Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

There’s been something of a fuss over Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl declaring that the American literary world was ”too isolated, too insular.” and ”participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

There’s actually some substance to this charge, but the reason we don’t “participate in the big dialogue of literature” is because the American dialogue is so rich. Mostly because of their relative small sizes, very few countries can boast a national literary tradition that even comes close to the US in terms of richness, depth and diversity. A good way of illustrating just how awesome the US is when it comes to literature is going over the great American authors who haven’t won a Nobel.

John Updike

Phillip Roth

Thomas Pynchon

Don DeLillo

JD Salinger

Joyce Carol Oates

Cormac McCarthy

Since the award will probably only go to white males at five-or-so year intervals*, I’d be worried about Roth or Updike ever getting their due. In light of Doris Lessing (!) winning the prize last year, this would be a damn shame. (Thankfully, there are rumors that Salinger could be in the running this year). Of course, the Nobel Prize has hardly consistently rewarded the best. Authors who didn’t win include Nabokov, Borges, Twain, Auden, Arthur Miller, Orwell, Waugh, Henry James and most shamefully, Leo Tolstoy.

A good sleeper pick would be Alice Munro. It would be nice if someone who’s universally considered the English language’s greatest short story writer got some wider recognition

One could put away all the criticism of James Woods approach to fiction, and still find the entire enterprise to be lacking.

 Ned Resnikoff tumbls at this well, so I’ll let him explain:

 Not only is this true, but think about how much fiction—and any form of art, really—would suck if it weren’t true. If there were really some kind of Platonic ideal of the perfect novel that all writers needed to aspire to, then the best fiction would be whatever got closest to that—and that fiction would all look pretty damn similar. As a consumer, I like having my variety. And as a writer, I like the fact that nothing is set in stone, and I get to discover and employ the kind of writing that moves me, and sets me apart from everyone else.

The slightly more cynical way of making this point is that, to echo Theodore Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap. So that means if every young writer read The New Yorker or the London Review of Books and saw that James Wood liked his fiction a certain way, and sought to imitate that form, we would had have a bunch of crappy wannabe Chekhovs and Flauberts. Sure, some of these authors would produce great works, but most of them wouldn’t. So what we should have is as much experimentation as possible. There will always be a massive supply of people – smart, good people – writing fiction, and if critics can remain relatively open-minded about what type of fiction they enjoy or approve of, it may very well let these authors find their niches.

 Let’s imagine that, in Wood’s perfect world, everyone wrote like he would want them to. Let’s even imagine that DeLillo and Pynchon were so taken by Wood’s argument (since I’m a diehard hysterical realist, non-linear plotting isn’t a very big deal) that they decided to write like he wanted them to. Would we, the readers, be better of? Of course not! Since literary genius is a fleeting phen point pretty omenon, critics should be as open to it – in all possible forms. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a huge amount of overlap between, say, Thomas Pynchon and Henry James: they’re both fantastic writers! And their awesomeness is best expressed in the way that they see fit. To put it another way, I think we’ll remember Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, DeLillo, Pynchon and Wolfe much longer than we’ll remember Wood.

see a whole lot of value in catering to what “people” think. Yeah, I sound an aristocratic dickwad, but I basically agree with Bryan Caplan (and Matt Yglesias) that on fiscal and economic issues especially, many people just have the basic concepts and facts wrong.

I could point to polls showing that many think that foreign aid and welfare are large part of our budget, or that most jobs lost in the manufacturing sector are lost due to foreign trade. More generally, there is very little reason to think that just because we all participate in the economy (this is Chris Bowers’ argument), that we all thus know a lot about it. Yglesias:

 Similarly, most people in their personal lives aren’t aware of making any dramatic decisions based on small changes in interest rates. Therefore, they may conclude that small across-the-board changes in interest rates couldn’t possibly have dramatic impact on their lives. And yet, anyone who thinks that is wrong. But to see that that’s wrong, you need to acquire some expertise in the subject.

 In the context of the bailout, I think that a lot of people aren’t supporting it because they don’t know the connection between credit markets drying up and their own personal finances. But ask any economist (or really anyone who thinks about this stuff), and they’ll tell you that, yes, the TED spread and the availability  of credit has a whole lot of importance for just about everyone. Another reason there’s been this populist upsurge against the bailout is that it “costs” 700 Billion dollars. This just isn’t true. Sure, the initial outlay will be 700 billion, and some media organizations would have you think that this was equivalent to appropriating 700 billion to spend somewhere, but it isn’t. Although it’s unlikely that the government would make a profit selling these distressed bank assets later, the total hit to the budget will be much, much less than 700 billion.

