Month: May 2014

by Tracy R. Walsh

Amanda Hess takes note of a new meta-analysis indicating that most prejudice is not due to hostility toward others, “but rather simple preferences for people like ourselves”:

In a review of five decades of psychological research, [the study’s authors] found that while most researchers defined prejudice as an expression of hostility, the more pervasive form of bigotry in the United States comes from people who favor, admire, and trust people of their own race, gender, age, religion, or parenting status. Even people who share our birthdays can catch a break. That means that – to take just one example – sexist bias isn’t largely perpetuated by people who hate women. It’s furthered by men who just particularly like other men.

For Hess, the study suggests why discrimination remains such an intractable problem:

We’re not asking the powerful to stop hating; we’re asking them to cede some of their power to others. If the powerful are required to extend their networks to offer jobs to people who aren’t like them, that means that they can’t keep hiring their friends (or people who they feel have the educational pedigree and family background to one day become their friends). … Housing and employment discrimination against minorities isn’t just a case of some people missing out on the opportunities they deserve, but also of white people getting opportunities that they don’t.

In the lead-up to Egypt’s presidential election next week, Max Rodenbeck examines the findings of a recent Pew survey, which puts putative winner Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi’s favorability at 54 percent and shows “declining faith in democracy”:

In the heady days of 2011, 54% favoured “democracy, even with some risk of political instability”, over stable government without full democracy. Those proportions have now reversed, a factor that has clearly played to Mr Sisi’s electoral advantage.

But Egypt’s new leader should take little comfort from other trends. Trust in national institutions, including the army, the media, religious leaders and the courts has slumped to an all-time low; in the case of the military from 88% approval in 2011 to just 56% now. This is an indication that the post-coup-regime’s use of harsh policing and harsher justice has carried a heavy cost in public support. Significantly, some 63% or respondents said the government now “does not respect” personal freedoms, up from 44% under Mr Morsi.

Perhaps most ominously, a solid 72% of respondents say they are dissatisfied with the country’s general direction. That is a higher proportion than in 2010, the year before Egyptians rose up and overthrew Hosni Mubarak, their dictator for three decades.

Richard Wike focuses on what Pew found out about the Muslim Brotherhood:

Back in 2011, just after the revolution, three-quarters of Egyptians had a favorable opinion of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even in the spring of 2013 a solid majority (63 percent) still expressed a positive view. In the new survey, however, just 38 percent give the Brotherhood a positive rating. Still, the fact that roughly four in 10 Egyptians continue to have a favorable opinion of the Islamist organization, which the Egyptian state has declared a terrorist group, means that Sisi will come to office facing significant opposition to his rule.

In some ways, the Brotherhood’s resilience shouldn’t be a surprise: The organization has been around for nearly nine decades and has survived varying levels of repression over time, adapting and transforming itself as the political context changes. Egypt remains a country where many Islamist positions enjoy a great deal of acceptance, providing groups like the Brotherhood an ongoing base of support.

Meanwhile, Eric Trager interviews Sisi’s quixotic challenger Hamdeen Sabahi:

Sabahi, who finished a strong third in the 13-candidate 2012 presidential election, knows that the odds are severely stacked against him. “I think the political atmosphere says that there is a state candidate,” he said, referring to Sisi, during an interview at his Giza-based office in early April. “I think this atmosphere does not give an equal competitive opportunity in this election.” … Yet despite the hopelessness of his relatively small campaign, Sabahi is making one important contribution to Egypt’s political landscape. In an otherwise repressive political environment, he is working to preserve Egyptians’ ability to challenge Sisi’s emerging regime. …

Yet despite the hopelessness of his relatively small campaign, Sabahi is making one important contribution to Egypt’s political landscape. In an otherwise repressive political environment, he is working to preserve Egyptians’ ability to challenge Sisi’s emerging regime. “I am not an idealist who stays at home waiting for this state to be neutral,” he told me. “For this reason, I believe in running for this presidential election so that democracy becomes a right.”

by Jonah Shepp

Reviewing Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed, Elizabeth Kolbert ties Schulte’s exploration of American busyness back to John Maynard Keynes’s famously incorrect prediction that dramatic increases in productivity would lead to less work and more leisure time in the 21st century:

Eighty years after Keynes first composed “Economic Possibilities,” a pair of Italian economists, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, got to chatting about it. How could “a man of Keynes’s intelligence,” they wondered, have been “so right in predicting a future of economic growth and improving living standards” and so wrong about the future of leisure? They decided to pose this question to colleagues in Europe and the United States. Perhaps some of those they asked were women; in any event, all those who responded were men. The result, “Revisiting Keynes” (2008), suggests that Nobel Prize-winning economists, too, are perplexed by “the overwhelm.”

Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime. But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need.

But Derek Thompson pushes back on the notion that Americans are busier than ever:

For much of the essay, this premise survives unchallenged. Obviously, we’re working more than ever, because it feels like we are. Right? Actually, no, we’re not.

As a country, we’re working less than we did in the 1960s and 1980s and considerably less than we did in the agrarian-industrial economy when Keynes foresaw a future of leisure. It’s not until the end of Kolbert’s essay that the reader steals a glimpse of the cold hard statistical truth: Every advanced economy in the world is working considerably fewer hours on average than it used to. …

For many Americans, particularly less-educated men and women, Keynes’ crystal ball has correctly foretold a future of historically high leisure time. But single parents in the U.S. report the most hours worked and severe time shortage in the developed world, and higher-educated men and women are actually working more than they were 50 years, bucking the global trend. Economists call this the “leisure gap,” and it’s a mirror reflection of the income gap. When it comes to leisure, the rich have less, and the poor have more.

