Sitting at the Front of the Bus

Posted on October 31, 2008 | 1 comment

No, sorry, this isn’t about Rosa Parks, nor is it a riff on the great Otis Redding song, although I listened to his greatest hits this morning. This post is about a far more quotidian subject, namely my daily commute.

Every day I take the express bus downtown to my office. Here in San Francisco, express buses are double-length, with some seats running along the walls and other seats perpendicular to the walls. The first several seats, 10 or so, are all along the walls, and they are all meant to be given up to elderly or handicapped passengers. In fact, a big blue sticker above these seats clearly states that:

Federal law mandates that the front seats of the bus be given up for seniors and persons with disabilities. Please do not sit in those seats if a senior or person with a disability needs a seat.

The express bus is a commuter bus, so there are almost never elderly or handicapped passengers. 99% of the passengers are healthy yuppies heading to work; therefore it would be silly to leave those front seats empty, waiting for some Nana who will never board the bus.

However, I find it interesting that it is nearly always women who sit in these seats. Men will move to the back, standing if the bus is full, rather than sitting in the front seats. Women, on the other hand, often don’t even look to the back; if the front seats are open, they plop their apple-shaped derrieres right down.

I’m not sure of the reason for this disparity, but let me throw out a few possibilities:

  • Women wear high heels and want to sit down as soon as possible
  • Men are afraid of breaking the rules
  • A man knows that if a senior actually boards, he will be expected to give up his seat before a woman, and he doesn’t want to hassle with the mid-ride change
  • Women internalize that one day they will be pregnant, and these seats thus will be reserved for them

Again, nobody is actually taking seats from seniors, so there is nothing wrong with sitting in these front seats, but I find the strong gender difference to be fascinating. Any suggestions?

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Religion and Violence

Posted on October 28, 2008 | 1 comment

I recently attended a lecture by James Carroll, writer of Constantine’s Sword and House of War, among other books. Carroll was ordained a Catholic priest, but left the priesthood to write, and has become critical of both religion and the military-industrial complex. He combined these issues in his lecture, which was generally about war, religion and violence.

I won’t try to summarize Carroll’s lecture, which was wide ranging and full of allusions, particularly with references to Civil War violence and its place in the American psyche, but I’ll try to reconstruct the thrust of his argument. Fundamentally, Carroll believes that religion promotes violence, partly through its inherent duality – non-believers are wrong – and partly through its emphasis on martyrdom. He posits that this religious conveyance of violence is demonstrated by what he calls “irrational escalation” of violence: when individuals or states keep attacking beyond a point where it makes any sense. The bombing campaigns of the late Vietnam War are an example for Carroll of violence which a participant – in this case the US – escalated past rationality. For Carroll, the irrationality of this violence is proof of its religious origin (I’ll ignore for the purposes of this post any counterarguments, such as the role of game theory in irrational violence).

Carroll then takes this concept of escalating violence and brings it forward into the nuclear age. For him, nuclear war is fundamentally different than conventional war. While the bombing of Vietnam generated horrific deaths, it didn’t actually threaten humankind. Nuclear war does. Thus Carroll states that irrational escalation of violence, which used to be just awful, is now unacceptable, because it could destroy the world. Add in the potential of non-state actors to acquire nuclear weapons or other WMDs, and Carroll sees that religion has a duty to actively renounce violence. There are interesting parallels here to Sam Harris’ arguments in The End of Faith.

Carroll’s talk was surprisingly moving, and he received a heartfelt ovation at the end. I think the emotionality was due not only to Carroll’s outstanding oratorical skills, but also to the tremendous import of what he was discussing. This was not your standard scholarly lecture on the nexus of religiosity and violence, but rather an impassioned call for organized religion to try to save the world. Carroll’s passion was contagious; he stood, utterly firm in his analysis and resultant convictions, and we were inspired to stand with him.

It is unclear to me whether Carroll would position himself as a fully Gandhi-style non-violenceinist (no, it’s not a word), but he is absolutely trying to move the world away from institutionalized violence, pushing religion to help with that movement. In face of a history of human savagery, Carroll still hopes to create change, viewing his hope as not a futile dream, but rather an essential political act. And for the 75 people who heard him speak, we were lucky enough to experience how we can be moved and inspired by a single man’s fierce hope.

Yet again, thanks to Septa for her input.

