Social Policy and Marketing Parking Spaces

As most of you know Matthew Ygleasias is neoliberal nitwit. For some reason, perhaps the utility of nitwits to forward neoliberal nonsense, lots of folks on the putative left like to link to him and engage with his nitwittery. Over here, for example Mike Konczal mention Yglesias and the guy who invented the idea of using market mechanism to create a dynamic pricing of parking spaces in the same passage. Over here, we find a discussion of the same set of issues, using the market to increase the costs of good and services by including "negative externalities." In the latter example, Peter Frase concludes with these perfectly sensible comments:

Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of ability to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person’s desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists know this, but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the decreasing marginal utility of money, an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don’t need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as “the market price for street parking”. But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what’s needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

What I don't understand, to be frank, is why we have all these bright fellows seeking to resolve epiphenomenon when the real problem, as Frase points out, is economic inequality. Basing any set of social or political responses to the problems of humanity in society on market mechanism necessarily results in a society based on wealthy people's desires.

So how about everyone on the loft leave Yglesias to blather on in the well-funded obscurity of Slate except, perhaps, to point out that his solutions to life's problems are the "and a pony" of "left" policy discourse.

Warren Report Video Edition

Here is Elizabeth Warren in her own words:



Here is some more:



Here's a positive, I think, satiric take:



Here is what the creatures of oligarchy want you to hear:



What I find odd is that the editors think that by highlighting her commitment to doing what she thinks is right they are proving that she is wrong for public office even as their preferred candidate, Scott Brown, defends what he has done by to continue the ruination of the working class in this country because he thinks he's right in every particular. As by the way, when I wrote that sentence, I had no idea what Scott Brown said or how he voted but using the amazing predictive skills I have honed over the years of listening to apologists for the oligarchy, I assumed that he made an ass of himself and, what do you know, I was right.

Adminstering Austerity

Lots of people like to blame teachers for the problems of our schools. Many times this blaming uses the size of their salaries and pensions as evidence for their perfidy. Indeed, the conviction that teachers and other public employees were raking it in lay behind the latest Republican efforts at the politics of resentment. No less a person than the very embodiment of the banality of evil was banally and inaccurately pointing to our brokeness as the justification for robbing teachers and other public employees of god knows how much money. Lots of folks argue that this was an attempt to destroy one of the last decent paying jobs for the American working class. They'd be right.

But it was also a continuation of the long-standing Neoliberal desire to transfer salary and wealth from the workers to the relatively parasitic managerial class. For today we read in the WSJ of administrators two of whom

 received an increase of $20,000 or more, and six received an increase of $10,000 or more. Two administrators also were promoted and received increases of $20,000 or more. Administrators receiving raises saw the increase as of January, and that base rate will be frozen for the 2011-12 school year.

So its layoffs, furloughs, and wage cuts for the workers while the administrators' salaries continue to go up. Let's hear it for austerity.

How Not To Criticize Bad Policy

Think Progress on Pawlenty and the destruction of Medicare:

GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty said yesterday that he would sign the Medicare-ending Republican budget into law if elected president. “If that was the only bill that came to my desk, and I wasn’t able to pass my own plan, I would sign it,” he said of the hugely unpopular plan.

The plan is, it's true, hugely unpopular, but that really isn't the most salient point. It is wasteful, destructive, counter-productive, and generally anti-human. Think Progress has, I think, mentioned all of those points in other articles etc; however, it needs to make the most important point every single time.  The debate isn't on popularity, which might make sense if we were electing the prom king and queen, but rather on the outcome. Tax cuts are "popular," in the sense that people like them but actually hate the policy outcome: reduced service. Let's make an attempt to stick to the important stuff.

Error Prone

This morning I read about Chrysler's return of a bunch of the money the State gave it during the dark days of yesteryore. And, I thought, that ought to be one more counter on the side of those who think that this Administration is doing at least somethings more or less right and, consequently, as more evidence that the Neoliberal lock on policy-making ought loosen.

