I feel I’m taking the standard liberal line when I say that I’m quite sad for Jesse Helms’ family about his passing, but I also thought the day he left the Senate was one of the happier days of my poliitcal life. He was, unquestionably, the most sucessful openly racist politician in a time when blatant racism was supposed to be a disqualifer from participation in public life. Not only did he hold bigoted views towards black people, he also was responsible for the HIV ban, had an enduring hate for multilateral institutions and a certain fondness for reactionary right-wing governments abroad. He was, in short, the apothoseosis of everything wrong about Republicans from 1964 onwward.

But he was also a relic. In the past few years, there’s been a flourishing of commentary among liberals about how Republicans used white racism (or resentment, if you want to be nicer about it) to maintain political dominance from 1968 to 1992. Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal and, to a lesser extent, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, are good examples of this trend. The weird part about this commentary is that it comes as the very same time that mainy powerful Republicans are openly trying to overcome this legacy.

In 2000, Bush became the first Republican to win the White House since Eisenhower who didn’t rely on some implicit fear of black people/crime/urban disorder to win support. He didn’t give any speeches in Philadelphia, MIssissippi, ran no Willie Horton ads and even made a point of reaching out to black and Hispanic voters. Ken Mehlman even made a public apology to african americans for the GOP legacy on race. Karl Rove had a grand political strategy that involved shaving off some blacks and lots of Latinos from the Democratic coalition. Of course, by 2004, there was plenty of fear-mongering as well as reliance on homophobia to whip up votes, but it would be dishonest to ignore the progress the GOP made since 2000. This was also the period when open racism (against black people) finally became a disqualifier for being a powerful Republican. Trent Lott was forced out of his minority leadership, while Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms both retired.

So why are so many mainstream Republican and conservative figures and organizations rushing to defend and praise Helms? The core of the Republicans agenda these days (terrorism and social issues) isn’t the same mix (crime, urban disorder, states rights) that invited a reaching out to  anti-black racists. And while I agree with Mark Schmitt that Republicans are banking on a certain type of white/”American” identity politics these days, it’s still markedly different from the subtle and sometimes not so subtle race baiting of Nixon, Reagan, Helms et al. Part of it is quite easy to explain: you simply don’t let your opponents define your political movement in the worst possible terms. But still, Jesse Helms is not very relevant to what the GOP is doing today, and if the conservative movement ever wants to shake its reputation for racism, a full throated denunciation of the most openly racist Republican of the late 20th century would be a good place to start.

PS - This would be a good oppurtunity to link to David Weigel’s excellent essay on Helms. The crucial point Weigel makes is that Helms wasn’t a very effective politician - North Carolinians didn’t like him for bringing home pork or any traditional legislative achievements, they liked him because he hated liberals and liberals hated him. He really was the purest form of conservative resentment that made it into real politics.

Montenegro is a weird little country. Not only is it the second newest country in the world, it also seems to have next to no national indentity. They speak Serbian, write in Cyrillic, put the Austro Hungarian eagle on everything, and use the euro. Considering that you can get around the Balkans speaking variations of Serbian, it more and more seems like Tito had the right idea by keeping national movements down and just calling the whole region Yugoslavia. Of course, the ethnic and national balkanization was the result of horrible civil wars and ethnic cleansing, which were themselves the inevitable result of keeping an unwieldly mutli-ethnic, multinational country together, but it’s pretty easy to see that much of the subsequent division has been rather arbitrary.

But despite its political weirdness, Kotor is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited It sits on an inlet from the Adriatic and is on the base of incredibly steep hills that go straight into the water. The water is, of course, clear and warm and delightful to swim in. The old city itself is immensly charming, but isn’t really all that different from Dubrovnik or any other old port on the Adriatic.

On a non travel related note, I should use Stanley FIsh’s Times piece on Heller and intentionalism to say just how much I love Stanley Fish. Not only does he address a large number of topics in a generally interesting, erudite and heterodox manner, he’s a great example of a public intellectual whose speciality is in the Humanities. As many have commented, one great difference in the public intellectual culture of today as opposed to the hey-day of New York in the 1950s is that today’s public intellectuals tend to be from the social sciences, especially economics. So instead of Irving Howe or Lionel Trilling commenting on culture, we have Tyler Cowen and Steven Levitt.

