Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 314

Shelf Lives

Rachel Manwill confesses that she owns more than 850 books she has yet to read. She wonders what the point of holding on is:

There are many “big” books in my expanding, unread library – books that had an impact when they were released and continue to have an impact on literary culture and communities. Books like Freedom by Jonathan Frazen, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz languish. And often, so often that I’ve made a joke out of it, I will reply to a query about whether I’ve read this book or that that I “own but haven’t read it.”

But these books – especially those “big” books – I feel in some ways that just having them on my shelves means something, that it’s better than nothing. I feel like I’m doing something with those books, even if that “something” isn’t reading them. I don’t know if that feeling is about supporting the authors either through money or awareness or if its about intellectual acceptance – I know OF a book, I was current enough with the trends to buy it – or if its about none of those things and I truly believe that time will slow and someday, I will get around to reading each and every one of these unread volumes.

Mental Health Break

A pushpin adventure:

A GIRL NAMED ELASTIKA from Guillaume Blanchet I Filmmaker on Vimeo.

The End Of Fast Fashion?

Keila Tyner suggests that our current era of cheap clothing is coming to an end:

From the 1900s to 1950s, American consumers spent approximately 12 to 14 percent of their annual income on clothing. Today, we spend about 3 percent. But our closets are actually bigger. The average American house has doubled in size since the 1950s and closet space has increased, too, particularly with the advent of the walk-in closet in the 1980s. We likely have more than five times as many clothing items as we did in the first part of the 20th century. The move of clothing production overseas where labor costs are low has made it possible for us to have large quantities of items without paying much for them. But this could be changing. …

At this point, the primary concern for manufacturers and retailers is rising labor costs. In China, manufacturing wages have increased by 71 percent since 2008 and are projected to rise by 10 percent this year. Manufacturers are searching for other production locations with cheaper labor, but wages are rising in those countries as well. For instance, the minimum wage is Bangladesh has risen by 77 percent as a result of much debate following the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse on April 24, 2013, and Indonesian unions recently staged a strike in demand of a 30 percent wage increase.

Previous Dish on fast fashion here and here.

The GOP’s Anti-Obamacare Dogma

Chait believes the ACA debate reveals a deeper divide between the parties:

One of my longstanding fixations, going back almost a decade now, is that we make a mistake when we think of liberalism and conservative as symmetric ways of thinking. On economic policy, at least, they are asymmetric. Liberals believe in activist government entirely as a means to various ends. Pollution controls are useful only insofar as they result in cleaner air; national health insurance is valuable only to the extent that it helps people obtain medical care. More spending and more regulation are not ends in and of themselves. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in small government not only for practical reasons — this program will cost too much or fail to work — but for philosophical reasons as well.

A new political science paper by Matt Grossman and David Hopkins bears out this way of thinking about American politics. The authors find a fundamental asymmetry between the Republican and Democratic coalitions. They examined survey results and other data among voters, activists, and elites, and found that Republicans express their beliefs about government as abstract ideology (big government is bad) while Democrats express their beliefs in the form of benefits for groups. The differences are enormous [as the chart above from the paper demonstrates.]

This, he argues, is why Republicans ”have expressed from the beginning a theological certainty that Obamacare will fail.” Matt Steinglass also  to understand ACA opposition:

For the most part … opposition to Obamacare now is based on two things. At one level, it’s a question of partisanship. Republicans have turned “Obamacare” into a word that much of the country finds inherently distasteful. No matter how well the system performs, it’s too late to reverse those associations. At another level, many dislike the basic transaction at the heart of universal coverage: richer people have to basically pay for poorer people’s health-insurance. In Kentucky, for example, Republicans are avidly working to reverse the state’s Medicaid expansion, even though the federal government pays for the entire thing initially, with the state expected to kick in 10% in the future.

Ponnuru, meanwhile, calls again for conservatives to stop awaiting Obamacare’s failure:

The likelihood of replacement would be higher if there was an alternative that didn’t take away people’s insurance — one that promised to cover roughly as many people as Obamacare does, or even more. Letting people on Medicaid buy into the market by converting much of the program into tax credits, for example, would be more viable than just kicking its new beneficiaries off the rolls.

Opponents of Obamacare should always have been thinking along these lines. Now they have less and less choice.

Sex-Selective Abortion In America?

After South Dakota’s governor signed into law a new ban on sex-selective abortion last week, Tara Culp-Ressler denounced it as “an unnecessary abortion restriction that reinforces racial stereotypes about the Asian American community”:

In fact, this type of legislation is a solution in search of a problem. While female infanticide is an issue in some parts of the world, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Asian American or Pacific Islander (AAPI) individuals who live here in the U.S. are having abortions based on gender. There is no epidemic of sex-selective abortion among the AAPI community, and passing legislation to “fix” this nonexistent issue simply ends up damaging women of color. Ultimately, these laws scrutinize Asian American women based solely on their race.

Jonathan Coppage demurs, saying the Guttmacher paper Culp-Ressler cites for ”no evidence” doesn’t really support that claim:

The policy review paper acknowledges the evidence, but calls it limited and inconclusive. Yet the two leading studies cited by Guttmacher policy review author Sneha Barot, and subsequently most of the authors relying on her paper, are neither especially limited nor inconclusive.

Drawing on U.S. Census data and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, study authors Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund of Columbia University open their discussion, “We document son-biased sex ratios at higher parities in a contemporary Western society. We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

Now, as the second study‘s author, Jason Abrevaya, explains in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, prenatal sex selection could conceivably be a result of using more advanced reproductive technologies, like IVF or sperm sorting. In practice, the high expense and rarity of such procedures means that almost all prenatal sex selection most likely takes place by abortion. He concludes his study, “This study has offered evidence consistent with gender selection at later births within the United States.”

