Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 231

How Big A Problem Is Student Debt?

Leonhardt believes the problem is overblown:

In fact, the share of income that young adults are devoting to loan repayment has remained fairly steady over the last two decades, according to data the Brookings Institutions is releasing on Tuesday. Only 7 percent of young-adult households with education debt have $50,000 or more of it. By contrast, 58 percent of such households have less than $10,000 in debt, and an additional 18 percent have between $10,000 and $20,000. “We are certainly not arguing that the state of the American economy and the higher education system is just great,” Matthew Chingos, a Brookings fellow and one of the authors of the new analysis, told me. “But we do think that the data undermine the prevailing sky-is-falling-type narrative around student debt.”

Choire Sicha tears into Leonhardt:

All this data comes from the Survey of Consumer Finances, which is conducted by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Department of Treasury. … Of all the households in that study, only about 1711 have “household heads” that are younger than 40. That’s what they’re extrapolating from. (And, intriguingly, a small number of those have a head of household younger than 18.) This is not a big sample!

What, obviously, does this data completely omit? Well, one obvious thing is…

households who are headed by someone who is not under 40. One thing we know is that, in 2012, 36 percent of Americans aged 18 to 31 were not their head of household, because they were living with their families. This survey also clearly combines family and non-family households. (Also, there’s some unknown amount of statistical imbalance from same-sex households; 31 percent of same-sex households are likely to have two college-degreed people, compared to 24 percent of opposite-sex married households and just 12 percent of opposite-sex cohabiting households.)

But Freddie questions Choire’s statistical know-how:

This is something I’ve written about before – people dramatically overestimate the sample size needed to make responsible statistical conclusions. A sample size of almost 2,000 isn’t just big, it’s enormous. The standard error of a sample of this size will be very low. Absent systematic sampling bias (as opposed to error), the odds of the underlying population being significantly different from a sample of this size is tiny. Saying that it’s not a big sample just displays ignorance about the standards applied in statistical research.

His take on the topic:

[T]he student loan crisis is indeed a crisis, a moral and practical problem of considerable size. But it’s not the size that most people think it is. And more, it doesn’t change this fact: that despite the endless concern trolling of almost our entire media, the constant tendency for the (college educated) professional writers in our culture to say that “college isn’t worth it,” a college education remains a very good investment for the large majority of graduates. American college graduates are, by essentially any international standards and in comparison to Americans with only a high school degree, in a very economically secure class.

At the same time, Derek Thompson makes the case that college isn’t actually getting that much more expensive:

One of the confusing things about college is that it’s hard to keep straight its price, cost, and value. The sticker price of college – that is, the published tuition – isn’t paid by most middle-class students, who receive grants, tuition breaks, and tax benefits. The average net price of a bachelor’s degree is still 55 percent lower than the sticker price today. For many students, tax benefits eliminate the full cost of an associate’s degree. College is much cheaper than advertised.

Meanwhile, Matt Phillips argues that “if you managed to rack up giant student debt loads, that’s likely because you’ve undertaken – and finished – the kind of extensive education that enables you to earn a good salary over time.” He adds:

The real student debt problem comes in the relatively modest amounts of borrowing done by low-income, first-generation college goers, who are four times more likely to leave school after the first year than students without those risk factors. Incidentally, this is also why increased funding of state schools is probably the answer. And, of course, most elites didn’t go to state schools. (Go SUNY Binghamton!)

Jordan Weissman concurs:

If you talk to people who study education policy for a living, they’ll tell you that the real victims of student debt aren’t English grads who took out a bit too much money to attend the University of Michigan or Oberlin. Those kinds of borrowers usually end up just fine.

However, there is a huge contingent of working-class and minority students – some of whom are among the first of their families to attend college – who are getting chewed up by student debt. These are young people, and increasingly older adults, who might not have gone to college 20 or 30 years ago, but do now because the economy is brutal for job-seekers without a degree. They borrow for school, often to pay the inflated tuition at an unscrupulous for-profit institution or little-known vocational school, then frequently drop out. Suddenly, they find themselves in debt, with no degree and no guidance on how to manage their loans.

