John McWhorter and Glenn Loury on the ethics of Ferguson

John McWhorter: [Michael Eric] Dyson thinks that a Michael Brown doesn't have any control. . . . The idea is that it's unfair to even suggest that the black community has control . . . . It's considered to be a special case, I think, in human history. The idea is that slavery plus Jim Crow and all these 400 years, then deindustrialization . . . makes it so that we have a group of people who cannot be expected to control themselves. It's on society.

Glenn Loury: That's a . . . category mistake. It mixes up two different kinds of things. Suicides will go up if the unemployment rate stays above a certain level for a certain period of time. I don't have the data at my fingertips, but I bet it's true. So, a social scientist can learn that, and that's worth knowing. This individual who hung herself — you can't account for that action with that reference. That's absurd. It's just mixing up two different kinds of things. There's no inconsistency between the simultaneous existence of a collective and an individual responsibility. Societies are responsible for the conditions in which people live; people are responsible for what they do in those conditions. I see no contradiction there.

McWhorter: You know, I know what you mean, but I honestly think that a lot of people, including a great many academics and intellectuals, would disagree with that point. You and I would be considered a little bit backward in understanding that there's a point beyond which individuals really cannot be held responsible. I think that in terms of that suicide example, many people would say: "No! You can't talk about what's going on inside of her! It's the larger issue!"  . . . The main flashpoint of Ferguson is that Michael Brown and his friend refused to step aside. And I'm not saying that in blame; I'm saying that because that shows you what their attitude toward law enforcement was. And I think that ultimately, that's law enforcement's fault. . . . Now, do I think of Michael Brown as responsible for the fact that he really could have just moved aside? I do. But on the other hand, I also see a society where I don't think that a representative number of people are going to be convinced by that. . . .

Loury: There's an ethical question here. . . . What does it mean to treat people with dignity and with respect? Withholding from them the presumption of their being responsible and capable, in terms of the management of their own lives, is a profound move of disrespect, in my opinion. I don't know how you can possibly have equality under such conditions. Those people then become infantile. The people about whom you say: "Oh my! Look at their conditions! They can only do this!" They become outside the orbit of any kind of moral discourse. They're not moral agents anymore. . . . You've gotta treat people as moral agents, man, or else you're not taking them seriously as human beings.

McWhorter: Well, isn't it sad that the fact is: we're backward! That is exactly why people hate the kinds of things that you and I write, because the idea is that this kind of Kantian — you might even call it "enlightened" — way of looking at it doesn't work when it comes to the descendants of African slaves in the United States of America. . . . I cannot stand the idea that part of my racial identity is supposed to be that I'm supposed to only pay lip service to the idea that we can do anything about our fate — that I'm supposed to just watch this steamroller rolling over us, and have a sense of heroicness in undergoing it and making sure that people see me undergoing it. That doesn't work.

"This is fiscal child abuse pure and simple . . .

. . . and [Paul] Krugman should be ashamed of his contribution to it."

So says Laurence Kotlikoff (who was a third-party presidential candidate in 2012). More:

The U.S. fiscal gap of $222 trillion is enormous and totally unsustainable. But rather than discuss the fiscal gap, Krugman discusses the official debt which is one-twentieth as large and . . . a measure of the government's words, not its policies.

Of course, once you have the emperor convinced that his new clothes are for real, you can take full advantage of his ignorance. Krugman is doing this with his readers. He's taking advantage of their ignorance by showing that a non-measure of government sustainability, intentionally designed to be as small as possible, is not of major concern. And in claiming that the long-run is distinct in terms of policy from the short run and can be ignored until we reach it, he's persuading his readers that they needn't worry about the fiscal Sword of Damocles suspending over our children's heads. . . .

There is not a single dynamic model of the economy's dynamic transition being published in leading economics journals that doesn't include the constraint that the fiscal gap be zero. But Krugman simply discards what we academic economists call the government's intertemporal budget constraint.

Let's be clear. Generationally speaking, paying for the government's spending is a zero sum game. Eliminating the fiscal gap -- satisfying the government's intertemporal budget constraint -- requires either a) an immediate and permanent 64 percent hike in all federal taxes or b) an immediate and permanent 35 percent cut in all projected government outlays including those called "interest and principal." If we wait a decade to take our medicine, these figures become 70 percent and 38 percent respectively. And, guess what? In that case, our children will face even higher taxes or lower spending over their precious lives.

