Ignorance and Arrogance

September 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Visitors to the US are often dismayed by how little most Americans know about the rest of the world.  As Ambrose Bierce said, “War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”  We don’t even know all that much about the countries we do make war on.  But why should we?

In his speech to the Republican convention,  Marco Rubio said,

These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America. [NB: threaten]

In Rubio’s view, knowing nothing about other countries is fine because we can just assume that America is best at everything.  Other countries should copy us. 

The defense for our ignorance is our arrogance.   But who benefits from our ignorance of the rest of the world?

When Verizon offered me their land phone-cable-Internet “triple play,”  it seemed like a good deal.  But my basis for comparison was what I was paying before (more), and what Time Warner was offering (roughly the same).

Then I heard David Cay Johnston interviewed on “Fresh Air.” Johnston too must have gone for a package deal. 

We're way behind countries like Lithuania, Ukraine and Moldavia in the speed of our Internet. Per bit of information moved, we pay 38 times what the Japanese pay. If you buy one of these triple-play packages that are heavily advertised, where you get Internet, telephone and cable TV together, typically you'll pay what I pay, about $160 a month, including fees.

Well, the same service in France is $38 a month . . . . And instead of two-country calling, you get worldwide calling to 70 countries. You get an Internet that is 10 times faster . . . downloading and 20 times faster uploading. And you get much broader international television stations than you get here in America.

To the list of countries that are way ahead of us in average speed Johnston could have added Latvia and  the Czech Republic as well as more likely countries like Japan and South Korea. 

Oh, that threat of being like other countries. I wouldn’t mind the threat to reduce my Verizon bill to $28.  But why is my bill so high?  Must be the cost of freedom.  As Rubio explained, the US “chose more freedom instead of more government.”
The threatening ideas Rubio was referring to – those bad ideas used by other countries – are ideas about the role of government.  Much better is the idea of American capitalism: If the government doesn’t interfere, then competition among corporations will bring us more and better stuff at lower prices.  At least that’s what Rubio, the corporations, and their other defenders tell us.

Johnston looks at his triple-play bill and sees the actual government role as something different from that ideal.  The bill is higher, he says, because telecoms use their wealth and power to get legislatures to write friendly laws that force consumers pick up the tab.* Our ignorance – ignorance of those laws and how they are made, and ignorance about other countries – is a big help to the corporations.

When George W. Bush used to insist that America’s health care system was the best in the world, most Americans had no idea what other systems were like or how much they cost.  Besides, how can you define quality in health care, and in any case, it’s hard to imagine yourself going to a French or Swiss doctor. 

But we all know what an Internet connection is, and we get the bill every month.  It’s just that most of us can’t discuss that bill with anyone in Paris or Vilnius. 

Maybe we should follow Rubio’s advice and avoid making that comparison. Ignorance is bliss. It’s also beneficial to Verizon.

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*Johnston has much more about this in the interview and in his new book The Fine Print.

Moral Principles and Political Tension

September 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Riffing last week on the Jonathan Haidt’s moral chart, I said (here) that the conservatives’ choice of five moral principles makes it easier for them to justify any idea or action.  Liberals have to get by on just two such principles. 

It hadn’t occurred to me that this moral diversity may also make it harder for conservatives to agree among themselves. We usually think of the Democrats as the weak magnet, unable to keep its iron filings from floating away.  Hence Will Rogers’s famous “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

But B.A., who blogs for The Economist,* notes (here) that the different branches of the Democratic party are not really at odds on specific policies.

Obama’s embrace of gay marriage did not require him to cut food stamps. Supporting card check neutrality for unions does not interfere with opposing tort reform. In fact, all of these positions can be collectively thrown together under the rubric of fairness and equality.

In fact, the policies mirror Haidt’s liberal diptych

• Harm / Care
• Fairness / Reciprocity

Things are different on the other side of the aisle.  Republicans seem remarkably similar to one another – the  convention in Tampa looked like a huge gathering Buick drivers – but the ideological voices aren’t always in harmony.  B.A. refers to

the competing blocs within the party – pro-immigration businesses versus nativists, tax-cutting zealots versus defense hawks and retirees who want to keep their entitlements . . .

He could have added the Randian libertarians and the religious conservatives. These seem to comprise all five of Haidt’s moral principles – the liberal two plus

• Ingroup/ Loyalty
• Authority/ Respect
• Purity/ Sanctity

(Haidt has recently added a sixth  – liberty, a card which he deals to both sides of the table, making the count six vs. three.) 

