Dan Ancona's Weblog

Rsync and iTunes

2011-08-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

There are a good number of sites out there that will tell you how to keep your iTunes library synced between two machines. For my own reference and in case it's helpful to you, here's how I do this using a firewire drive. I try to only update one machine at a time. Usually that's my desktop, unless I have a gig coming up, in which case I move everything over to my laptop where the dj software lives. I use rsync; the only really tricky thing is getting the trailing slashes right. This seems to work.

On the most recently updated box, do

rsync -aveP --dry-run ~/Music/
  /Volumes/2010Backups/Music/

Then delete the "--dry-run" and actually make it go. Eject and uplug the drive, and plug it into the on the less recently updated box. Then do this

rsync -aveP /Volumes/2010Backups/Music/ ~/Music/

Do Something About the Giffords Shooting: Engage on Ideas

2011-01-11T13:04:00.000-08:00

This is not a post politicizing the Giffords tragedy. The problem isn't the political parties, the problems lies in the realm of the ideas this country runs on. The parties simply refract those ideas in different ways. One of the great victories of the conservative movement is how well they've reached and recruited Democrats. Presidents Obama and Clinton (and countless other Democratic leaders) have reinforced conservative ideas and narratives as well as either Bush has. Sometimes better.

This post also is not about assigning blame. While we need to resist the urge to point fingers, the need to avoid blame can't stand in the way of looking at why this happening, who has power in our society to fix it, and what it's going to take.

I firmly believe this can change. I do not believe that a culture of violence and domination is somehow inescapable in this country. America was founded as a response to the illegitimate domination of the British Crown. This love of true freedom runs very, very deep in our veins. Violent means were necessary to overcome British domination, as they sometimes are. But even though violence runs through American history, it is not the only current. There have always been countercurrents and there are always nonviolent paths forward.

[Updated: Got to own some privilege here. It's awfully easy enough for me to downplay the horrific violence, conquest and genocide that both preceded and followed the revolution, as well as the slavery the new republic was built on -- and that's exactly what I did in this paragraph. Thanks to Nezua for calling me out. The historical record couldn't be more clear: the white people who came to America were and are a bloodthirsty, violent lot. But the point remains that there were countercurrents to the main line of violent domination and oppression, and I believe the revolution was one of them.]

The most important countercurrent right now, from my perspective, is the progressive movement. It is the braiding together of many different movements: antiracism and civil rights, environmentalism, feminism, the peace movement, the unionism and labor solidarity movements and many others. Below, I make the argument that conservative anti-government ideas led to the shooting of Representative Giffords. These ideas need to be fully discredited and replaced. The progressive movement is going to do that, or we are going to either fail as a nation or just skip along from one horrifying tragedy to another.

I think we will discredit them, because it's becoming increasingly obvious that governing by conservative ideas leads to bad outcomes. Even Alan Greenspan admitted that deregulated capitalism led directly to the financial crisis. Deregulation and decades of underinvestment in energy alternatives (in favor of "drill baby drill") led directly to the BP oil spill. Now the shredding of the safety net, income inequality so high that it's a barrier to the kinds of safe communities we want to live in and a permeated culture of violence have combined to lead to a shocking amount of suffering and death.

In times of public grief like this it is very tempting to look for an out. A comforting response comes in the form of a post on boingboing (a widely read news & curiosities site) titled "Why the [shootings] Mean That We Must Support My Politics." It was initially linked to after 9/11, and reads to me as the voice of someone who'd been deeply hurt and was grappling (somewhat clumsily) with the numbness stage of grief over a very public and truly horrible event.

I don't blame anyone for wanting comfort at times like this. But at some point the numbness wears off and reality remains. This is not a moment in American civic life for comfortable withdrawal. This is a moment for facing reality in all its ugliness, a time for connecting and for taking action. Either the progressive movement or some other group has a the best argument for how to decrease violence. Whichever community has the best argument needs your help.

The focus has been on political rhetoric and I don't disagree that this matters. But the problem goes far deeper, and the vicious counterattack to claims that the rhetoric does indeed matter is part of a larger strategy of separating and compartmentalizing the problem so we can seal it off, forget about it, and get back to focusing on whatever it was we were focused on - our jobs, our families, that next level of Angry Birds. (Don't get me wrong - there's an appropriate time and place for escapism. We just can't live there.) "He was just a lone nut" makes this into a one-off, an isolated case completely disconnected from any social or civic process.

But reality does not work this way. Reality is interconnected. There is no such thing as a lone nut in this country right now. Conservatives have counterattacked so aggressively on the charges of violent rhetoric (while cleansing their websites in the background) because if you start thinking of the role violent rhetoric might be playing, you might start thinking about the systemic nature of this problem. And if you start thinking systemically, that path leads away from their movement, with it's emphasis on hierarchy and control and separability and disconnectedness.

Consider five systemic problems that are the context for tragedies like this:

We have grotesque income and wealth inequality. There is a very well documented, unmistakable relationship between income inequality and both mental health problems and incidence rates of violence. Income and wealth inequality is a wall between people, a barrier between us and the peaceful, equitable national and local communities we all want to live in. Author Mark Ames wrote the book on workplace shootings, and starts to explain the social underpinnings of these disasters:

"The first private-workplace massacre took place in 1989, at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky—at the end of a decade of Reaganomics that radically and violently changed the workplace culture, creating yawning new inequalities. These workplace shootings have been with us ever since."