First up is Mitt Romney. He denounced Obama's Administration's bailout plan as the worst kind of socialism and so on. Now he claims that he invented Obama's Administration's bailout plan. The Republican majority in the House are so dedicated to deregulation that they are behaving like cads and bounders in their "grilling" of Elizabeth Warren. The House Minority Leader wants spending cuts to offset any aid to Joplin MO. And so on.

How long do we have to put up with this nonsense? The Neoliberals are wrong and events have shown them to be wrong. It's time to try something else.

Crises Management

When I think about a crisis, I think of a discrete moment during which the normal means of dealing with one or another of life's problems fails and the problem metastasizes and fundamentally alters the problems scale threatening lives, homes, and etc. During a crisis those actually dedicating to solving it pursue multiple paths, attacking immediate and underlying causes, and jettison those methods that fail. The same, it seems to me, is true of forest fires, floods, and the Berlin Air Lift. There is an underlying intractable problem that grows into a life threatening something or another, previous measures fail and therefore something new and dramatic must be done.

So, for example, contagious disease is a recurring problem for humanity in a social state, the flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was a crisis. The state operating through a variety of humanitarian and other organizations, sought to deal effectively with the dead, provide palliative care for the ill, inhibit its spread, and find a cure. San Francisco order everyone to wear a mask as means of stopping the dread disease's spread. When they figured out that the gauze masks were of little use, the stop enforcing the rule.

Lots of ideologically driven nimrods are insisting that the American educational system is in crisis. How can this be? Educating children, young adults, and adults, has always been a difficult task. But no one is going to die, lots of homes are being built, books written, and so on. The evidence is that the choice and accountablility don't work and, in fact, that whole dealio is a scam. Rather than abandoning choice and accountablity the people are pursuing it with greater vigor or moving the goalposts and generally denying that improvement has anything to do with it.

This isn't a crisis, it's an opportunity for people who hate people trying to rob us of yet another social good in favor of market fundamentalism, which is just another way of saying let's let the rich rule.

No Ride Zone

Sen Schumer's notion of a no ride list is beyond silly. The last thing train travel needs is to make the getting  on and off trains more like the getting on of planes. Especially as the idea is based on the ravings of Osama's journal.

It's The End of The World As We Know it and He Feels Fine

The people responsible for hiring and firing people have been firing them at a decent clip and not hiring them at a slightly faster pace. The people responsible for getting or giving wages and dividing wealth have, for some time now, decided that fewer people with preposterously large incomes and ridiculous levels of wealth is better than seeing to it the vast majority of Americans have decent wages and any wealth.

Matthew Yglesias thinks that this if "fine."

And then asks, what he sees as,

[t]he real question is: Why are policymakers satisfied with FINE?

Two points: The economy isn't fine; after 30 odd years of Yglesias' Neoliberalism it's broken. Policy makers are doing the wrong thing because right now Neoliberalism reigns supreme.

If he actually wanted to fix the problem, he attack Neoliberalism and admit that it broke the world in the first place.

Oh For Dumb

So Matthew Yglesias understands that all the promises of charter schools are a nonsense. But he can't bring himself to reverse his position on choice and the perfection of the market. He, consequently, moves the goal posts from charter schools and choice creating better outcomes to charter schools and choice increasing human happiness because of illusions.

On the other hand, when confronted with something that all profession educators understand as a necessary first step to improving outcomes: class size. He denigrates it.

It's almost like he doesn't care about ends so longs as his means are put into place.

This Is Ridiculous

Over to Balloon Juice, we learn that the newly-installed administrator of Benton Harbor MI wants to lead it back to solvency by

Mr. Harris began paying debts, laying off workers and considering a plan to merge the fire and police departments into a single unit where firefighters could ultimately answer burglary calls and police officers could put out fires.

If you go to the NYT and read the whole thing this startling factoid leaps out

One commissioner glowered at Mr. Harris (whom the city is required to pay $11,000 a month under his state contract) when they crossed paths in City Hall.

12x11= 132k per annum. Nice work.

