Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I’ve been writing the “Why You Should Care” column for North by Northwestern for about ten months or so. If I may say so, I think the column is pretty good. One problem: not enough Lil Wayne references in the ledes. So, in my latest, which is about how disastrous the return of super-high profitability in the trading sector is, I prominently feature Young Weezy. Exactly how we’ve gone a whole year writing about bailouts without mentioning “Got Money” is really beyond me.

Seems appropriate

Le Duc Tho, Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, Barack Obama. Dark-muslim-commie America haters all.

I really don’t know how to react to Obama winning the Nobel. It’s just too ridiculous. The only people I could have seen predicting this are the Glenn Beck crowd, who would throw that prognostication in there as a part of a ridiculous rant about Obama’s affinity for those socialistic Northern Europeans.

I’ve had two columns for the world’s greatest online publication — North by Northwestern – in the past week. One on net neutrality and one on financial services reform. Check them out.

I haven’t been posting nearly enough. It’s two parts moving in, two parts seeing people I haven’t seen in three months and one part playing Madden ‘10 on the 37 inch flatscreen that came in this morning. I am, however, still twittering like a fiend. So if you need that daily dose of wry, informed and impetuous commentary on current events, check out the feed.

I was going to write a longer post on the usefulness of various Marxist ideas in scholarly practice, but as he is wont to do, Dylan has already done so and made any extra thoughts I might have a bit superfluous.

I would like to add that I think Will is right, in a limited sense, that due to the various cultural prejudices and path dependence in academia, that some Marx influenced ideas are more widespread than the value of the research program would say they deserve (world systems theory, for instance), but that’s a criticism of just about any scholarly approach or program that has staying power, and doesn’t have a ton to do with Marx himself or any of his ideas.

Will Wilkinson says that it would be interesting to debate this proposition:

It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx

Will’s a very smart guy, and naturally, is not exactly predisposed to be a fan of  Marx. But still, this is just silly. Although Rand was writing some 100 years after Marx, if you just look at the academic work influenced by the two, it’s pretty easy to see which lodestar would be more embarrassing. On one side, I present to you much of the British historical profession in the 20th century, including luminaries who, despite occasionally noxious and naive politics, were (and are) great scholars; Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, E.B. Thompson. Not to mention the literary theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists and scholars in just about every field who are deeply indebted to Marx. Carrying the Randian torch, on the other hand are…Leonard Peikoff? Alan Greenspan? Chris Sciabarra?

So when Wilkinson says that “Marxists, neo-Marxists, crypto-Marxists, post-Marxists, etc. have an enduring influence on intellectual fashion,” he seems to dismiss out of hand that the “enduring influence” might be a result of a Marxian scholarly program bearing fruit in all these fields. Now, I’m not saying that the Marxist interpretation or approach to anything is necessarily always correct, or even the best approach, but Marxist and Marxist-derived ideas are certainly useful in a great many scholarly endeavors.  Now, I’m sure that Will believes, in good faith, that “Standard, non-Marxist economic history is not only better history, but equally sweeping,” but surely he can see why others may disagree.

UPDATE This piece by Robert McHenry at the American, comparing Marx and L. Ron Hubbard is also pretty silly.

A big part of blogging, for me at least, is opining on issues that I have a pretty shallow understanding of. By that, I mean, I haven’t done the requisite background reading on all sides to really come up with a conclusion. But, of course, that doesn’t stop me from opining! The entire method kind of sucks when I write a blog post about a book based only an interview with the author, and the author responds. Well, without further adieu, here’s Douglas P. Fry, author of Beyond War, below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anne Applebaum makes a strange argument against global warming treaties:

The truth is that carbon emissions will not be reduced by international bureaucrats, however well-meaning, sitting in a room and signing a piece of paper. Nor will they be reduced by public relations campaigns or by Oscar-winning documentaries. Above all, they will not be reduced by a complex treaty that neither the United Nations nor anyone else can possibly supervise, particularly not a treaty that effectively punishes those countries that abide by it and ignores everyone else. They can be reduced, however, by the efforts of entrepreneurs like Pickens. If he and others can find economically viable ways to produce clean energy, the problem will solve itself without the aid of a single international conference. To put it differently, the first solar-power billionaire will have many, many imitators.

And how, Ms. Applebaum, will the nations of the world provide the incentives for these hypothetical solar power billionaires?  By “slap[ping] higher taxes on fossil fuels in their countries.”

