The Dish

[Peter Suderman] Susan Jacoby, following up on this Times Online piece, seems to think so. Right now, she says, there is "a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

Jacoby has joined the ranks of a growing cohort I think we should call techno-moralists. They run basically the same game as the moral scolds who shriek every time Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth release new movies, or Rockstar Games puts out another edition of Grand Theft Auto. But instead complaining that culture is being debased by particular imagery, their complaint is that new technologies—particularly the internet—are causing the downfall of Western Civilization.  

We saw this recently with Doris Lessing, for example, who in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech intimated that computers and the internet are rotting our brains. We hear ominous warnings that text-messaging teens are "losing very natural, human, instinctive skills" to a steady stream of  communication via 160-character blips. Thanks to a combination of technology and laziness, American kids, we’re told, are "dumber than dirt." 

But are we really headed for an electropocalypse heralded by whatever’s in this week’s Best Buy flyer? Somehow I doubt it. Text messaging for example, seems to have made kids more comfortable with writing, and some evidence suggests that kids are actually growing more literate. Meanwhile, on the violent imagery front, violent crime amongst youth is down since 1993, when violent video games like Mortal Kombat began appearing. 

Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that it’s all sugar plums and roses. New technologies do cause changes in the way we live, and some of them will probably be at least partially negative. Shorter attention spans might become the norm, but so, I suspect, will greater ability to process larger amounts of discrete information. Memorization will decrease, of course, but ability to link and organize facts will probably increase. As video becomes more dominant, strong writing skills may not be as prevalent, but the ability to communicate in the grammar of film—sounds, images, spoken words—will grow as cheap high quality video cameras become the pens and notepads of the next generation.  

So yes, as new technologies insinuate themselves into more and more lives, there are and will be trade offs, but Jacoby just ignores them. Instead of actually addressing the challenging and complex ways technology is transforming society, she’s chosen simply to be offended—which, as far as I’m concerned, is an anti-intellectual stance if there ever was one.

[Jim Manzi]

Megan McArdle correctly characterizes Hillary Clinton’s proposal to provide mortgage relief by legally prohibiting interest rate resets for years and foreclosures for months as a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.”  The obvious problem with this plan is that, while a pretty sweet deal for the people who get their debt unilaterally renegotiated by the entity that controls the army, it may become very hard to get lenders to enter into future contracts with customers who have marginal credit.  Of course, the government could subsequently address this problem by requiring that any lender who wants to participate in the US mortgage market must make loans on favorable terms to these consumers, and more to the point, voters.  The resulting cross-subsidies, combined with restrictions on exotic products, would inevitably lead to some degree of reregulation of the mortgage industry in the name of fairness and equity.

It seems to me that this proposal is a great example of the kind of ideas that liberals generally, and Clinton and Obama specifically, have been pushing to deal with the many political issues that are really various manifestations of one underlying problem: inequality has been rising steadily rising in the US for the past 30 years.  There are many reasons why inequality started growing in the late 1970s – the oil shocks, the transition to a knowledge-intensive services economy, the dismantling of the traditional family, massive immigration of low-skill workers and so forth – but the Reagan policy of deregulation has interacted with and exacerbated these trends.

The common philosophy underlying the relevant liberal proposals such as mortgage relief is therefore simple: reregulation.  On one level this is sensible, since reregulation can be used to decrease inequality. However, it holds a huge pitfall.  The reason that Reagan embarked on the deregulation process in the first place was that increasing international competition demanded this if the American economy was to continue to succeed.  The objective global conditions that had allowed

America to have it all – rapid growth combined with high equality – had changed for the worse by the late 1970s.  In economic terms, this has gotten much more severe since 1980 due to the economic rise of the Asian heartland.

There is no going back to the successful regulated economy of 1955, but there is also no denying the depth of the problem of inequality.  In an article on this topic in the upcoming National Review, I pose the resulting dilemma this way:

So here we have our current economic situation: we are rich and economically successful, but increasingly unequal.  If we give up the market-based reforms that allow us to prosper, we will lose by eventually allowing international competitors to defeat us; but if we let inequality grow unchecked, we will lose by eventually hollowing out the middle class and threatening social cohesion.  This, not some happy-talk about the end of history, is what “globalization” means for the US. … Seen in this light, the challenge in front of us is clear: how do we continue to increase the market orientation of the American economy, while helping more Americans to participate in it more equally?