This change isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s certainly refreshing to see someone whose background is in Milton comment on the affiars of the today. This is especially nice when Fish comments on legal matters. Legal debates, especially constitutional ones, often tend to revolve around questions that those with a literary mind can best answer - would you trust an economist to illuminate the issues surrounding intentionalism? Of course, the law has been ground zero for the domination of economists and social sciences. What is law and economics - or even legal realism and pragmatism - rather than a “de-humanitiesizing” of legal scholarship and theory? Both schools are, of course, quite valuable, but there is a need for balance in the popular and academic discussions of the law.

And while we’re on the topic of literature, I have some quick notes from the reading I’ve been doing.

One - Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated  is to the Holocaust what Beloved is to Slavery. Both books skirt around long, in-depth discussions of what they’re nominally “about” and instead use the form of the novel and a variety of postmodern tricks and techniques to evoke the horror of their respective subjects instead of just describing them. They also both have something to say about memory, though Beloved more so than Everything is Illuminated. One major difference is that Everything is Illuminated is hilarious and quite readable; while Beloved is super serious and often ponderous.

Two - Are their novels that are, at their core, optimistic about modernity? Or any works of art, for that matter? Even books that are enthralled with capitalism - the works of Ayn Rand comes to mind - criticize real, exisiting modrn societies for being weak and collectivist. Having just read White Noise and Brideshead Revistited, I can’t help but feel dissapointed that the smartest and best novelists - Pynchon, DeLillo, Waugh, hell, even Homer is ambivalent about technology and modernity - have an overall message that seems just wrong. No matter how much I love the humor and occasionally trenchant cultural analysis of White Noise, I want to scream, “But what about the fact that fewer people are in poverty than ever! Interestate war is fast becoming a thing of the past! People are happier! The existence of consumer culture means that humanity has broken free for the Malthusian trap that has ensnared it for 99% of our history!” Much the same could be said to Pynchon. And to Waugh, shouldn’t we all note that aristocracy…umm..sucks?

Of course, it is the role of the novelists to criticize, and they are hardly obligated to propose an alternative model for society. I could read the Economist for my optimism about the long term trends of history, and then turn to Pynchon and DeLillo for a reminder of how these trends aren’t all good. But reading postmodern novels is a whole lot more fun than reading the Economist. So here’s my question to any remaining readers - are their good novels that are ultimately optimistic about the state of the modern world?   

I guess my last note is to encourage yall to read Dylan Mathews Richard Rorty inspired ruminations of the Fourth of July. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is actually responsible for me proudly indentifying as an American without being constantly worried about the ugly, exclusionistic underside of nationalism. It’s one of the few political books I’ve read that has a. actually changed the way I view the world and b. would recomend to everyone who identifies as anything close to left-of-center.

That sounds like the chapter of a Robert Kaplan book, and it is appropriate, seeing that there are still bullet holes all over the buildings in the main city square, not to mention land mines and bombed out buildings that litter the beautiful countryside. Speaking of which, Bosnia is a strikingly beautiful country and Sarojevo is really its crown jewel. It is really generic to marvel at the catholic churches, orthodox temples, mosques and synagogues that all peacefully coexist, but considering that this is a city where world war I started and was under siege for almost three years, it is pretty amazing. And since I am morbidly jealous of all the journalists who got their starts reporting from Bosnia (Chris Hedges, Samantha Power, Robert Kaplan, David Rieff), we all paid a visit to the Holiday Inn where they all lived and snipers ally, a block that was constantly littered with Serbian gunfire. Oh yeah, the food is delicious, the beer is really cheap and the women are beautiful.

Speaking of which, if you ever find yourself in the balkans, go to Belgrade. Sure, it was bombed by the USA less than ten years ago, but that has not stopped them from having the best party scene of any European city we have visited. The clubs get going at around 1:30, break up around sunrise and are absolutely filled with beautiful women. Oh yeah, they are on barges. I guess it is better we are in Bosnia, a country whose suffering we merely ignored for a really long time, for the fourth, rather than a county whose capital we bombed. Of course, Pristina would have been the best, but there does not seem to be anything to do there…

Oh yeah, Obama was really good to come out in full support for government funding of religious social services. This is one of those essentially meaningless issues that Democrats should seize upon for political positioning purposes, and Obama was smart to do so. Now, if he could come out for gay marriage while at the same time proposing a marriage initiative on a larger scale than the small bore Bush programs, I would be incredibly happy.

Greetings from Budapest! I dont have a ton of time, and please excuse the poor typing, because hungarian keyboards are quite strange.

