The Dish

Emma Brockes argues that Broadway is “the last bastion of a certain kind of thinking, which is: if it hurts, it must be working”:

For many of us, going to the theater is still bound by notions leftover from school that art is occurring and we’d better knuckle down and enjoy it, or else. If it’s uncomfortable, all the better, and everything is set up to encourage this mindset: making you wait outside the theatre, no matter the weather, until the last possible moment.

Even in the West End, where the seats are as small but the tickets at least cheaper [than in New York], you’re allowed to mill in the foyer long before showtime – and then marshaling you brusquely across the threshold, past the bar where you can drop $20 for a gin and tonic and on to your seat, where, getting up to let others pass, you threaten to pitch forward into oblivion, never to return. (Unless you’re in the expensive seats, where all you suffer is the indignity of a chest or knee bump with the person you’ll be listening to breath for the next two hours.) At the end of the performance, you are chucked out a side-door into an alley by the dumpster. …

The odd thing is that these conditions persist in an age when all forms of entertainment are subject to such fierce competition. As the tech expo, CES, has been demonstrating this week, the sophistication of home entertainment is such that it is a wonder any of us ever leaves the house. Even going to the movies, at $20 a shot, looks increasingly unappealing in the face of new 4S screen technology: “four times sharper than HD,” say the releases, which Netflix among others will be filming in this year and will presumably make reality look like a shabby also-ran. In such a climate, you would think theaters would make an effort to coddle their patrons, but perhaps they know something we don’t.

McArdle wonders about the long-term psychological affects of the financial crisis:

The economy does seem to be easing back into a slightly more normal pattern of jobs and growth (at least, as long as we think that the dismal December jobs report was a fluke, rather than a harbinger of worse to come). But it still faces a big test: Can people who survived the Great Recession shed the fear they acquired during those wretched years? The people who survived the Great Depression, particularly its early years, bore permanent scars. There were labor market scars – then, as now, being out of work for a long time was not good for your long-term earnings prospects. And there were psychological scars. My grandfather used to hide money in the house in case the banks closed, to the point where my grandmother found $10,000 stashed in a teapot she was about to donate to the church jumble sale. (Thank heavens she decided to clean it first!) U.S. household savings rates began to decline just as the last children of the Great Depression began to retire and let the baby boomers take over, and while a lot of factors contributed to that, struggling through the Great Depression may have made those generations more conservative in their financial habits.

A recent study suggests that growing up in a recession has a lasting effect on young people’s belief in a just world:

It turns out that a severe regional recession strikingly alters the attitudes and beliefs of individuals growing up there. Recessions do alter perceptions, especially of people between the ages of 18 and 25. Recession-influenced respondents expressed a stronger preference for government redistribution and tended to believe that success in life was more a matter of luck than hard work; as a result they are also more likely to vote for a Democratic president. Four points are worth noting:

• First, the effects of a severe recession experienced are large when the individual is between the ages of 18 and 25 – the so-called formative age – during which social psychologists think most of social beliefs are formed; the effects are not so strong when the recession is experienced later in life.
• Second, these effects are permanent because attitudes of recession-stricken individuals remain significantly altered many years after the severe recession ends.
• Third, we control for individuals’ endowments such as income, level of education, and ownership of a house that could also have an impact on beliefs. We thus measure the direct effect of a recession on beliefs; this effect could be even bigger if we added also the indirect effect through the personal endowments, which are also affected by a recession.
• Fourth, our estimation represents a lower bound of the effect of a recession on beliefs because our identification strategy relies only on regional shocks implicitly ignoring the effects of nationwide recessions.

That same pattern is found in an analysis of the World Value Survey, which includes data from 37 countries. When we worked with this larger sample of countries, we also found that coming of age in a lousy economic environment breeds the belief that success in life depends more on luck than effort, which in turn leads to more support for social welfare policies.

It’s less lucrative that you might expect:

Generally speaking, investors are interested in checking out a company’s gross profit margin, which is the ratio of its revenue minus cost of goods to its overall revenue. A high gross profit margin suggests the company could be highly profitable as it scales up its production. Over a six-month period, Brandon’s dispensary had an average gross profit margin of 32 percent. That’s not terrible—most grocery stores have gross profit margins around 20 percent—but it’s not great either, and not at all the financial bonanza many people make the legal marijuana business out to be. Starbucks, another company that deals in mind-altering, plant-based substances, regularly has gross profit margins of 57 percent, nearly twice that of Brandon’s dispensary.

