Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 265
May 22, 2014
Mental Health Break
Plasticine Rhythm from Andy Martin on Vimeo.
Using the iPhone app ‘Vine’, I created a series of stop motion loops over a period of about 6 months. It was a good way to experiment quickly with plasticine in motion and they were fun to make (a compilation of these Vines can be seen at vimeo.com/94679344).
Sharing The Bottom Line With Workers
Seth Stevenson recommends open-book management:
Some owners or managers might be reluctant to share numbers with employees. One concern is that workers might leak information to competitors. But if employees have been sufficiently motivated by equity stakes or bonuses that are entwined with company performance, the last thing they’ll want to do is harm the company by aiding a rival. An employee of Square, the privately held San Francisco–based payments company, tells me that over the multiple years that Square has been sharing financial numbers with its employees, there’s never been a single leak—despite operating within the incestuous, cutthroat realm that is the Bay Area technology sector.
Another worry is that sharing numbers might fuel employee resentment over how budgets are distributed. But according to [Open-Book Management author John] Case, most low-level workers vastly overestimate how much of their company’s revenue is profit. When they learn how thin the margins truly are, they develop far more respect for attempts to limit needless expenditures. In situations where layoffs become necessary, opening the books can help workers understand why the company was forced to cut jobs. Case credits open-book management for frequently defusing adversarial relationships between labor unions and management.
May 21, 2014
Reading His Way To War?
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are Vladimir Putin’s two favorite writers – but the wrong one has influenced his understanding of Russia’s role in world affairs:
Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm. This messianic vision stemmed from the fact that Dostoevsky thought Russia was the most spiritually developed of all the nations, a nation destined to unite and lead the others. Russia’s mission, he said in 1881, was “the general unification of all the people of all tribes of the great Aryan race.”
This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others.
Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture. One of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning was his capacity to uncover the full-blooded truth of each one of his characters, no matter their nationality. In his Sevastopol Tales, which were inspired by his own experiences as a Russian soldier fighting against the combined forces of the Turks, French, and British in the Crimean War of the 1850’s—in the very region recently re-annexed by Russia—Tolstoy celebrates the humanity of all his characters, whether Russian, British, or French.
Unfortunately, amid all the spiritual turmoil following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians have tended to cling more to the starker, messianic vision of Dostoevsky than the calmer vision of universal humanity Tolstoy espoused, finding the latter perhaps a tad too democratic, humanistic, and soft for their hardened tastes. After all the tragedies of 20th century Russian history, and the humiliations of the past 20 years in particular, many ordinary Russians are seeking unequivocal proof of their national worthiness—indeed superiority—among the family of nations.
Face Of The Day
Spanish matador Saul Jimenez Fortes is gored by a bull during the San Isidro Fair at Las Ventas bullring in Madrid, Spain on May 20, 2014. For the first time since 1979, the bullfight was cancelled after the three bullfighters were injured by bulls. By Europa Press/Europa Press via Getty Images.
Who’s To Blame For The VA Scandal?
Jordain Carney and Stacy Kaper call the broken veterans’ health system “a failure with many silent fathers,” including Congress, the VA leadership, and the past ten presidential administrations:
In many ways, the Obama administration is paying for the negligence of past administrations, dating all the way back to President John F. Kennedy, who authorized the decade-long use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But it wasn’t just Kennedy. Under President Johnson, Agent Orange was the dominant chemical used during the war. President Nixon halted its use, but a long line of presidents either refused to acknowledge the damage done or failed to address it.
President Carter’s VA created the Agent Orange registry, where veterans who were worried about potential side effects could be examined. But four years later, a GAO report found that 55 percent of respondents felt that the VA’s Agent Orange examinations either weren’t thorough or they received little or no information on what long-term health impacts exposure could cause. … The government’s long-standing failure to address the damage done to veterans by Agent Orange mirrors the larger failure of the VA. It spans generations and party affiliations, and every effort to fix it comes with unintended consequences.
But Tuccille claims that the VA hospitals’ wait list problem is just what happens when you have socialized medicine:
This should surprise nobody. Canada’s government-run single-payer health system has long suffered waiting times for care. The country’s Fraser Institute estimates “the national median waiting time from specialist appointment to treatment increased from 9.3 weeks in 2010 to 9.5 weeks in 2011.”
Likewise, once famously social democratic Sweden has seen a rise in private health coverage in parallel to the state system because of long delays to receive care. “It’s quicker to get a colleague back to work if you have an operation in two weeks’ time rather than having to wait for a year,” privately insured Anna Norlander told Sveriges Radio[.] An article in The Local noted that “visitors are sometimes surprised to learn about year-long waiting times for cancer patients.”
Joan Walsh finds it pretty rich that Republicans in Congress are trying to make political hay out of the VA’s problems while doing nothing to fix them:
There’s real trouble at the VA, but there’s bigger trouble for the Republican Party, which purports to love veterans but does little to help them. Thom Hartman recently ran down the list of pro-veteran measures the GOP has blocked. Earlier this year Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to boost VA funding by $21 billion and restore military pensions cut in the Murray-Ryan budget deal. They opposed President Obama’s $1 billion jobs bill to put unemployed vets to work in 2012. They’ve killed bills to help homeless veterans and promote vets’ entrepreneurship.
