Horrid Little Woman

Megan McArdle has a long post up explaining how income loss really only matters when it happens to the riches. In what she seems to think is a QED moment, she appends this from a "bankruptcy attorney":

Another factor I've noticed with my bankruptcy clients is that a very rich person whose income takes a sudden precipitous drop to a still-pretty-good income can actually wind up in more financial trouble, faster, than a very poor person whose income drops to zero.  If you were making $300k a year and spending $200k of it on fixed expenses, and your household income drops to $125k a year, unless you have substantial liquid savings or are able to sell your house and your car and your boat yank your kids out of private school REALLY fast, you're going to wind up in bankruptcy in a fairly short space of time.  A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt.   Not that it's not still ultimately much better to be the rich person, but the rich person does get hit with a more panic-inducing financial calamity in the short term.

Having fallen so far, the riches have it much worse, even thought they still earn 125k per annum, because of panic induced by not having 200k per annum anymore. Meanwhile, our poor is home with her family plus her husband and kids but that dislocation doesn't matter because? And what if the parents live month to month in one bedroom apartment? Where do the poors go? What if only one of the poors loses their job? 36k with two kids to 18k with two kids say. Somehow or another staring homelessness and food deprevation in the face is less panic inducing than structured bankruptcy and a decent life on 125k?

Actually and to be fair, the bankruptcy attorney seems to think that poors are single and so they don't have to worry about kids, which is totally bullshit and emblematic of the horribleness of the defenders of the  riches.

It's not a case of no sympathy for the riches when things go bad; it's the case that the poors need help now while the riches have a whole system in place to protect them from the "creative destruction" of a neoliberal economic system come undone.

Horrid People

It isn't a secret that because of Citizens United and massive wealth, people like the Koch Brothers are running the Republican Party. Their front group ALEC writes anti-American and anti-Human legislation which their bought and paid for legislators duly submit. For anyone interested in the future of democracy as a going concern this kind of influence is beyond troubling. And rightly in my view,  President Obama is using these plutocrats undeserved political influence to run against robotic sociopathic plutocrat Mitt Romney.  Megan McArdle sees this and tries to mock the idea that anyone whose livelihood depends in total or in part on Koch cash is in the pay and pocket of these bloated plutocrats.

Why, one wonders, is necessary to hate America in order to be a spear carrier for authoritarians? Well, actually, I guess, the question answers itself.

My God

Megan McArdle wrote a 10 bazillion word post on her kitchen. It is the oddest damn thing I have ever read and I read the whole thing. To be sure, it was the reading in a semi-hypnotized state; hypnotized by the bizarro detailed description of how she and her husband hired people to do things to stuff they bought and then they themselves actually stained wood.  It's like pioneer days .

UPDATE:
It occurs to me that she spent nearly 2k on that mixer dealio and claims to have spent nearly 2k on the renovation, which means that she could have had the new kitchen some time ago but no mixer dealio or have twice the kitchen now with no dealio. All in all the highlarryittee of preaching inexpensive renovation while in the possession of a nearly 2k mixer dealio is hard to miss.

How Not to Appologize For Mitt Romney

The Wall Street Journal has along article on the odious Bain Management that shows them to be not particularly competent, most of the profit came from a really small number of deals and nearly a quarter of the companies with which Bain invested came a cropper, looking at this date Megan McArdle "argues" the she

[t]hink[s that] you can tell two stories from this data--and without looking at each individual case in depth, it's really hard to tell which story is right..

Without looking, which path does she choose? Hard graft or hand waving and excuse making for the Galtian leaders of capitalism, long may they creatively destruct with a dollop of who can tell.

History Trumps Economic Theory

Megan Mcardle assumes that economic decisions are based on reason. This historical explanation of qwerty (via) shows that she is talking out of her fundament. In other words, she is wrong about everything.

How to Lose an Argument

Megan McArdle has a longish post up on the Paterno affair in which, as usual, she insists that it's complicated and besides Nazis. One obvious response is if I did what Joe Pa and co did then I would be a moral failure. A second response is that when anybody argues something along the lines of

We are evolved to live in small groups, with very deep loyalty to the other members.

They lose the argument. Why? Because just so stories about evo psych that support your position are the Freidman cab drivers of ignorance. Fear of men with sticks is a much better explanation of failure to act as we know is right; love of men with carrots works as well. Relying on the hand waving of pseudo-science is a sign of intellectual dishonesty.