Christopher Ingraham adds, sensibly:

The big story in student debt over the past 20 years is not – and never should have been – the few people taking on huge debt burdens, but rather that the share of all students graduating with any student debt has risen sharply:

In 1989, 22 percent of households headed by twenty-to-forty-somethings with a degree were saddled with student loan debt. That figure more than doubled by 2010, standing at 50 percent. It’s likely climbed even more since then. That number is probably an underestimate, too. … Another important consideration is that the data above only go back to 1989. If we could extend it further, to the 1960s and 1970s, when Boomers were graduating, we’d likely see even lower rates of student debt back then. This is the reason why it feels like student debt is everywhere these days –compared to the ’60s and ’70s, it is everywhere.

Lastly, Mike Konczal notes that today’s student debtors spend 13.4 years paying off their loans, in contrast to the class of 1992′s 7.4 years.

Was Sectarian Strife Inevitable? Ctd

A reader grabs the question by the horns:

I am a longtime reader and feel the need to weigh in on this ongoing debate about sectarianism in Iraq. I wrote my dissertation (under the supervision of Juan Cole) about Iraqi anti-colonialism during the era of indirect British rule (1932-1958) and am currently working on a book that expands the project a bit to cover 1914-1963. As of this fall, I will be an assistant professor of history.

In my view, there is something really problematic about the way in which this debate about sectarianism in Iraq is evolving. On one side we have the argument that sectarianism is an inescapable element of a primordial culture, and that the current violence is the inevitable consequence of the (British) colonial myopia that forced Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds into an artificial nation-state. On the other side, we have the argument that sectarianism is a fundamentally modern phenomenon, the entirely avoidable outgrowth of an (American) imperial ignorance that insisted on viewing Iraq as a collection of distinct sects and proportioning power and influence along sectarian lines.

Both arguments ignore the basic realities of Iraqi history between 1920 and 2003.

The constructionists, as you have noted, often fail to take seriously the significance of sectarian violence in the aftermath of the Gulf War, either ignoring the brutal suppression of the Shi’a intifada or dismissing it is an act of political brutality that was statistically (but not ideologically) sectarian. The primordialists, though, are guilty of ignoring an earlier period of communal coexistence in the 1940s and 1950s. Fanar Haddad, Reidar Visser, Sinan Antoon and other constructionists are on very solid ground when they point to this period, which was absolutely not an historical mirage or a superficial alliance of collective interests, as the casual observer might assume. It is true that the Kurds were never entirely integrated into this burgeoning sense of Iraqi collectivity, but the Kurdish issue is not exactly what we have in mind when we talk about sectarianism in Iraq.

So what the hell really happened, then? If we can’t simply wave our hand and bemoan the original sins of British colonialism in setting this whole tragedy in motion OR point our finger at the neo-conservatives for making this avoidable bloodshed inevitable, how can we account for what is happening? Fanar Haddad might be a bit reductive in the Vox interview that you cited – though he does explicitly reference the Iranian Revolution and the rebellion of 1991 as part of a “cumulative process” of deepening sectarianism, but his book Sectarianism in Iraq gives far greater attention to the formation of sectarianism before and after 2003.

The language of today’s sectarianism is a gradual and logical outgrowth of the narrative of shu’ubiyya, a reference to Persian Muslims who supposedly worked to undermine Arab cultural and political unity in the ‘Abbasid period. This narrative was heavily utilized during Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War and during the suppression of the 1991 uprising, but its modern usage really dates back to the way that Arab nationalists talked about the Iraqi Communists during the Qasim years (1958-1963). Again, given the concentration of Shi’a in the Iraqi Communist Party, the casual observer might insist that this was surely just primordial sectarianism cast in different ideological terms, but I contend that the historical evidence weighs strongly against that conclusion. Some of the principle proponents of this anti-communist shu’ubiyya discourse were Shi’a, like the famous poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. The political violence that followed the 1958 Revolution tended to gradually undermine the secular basis of the dominant political parties and to replace these modern political identities with older loyalties rooted in ethnic and religious ties.