To put the fiscal gap of $222 trillion in perspective, the whole United States GDP is only about $15 trillion. Kotlikoff adds:

These aren't my estimates of the fiscal gap or what's needed to close it. They are my calculations based on the Congressional Budget Office's long-term fiscal forecast called the Alternative Fiscal Scenario. The CBO publishes this forecast in June each year. Last June the fiscal gap was $222 trillion. In June 2011 it was $211 trillion. It rose by $11 trillion between 2011 and 2012, which is the same amount as the entire stock of federal debt! The reason, in large part, is that baby boomers got one year closer to cashing in on all those Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments which they are owed, but which have conveniently been ignored in tallying up federal debt.

Here's Kotlikoff talking about this problem with Glenn Loury:

When should you stay at your job?

How Mitt Romney could lose the nomination

Mickey Kaus explains:

Matt Lewis Newt-ly calls out Bill Sher for failing to understand the appeal of Newt Gingrich.

Matt Lewis talks like Newt Gingrich while calling out Bill Sher for failing to understand Gingrich's appeal:




Here's the post Matt Lewis is referring to: "How to talk like Newt (in 7 easy steps)."

I noticed that in the last debate, Gingrich would qualify all his statements with "explicitly." By my count from searching the transcript, he used that word 4 times (and no one else used it at all). It's a way to sound intellectual without necessarily saying anything.

"Newt Gingrich Speaks Well. But Is He Smart?"

An excellent question by John McWhorter.

Gingrich is good at taking fairly standard conservative views and dressing them up in academic-sounding verbosity. I don't find that very impressive.

In this video, Glenn Loury and my mom, Ann Althouse, start out talking about Rick Perry's infamous moment of forgetfulness, but then broaden the topic to how much intelligence matters in a president:



The fact that there are many smart people who shouldn't be president is true but beside the point. Intelligence isn't a sufficient condition for being a good president, but it's a necessary condition. In other words, a smart president might be mediocre, but a dumb president isn't going to be good. Another example of a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition: I wouldn't vote for a presidential candidate who can't speak English or who can't read. Still, most literate English-speakers aren't qualified to be president. Here's a theme I plan to return to in a future post: we're observing a job application process, and we (Americans) get to hire someone for the job. Most job requirements aren't guarantees of doing a good job, but they're still requirements.

Is Jon Huntsman the "conservative" candidate?

Michael B. Dougherty argues that Huntsman is the strongest conservative candidate for president, but he just isn't expressing it well:



Dougherty points out that Huntsman's speaking style might be turning off Republicans voters because he "speak[s] like a diplomat" and uses "circumlocu[tions]." I've noticed that Huntsman will often phrase his statements in terms of the overall discussion. This creates a distance between himself and his words. I wrote in one of my debate live-blogs:

Huntsman [says]: "This country needs more workers. Can we say that? This country needs more workers." When he asks if "we" can say that, he intends to present himself as someone who has the courage to speak the truth, but he ends up sounding like he's weak, tentative, in need of others' approval.

Huntsman needs to learn to get to the point — without asking for permission to do so.

"When it's Obama vs. anybody, Obama loses."

Says Robert Wright:

"Isn't it a little alarming ... that fundamental constitutional principles can just fall by the wayside, and just nobody does anything about it ...?"

Robert Wright, who strongly opposed President Bush's invasion of Iraq, starts out by giving a hedged defense of President Obama's invasion of Libya (he sees it as "dicey" but justified and likely to succeed soon). However, he becomes disturbed once my mom, Ann Althouse, explains how constitutionally suspect Obama's actions have been. That's when he makes the statement I've put in the heading of this post:



The constitutional part of their discussion starts at 11:45.

(The Libyan city Wright at first can't remember the name of is Benghazi.)

"The one lie . . . that no news organization will admit to or expose"

Mickey Kaus says something he claims you'll only hear on Bloggingheads:



"If you're into politics, it's a very good time to go off and raise a family, write a play, paint a painting, do something else for a while."

I'm convinced.

Glenn Loury to John McWhorter: "I hated your guts, John!"

Loury just said that to McWhorter on Bloggingheads — but only in the past tense.

Loury explains why he had such an averse reaction to McWhorter's writings at first. He gradually came to "like" McWhorter, partly because McWhorter gave up his tenure at Berkeley:



Loury describes what it's like to work in academia:

This encrustation. You get stale; you get hidebound; you get obsessively, narrowly, inwardly focused on . . . the 300 people around the world who read the journals that you publish your articles in and do the specialized thing that you do. You get, maybe, soft.

And Loury says that's exactly what McWhorter is not like.

But McWhorter says:

You and I had . . . kind of a chill.

Loury responds sarcastically:

Oh, really? You think so?!

And this gets to the substance of how Loury's view of McWhorter has changed. Just to give you a taste, Loury says (talking about McWhorter's excellent book Losing the Race):

I was in my "changing over to liberal" phase, and you were . . . a suitable object of villification for a person trying to redefine themselves as a liberal. . . . I would have said: "OK, I know what he's talking about . . . . I know that he's not making these stories up . . . . But you can't go out into public, being a black professor, and talk like that about your students. There's something deeply disloyal . . . I give those speeches to my students all the time. But to write it down in a book and let white people read it, John?!"

