Month: September 2010

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

 The argument that sweatshops are good is one made in ignorance.  People who believe this tend I fear to define what happens in the world by means of statistics rather than with a variety of tools which might/should include direct, extended experience not simply of the life of someone working in a sweatshop but of her family and community and the local environment.  The negative effects of sweatshops are almost always greater than the seeming growth in individual income.

Think of families without mothers or fathers available because or the need to relocate, to work twelve, fourteen hour days seven days a week. Think of health impacts over time,  of communities where education gets you nowhere Think of the effects of the sweatshops on the previous local means of making a living.  To know about the impact of sweatshops, you need to know of where the profits from the sweatshops are going. 

You need to value more than income statistics: you need to realize that sometimes an income of 9-11% over the national average, or even double, can still be hardly anything; you need to see human lives as needing community, family, connection, and time to partake in them. You need to see the sweatshops as destroying possibilities for creating local and sustainable economies that are good for more than the sweatshop owners and that don't deceive numbers crunchers. You need to NOT be swayed by the sight of rows of docile workers in what seem to be clean factories.  These are like Pullman villages. We need to stop blinding ourselves to the destruction of lives.

You don't need to convince me that the life of a sweatshop worker is bad. I agree that it's terrible work. But opposing sweatshop labor, when the alternatives are even more bleak, makes the situation worse, not better. Yglesias said it well awhile back:

I think it’s wrong to say that all consideration of international labor standards is merely aimed at keeping people stuck on the trash heap, but it’s a valuable reminder about the generally limited ability of just saying “no” to things to accomplish what people want. Part of the reason sweatshops exist and attract laborers is that life on the garbage heap is even worse, as is the life of a third world subsistence farmer. If you want to improve things, you need to actually be expanding the set of feasible options, not just arbitrarily closing down one path.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader named Mark writes:

With regard to your comments on the limits of meritocracy, I agree with much of what you have to say (and I'm saying that as a Harvard Law graduate who used to work at big law firms, so maybe that's a statement against interest).  However, I have to critique what seems to be an apparent assumption of yours, namely that the "Northeast professional elite" runs the country, and therefore we really have to worry about how that elite is created. 
 
I'd agree that the Northeast professional elite runs much of the Northeast (who else would run it?), it doesn't really run the rest of the country.  While Ivy League degrees are helpful things to have, much of the business, artistic and political elite in this country doesn't have degrees from Ivy League schools.  There's no shortage of state school graduates in senior positions at Fortune 500 companies and in the Congress, and Wes Anderson graduated from the University of Texas, after all.
 
There are some professions in which there is a major Ivy League cultural bias, namely investment banking, the professoriate at good law schools and the profession that you are in.  While those are all important professions that have great influence in our society, they don't dominate our society.  No profession or particular group does, despite the pretensions and dreams of some.  Let's not let an intelligent discussion on the limits of meritocracy fall into a version of the sort of anti-Eastern Establishment sort of rhetoric one finds in some elements of the political and cultural right that you have tangled with yourself.

Yes, that's a good point. It's one I tried to make myself back when I began talking about this subject:

In terms of who does more to shape the country and its future, try ranking Leon Panetta, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, an exceptional high school English teacher, David Foster Wallace, Barbara Streisand, Rick Warren, a successful small business man, Lynn Cheney, Haley Barbour, the mayor of Omaha, Nancy Pelosi, Kobe Bryant, Ezra Klein, Bill Keller, Sarah Palin, Chick Hearn, the scientist most responsible for Lipitor, Rush Limbaugh, a federal circuit court judge, the CEO of the biggest employer in Cleveland, a veteran police officer on the streets of Chicago, the Governor of Nevada, Rupert Murdoch, Malcolm Gladwell, Donald Bren and L. Ron Hubbard.

Were there an objectively correct ordering known only by God, what percentage of humans would arrive at it?

Yet here I've been focusing on the Ivy League and other elite colleges!

Insofar as I'm justified in doing so, I think it's because the northeast has been growing in influence lately. Our politics is emphasizing federal solutions that are impinging on the autonomy of the states, most notably with President Bush's awful "No Child Left Behind" and President Obama's health care bill. The growth of California was once financed largely by Bank of America, back when it was founded and headquartered in the Golden State. These days everything in the American economy seems to run through Wall Street, and its mistakes affect us all. Next go 'round, however, I'll be sure to start a discussion about another subset of our diverse elite.