And in the current crisis, there’s yet to be a genuine GOP answer to the problems at the VA, beyond anti-Obama grandstanding. Do they want to voucherize veterans’ health care, like they do Medicare? Abolish the VA entirely? “Privatize” it, whatever that would mean?
John Dickerson also asks, “Does anyone have faith that this outrage will be answered by serious action?”
One primary reason to despair is that we’re already living at peak outrage. Fake umbrage taking and outrage production are our most plentiful political products, not legislation and certainly not interesting solutions to complicated issues. We are in a new political season, too—that means an extra dose of hot, high stakes outrage over the slightest thing that might move votes. How does something get recognized as beyond the pale when we live beyond the pale?
What makes the VA scandal different is not only that it affected people at their most desperate moment of need—and continues to affect them at subpar facilities. It’s also a failure of one of the most basic transactions government is supposed to perform: keeping a promise to those who were asked to protect our very form of government. … In this time of political purity tests, let’s require a purity test for the constant state of alarm. The next time someone turns their meter up to 11—whether it’s a politician, a pundit, or your aunt on Facebook—their outrage should be measured against what has already happened at the VA.
Your GPA Shows Up In Your Paycheck
Jonnelle Marte examines a new study that uses GPA to predict future earnings:
A report published Monday in the Eastern Economic Journal by researchers from the University of Miami found that a person’s grade-point average in high school not only indicates the person’s chances of getting into college and whether he or she will finish college or graduate school. It could also be an indicator of how much that person will earn later in life.
Indeed, for a one-point increase in a person’s high school GPA, average annual earnings in adulthood increased by about 12 percent for men and about 14 percent for women, the report found. (Men and women were looked at separately since women have lower average earnings than men, making about $30,000 on average in adulthood compared with the average of $43,000 for men.)
Bryce Covert focuses on the gender gap:
The team of University of Miami researchers found that a one-point increase in GPA means a 12 percent boost in earnings for men and a 14 percent boost for women. Even so, there’s a big gender gap in total earnings. A woman who got a 4.0 GPA in high school will only be worth about as much, income-wise, as a man who got a 2.0. A woman with a 2.0 average will make about as much as a man with a 0 GPA. The data also show that average high school GPAs are significantly higher for women, but men will still end up having significantly higher income later on.
It also found that high school grades can indicate the likelihood of going to college, and that a one-point increase doubles the chances of completing a degree for both genders.
Last week, Philip N. Cohen put these kinds of studies in context. He used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to compare the “Armed Forces Qualifying Test scores, taken in 1999, when the respondents were ages 15-19 with their household income in 2011, when they were 27-31.” He found “a very strong relationship—that correlation of 0.35 means AFQT explains 12 percent of the variation in household income”:
But take heart, ye parents in the age of uncertainty: 12 percent of the variation leaves a lot left over. This variable can’t account for how creative your children are, how sociable, how attractive, how driven, how entitled, how connected, or how white they may be. To get a sense of all the other things that matter, here is the same data, with the same regression line, but now with all 5,248 individual points plotted as well (which means we have to rescale the y-axis):
Each dot is a person’s life—or two aspects of it, anyway—with the virtually infinite sources of variability that make up the wonder of social existence. All of a sudden that strong relationship doesn’t feel like something you can bank on with any given individual.
The Flexibility Of Racial Categories
The latest example of it:
The researchers found that 2.5 million Americans of Hispanic origin, or approximately 7 percent of the 35 million Americans of Hispanic origin in 2000, changed their race from “some other race” in 2000 to “white” in 2010. An additional 1.3 million people switched in the other direction. A noteworthy but unspecified share of the change came from children who weren’t old enough to fill out a form in 2000, but chose for themselves in 2010.
The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white.
Recent Dish on the social construction of race here.
The Intercourse Is For Fun, Ctd
In case you have the song stuck in your head too:
A reader is worried about TMI:
There is a reason you leave out the discussion of sexual pleasure in the sex talk with your kids: they are KIDS! They still think the other gender is yucky. Even when people kiss, kids are grossed out. You should get a jump on the game and tell them the facts of life BEFORE they are interested in sex. After I told my son the facts he stated “I’m NEVER doing that!” My daughter’s response was “That sounds really uncomfortable.” The basic facts are so preposterous to them they would never believe that people do it for fun!
Another reader notes:
Several year ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ developed a series of sexuality programs that provide age-appropriate information for children, adolescents, and adults called “Our Whole Lives”. For example, the 27-session program for grades 7 thru 9 dedicates a class session to lovemaking and pleasure. This curriculum also dedicates a class session to masturbation, including the myths and facts about masturbation (e.g. the fact that masturbation is one of the safest sexual activities that a younger adolescent can engage in).
Another:
Three quick anecdotes:
1) Mom told me flat out, “Well, it feels really, really good. Of course God made it feel really really good! If it was boring like brushing your teeth, no one would ever get around to making babies!”