That's from this clip, where Loury recounts several of their disagreements:

Then McWhorter asks (this is still in the above clip):

What's changed . . . ? I am still in some ways as woefully ignorant as I was when I was a callow 35. So, what's different now?

I like Loury's response, which explains why you can have affection for someone partly based on your discussion of issues, even while strongly disagreeing on those same issues:

I still think . . . you're wrong in your conclusions about welfare. Which is not to say that welfare was the greatest thing for black people, but I don't think the case that you make has been proven by the evidence that you give. [Loury is referring to McWhorter's Winning the Race here.] . . . So, you and I are going to have to agree to disagree about that. What has changed is that there's a person. This is not just about a portfolio of positions, which I either agree or disagree with, and if the index of disagreement is above .7, then I hate. This is about people. Life is interesting. People change. There's a lot of stuff that's going on. You can be educated [by me], or you can educate me. I like you. I like the spirit. I like the guy.

They had already stated their feelings even more strongly, in this diavlog from November 2008:



(That's from this old post of mine, which has the full context of that clip in case you're interested.)

If Obama is an introvert, how big a problem is that?

John McWhorter — who just last month was still making the case that Obama has done a "good job" as president — says he's finally become "truly unhappy for the first time" with Obama as President:



Here's my own partial transcription of McWhorter's points:

I'm beginning to realize that there really are some serious problems here. . . .

This was something I didn't realize was going to matter as much as it has: he's not really a people person. . . . He hasn't developed the chummy, cordial relationships with key people in Congress that really is part of getting past gridlock. Personal relationships are not everything, but they matter. . . .

He kind of keeps to himself. He is a cerebral person. He is somewhat detached. In that, I've always kind of liked him, probably because I am that. But I'm not President, and never will be. And I think that his personal quality means that he is disliked by people like John Boehner. . . .

And, you know, that can't change. You can't fake being somebody who likes to press the flesh.

Do you also notice that you're hearing that he doesn't like being President, which is one of the saddest things I've ever heard? I mean, who would want that job? Part of the reason you like it is because you like the pressing of flesh and the having some Scotch in the office, talking to Tip O'Neill, etc. That is not him. And if you're not going to like it, that's going to "tell on you" after a while. . . . He's not personally up for the job.

Glenn Loury refers to this Politico article, which gives a list of anecdotes like this:

The president invited Senate chairmen and ranking members over for dinner in March 2009 but came in after they were seated and went back to the residence without shaking hands or visiting each table.

One well-known Democrat summed up the cost of the slights and the seeming indifference to basic political courtesies this way: “These are little things that are not going to affect public perceptions. But it affects the infrastructure of how you put together a campaign. These are the people that you need to raise money, to give money, to organize, to show up, to speak out.”

Has affirmative action hurt Barack Obama?

Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright debate the question:



They agree that affirmative action has probably hurt Obama. They seem to agree about how it affected him early in life, while disagreeing about how his experience as president is problematically different. Wright thinks the problem is that Obama wasn't prepared for all the racism he faces now. Kaus thinks Obama wasn't prepared for the lack of racial bias affecting his presidency. (Actually, it's not clear how much they really disagree; Kaus aptly notes that Wright "snatched disagreement from agreement.")

"Irony as a political statement is no politics at all."

That's what Ana Marie Cox says in a good Bloggingheads discussion with Rich Lowry about Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Keep Fear Alive" — and about protest politics more broadly:



With this post, I'm creating a new tag: "signaling." That word isn't used in the clip, but signaling is what they're talking about. I'm also adding the tag to the post on Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

How to harmonize Islam with feminism, freedom, and Europe

Mona Eltahawy and Claire Berlinski have an hour-long conversation on that question:



(Links to a couple websites they refer to: Ricochet and Musawah.)

Short URL for this post: goo.gl/x6Sj

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury debate: Has Obama been a "failure"?

I'm planning on doing a post listing the main ways I've found Obama disappointing as president.

What do you think? How has he disappointed you? Or has he actually done a "good job"? Feel free to put any thoughts in the comments (not necessarily about the same issues McWhorter and Loury talk about).

Fake outrage over the deficit from the Pledge to America (and everyone else)

Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle notice that the Republican Party's Pledge to America repeats the same incoherent set of positions we've been getting from the Democratic and Republican sides for decades:

1. We can't raise taxes.

2. We can't cut military or entitlement spending.

3. We have to reduce the deficit.

As Drezner says: "Good luck with that."