 So, when the opposition to this bill is largely based on 1. a misunderstanding of how the economy works and 2. incorrect information about its cost, it’s really hard to say that we’ve had some great, small-d democratic victory in the past two days. 

I’ve often taken the line that the GOP is primarily in the service of enriching already rich people and for jigging the rules so that corproations make as much money as possible. Well, the epic stupidity that was the House rejecting the bailout bill (with the help of inane House Democrats) should prove that even if all the richest people and corporations in the world support a piece of legislation, it’s still within the powers of the GOP congressman to say stupid things like that the bailout would be “a coffin on top ofRonald Reagan’s coffin.” or that it would lead us down “the slippery slope to socialism.”

It’s not like the stupidity was limited to Republicans. Looking for short-term political advantage, the know-nothing Democrats were out in full force. Here’s my favorite, ““Financial crimes have been committed,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio. “Now Congress is being asked to bail out the culprits.’” Because ranting about “financial crimes” is so much more important than shoring up confidence in the financial system, right?

If Congress remains stupidly relacitrant, I guess we’ll see Paulson and Bernanke doing a bunch of piecemeal moves with individual failing banks and insurers. They’ve shown a fair degree of confidence with handling the AIG mess, as well as WaMu going under. Everyone should probably read Daniel Gross’ column, where he argues that government buerecrats have shown much more ability in dealing with the crisis than has the Congress. But these piecemeal solutions won’t get close to addressing the problem of the entire financial system, and Paulson really does need the power and resources to do something big. Whether or not the House realizes this…well that remains to be seen.

Enjoy the ride, everyone!

To dwell on James Wood for a second, another big problem with his White Teeth review (and according to the reviews of How Fiction Works, that too) is his rather narrow, almost arbitrary conception of the purpose of fiction. He seems to either ignore or just dismiss out of hand, any “meta” aspect to these works. For a better idea of what I’m saying, read this passage:

What are these stories evading? One of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibility of novelistic storytelling. This in turn has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character. Stories, after all, are generated by human beings, and it might be said that these recent novels are full of inhuman stories, whereby that phrase is precisely an oxymoron, an impossibility, a wanting it both ways. By and large, these are not stories that could never happen (as, say, a thriller is often something that could never happen); rather, they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” (say, a man levitating) is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility” (say, the possibility that a fundamentalist group in London would continue to call itself kevin). And what above all makes these stories unconvincing is precisely their very profusion, their relatedness. One cult is convincing; three cults are not.

 Novels, after all, turn out to be delicate structures, in which one story judges the viability, the actuality, of another. Yet it is the relatedness of these stories that their writers seem most to cherish, and to propose as an absolute value. An endless web is all they need for meaning. Each of these novels is excessively centripetal. The different stories all intertwine, and double and triple on themselves. Characters are forever seeing connections and links and plots, and paranoid parallels. (There is something essentially paranoid about the belief that everything is connected to everything else.)

 So James Wood thinks that novels should avoid the wild plot contraptions that are an “unconvincing possibility.” If your of the opinion that sympathetic storytelling is the raison d’être of fiction writing, than of course non linear plots involving talking dogs, the mystical properties of Icelandic spar, time-travel or maybe even a major character that happens to be a mechanical duck aren’t going to be all that appealing. But maybe Pynchon (and Delillo, Smith, Wallace etc) are trying to do something else than tell stories populated by lifelike, sympathetic characters. I can’t imagine that Wood doesn’t understand this, but his criticism of the “relatedness” and “connections and links and plots, and paranoid parallels” misses the point of, say, The Crying of Lot 49. 

 I think that there’s critical consensus that the absurd relatedness that marks Lot 49 is actually a comment on the “essentially paranoid” belief that there is an intelligble way to interpret the bewildering events we’re both a part of and witness too. Oedipa, of course, never figures out exactly what’s going on. And there’s no way she could. Pynchon gets our hope up that the auction of Lot 49 will provide some vital clue to unravel the mystery of WASTE, trystero and everything else. Of course, we never figure out what’s actually going on…and that’s kind of the point.

