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Pre-WWII New Deal Saw Biggest Drop In Unemployment Rate in...

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:55:00 +0000

Pre-WWII New Deal Saw Biggest Drop In Unemployment Rate in History

AMERICA UNDER SOCIALISM!

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:19:55 +0000

AMERICA UNDER SOCIALISM!

Wasting Away In Hooverville

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:19:51 +0000

Wasting Away In Hooverville:

Now here is the extremely strange thing about The Forgotten Man: it does not really argue that the New Deal failed. In fact, Shlaes does not make any actual argument at all, though she does venture some bold claims, which she both fails to substantiate and contradicts elsewhere. Reviewing her book in The New York Times, David Leonhardt noted that Shlaes makes her arguments “mostly by implication.” This is putting it kindly. Shlaes introduces the book by asserting her thesis, but she barely even tries to demonstrate it. Instead she chooses to fill nearly four hundred pages with stories that mostly go nowhere. The experience of reading The Forgotten Man is more like talking to an old person who lived through the Depression than it is like reading an actual history of the Depression. Major events get cursory treatment while minor characters, such as an idiosyncratic black preacher or the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, receive lengthy portraits. Having been prepared for a revisionist argument against the New Deal, I kept wondering if I had picked up the wrong book.

Many of Shlaes’s stories do have an ideological point, but the point is usually made in a novelistic way rather than a scholarly one. She tends to depict the New Dealers as vain, confused, or otherwise unsympathetic. She depicts business owners as heroic and noble. It is a kind of revival of the old de haut en bas sort of social history, except this time the tycoons from whose perspective the events are narrated appear as the underappreciated victims, the giants at the bottom of the heap.

Mostly Shlaes employs wild anecdotal selectivity. At one point she calls the pro-labor Wagner Act “coercive,” and elsewhere she alludes to the subtle anti-Semitism of a newspaper column criticizing opponents of the National Recovery Administration. Shlaes ignores the vastly greater use of violent coercion on behalf of employers, or the immensely more common use of anti-Semitic tropes against the New Deal. Does Shlaes think that workers were more coercive than capitalists, or that liberals were more anti-Semitic than conservatives? The book does not say, but clearly she wants her readers to come away with this impression.

Shlaes begins every chapter with a date (say, December 1936), an unemployment percentage (15.3) and a Dow Jones Industrial Average. The tick-tick-tick of statistics is meant to show that conditions did not improve throughout the course of Roosevelt’s presidency. Yet her statistics are highly selective. As those of us who get our economic information from sources other than the CNBC ticker know, the stock market is not a broad representative of living standards. Meanwhile, as the historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, her unemployment figures exclude those employed by the Works Progress Administration and other workrelief agencies. Shlaes has explained in an op-ed piece that she did this because “to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn’t have regular work with long-term prospects.” So, if you worked twelve hours per day in a coal mine hoping not to contract black lung or suffer an injury that would render you useless, you were employed. But if you constructed the Lincoln Tunnel, you had an anxiety-inducing make-work job.

In response to this criticism, Shlaes has retreated to the defense that unemployment was still high anyway. “Even if you add in all the work relief jobs, as some economists do,” she has contended, “Roosevelt-era unemployment averages well above 10 percent. That’s a level Obama has referred to once or twice—as a nightmare.” But Roosevelt inherited unemployment that was over 20 percent! Sure, the level to which it fell was high by absolute standards, but it is certainly pertinent that he cut that level by more than half. By Shlaes’s method of reckoning, Thomas Jefferson rates poorly on the scale of territorial acquisition, because on his watch the United States had less than half the square mileage it has today.

In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:19:52 +0000

In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.

Post [Seminary] Secret

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:19:51 +0000

Post [Seminary] Secret

Law Enforcement and DWI

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:19:52 +0000

Law Enforcement and DWI:

That’s the problem with overly draconian laws — exceptions, exemptions, free passes, etc.… are granted to favorable factions…

I’m certain that these affordances are also applied to friends of law enforcement officials…

"I think it’s time to take Wall Street literally: they’ve made it abundantly clear they have an..."

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:19:51 +0000

“I think it’s time to take Wall Street literally: they’ve made it abundantly clear they have an insatiable appetite for killing things: the housing market, the financial system, the economy, reform legislation, the next generation’s future. Wall Street is so steeped in destruction that the symbols of death are everywhere.”