Oh, For Dumber

Megan McArdle:

I don't care about income inequality.  I care about the absolute condition of the poor--whether they are hungry, cold, and sick.  But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.  Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine.  And I'm not sure why anyone should.  Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.

But while I do not care about gaps and ratios, I do care about opportunity.  It is fine that CEOs earn many times what their workers do--but it is not fine if some are born to be workers, and others to be CEOs.  And unfortunately, that increasingly seems to be the story in America, as Scott Winship outlines in a fine new piece for National Review:

Megan the reason to care about income inequality is that it allows the rich to construct a system that makes opportunity, political equality, and a decent life for the majority all but impossible. You are here arguing that you don't care about the very thing that makes the world less fair and, to be blunt, less meritocratic.

The whole thing is an incoherent mess of  willful misunderstanding working on behalf of obsfucation.

Take, just as one example:

But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard.  (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.)  Whatever the systemic injustices, it's also quite clear to everyone . . . even parasitic leeches of investment bankers . . . that their salaries only come as the result of frantic effort.  

A ditch digger working full, she argues, does less work in 40 hrs than a financial whiz does in 50. Salaried employees work 40 hrs a week, except when there's extra work to be done. Investment bankers don't, in fact, work 40 let alone 50 hrs a week. What do these, she gets one point right, parasitic leeches do for 50 hrs a week?

Oh For Dumb

Megan McArdle doesn't know what an unintended consequence is.  If a group or individual launch policy z in hopes of outcome a and they get not-a, not-a is an unintended consequence. Sort of like, if you argue that lower taxes for the rich, fewer limits on what the rich can do with their money and less oversight of what they do with their money will lead to a world in which everyone has a pony and, instead, it leads to an economic train wreak, the train wreak is the unintended, but not unforeseen, consequence. So when the good government types argued that earmarks were a form of bribery that enabled speakers to coerce legislators to vote against their or their constituents best interests and you have a situation were  Boehner's inability to bribe legislators to vote against their (incorrect, imo) understanding of their best interests , it isn't an  unintended consequence it is the intended consequence. 

Books Are Forever

For a while now, I've been worried that the book, the physical printed book, was going to disappear. I use kindle and its perfectly adequate, but books are the bee's knees. I am, therefore, heartened by this from Megan McArdle:

I'm pretty sure the print book's days are numbered for anything except specialty applications.  The die-hards will cling for a while, but ultimately, book buyers are already an extremely affluent group, and the convenience in acquiring, porting, and storing your library simply overwhelms the drawbacks, especially as Amazon has introduced innovations like eBook lending.

Inasmuch as she is wrong about everything it follows that she is wrong about this. For my money, if you want to know, the book's future lies in ondemand printing services like the Espresso ondeman book making machine.

When Lies Aren't Really Lies or; The Limits of Oral History

It what can only be called a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of "fabrication," Megan McArdle muses on people lying about their pasts that

[t]his isn't necessarily fabrication; it's just that we pick and choose what we recall, and those who are happy will selectively recall the best parts, while those who are unhappy will accentuate the negative.

It is necessarily fabrication when you pick and choose this and that to create a false picture of the past. This why oral history is limited use.

Oh For Dumb

Megan McArdle:

John Quiggin complains that what the classic essay I, Pencil actually shows is the wonders of a mixed economy, not the market.  The essay traces all the amazing transactions that need to occur for a simple pencil to be made, pointing out that not one of the people involved could make a pencil by themselves, and most of them don't even know that they're involved in producing a pencil.  But what about the US Forestry Service? Rail rights of way? The education system?

This is an argument to which the left-wing has a great deal of recourse whenever anyone suggests that people have a right to keep what they earn from voluntary transactions.  You can only make money in the context of society, and so society has a right to regulate your transactions, and seize the proceeds, in any way that society sees fit.

And yet, the argument applies just as well to our sex lives or our political beliefs: they take place in the context of all sorts of government protections, from rape prosecutions to whistleblower laws.  Without markets and the government, the "anything between two consenting adults" morality to which the majority of the elite subscribes would be impossible; the closest substitute for these things is family, and families have a very clear, deep, and persistent interest in regulating the sexual behavior of their members.

Does this mean that the government (or our employers) may properly restrict our sexual behavior to that of which a majority of our neighbors approve? That bed you're having sex in probably travelled on the interstate highway system, so standby for government inspection . . . 