There is obviously a very complex historical argument that lies beneath this brief sketch, but it is really important to note that the tragedy of Iraq ought to be seen as part of the broader trajectory of secularism and socialism in decline. The fact that the decline of ideological and class loyalties in Iraq has given rose to bloody and violent sectarian strife does not necessarily indicate that sectarianism was lurking beneath the surface all along. The failures of British colonialism and Hashemite nation building, the violence of both communist and anti-communist partisans in the early 1960s, the unique depravity of Saddam Hussein, the incompetence and unforgivable ignorance of the American neo-conservatives, the foolish policies pursued by Nuri al-Maliki, the despicable role played by the Saudis, and the grotesque ideology of the Jihadis have all played their own important roles. It would be quite a pity, though, to ignore the historical significance of coexistence in mid-century Iraq and chalk this all up to the primordial hatreds of a backwards civilization.

I do really appreciate and respect you for engaging in this debate at a time when so many Americans simply want to shake their heads.

Defending The Drum Solo

Colin Fleming insists that its bad rap is unearned:

In jazz, unlike rock, the drum solo is afforded the utmost respect. The genre’s percussionists pore over the work of giants of the form like Art Blakey, and with good reason. Consider Blakey’s solo on “Bu’s Delight” from 1963, a mini-masterpiece of pacing, narrative, and sonic architecture. The cymbals, maintaining the beat from earlier in the track, provide a low-key intro, to which Blakey adds tom rolls that have this spooky, hoodoo vibe to them, something for Macbeth’s witches to dance to. The rolls coalesce into a riff that advances and then retreats, as though feeling out its environment, gaining more confidence in the process, and then giving in to pure and mighty blues funk, a soundtrack to kick up a jig under moonlight. This is the drum solo at its best.

But plenty of jazzers do indulge in the same excess that made so many rock drum solos the kind of thing that Animal skewered on The Muppets, bashing away like a furry Dionysius at the wine fair. Lightyear Entertainment’s recent album of Buddy Rich solos—just solos—illustrates this well. It’s a record meant to blow your mind once and then never be listened to again.

You can do so above. Update from a reader:

With the futbol ongoing in Brazil, I thought you needed more of a Latin tinge – so, live at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2002, here are: Michel Camilo (Dominican) on piano, the great Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez (Cuban) on drums, and Anthony Jackson (U.S.A.!!) on bass:

Face Of The Day

Juan Aguirre watches USA play Germany in a World Cup soccer match on one of two large screens placed for fans in Chicago’s Grant Park on June 26, 2014. Organizers expected as many as 20,000 people to watch the game in the park. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. Team USA ended up losing 1 -0 but they still advance to the round of 16.

Did SCOTUS Tip Its Hand On The NSA?

Allahpundit wonders if there might be some clues in yesterday’s Riley ruling, given the surprisingly intense support Roberts expressed for digital privacy:

Maybe not: Gabe Malor’s right that there’s a difference legally between the cops searching data stored on your own hard drive and searching data (or metadata) you’ve shared willingly with a telecom company. There’s a privacy interest in the former but not, under current precedent, in the latter. Then again, Roberts’s language today really is broad. If the Court’s worried about letting the state tap a bottomless reservoir of information about individuals, they may not care much where the tap is placed. You could, in theory, dispatch with current precedent in one flourish: Since, in our interconnected world, virtually all digital information is disclosed to some entity at some point, the act of disclosure to a telecom company can’t be understood as destroying the individual’s privacy interest in the information.

“After Riley,” Tim Edgar remarks, “the intelligence community has some reason to be nervous”:

In defending its activities, the Obama Administration has pointed—entirely appropriately—at privacy protections, including detailed targeting and minimization procedures, and substantial internal and external oversight.  Despite real challenges, these protections are meaningful and far exceed anything that other nations provide to protect privacy in their intelligence activities. The Chief Justice made short shrift of a similar argument in Riley, when the government said it would develop “protocols” to deal with the privacy problems its cell phone searches would create in an age of cloud computing. “Proba­bly a good idea, but the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols,” he said.

As someone who wrote and reviewed many such guidelines for intelligence agencies, I couldn’t agree more!  I expect to see this quote in brief after brief, whenever the government says internal safeguards are good enough. There is undoubtedly some heartburn at the NSA on this point.  Safeguards and oversight matter.  The Supreme Court reminds us that they are no substitute for the Constitution.

