Despite the thousands of man-hours that have been spent railing about the shootings in Arizona over the weekend, I have yet to hear of any blogger, columnist, or public figure who has pledged to moderate his or her own tone or mode of expression. Lots of condemnation of political opponents, though.

My colleague at OTB, Alex Knapp, has posted a good post on the subject.

The news programs, newspapers, editorial pages, and blogosphere are full of the story of the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, many focusing on the increasingly harsh political rhetoric we’ve seen:

WASHINGTON — The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others at a neighborhood meeting in Arizona on Saturday set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.

While the exact motivations of the suspect in the shootings remained unclear, an Internet site tied to the man, Jared Lee Loughner, contained antigovernment ramblings. And regardless of what led to the episode, it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.

I don’t want to get too deeply into this story; this blog is not a “hot news of the day” blog. For a roundup of blogospheric commentary I’d direct your attention to this one by my friend Joe Gandelman, who covers the subject with his usual excellence. I would also like to hold out the post of my blog-friend Steve Hynd on the subject for praise:

Various individuals are frantically trying to make connections between Loughner and either the right-wing Palinite tea party movement or ultra-left radicals, depending upon their own partisan bias.

We at Newshoggers will try not to do that. It’s way too early to make such pronouncements, both in terms of evidence and of good taste. Apparenty the shooter was arrested so we’ll all find out in good time.

Our deepest condolences to the bereaved and best wishes to the injured and their families.

There is one word I’d like to add. I have already seen multiple newspaper columns and blog posts condemning one or the other person for their harsh and inflammatory rhetoric, frequently, ironically, by those with the most opaque partisan blinders. I genuinely wish I were seeing more pledges to eschew harsh and inflammatory rhetoric rather than condemnations of it on the part of political adversaries.

Moderation has more than a single dimension. Not only is there moderation in policy, something quite different than mechanical compromise or meeting halfway, but there is moderation in tone. In my view we need more of both.

Update

James Joyner has a fine post in which he puts one of the communications that has been sharply criticised into perspective. In the post, too, he notes a puzzling post by James Fallows which to my eye portrays itself as a critique of pat explanations for violence by people with complicated and irrational motives while suggesting just such a pat explanation in its peroration.

The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week. First place in the Council category was Bookworm Room’s What’s the matter with Mexico?. I suspect this is a question that will be asked with increasing frequency as remittances sent from the United States to Mexico continue to decline and violence in Mexico continues to increase.

First place in the non-Council category was Victor Davis Hanson with Raging Against ‘Them’.

You can see the full results here.

Kevin Drum pooh-poohs one explanation for stagnant middle class income and suggests several others:

As it happens, swelling health care benefits aren’t enough to account for more than a small amount of middle class income stagnation over the past three decades. The arithmetic just doesn’t work out. But Matt is right that the weakest part of my story is coming up with a good causal account of how the top 1% sucked up so much money from the middle classes. But I think it’s a mistake to get overly wonky and look for some kind of geometric proof of how this happened. You’re just never going to get that. You’re never going to be able to point to a specific policy at time X that caused a specific transfer of income share at time Y.

Still, I don’t think that a plausible story of causation is really all that hard. First, take a look at middle class income stagnation. What caused that? Matt already pointed to one cause: monetary policy since the late 70s that’s kept inflation low at the cost of keeping labor markets persistently loose. To that, I’d add several other trends that have marked the past three decades: trade policies that accelerated the decline of U.S. manufacturing; domestic deregulation policies that squeezed workers; stagnation in the minimum wage; immigration policies that reduced wages at the low end; and a 30-year war against labor that devastated unions and reduced the bargaining power of the working class.

much of which I agree with and then continues with something that I don’t agree with at all:

Now, if these policies hadn’t been in place, middle class wages would likely have grown at about the same rate as the overall economy—just as they did in the postwar era. But they didn’t, and that meant that every year the money that would have gone to middle class wage increases instead went somewhere else.

I think that this is highly suspect. It reeks of the “lump of labor fallacy” or something very much like it. I think it’s far more likely that, absent certain policies to which I’d add healthcare policy, the incomes of people in the middle quintiles would have remained stagnant, so would those of people in the top quintile, the incomes of those in the top 1% of income earners would have grown less, and the incomes of the topmost .1% of income earners would have grown just about as fast.

As I see it there are several telling questions in discussing income and income inequality:

1. How do you calculate income?

   In my view it makes a good deal more sense to talk about total compensation rather than just wage income. When you take total compensation into account, I think it reduces the “stagnation” argument considerably and total compensation certainly tells an interesting story about the changes in the lives of the poor, the working poor, the middle income, and those just above middle income. It doesn’t say much at all about why the incomes of the very rich are so high.

   And then there’s the question of changes in what people buy, an even thornier problem.