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End of the Tax Revolt?

Posted on October 23, 2008 | Leave a comment

Back in early 2007 Mark Schmitt wrote an interesting piece in Washington Monthly suggesting that America might be approaching a time when talking about tax hikes was not an automatic loser. He pointed out the financial crises that are likely to come if the government doesn’t increase revenues, and then discussed various ways that a bipartisan consensus could emerge. In the midst of the current financial crisis, with government spending suddenly increasing by a trillion dollars, Schmitt’s argument is even more powerful. Check it out here.

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In Defense of Elitism

Posted on October 22, 2008 | Leave a comment

The McCain-Palin campaign, and Republicans in general, keep attacking “elites.” What’s so terrible about being elite? When the US military has a difficult assignment, who does it send? Its elite commando teams, the SEALs and the Green Berets. If you want to win a gold medal, who do you send? An elite athlete like Michael Phelps. If you have a heart problem, what doctor do you want? An elite cardiologist.

For doing difficult things, we generally want the best prepared person we can get. After all, you wouldn’t get on an airplane piloted by someone who had barely gotten through flight school. But when it comes to the presidential election, the contest for possibly the hardest job in the world, suddenly the approach gets reversed. Advanced training and cerebral approaches are eschewed in favor of plain speakin’ and gut instinct.

I’m not saying you have to go to fancy schools in order to be a good president. George W. Bush went to two of the fanciest, and he’s pretty well cheesed things up. But neither should prestigious degrees or eloquent speech preclude one from being elected. There is nothing inherently bad about being elite, nor inherently good about being average. That being said, I don’t want Joe the Plumber running this country, although I want my president to remember who Joe the Plumber is. Or as Jon Meacham put it, “Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks?”

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Francis Fukayama Redeems Himself

Posted on October 20, 2008 | 1 comment

Francis Fukayama may have restored his reputation, at least with me, by writing an article in Newsweek recently in which he was actually right. Fukayama, a professor at Johns Hopkins, is probably best known for writing The End of History, in which he claims that liberal democracy has won and is dominant. He was also an early supporter of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, providing intellectual justification from a non-Pentagon neocon that was essential to selling the war.

But Fukayama was so wrong on both counts that I was beginning to think that maybe he taught at Johns Hopkins preschool rather than the University. His Newsweek article, however, is possibly the best summary I’ve seen of where the US has gone wrong over the past several decades. To summarize his summary: the Reagan revolution was about A) lower taxes and less government; and B) supporting liberal democracy worldwide. We’ve gone too far on A, as demonstrated by the current financial crisis, and we’ve ruined B by doing it at gunpoint rather than through persuasion. Rather than adding more commentary, I encourage you to read his article here.

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Seth Rogan and the Mortgage Crisis

Posted on October 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

Professor Gary Cross, of the University of Pennsylvania, has a new book out, called Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity. In it he traces concepts of adult masculinity from Victorian gentlemen to the man in the gray suit of the 1950’s through the deconstruction of tradition in the 1960’s counter culture and culminating in the modern boy-man, exemplified by the genial slackers portrayed by Seth Rogan in virtually every movie he has ever been in.

What does that have to do with the mortgage crisis? I place Professor Cross’ cogent analysis in a broader context of evading responsibility, which has become more and more the American paradigm during the period Dr. Cross analyzes. As men have transitioned from working downtown to getting stoned while they play video games…

….so too Americans have transformed themselves from a thrifty nation of hard workers into a society of debtors who leapt at the “free money” given them by cheap mortgages and (falsely) rising house prices.


Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

And while Mr. Rogan’s character in Knocked Up became responsible toward the end of the film, it took the crisis of Katherine Heigl’s pregnancy to force that maturation. In the same way, not until this year’s financial crisis did Americans recognize that they were living beyond their means. They would have continued to toke at the mortgage-backed bong, one hand on the joystick and the other in the Cheetos bag, had not Fannie and Freddie’s financial water suddenly broke, uncomfortably thrusting us all into mandatory adulthood.

Post Scripts

None of this should be taken as an attack on Seth Rogan himself. He is clearly way too busy to actually be a stoned slacker, and I’m sure he now has more than enough money to support several giant mortgages.

Also, lest you think Professor Gary Cross is something of a dilettante, you can download his extensive publication list from the Penn website. Full disclosure, however: he is a fellow graduate of Harvard Divinity School, so I tend to support him.