This is Almost Certainly the Wrong Way to Go About Things

This idea

Mexico should, after a public and transparent process, designate one of its dealing organizations as the most violent of the group, and Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts should focus on destroying that organization.

Leads Matthew Yglesias to conclude

I certainly agree that something along these lines is the right way to deal with the crime and violence associated with hard drugs. The idea that a city is going to eradicate the buying and selling of cocaine and heroin from its borders is preposterous. What you want to do is make the dominant business strategy for a vendor of hard drugs be something like “don’t kill anyone and don’t be a nuisance.” You find the peg that’s stick out highest on the disruptiveness chart, and you whack it down.

You know what would work? Legalization. People still smuggle alcohol but without the violence that attended alcohol smuggling during Prohibition. You stop the violence and corruption associated with drug smuggling? Make it unnecessary.

Monkeys and Rice

 Years ago somebody told me how to trap a monkey. The story was put some rice in a jar with an opening big enough for the monkey's open hand to fit in but small enough that when the monkey grabbed the rice it could not get its hand out. Monkeys, the story went, had one track minds and as the monkey hunter approached they would panic and try to run away only to realize that they had a hand full of rice they could extract from the jar. They would then focus on extracting the rice and forget about the hunter only to end up caught. Relatedly Kierkegaard argued that anxiety over choosing one thing over another was proof of free will. If you had no choice, he reasoned, you would have no anxiety. As people had anxiety choice existed.  His preferred solution was to accept Christianity and live by its precepts. In short, short circuit the anxiety of choice by letting go of the ability to choose by letting others choose for you. I would argue that these equally unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of choice structure Matthew Yglesias' thoughts on nearly everything with an added dose of misunderstanding and misdirection.

Like a monkey with a handful of rice, Yglesias continues to  argue that educational reform is an economic category. He suggests that

One of the most important things about the health care and education segments of the economy is that part of what customers want is attention. Parents like the idea of small class sizes, and patients like the reassuring face-to-face presence of a doctor with a good bedside manner. But personal attention has the pretty special characteristic of being immune to productivity enhancements.

Students and patients, he wants us to believe, are identical in being "customers." This is simply wrong. Students and patients are students and patients.  Medical care costs more because it is a for-profit enterprise, education costs more not because of profits but because of population increases that demand more teachers or larger class rooms. And important point is that an economically efficiency has nothing to do with effectiveness, safety, or what have you.

Despite his attempt to dismiss face-to-face teaching as an irrational desire for "attention" the fact of the matter is that smaller classrooms are more effective. Ask any teacher, as opposed to loud-mouthed, hard-charging pundits and other assholes, about classroom size. Smaller is better.

It is also clear here the he has shifted the terms of the debate from effective teaching to efficient teaching. One reason for this might be that all the market-based Neoliberal reforms, choice, testing, teacher bashing, etc, have been shown not to work and the only way to argue for continued Neoliberal reforms is to shift from doing something well to doing it cheaply.

 He claims that the current efficiency crisis

 creates the following trilemma as economy-wide productivity rises:

— One: The wages of teachers and doctors can fall relative to average wages, because teachers and doctors aren’t increasing their productivity as rapidly as the average worker.
— Two: Paying the salaries of teachers and doctors can account for an ever-growing share of national output, because the rest of our output is getting more efficient and teaching and treating isn’t.
— Three: The amount of attention provided by teachers and doctors to students and patients can decline.

Conflating doctors and teachers fundamentally distorts teachers' wages. There is also four: move funds from, say, defense to education. It is not the case that the world of state expenditure cannot be reallocated if the reallocation will create a world better suited to human beings happiness and well being even if profitability and economic efficiency have to take a hit.

Just as importantly, Ygelsias continues to misunderstand his source material. Specifically Baumol:

And if you think we need to increase the relative wages of teachers while further shrinking class sizes and sustain that policy over time, it’ll mean steadily increasing taxes, no one-off increase will undue the Baumol Effect. That’s one possible answer—America is lightly taxed compared to other rich countries—but you owe it to yourself at least to face up to that.