 But I don’t want to quibble with deep plot analysis of Pynchon or anyone else. I merely want to propose that meta-fictional devices, like ridiculous names, talking ducks, complex and oftentimes abtruse plotting and silly coincidences have a serious purpose, and that the authors who use these devices are trying to make some sort of statement besides investigating the “representation of consciousness.” There is a serious argument behind self conscious, meta-fiction that Wood seemingly abhors. It’s not Wood’s argument for fiction, but it’s an argument that has some pretty smart and respected people behind, and yet Wood barely lets us know why anyone would want to write that. And when he does give Smith an extended chance to justify her (and others) work, he really doesn’t engage with the argument very deeply, and only praises Smith where she writes as he would like her too. For a decent justification of meta-fiction, specifically Pynchon’s, take Eric Rauchway’s review of Against the Day.

 Early in Against the Day Pynchon reminds us of this idea and expresses it graphically: “Many people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth… [But t]here is no connection…. You are redeemed not through doing penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen.” The salvation story we might like — we do good and we get rewarded — implies a line whose equation we could plot. But the arbitrary Puritan God robs us of plottable lines. Grace comes when He pleases and at no predictable moment.

 

And if the story of salvation resists such plotting, so do Pynchon’s own stories, which often seek to escape plottable trajectories. V and its sequel, V2 – er, Gravity’s Rainbow – borrowed the idea of a mathematically predictable arc of history from Henry Adams. The plottable curves do murder: the V2’s fly from Germany up to the stratosphere and down to bomb London, just as humanity races up from barbarism to civilization and then, all force (vis) spent, hurtles down at increasing speed to decadence and destruction. If the imposition of order, the reduction of experience to Cartesian coordinates and determined paths, leads to this certain Hell, wouldn’t you prefer uncertainty — even at the cost of forsaking the conventional plot curve of Freitag’s triangle? Pynchon’s characters do, yo-yo-ing back and forth or even apparently dissolving, they avoid any ending.

 So there, that’s an argument for why, say, characterization should get less emphasis and, instead, why authors should focus on dense, interconnected storytelling. But if you read Wood’s much appreciation denunication of the genre, you’d have no idea that there was any such support for hysterical realism. You would think that it was just a way for intelligent, energetic authors to show off…or something.  

 From Mr. Scott (my history teacher junior year) to Professor Smith (my english/history teacher this year), most teachers tell their students to read texts sympathetically, and not necessarily try to argue with them, but instead figure out what the author is trying to say and why they are trying to say it. Maybe because James Wood is such an eminent figure in literary criticism, he can just say that novels have to be his way…or else, but for everyone who isn’t James Wood (who, presumably, his book reviews are written for), we would be interested in what an exciting, talented young author like Zadie Smith is trying to do and why she’s trying to do it.

Sorry about writing yet another post that’s essentially navel gazing with a patina of general relevance, but I just (OK, maybe I didn’t just realize this) realized that many of my favorite writers about culture, literature and the intellectual world are either lapsed Phds or “failed” academics. Stephen Metcalf, for example, was enrolled in two different English PhD programs. Jim Holt, described himself as a failed mathematician, DFW briefly attended Harvard as a philosophy graduate student. I think many of the contributors to Lingua Franca had been enrolled in a PhD program at one time or another.

So, so since I know that (as of now), I want to be someone like Jim Holt or Benjamin Schwarz, should I muck around in a philosophy or literature PhD program for a few years after I graduate from college? I mean, that seems to be the career advancement path that everyone else is following!

I haven’t read How Fiction Works, but I’ve re-read his infamous TNR review of White Teeth, in which he both names and disses my favorite type of fiction – Hysterical Realism – as well as throw in some barbs at just about all my favorite authors (DeLilo, Pynchon, DFW, Tom Wolfe…even Tolstoy).

Wood’s argument, that novelists should be concerned with creating characters full of sublime “lifeness,” characters that one can sympathize with and care about, as opposed to creating ridiculous worlds full of all sorts of technical contrivances, literary flourishes and all matters of absurd plotting and description, is expressed quite eloquently and convicingly. Until you realize that there isn’t a reason why we should approach fiction as Wood does, besides the fact that it’s how James Wood approaches fiction. 

Although anti-foundationalism is on rather contestable ground when it comes to science or philosophy, when it comes to literary criticism, it seems obvious that there isn’t any true ground to stand on. Sure, within the framework of a certain type of novel, we can make distinctions between good and bad. If someone is writing like Hemingway, and can’t actually communicate anything using short, clear sentences, then we can say that writer is screwing up. If someone is trying to write like Pynchon and has none of the flair, bombast or literacy with science, history and math  Pynchon does, we could easily criticise him. But the meta-question of whether or not a Pynchonian novel is better than a Hemingwayean novel (or a Jamesian better than Faulknerian better than Flaubertian etc etc) seems to have no rational or justifiable way to resolve itself.