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More on the Laffer Curve

Posted on October 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

I recently discovered another tidbit that points out the lunacy of the Laffer Curve. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw – former Chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors – quotes David Stockman, who was telling a story about Ronald Reagan:

[Reagan] had once been on the Laffer curve himself. “I came into the Big Money making pictures during World War II,” he would always say. At that time the wartime income surtax hit 90 percent. “You could only make four pictures and then you were in the top bracket,” he would continue. “So we all quit working after four pictures and went off to the country.” High tax rates caused less work. Low tax rates caused more. His experience proved it.

But that example is irrelevant to the actual economy. Movie actors can stop making movies when they feel like it. But people with real jobs, even big shots on Wall Street or in venture capital, or entrepreneurs, like John McCain’s “Joe the plumber” from last night’s debate, can’t just stop working in the fall when they’ve earned enough money. In the real world, you keep working all year, even if you don’t need the money you’ll make in those last two months, because you’ll lose your job if you stop working, or because your employees need the money even if you don’t. The fact that the Reagan economic plan, and thus Republican orthodoxy, was built on the unusual case of movie star economics is profoundly disturbing.

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Republican Tax Policy

Posted on October 15, 2008 | 3 comments

Republican tax policy is so big a target it’s almost hard to know where to begin. But I’ll start with the most basic fact: Republic policy is to cut taxes. In general, Republicans will always push for lower taxes. Income taxes? Lower. Capital gains? Lower. Corporate taxes? Lower. Got yourself a financial crisis? Lower taxes will solve your problem!

The Republican quest for lower taxes is driven by three major impulses, one philosophical, one economic, and one greedy. I’ll discuss each impulse in turn.

The philosophical impulse is, broadly speaking, that the government shouldn’t take what you earn. As the current GOP platform puts it, not only should you “keep more of what you earn,” but “government should tax only to raise money for its essential functions.” But this too has multiple components. Saying “essential functions” relates to the Republican emphasis on small government. I already dealt with that ridiculous canard here, so I shall discuss it no further.

But keeping more of what you earn, to Republicans that’s just part of liberty and freedom, Mom and apple pie. As the Club for Growth puts it, they believe that “opportunity come(s) through economic freedom.” I get that; part of the American foundational myth is freedom from the heavy hand of government – no taxation without representation and all that. But notice that the famous phrase does NOT say “no taxation,” it just demands fair representation. In fact, Section 2 of the Constitution, the fifth paragraph in the entire document, condones taxation. The Founders didn’t equate freedom with reduced taxation.

The pairing of freedom and low taxes is merely a Republican shibboleth, one that we are all supposed to believe because they have repeated it so often. Yet why must society accept their definition of freedom? After all, cannot freedom also mean living in a safe, just and ordered society? That society requires government, and government requires taxes. Or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “taxes are the price of civilization.”

The second Republican impulse to lower taxes is economic. The theory is that lowering taxes stimulates growth.  Again, from the GOP platform: “Republicans lowered taxes in 2001 and 2003 in order to encourage economic growth.” Yes, under standard Keynesian economics, a tax cut will put more money into the economy and thereby stimulate consumption. But the Republican view is based more on the theory that tax cuts fuel productive investment. That theory is based primarily on the Laffer Curve. Dr. Laffer himself: “The higher tax rates are, the greater will be the economic (supply-side) impact of a given percentage reduction in tax rates.”

Famous for being sketched on a cocktail napkin in a Washington DC restaurant, the Laffer Curve states that at 100% taxation the government will make no money, since all activity will cease. Sure, and when the sun explodes, all activity will also cease. Duh. But that doesn’t mean that lowering taxes inevitably leads to more activity, which is how Republican supply-siders generally interpret Laffer. Simple common sense rejects that implication of Laffer; does anyone really believe that investor X or entrepreneur Y will refuse to build a company because their gains will be taxed at 60% instead of 30%? That’s ridiculous. And all empirical studies agree. No study supports Laffer effects at any tax rate below 90%.

Here are just a few links to various studies and summaries:

But Harvard economist Jeff Frankel put it best: “The Laffer Proposition, while theoretically possible under certain conditions, does not apply to US income tax rates:  a cut in those rates reduces revenue, precisely as common sense would indicate.”