You know if the sex being had is a for profit enterprise than of course the kind of economic regulation authorized by the Commerce Clause and its interpretation is fully warranted. Taxation with representation also being part of the Constitutional order of these United States makes claims about seizing proceeds "in any way that society sees fit" a nonsense. If, on the other hand, its sex between adults then the privacy rights derived from Griswald etc pretty clearly enjoin the State from regulating.

So the idea that the regulation of consensual sex undertaken in the pursuit of happiness is similar to the profits earned because of state protections and investments is a silly.

Baked, and Not in a Fun Way

So, Megan McArdle has a post up on how super easy it is now to cook because of Gadgets! and Measuring Cups! While 1900 grannies had it hard because of the opposite. My Grannie, born at the on the boat circa 1900, made the world's greatest chocolate chip cookies. She almost never measured anything. You know why? Because she had made 10bazillion batches. I make a really nice tart, not that kind, and I don't really measure anything anymore. If you do something often enough with the same set of tools you know what works and what doesn't. It's pragmatical.

Tax Policies Aren't Necessarily Tax Policies

After noting that changes in tax policies might explain the growth of income inequality in these United States, long may humor be her best medicine, Megan McArdle concludes

Explanations involving very US-specific factors, like "culture", our tax policy, or some sort of capture whereby the wealthy have somehow rigged the system in their favor, become much less compelling.  Rising inequality (and slower income growth) have been a rising trend across most of the developed world for three decades.  We need a better explanation than greedier rich people, or stupider politicians.

So it wasn't that greedier rich people supported stupid politicians who changed the tax code in a way that allowed the rich to be open about their richerness it was, as her source put it

However, let's instead assume the post-1986 U.S. trend is an artifact of the 1986 tax reform. 

The "let's assume" bit is, I believe, the way economist think and it is, I think, unfortunate that they think that way. Even if you disagree with the assumption the cause of the spike was a change in tax policies and the there isn't an argument that there is no rising income inequality in the source just that the US isn't especially worse then elsewhere.

Bad Teacher

Megan McArdle has long and misleading post up on why we have to fire teachers, in large numbers and immediately, and, among other things, makes the point that it's too hard firing bad teachers.  Well, here's a story about a teacher who has twice been fired for no good reason. She was once a porn star but there is no suggestion that she wasn't and isn't an effective teacher. This is why teachers require protection from being fired. And, I would add, why all workers need protection from being fired for no good reason.

She Said/He Said

Megan McArdle on the various estimates of how many jobs the Republicans' crazy budget cuts will lead to, they are, she wrote,

certainly troubling.  But like Ben Bernanke, I find these estimates somewhat high.

Ben Bernanke on the job losses

“Our sense is that the 60 billion dollars cut spread out in the normal way would reduce growth. But we think given the size it’s one to two tenths [of a percentage point reduction to gross domestic product], about a couple hundred thousand jobs,” he told the House Financial Services Committee. “It’s not trivial.”

In the midst of a recession, it seems, the only forbidden act is tax increases, decreasing public employees' take home pay, destroying jobs, rejecting job creating investments, and related etc are a okay, because?

History is a Discipline

Megan McArdle argues that had unions opposed increased productivity

 in 1810, we'd all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.

This is an odd argument on several grounds but its central claim is incoherent when you consider the processes through which life expectancy increased.  Increases in longevity are most often the result of decline in infant mortality and this was certainly the case of late 19th century America. Other causes of longer lived folks, improved nutrition and medical care - for example, have nothing to do with economic productivity in the industrial sector.  Better roads and railways, created, sustained, and supported by state intervention in the market place as one example, improved standards for medical professionals and acceptance of the germ theory of disease in the late 19th early 20th for another..  Public hygiene movements, that transformed cities form filthy and disease ridden, used the state's power to recreate cities and, again, have nothing to do with economic productivity. Clean food and drug, air and water acts have nothing to do with economic efficiency or productivity and are responsible for improving the conditions in which people live and work. Humanity's response to the problems created by the exploitative economic relations concerning resources of people lead to intellectual and material improvements: history isn't written in the passive voice.

In this case, as in nearly all cases of improving the material and intellectual position of humanity in a social situation, people decided to overlook economic efficiency because people matter more than profits or things. And its was people acting in the interests of the common good, which is to say clean cities and longer lives, that lead to this improvements. It was also the case that there was an admixture of pure and impure motives for urban renewal: social hygienist were often fans of Eugenics and agents who wanted strong states often transformed cities for reason of their security as well as public health. Lots of American urban reformers of the left and the right spring to mind of the first and Hausmann's Paris for the second. As medicine improved its professional profile, midwifery declined. Nonetheless, let's not throw healthy babies, clean cities, and related whatnottery out with soiled bath water.