When we shared a redacted version of Brandon’s financials with Alexander Ooms, managing partner at ClearCreek Partners, a Denver financial advisory firm, he was circumspect, to say the least. “Since I help companies raise capital, my thought here is, ‘Wow, it’s going to be really hard for any marijuana business to raise institutional equity,’ ” he says. “Can retail marijuana be a solid business? Clearly, yes. Can it be highly profitable? Not sure.”

Meanwhile, Harrison Jacobs looks at how legal weed threatens Washington’s medical marijuana system:

Medical marijuana’s lack of oversight was a prime reason so many voters with no stake in the marijuana debate voted to legalize recreational weed. Under I-502, the Washington Liquor Control Board authorizes licenses for businesses, enforces regulations and collects 25% excise taxes at three separate points: when the producer sells to the processor, when the processor sells to the retailer, and when the retailer sells to the customer.

Tack on state sales taxes and you are looking at nearly a 40% tax rate for recreational marijuana. A regulated, heavily taxed system had voters, politicians, and even potential marijuana investors with dollar signs in their eyes. Medical marijuana, on the other hand, is subject to only the state’s regular sales tax rate, which is just 6.5%.

It’s now clear that it doesn’t make sense to maintain Washington’s loosely medical marijuana business alongside the new, highly taxed recreational system. If people can obtain legal high-quality marijuana at a far cheaper price, users will likely attempt to go to the medical marijuana stores. That could be a lot of lost revenue for Washington state and provide ammunition for legalization’s opponents to call the experiment a bust.

Sullum also covers the issue:

Last summer Mark Kleiman, the UCLA drug policy expert who has advised Washington state’s marijuana regulators, told me “the legal market is going to have a hard time competing with the illegal market, but a particularly hard time competing with the untaxed, unregulated sort-of-legal market.” He was referring to the hundreds of medical marijuana suppliers in Washington, which are not licensed by the state but operate under creative interpretations of a provision allowing patients to create “collective gardens.” Yesterday the state House of Representatives took up the question of how to deal with these competitors. The leading proposal, reflected in a bill considered by the House Health and Wellness Committee, is to ban them. …

What works for patients … does not necessarily work for the state, which wants to maximize tax revenue and head off federal intervention by creating a tightly regulated system aimed at preventing diversion to minors and other states. Although the backers of I-502, Washington’s legalization initiative, assured skeptics that the measure would not change the rules for medical marijuana, it was pretty much inevitable that legislators would once they absorbed the fiscal and political realities created by the new distribution system.

(Photo: Tyler Williams of Blanchester, Ohio selects marijuana strains to purchase at the 3-D Denver Discrete Dispensary in Denver, Colorado. By Theo Stroomer/Getty Images)

Beinart liked Rand Paul’s foreign policy speech:

Paul approvingly quoted the diplomat and scholar George Kennan as distinguishing “between vital and peripheral interests.” That may not seem significant, but it is. For most of American history, U.S. foreign policymakers had a rough idea of which chunks of the globe really mattered to American security. They started with the Monroe Doctrine, the belief that no foreign power should make the Americas a base for operations against the United States. In the 20th century that expanded to include the belief that no single power should be allowed to dominate Western Europe or East Asia, since that power might then threaten American access to key overseas markets. That principle was finally extended to the Middle East on the theory that no adversary should be allowed to threaten America’s access to oil. …

When the Cold War ended, however, the idea of a foreign power dominating Western Europe or East Asia, or creating a beachhead in the Western Hemisphere, suddenly seemed fanciful.

As a result, the language of national interest largely disappeared. It has been replaced by a discussion of foreign “threats” and American “values.” But without a definition of interests, it’s impossible to define what constitutes a threat. And without a definition of interests, supporting American “values” is a limitless pursuit. Americans will never reach a consensus on where exactly our interests lie, but just reintroducing the concept suggests an overdue recognition that because America’s power is finite, its interests must be too. Which is what Paul did on Tuesday night.

Larison responds:

[T]he problem of the last twenty years isn’t that American politicians and policymakers have ceased referring to national interest, but that many of them tend to treat even relatively minor foreign disputes and conflicts as things that threaten “our vital interests” and some go beyond that to pretend that “our vital interests” are at stake wherever our “values” are coming under attack. It isn’t enough to “reintroduce” the phrase national interest to the debate. It is essential that it be defined in a much less expansive, bloated way than it has been for the last twenty years, or else it will continue to be used to justify endless meddling all around the world.