Why the Battle Won’t End

My first eye exam was administered by the ophthalmologist my father had been seeing for years, old Dr. Alvis. Reminiscent of the 1970s BBC farce, Are You Being Served?‘s Grace Brothers department store with “young Mr. Grace”, a doddering ancient, and “old Mr. Grace” (“old Mr. Grace doesn’t get out much any more”) Alvis and Alvis were father and son ophthalmologists. Dr. Alvis Senior continued to work into his 90s, performing glaucoma tests by hand. A remarkable man.

The eye test consisted of showing me a series of slides and having me identify what I saw: dog, cat, chicken, etc. The final slide was a close-up, much enlarged picture of a mouse which I dutifully and with a certain amount of alarm identified as an elephant, much to Dr. Alvis’s and my mother’s merriment, presumably the desired effect. The point of this story is that perspective is important.

I was depressed by this article in The American Interest by Peter Pomerantsev on the “polarization spiral” in news coverage. The article included some interesting insights or, at least, useful ways of thinking about things, for example:

The very architecture of the internet fosters an environment where it is profitable for news organizations and individual users to take ever more extreme and polarizing positions1—an algorithmic logic that in turn encourages the populist politicians. They, in their turn, create content that mainstream media feels they are obliged to describe…and so the spiral spins on.

This spiral can be clearly seen in action in Italy, where politicians like the Minister of Interior, Matteo Salvini, have learned to dominate the information space.

Why did I find it depressing? Here’s an example of his prescription for breaking the deadly spiral:

Breaking the polarization spiral will require, first and foremost, greater public oversight of the algorithms and social media models that currently encourage extremism. Such regulation is already well on its way in Europe, and public pressure is growing in the United States. It is important that any regulation is focused not on censorship and content “take-downs,” but on encouraging accurate content, high editorial standards, and providing people with a balanced diet of content instead of encasing them in “echo chambers.”

Breaking the polarization spiral will also mean reforming the ad-tech system. As a new white paper by the Global Disinformation Index elaborates, this will require both automated analysis that looks at the metadata of news domains to see whether they show telltale signs of being created in nontransparent ways, as well as a qualitative review of the content and editorial practices of news sites to determine which ones follow journalistic standards around accuracy, transparency, corrections, and reliability.

The reason I find it depressing is that every incentive points in the opposite direction. In Europe the form that “greater public oversight” is taking is towards increasing censorship. Examples of that are easy to find. Viewpoints that are not officially sanctioned are simply banned. That’s one way of dealing with the situation but not one that I find encouraging.

A different but related resolution would be for a single, private viewpoint to dominate the “information space” completely. In the U. S. presently there is a trend towards such a viewpoint and it is one held by, perhaps, 8% of the American people.

The present, uncomfortable equilibrium is between two competing narratives, epitomized by MSNBC on the one hand and Fox News on the other. It reminds me of nothing so much as the trench warfare of World War I.

You can also see the nature of the problem in how every “fact-checking” site has evolved. Although they may begin by actually checking facts there is a tremendous tendency for them to start “fact-checking” opinions, political positions, and wisecracks as though they were assertions of fact.

I believe that the best solution resides in a well-informed public, able on its own to distinguish between fact and politically-motivated fiction but that, too, is a fantasy. But how can you evaluate the factual basis of any report in the absence of trust or some yardstick against which to measure it? Without perspective?

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Your Exercise For the Day

Downwards facing dog.

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Living Together As a Nation

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been listening to old radio programs a lot these days. They provide a tonic for the generally upsetting news of the day. One of the programs included a public service spot from Bill Goodwin, longtime announcer for Burns and Allen on the radio which concluded: “If we can laugh together as a people, we can live together as a nation.”

Consider that in the context of this article at The Atlantic on the decline of the Hollywood comedy:

The decline of the comedy is a trend that has been under way for a while now. Hollywood’s reluctance to make comedies is also explained by declining DVD sales, itself caused by growth in streaming services like Netflix (which are commissioning their own original content, including comedy television).