Bratislava - It’s amazing that so many beautiful women can live in a city that is mostly none as being the but of jokes about soviet-era shitholes. Also, there was a poster in our hostel that said “Slovakia:Part of Europe Worth Seeing.” In all seriousness, it has a beautiful old castle, weird looking “modern” Soviet bridges and…well, beautiful women. Great for a day.

Vienna - We were there for the euro 08 final, and luckily, we decided to root for Spain. So, we got decked out in spanish flags and scarves and dance and sung in the streets with thousands of drunken, pleasantly roudy spainards and Germans. Once the game ended, it was absolute pandemonium. The germans and local vienesse joined in with the Spanish revelers and drunkenly danced the night away in St. Stephen’s Square. Oh yeah, the hofburg was super cool, as were all the Klimt paintings.

Budapest - Best city so far. Kinda like Prague, but less cute and a bit more spread out and bustling. The baths are awesome, and the “house of terror” - a museum commerating the victims of communist rule that’s housed in the old hungarian secret police building is one of the most sobering, shocking and intensly political museums i’ve ever been to. I’d say that it, along with just a general tour of eastern europe is a must for American liberals who thought that anti-communist had gone too far in the cold war. Even though hawkish conservative policies probably didnát do much to liberate the hundreds of millions who lived in soviet prison states or in the Eastern bloc, it1s certainly true that soviet communism was as profoundly evil (if not more so) than german nazism. Hungary was not liberated in 1945, it was instead embarking on 45 years of the worst possible oppression. I’ll have more coherent thoughts on this later. Oh yeah, gorgeous women abound in budapest as well.

Well, next is Belgrade. Yep, Belgrade. Weren’t there violent anti-american riots there not too long ago.

PS - David Brooks column on Grand New Party is notable for mentionig quite a few people who are my g chat friends or at least occasional email correspondents. Kinda weird.

Prague is a tourist city, especially the central area where most of the night life is. As we pubcrawled, we met up with some Spanish guys who were sporting Spanish flags and scarves. We ran into some Germans, and instead of some sort of brawl, both sides merely jumped around (together) and sang their respective team songs. Something tells me that in the US, when inebriated fans encountered eachother, the resulting incident would be less lightheareted. Maybe I’m blinded by the fact that the Oakland Raiders are my home team, but there was a distinctly European flavor to the whole interaction. Of course, if the final featured more traditioanlly belligerent soccer-nations (England, Italy), it could have easily been much different.

I guess we’ll see if the lack of violence will be able to survive the final in Vienna. It should be fun either way.

Prague is a wonderful city. It’s full of historical sites, beautiful young people from all over the world and cheap, delicious beer, To get all around this magical place, Prague has quite the cheap, efficient and useful metro system. My friends and I would go all over the city on the subway, and we realized something queer. No one seemed to buy passes or, if they had, they never seemed to scan them. So we figured that we could get away with only buying the cheapest passes and then pleading confusion and stupidity on the off chance that someone request to see our tickets. So we’re waiting to get on our train, having missed our stop by one, when two transit cops request to see our tickets. We dutifully show them our expired, invalid tickets and hand over our identification. They have the gleam in their eyes like they got us. They explain that our ticket is bad, and then request that we pay the 700 Czech Kroner (roughly $50) fine “on the spot.” As we all rummage around for the appropriate amount, they begin to walk us up to the station office. They put the 2100 Kr that three of us fork over in their little bags, making zero recording or doing anything official with their bounty. We soon figure out that it’s a bribe when they take 30 euros from the fourth member of our party. To be nice, they cop us the cheapest possible ticket and see us on our way.

It’s good to know that even with the EU inextricably stretching outward, standardizing rules and flattening out cultural distinctions, that low level police corruption aimed at young tourists is still thriving in the Czech Republic.

PS - LIke Yglesias, I’m something of a Russophobe Russiaphile, and so my friends and I rooted for the Motherland in their semi-final match against Spain. We were backed up in this choice by the number of cute girls with the Russian flag painted on their faces, as well as the several awesome Russian dudes waving flags and shouting for the reunification of the USSR (can’t actually confirm that last part). But as Spain built up their insurmountable lead and the Russian section quieted down and the tear-drenched mascara began to stain the faces of the cute Russian fans, we soon realized that the Spanish contingent also had awesome fans, numerous cute girls AND they were having an amazing time. So I guess the lesson is not to get your face painted at least until the outcome is clear.