Right now this very moment, in the interests of economic efficiency and increased productivity,extractive industries are polluting and working on returning us to the 19th century so we can all die young.


Just as was the case with Baumol's argument about productivity and increased wages things don't just happen they are made to happen by people interesting in making them happen for reasons good and ill. The only reason to ignore the fact that people make their own history, albeit not in a context of their own creation - to paraphrase some old windbag or another, is if you want people to think that the miserable world created  by Neoliberalism's commitment to market fundamentalism is "natural" instead of being foist upon us by unpleasant  men and women who wish that the greatest number of us  suffered for the increasing few.

Two Things at One Time

Megan McArdle doesn't understand the concept of walking and chewing gum.  She takes Ezra Klein to task because he argues that union support of Medicaid proves it cares about the least among us.  McArdle's "argument" is that

[i]n the most recent quarter for which the Census has data, corporate income taxes provided about $9.2 billion worth of revenue to all 50 states.  This is less than 20% of New York State's Medicaid bill. It is also about 3% of the overall tax revenue collected by the states.  This goes up to about 4.5% in the second quarter of the year, which includes April 15th, but overall, it is not a very significant source of revenue.

Sales and gross receipts tax are much more significant--about $72 billion, or a quarter of the total tax take.  But general gross receipts taxes are used in only a minority of states; most of that is sales tax revenue.  And sales taxes are generally assumed to ultimately be borne by the consumers, not corporations.

So the unions are not lobbying against corporations, who do not have much of a dog in this fight.  Who does?  Taxpayers, and consumers of health care services.

You know what unions want to do about this right? Raise corporate tax rates. It's not just that she dumb and lazy it's the near perfection of her dumb laziness, the characterization is meant with all due civility.

That is The Question

Megan McArdle suggest that we have too choice peaceful transfers of power from tyranny to something, presumabley, better or justice when it comes to violent tyrannts:

We satisfy the requirements of justice--but we make it more likely that dictators will cling to power, inflicting bloody purges on their people rather than share Pinochet's fate.
Of course, that's far from certain, because presumably hounding and/or prosecuting former dictators must have some deterrent effect.  Along with satisfying the requirements of justice, one hopes that it makes a would-be strongman think hard, and maybe take a gulp or two, before he orders that first mass execution.

She also asks if men who

 come to power through bloody conflicts that put them at great risk of losing their lives, and the violence and repression usually start during those conflicts.  Are they going to worry more about The Hague than the guy with the rival army?  Or the radical guerillas operating in the hinterlands?  By the time they're worrying about, um, succession planning, it may be too late to assure a secure future by being on their best behavior--the nasty process that brought them to office and cemented their power in the face of threats has probably pretty much guaranteed prosecution.

Well, one might answer, if we increase the likelihood that seizing and maintaining power through violence leads to successful prosecution and imprisonment then yes? Of course you could also could also make the argument that you can either have one thing or another but never both.

At any rate, it's something we should think about.  Which do we want more: peaceful abdication? Or justice?

Can we not have both?

Empathy Isn't Another Word For Narcissism

Meagan McArdle:

Yesterday, I came across this link to an absolutely heartbreaking photo series about an HIV-positive drug addict who the photographer found in a shelter, and then followed for 18 years.  Like Laura, I shamelessly cried at the images.  Then I noticed that the woman in them was ten months younger than I am.  By 2004 she looked like an old woman.  Her body and her life were ravaged by her infection; she died without reaching her 37th birthday.

It doesn't make it any sadder that she was my age, of course, but it does make it seem more real to me

There ya go. It's not sadder but the fact that the doomed drug addict is like her makes it more real; imagine McArdle's response if the drug addict would have been a 90 year old transvestite. It's almost as if she is proud of being so short sighted she can't see past her mirror.

When the Perfect Becomes the Enemy of the Good

When Voltaire wrote that I think he had this particular troika of doodlebugs in mind: Ross Douthat, Megan McArdle, and Matthew Yglesias. These three members of the pundocracy spend much of their time blathering about things of which they know nothing.  Recently, they all managed to pen posts that denigrate the idea of doing anything to meliorate the world as it presently is.