I think we can all agree that it would be nice if every country had a tax on carbon that both lead to decreased emissions and spurred the creation of breakthrough alternative energy technology. But they don’t, and that’s where all the action is.

And although Applebaum says that global warming is a big problem and that she really, really wants a stronger response to it from the world’s government, she seems strangely hostile to any of the methods that advocates use to get publics and governments to adopt their favored polices.  The thing is, those “public relations campaigns” and “Oscar winning documentaries” are how one goes about convincing the  public and policymakers that it’s worth incurring the short term cost of carbon caps and taxes for the long-term benefit of the world not melting down.

Also, the reason people who work on global warming want an international treaty that establishes caps for everyone’s carbon emissions is because many governments don’t see the point of taking a short-term economically negative, politically controversial stand on global warming without some assurances that there will be coordinated global so that their carbon policy won’t be for naught. Ultimately, the reason we have the treaties, the documentaries, and the PR campaigns is to convince policymakers to put caps on carbon, increase the price of carbon and invest in alternative energy — all of which Applebaum seems to support.

I think the real question isn’t whether or not Applebaum’s column makes any sense — it doesn’t — but why she wrote it. After all, she agrees with the mainstream consensus among people conerned about global warming that we need to get the incentives right to spur alternative energy advancements. But because it’s de rigueur for columnists to make a big show of disagreeing with some aspect of any consensus, especially liberal ones, Applebaum ends up sounding very strange.

All day

Any posts that show up were magically written earlier

So, I guess I was too sanguine about the situation in Honduras. Zelaya, stupidly and impulsively in my view, tried to fly to Tegucigalpa, and shockingly, the sitting government didn’t want their deposed president to come back without there having been any negotiations or discussions. But Zelaya supporters wanted their president back, and when the military blocked off the airport, riots and shootings and all that bad stuff ensued:

The attempted return by Mr. Zelaya sparked the first wave of real violence since shortly after the president was deposed last Sunday. Thousands of pro-Zelaya protesters clashed with army troops guarding the Tegucigalpa airport shortly before the former leader’s plane was scheduled to arrive.

Protesters, some wearing bandanas to cover their face, threw rocks at soldiers and tried to break through one of the fences surrounding the runway, TV images showed. Troops responded by firing tear gas into the rowdy crowd. Ambulances turned up soon after, although it was initially unclear if anyone was injured.

I just found out. From about 5:30 on, I wasn’t using my blackberry because it was low on battery. It turns out that this Korean woman tried to tell me at a busstop in Fairfax, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Wow. Mark Sanford and Ayatollah Khamenei must be thrilled.

In all seriousness, this is all quite sad. In fact, the entire Michael Jackson saga from the late 1980s on is really a tragedy. His ability as a performer was really on a different level.

A certain other young blogger and I were talking about how much we adore that cantankerous, racist, homophobic, charming, lovable sui generis nut that is John Derbyshire. I mean, not only did he write a book about the Reimann Hypothesis and appear in Enter the Dragon, but he may have written the greatest paragraph in the history of political commentary:

However shocking the things I am saying here may seem in this long tranquil time, I guarantee that when the first U.S. carrier is sunk by Chinese action, or the first American city is erased by a Chinese ICBM, Chinese nationals, including those who are U.S. Citizens, will be hustled into camps faster than you can say “executive order” and will stay there for the duration, whatever the ACLU– or even the Supreme Court– thinks about it. I hope the camps will not be very uncomfortable, for I shall be there too– the Derbyshires travel as a family. I also hope that I shall be able to maintain sufficient detachment to understand that a responsible U.S. government really has no choice in the matter. (emphasis mine)

Wow. Just Wow.

(Yes, this was written some 9 years ago, but some things are just too noteworthy for timliness to be a concern)

If you’re going to write a non-news, silly, non-falsifiable trend story about teenagers hugging, can you least include the most salient cultural reference?

This isn’t very difficult.

Barack Obama is not a very funny man.

Better start saying your prayers.

Some of my thoughts on nuclear abolition — along with a corny Austin Powers reference — over at North by Northwestern.

Also, check out a review of Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.

Although he wrote this a little bit ago, I recommend that everyone check out Dylan Matthews’ reflections on volunteering at a SEED school in Washington, D.C. His post captures a lot about the education debate, especially how a narrow focus on education per se can obscure how other areas of social policy — namely child poverty and its attendant cultural blocks to achievement — can have a very powerful effect on educational outcomes.

