Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2348

People Want To Tax The Rich

This is a well-known poll result, but the latest from Marist (PDF) confirms it:

One of the most striking aspects of American politics over the past decade has been the unwillingness of moderate/vulnerable Democratic Party members of congress to embrace the median voter's view of this issue. In principle, it ought to be a potent wedge that sharply divides the Republican base from moderates and independents. But instead of moderate Republican politicians feeling political pressure to break with their leadership on taxes, we've consistently seen moderate Democratic Party politicians breaking from their leadership.

We Need a 'Get Smart' For the War on Terror

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I was sorry to hear today that CBS is canceling Chaos, its hour-long CIA show. It's not so much that that Chaos was fantastic, though Freddy Rodriguez is a charmer, and deserves a functional lead role in something. But in its semi-jokey approach to espionage, whether the agents are sneaking into North Korean in the guise of cranky dissident American filmmakers or subjecting themselves to unheated swimming pools to satisfy a crabby arms dealer's sexy daughters, it had a whiff of Get Smart about it. And that's a good thing, something we could use more of in a cultural moment when the zone is flooded with CIA and Homeland Security shows, when the closest we get to a parody of our security apparatus is some very tanned spies chilling in and shooting up Miami in Burn Notice or the oversexed agents of Archer.

Get Smart operated on two premises. First, that our so-called enemies are as ridiculous, confused, and out of their depths as we are: in this episode, the agents of KAOS can't even close a shoe sale, much less beat Smart:

And second, the spy bureaucracy is sort of hopeless, as we find out when Max is dispatched to the Iron Curtain to pay off CONTROL agents behind enemy lines. "Secret agents have to live too!" complains Smart's first contact aboard the Orient Express. "Everything costs so much today. The guns and knives are expensive. Poison is up. Strangling wire is $6.80 a yard."

All this haplessness is the end product of the fact that the enterprise itself is semi-ridiculous, an idea that's essentially taboo in our security-oriented pop culture. Even as Chaos started the first episode with a goofy, old-timey montage illustrating the CIA's fubars and inflated sense of self-worth, or ha a team of goofy agents mess around on Company time, or a guy who claims to be a "human weapon," it takes seriously the idea that North Korea is a threat, that we should spend a lot of time and resources humoring a recalcitrant arms dealer. Ditto for Burn Notice: the show gets a lot of its charm from its cast of roustabout former CIA and FBI agents, but the show still insists that there are serious national security threats coming through Miami on a near-daily basis.

Get Smart insisted that we'd trapped ourselves in a game of Spy v. Spy, that it was ridiculous (and very funny) that we were plowing huge amounts of money into developing levitating shoes, or having agents brew up coffee in a lab. The conflicts never really required more in the way of resolution than a punch in the face. The prospect of infiltration was about as serious as the threat of vampires. I can't imagine the reaction to a mainstream show today that so forcefully and hilariously insisted that our whole national security enterprise was a fraud, but an equivalently funny show would be incredibly bracing.

Send In The Advisers

I haven't done a Libya post in a while, but here's somthing:

UK's William Hague says Britain will send military advisers to Libya to help rebels.

One thing that happened at the beginning of the debate over military intervention in Libya is that critics tended to point out that there was a hefty degree of hypocrisy wafting about the enterprise. Proponents countered that the mere existence of hypocrisy doesn't prove anything. And, indeed, it doesn't.

But when you're assessing the actions of political leaders it's important to think about issues of credibility. We were told this was a humanitarian intervention, but it swiftly became clear that it was in fact a political operation designed to produce rebel victory in a civil war. We were told this was a "no-fly zone" but it swiftly became clear that it was in fact a tactical air support operation designed to produce rebel victory in a civil war. And of course while policymakers certainly have the right to be optimistic about the ability of air power to produce favored outcomes on the ground there are no guarantees in this sphere. Once you're committed to rebel victory in the Libyan civil war, you're sort of committed. If air power isn't enough, maybe you send in the advisors? Maybe the CIA puts boots on the ground. Maybe in strict humanitarian terms prolonging the conflict proves counterproductive (just ask Misrata) and maybe you return to the fact that there seemed to be something fish about this operation from the beginning.

Where The Sodomites Are

Everywhere, of course. But in much of the country they're breaking the law. Mother Jones tells us where:

Georgia and Michigan seem not to be aware of the basic regional patterns of American politics.

