Month: June 2014

As the World Cup kicks off in Brazil, Douglas Foster considers how the protest movement that emerged in the year leading up to the games has influenced the country’s politics:

[T]he mass anti-government protests that erupted in Brazil last year have stung the nation’s leaders and stunned FIFA officials. The World Cup is getting underway at a time when the country’s long economic boom has given way to a skid, fueling demonstrations against government corruption and shoddy public services. Protest organizers have managed to shift the country’s political discourse, while demanding that the $11 billion-plus budgeted for the games be spent instead on the nation’s highly stressed schools, infrastructure, and health-care systems. In a country where a majority of the populace now opposes the government’s decision to host the competition, a chant has emerged among demonstrators: “There will be no World Cup!” There will be, of course, but Brazilian politics may emerge from it transformed.

Luke O’Brien blames FIFA for much of the World Cup-related repression that Brazilians have come to resent:

FIFA is essentially its own nation-state, one untethered to any particular jurisdiction but powerful enough to impose its governing architecture on actual countries. In South Africa, FIFA demanded that the parliament pass legislation to ensure that nettlesome things like labor regulations didn’t interfere with business. In Brazil, FIFA made the host country ignore its own law prohibiting alcohol sales in stadiums (to prevent rowdies from getting too sauced) so World Cup sponsor Budweiser can push its suds.

Stadium exclusion zones, another tactic from the South Africa playbook, surround the venues. Inside them, only FIFA-approved products can be sold. Dissent is smothered by Big Macs and Adidas apparel. Free speech, also restricted, could be met with something more menacing, especially given the way World Cup protestors in Brazil have been treated so far, which is with rubber bullets and tear gas. When I went down to the famous Maracanã stadium in Rio a week before the first game, I found dozens of body-armor-wearing, black-clad special police waiting to pound the dirt out of any favela punk who dared take a run at the outer perimeter.

Travis Waldron laments that the World Cup “has become so ruinous that it borders on ruining itself”:

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. None of the problems the World Cup has created, made worse, or highlighted in Brazil are necessary to hosting this tournament. None of the problems it has or will create in Russia, Qatar, or future hosts are either. We don’t need 12 shiny new stadiums that only remind us how hard we’re not working to improve the not-so-shiny schools and hospitals and favelas around it. We don’t have to perpetuate corruption, to abuse workers, to relocate families, to hand out special tax breaks, to pretend that these events drive massive economic growth when they don’t.

Drop a ball between two national teams in an adequately safe stadium and let them play, and the part of the World Cup that is fun will still exist.

Part of what has driven the protests is the amount of money Brasilia has spent on the Cup. But Diego von Vacano and Thiago Silva run the numbers and find that it wasn’t really that much, at least when compared to what the government puts into its social welfare programs:

Total investments in the 2014 FIFA World Cup  by the Brazilian government amounts to $11.2 billion. According to official data, these investments were provided by federal, state and municipal governments, as well as private entities. Also, according to public official information, the Brazilian federal government spent $1.76 billion specifically on the construction of stadiums. Now let’s look at social program expenditures in the same period. Between 2010 (the year that the investments on the World Cup and for the construction of stadia began) and the beginning of 2014, the Brazilian federal government invested $363 billion in health and education (the two social sectors that receive the greatest amount of investment by the government).

So, comparing expenditures on the World Cup and investments by the federal government on health and education, we can see that the former represents only 3 percent of the total of the latter two expenditures (the total of all forms social spending is $385.4 billion). Protestors claim that the government is spending too much on stadiums while neglecting health and education. Perhaps, but stadiums are only about 0.5 percent of the total amount invested in these two social sectors in the past four years.

Jon Lee Anderson decries the international criticism of Brazil that has come along with the games as opportunistic and unfair:

It is excruciating to watch this full-glare inquisition. It feels unseemly. Brazil is a big, uneven, still-developing country that, paradoxically, most of us love from afar and romanticize unequivocally most of the time (aaah, Ipanema, Rio, Ronaldinho, Gisele Bündchen, samba!, and so forth). …

This is not Putin’s Russia, where a megalomaniac gangster who has hijacked a state has spent fifty billion dollars for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. This is Brazil, the country everyone celebrated when it won the right to host this World Cup, and the next Olympics, too. This is the Brazil of the great beloved Pelé, and he was there, ecstatically hugging Lula, the bearded, wily left-winger who was President when Brazil was announced as the 2016 site. There were no serious questions, as there have been since Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup, about whether Brazil had bought its bid with bribes to sports officials. Brazil and fútbol are synonymous. When Brazil won, it seemed right to everyone, and it still should.