And even if a very smart guy like James Wood could think of a universally intelligable justification for his favorite type of fiction, as a matter of sociology, we would just say (correctly) that Wood was merely taking his specific taste and then finding a set of reasons why we should all adopt it.

A quick endnote. Everyone should know that my familiarity with literary criticism is embarassingly shallow. For all I know, Northrop Frye (or some other literary critic) resolved these issues decades ago. If anyone with a background in literature wants to chime in and correct me, I’d be more than happy. (hint hint, nudge nudge)

Both Cal and Northwestern are tied for the lead in their respective conference. Allow me to extrapoloate just a little bit: I’ll be in Pasadena for New Year’s!

Oh yeah, and the Chargers and Raiders are tied for second in the AFC East.

OK, I’ll be upfront. I didn’t watch the entire debate, and I slept for about 20 minutes. I found it incredibly boring, and with the exception of a few crazy things McCain said, totally unenlightening. The most exciting part for me was seeing the gaggle of Koreans who live in my dorm boo Obama for portraying Korean manufacturing as a threat to the American worker, and cheering McCain when he said that South Koreans are, on average, three inches taller than their North Korean counterparts. But here were the three moments that made me think that McCain isn’t just a flawed politician with bad ideas, but someone who has a very basic disconnect with the issues the country faces or who just doesn’t care.

1. In the opening section on the economy, and then on government spending, McCain continuously harped on 18 billion dollars of earmarks. Sure, earmarks probably aren’t the best way to spend money (even if they don’t actually increase the budget, they merely redirect other appropriations), but 18 billion dollars pales in comparison to the cost of the Iraq war (approaching 1 trillion dollars), pales in comparison to the 600 300 billion or so in revenue loss that McCain’s tax cuts for the rich would lead to. It’s chump change compared to the 700 billion we’ll have to spend initially on the bail out. The point is, you can do all you want about earmarks and save a small amount of money and prevent some petty corruption. If McCain actually claimed to care about federal spending, he wouldn’t be proposing massive tax cuts, he’d think about military spending in a more holistic way (more on that later) and would actually say something about entitlement reform.

But McCain seems to lack the ability to think about policy in a systemic, big picture way. He instead just sees greed and corruption among those Congressmen who request earmarks. He thinks that if we “know their names” and he whips out his great veto pen, spending will miraculously fall. We merely have to be virtuous. Too bad that government spending is nearly all entitlements and defense. Entitlement spending is mandated by Congress, and defense spending isn’t going to be cut under a McCain administration. So all he can to is pontificate about earmarks, while ignoring the herd of elephants in the room.

2.The second bizarre thing McCain said was proposing a “spending freeze” on all non-discretionary, non defense and non veterans spending. So either McCain is bullshitting (likely) or he’s actually proposing to freeze Pell Grants, Head Start, unemployment benefits and a whole host of government programs that have near universal support among the public. Obama should be pointing this out. Mark Schmitt has more on just how extreme a promise this is. 

The last bizarre thing McCain said was his impassioned rant about cost overruns in defense spending. Surely, this is a real problem that ought to be addressed, but really, a weapons program that is slated to cost 180 million and ends up costing 400 million isn’t that big a deal. Especially compared to the fixed cost of maintaining military bases all over the world, of staying in Iraq (once again, nearly a trillion dollars), or of getting these weapons systems in the first place. If I heard McCain said that we should cancel a weapons program (say, new submarines, drastically cutting back our F-35 and F-22 order), I might have been impressed. But because McCain can’t think about questions of government spending in a big picture way, and he can only focus on small, marginal instances of greed and incompetence, it would be incomprehensible for him to bring up defense spending that actually mattered. This approach would make sense for a senator who’s closely involved with the defense appropriation process, but a president has to set large-scale priorities, and that doesn’t mean mucking around in exactly how much a given weapons project is going over its initial estimate.

We all know that McCain’s ideas (confrontation in foreign affairs, league of democracies, tax cuts for the rich, throwing everyone into the individual market of health care etc etc etc ) are bad, but this debate showed that his very approach to politics and policy is fundamentally flawed and should disqualify him from being president.

