted above, they attract less conservative opposition. So my argument is to spend the next few years focused on passing and strengthening civil unions, state by state, and wait for the citizenry of the country to catch up. As the graph below shows, they ARE catching up. As older people die and kids (who are used to seeing things like Eric come out of the closet on Gossip Girl) become eligible to vote, the tide will turn and gay marriage initiatives will be able to pass.
Attitudes toward gay marriage by age
I recognize that this is all easy for me to say as a straight man. I don’t have to settle for the inferior civil union, nor do I have to live every day feeling like my society is not treating me fairly. While I can imagine that feeling, I can never completely understand it, since I can’t live it. I readily concede that saying that we should delay fairness is awful. So when gays say that they have to fight for their civil rights now, I get it, and I don’t mean this post to argue against it. This post is purely about tactics, and about what I think is the quickest way to achieve the gay marriage goal.
Categories: Politics · Pop culture · Trends
Tagged: culture, gay marriage, love, maine, Politics, Trends
A mere 15 years after buying it, I am finally getting around to reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. Thoughtbasket readers will probably see numerous posts inspired by this book, likely spanning months, since that is how long it will take me to finish it based on my current reading pace.
The basic premise of the book is that while people, as individuals, are generally pretty moral, once they group together – as tribes, countries, companies, trade organizations – they often act in immoral ways. How Niebuhr bridges this dichotomy will require me reading beyond page 25, which is where I am now.
But in setting up the dichotomy Niebuhr discussed the forces that push man into society and ways that society enforces mores and rules. Writing in 1932, he says this:
“With the increased centralization of economic power in the period of modern industrialism, this development merely means that society as such does not control economic power as much as social well-being requires; and that the economic, rather than the political and military, power has become the significant coercive force of modern society.”
I don’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed that the economic elite have controlled our society for at least 75 years.
As the government throws trillions of dollars at Wall Street, with Goldman alumni seemingly running the Treasury department, and bankers using taxpayer dollars to pay themselves multimillion dollar bonuses (why isn’t that bonii?), it really seems like Simon Johnson is right and the financiers have taken over government via a quiet coup. But according to Niebuhr they took over government long ago, and while they have certainly managed to pillage the common man in the intervening years, the reality is that standards of living have increased since the 1930’s, so perhaps economic coercion isn’t that bad. That’s the relieved side of my brain.
The disturbed side of my brain, on the other hand, focuses on the pillaging. Note that in the above graph, standards of living have improved dramatically at the top end, but not so much at the bottom end. Not surprisingly, those who hold economic power ensure that society is set up such that most of the proceeds of growth accrue to them. Or, as Niebuhr puts it, “the dominant class….always paying itself inordinate rewards for its labors.” I wonder when and how we went from being a democracy deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed,” to a society in which economic entities are dominant.
Should we blame greedy businessmen and craven politicians? Of course. But we need to look in a mirror too. Gary Cross discussed at length in An All-Consuming Century the trade-offs that labor organizations consciously made to ensure steady employment at a stable wage. Many of these trade-offs transferred power from unionized masses to the corporate elite. And as I’ve noted before, we all need to be more active and informed voters; when our representatives are more beholden to corporations than to people, we need to vote them out.
Categories: Business · Politics
Tagged: Business, corporate power, economics, income distribution, lobbyists, morals, Politics, reinhold niebuhr, Religion
Apparently there is an ongoing debate in ophthalmological circles about using Lucentis or Avastin to treat macular degeneration. These are two closely related drugs, both made by Genentech from the same molecule. Avastin has been approved for treating various cancers, but ophthalmologists have evidently been using it off-label for a while to treat macular degeneration. This off-label use is one of the reasons Genentech produced Lucentis, which has been approved for macular degeneration.
Why is this relevant to health care reform? Because Lucentis costs thousands of dollars per dose while Avastin costs less than one hundred dollars. Even worse, as I was told by an ophthalmologist over the weekend, insurance policies keep even those doctors who are worried about costs from using Avastin. Doctors pay $50 for a dose of the drug, but only get reimbursed $7, so they are losing $43 per treatment. If they use Lucentis, they get full reimbursement. One might argue (in fact, I probably would) that the ophthalmologists are making so much charging for the treatment that they should eat the $40 loss, but I doubt many of the doctors will listen.
I know that there are many complexities here: you can’t expect insurance companies to fund the use of unapproved drugs, and you want a drug approval system that errs on the side of safety, and there hasn’t been a head-to-head trial to see if Avastin is fully equivalent to Lucentis. But surely there is a middle ground, where drugs are sufficiently vetted yet we are not incenting doctors to prescribe thousand dollar drugs instead of fifty dollar drugs.
Categories: Business · Politics
Tagged: Business, drugs, economics, health care, insurance, Politics
I recently posted about how corporate lobbyists stymied consumer protection reform in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Now here is a quote from Baron Arthur Salter’s book Recovery, from 1932:
“Government is failing above all because it has become enmeshed in the task of giving discretionary, particular preferential, privileges to competitive industry.”
Ugh. Will the system ever be as responsive to individuals as it is to corporate interests?
Categories: Business · Politics
Tagged: Business, corporate power, economics, lobbyists, Politics
I recently finished reading a great book called An All-Consuming Century by Gary Cross, a professor of history at Penn State. In this book Professor Cross traces the history of American consumerism in the 20th century, exploring the various roles of consumers, marketers, politicians and temperance movements, and teasing out theories of why America is so much more consumery (my word, not his) than other countries.