Still, over the years, comedy figures (like Jerry Lewis, weirdly popular in France) have occasionally been a useful “soft power” foreign policy tool for the U.S. At another time of geopolitical uncertainty, if the world doesn’t think America is funny anymore, could it actually be a problem?

or this from the Hollywood Reporter:

Comedy lovers, not to mention fans of Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, took succor in early June from the promising limited opening of Late Night. The picture, which Amazon Studios acquired at Sundance for a reported $13 million, debuted the weekend of June 7 to a per-screen average of $62,414, second only this year to Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame.

A week later, the picture fizzled when it went wide, earning $5.1 million, or $2,314 per screen (a third of Men in Black: International’s per screen take, itself a disappointment), thereby proving itself the latest in a string of comedy casualties at the box office.

Attributed to many but apparently original to Carol Burnett, “Comedy is tragedy plus time” is appropriate. Is the decline of comedy because everything is so ephemeral these days, present today forgotten tomorrow (unless it’s useful in raking up an old score), or because when you see tragedy as central to your identity nothing can possibly ever be funny?

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Tread Lightly

Many U. S. cities are on tenterhooks today in anticipation of the ICE raids to enforce the deportation of people already on deportation orders. Chicago is one of those cities and the Chicago Tribune reports:

For the second time in less than a month, immigrants and their advocates in Chicago and other major cities are girding for the prospect of a large-scale Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation campaign reportedly set to begin this weekend.

With President Donald Trump hinting that sweeps targeting undocumented families and those with final deportation orders would begin soon — after announcing and then postponing the planned raids last month — activists in Chicago are again mobilizing resistance and advising immigrants of their rights.

On Thursday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot reiterated that Chicago police won’t cooperate with agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the campaign and blasted the president for “fear-mongering” and “making immigrants scapegoats … who are just here to live their life. That’s not who we are or should be as Americans.”

I hope the mayor and officials across the country continue to tread lightly. There can be a very fine line between non-cooperation and obstruction, between protest and lawlessness. The president’s authority to send troops into American cities to quell disturbances was greatly broadened by the Congress in 2006, something that I opposed. The old wording of the Insurrection Act of 1802 was “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy”. The new wording is “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” in addition which could mean just about anything the president decides it means.

Tread lightly.

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Employment and Monopsony Power

At Bloomberg Noah Smith is skeptical about the findings in the CBO report on the effects of a $15/hour minimum wage. Here’s the kernel of his article:

When employers have excessive power, minimum wages cause much fewer job losses, and modest pay increases can actually raise total employment by drawing marginal workers into the labor force. An interesting new paper by economists José Azar, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ioana Marinescu, Bledi Taska, and Till Von Wachter found exactly this sort of effect. The authors concluded that when there are fewer general merchandise stores (think: Wal-Mart) in a particular area, minimum wages tend to cause less unemployment among store workers. In areas with only a very few stores, higher minimum wages actually raise the number of store employees — just as monopsony theory would predict.

This single study isn’t definitive, and needs to be replicated with alternative methodologies. But it suggests that minimum wages could work very differently from how the CBO predicts. The CBO’s analysis relies on the idea that the job loss from minimum wage is proportional to the amount that it would raise earnings in a given area — in places like rural Kansas, where wages are low, this implies that the impact of a federal $15 minimum wage could be ruinous. But since small towns are precisely the kinds of places that are likely to have only a few employers, the negative impact of a higher federal minimum wage might be more muted than the CBO expects.

This seems like a good place to remind people of how the Congressional Budget Office operates. Typically, they receive a request from Congress for an analysis, stating the parameters and constraints of the analysis. We don’t know what the CBO was asked to do but, based on what they did, we can guess. They were asked to provide an analysis of three different minimum wage levels to determine the employment effects of the different scenarios and was probably asked not to consider run-on effects.

I should also point out that retail (“think: Wal-Mart”) is not the right comparison. The hospitality industry, mostly fast food and casual dining, is the right one since that is where most minimum wage employees are employed. Those are not in a monopsony position. They’re in competition with most homes and many grocery stores. As I have pointed out before these establishments operate on very narrow margins. Just a few points of additional costs can make the difference between profit and loss.

I do agree that more study is needed. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Additional, broader studies should be done, focusing on regional and sector impact.