2. What changes in income have been the consequence of policy?

   Kevin’s remark addresses this to some degree. I think that changes in trade and immigration policy over the period of the last forty years have tended to reduce the income of the lowest income earners (while increasing their buying power) and that changes in technology have reduced the income of middle income earners over the last twenty years. This, too, is the result of policy but policy at another remove.

   I’m more skeptical about unionization than Kevin is—I think that as long as we’re not willing to build a wall around the United States that what’s going on in the rest of the world will leak through to us and you can’t pay unskilled and semi-skilled labor here an ever-rising multiple of what unskilled and semi-skilled labor is paid elsewhere. How does the increasing reliance of organized labor on public sector workers unions fit into Kevin’s narrative?

   Healthcare policy has all but certainly increased the incomes of those working in the healthcare sector and many of those are in the top 1% of income earners. Relatively few are in the top .1% of income earners.

   Monetary, banking, and securities policies have almost certainly helped to increase the income of those in the financial sector and that growth accounts for a substantial proportion of the rising inequality. It also accounts for some proportion of the increased income among the top .1%.

3. Is the increased income of the top .1% of income earners the result of lower income among those in the middle and lower income brackets?

   I’m not convinced of this. I think there’s a good argument that some of the income increases among the top 1% and the income stagnation or decline among those in lower brackets have common causes. But that the former causes the latter? Not so sure.

   I genuinely doubt that Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, or Mark Zuckerberg getting rich resulted in poor people getting poorer. I think they’re rich because they’re prodigies, there are a lot of people, and the economy is huge. How many of those in the top .1% of income earners fit into that category? I have no idea.

4. Is income inequality bad?

   As I’ve said before my ideal society is one in which people are much more equal and freer than they are now. I’m little more concerned about the political influence of the top .1% of income earners than I am about that of the top 1%. Both are disproportionate and I think a lot more of the latter are dependent on rent-seeking.

5. Can anything be done about it?

   In my view this is the really critical question. I have grave doubts that transferring income from the top .1% to the next .9% will actually do much about income inequality or reduce its negative social and political effects to the extent that there are any but that’s what most of the proposals I hear do.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its employment report for December, 2010:

The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.4 percent in December, and nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in leisure and hospitality and in health care but was little changed in other major industries.

Good news, eh? There’s more. The broader U-6 measure fell, too, from 17% to 16.7%.

Riddle me this. How can the U-3 unemployment rate fall sharply, the U-6 unemployment rate fall sharply, the number of long-term unemployed remain essentially the same and the economy only create 100K jobs? Inquiring minds want to know.

I can only speculate that the BLS is jiggering the business birth/death ratio. But I’m open to other ideas.

Update

Tyler Durden explains the figures:

While today’s unemployment number came at a low 9.4%, well below expectations, the one and only reason for this is that the labor force in America has plunged to a fresh 25 year low. Assuming a reversion to the mean in the long-term average participation rate back to 66%, means that the civilian labor force, which in December came at 153,690, a drop of 260,000 from November, is in reality 157.6 million, a delta of 3.91 million currently unaccounted for. Maybe someone can ask Bernanke during his imminent presentation before Congress what happened to the unemployed population, which would have been 18.4 million if this labor force delta was incorporated, resulting in an unemployment rate of 11.7%.

A “company town” is a town that was built by a company and in which all of the town’s businesses, residences, and civic institutions are owned and operated by the company. The classic company town is Pullman, Illinois, pictured at left at its height. Pullman was built, owned, and operated by the company that manufactured Pullman railway cars and for practical purposes everyone who lived in Pullman worked for the company. At the peak of the movement there were thousands of company towns of this sort and 3% of Americans lived in them.

There is another sort of company town, too. A town can be so dominated by a single company or even a single industry that its economy becomes dependent on the company or industry. Gary, Indiana or Pittsburg, Pennsylvania were dominated in that way by the steel industry. The fortunes of these towns have risen and fallen with those of the steel industry. In 1960 Gary’s population was nearly 180,000. Now it’s around 90,000.

The largest and most prominent of this other sort of company town is Detroit, Michigan. Home to GM, Ford, and Chrysler, once the “Big Three” automakers, it was once one of the largest and most prosperous American cities. In 1950 its population was almost that of Chicago; now it’s less than half that and continues to fall. The burned-out shell of a house pictured at right is in one of Detroit’s “ghost town”areas: areas in which nobody lives and which have simply fallen into ruin.

