Month: February 2013

Contra Barro, Noah Millman believes that raising the minimum wage is superior to increasing the EITC. Among other arguments:

[A] hike in the minimum wage creates incentives to improve productivity, while a hike in the EITC has the opposite effect. A hike in the EITC makes it more possible for employees to continue to work, and survive, at very low wages. Because of the low wage, the employer has little incentive to invest in the worker – indeed, any investment is likely to “pay off” by seeing the worker leave for a higher-paying job. By contrast, a hike in the minimum wage creates a dilemma for employers: either they need to get more value out of their employee, or their profits will decline. That creates an incentive to invest in the employee, in order to derive value that justifies the higher wage. And, in fact, there’s empirical evidence that hikes in the minimum wage can reduce turnover and drive productivity improvements at the bottom of the wage scale.

Despite the “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture in the NFL, there are some players who have proven to be outspoken pro-gay advocates. Chuck Culpepper, who describes himself as “that exotic creature, a gay male sportswriter,” recalls his interview with recent Super Bowl champion Brendon Ayanbadejo:

You don’t know me,” I said, and he grinned at that, “but you have done a lot for me,” and his eyes told me he knew what I meant. “And I just want to tell you that I am so grateful. You are a good man.” … As we let go of our handshake, he said simply and unemotionally, “It’s the right thing to do, plain and simple.”

Meanwhile, Amanda Terkel reports on progress in the NBA and the growth of Athlete Ally:

Denver Nuggets star Kenneth Faried has become the first NBA player to join an organization devoted to fighting homophobia in sports, and said he hopes his involvement will raise awareness of gay rights in professional basketball. Equal rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community is close to the heart of Faried, nicknamed the “Manimal” for his fierceness on the court. The 23-year-old forward was raised in New Jersey by two mothers, who married in 2007. Faried recently appeared with his mothers in a video for the advocacy group OneColorado, to encourage Colorado to legalize civil unions.

A reader writes:

Your post is right to point out one source of crappy writing. Many academics are guilty as charged. But you misrepresent the central point Peter Elbow made: the good reason why academic writing often is not clear and straight to the point.  As any academic worth his or her salt will tell you, you’ve committed the cardinal sin of quoting out of context in a way that violates the author’s point to make your own.

The circumlocutions of bad academic writing come “from a valuable habit of mind,” Elbow suggests.

It’s the habit of always hearing and considering a different idea or conflicting view while engaged in saying anything. Too many things seem to go on at once in our minds; we live with constant interruptions and mental invasions as we speak. We are trained as academics to look for exceptions, never to accept one idea or point of view or formulation without looking for contradictions or counter examples or opposing ideas. Yet this habit gets so internalized that we often don’t quite realize we are doing it; we just “talk normally” — but this normal is fractured discourse to listeners.

That said, while this “valuable habit of mind” helps explain bad academic writing, it is no excuse.  Scholars should learn to write and speak with greater clarity, especially when they are trying to explain the complexity of an issue or assertion. Beyond Elbow’s explanation, two things explain why academics often are such poor writers, especially when compared to books published by presses such as Knopf.

First, academics are not trained to write well at the graduate level, any more than undergraduates are trained well at the undergraduate level.  The focus of grad training is, as in the past, on research and analysis.  Writing is an afterthought.

Second, people who publish with trade presses, and the better textbook presses, have their work edited line by line, not just for its content but for clarity and elegance of expression. In contrast, academic presses typically are concerned with content and copy-editing.  They don’t have the budget for line-by-line editing for clarity and elegance.  My own experience working with a small textbook company confirms this, where the owner and head editor ripped my writing apart and helped me put it together, letting my voice come through better than it ever had before.  I now co-edit a series for that company, doing the same to other authors.  Some of the author’s I’ve worked with have said that they now feel lost at sea when working with academic presses that take a hands off approach.  I feel the same way.