In any case, I'm grateful for this e-mail, because it injects needed perspective into the conversation. I'd also observe that the anti-Eastern establishment rhetoric — both the defensible and absurd variety — are only going to intensify if its political wing persists in asserting more and more control over a diverse continent.

by Chris Bodenner

Jacob Sullum sets his sights on the FDA's case for banning the over-the-counter sale of dextromethorphan, the cough suppressant found in Robitussin. (How would Chris Rock's dad cope?)

by Chris Bodenner

What have you done lately?

by Chris Bodenner

This is the most brilliantly ribald thing I've seen in a while.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Donna Reed in the nightmare portion of "It's a Wonderful Life," be-spectacled, bunned, and timid, seems still to be the exemplar in people's head when they think of a librarian.  And, although we have a country full of college graduates, a librarian is still conceived of as the matronly local public librarian, stamping cards and finding interesting books for tweens.

But librarianship is both more rigorous and less self-important than people think.  My colleagues and I have advanced scholarly degrees (I have a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from NYU, an MA and an M.Phil. in medieval history from here at Columbia, and an MLIS from Rutgers).  We know how to do research better than most faculty, as professors often don't adapt to new methodologies or technology, preferring the tried-and-true (not all, but oh, so very many).  But we are treated as service personnel by the majority of faculty and as punch-lines by those outside academia altogether.

At the same time, we are gregarious and resourceful.  I tend to feel that my bartending experience was as important as my scholarly training: it taught me how to multi-task, to handle difficult people tactfully, and gave me an ethos of customer service.  We are sympathetic, supportive, and often silly (when it works best, as in undergrad orientations).  We are au courant with technological developments (like the porn industry, we are aggressive at adapting new technologies to our own ends).

In other words, we are well-rounded human beings, not figures of fun.  It would be nice if more people realized that.

 

by Conor Friedersdorf

The next iteration of Medal of Honor, a video game, has a multiplayer mode that gamers will play on the Internet, where some people will play as the good guys, and others will play as the Taliban, trying their best to kill allied troops.

Via Jacob Sullum, a reaction from a writer at The New York Times:

If Medal of Honor let you play as the Taliban throughout an entire single-player campaign, then we would have a real controversy on our hands. Imagine the reaction to a game that included a mission where you were cooperating with Al Qaeda during the siege of Tora Bora and had to protect Osama bin Laden while spiriting him to safety.

That is not what is going on here. Medal of Honor allows you to play as the Taliban only during multiplayer matches. In such matches there is no story — and no presumption of success. And there is no sense of character development. The job is to match wits with the other humans on the other end of the Internet and defeat them through coordination, tactics and execution under pressure. The actual identities of the combatants are no more meaningful than the choice of black and white in a chess game.

The rest of the piece is worth reading. It points out that we've been able to play as Germans in some World War II games for years. Furthermore, the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II game sitting atop my X-Box has a disturbing level where you're a covert operative who helps Russian terrorists slaughter an airport full of innocent people, and we're long past the release of Grand Theft Auto and its sequels.

What I'd like to see is a war game where you're forced to play for a level or two as an innocent civilian. Perhaps a little kid trying to restrain your dad from lashing out after American troops inadvertantly hurt your mom during a house to house sweep, or a pregnant woman running to a  bomb shelter as an American air raid begins.  It's one side of war that the average video game player never thinks about, and perhaps the exercise would help people to better understand what it feels like to be on the sidelines in possession of one of the hearts and minds Americans are so desperately trying to win.

by Chris Bodenner

Linguist John McWhorter jumps into the historical record and finds that the ironic, in-group use of "nigger" is nothing new:

The reason one might feel that one has been hearing the black use of the N-word “lately” is because one has heard rap only “lately,” and because only “lately” has there been a regular string of black stand-up comedy shows on television and black comedy films. Before all this, the same stuff was going on, just unrecorded – i.e. in spoken language, always thriving, be it on the streets of Detroit or Kiryas Joel.

He also debunks the idea that Yiddish is dying:

The problem is a notion that a language doesn’t really exist unless it is thriving on the page. But that is, frankly, an illusion due to the invention of print just several centuries ago. There are about 6000 languages in the world, and only about 200 are written in any real way. That is, there are 5800 languages that are only spoken – and yet tell their speakers that the languages they learn on their mommies’ knee are not “real”!