If this report is true, the last quarter of the twentieth century may have seen a new sort of company town emerge:

Not surprisingly, home prices decline sharply in markets that suffer substantial and persistent decreases in population or employment. Such decreases in population and employment trigger declines in the demand for housing, and because people are more mobile than houses, it takes many years for supply and demand to become balanced again and for house prices to return to prior levels. This finding is supported by strong narrative and empirical evidence: home prices decline to a much greater extent when population falls than home prices increase when population grows. Of course, a substantial and persistent decline in housing demand can be driven by factors other than population. If these other factors are not persistently in decline, then house price declines in these areas need not be persistent either. Hence, the key to any forecast of house prices in many markets today depends upon future housing demand in these markets relative to that reached prior to the Great Recession. For those markets in which housing demand seems likely to remain below previous peak levels, recovery in their real estate markets will be long in coming. For example, Stockton, California, which is a key case study in this paper, may become a new type of declining city born of the Great Recession and the housing boom and bust of the 2000s.

What is the primary industry of cities like Stockton, California, Miami, Florida, and Phoenix, Arizona? It may be that residential construction has become their primary industry and, like Detroit or Gary, their fortunes will rise and fall with those of that industry. This is the economic equivalent of the inexplicable celebrity—somebody who is famous for being famous. Growing because they are growing.

I find stories like this one fascinating:

TEHRAN — A team of archaeologists working on Bam riverside in Kerman Province have recently unearthed ruins of a large ancient site, which are believed to belong to a 5000-year-old civilization.

The site was discovered while excavating for a construction project in the Khajeh Askar region near the city of Bam, team director Nader Alidadi-Soleimani told the Persian service of the Mehr News Agency on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, part of the site was damaged during the excavation,” he said.

“Based on the artifacts unearthed there, the site was one of the early places of human habitation in Iran, whose inhabitants had a connection with other civilizations such as the Jiroft civilization,” he explained.

There are reports of inscriptions found at these sites in cuneiform and the proto-Elamite script. Very little is known about the Elamite language—it doesn’t seem to be related to Semitic, Indo-European, or even the Sumerian languages (to which nothing else seems to be related, either). It may be that there’s an entire chapter of human history waiting to be uncovered.

Most people are only marginally aware of it but until about 300 years ago virtually nothing, outside of a few hints in the Hebrew Bible, was known about civilization prior to Greece and Rome. There’s an entertaining book on this subject, named, appropriately enough Civilization Before Greece and Rome. It outlines the story of the deciphering of hieroglypics, cuneiform, and other scripts and a few of the challenges that remain.

In a theme that I return to repeatedly here, we actually know very little about ancient Greece and Rome. Most of the great Greek and Roman literary works, e.g. M. Antoninus’s Meditations, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s The Ascent of Cyrus, are known only from fragments, quotations from them in other works, or a handful of manuscripts copied by Christian and Muslim scholars that date from a millennium or more after their supposed writing.

We know remarkably little about antiquity, indeed, little about the time before the invention of the printing press a mere 600 years ago. Much of what we know is just what people who came much, much later wanted us to know.

There’s an odd little discussion going on over at EconLog over what one’s likely response to attack might be that began, peculiarly, with a post on foreign policy:

My prediction: If someone suddenly tried to kill David, he wouldn’t “defend” himself. He would run away. So would I. So would almost everyone.

My suspicion, based on decades of training and teaching, is that neither of them would do eiither. They would neither fight nor flee: they would freeze, deer in the headlights. I don’t know for sure but I think this response is the result of the conflict between the two instincts.

I also think that the response to deadly threats varies based on physiology, training, and experience. Some are natural fighters; others are natural fleers.

For the many years during which I taught self-defense I advised flight and taught fight, knowing that the former was far more likely to succeed. I think that a little training can give the student enough presence of mind to avoid that moment of indecision and use it more profitably by running away. It takes an enormous amount of training and persistence to learn to fight effectively.

As I’ve mentioned occasionally before, I know, based on experience what my response would be. If I were attacked I would experience a feeling of great tranquility and I would destroy my opponents. That’s exactly what happened when I was jumped by three guys. I broke one’s arm, another’s collar-bone. Then I ran away.

I wonder if the in-flight movie was Fate is the Hunter:

Things are different when you are racing through the air six miles above the ground. Mundane mistakes can become disruptions for hundreds of people, creating news and likely even fodder for comedians.

And so it was for pilots of United Airlines Flight 940 on Monday night. One spilled coffee accidentally on the Boeing 777’s avionics while over Canada en route to Frankfurt from Chicago. When radios went goofy, a pilot put the “No Radio” code (7600) in the transponder but mistakenly entered 7500, which means hijacking or unlawful interference.

When that happens, there’s a lot more than crying over spilled coffee. A Transport Canada report said Canada’s defense department was notified, but that with the help of United’s dispatch staff the flight crew confirmed it to be a communication issue and not a hijacking.

The plane diverted to Toronto. A spokeswoman for Transport Canada told the Associated Press that in addition to communications problems, the plane also had some navigation problems.

The 1964 movie, based on a novel by Ernest Gann, follows the investigation of the crash of a commercial airliner which is ultimately determined to have been caused by spilling coffee into the avionics.