PPS - Unlike Yglesias, I don’t see the end of Amsterdam’s infamous coffeshop culture anytime soon, conservative government or not. It’s easy for one to say “oh, weed is legal, but it’s getting harder to be licensed and open a new shop, so the culture must be changing.” But Yglesias has been to Amsterdam fairly recently, and surely he saw how widely available it was. It’s really quite shocking and just goes to show that weed will be de facto legal and widely available for the foreseeable future. Sure, they’re banning outdoor smoking (of tobacco, you can still spark up in coffee shops) as well as moving towards restricting magic mushrooms, but these are really marginal changes that reflect a rise of public health consciousness, as opposed to a move away from the drug culture that defines the city.

PS - Hostel tips for Budapest? That would be really helpful. Vienna too.

Beginning early this afternoon and ending sometime in late July, I am going to be in that great continent. I’m not bringing my laptop, so expect blogging to come to a standstill for the duration. I’ll still be writing for Pushback as much as possible and checking my email, but most of the blogging here will probably consist of posting pictures.

So if any of you fair readers have advice of cool things to see, bars/clubs to go to or really anything at all about Amsterdam, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Dubrovnik, Kosovo, Montenegro, the Dalmatian Coast, Sarajevo, Naples, Rome or Istanbul please drop a comment or send me an email.

I may be the only person in the world that really likes both Kathy G and Megan McArdle, so it’s somewhat disappointing to see G make such a lame, petty point:

A blogger expresses the touching sentiment that “the world would be a vastly better place if people recognized that the right response to disagreement is debate, not rage” and sorrowfully reflects that “too many people in political debate are looking for reasons to be angry.”

And yet — this same blogger’s most notorious pronouncement concerned the matchless hilarity that would ensue if antiwar demonstrators were to be attacked by counter-demonstrators wielding two-by-fours.

Why, that’s a bit ironic!

Ah yes, one comment from February of 2003. Seriously, can people drop this? You blog for 7 or so years and of course you’ll say something stupid or overheated. And more importantly, the post in question reads like McArdle is only advocating the two-by-fouring of “the scruffier element of Saturday’s peace rally [that] is planning on demonstrating for peace by, er, wreaking mayhem.” Sure, it’s still not the best sentiment, but it’s not like McArdle thought that New Yorkers should start beating up on quakers marching through the streets.

Can’t you go back to arguing over early childhood interventions, the minimum wage or the Coase Theorem? Please?

Nick Kristof’s column for the Sunday Times is one of the best reflections I’ve read on the horrible moral deadening that is the result of Israel’s maintenance of its settlements. While Kristof could have easily just explained how horrible the Hebron settlers can be, how the lives of Palestinians living near settlements have been horribly affect, and of the constant fear that many Israelis live in due to rocket attacks, he decided to emphasize the multiplicity of voices within Israel, of Zionists who don’t believe that their creed must result in the occupation and bantustanization of an entire people. For pointing out that the debate within Israel is often more active than the debate about Israel, Kristof is opening up space for Jews and other Americans to discuss the plight of the Palestinians in good faith. And he deserves mad props for doing so.

I seriously doubt Ilya Somin when he says that academic disapproval of Mormonism and Evangelical Christianity is merely a function of academics being generally liberal and Mormons and Evangelicals being generally conservative:

The study Todd cites shows that 53% of academics have an “unfavorable” view of Evangelical Christians and 33% say the same of Mormons. By contrast, only 13% have an unfavorable view of Catholics and 3% towards Jews. As Todd points out, Evangelical Christians and and Mormons are generally seen as politically conservative, while Jews tend to be liberal, and Catholics somewhere in between. Todd may well be right that academics’ views of Evangelicals and Mormons are based on stereotypes rather than personal experience. However, the stereotype that these groups tend to be politically conservative is actually correct. For example, a recent survey found that 47% of evangelicals describe themselves as “conservative,” while only 14% call themselves “liberal.” A Pew survey found that 72% of white Evangelicals voted for the Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections. The numbers for Mormons are similar (majority-Mormon Utah is perhaps the most reliably Republican state in the country).

This strikes me as obviously wrongheaded. Sean Carroll points out that Evangelicals and Mormons are, generally, some of the most agressive anti-intellectuals out there. Both have, at the heart of their creed, certain propositions that very few intellectuals or academics could ever agree with. The story of Joseph Smith, though no less credible than other founding-faith stories, only happened in the 19th century, meaning that there is written documentation of him being totally full of it. Also, Mormons steadfastly believe silliness like Native Americans being the lost tribes of Israel and a whole host of simple empirical facts that are just wrong. Evangelicals, on the other hand, have been incredibly hostile towards academia, and have viewed it with contempt for the entirety of the 20th century, so it makes sense that academics have returned the favor.