There is too much in his book to summarize, and I’d prefer that you buy it anyway, because it’s a great book. It’s currently number 330,562 on Amazon and I’m sure that we can get it up in the two hundred thousands. Suffice it to say that in a society founded on egalitarianism, consumption can be a method of both differentiation and assimilation.
One of the side themes that emerges from Cross’ book, and the one this blog entry is actually about, is the role that corporate lobbying has historically played in keeping consumption up. At a time when the role and power of Wall Street and insurance company lobbying are being much discussed, it seems appropriate to note that it’s nothing new for big business to use its money and lobbying clout to push around the little guy.
In particular, Cross discusses how after a rush of consumer rights legislation in the 1960’s (Hazardous Substance Labeling Act, Child Protection Act, Clean Air Act, etc.), corporations figured out how to lobby in order to limit the scope of those laws. “By 1976, they had begun to learn how to lobby a more decentralized Congress and to use Public Action Committee funds and grassroots pressure groups to regain dominance.” (p. 158) Moreover, as Cross makes clear, the deregulation that marked the Reagan era was the nexus of laissez faire ideologues and corporate lobbying, and it encouraged consumption by limiting constraints on corporate marketing and product safety as well as environmental impact. Cross: “…deregulators were not friends of the average consumer, for they allowed higher bank fees, cable TV rates, insurance premiums, and child care and health costs.” (p. 205)
The fact that corporate lobbyists have been harming our hypothetical little guy for decades doesn’t make it right. I’m sure that the moneyed and powerful have been pushing their interests for longer than that. But in a US congressional system that has become so driven by the need to raise vast sums of money, the power of lobbyists is greater than ever. Solutions? Campaign finance reform and term limits are both possible answers. But the strongest answer is for voters to be aware of what their representatives are doing and act accordingly. Hey Montanans: if you don’t like that Senator Baucus took millions from the insurance industry while writing the health care reform law, then vote him out. We the people have a fair amount of power, but we have to work to exercise it.
Categories: Business · Politics
Tagged: Business, congress, consumerism, health care, lobbyists, marketing, max baucus, penn state
I’m not here to criticize Nicholas Kristof; not only have I linked to him before, but he is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a Rhodes Scholar. But his most recent column says exactly what I’ve been saying recently.
First he says that “universal health care is not an economic or technical question but a moral one.” That is precisely what I said in this post. Then he quotes the new study showing 45,000 annual deaths from lack of insurance. Just as I did in this post. Then he closes by calling America a “great nation,” which is pretty similar to my phrasing: “the greatest…country.”
I’m not saying that Kristof is plagiarizing me. Let’s be honest: I’d be freaking psyched if a NY Times columnist stole my words. I’m just saying that if you want to know what the Times is going to say a fortnight hence, read Thoughtbasket now.
Categories: Politics · Pop culture
Tagged: health care, health care reform, insurance, morality, morals, nicholas kristof, ny times, Politics, rhodes scholar
Back in February the New Yorker wrote an article about how Florida was sort of the epicenter of the real estate madness, full of frauds and crooks, and that the entire state was essentially a giant ponzi scheme. The story mentioned one man in particular, Sonny Kim, who sold 90 properties, netting $4 million. Here is a link to a story in the local paper about Mr. Kim. The buyers were mostly in on the scam, putting no money down, getting liar loan mortgages from foolish loan officers, and then walking away, sticking the bank (meaning the taxpayers) with the house while Mr. Kim kept his proceeds.
Here is how it works: “A common scam works like this: Someone with cash buys a crummy house cheap. A mortgage broker signs on and finds an appraiser to inflate the value. The broker shops the loan application, with false data about the borrower and the house. Bank loan officers approve it.”
Sonny Kim bought one house for $100, and three months later “flipped it for the sum of three hundred thousand dollars, with the help of a no-money-down mortgage from a subsidiary of Washington Mutual Bank, which later foreclosed on the house.”
I saved the article, so that I could go back to it later and see what happened to these folks. According to the St. Petersburg Times, which broke the story, nothing has happened. Sonny Kim hasn’t been charged with any crime. The title agent who managed a third of Kim’s deal, and was arrested on other fraud charges, hasn’t been charged for these deals. Nobody at WAMU is in jail. So all the people who made money on these fraudulent deals are sitting pretty, spending their money on mojitos, while the taxpayers are footing the bill for the bailout. That seems wrong somehow.
In fact, here is a quote from another house flipper, who started his real estate career while on probation from a cocaine conviction: “I drive a Hummer and own a 1970 vintage Oldsmobile 442. I always wanted diamonds and now I own them legally and no one can take them away.”
Categories: Business
Tagged: Business, financial meltdown, florida, justice, Politics, real estate
Here is a link to a new study which estimates that 44,789 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. This is the study that Rep. Alan Grayson referenced when he faux-apologized for mocking the Republicans’ lack of a health plan.
This is a purely statistical study, and I am totally unqualified to assess its methodology. However, it is being published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, and was written by fancy-pants researchers at Harvard Medical School, so it’s probably a pretty decent piece of work.
Categories: Politics
Tagged: alan grayson, death, health care, Politics, republicans
On Making People Happy
October 21, 2009 · 4 Comments
A friend recently used the old line that “you can’t make others happy unless you’re happy yourself.” I disagree, and I told my friend so. As I recall, my exact words were “That’s ridiculous. I have a Ph.D. in making other people happy.”
I don’t really have a Ph.D. at all, in making people happy or any other subject, but I do like to make the people around me happy, and here are three techniques I sometimes use:
There you have it. A graduate degree in making people happy, in three easy steps.
→ 4 CommentsCategories: Philosophy
Tagged: commentary, friendship, happiness, relationships