And let’s not lose sight of the underlying problem. The minimum wage is intended as an entry-level wage, mostly paid to people just entering the labor market to enable them to gain experience and go on to a better-paying job. The problems are that we’re not creating enough better-paying jobs, the number of entry-level workers is increasing faster than expected, and adults are trying to support families on what should be a wage for single young people.

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The Age of Fanaticism

Just about every major news story these days reminds me of George Santayana’s remark: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” Sometimes I’m not certain whether today’s fanatics have forgotten their aims so much as that they are afraid that their aims will be revealed.

Just about every story of the day opens with partisan bickering. It’s hard to get a purchase on their merits under the circumstances.

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The Limits of College Debt Forgiveness

Writing at The Hill Peter Morici expresses skepticism about one of the policy proposals that Elizabeth Warren has championed: college debt forgiveness. The piece is hard to excerpt but it’s reasonably short. I urge you to read the whole thing. The bottom line is that college debt forgiveness will improve little other than the balance sheets of the young people who’ve undertaken educational debt.

There are many other reasons to be skeptical including that most of the debt has been undertaken by the children of the prosperous. It would be yet another subsidy for the rich. And what about the young people, many of them poor, who have no educational debt? How fair is to spot kids with well-heeled parents a couple of grand (or a couple of tens of grand) while offering nothing to the half of all young people who do not pursue higher education?

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The Germans Regard George Patton

I found this review at the Hoover Institute of a book about how the Germans regard George S. Patton thought-provoking:

Of the allied world War II generals, George Patton may be considered the most “German.” He had carefully studied the early Blitzkrieg campaigns against Poland and France and shared the conviction of the Wehrmacht commanders that that a war of movement — short, sharp, and furious — was the way to avoid a repetition of the endless slaughter of World War I. “Always take the offensive. Never dig in,” was Patton’s motto. He expressed his aversion to fixed positions in graphic fashion: After having found some slit trenches around a command post in Tunisia meant to protect it from air attacks, he asked the commanding officer, Terry Allen, to show him his, whereupon he promptly urinated into it. “There. Now try to use it.”

It’s not particularly surprising that the Germans have a fairly low opinion of Patton. They think that he was just lucky, unaware of Branch Rickey’s remark about luck. For the last seventy some-odd years the Germans have been trying to figure out how a rabble of mongrel lunkheads managed to prevail against their impeccable, educated, and aristocratic generals who consistently out-maneuvered them and their determined soldiers who routinely out-fought them. There are probably as many opinions as there are people rendering opinions.

The Russians’ opinion is that we didn’t win. We just held their coats while they won the “Great Patriotic War”.

Hollywood’s opinion was that free, clean-cut Yanks, pulling together despite their differences, prevailed over the beastly Huns.

If I’m not mistaken the prevailing view in the United States is that the U. S. economy beat the German economy and American logistics beat German and Japanese logistics at the same time. I think there’s merit to that. The Germans and the Japanese had a similar problem: they needed to keep the United States out of the war. As the Japanese generals recognized the only way to accomplish that was via a master strike. Unfortunately for them, that needed to be followed up by occupying the Hawaiian Islands and that was just beyond their reach. Had they accomplished that the logistical challenges of fighting a war across the Pacific might well have been insurmountable.

The Germans had a similar problem but a better position. Had they been able to defeat the British in short order, the logistical challenges might have deterred the United States. Consequently, there’s a pretty good argument that the British won World War II, not just their military but the whole British people.

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On the Border

Just for the record, I think that migrants held at the border for attempting to enter the country illegally should be maintained in humane conditions. Further, I think that should go without saying. I think that most of the blame for the present situation resides with the Congress, chronically unable to rise to the occasion. Appropriating more money enable the Border Patrol and ICE to manage the unprecedented numbers of families with children coming into the country is a start but it’s just a start.

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The Intrinsic Value Theory of Pricing

The idea that prices reflect the inherent value of something is incredibly tenacious. It’s reflected in attempts to determine the relative values of different jobs that have few if any similarities and it’s being played out right now in the complaints about how the members of the U. S. women’s soccer team are paid. Shouldn’t water, necessary for life, be more valuable than diamonds which aren’t? The idea doesn’t hold water.

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