There’s a reason that I’m much more interested in Northwestern’s 22-17 over Iowa, putting us at 5-0 for the first time since 1962. For all of Northwestern’s flaws – and they are numerous – they at least treat the game seriously, which is more than I can say about McCain*

*You should notice that I was able to go on a long, impassioned rant about John McCain’s lack or seriousness and fundamental personality flaws without mentioning Sarah Palin. 

Mark Kleiman and Ezra Klein are right to compare the House GOP’s position vis a vis the bailout to the wrangling over comprehensive immigration reform. In both cases, you had the overwhelmingly majority of the Democratic caucus, as well as the Bush administration, in favor of a plan that was incredibly elite friendly (and a pragmatic improvement over the status quo).

But, contrary to Thomas Frank et al, the GOP isn’t just a machine for redistributing wealth upward (though that’s quite important), it’s also a machine for promoting conservative ideolgoy uber alles. If you read the Times account of the late night meeting between the House and Senate leaders, Hank Paulson, Obama, McCain and the President, you’ll read a story of the Democrats and the administration coming to a sensible enough bipartisan agreement that everyone from Krugman to Mankiw agrees is necessary in some form, and then the House GOP leaders torpedoing it.

Boehner and McCain, of course, would say that they didn’t sabotage the deal, they merely put up one that respected conservative principles. But their plan isn’t a real policy solution that anyone interested in actually dealing with the problem at hand would bring up. The basics are that they want to encourage private capital to bail out the banks. But why would anyone want to buy up toxic paper which no one knows the value of? Good question. Their other main gimmick is – wait for it – lower capital gains taxes. At this point, you know that conservative ideology has totally demolished any ability for the house GOP to think in terms of effective policy. That’s because getting rid of capital gains would actually hurt banks trying to sell their shitty assets. They would no longer have the incentive to take their loss on their toxic assets so as to offset the capital gains tax elsewhere. This is a policy that A. makes no sense and B. doesn’t even achieve the ends it purports to be concerned about. 

What we’re seeing, I feel, is the cult members overthrowing the leader for not being extreme enough. Of course, Bush and his economic advisors (and the conservative leadership) have pushed supply side economics for the past 7 (and 25) years. The elites, however, still know that the solution to every problem isn’t necessarily cutting taxes on capital formation. They know that, sometimes, government stimulus and spending is necessary to rescue their friends in the financial industry (and, incidentally, the economy). But, for so long, the conservative elite economic message and the lumpen-ideological message have been the same, that the leaders can no longer control their flock. We have conservative sheep who can only bleat “tax cuts good, government spending bad,” and the shepherds are freaking out. (sorry for the mixed metaphor)

For more on how the House GOP proposal makes no sense, check out Klein.

This great tidbit, more so than any policy plan or hysterics at a late-night meeting, capture how far out to lunch the House GOP is:

According to one GOP lawmaker, some House Republicans are saying privately that they’d rather “let the markets crash” than sign on to a massive bailout.

“For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?” the member asked.

President Bush’s lame duck status, and his heavy hand in dealing with lawmakers in his own party for the last seven-plus years, is also coming back to haunt the White House, as House Republicans grumble that Bush is “trying to tear up the Constitution” by committing the federal government to such a massive intervention in the U.S. financial markets.

Oh yeah, did I mention that John McCain is aligned with these jokers?

Yeah, yeah, I know there’s this massive 700 billion dollar bailout in the work, and that the Treasury plan is shoddily constructed, short on details and would give massive power to an administration that clearly isn’t responsible enough to use it in a productive way. But I’m a college student, a college student who, last night, was lucky enough to get Chicago’s Field Museum to himself (and 2000 other NU freshmen) for “Fling at the Field.” Yes, the dancing was fun and all, but the Museum is awesome! All the fossils! Of Dinosaurs, mammoths, prehistoric fish, sabertooth tigers and giant sloths! Oh yeah, being in college is fun too.