I don’t excuse bad academic writing; it is, in the end, the author’s responsibility.  And I do think that scholars should focus more attention on clear speaking and writing, with all the discipline and practiced needed to become clear, if not elegant in their communicating.  Students and readers would benefit as would the scholars themselves. Clarity of expression is, in my view, closely related to clarity of thinking.  But the best writing and thinking happens when people with complimentary skills and insights work together, whether in clarifying ideas or communicating effectively.  One is less likely to writing a bad sentence … or quote sentences badly out of context.

Seth Masket wonders why campaigns waste so much money:

Why did a sophisticated, data-driven, academically informed campaign like Obama-Biden ’12 do things that didn’t matter? Why did it, for example, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements during the summer of 2012 when any meager effect those ads might have had was almost assuredly gone within a few days?

Among his answers:

[I]t’s hard to imagine a campaign manager who is completely convinced by academic studies that a given campaign tactic is completely useless and is willing to bet his or her income and reputation on it. We’ll probably be seeing a lot of heavy investments in ineffective campaign methods for some time to come.

Today on the Dish, Andrew stood in awe of the ongoing radicalization of Gingrich-ified GOP and evoked Henry Fairlie’s words on the “America of fear” to put a name to the madness. He returned to the case of Marcial Maciel as a critical indictment of the Vatican’s degradation and echoed Jay Rockefeller’s condemnation of America’s black sites-torture program. Later, Andrew checked in on the struggling case against marriage equality, looked up the history of the ❤, and delivered a list of thank yous to the people who made the new Dish transition possible.

In political coverage, Weigel sized up the Republicans’ Hagel hysteria, Larison scratched his head, Kaplan chided the Senate Armed Services Committee, and readers offered thoughts on the whole mess here. We continued to analyze the president’s pre-K proposition, Josh Barro proposed a better but unlikely substitute for boosting the minimum wage, and Tried to parse new signs of easing health care costs. Readers sounded off on Andrew’s aversion to ribbons-for-a-cause, Rabbi David Novak recalled the time the Pope came across ACT-UP, and the Tax Policy Center let us tally up the benefits of marriage. Later we debated whether Rubio is a rising star or mere placeholder as Wickman wondered if it’s possible to keep nuke tests on the DL.

In Valentine’s Day coverage, Liza Hix served up a host of spiteful V-day cards, Natasha Vargas-Cooper discovered the “demonic power of sex,” and we casually attempted to nail the meaning of love. Freddie asked for a subtler rom-com formula while Josh Freedman dumped his girl by the numbers. Elswhere, Daniel Estrin followed an Israeli matrimonial detective around Eastern Europe, as Natasha Lennard revealed the pain of proving it to the feds.

After we paged through the poetry of Robert Graves and James Merrill for the occasion, readers recoiled at the ranking of poets in general. After Katie Boo divulged her pleasure reading, readers offered more thoughts on the show COPS, a genre of its own. Cass Sunstein introduced some social mores to combat obesity, Brodie Smith breezed through the MHB, and we glanced out at West Hollywood for the VFYW.

–B.J.

Natasha Lennard draws a distinction between a “green card marriage” and a “marriage green card” while commenting on the absurdity of proving “true love” to a federal agent:

Proof of love when it comes to green cards is something both specific and ephemeral. The idea is to show, as our immigration lawyer explained, not only that you love each other and want to be together in this country, but that you would have gotten married anyway. It’s an important hypothetical, which technically gives the government insurmountable leverage. Proving what you would have done anyway is impossible, and this is the catch. …

When amassing evidence of love for the USCIS, a couple essentially aims for a facsimile of doing what people who get married anyway do — which, going by government guidelines, refers to anachronistic, income-stable, middle-class American Dream aspirants. Such people barely exist among all-American couples, let alone green card hopefuls, but the simulation persists between the lines of USCIS guidelines for proof.

Ellen McCarthy tells one couple’s story:

Experts say it’s difficult to track the number of couples with intellectual impairments, because they often enter into committed relationships without getting married. In many instances, a legal marriage could interfere with Social Security or health-care benefits. But the intellectually impaired and their advocates say it should surprise no one that they often possess an abiding desire to find a partner in life.