Catholicism and Judaism, which academics don’t disapprove of (or do in very low numbers), have incredibly illustrious intellectual traditions, and even though they too have some basic problems with empiricism, those problems are an order of magnitude less glaring than those afflicting Evangelicals and Mormons.

Also, Catholics and Jews are perhaps the two most intellectually minded religious groups in the history of the Western world. I hardly have to list off famous institutions of higher learning or intellectuals to prove this point, but suffice to say, Georgetown beats out BYU and Oral Roberts, de Chardin is better than Kurt Wise, and that Heschel, Maimonides, Arendt and Berlin could beat out anyone that Evangelicals and Mormons have to offer.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that due to run-ups in fuel costs, public transportation systems are having to raise prices and even cut back service. This is despite the highest ridership (by proportion) in some 50 years:

Escalating fuel prices that have pushed more commuters out of their cars and onto buses, ferries and trains also have put an added financial strain on transit operators and could lead to higher fares.

The price of diesel, which fuels such Bay Area transit fleets as Caltrain, AC Transit and the Alameda ferries, has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to data compiled by the American Public Transportation Association. In April 2004 the average cost of a gallon was $1.25. In April 2008, the price jumped to $3.32.

The result, said Rob Padgette, the trade group’s director of policy and research, is that transit operators nationwide are considering raising fares or cutting service, just when demand for mass transportation is at the highest level in half a century and operating subsidies from financially-drained local and state governments are drying up.

“It’s a very tough situation, and transit agencies are trying to figure out what to do,” Padgette said. “Fuel prices are outrageous. Everybody’s being hit.”

Industries from airlines to delivery services already have opted to pass the cost onto customers. It’s not surprising that transit operators are looking to do the same.

The Utah Transportation Authority, which serves Salt Lake City, was one of the first major operators to put the pinch on riders by tacking on a 25-cent fuel surcharge to its regular $1.75 bus fare beginning July 1 despite loud protests from low-income residents.

This is incredibly short-sighted. Although the real costs of public transit are rising due to fuel costs, states and transit authorities should be doing everything they can to keep the prices where they are, and if that fails, then to raise prices to actually expand capacity. That’s because we’re likely to see oil prices in this realm for a long time, and the increase in public transportation ridership should stay at this level. So that means we should be expanding the infrastructure so that public transportation systems can sustain ably operate in a world where gas is expensive and people don’t want to drive as much. To jack up prices and maybe even cut back on service in California is especially egregious, because the state gas tax is a sales tax, meaning that revenue goes up as the price goes up. So we should be spending all this new revenue (or at least some of it) on making public transportation better, not on making it less accessible.

Matthew Yglesias notes the benefits of renting, which is only increasing as the economy tightens up:

Given all that, it seems that there’s no reason for our policy and rhetoric to include a strong bias in favor of homeownership. Renting gives people more flexibility about where they live, which is probably a good thing in a continent-sized economy where there can be a lot of localized booms and busts. What’s more, a house you own combines two elements — a consumption good element and a savings element. Renting separates that out — you rent as much house as you feel like consuming, and then you save money by buying mutual funds or whatever. When people own they tend to wind up living inside they mutual fund, which means buying a bigger house than they might have rented, which distorts energy consumption patterns and all kinds of other things.

This seems like a good time to point everyone to Clive Crook’s classic Atlantic polemic in defense of renting, or more precisely, his polemic attack on home ownership.   So here it is, “Why Home Ownership Hurts America.” One of the best commentaries I’ve read in recent years.

Kay Steiger reports on her tour of DC Public pools:

Today I went to the second in my exploration of DC’s public swimming pools. This one was south of Dupont Circle, called Francis (25th & N, near Trader Joe’s). It’s a nice pool, divided into three sections: the baby pool, the lap pool, and the diving pool. The diving pool was 12 feet 8 inches deep, probably the deepest you’ll find in the city. The DC pools are free to city residents, and I had a lot of fun.

Wow, that sounds awesome. My swimming options are basically this one private pool, which is part of a larger fitness club that my parents are part of. They have three pools, one solely dedicated to laps, one split  between laps and general usage and a baby pool. But there’s NO DIVING BOARD! Sure, it’s nine feet deep, which is OK, but an extra three feet and eight inches plus a diving board would be awesome. One would think that public pools would have greater liability concerns and thus wouldn’t have features as fun and dangerous as deep diving areas with nice boards, but apparently the DC city government has figured out to provide something that’s a genuine service to its citizens.