I hardly want to spend all day criticizing Adam Serwer’s Hip-Hop and politics piece, but there’s one assertion that is just glaringly incorrect: that Lil Wayne is “cheerfully apolitical.” The guy sure is cheerful, except for the few rather morbid and glum tracks that pepper TC3, but he’s clearfully one of the most profound political commentators of this, or any, time. Just read, and prepare to be enlightened:

Barack, I guess, but I can’t make a real opinion. I ain’t watching no debates. I just want my people to understand that Hillary and Barack are not running for president–they running to be able to run for president. There’s a Republican party, too–we ain’t about to win, fool! A woman or a black man versus an old white dude? Fcuk no! They gonna be like, This black-ass nigga trying to come in my Oval Office? Fcuuuuuk no.The world about to end in 2012 anyway. ‘Cause the Mayans made calendars, and they stop at 2012. I got encyclopedias on the bus. The world is gonna end as we know it. You can see it already. A planet doesn’t exist: There’s no more Pluto. Planes are flying into buildings–and not just the Twin Towers, but dudes who play baseball are flying planes into buildings. Mosquitoes bite you and you die. And a black man and a woman are running for president!

The only other political commentary that can even compare is DMX’s befuddled reaction to the fact that a man named “Barack Obama” was even running for president.

But aside the substantive claims about whether or not American hegemony is benign compared to Russia’s, it’s still rather hilarious to see carping about Russia establishing bases in areas that A. Historically were part of Russia and B. Have high proportions of pro-Russian citizens. I’ll let you figure out the inconsistency involved.

I hardly want to simply re-rehearse the arguments I made here and here, but I should note that I find a lot to disagree with in Adam Serwer’s TAP piece asking if “hip-hop’s mainstream success hindering its political future?”

I always find it weird when hip-hop is assumed to be an inherently political genre, because it’s a style of music that literally came out of house parties. Sure, the political effects of Mosesian city planning and Reagan-era welfare reforms helped form the milieu (the South Bronx in the late 70s and early 80s) that hip hop emerged from, but that hardly makes it implicitly political. This assumption that hip hop has a “political future” also does a lot to denigrate or dismiss great rappers who are totally apolitical. Just because 2pac occasionally talked about systemic injustices in the criminal justice system (it’s also worth considering that he was a convicted rapist), that doesn’t make him better than Biggie, who was primarily concerned with partying, smoking, getting rich and getting laid. Although people who are insecure about hip-hop’s artistic status would like to present activists like Dead Prez as representative of what the genre is or should be, “Big Poppa” is really the best hip-hop has to offer. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

So, can we all agree that the Bulls (my second favorite NBA team) made the right choice?

Also, expect blogging here to slow. There’s so much to do in college! It’s really cool!

Hey guys, sorry for the radio silence for the past little bit. At first I thought it would merely be the wilds of Northern Minnesota that kept me away from his rather addictive little hobby we call blogging, but then it turned out that the wonders of Wildcat Welcome Week could keep me away from the computer just as much as the backwoods of the Upper Midwest.

I guess some stuff happened in the financial markets while I was gone, which led to my freshmen dean, Layne Fenrick, make a surprisingly well received joke about AIG – I guess all those kids majoring in econ who want to work for investment banks have a sense of humor.

I don’t really have any commentary to add, except to say that I think the fact that the financial sector is going into an embarrassing tailspin hasn’t really seemed to have much effect on the “real economy,” but any effects will probably be  I’d also like to sound a note of caution for those that think Lehman’s collapse spells the end of college students who see their elite educations as a four year training course for IBing. Investment banking still offers incredibly high first year pay for kids who didn’t have to pursue a particularly technical or difficult college career. And, in four years (when I graduate), we could once again have a booming financial sector; hell, Bank of America and JP Morgan are making a killing now taking on these distressed assets. Suffice to say, we should all wait a few months, and probably a few years, before we indentify some confusing balance sheets as a sign of world-historical change.

Oh yeah, and the Wildcats are 3-0. (Ohio State isn’t)

On the heels of Northwestern’s not too impressive victory over Duke, and Cal’s epic stomping of Washington State, I’m heading off to an undisclosed wilderness location for some orientation. So, no blogging till the 16th, at the very earliest.

Until then, Go Raiders!

If I were a bigger deal, I’d have some guest bloggers, but in lieu of that, all I can say is that you should check out Dylan Matthews, Ned Resnikoff, Mike Meginnis, Jamelle Bouie, Steven White, John Cain and Matt Rognlie for all the impetuosity you need. And if you want progressive think-tank funded, multi author impetuosity, head on over to Pushback.

We know from Larry Bartels that inequality tends to go up under Republican presidents, and down during Democratic presidents. If Obama is elected, when can certainly expect some increase in inequality. He’ll raise taxes on the wealthy, and if the Employee Free Choice Act is passed, wages in the middle should go up some. Tack on the traditional Democratic focus on unemployment as opposed to inflation, along with the possibility of minimum wage increases, and some decrease in inequality is certain.