As I've mentioned before, the Baumol Effect, or Disease, isn't a law its an economist's intervention into a policy debate about urban decay and how to stop it. Baumol argued for unions and paying more for teachers. Treating Baumol's argument this way makes policy preference into laws, which isn't true. If you push something hard enough it will fall over, is a law testable both in theory and in fact. Arguing that tax revenue will never increase enough to cover the costs of hiring teachers and paying them a decent wage isn't a law, it's an assertion.

We can, to repeat myself, rejigger state expenditure, less on defense and prisons and more on education, infrastructure, and communication, which wouldn't require tax increases. We can increase taxes or decrease subsidies or close loopholes or we can more create jobs that pay decent wages by strengthening unions which would increase tax revenues without a tax increase.

In other words, Yglesias needs to face up to the fact that his single-minded focus on market-based solutions to non-market problems leads him into all manner of absurdity and he has to face up to the fact that his decision to accept ideologically based solutions to real world problems while ridding him of the anxiety of choice has limited his ability to think creatively.

The Problem With Anti-Empiricism

Matt Yglesias argues that

if dental hygenists were allowed to work on their own, not only would this be good for hygenists (a lower-wage and female-dominated profession, and thus a progressive thing to do) it would almost certainly make it cheaper and/or more convenient to get your teeth cleaned.

A few facts, Alaskan d.h.s make 96k per year, those Washington state make 90k, d.h.s in Michigan, with the "highest concentration" of d.h.s in the land, make 59k. Nice wages, I would say.


We have an imaginary problem, low paid women enslaved by the evil dental monopoly, to which he offers the neo-Liberal solution of deregulation and increased competition because increased competition  will

Mak[e access to dental services] as cheap and convenient as possible for people to avoid [dental diseases, which] does a lot to raise living standards. Obviously in part that can be read as a good reason to pay for poor people’s dental bills. But at the end of the day, making these services affordable really does require us to find ways to make delivery cheaper.

According to the neo-Liberal tooth fairy you increase competition and decrease cost because this increases wages or shorter: more equals less which than equals more. This kind of argument makes clear why Yglesias hates empiricism; his ideology only works if you get to make stuff up.

Oh, and yes it does read as good reason to pay for poor peoples' dental bills not, however, via neo-Liberal tooth fairyism but rather by expanding health care through increasing wages by strengthening unions or mandating living wages, the nationalization of health care or other related progressive response to the needs of humanity in the social situation.

Other Conversations Not Taking Place

Recently, Robert Farley complained about the dearth of "progressive" theories and theorists of issues military. This contra-factual claim led me to this guy, which led me to this post from this post, which contains these pictures of a green and pleasant land:

made barren and peaceful:

by the neo-Liberal consensus, and from the last post which makes the point that a "progressive" doctrine of all things military is, much like a progressive doctrine of all things, civil, social, and economic are, to insist that we stop killing folks for no good reason and think about people as something 

more than material goods maximizing automatons. If we destroy their homes and then rebuild one with, say, with more room and running water, then not only should be grateful (the imperialist mindset), but will be grateful (the COIN mindset). If we occupy their country and destroy their local institutions, but somehow marginally raise their standard of living, they will thank us for it. It is both a morally bankrupt approach and delusional.[1]

Which is all another way of saying, to those centrist neo-Liberals adamant in their refusal to speak the hippies to their left, you're doing it wrong.

[1] By the way, want to know what a COIN success story looks like? Well, the second picture but in more details see here (subscription needed).  Shorter: kill everybody and use the army to sit on the few that you might have missed. Happy New Year.

How Ron Johnson Got Rich

It seems that our manufacturer and accountant made his money the old fashioned way: marry into a company and sell stuff to your father in law.  It's the very model for job creation here in Wisconsin and the nation more generally.  The un- and underemployed will hang out around the watering holes of the rich and famous and marry their way to prosperity. Given the rather skewed nature of wealth distribution in these United States, home of the world's only and therefore largest corn palace, we may have to introduce polyandry, polygamy, and perhaps legalize bigamy.