Watching The Wire, I don’t think think “wow, Baltimore is super awful” but instead, “wow, that’s a lot like Oakland.” We all remember in Season One when Clay Davis’ driver is caught driving away from the Towers with $30,000 in cash, and how Davis intervenes with Burrell to make Daniels’ investigation into Barksdale and Davis go away. Well, basically the exact same thing just went down in Oakland.

Recently, a wave of homicides and restaurant robberies have struck Oakland. In response, the police arrested 56 members of the infamous Acorn gang who were connected to the crime wave. One of the gangbangers caught up in the police sweep was 27 year old William Lovan, the “nephew” of City Administrator’s Deborah Edgerly. Edgerly intervened, ordering the cops on the scene to tell her why the car was being towed and then, according to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Chip Johnson, “she vowed to contact Oakland Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan and Tucker when the officers refused to tell her, police say. She then promised an internal affairs investigation into the whole matter.” She wasn’t very effective at bailing out her nephew, Lovan has now been charged with murder and armed robbery, while Edgerly has been forced to resign.

But it gets worse, not only was Lovan a gangbanger receiving protecting from a high ranking city official, he was also a repairman for the parking division, and was one of “several people” in the Edgerly family who was employed by the city. And, shockingly, these relations got special treatment when applying for city jobs:

Edgerly has requested - and received - concessions in the past from the Police Department, most notably a change in the city’s physical training requirements to help her daughter’s efforts to become a police officer.

Erin Breckenridge, her daughter, who still works as a civilian employee in the department, was provided with an unprecedented four opportunities to pass the academy training’s physical skills test.

Of course, Edgerly is likely to replaced by another corrupt hack, or an ineffective boob in the mold of Dellums, but still, it’s nice to see someone in Oakland facing accountability. It would nice if this happened a bit more.

From Ezra Klein, comes this paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon exploring the rise of inequality. Or more accurately, two types of inequality. One, the seperation of the top decile (10%) from everyone else, and two, the rise of inequality within that top decile. Of course, these two phenomena seem related, but they really aren’t. The factors driving the great accumulation of wealth among the tippity-top are different, according to Gordon and Dew-Becker, than what’s responsible for the 90th percentile running away from everyone else - skills based technological change, or more specifically, increased returns to managers:

During  1979–97 fully half of the growth in the college wage premium can be attributed to the increased relative wage of the group called “managers,” and only 17 percent to the computer-related occupational groups. The Autor et al. three-way distinction would place computer programmers and many types of engineers in the middle, rather than high category, as jobs subject to outsourcing and not benefiting from a rapid growth of demand relative to supply…

It’s hard to see why this type of inequality is ipso facto objectionable. It seems to be purely an effect of markets working, basically, as they ought to. The problem is that in the past, when the college wage premium increased, more people would go to college and it would balance back out. So I don’t think our efforts here should be focused at decreasing inequality, per se, but instead at trying to increase opportunities for people to get that skills-based wage premium, and if not that, than increased unionization and raising the minimum wage could help boost incomes for everyone else.

The second inequality is that within the top decile. This isn’t driven by SBTC, decreased unionization or a flagging minimum wage. They identify two main factors: the “superstar effect” and clubby relationships that ensure high CEO pay:

Superstars include the top members of any occupation that provides disproportionate rewards to the first-best as contrasted with the second-best. The superstar phenomenon has at its core the magnification of audiences, the fact that a single performance can be witnessed by an audience of one person or ten million people, depending on the perceived attraction and talent. The second category includes law partnerships, investment bankers, and hedge fund managers, where there is no obvious analogy to audience magnification but where there are steep wage premia for the very best in an occupational niche, and where it is apparent that incomes are highly market-driven.

The most contentious question regards the third category, top executives in public corporations. The core distinction is that CEO compensation is chosen by their peers in a system that gives CEOs and their hand-picked boards of directors, rather than the market, control over top incomes. The idea that managers, rather than stockholders, control directors goes back to Berle and Means (1932). This idea that the principal-agent control of stockholders should be reversed has been applied fruitfully by such authors as Bebchuk and Fried (2004). They argue that managerial power lies behind some of the outsized gains in CEO pay.