Douthat argues that

[a]fter all, what ultimately ails the world is its inherent imperfectibility — its fallen character, if you’re a Christian; its irreducible complexity and tendency toward entropy and dissolution, if you’re a strict materialist. This is true on all the great issues of the day. No matter how many lives may be saved or lost because of health care policy, no lives will be saved forever, and every gain will be an infinitely modest hedge against the wasting power of disease and death. No matter the wisdom of our politicians or the sagacity of their economic advisors, no policy course can guarantee universal wealth or permanent economic growth. And no matter the temperature of our discourse, the state of our gun laws, or the quality of our mental health care, nothing human beings do can prevent the occasional madman from shooting up a crowded parking lot.

I am not sure what he means by "strict" in his characterization of materialist, but I am, more or less, a materialist and what he said there is poppycock. It is, obviously and trivially, true that no matter what problems will remain; this doesn't mean we have to stop. From a Christian perspective there is no greater call to action than this

34 Then shall the King say to them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 For I was an hungered, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: 36 Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. 37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we you an hungered, and fed you? or thirsty, and gave you drink? 38 When saw we you a stranger, and took you in? or naked, and clothed you? 39 Or when saw we you sick, or in prison, and came to you? 40 And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.

It is also that case that, according to Christ, the world will be made perfect

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: 32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats: 33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

There is the whole tradition of Christian melioration of things of the this world, like Just War theory, Peace of God, Truce of God, and the whole notion of meliorating the City of Man while the Douthatss of the world await the Son of Man to return and send the rest of us goats to the fiery pits. He is, in other words, full of it. Sure the world as it is is a tough place to love and harder place to fix; but so what?  I thought Catholics rejected a theology of despair.

McArdle reads, or claims to, the recent Atul Gawande, that I mentioned here, and concludes

But not the only reason. Even the programs that genuinely work have a lot of things going for them that a broader program won't.  They have a crack team of highly educated experts who are extremely excited about the program, and understand the ideas behind it backwards and forwards.  They work in a controlled environment, and usually have a decent amount of administrative support for their efforts.  They are time limited, which matters--people are willing to endure lots of things for a limited, known duration that they wouldn't do permanently. They are often offering bonuses for participation.

Then they get implemented in the real world, with ordinary people who don't particularly want to change the way they've always done things, don't really care about the noble ideas behind your program, and don't see any end to it.  And the effects disappear

See, it cannot work because "ordinary" people wont do the work necessary to make change a reality. Of course, the one of the points was that ordinary people with the necessary skills could and did make the various experiments work.  It is also odd, isn't it, the degree of contempt she displays toward ordinary folks.  The article made clear that there was template for success: more intervention led to lower health care costs for the most expensive patients and their health improved.  Her claim is that "ordinary" people hired to engage in similar acts, wont because, you know, "ordinary" folks are lazy asses. This from a woman who cannot add.

Matthew Yglesias, riffing off of something Jon Chait burbled, thinks that although

[w]hen Bill Clinton pronounced that “the era of big government is over” in 1995, he was clearly wrong. And since that time we’ve gotten SCHIP, Medicare started covering prescription drugs, and now we have the Affordable Care Act. So the era of big government wasn’t over in 1995 and it’s not over in 2010, but what is over is the era of big government liberalism. That’s not to say there will be no new changes to health care policy or to education policy or any of the rest of it. But there aren’t any major new fundamental commitments to be undertaken and there isn’t any more money to undertake it with. 

Because

Future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered. 

Remember that neither Chait nor Yglesias has anytime for anyone on their left and Yglesias really and sincerely believes that, despite all reality to the contrary, neo-Liberalism is the most bestest way to make the world a better place for all; primarily, the last quoted sentence suggests, because the supply of robots is unlimited. Color me shocked, a neo-Liberal looks around at a world with high unemployment, increase income and wealth disparity, increasingly deregulated economies falling into cycles of boom and bust much like the bad old days pre-Keynesian interventionism, and so on and concludes that our most pressing problem is the continued depression of workers wages and the continued process of deskilling.  If you don't believe me on the last point go and read one of his posts on education reform. Or, better yet, go read about neo-Liberalism and welfare or the way in which Yglesias, whether he knows it or not, is acting and speaking in the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

If we listen to anyone of these up-and-coming embarrassments to the all-American values of hard work, getting things done, and the gradual creation of an ever more perfect, even if it always sucks, world, we would give up. Why, one wonders, would such a "diverse" group of "thinkers" decide to try and convince everyone to stop working?