He thinks this leisure gap reveals Schulte’s and Kolbert’s biases:

It’s appropriate that both Brigid Schulte and Elizabeth Kolbert are successful working moms, since this category of workers has seen its leisure time fall despite rising incomes. Since 1950, young married women’s work hours have tripled while married men’s hours have declined, according to the Philadelphia Fed. The well-educated rich, married, working mother is overwhelmed. But there are a lot of Americans who are neither well-educated, nor rich, nor working, nor parents. For them, there are probably more pressing concerns than belonging to (in the words of Swedish economist Staffan Linder) a “Harried Leisure Class.”

Previous Dish on Overwhelmed here.

by Jonah Shepp

Earlier this week, Ramesh Ponnuru urged Republicans to embrace alternatives to the minimum wage that he believes would better help low-wage workers and the middle class, such as raising the Earned Income Tax Credit and addressing rising costs of living:

Republicans should attack both ends of the problem. Rising health-insurance premiums are a big reason wages have stagnated. Scaling back the tax break for the most expensive policies, as part of a market-based reform of health care, could help wages rise again. And wages would stretch further if costs were lower. Higher education seems ripe for reforms that make financing easier and create lower-cost alternatives to a traditional four-year degree. Energy costs could be restrained through increased exploration and decreased regulatory mandates. The cost of raising children would fall if the tax code did more to recognize it as an investment in the future.

Chait responds that the Republicans of Ponnuru’s idyll are not the ones who actually sit in Congress:

One problem with this plan to get Republicans to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit is that, as Ezra Klein points out, they’re currently fighting extremely hard to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit. Ponnuru’s column doesn’t mention this highly relevant detail.

What’s more, one of the main reasons the Earned Income Tax Credit exists is to cushion the impact of state taxes, which often force workers on the bottom half of the income spectrum to pay higher rates than the rich. And why are state taxes so regressive? Well, a main reason is that Republicans want it this way. The states that raise the highest proportion of their taxes from the poor are Republican states. The EITC is in large part a way of using the federal tax code to cancel out Republican-led policies of taking money from poor people, so naturally Republicans at the national level oppose it, too.

Ramesh fires back, and Ross Douthat comes to his aid with an argument that Republican tax policy has helped the poor:

If you look at this table, for instance, you’ll see that federal income tax liability for the poorest 10 percent declined pretty steadily from the 1986 tax reform onward — quite often thanks to policy changes that Republicans either accepted or actively endorsed. Or again, if you look at this chart, you’ll see that we cut taxes on low-wage workers three times (relying on the EITC and child tax credits) in the twenty years before the Obama era: first in the ’86 tax reform, under Reagan; then in 1997, in a Clinton-Gingrich deal, and finally in 2001, in the Bush tax cuts. Those were not policies supported by all Republicans and conservatives by any means — hence the internal party debate, which swung in more Randian direction in 2009-2012 — but they were ideas that many Republican leaders embraced, pushed for, and signed into law.

And of course they were accompanied, as in many of today’s reformist proposals, by changes and cuts to existing welfare programs, with the overall goal of changing the incentive structures facing the poor, so that work would become more rewarding and attractive and idleness less so. Reasonable people can disagree about the consequences of these reforms, but there’s a pretty plausible case that this combination of increased take-home pay and lower guaranteed benefits, rather than punishing the poor, tended to help them: At the very least, we seemed to make more progress reducing child poverty from the 1990s onward, as Scott Winship argued earlier this year in Politico, then we did in the years before the EITC/welfare reform/child tax credit combination became federal policy.

Chait remains convinced that “the reformers are massively understating the obstacles before them”:

There are reasons Republicans have fought so hard to claw back subsidies for the least fortunate. Active philosophical opposition to redistribution is one. A general detachment from the poor is another. The unforgiving zero-sum math of budgets, which means a dollar spent on helping a Walmart mom is a dollar in higher taxes or lower defense or politically painful cuts in retirement benefits, is a third. I do think the Republican reformers can nudge their party to a better, or at least less terrible, place. But I don’t think they’re being very straight about it.

by Patrick Appel

On Monday, a Detroit meatpacking company recalled 1.8 million pounds of beef. Susannah Locke conveys how the centralization of the meat industry amplifies the risks of widespread contamination:

Just four companies slaughter 80 percent of cattle in the United States. (The meat-packing company involved in the current recall isn’t one of those big four, however.) And three companies control half of America’s chicken, according to Christopher Leonard’s new book The Meat Racket.

That industry concentration has, in turn, led to more meat being slaughtered and processed in larger, centralized facilities — since it’s more efficient that way. And that, in turn, can make it easier for contamination to spread more widely.

Lindsay Abrams also warns of the disease-spreading potential of modern-day slaughterhouses:

As thousands of cows pass through assembly lines, a single ceiling drip, to take one example, could contaminate large swaths of them in record time, and safety inspectors can have a hard time spotting a problem amid the chaos. Then, of course, there’s the poop: “These animals are all raised on factory farms now,” Leonard explained, “where they’re much more crowded than ever before. And chickens and cows literally live their whole lives standing on beds of manure and feces.” They enter the slaughterhouse already covered in fecal matter, upping the odds of contamination once they’re killed.

It’s not just your mass-produced, factory farmed meat that’s in danger, however. A full quarter of the cows slaughtered in Ranchero’s slaughterhouse, site of the 8.7 million pound recall [in February], came from small, local and sustainable ranchers who sold “niche” products like grass-fed and organic beef. Even mid-sized slaughterhouses are closing their doors, said Leonard, meaning those ranchers didn’t have much of a choice but to rent out space from a large facility that was also processing cattle for the big four meat companies. Once there, those animals, regardless of how responsibly they were raised, became a disease risk as well.