Although there should certainly be some reforms relating to CEO compensation, it seems like the biggest driver of inequality in the highest decile is market based. The Nation’s special inequality issue has a great chart showing that the compensation of the top 5 hedge fund managers is 43 times greater than that of the top 5 CEOs.  So, Gordon and Dew-Becker ultimately conclude that there is only one mechanism which can reduce top-decile-inequality: tax policy.

This, I think, is a central question for liberals. All left-of-center folk agree that there should be higher taxes on the rich and that we should be promoting policies which will expand opportunity for the bottom 90 percent. This means increased educational access, universal health care, more union-friendly policies and so on and so forth. But even if we were to implement a fairly progressive agenda tomorrow, we’d likely see little decrease in pre-tax inequality (or even post-tax inequality). That’s because the forces driving the extreme inequality we see today have little to do with decreased unionization or the college wage premium being so high. They have to do with the fact that individuals can make extremely large amounts of money in the financial markets. And this is where the split will occur.

The Nation argues that the existence of concentration wealth is, in and of itself, a bad thing. The reasoning is actually fairly persuasive. It will be impossible to enact those reforms I listed above when people like Bruce Kovner can make billions of dollars and fund AEI and the Manhattan Institute to agitate against those progressive ideas. In short, with concentrated wealth comes intrinsic conservatism, as those wealthy people will inevitably use their great clout to preserve their position. An so there is a feedback loop, whereby ideologues/rich people implement policies that make them richer (deregulation, lower marginal tax rates, union busting etc) which then allows them to influence the system to preserve those policies to ensure their high position. The reduction of concentrated wealth thus becomes “the reform that makes all other reforms possible.”

Now, I don’t agree with this position, because I think the measures necessary to truly disperse or eliminate concentrated wealth would be bad for growth, but it’s one that has lots of support and will only gain more.

So, for now, as inequality has exploded under a Republican president, nearly everyone from the center-left to the progressive left is convinced that something ought to be done. But expect the debates to become heated once modest tax increases don’t reduce top decile inequality all that much.

Stephen Dubner asks the question, and solicits the internet’s answers. As usual with these types of questions, the answer isn’t nearly as important as the criteria for selecting answer. And so to make this easier, I’ll limit myself to those thinkers that are A. Alive and B. made contributions whose importance are recognized by people outside their field and/or the general public. So here we go, in no particular order.

Noam Chomsky - The man invented modern linguistics almost entirely on his own. He also single handedly vanquished two theories that had dominated the social sciences before him - The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and behaviorism.

James Watson - discovered the double helix. He’s responsible (along with Crick, of course) for the biological sciences taking over physics as the science which has been making the greatest advances in explaining our world

Vint Cerf - Invented the internet.

Norman Borlaug - Not so much a thinker, but he’s the scientist who’s had a direct, positive impact on more people’s lives than just about anyone else in history.

You’ll notice that this quick list doesn’t include anyone from the humanities. That’s because even though I dearly love philosophy and literature, there are very few novelists, theorists or philosophers that I would define as “important.” That’s because very few of them ever change the material conditions in which they operate, or really have a whole lot of realinfluence (much the same can be said about economists, another filed I ignored). I guess a few philosphers (broadly defined) have - Marx, Friedman (even that is debatable) - and maybe some novelists (Harriet Beecher Stowe…), but nowhere near on the scale that any of the scientists and inventors that I’ve listed have.

Chomsy certainly seems to stand out - it’s hard to recognize the influence of his linguistics on the world at large, and it definitely pales in comparison to Watson or Borlaug - but I view Chomsky as a thinker who’s intellectual contribution, as far as changing the way people view an entire field (or inventing an entire field) is certainly comparable to Darwin or Smith, and maybe even Einstein or Newton.

Now, if we got rid of my first criteria of “alive” and just talked about “Modern” thinkers, then the list would obviously change a lot. If we define modernity as starting in the early 19th century, then the Greatest Modern Thinkers would be Darwin, Einstein, Marx and Maxwell. (Smith is only omitted because Wealth of Nations was published in 1776)

There’s even more news that Obama is considering picking Sam Nunn as his Veep nominee. And that news is distressing. To put it quickly - Sam Nunn is really old, not very liberal, main opponent of dropping the gay ban and was the main proponent of DADT. I’d love see Nunn in the Obama administration working on issues related to defense and nonproliferation, but it’s just ridiculous to award the number two position in both the country and the Democratic party to someone who’s unacceptable to a major part of the Democratic coalition.

