Heading out to case the promise land

The Republican-controlled Committee on House Administration has denied a request to broadcast the testimony of Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke on the health reform law’s mandated coverage of contraceptives at a Democratic Steering and Policy Committee event. The event was organized by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in a bid to allow Fluke a second opportunity to speak on the issue after the young woman was barred from the all-male panel by Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) at last week’s House Oversight and Govenrment Reform Committee hearing. According to Pelosi’s office, this will be the first event in which the House recording studio has not covered an event.

I want to make the point that this consistent with my long thesis that we are returning to an environment where productivity gains do not accrue to unskilled labor because they are imbedded in the brains of the innovators.

At its heart the issue is that Industrialization Really Was Different, and there is no reason to think it will come again.

The reality of this new world is that you cannot simply work hard and make a good living. Nor, should you expect that if you save for your future you can support yourself.

Politico attempts to frame the meme "birth control moms."

You know, like "soccer moms" and "security moms." But it's distractingly oxymoronic: if you use birth control, it's to avoid motherhood.

As the presidential primary race has unfolded over the last few months, curious Americans have angled for a look at the candidates' wallets -and observed that they are bulging. There's Newt Gingrich, with his $7 million fortune and an up to $1 million revolving line of credit at Tiffany. The relentlessly anti-elitist Rick Santorum disclosed last week that he earns roughly $1 million a year. Mitt Romney built an immense $200 million fortune through his "corporate raider" work at Bain Capital; even Ron Paul, who claimed in one debate that he was embarrassed to show his tax forms because he made so much less money than his rivals, is worth as much as $5.2 million

This striking wealth among politicians goes beyond the GOP. One of these four men will face off against the now wealthy Barack Obama, whose book royalties alone ran to $2.5 million in 2008. Beyond the Oval Office, there's Congress, whose members have a median net worth of $913,000, compared with $100,000 for the rest of us, according to a recent New York Times report. (Massachusetts' own John Kerry is one leader of the pack, with a fortune that in 2009 was estimated at $167 million.)

[A] number of new studies suggest that, in certain key ways, people with that much money are not like the rest of us at all. As a mounting body of research is showing, wealth can actually change how we think and behave - and not for the better. Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them. They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble. And they are more likely to defend an unfair status quo. If you think you'd behave differently in their place, meanwhile, you're probably wrong: These aren't just inherited traits, but developed ones. Money, in other words, changes who you are.

( Read More )

fandom_helps

The 2012 election will offer voters a stark choice between right and left alternatives.

While Americans are going to be able to choose between two contrasting ideologies, what if both choices are off the mark? What if the legitimacy of free market capitalism in America is facing fundamental challenges that the candidates and their parties are not addressing?

[Richard] Freeman [labor economist at Harvard]wrote in an email to The Times that increases in inequality “threaten the success of democratic capitalism.” Freeman contends that the:

economic interests of small groups of “crony capitalists” have come to dominate government responses to the financial crisis and ensuing recession. The danger is not an ever-expanding socialist state, per Hayek’s road to serfdom, but of a move to economic feudalism, in which a small set of wealthy masters dominate markets and the state and subvert or outsmart efforts to regulate their behavior or rein them in.

The rich, Freeman argues, will always use their resources to protect their interests. But now, he says, “inequality is off the charts” in the United States, giving the rich unprecedented power to influence political outcomes. This reality was forcefully driven home, Freeman says, in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse when the most culpable banks were able to extort continued control over the decisions of policy makers and legislators.

[Francis] Fukuyama [senior fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy] in an provocatively titled essay — “The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?” — which appeared in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, warns that

the benefits of the most recent waves of technological innovation have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society. This phenomenon helped cause the massive growth of inequality in the United States over the past generation.

Fukuyama’s conclusion is pessimistic:

There are a lot of reasons to think that inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.

While [Lawrence] Summers believes that the free market can be reformed, he provides few specifics, although his doubts are explicit:

Serious questions about the fairness of capitalism are being raised. These are driven by sharp increases in unemployment beyond the business cycle – one in six of American men between 25 and 54 is likely to be out of work even after the economy recovers – combined with dramatic rises in the share of income going to the top 1 percent (and even the top 0.01 percent) of the population and declining social mobility. The problem is real and profound and seems very unlikely to correct itself untended.