Bottom line: this Republican concept that lowering tax rates will unleash torrents of investment and innovation is rubbish. It defies common sense, and every academic study proves it to be wrong.

The third and last Republican impulse driving taxes lower is pure greed. Quite simply, they want to keep more of the money they make. And again, I understand that; nobody really likes giving money away, especially to a government that may spend your money on things you don’t support.  But the Republicans driving this policy aren’t exactly Joe Sixpack, working class stiffs hoping to keep more of their hourly wages. Instead, they are folks like Stephen Moore and Grover Norquist, white middle-class intellectuals who have never had to worry about money or needed the support that tax dollars provide to the less fortunate. Or, even more pointedly, they are Wall Street titans like Henry Kravis and Steve Schwarzman, of KKR and Blackstone Group, who are worth billions and really don’t need the extra money. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal noted that these and other Wall Street bigwigs were finally supporting McCain because “ ‘Reality set in,’ one fund-raiser said. ‘Donors realized they could face an Obama administration next month.’ They are petrified they will face steep increases in personal and corporate tax rates, this person said.” Schwarzman took home over $700 million when Blackstone went public. Does he really need a lower tax rate on his future income?

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The Myth of the Dehydrating Cocktail

Posted on October 9, 2008 | 1 comment

People say that drinking alcohol dehydrates you. We all know the clichés: drink a glass of water between each cocktail, sip water along with your wine, chug Gatorade before you go to bed. Virtually everybody I know has a secret for surviving a long night of drinking, and those secrets always revolve around aggressive hydration. Science agrees, telling us that alcohol serves as a diuretic by inhibiting a hormone that regulates water absorption in the kidney.

I don’t care what science says. I know that my mouth waters in anticipation when I am making a cocktail; how could my mouth make this mistake? Moreover, common sense tells us that the dehydration risk is overstated. Consider the screwdriver, that most basic of cocktails. Two parts vodka to five parts orange juice. Orange juice — so wet, so delicious, so not just for breakfast any more – can’t be dehydrating, not with just two hits of vodka. Or contemplate a single beer, which has the same amount of alcohol as one shot, but diluted down with 11 ounces of sky blue water. That’s 11 times as much hydrating liquid as dehydrating alcohol.

But I don’t even care what common sense says. I reject the myth of the dehydrating cocktail because I know that drinking alcohol is more mental than physical. Drinking is a metaphysical act, transcending any impact on the body. I posit that drinking is an act of self-realization, one that affirms our own humanity. By drinking, we establish that we are more than just physical manifestations; we are controlling our minds, and thus our beings.

How can being drunk affirm the self? Because our minds make us human. Ever since that crisp French morning when Descartes said “cogito, ergo sum,” philosophers have situated the self within the mind. With lesser minds we would be nothing but tall bald monkeys; but with our big brains we achieve self-consciousness, the ontological root of humanity. By drinking, we focus on that human brain, not our bodies. With alcohol we seize control of our mind – its inhibitions and fears, the dark doubts that plague our sober thoughts – and bend it to our will.

Indeed, drinking is an act of free will, of choosing mind over matter. By controlling our mental state we control our very being, rejecting the nausea or dizziness with which our bodies seek to reclaim their concreticity. Just as we choose our minds over our bodies, we can similarly choose to reject dehydration. When drinking I affirm all that is human – and humane – about me; I prioritize my mind, and thus necessarily subjugate my body and its paltry claims of dehydration.

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$25 Billion in Car Company Loans

Posted on October 7, 2008 | Leave a comment

Lost in all the press over the $700 billion bailout and the ongoing financial crisis, we all managed to lose track of the little matter of $25 billion in low-cost loans that the government is making to the big three auto companies. These loans are ostensibly to help retool old factories so that they can manufacture new fuel efficient cars.

This is, to put it mildly, offensive. In fact, I have a big long post that I am working on, one that ties Detroit to Washington DC, and that discusses the metaphysical phenomenon of current actions sowing the seeds of one’s eventual destruction. But that post isn’t finished, so in the meantime, I would just like to point out that the need for fuel efficient cars didn’t come on suddenly, like the financial crisis. And while prescient commentators over the last few years were pointing at a financial meltdown, the growing market for fuel efficient cars has been obvious to everyone for decades. After all, that’s how Toyota became bigger than Ford: by selling small cars.

Detroit reminds me of this guy:

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