Of course, I’m not the only one who feels this way, and my friend Dylan Matthews has even done some organizing for the anti-Nunn cause. So check out havingnunnofit.com and send a message to Eric Holder and David Plouffe that Nunn is just a bizarre, unacceptable choice for VP.

I’ve been waffling back and forth on whether the US or some coalition of powers should intervene in Darfur, but this Washington Post report detailing the level of anarchy gripping the region has almost turned me into a decisive opponent of intervention:

While the government and militia attacks on straw-hut villages that defined the earlier years of the conflict continue, Darfur is now home to semi-organized crime and warlordism, with marijuana-smoking rebels, disaffected government militias and anyone else with an AK-47 taking part, according to U.N. officials.

The situation is a symptom of how fragmented the conflict has become. There were two rebel groups, but now there are dozens, some of which include Arab militiamen who once sided with the government. The founding father of the rebellion lives in Paris. And the struggle in the desert these days is less about liberating oppressed Darfurians than about acquiring the means to power: money, land, trucks.

Though there are some swaths of calm in Darfur, fighting among rebels and among Arab tribes has uprooted more than 70,000 people this year, compared with about 60,000 displaced by government attacks on villages, according to U.N. figures.

Although powerful countries such as China, which is heavily invested in Sudan’s oil, have been criticized by human rights activists for not doing more to pressure the Sudanese government to end the conflict, some analysts say the breakdown of command lines on all sides has made the situation increasingly impervious to outside influence.

It’s not at all clear that there’s a specific group that an outside force to protect, and even more importantly, a specific group to go after. Sure, we could try to beef up the AU force and protect refugees, but beyond that, it seems just about impossible to actually identify the bad guys and kill them/drive them away from the innocent people they are trying to kill. So maybe I’m not against all forms of intervention, but I’m certainly against any type of offensive intervention that tries to proactively identify the bad guys and kill them. Also, regime change in Khartoum is a horrible, horrible idea. The place seems more and more like Somalia Redux.

Brade DeLong takes issue with Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay for The Nation, in which she argues that due to skyrocketing inequality, the rich are pushing everyone else out of beautiful places in which to live. She gives the example of Jackson Hole, or more specifically, Driggs, the town one pass over from Jackson Hole, where the low wage workers that support any vacation destination live:

About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug, inexpensive one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Teton Range from wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At that time, Driggs was where the workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed and hike along the same pine-shadowed trails.

But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs–Paul Allen of Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford–transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven’t been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable Jackson Hole. Where the wait staff and bed-makers live today I do not know.

I think Ehrenreich is confusing a few things here. If she wants to argue that it’s hard for anyone besides the rich to live in beautiful areas - Lake Tahoe, Jackson Hole, any nice beach area - then she’s certainly right. But if she wants to argue that it’s impossible for the non-rich to visit these types of areas, then she’s certainly wrong. Let’s look at Tahoe, the area with natural beauty that I know best. The first dynamic Ehrenreich identifies is certainly going on. From the mid 90s to the mid 2000s, spurred on by the tech boom, property values in the Tahoe area exploded as people began buying second homes. This means that Truckee, which used to be something of a working class area, has turned into second-home land as developments are popping up all over the place. So where do all the bank tellers, check-out clerks and waiters live? Well, lots of them live south on Highway 80, around, say Grass Valley, which doesn’t have the stunning beauty of the Tahoe area. Others live farther north on 89, which is more isolated than the Truckee-Tahoe area. So one can make the case that a fair number of non-rich people are being economically excluded from the stunning natural beauty of Tahoe.

But regular people aren’t! It’s pretty easy to travel for Tahoe, hike in the mountains, swim in the lake and generally experience the environment. There are numerous free, public beaches all over the lake. It’s very easy to camp across the street from the lake. Access to the hiking trails is free. Besides the high cost of driving the three hours from the Bay Area (or farther), Tahoe is remarkably accessible. I guess it’s questionable what the social value of having large number of non-rich people live in the most beautiful places in the world.

There just aren’t that many people who can even live in a place like Tahoe, but if we expand out past Tahoe, Jackson Hole, Key West and into say, Vermont, it’s not clear if Ehrenreich argument still holds up. Sure, even Vermont is getting invaded by people from New York and Boston looking for second homes for skiing, but there’s still a huge amount of low-rent, rural land that is shockingly beautiful. I guess the real question is if rural areas count as naturally beautiful (Vermont, Kentucky, West Virgina), or if only those 1000 Places to See Before You Die (Tahoe, Jackson Hole, Key West) make the cut.