2) The first non-parental person whose opinion on the subject made me TRUST them was my Sunday school teacher in high school, who also said flat-out, “Sex is FANTASTIC. You’re going to love it, trust me!” (And then went on to explain how we should be married first, but still … it was so refreshing to hear someone tell the truth!)
3) As a kid, I knew my dad had a vasectomy because it was all part and parcel of my adoption story – Mom and Dad had children before me who died stillborn, and that was apparently going to keep happening (this was the 1960s), so dad got “fixed” and they adopted. Then when I was about nine, we had a male cat who got “fixed”, and while petting him, I discovered he had an erection. I went to Mom: “Hey, I thought when we ‘fixed’ him, he couldn’t do that anymore.” And Mom laughed really hard and turned a bit red, and said, “Well, no, what man would sign up for THAT?!” – which is when I realized we weren’t talking about the cat anymore …
Another anecdote from a reader:
My middle school science teacher (at my Catholic school) always made it a point, when we got to intercourse and reproduction, to tell us that “God made sex fun for a reason.” Whether you replace that with “nature,” “evolution,” “spaghetti monster,” or “Allah,” the point stands. I never really appreciated how progressive that was, much less in a Catholic school in the South, but the more time goes on the more I respect what she did. She was a phenomenal teacher all-around, and a big part of that was complete honesty with her students. What’s the best way to make humans reproduce? Make the method of doing so a complete blast!
Keep up the good work. I’m on my second year of subscription and have no regrets!
A $1.8bn Slap On The Wrist
David Dayen is livid at how easy Credit Suisse is getting off after it became the first bank in 25 years to plead guilty to a felony in US court:
In the agreement, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to one count of aiding tax evasion. The Justice Department made sure to check with New York’s banking regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve to eliminate any unwanted consequences from the guilty plea, like the revocation of Credit Suisse’s banking charter or investment-adviser license. (Incidentally, there are fewer of these collateral consequences with foreign banks, which gives away why Credit Suisse, and not JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America, was forced to plead guilty.) Instead of a corporate death penalty, Credit Suisse will pay $1.8 billion in fines to DOJ, $715 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services, and $100 million to the Fed. In addition, the bank will have an independent monitor overseeing its activities for two years.
This makes any fallout from the scandal mostly one of reputation, which means not much fallout at all.
Matt Levine finds something for everyone to hate:
If you’re a critic of bank impunity, you think this is dumb because no top executives will go to jail, or even be fired, and really there are no negative consequences beyond what you’d get from civil charges or a deferred prosecution agreement. If you’re a defender of banks, you worry that the Justice Department has missed some unintended consequences, and that Credit Suisse’s guilty plea will cause a colossal and accidental financial crisis.
Either way, the point is that the only consequences of the guilty plea — as opposed to a deferred prosecution, etc. — are the ones prosecutors forgot. Those consequences might be catastrophic, or they might be nonexistent, but if they exist, they exist because no one thought of them. It’s deterrence by accident: Prosecutors did their best to avert everything bad that might come from a guilty plea, but the deterrence value comes from the fact that their best might not be enough.
James Kwak thinks a more appropriate punishment would be to shut down Credit Suisse’s US operations entirely:
There are two main ways to really punish criminals and deter wrongdoing in the future. One is criminal prosecutions of the individuals involved, ideally getting lower-level employees to cooperate and gathering evidence as far up the management hierarchy as possible. (There are ongoing prosecutions against several Credit Suisse employees.) The other is putting a bank out of business by revoking its license. Even if he escapes jail, no CEO wants that on his résumé. And it seems entirely appropriate for a bank that engages in a decades-long criminal conspiracy that costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.
The conventional wisdom, however, is that you can’t revoke a large bank’s license because of potential systemic consequences. (That’s why prosecutors only pressed for the guilty plea after receiving assurances that regulators would not revoke Credit Suisse’s licenses.) If this is true, of course, that’s an overwhelming argument that such “too big to jail” banks shouldn’t exist in the first place. We don’t want a financial system dominated by banks that can willfully flout the law.
Kevin Roose doubts the guilty plea will mollify those who are still angry that nobody went to jail for causing the financial crisis:
What we’ve learned since 2009 is that the prosecution of complex financial crimes is a zero-sum game. With limited resources and a ticking clock, every case you choose to prosecute fully has to be carefully selected, with the most important determinant questions being “will I win this?” and “how long will it take?” Insider trading cases are easier to convict on than mortgage fraud cases; accordingly, they get more attention. Tax evasion is lower-hanging fruit than CEO misbehavior, so it’s naturally where prosecutors want to direct their attention.
That’s understandable, and forcing guilty pleas on lesser charges is perhaps better than the alternative. But let’s not conflate issues here. “Too big to jail” isn’t a controversy about how banks will be treated in the future. It’s a scandal about how they’ve been treated in the recent past. And no number of guilty pleas is likely to calm the public down, especially when the pleas seem to have so few real-world consequences.
Mental Health Break
Far from your typical surf video:
One Hour of San Diego Surfing Time Collapsed: San Diego Study #4 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.
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