[Patrick Appel] He is on vacation this week, which mostly entails his staying at home and sleeping. He will be back on Sunday. Until then, you are stuck with us.

A Japanese Macaque monkey relaxes in the hot spring at the Jigokudani (Hell’s Valley) Monkey Park on February 17, 2008 in Jigokudani, Nagano, Japan. This Macaque troop regularly visits the Jigokudani-Onsen springs to escape the cold, behaviour originating from a female Macaque which ventured into the hot springs to retrieve soybeans in 1963. By Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images.

[Patrick Appel] Paul Lukasiak tries to argue that Clinton actually has the popular vote lead. Tom summarizes Paul’s argument:   

Apparently, if you only count votes up to Super Tuesday, discount every state that had a caucus, only go by the exit polling, and eliminate any voters who weren’t registered Democrats, then Hillary Clinton actually has the popular vote lead. In other news, based on exit polling and early voting from 2004 President Kerry will be running for reelection.

The idea that caucus states don’t count is pretty bewildering, especially when the Clinton campaign is simultaneously arguing that Florida and Michigan voters were disenfranchised. Even if you count Michigan and Florida voters, Obama still has the popular vote.

[Patrick Appel] Within the past few weeks, it has become obvious that the eventual Democratic candidate will attack McCain on economics. The Democrats have picked up where Romney’s attack ads left off. After reading Andrew Ferguson’s article, I don’t feel any better about McCain’s economic platform:

What makes it odd is [McCain’s economics advisors] aren’t like each other at all, at least when it comes to their economic views. A couple of them, if you put them in the same room, would set off an intergalactic explosion like the collision of matter and antimatter.

One adviser, Jack Kemp, is the man who talked Ronald Reagan into embracing supply side economics in the 1970s, which launched the Reagan boom of the 1980s. He’s the world’s bubbliest advocate of tax cuts, dismissing the traditional Republican fixation on balanced budgets as "root canal" economics. Another adviser, Peter Peterson, is root canal economics. He’s a dour Jeremiah who called the Reagan boom a "mad, drunken bash" and thinks steep tax increases on income, gasoline, tobacco, and alcohol, on top of a 5 percent consumption tax, are necessary to put the government’s finances in order. He and Rudman run the Concord Coalition, an advocacy group that regards the federal government’s budget deficit as the country’s foundational economic problem.

[Patrick Appel] I mulled over this sentence by Ryan McMaken most of yesterday:

…war is the biggest of big government programs, and the candidate that opposes it is almost inevitably the de facto small-government candidate.

[Patrick Appel] Sam Harris describes what he sees as the root of the emotion.

Bebek, Istanbul, 5 pm.

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post (emphasis added, and stolen from publius):

“Supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are worried that convoluted delegate rules in Texas could water down the impact of strong support for her among Hispanic voters there, creating a new obstacle for her in the must-win presidential primary contest.

Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state’s unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.

What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa’s heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts in Dallas and Houston — where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support — could yield three or four times as many delegates.

“What it means is, she could win the popular vote and still lose the race for delegates,” Hinojosa said yesterday. “This system does not necessarily represent the opinions of the population, and that is a serious problem.””

When I read this, I dissolved in giggles after the first sentence. It was that part about the Texas delegate selection rules “creating a new obstacle for her” that got me. In what sense are the Texas rules a “new obstacle?” Were they only recently passed? Not as far as I can tell — here, for instance, is a pdf about them from August 2007, which should have given the Clinton campaign ample time to get up to speed. While I was having fun thinking of possible analogies — would I describe the existence of the Pacific Ocean as “creating a new obstacle” for my plan to walk from Baltimore to Beijing? or the fact that five is a prime number as “creating a new obstacle” to my proving that it is a multiple of two? –my co-blogger publius was actually writing the post I might have written, only funnier:

“Good lord, let’s see if I have this right. The Clinton campaign decides to cede every post-Super Tuesday state to Obama under the theory that Texas and Ohio will be strong firewalls. After – after – implementing this Rudy-esque strategy, they “discovered” that the archaic Texas rules will almost certainly result in a split delegate count (at best).

While they were busy “discovering” the rules, however, the Obama campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system, organizing precincts, and making Powerpoints. I know because I went to one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited Mark Penn I suppose. (ed. Maybe foresight is an obsolete macrotrend.)”

Note to self: If I ever run for office and base my campaign on the idea that I am ready to lead from day one, I must remember to actually run an effective campaign.