In Hollywood, Sexism Doesn’t Pay Off

Walt Hickey employs the Bechdel test to argue that Hollywood’s exclusion of women makes no economic sense:

[T]here’s a wide-ranging perception in Hollywood that audiences — in the U.S. and abroad — simply don’t care for women in leading roles and that movies for and about men are more likely to have better cross-market appeal than movies about women. The theory is that “women will go to a ‘guy’s movie’ more easily than guys will go to a ‘woman’s movie,’” said Michael Shamberg, who produced “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “Django Unchained”(2012) and “Garden State” (2004).

This assumption is up for debate; we found that films that pass the Bechdel test tend to do better dollar for dollar than those that don’t — even internationally. …

The total median gross return on investment for a film that passed the Bechdel test was $2.68 for each dollar spent. The total median gross return on investment for films that failed was only $2.45 for each dollar spent. And while this might be a side effect of films with lower budgets tending to have higher returns on investment than films with higher budgets, it’s still a strong indicator that films with women in somewhat prominent roles are performing well.

Alyssa applauds:

This is exactly the kind of analysis that I suggested data-driven journalists could profitably contribute to entertainment reporting back when FiveThirtyEight.com launched. And it is exactly the sort of data that backs up the anecdotal evidence that those of us who would like to see more female characters, and more kinds of stories about women, have been brandishing at Hollywood for years. If skeptics of women-centered stories are able to brush off examples like the billion-dollar box office for “Frozen” as some sort of fluke, maybe long-range data like Hickey presents here, and that which [journalism professor Stacy] Smith is assembling, can start to turn this titantically misguided assumption around.

Proportional Stop-And-Frisk

Christopher E. Smith’s son, a black Harvard student, was repeatedly stopped and frisked by the NYPD during his internship on Wall Street. In response, Smith recommends not curbing the practice – as is already happening - but to expand it to all New Yorkers:

As an intellectual exercise, why don’t we envision matching the application of stop-and-frisk to the demographic composition of a city? In New York City, if officers wanted to stop-and-frisk three African-American men on their shift, they’d also have to stop-and-frisk five white women and five white men – and proportionately equivalent numbers of Latinos and Asian-Americans. Someone might say, “Wait, it’s a waste of the officers’ time to impose these searches on innocent people instead of searching people who might actually be criminals.” But the evidence shows that New York City police were already imposing stop-and-frisk searches on innocent people nearly 90 percent of the time – it is just that the burden of those stops and searches has been endured almost exclusively by young men of color….

This suggestion isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. If police were to actually apply it, even for a short while, it would test society’s disregard for individualized suspicion and force us to think more deeply about what it means to impose stop-and-frisk on large numbers of innocent people. It is easy enough to rationalize away a “special tax” when we apply it to “them.” But how will we feel about that burden once it’s shared by all of us?

Update from a reader:

How about we just make the frisking fit the crime? The SEC should be doing “stop-and-audit”s on Wall Street.

Knowing The Score

How do we identify “expressiveness” in music? It depends on who’s listening:

Recent empirical work has shown that listeners tend to be unable to say if the expressiveness they are hearing originates from the composition or the performance. Studying the experience of professional musicians highlights how differently they approach their performance. For them the score is never just notes on paper but already music imagined as sound. This imagination depends on their socio-cultural, historical position, personality, and education. They use metaphors and heuristics, short-cuts that package up accumulated knowledge and speeds up problem solving in preparation for and during performance. They rarely speak of specific emotions to be conveyed but conceive of music as “emotional,” “dramatic,” “uplifting,” or “turbulent,” for instance.

This is true of music and musicians of other artistic traditions, like classical Hindustani music. According to the dhrupad singer Uday Bhawalkar, “Music without emotion is not music at all, but we cannot name this emotion, these emotions, we cannot specify them.” The sentiments or emotions that we encounter in daily life become transformed into aesthetic experiences in theatre.

(Video: Uday Bhawalkar sings Dhrupad)

Burma Still Isn’t Free

Min Zin worries that Burma will grow increasingly unstable:

Under the current Burmese system, the people do not directly elect the president: parliament does, in a complicated procedure that gives disproportionate power to the military. Even though the current ruling party is unlikely to win both houses of parliament in the 2015 elections, the military members of parliament can still nominate its leader as their candidate for the presidency. So it’s entirely possible that army chief Min Aung Hlaing, who reaches retirement age next year, will enter politics and become the military’s nominee for the presidency.

And that, obviously, is a problem. The military has dominated politics in our country for the past half-century. As long as the military continues to control the presidency rather than handing power over to a civilian leader like Aung San Suu Kyi, the legitimacy and stability of the political transition will be incomplete.

Although he’s a bit more sanguine about Burma’s liberalization, Jay Ulfelder zeroes in on the same problem:

[W]hat’s emerged so far is more like the arrangements that hold in monarchies like Morocco or Jordan. There, loyal opposition parties are allowed to contest seats in the legislature, and a certain amount of free discourse and even protest is tolerated, but formal and informal rules ensure that incumbent insiders retain control over the political agenda and veto power over all major decisions.

For that to change in Burma, the country’s constitution would have to change. When military elites rewrote that document a few years ago, however, they cleverly ensured that constitutional reform couldn’t happen without their approval. So far, we have seen no signs that they plan to relinquish that arrangement any time soon. Until we do, I think it’s premature to speak of a transition to democracy in Burma. Democratization, yes, but not enough yet to say that the country is between political orders. What we have now, I think, is a partially liberalized authoritarian regime that’s still led by a military elite with uncertain intentions.

The View From Your Window

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 5.32 pm