Time for the charts and graphs, Mr. President?

Anyone old enough to have followed the candidacy of Ross Perot probably remembers how the media mocked and smirked at him for using charts and graphs in his TV addresses to the voters. How could anyone be so dense? The public doesn't have enough attention span to even look at, much less understand, your slides!

Then someone actually polled this and discovered that the public liked the charts and graphs. Of course, the media studiously ignored that finding. Presumably the talking heads were bored by actual information, so they naturally assumed that the "common people" they claim to represent must be also. And in the meantime, Perot's candidacy went down in flames for other reasons.

Fast forward to today. The issues that Obama is grappling with are big and complex. Before the public can get behind any solutions, they have to understand the problems. The media are useless for this: they'll provide nothing but "he said, she said" (i.e., "balanced") reporting. If Obama says one thing and John Boehner says the opposite, they'll give equal weight to both claims.

Maybe it's time to bring out the charts and graphs.

If you saw "An Inconvenient Truth," I'll bet the same image sticks in your mind that stuck in mine: Gore's simple trend line graph showing the rise in atmospheric CO2 over the years. It was a dramatic illustration of the problem, and it's very hard for Inhofe and the other deniers to just dismiss it. It was, in short, persuasive!

I think that similar kinds of hard data, graphically presented, could be equally persuasive on the economy, education, financial reform—all the big issues that Obama has to argue about with idiots.

If it's "I claim this" and "You claim that", it's easy for voters to dismiss it as just politics. But if it's "I claim this, and here's a dramatic illustration that proves it," it's much harder to ignore. And educational experts will tell you that the most effective way to communicate is with words and pictures.

So how about it, Mr. President? Why not try backing up your great rhetoric with equally great illustrations? What could it hurt?

(A really good way to start: bring in Edward Tufte, the guru of visual presentation of data, as a consultant.)

This Time, We Can't Leave the Middle Class Behind

Another sad example of what passes for economic thinking ("We've got to get the GDP up!")



Eric Zencey is only the latest person to deconstruct the notion that GDP measures anything useful or important, writing in last Sunday's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/opinion/10zencey.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all



When the GDP blips up, all the pundits say "we're in recovery." As Zencey notes, this is like holding a match to a thermometer and concluding that the room is getting warmer. Or, put far more elegantly, it's a "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."



GDP has to go. It contributes enormously to the destruction of the environment by failing to account for the costs of the loss of natural capital. If we want to keep it around for sentimental reasons, it should be renamed "Gross Domestic Transactions."
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

My Personal Physician

If I should ever in this life reach that benighted state where I both desire and can afford my very own "personal physician," I hope someone will do me the favor of just shooting me right then and there.

The recent death of Michael Jackson made me think: doesn't it seem like those celebrities and other rich folk who find it convenient to keep a sawbones on staff tend to die (a) young, (b) under somewhat dodgy circumstances, or (c) both of the above? I'll bet there's a negative correlation between longevity and how easily accessible your doctor is (only up to a point, of course; poor people obviously have the opposite problem, and they too often die young too).

It's not really hard to understand what happens. In medical school, young doctors-in-training are provided with a toolkit and taught how to use it. Once it was a little black bag, but increasingly these days, it's a prescription pad. It seems there's a drug for just about everything, and they're meant to be prescribed and used, by golly (my all-time personal favorite is the drug that was flogged on TV as a cure for "social anxiety disorder": basically an anti-shyness pill, as if a couple of shots of Tequila couldn't do the trick. In my youth I probably would've popped those things like jelly beans, but somehow I muddled shyly through without chemical aids.)

Now take a self-absorbed, narcissistic star, add a captive physician just down the hall, and you've got a recipe for massive pharmacological intervention. "Doc, I've got a headache!" "Doc, my back hurts!" "Doc, I couldn't sleep last night!" Out comes the scrip pad yet again, and into the star's body goes yet another powerful chemical—often an addictive one. Soon you're taking drugs to combat the undesirable side effects of other drugs. And it's all perfectly legal, thanks to your Personal Physician.

It's a slippery slope indeed, and once you're on that path, it seems to be just about impossible to get off it. In a sense, the doctor is as trapped as the patient—hired like any other employee to keep the employer happy, and using the only methods he or she knows. Typically, the cocktail of medications continues to get more potent, until the patient's body simply can't take it any more.

Most people have their good days and their bad days. But if you're a star of the caliber of Michael Jackson or Elvis, you may come to expect, and demand, that every day should be a good day. After all, you're special. You deserve it.

And if you have to hire your own doctor to get it, so be it.

An Odd Email Phenomenon

For the last year or two, I've been conducting a sort of informal experiment with my email. I'm kind of old-school, and while I try to keep my messages telegram-short in respect of Internet-age attention spans, sometimes a message just takes whatever it takes to communicate. Sort of like those, you know, letters from ancient times.

I've always been liberal with the use of postscripts (no, not the printing language!) in my letters. Where else are you going to put those "oh, by the way" tidbits? In fact, I confess that in my passive-aggressive mode, sometimes the most important (or controversial) part of my messages is saved for the "P.S."

Here's the deal: I can't offhand recall a single time when anybody has responded to a comment or question I've put in the postscript of an email. It's like they're invisible! This is extraordinary to me. I mean, come on, people, are you really so time-stressed that you almost unconsciously decide that anything in a P.S. can't be that important, and it's OK to just ignore?

The experiment continues, but I'm not optimistic.

P.S. Gotcha!

It's the usury, stupid.

(cross-posted here)

Labor lawyer, progressive activist, and recent candidate for Rahm Emanual's House seat Tom Geoghegan has a great article in April Harper's, entitled Infinite Debt: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy.