- Pam Martens

Crowdsourcing Abundance or “Screw’ em, Let’s Do This Ourselves”

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:19:50 +0000

Crowdsourcing Abundance or “Screw’ em, Let’s Do This Ourselves”:

Not everyone has a large house to trade or a large sum of money to donate but look around you—we have excess of stuff, talent, ideas, information—in our homes , in our communities, and in our organizations. We are over-producing and under-utilizing resources all over the place. Witness the recent example of clothing retailers like H&M deliberately mutilating and tossing unsold clothes in the trash. Many experts in retail concede that the practice is not uncommon—for some unfathomable “economic” reason it makes more sense to destroy clothes than to release them into a local community. The situation is even worse when it comes to food. We over-produce and waste a lot of it. According to the USDA, just over a quarter of America’s food — about 25.9 million tons — gets thrown into the garbage can every year. University of Arizona estimates that the number is closer to 50 percent. The country’s supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores alone throw out 27 million tons between them every year (representing $30 billion of wasted food). This is why the U.N. World Food Program says the total food surplus of the U.S. alone could satisfy “every empty stomach” in Africa. How about empty stomachs in our own communities?

The list goes on an on. We have surplus of space—many commercial buildings, schools, corporate and government spaces are underutilized, while many small organizations and individuals are struggling to find spaces for their work. We also have excess of talent—musicians, artists, designers, educated unemployed people, young and old—needing audiences, venues to work in, or contribute ideas to. Many unemployed or underemployed people have excess of time, excess of knowledge, excess of skills. We have excess of empty seats in our cars and not enough public transport to help people get around. I bet we even have medical doctors who are willing to treat people in need for free. This is what many doctors are doing in Haiti right now; this is what many of them do informally among their family and friends.

Just like the global level hunger is largely a problem of distribution rather than production (we currently have enough food available to feed the world’s population), the problem of economic and psychological malaise many of our communities are experiencing may be a problem of distribution rather than supply. If we pulled together available resources at the local level, particularly leveraging surplus currently available within our organizations, we could do a lot to improve our local economies. We can also improve psychological well being in our communities by turning up levels of giving and by increasing connectedness within our communities. And this, according to Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis”, is one of the main contributors to happiness. Haidt points out that, “We are, like bees: our lives only make full sense as members of a larger hive, or as cells in a larger body. Yet in our modern way of living we’ve busted out of the hive and flown out on our own, each one of us free to live as we please. Most of us need to be part of a hive in some way, ideally a hive that has a clearly noble purpose.”

Monte Wolverton

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:19:52 +0000

Monte Wolverton

The medical malpractice myth

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:19:51 +0000

The medical malpractice myth:

The best attempt to synthesize the academic literature on medical malpractice is Tom Baker’s The Medical Malpractice Myth, published last November. Baker, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who studies insurance, argues that the hype about medical malpractice suits is “urban legend mixed with the occasional true story, supported by selective references to academic studies.” After all, including legal fees, insurance costs, and payouts, the cost of the suits comes to less than one-half of 1 percent of health-care spending. If anything, there are fewer lawsuits than would be expected, and far more injuries than we usually imagine.

As proof, Baker marshals an overwhelming array of research. The most impressive and comprehensive study is by the Harvard Medical Practice released in 1990. The Harvard researchers took a huge sample of 31,000 medical records, dating from the mid-1980s, and had them evaluated by practicing doctors and nurses, the professionals most likely to be sympathetic to the demands of the doctor’s office and operating room. The records went through multiple rounds of evaluation, and a finding of negligence was made only if two doctors, working independently, separately reached that conclusion. Even with this conservative methodology, the study found that doctors were injuring one out of every 25 patients—and that only 4 percent of these injured patients sued.

The Harvard study stands for a large body of literature. On their own, however, the results don’t disprove the Republicans’ thesis that many medical malpractice suits are frivolous. Maybe badly injured patients don’t sue, while the reflexively litigious clog up the legal system, making tort reform a viable solution. But a new study, released in May, demolishes that possibility. Dr. David Studdert led a team of eight researchers from Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Harvard Risk Management Foundation who examined 1,452 medical malpractice lawsuits. They found that more than 90 percent of the claims showed evidence of medical injury, which means they weren’t frivolous. In 60 percent of these cases, the injury resulted from physician wrongdoing. In a quarter of the claims, the patient died.

When baseless medical malpractice suits were brought, the study further found, the courts efficiently threw them out. Only six of the cases in which the researchers couldn’t detect injury received even token compensation. Of those in which an injury resulted from treatment, but evidence of error was uncertain, 145 out of 515 received compensation. Indeed, a bigger problem was that 236 cases were thrown out of court despite evidence of injury and error to patients by physicians. The other approximately 1,050 cases, in the research team’s opinion, were decided correctly, with damage awards going to the injured and dismissal foiling the frivolous suits.