Climate Denialism Promoter Fred Hiatt Hits American Conservatives For Embrace of Climate Denialism

The earth's climate is shifting. Most generally, the planet is getting warmer. And while many factors contribute to the earth's climate, the key factor in the warming trend is human industrial activity. The science on this is quite clear. But the United States is a major fossil fuel producing country with an industrial policy oriented around subsidies for the production of fossil fuels and the lavish consumption of energy. Facing up to science would challenge both powerful economic interests and the cultural identity of suburban conformists. So there's enormous political resistance to it. In an ideal world, a national elite infused with a spirit of responsibility and ethics would push back against that resistance.

Unfortunately, Washington Post opinion section editor Fred Hiatt has not embodied that kind of spirit over the years. Over the course of 2009, he published no fewer than six separate columns from George Will spreading misinformation about climate science. This, recall, was during the year when there still seemed to be prospects for a bipartisan legislative solution to the climate problem. But Will, as the premiere conservative columnist for the premiere newspaper in the national capital, helped establish bogus science as a constitutive element of conservative ideology. Naturally, people complained about this but Hiatt stood foursquare behind Will's right to misinform readers of The Washington Post. But yesterday, Hiatt seemed very upset at the social acceptability of this misinformation that he once helped promote:

The climate change denialism is a newer part of the catechism. Just a few years ago, leading Republicans — John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty among them — not only accepted global warming as real but supported some kind of market-based mechanism to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels.

Now polls show declining numbers of Republicans believing in climate change, and a minority of those believing humans are at fault, so the candidates are scrambling to disavow their past positions.

Palin, who as Alaska governor supported efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, in 2009 wrote in The Post, "But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

Better late than never, I say, but why didn't Hiatt feel this way back when climate change was a live issue in American politics? Why wait until after this dogma has consolidated? For that matter, why did Hiatt publish the Palin op-ed in question if he knew it to be inaccurate?

Does Age Discrimination Law Increase Labor Market Discrimination Against Older Workers

The current recession has hit the youngest cohorts the hardest, but in many ways the saddest stories come from the older cohorts of workers. Unemployment among fiftysomethings is lower than among twentysomethings, but those people in their fifties who have lost their jobs face an extraordinarily bleak outlook. And in an interest article on the evolution of retirement in America, Emily Yoffe suggests that the adoption of rules banning mandatory retirement policies have actually made things worse:

"Basically, it's a mess," says [Steven A.] Sass of the world of retirement today. He says employers liked mandatory retirement because it allowed for an orderly and predictable departure from the payroll. But that certainty is gone at a time that, more than ever, older workers need to find new jobs. In the 1980s, Sass says, about 75 percent of 50-year old workers would be at the same company 10 years later. Today, only half of 60 year-olds are working at the same place that employed them at age 50. In Working Longer, he and [Alicia ] Munnell float what he calls the "somewhat scandalous" suggestion that the prohibition on mandatory retirement be repealed—allowing companies to impose it, he suggests, at the "politically feasible" age of 70. "Unless employers have an assurance they have a way to get rid of older employees, they won't hire older workers," he says.

Sass, Munnell, and the team at Boston College's Center for Retirement Research are some of the best in the business so I doubt they arrived at that conclusion frivolously.

Matt's First Seder

I hosted a seder last night. Fun! But hard work!

It was also kind of a feminist consciousness raising moment as you recognize that the underlying assumption of the traditional seder meal is that you conveniently have a wife on hand to serve as full-time chef/cleaner/etc. Working in the blogging sector with flexible hours also works but is presumably not all that traditional.

That said, if you have a lot of time to put into slow-cooking something I highly recommend Homesick Texan's oven-baked brisket recipe. Take the advice to "beg your butcher [...] to get a generous piece of meat still covered in fat" seriously. The slab I obtained at Eastern Market weighed 6 pounds and I cooked it for 7 hours, but the thick layer of fat on top kept everything juicy and delicious.

Endgame

Disturbing and purging my mind:

— The financial reporting Pro Publica won its Pulitzer for.

— Also a much-deserved commentary award for David Leonhardt.

— Will Carl Gustav XVI's visit to Afghanistan be a turning point that restores Sweden to its 17th century great power status?

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— Jason Furman on Wal-Mart (PDF).

— Fun with DC redistricting.

— The climate fallback plan.

— Roundup on how Randal O'Toole is wrong.