B.A. credits this moral diversity in the GOP for Romney’s refusal to make specific proposals lest he offend one of those blocs.  But these blocs have long been part of the GOP.  Back in the Bush years someone (can’t remember who) referred to them as “The Taliban, the Predators, and the Neo-cons.”  But as long as the party was winning, everyone was happy, and these differences seemed unimportant.  Now that the party teeters on the verge of losing the big prize yet again to a Kenyan socialist, conservatives are looking at one another and wondering whose principles should be put front and center to bring back the glory days.  That goal, “taking our country back,”** may be the main thing they all agree on.  They just can’t agree on which of their principles to push forward.

Mo’ principles, mo’ problems.


* The Economist identifies its bloggers only by initials.  Apparently, in the magazine’s view, these scribblers are not worthy of a full byline.

** An earlier post on this meme is here.

Romney and The Help

September 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Romney 47%” recording reminded me of “The Help.”  Apparently, the recording was made by the help – a waiter or bartender or some other hired servant who, either independently or at the behest of a reporter, put the camera or cell phone on the counter and pushed “record.”

I didn’t find “The Help” all that impressive a film (further comments on it are here).  It was too pretty.  Emma Stone was prettier than the real author, and race relations in the film were prettier than Mississippi of the early sixties.  But “The Help” did accurately show one often overlooked aspect of the relation between servants and those who hire them:  servants are so powerless that from the masters’ perspective they become non-persons.   Servants are harmless.  And all they are is servants, at least to the master. 

No man is a hero to his valet.  But masters also forget that the valet may be more than just a valet. So masters relax the usual constraints of self-presentation and information control, and servants acquire a lot of information.

Most of the time, servants use that information only among themselves, largely as protection for the self.  By swapping stories that deflate the self of the masters, they  narrow the self-worth gap between the two statuses. Information is power, but the power of servants’ information usually remains potential. 

Still, every so often, as in “The Help” and in “Romney 47%,”  that power becomes actual.

Quote, er Insult, of the Day

September 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The quote of the day was from a day back in May but just leaked yesterday – Mitt Romney speaking to people who had ponied up $50,000 for dinner.  Speaking about the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax, Romney said that they are people who

believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. . . . . And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Random thoughts:

1.  Half of the 47% (closer to 46%, but who’s counting) pay no taxes because their income is so low that standard deductions wipe out any income tax liability.  The other half, who have higher incomes, pay no taxes because of “tax expenditures” – special deductions written into the tax code.  Of those people, most are accounted for by elderly tax benefits, credits for children, or credits for the working poor (Earned Income Tax Credit).

The Tax Policy Center (here) provides this pie chart of the people Romney says do not take personal responsibility or care for their own lives.

(Click on the pie for a larger view.)

2.  Romney’s complaint is that because these people pay no income tax, he can’t win their votes by promising to cut their income taxes.  The problem is not that their taxes are too low but that as far as cutting their taxes goes, someone else got there first. 
    And who were those dastards who ruined it for Romney?  Sneaky liberals like Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon (the EITC, signed by Ford, was an outgrowth of Nixon’s idea for a Negative Income Tax) and the big tax cutters Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. 

3.  Not long ago there was speculation that for several years in the recent past, Romney himself was among the 47%.  Romney has denied this, and although he has the evidence to back up what he says,  he refuses to provide that evidence.  In any case, of people making more than $200,000 last year,  72,000 paid no income tax.  Of those, 18,000 made a half million or more.

4.  Romney is wrong about voting.  Seniors favor Romney by 8-10 points. And about one-third of the lowest income group (the white males mostly) will vote for Romney.  I doubt that Romney’s insulting them will change their minds.

The Atlantic (here) posted this map showing the non-paying tax filers.  The ten states with the highest percent of non-payers are red, the lowest blue.

The low-income voters in those Southern states favor the Democrats.  No wonder Republican-controlled governments in so many of those red states are passing laws to keep poor people from voting.

(Note:  the percentages are low – the highest state, Mississippi, has only 49% not paying any tax – because the figures are based on those who filed tax returns. Millions more poor people did not bother to file.  Including them would raise the percentage of income tax non-payers.)

5.  Is it possible these insults will help Romney?  What if it’s like advertising, and people make their choices on the basis of fantasies of who or where they want to be rather than where they actually are now?  If Romney can convince people that Obama is for losers (working drudges and moochers) and Romney is for winners (independent and successful entrepreneurs), he should pick up the votes of wage-and-salary voters who dream of starting their own businesses. 

6.  At the dinner for his wealthy donors, Romney was confirming their view of Obama voters.  The picture was a largely inaccurate stereotype, but it was what the $50,000 crowd already thought and wanted to hear more of.  As others (Ross Douthat at the Times for example) have pointed out, Obama and the Democrats have done the same thing.