Previous Dish on Brazil’s World Cup preparations and protests here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Ruth Graham is embarrassed by adults who read YA fiction:

That will sound harsh to these characters’ legions of ardent fans. But even the myriad defenders of YA fiction admit that the enjoyment of reading this stuff has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia. … There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life – that’s the trick of so much great fiction – but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults. When chapter after chapter in Eleanor & Park ends with some version of “He’d never get enough of her,” the reader seems to be expected to swoon. But how can a grown-up, even one happy to be reminded of the shivers of first love, not also roll her eyes?

Dianna Anderson protests:

It’s easy to be cynical about pat endings and the tying up of loose ends if you’re looking at a tiny sample of literature that exhibits those characteristics. But in the years I’ve been studying YA, I’ve learned that the only uniting feature of the genre is the age of the protagonists. There exists futuristic science fiction, dystopian fantasy, romance, stories of death and complexity to rival the heroes of the adult literary world. As it turns out, young adult literature is just as varied as adult genres. Writing it off entirely is like writing off all of popular music because you didn’t like that one Miley Cyrus song.

Hillary Kelly explains why she rereads a YA classic “year after year”:

I suppose nostalgia is a part of it – each time I turn past the title page of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I reimagine myself on the floor beneath the window of my childhood bedroom. But it’s also because to reread Francie’s story is to reread the story of my literary life. It’s a chance to be more kind and generous to my younger self, to remind myself of how deeply the decisions of my childhood have ingrained themselves on my soon-to-be-30 brain. It’s a chance to remember that the complexities of adulthood are just variations on those from childhood.

Julie Beck has a more expansive take on why adults enjoy the genre:

I won’t deny that some of the appeal may lie in reading and remembering what it’s like to be that age, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t read these books to recapture a lost youth. I read them because the stories are good and meaningful to me now. And what, exactly, makes them good and meaningful? One of the great values of literature is its ability to convey experiences different from our own, to let us see inside the heads of characters from different time periods, different countries, different races, classes, and, yes, ages. Every time a grownup reads a YA book, they widen their perspective in important ways.

I don’t mean to delegitimize young adult books’ primary audience by suggesting their only value is to provide adults with a window into teens’ lives, or that the stories are only good if grownups can like them. What I do mean to say is that things made for teenagers are not inherently less worthy of our time, attention, and critical consideration, simply because they’re for and about teens.

Catherine Addington adds another perspective:

One obvious and undersung answer is that adults writing for children bring a cleaner perspective to their work. Sex and violence are present in their full human complexity, with fleeting emotional intensity, rather than in a numbing barrage of obscenity. The familiar social structures of young life, from school to summer camp to family life, provide a familiar backdrop for archetypal stories like first love and first loss. They allow adults to enjoy timeless themes with all of adult literary fiction’s seriousness, but little to none of its cynicism or vulgarity. They remove the obligation of maturity, while revealing the importance of life experience. In short, young-adult fiction does not condescend to its readers. It should be no surprise that it sells.

McArdle argues against Obama’s proposed student-loan policy changes:

It’s not that the horror stories about people with low earnings and huge debts are imaginary – I have not only read those stories, but have also been one of them. However, that group is relatively small. And in order to give them an extra break on their payments, the president and Elizabeth Warren are proposing that we should also give a whole lot of money to folks who don’t really need it. That’s bad public policy; moreover, it’s not particularly progressive public policy.

That said, I do think we should do something to help people who are genuinely stuck with debt that they will never realistically be able to pay. We should end the exemption of student loans from bankruptcy so that anyone who is overwhelmed by debt can go to court and get a genuinely fresh start. The special treatment of student loans is an outrageous bit of self-dealing by the government, which appears to be fine with debt slavery as long as Uncle Sam gets to be the master. It should stop.

Drum counters:

[U]nlike McArdle, I’m persuaded by the aggregate numbers that we have a genuine problem here. We don’t have a problem with college grads buying ever more expensive cars, which is why no one wants to provide auto loan relief. We do have a problem with the cost of college skyrocketing.

The resultingly high aggregate student loan debt is having a noticeable adverse macroeconomic impact (family formation, buying a house, etc.) at a time when we can ill afford it, which makes the case for a temporary refinancing program fairly compelling. More generally, it’s also the case that no society is well served by making income a barrier to higher education. More and more, however, that’s what we’re doing.