But it will be a modest decrease, and it won’t satisfy those who’s major objection to inequality is that the tippity-top of the income distribution having vastly more money than everyone else is necessarily bad. That’s because there are two different types of income inequality, and your standard Democratic policy solutions, or an increased investment in human capital as suggested by Ed Glaeser, only affects one. Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker wrote a paper explaining these two types of inequality. One type of inequality is “90-10″ inequality. This is the standard, skills based technological change explanation of inequality. Basically, managers got more money and benefited the most from productivity gains, which were unchained from median wages in the late 1970s. There’s also the unbounded increase in the college wage premium, which is no longer cyclical. This is the 90th percentile, and above, running away from everyone else – or, everyone else staying behind, while the 90th percentile’s income inequality shoots up.

But that’s not the entire inequality story, the other is inequality within the top decile. This is the inequality that liberals and progressives find so objectionable. This inequality that isn’t driven so much by technological change, lagging minimum wage, or decreased unionization, but instead by the “superstar effect” (JK Rowling can sell more books than any other author in history) or the institutional failures behind skyrocketing CEO pay. And the only way to address that inequality is massively increasing marginal income rates. 

In an Obama administration, we’ll probably see a bunch of policies that address 90-10 inequality, along with modest tax increases on the rich. But I don’t think we’ll see a decrease in the type of inequality that people really don’t like. Even if median wages go up, they’ll still be far outpaced by wages at the top, which have gone up by 121 percent at the 99th percentile, 236 percent at the 99.9th percentile and 617 percent at the 99.99th percentile. We’ll be living in interesting times, to say the least.

Why can’t the GOP propose this?

John McCain’s plan to get rid of the employer tax benefit and throw people into the individual market.

Government provided/subsidized/mandated catastrophic insurance.

Otherwise, have people be responsible for their own day-to-day health care costs.

Poor people get government subsides for basic care.

OK, I know the answer. That type of health care plan would be proffered if the GOP weren’t the one major party in the industrialized world that didn’t believe in social insurance That type of health care thinking would be promoted by a party that wasn’t downright nihilistic towards health care in the early 1990s. Mark Schmitt has more.

I’m scrambling around getting ready for school and what not, but let me note that Courtney Martin’s TAP article calling for more holisitic sex education, is a classic proposal that wouldn’t last one day in an actual school, with actual teenagers. Here, Martin quotes sociologist Jessica Fields:

“Sex education’s aim need not be limited to reducing rates of adolescent pregnancies, disease, and sexual activity. Rather, the aim would be to create classroom environments in which students and teachers listen to one another out of a commitment to recognizing and contending with sexual desires, power, and inequality. In a critical feminist sex education program, students and teachers would confront and strive to suspend — even momentarily — the sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism inside and outside the classroom.”

In this way, the classroom becomes not a reflection of our larger culture of sexual repression and explosion, but a more honest, more enlightened way of relating to ourselves and our own desires.

Yeeeeeeah. That would totally work. Get a bunch of teenagers, and an awkward, out of touch teacher (they all are) to reflect on “our larger culture of sexual repression” and start to talk about the wonders of female genital stimulation (that’s later in the article).  We can, of course, just ignore the fact that even mentioning these types of proposals would probably doom regular, comprehensive sex ed. Can you imagine anything more horrifying, more confirming of stereotypes about social liberals, to a parent on the fence about real sex or absintence only?

But let’s get back to the substance. The biggest problem with these types of proposals to insert all sorts of progressive values and Frierian pedagogy into education is that they vastly overstate the importance of school to the overall formation of a kid. Kids, at least in my experience, don’t form their political, cultural or moral values at school. They hang out with their friends, go to class, and then after school is done, go and do things they’re actually interested in. Students also have an automatic scepticism of most anything teachers tell them, and something tells  me that said scepticism would be increased if some sex-ed teacher started talking about sex beyond the standard “wrap your shit, take your pills and don’t get pressured into sex” message that constitutes most comprehensive sex-ed Schools have trouble enough teaching very basic things – how many of you remember the quadratic formula or how the periodic table is arranged?  To think that they can turn everyone into some mix of Dan Savage and Judith Butler is just pure utopianism.

I should also point out that teenagers can learn to appreciate sex as not just dangerous and baby-risking all on their own. They really don’t need to be convinced by their teachers on that point.