McArdle has a good rebuke to Tea Partiers who claim to be passionately opposed to the high deficit:

That's sort of like saying, "I want to be a size 6 and run marathons. I just don't want to do the part where I stop eating and go running."

ADDED: This is the Paul Krugman column that Drezner mentions (and agrees with. Krugman says:

In essence, what [the House Republicans] say [in the Pledge to America] is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid . . . No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

Jonah Goldberg explains how the Tea Party will help more than hurt the Republican party, bamboozling Robert Wright with his choice of metaphor.

Did the journalists who reported on the Koran burning threat understand what they were doing?

Matthew Yglesias offers some common sense about why Terry Jones, the pastor in Florida who threatened to burn the Koran, is (or isn't) such a big deal:

[I]t's kind of nuts, isn’t it, that we have the general in charge of an ongoing war commenting on some guy in Florida being a jerk. Even nuttier is that he might well be right that this episode will endanger the lives of Americans soldiers. But that really raises deeper issues about Afghan society and the wisdom and nature of America’s engagement with it. The essence of a digital, globalized world with billions of inhabitants is that there’s always going to be some jerk somewhere doing something ridiculous. “Guy in Florida deliberately trying to antagonize Muslims” can’t become a global news story every time it happens.

In the Bloggingheads clip below, Sarah Posner -- a reporter who specializes in religion -- asks why the mainstream media became so fixated on a pastor who has only about 50 congregants. She hypothesizes that the problem is that most of the reporters who covered the story aren't enough . . . like her! That is, they don't specialize in religion, so "they don't know how to evaluate the influence of a particular person."



While I share her incredulity that this became an international news story, I find her explanation hard to believe. Her own passing remark that Jones has only 50 congregants is not beyond the ken of any competent reporter. If anything, you'd expect a generalist reporter to have an especially high standard for when one pastor's statements are a real story.

For instance, Matthew Yglesias is not a reporter, let alone one with a religion beat. Like me, he's a 29-year-old opinion blogger. He and I can easily see these points, and I don't think this is because we're so extraordinarily perceptive or have any expertise about religion. I don't believe that the reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post lacked the capacity to do what Yglesias and I and so many others (including Dave Weigel and my mom, Ann Althouse) did when we wondered: Wait a minute -- how is this a major news story?

What seems to have been going on for a long time is that the MSM feels that a story is automatically newsworthy as long as it involves religion at all -- completely aside from any normal metrics of newsworthiness. Their standard seems to be based entirely on subject matter, not whether the events are likely to have any broader consequences.

Of course, the Koran burning would have had international consequences if Jones had followed through with it -- but only because of the media's own coverage.

Like it or not, symbolic burnings are pretty commonplace. People burn effigies, flags, love letters, sacred texts. It happens. And usually, it's not very exciting. Think of any kind of object, and there's probably someone somewhere burning it or fecklessly threatening to burn it -- despite, or because of, whoever might be offended if they found out. Normally, major news outlets wouldn't even think of paying any attention to these shenanigans, even if the burned object symbolizes something important.

Here's my point: a symbolic burning doesn't, by its own unaided momentum, inexorably alter anything else in the outside world. This is as true of a pastor burning a Koran as it would be of anything else. The media coverage to date has surely inflamed the Islamic world far more than if the pastor had burned the Koran and the media had ignored it.

As is so often the case, the news coverage itself becomes the story, but the news media rarely admit it. Normally, this is a fairly benign quirk of journalese: Bill Maher has noted that journalists reflexively avoid the first person (singular or plural).

In this case, however, more self-awareness on the MSM's part might very well have saved lives. Now that the story is out there, even though Jones called off the burning, it can be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. We'll probably never be able to pinpoint a causal link from the Koran burning media circus to a specific victim of terrorism, but that doesn't mean there won't be any such causation.

I hope that MSM reporters are pausing to think about what this whole episode means about their own role and responsibility. Reporters don't just neutrally reflect the world; they're willful actors who affect the world. To assume that their effects are always for the better can be fatal.

Why are young men often passionate about religion and war? Can women put an end to war?

John Horgan takes 18 seconds to recount the 3 phases of circumstantial religious belief in his life (via Bloggingheads on Facebook):



That's part of a discussion of why young men are often passionate about both religion and war. This segues into a discussion of whether war is inevitable and what factors make war less likely:



Here are the social factors that make war less likely, according to Thomas Hayden (who bases this on the empirical research he did for his book Sex and War):

1. A low ratio of younger (18-34) men to older men.

2. More women engaged in civic life. (This has to be a widespread engagement, not just having a few token women in highly visible leadership positions.)

3. More education for girls.

4. Less unemployed men.

5. "Family planning."

With the exception of #1, those are all good things anyway. What a novel concept: caring about women . . . and men! Let's try it!