Hosting a seder tonight, so naturally it's Joy Division "Passover"

Why Did The Union Fight?

I've always thought there was something about the Lincoln administration's determination to fight and win the Civil War that was a bit odd. Secession gave the regionally based Republican Party large congressional majorities that wouldn't exist if southern states had representation in congress. What's more, the Republican Party's controversial policy objective of banning slavery from the western territories could have been easily achieved by the much more modest policy of simply ensuring military control over the territories. Some fighting in border states such as Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky is easy to understand but why try to reconquer the Deep South?

In an interesting new paper (PDF), Zachary Liskow suggests economic motives were at the root:

Specifically, using voting patterns as representations of the Northern population's preferences, this paper tests empirically whether the economic motivations of its manufacturing interests might have been important components of Northerners' support of the decision to fight. The hypothesis that the North had economic motivations for keeping the South in the Union yields a specific prediction: counties with relatively large amounts of these manufacturing interests should shift their votes from Democrats to Republicans between 1860 and 1864. The reason is the following: the best way to keep the South in the Union before the Civil War was to vote for the Democrats, reducing the likelihood of secession by voting for the party more accommodating to Southern slavery interests. However, the best way to keep the South in the Union during the war was to vote for the Republicans, who were more likely to pursue the war until victory was achieved.

Using county-level census data and voting data from the 1860 and 1864 presidential elections, I find that there is a significant shift toward the Republicans associated with manufacturing employment. This shift toward the Republicans associated with manufacturing together amounts to 2.25% of voters in Northern states; that is, taking the results literally suggests that 2.25% of Northern voters shifted their votes to the Republicans out of a desire to protect their manufacturing interests by keeping the South in the Union.

The basic story here would be something like northern manufacturing interests wanted to keep the southern client base behind the US tariff wall in order to maintain privileged access to the market rather than compete on a level playing field with British goods.

Can't Talk About Residency Patterns Without Talking About Prices

(cc photo by jaywphotos)

Ben Adler, reviewing Suleiman Osman's The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York makes the excellent point that you can't discuss the social underpinnings of these trends in isolation from the economic fundamentals of supply and demand:

Osman writes engagingly for an academic, but he does lapse into jargon, throwing around undefined sociological terms like "Fordist" and "gemeinschaft" with abandon. Osman's narrative also focuses excessively on the cultural shifts that drove gentrification rather than the raw economic fundamentals. As many of his quotes and anecdotes illustrate, gentrifiers often did not want to discover the next neighborhood; they simply could not afford the last one. Osman writes: "Rather than seeking race and class homogeneity, middle class beatniks, radicals, settlement workers, and gay men pushed into poor districts in search of diversity.'" Seeking out diversity was certainly one factor, but so was the simple fact that the beatniks could no longer afford to buy brownstones on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Osman acknowledges as much only pages later: "In some cases, white-collar professionals offset their anxiety about racial mixing with their desire for attractive, affordable central city housing."

And the reason for this price surge is an important story, which Osman largely neglects: The government has favored suburban sprawl over walkable, mixed-use urban environments. So while one-third of Americans have stated in surveys that they would rather live in an urban environment, only 10 to 15 percent of housing fits that description. This in turn means exorbitant prices for the precious few urban neighborhoods, even ones that just a few years earlier would have been ignored by the wealthy precisely because they had a little too much "diversity."

Neighborhoods are, in part, expressions of specific historical moments. You would never build something exactly like "Brownstone Brooklyn" or Paris or Amsterdam or Cambridge, MA or Georgetown starting in the 21st century. Anything you build after the invention of the automobile is going to be more oriented around automobile usage than a neighborhood built before the invention of the automobile. But instead of saying "given that cars exist and people like that, market-oriented development of new neighborhoods will probably be more auto-oriented than old neighborhoods" the country has been engaged in a decades-long experiment in car-focused industrial policy. We've had large scale investment in moving cars around combined with widespread adoption (even in New York City!) of regulations mandating the construction of lots of parking alongside all new buildings. Having made traditional walkable neighborhoods illegal to build, it then turns out that many of the existing ones become prohibitively expensive. Since you have to be somewhat eccentric to want to pay a premium for walkability, the neighborhoods can then come to be defined by the idiosyncratic tastes of their residents while the policy-favored suburbs are associated with conformity. But in a level playing field market place you'd see less of a price differential, and urbanism would be both more common and more "normal," though still a bit of a minority taste.