But Garrett Epps isn’t ready to make any predictions:

There is already speculation about what, if any, implications this case will have for challenges to the National Security Agency’s amassing and storage of data from Americans’ cell-phone and computer use. It would, I think, be a mistake to read too much into it—nothing in this case implicated national security or terrorism, two government interests to which this Court seems relatively eager to defer—as in Clapper. But it does suggest that the Court that hears that case, when it does, will be more technically savvy than it has been. The John Roberts who wrote Riley will understand why privacy advocates worry about the collection of “metadata” as well as of the contents of calls.

The Strange Resilience Of David Cameron

Tally up the disasters: the loss to UKIP and Labour in the European elections; the embarrassment of having hired criminal phone-hacker Andy Coulson for Number 10; a doomed campaign to stop the incoming president of the European Commission; a looming end to the UK with Scotland’s impending referendum on independence; and a favorability rating of 35 percent (behind UKIP’s Nigel Farage at 36 percent).

And yet … he has a little spring in his step, thanks to:

the very public implosion of [Opposition leader] Ed Miliband. Yesterday, at Prime Ministers Questions, Miliband had the opportunity to humiliate David Cameron over the Coulson conviction. Instead, he ended up humiliating himself. “As the Tory benches cheered and their Labour counterparts grimaced, the wind left Miliband’s sails. After this right hook, Miliband’s technical queries on the civil service could not help sounding flat. Against expectations, Cameron ended the session on top,” reported that fanatical right-wing scandal sheet the New Statesman. Although the Statesman actually got it wrong. The problem for Miliband is that when Cameron came out on top it surprised precisely no one.

Then there’s a shift in mood since the Tories were able to avoid catastrophe in the recent local and European elections, and Labour looked much more wobbly than expected. And a Tory prime minister’s usual foes – his own backbenchers – are quiescent, if only because they see both a potential victory next year but more important a referendum on Britain (sans Scotland, perhaps) leaving the EU. In that Cameron’s failure to stop Carl Juncker winning the European Commission actually helps him in the long run – because it is likely to make the EU even less popular in Britain than it now is. Clive Crook is (rightly) worried:

Cameron’s difficulties over Europe are rapidly compounding. His position requires him to argue that Europe is reformable; Europe is telling the world it isn’t. How many of these rebuffs can Cameron absorb before he has to acknowledge that the U.K.’s choice is not between a new, less centralized union and divorce, but between divorce and the union as it is (only more so)? In effect, he’s already cast aside the argument that Britain has a compelling interest in remaining an EU member on almost any terms. If he believed that, he wouldn’t have promised a referendum in the first place.

Not so long ago, it was unimaginable that Scotland would leave the UK and that the UK would leave the EU. I still think the odds are slightly against both, but no one should bet on it. In which case, perhaps Cameron could survive … but the very structure of the country he governs fundamentally come apart.

(Photo: British Prime Minister David Cameron leaves 10 Downing Street in London on 18 June, 2014. By Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images.)

So You Think You Can Make A Show About Assad

FX’s new series Tyrant is about the Americanized son of a brutal Arab dictator who returns home for a family wedding and ends up having to stay to run the country. With a premise like that, how could they go wrong? Let’s start with the bad casting:

The problems begin with Adam Rayner, who plays the show’s protagonist, Bassam “Barry” Al Fayeed. After fleeing Abbudin—the fictional country standing in for pre-civil war Syria or Saddam-era Iraq—as a teenager, Bassam has made a life as a pediatrician in Pasadena, trying to forget that his father once used chemical weapons against his own people. After years of estrangement, he reluctantly brings his wife Molly (Jennifer Finnigan) and two children to Abbudin for the first time to attend his nephew’s wedding. (For some reason, Bassam’s wife doesn’t understand why her husband might have a complicated relationship with his war criminal father, and is hoping the two might reconnect.) Bassam is horrified by his family’s corruption and secretly afraid he is no better than them. The role requires an actor who can show the potential for brutality beneath his righteous outrage. Rayner mostly just glowers.