Robby Soave’s view:

When federal lawmakers forgives debts – in part or in whole – they reward students who borrowed recklessly. They also incentivize universities to raise tuition prices. College administrators know that they can get away with demanding more money, because students will take out more loans, confident that the government will bail them out if they run into trouble – and the government will stick the taxpayers with the bill if the students aren’t able to pay.

Jordan Weissmann considers a Republican idea we noted yesterday:

Since 1983, Tom Petri, a low-key House GOP congressman from Wisconsin, has advocated an idea that education wonks sometimes call “universal income-based repayment.” It would completely scrap the convoluted system that former students currently rely on to repay their loans. Instead, college debt would work like just tax withholding. A borrower would simply pay a set percentage of her monthly earnings to the government, deducted straight from her paycheck.

Countries including Britain, Australia, and New Zealand already take a similar approach. And, as many educationexperts have agreed, bringing it stateside would likely cure some of the worst symptoms of America’s student loan binge. It would ensure that every single borrower’s payments stayed manageable and virtually eliminate the risk of delinquencies and defaults. Think of it as the financial equivalent of putting up gutter rails in a bowling alley – it’s a foolproof plan to stop borrowers from veering into trouble.

Meanwhile, Adam Ozimek argues that the real problem with higher ed is a lack of transparency about outcomes:

One potential concern is that transparency on outcomes might incentivize colleges to focus on selectivity to inflate their statistics. But even something as simple as reporting income divided by SAT score would incentivize schools to not just let the best students in. Or schools could use a value added type approach that incorporated more measures of demographics, socioeconomic status, and ability to estimate how much schools contribute to learning rather than simply selecting on ability. Overall, if you’re looking for a cause of our higher ed woes, then focus on informational problems, not debt. And if your looking for a policy, focus on transparency. That’s not to say there’s nothing that should be changed about student loans, but this is not the biggest issue here.

Reihan shifts the focus to the college experience itself:

Consider the findings of Paying for the Party, a masterful account of the many ways life at a large Midwestern flagship public university is rigged against students from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. Over the course of five years, the sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton tracked a group of female students at “Midwest University,” a thinly disguised big public flagship school, starting in their freshman year. One of their most striking findings is that standard college advising consistently failed to meet the needs of students from modest backgrounds. Students from affluent backgrounds had extensive social networks at their disposal, which helped them turn degrees in “party majors” like sports communication and broadcasting or interior decorating into jobs in glamorous, or glamorous-sounding, fields. Students who didn’t have parents familiar with the ins and outs of higher education to help them navigate the system found themselves at the mercy of incompetent, indifferent, and overworked advisers who routinely led them astray.

Soccer’s US fan base is growing, especially among young people:

Soccer (in the form of U.S. Major League Soccer) has caught up to Major League Baseball among young sports aficionados—both sports have captured 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds as fans—according to the 2014 ESPN Sports Poll, which tracks interest in major league sports. The rise of soccer coincides with a surprising fall in the popularity of baseball, which had a 25 percent avid interest rate among that same audience just two years ago. (Football and basketball come in higher at 39 and 30 percent respectively, and hockey is the worst bet at just eight percent and falling.)

Andrés Martinez sees this as good news for Americans’ engagement with the world and a sign that our sports chauvinism may be on the wane:

It’s hard to exaggerate how much soccer’s incursion into American life threatens to erode American exceptionalism, not to mention our traditional geographic illiteracy. American kids now routinely wear the jerseys of teams in places like Barcelona and Munich, much like their counterparts in the rest of the world. Soccer offers American sports fans a sense of global, not just national, connectedness.

For most of the 20th century, even when so much of our culture was being adopted by others, Americans were adamant about not reciprocating by adopting the world’s sport. The prevailing culture was suspicious of the game, which at times could seem futile. Imagine going an entire match without scoring! Or, worse, tying! It seemed the duty of patriotic Americans was to avoid soccer, and even ridicule it, as much as it was to refuse measuring in centigrade or meters. We compensated for our sports provincialism by calling the champions of our domestic sports leagues “world champions.”

But all that is changing. With the World Cup in the Americas for the first time in 20 years, the United States will experience this year’s tournament in a big way, and the exciting narratives that spin out of it will help bind young American fans to cheese-eating kids in Normandy, and elsewhere.