Basically, what Dylan saw were a group of students and teachers and administrators who were all dedicated to boosting achievement for low income youth in a depressed urban area. Those who work at SEED put it in extraordinary hours, and the students who are there, though they are admitted by a lottery, are still from that group of students whose parents signed up from the lottery, meaning that they already have a leg up over the rest of the general population. 

Yet, the results are still unsatisfying. Even though SEED repersents the type of holistic approach that most everyone agrees is necessary for truely disadvantaged youth — meaning that beyond more and better academic instruction, there’s an attempt to actually change their habits, culture, surroundings and outlooks — it still can only achieve so much. That’s because “The kids get there too late for these things to make that big of a difference” and so SEED can’t really manage to totally change the lives of all these kids, and thus has a very high drop out rate. 

So here’s the big social policy problem. SEED, which already selects from a top strata of kids and has an all-encompassing approach to education, isn’t really working. And even if it were, it would suffer from the same problem that every type of model program has — the inability to scale. Quite simply, there are plenty of programs and approaches that can boost the achievement of a small group of disadvantaged students. The Knowledge is Power Program, for example, is considered to be the crown jewel of this model approach, and yet, there’s no evidence that KIPP is at all scaleable to actually educating all the kids in a single large, urban school district, let alone all the disadvantaged youth in the country. 

Clearly, high school is much to late to start the interventions that are necessary to make equality of opportunity a reality in this country. Hell, middle school is probably too late for a large portion of the disadvantaged population. At that point, this stops being an education policy question and turns into a social policy question. And it’s an expensive one.

Countries that have effectively dealt with this problem of child poverty and early childhood education are ones in Scandinavia and Europe that devote a huge portion of their GDP to government spending. I imagine that if we were serious about dealing with educational inequality in this country, we’d probably have to spend even more money on this bundle of social programs because our dysfunction is on a much larger scale and is much more entrenched in entire communities. 

One problem with this approach to educational achievements gaps — to focus on spending more money on social programs — is that you can’t describe it as education funding. That’s because it isn’t really education funding at all. For instance, pumping more money into DC public schools, even if its for something relatively good like paying good teachers more, probably won’t do much to improve educational outcomes. More money for early childhood programs, health care and the like, however, probably would do more. But the way most Americans approach and think about these problems, education is separate from these type of social policy issues. 

So, when Dylan says that the 90 billion for education funding in the stimulus was an encouraging but paltry figure, I have to disagree. I don’t think that pouring 90 billion dollars into existing funding streams and institutions will do all that much. Instead, we need to think more broadly about education and realize that the biggest gains will come from making investments in social policy. Once we see improvement on basic health and early childhood issues, then we can have a discussion about “education” funding. 

PS – I should note that just because addressing child poverty and the like is incredibly important, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pursue other education reforms like a focus on the quality of teachers.

Glenn Thrush at the Politico reports on numbers showing approval ratings for Congress going way up.

Democrats are touting a new Gallup poll that shows congressional approval ratings at their highest point in four years — 39 percent — but Republicans are trying pry behind those numbers to show that they’re mostly driven by Democrats who are finally content, rather than independents or Republicans. The poll shows 57 percent of self identified Democrats in the poll approve of Congress, up just 14 points in a month.

The big jump in Democratic approval of Congress is interesting. One of the weird things about Congressional approval ratings is that after Democrats won back Congress in 2006, they faced very low approval ratings for the duration of the Bush administration. A lot of conservatives harped on this point as a piece of evidence that Bush, Republicans and so on weren’t actually all that unpopular, at least in comparison to the perfidious Reid and Pelosi. But what they were missing — and this was explained very well by Glenn Greenwald a while back — was that Democrats were disapproving of Congress at roughly the same rate that Republicans were.

This was because the Congress wasn’t passing a lot of liberal policy and was doing little to stop the end-all, be-all of unpopular conservative policies: the Iraq war. With Obama elected, Congress can finally pass and implement Democratic policies and so Democratic approval ratings have gone up. With a plan for withdrawal, a massive spending bill that reflects Democratic priorities, pay equity legislation and a huge focus on health care and climate change, Democrats are liking Congress a lot more.

None of this was particularly complicated or hard to predict, and everyone harping on the low approval ratings at a time when Congress wasn’t satisfying anyone (Republicans were hardly getting their policy priorities pushed through between 2006 and 2008) was ignoring exactly why the ratings were so low.