Nor is there evidence to show that the level of jury awards has shot up. A recent RAND study looked at the growth in malpractice awards between 1960 and 1999. “Our results are striking,” the research team concluded. “Not only do we show that real average awards have grown by less than real income over the 40 years in our sample, we also find that essentially all of this growth can be explained by changes in observable case characteristics and claimed economic losses.”

"The sad irony of the malpractice system is that it has led doctors and hospitals to be much less..."

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:19:56 +0000

“The sad irony of the malpractice system is that it has led doctors and hospitals to be much less transparent with their data, which has made it harder to find out when things go wrong, which has made it harder to put in place systems that keep things from going wrong. But the best way to reduce malpractice costs would be to reduce malpractice.”

- Ezra Klein

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:10:12 +0000

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education:

Participatory culture didn’t begin or end with the internet. Most of what I am describing as participatory culture can be found in any thriving folk culture. At its best, a folk culture is defined through the expanding opportunities for participation. Everyone who wants to join is accepted. Everyone who has something to contribute is embraced. Experienced members share what they know through informal mentorship with newcomers because it expands the expressive resources of the community. The exchange of folk artifacts is reciprocal, based on the ideals of a gift economy, rather than hierarchical or commercial.

This idea of dispersed expression broke down in the 20th century as most forms of cultural production became professionalized and commercialized. We moved into a world where we consumed but did not produce the resources of our culture — never totally but largely. Throughout that period, though, there were all kinds of underground and grassroots practices which held onto the idea of shared cultural expression and participation. These practices have re-emerged and gained greater public visibility in the era of Flickr and YouTube.

These technologies have brought cultural expression down to a human scale; they have placed the exchange of stories or songs in a social context; and they have opened up a space where all of us can be welcomed as potential participants. All of the research shows that the communities of practice which grow up around this participatory culture are powerful sites of pedagogy, fueled by passion and curiosity and by a desire to share what we learn and think with others. As with older folk cultures, informal pedagogies thrive as people get together to learn based on shared interests rather than fixed roles and responsibilities.

"The main effect of the globalism fad of the past 30 yearrs — lowering the protective barriers..."

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:29:02 +0000

“The main effect of the globalism fad of the past 30 yearrs — lowering the protective barriers to trade that countries for centuries have used to make sure their own local economies are self-sufficient — has been to ship manufacturing (the creation of wealth) from developed nations to developing nations. Transnational corporations love this, because in countries with lower labor costs and few environmental and safety regulations, it’s more profitable to manufacture products. They then sell those products in the “mature” countries — the places that used to manufacture — and people burn through the wealth they’d accumulated in the earlier manufacturing days (home equity, principally, along with savings and lines of credit) to buy these foreign-manufactured goods. At first, it looks like a good deal to consumers in developed nations. Goods are cheaper! But over a decade or two or three, as the creation of real wealth is reduced and the residue of the old wealth is spent, the developed nations become progressively poorer and poorer. At the same time, the “developing” nations become wealthier — because those are the places that are producing real wealth.”

- Thom Hartmann

"The framers of the US Constitution were wary of all such public piety. Not for nothing did they omit..."

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:20:00 +0000

“The framers of the US Constitution were wary of all such public piety. Not for nothing did they omit the word “God’’ from its clauses. Official government exercises that assume divine license for the nation, whether celebrated with china and linen in Washington or with meals-ready-to-eat at Special Forces camps in Afghanistan, are bad politics. Equally troubling, their presumptuous appropriation of God’s will makes them bad religion. With an ideological past, and a banal present, the national prayer breakfast, given our self-sanctifying wars, bodes ill for the future.”

- James Carroll

We Love xkcd

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:17:55 +0000

We Love xkcd

New Study: Cat Owners Are Smarter Than Dog Owners

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:15:54 +0000

New Study: Cat Owners Are Smarter Than Dog Owners

"It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of..."

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:02:04 +0000

“It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.”

- Augustine slams Creationism

Analyze This

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:54:26 +0000

Analyze This:

Yesterday, in the middle of a discussion, I found out how tied some people are to the promotion of their party of choice. If there is a Republican (Nixon) who says abortion is necessary for inter-racial children (indicating an inherent racism and a pro-abortion stand), he is considered less pro-abortion than a Democrat who says abortion should be a choice (Obama).

The Joy of Tech

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:53:05 +0000

The Joy of Tech

4chan says Verizon is blocking 4chan

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:06:00 +0000

4chan says Verizon is blocking 4chan:

Verizon Wireless is said to be filtering HTTP traffic to/from boards.4chan.org (all image boards). From status.4chan.org: “After an hour and a half on the phone, we’ve received confirmation from Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are ‘explicitly blocked.”