I tend to be skeptical of "All-our-problems-are-due-to-(insert favorite bugaboo here)" screeds, but Geoghegan make a pretty convincing case that the removal of interest rate ceilings was the main trigger for the runaway expansion of the financial industry that got us where we are today.

The nut of the argument is pretty basic: as long as the government capped interest rates at something reasonable, financial services wasn't the most exciting place to be: the real action was in manufacturing.

And then we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter's term…that's when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.

Here's what happens: the financial sector bloats up…capital gushes out out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn't innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs.…we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.

Geoghegan points out that when Reagan left office (when interest rates were just beginning to really take off), the financial sector was "earning" 18% of all U.S. corporate profits. By 2002–2003, that had climbed to over 40%.

Everything followed from this. The bloating of the financial sector helped create the growing U.S. trade deficit, which brought in a flood of cheap money for borrowing—which helped further bloat the financial sector…Capital flowed out of manufacturing, with its "low" profits, and into the financial sector, where profits were much higher. We became less competitive in manufacturing because we could not accept the lower rate of profit—not vis-a-vis our competitors in Mexico, but vis-a-vis our competitors in New York City.

Geoghegan places the blame on three major changes:

1. The stripping of the power of labor. Since 1972, worker productivity has nearly doubled, but wages have remained flat or declined. This isn't supposed to happen, and led to a paradoxical situation in which, as the economy grew, individuals were actually becoming worse off: working harder, with less leisure, they tried to fill the hole in their lives by buying things they couldn't afford.
2. The ability of corporations to walk away from their obligations to their current and former employees. "…[R]ight around the time Reagan took office, companies began to figure out that they could go in and out of Chapter 11 in order to dump their obligations…Sure people stopped saving. Planning for the future no longer made much sense.…as they lost their rights as creditors [to their employers] in court, they were just in time to trade in their union cards for credit cards."
3. The legalization of usury, a process that happened over several years around the start of the Reagan era. With no cap on rates, millions of consumers became permanent prisoners of debt, and with lending so incredibly profitable, banks abandoned the ancient moral principle that loans must be repaid. This made the worst credit risks suddenly the most attractive customers, and led to the deluge of credit card offers that clog our mailboxes.

To maintain the obscene profits it had become addicted to, the bloated financial industry needed a continuous stream of new and highly profitable "products" to sell. So they dreamed up credit default swaps and all the other alphabet soup that are now sinking the economic ship.

What to do? Geoghegan has a number of ideas, including the establishment of state-owned banks, the cancellation of some consumer debt (especially in cases where the borrower has already paid more in interest than the amount of the principal), and an increase in Social Security benefits to "inject equity" directly into the accounts of working people and help make up for defaulted private pensions.

We could aim to reach that goal gradually, over the next twenty years, but even announcing the goal encourages future-oriented thinking. It would encourage people to believe that they could invest in real things again, instead of pinning their hopes on the false and predatory promise of a big, Vegas-style payout. The promise of a real public pension that people can live on would lead fewer of us to chase bubbles in good times, even as it gave all of us the confidence to keep spending when times were bad.

Geoghegan's bottom line: European-style social democracy beats America's casino economy.

Letter to a Friend

Background: I received an email yesterday from a friend. It was a forwarded "petition to Obama" to stop the granting of Social Security benefits to illegal aliens(!) Supposedly Congress voted for this and now Obama was being called upon to stop it.
I smelled a rat and Googled "social security illegal aliens". The very first hit was the expected item on Snopes.com debunking this bogus campaign, which has apparently been in circulation for going on 3 years (it long predates Obama). Below is my response to my friend.

You have to ask yourself how plausible claims like this are. Why would a Senator vote for something like they claimed in that email? To win the votes of some illegal aliens? But illegal aliens can't vote*. All the Senator would be doing is handing his or her opponent a knife to stab them with in the next re-election campaign. Most politicians are smart enough to figure that out (although I must say that watching the recent antics of the Limbaugh-worshipping Republicans is making me wonder).

I believe that the people who pass these emails around have a very clear agenda: to destroy the citizens' faith in any and all government. This is one of the biggest things that Obama, bless him, has to fight against: ever since Reagan started campaigning 30 years ago, the public has been bombarded with the message that government is inherently inept, corrupt, and incapable of getting anything right. The Republicans' eternal solution is deregulation and tax cuts: programs that benefit the rich and screw everybody else. (This is the inherent contradiction in Republican ideology: why would you entrust the operation of the government to people who don't believe that government can work? For the answer, see Bush, George W.)

The Republicans have flat-out admitted that their strategy is to obstruct everything Obama tries to do. Rush hopes he fails, remember? And yet they wave the flag and brag about their "patriotism."

Don't help the bastards, OK?

(I wish you'd send this to your list.)

--Rob

*The nonexistent problem of "voter fraud" is another big Republican lie.

The lights burn late into the night in Manhattan

Don't you just know that all over Manhattan this past weekend, the swells in their Armani suits were burning the midnight oil? They were combing through the language of the government's proposed bailout plan, looking for an angle…

No doubt a number of them had similar "Aha!" moments. Let's see: if we package some of these new government bailout bonds, mix in a little heavily-discounted bad paper, apply 20X leverage, and come up with a fancy new acronym, why, we just might be able to create—wait for it—A BRAND-NEW DERIVATIVE "PRODUCT"! Think of the commissions! Think of the easy profits! And hell, if it all goes south, the Feds will bail out the bailout! I'll be able to afford that summer place in the Hamptons after all!

Don't you just know it?