This is particularly disappointing because Rayner is a white, English actor cast in an Arab role. The producers’ claims that they couldn’t find an Arab actor with the skills to carry a show would be easier to forgive if Adam Rayner was giving a Bryan Cranston–level performance. Instead, he’s just a pretty white guy in a suit, easily overshadowed by the (actually Middle-Eastern) actors around him.

Poniewozik gets to the heart of the problem:

There’s not a fleshed-out character in the show, beginning with Barry’s stock-villainous brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), who we immediately meet raping a subject with her own husband and children still in her house. To a person, the characters are types: the shallow American kids, the dissolute playboys, the noble protesters and journalists, the cynical advisers, sneering elites and sad-eyed children. The problem isn’t that Tyrant portrays a troubled region as troubled; it’s that it doesn’t use its time to begin to make this world as real as ours.

Eric Deggans also faults the show for trading in stereotypes:

This is a show about the Middle East as seen through Americanized eyes, with little of the nuances in Arab or Muslim culture on display. The unfortunate effect is a constant, not-so-subtle message: If these people would just act like Americans, everything would be so much better. Piled on top of this simplistic dynamic is a series of decisions made by the characters that seem utterly baffling. …

In fact, even though the country is teetering on edge of rebellion during many episodes, no one in Bassam’s immediate family acts as if he is worried about his own safety. And when they arrive in Abbudin, they seem to know almost nothing about the country — as if at least one of them wouldn’t have hopped on Google to read up a little on this dictatorship ruled by their relatives.

Alyssa pans the show as well:

“Tyrant” feels less like an act of powerful imagination and more like the recreation of a Generic Middle East (it was shot in Tel Aviv), where everyone is oppressed, except the tacky gluttons who are blowing their money in nightclubs. Everyone speaks in cliches, whether they are defending their right to Dom Perignon or talking about winning over survivors of the regime’s gas attacks or overseas audiences.

And the show, in keeping with the long-running television vogue for explaining repulsive people, veers towards moral relativism. Having established Jamal as a serial rapist, it is genuinely bizarre that “Tyrant” spends subsequent episodes worrying about his sexual health. It is nice that a prep-school aged Barry was horrified by his father’s use of chemical weapons, but against tens of thousands dead, are we really supposed to be this concerned with his feelings?

The Best Of The Dish Today

A reader emailed today and included the following passage from DFW’s famed Kenyon Commencement speech that resonated with me as we all try to come to terms with the decisions we have to make in Iraq:

[A] huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Now think of cable news or the instant web cacophony; think of “winning the morning”; think of all the certainty I convey on this blog every day. What I’ve been striving for in this space since the Iraq War began is a way to think about the world that is less about ME and to grasp the realities of global politics in a way that is less about US. What I pray for is an America that is “well-adjusted.”

Posts worth revisiting today: Internet addiction in China and in a brilliant music video; Republican sectarian warfare after Mississippi; another Windsor-fueled breakthrough for marriage equality; and the mental health of animals and Uruguayan football players.

The most popular post of the day was Raging Against Obama – And History; followed by The Whoring Just Keeps Getting Worse, on the latest low in “sponsored content.”

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 15 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish - for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: People walk through the site at Worthy Farm in Pilton on the eve of the first day of the 2014 Glastonbury Festival on June 24, 2014 in Glastonbury, England. Gates opened today at the Somerset dairy farm that plays host to one of the largest music festivals in the world. Tickets to the event, which is now in its 44th year, sold out in minutes even before any of the headline acts had been confirmed. The festival, which started in 1970 when several hundred hippies paid £1, now attracts more than 175,000 people. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.)

Debating “The Case Against 8″

You’ve probably heard more than you want to about this, but if you’re interested in what happened when I engaged its directors – and two plaintiffs – then sit back, and get some popcorn. And if you’re curious about the real history of the marriage equality movement, Evan Wolfson has put together a helpful time-line of ten milestone moments. And you can extend it back a bit in terms of the debate in the gay community all the way to the 1950s, if you care more about context than p.r. Or even back to the 1580s, if you’re alert.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Andrew, could you please stop referring to publishers who sell sponsored content as whores? It’s really offensive to whores.