Read the whole article, this a crucial beginning to understanding this tragedy.

We've made horrific cuts to mental health services. Particularly in Arizona: "To fill a $1 billion hole in its 2011 budget, Arizona slashed this year’s budget for mental health services by $36 million — a 37 percent cut." This is what happens when you try to drown government in the bathtub.

We have a state culture of violence. Examples abound: a complete absence of even the most minimal common sense controls on gun purchases. A reliance on continual war for foreign policy. Military spending greater than the rest of the world -- and on a system that was defeated by two dozen angry dudes with box cutters, a reality we still haven't come close to facing as a country. The violent political rhetoric is just a reflection of all this. We don't have a rhetorical problem with violence in the US. We have a substantive one. [Update: also include our criminal justice system -- the US is, shamefully, #1 in incarceration rate worldwide -- and the racist, counterproductive death penalty in particular.]

We have a media culture of violence. The most dominant mythos in our media is one with ancient Babylonian origins, that theologian Walter Wink calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Warning: if you read that article you will start to see that narrative everywhere. It is completely omnipresent in American culture, and it is completely absurd to pretend that this story could not possibly have any impact on people's thinking. Some specific evidence: "Violent Video Games Increase Aggression Long After the Game Is Turned Off, Study Finds" and a more generalized meta-study. For more on Wink, read this summary of Engaging the Powers, his wonderful but very difficult book on the history of domination and Christianity.

Last, we have to face the breakdown of the nuclear family. Our culture is at the very beginning of grappling with some tough questions about family structures, gender roles and how the built environment shapes these. With marriage rates down and on the order of half of those marriages ending in divorce anyway, this has to happen. To some extent this is the (very positive) byproduct of feminism: fewer women are willing to stay in a bad marriage now. This is good for them and it's good for kids. And many people do manage to build community in the suburbs. But as Loughner's case shows, it's easy to fall through the cracks.

Of these, the first three are unquestionably exacerbated by the ideas of the conservative movement, and the last two are (in my opinion) not addressable by politics at this stage.

Beyond some legal limits on violent political rhetoric and perhaps clear labeling of violent media, I don't see political answers to media violence. I certainly try to limit my personal consumption of it. This is made easier by the realization that hit me once, after watching Iron Man and one of the recent Batman movies back to back one evening: once you realize it's the same story, these things get really boring. This irritates my fifteen year old cousin to no end but the same is true for violent video games. They just don't hold my interest. I do see spiritual answers to media violence, but that is a topic for another post.

The progressive community's answers to violence include fixing the grotesque inequality that's throwing up these barriers between people in our communities and driving us all crazy, funding the mental health safety net, curbing the culture of state violence, and starting to ask the hard questions about media violence and how we organize our families and communities.

But the progressive economic story is not yet strong or clear enough. The argument that we need investment in our society runs directly into the argument coming from everywhere that what we really need is austerity, more belt tightening and tough medicine. The argument that we need democratization of economic power that would undo inequality runs smack into the belief that the rich and the poor deserve what they get and a million other arguments. The argument that we need to spend less on militarizing the planet runs straight into the fear of terrorism and the uncertainty of our position in a complicated world.

To overcome this, the progressive community needs your identification, your help, your ideas and your participation. Read, think, write and talk about ideas. Figure out how to tell your story. Over time, this will help all of us figure out how to tell our story together. If you work at a place that has power or financial resources, make supporting and funding this work a priority for 2011. If you're reading this and you're already doing this, you rock. Thank you.

Thank you for reading all this. May God bless the people of our country and all we've been through, as well as all countries and all people of the world.

[Update: If you're not sure what I mean by ideas work, have a look at this scary, tacitly anti-Semitic graphic novel that the NRA published in 2006. There's a direct line from this to Sarah Palin's use of "blood libel" today. It's bonechilling to look at in light of the events of this week, but look for the clarity and effectiveness of the narrative and the production values. It's four years later and progressives have yet to produce anything remotely this powerful or effective. If you agree with the ideas above, what can you do to help change this?]

Joel Kotkin's Wrong Direction

2010-02-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

Joel Kotkin, anti-urbanist and defender of the suburban faith, has a recipe. Start with a chunk of geography and a litany of its problems. Pull a couple numbers out of a poll, drop a couple erudite references to political commentary of the 40s or 50s.

The next all-critical step is the blame salad. Go after labor with a vengeance, especially public-sector unions. Blame Democrats. Blame "minorities" repeatedly. Blame Schwarzenegger, but don't dwell on it, and go back to blaming minorities some more. Blame bubbles, but never talk about where they came from, why they're happening or how we could stop them. Sprinkled on top, blame some abstractions. Blame a lack of pragmatism, an increase in partisanship, a wave of narcissism, a reliance on income redistribution. More recently he's added another topping to the salad: blaming nonprofits.

Let's start with some basic facts before we really get into it.

First, both San Francisco and California are doing a lot right. Despite their undeniable problems, this is a great state and a great city, and, yes, a great place to start a business. San Francisco has some of the lowest unemployment in the state. Our economy and our public infrastructure have both taken some dents, no question, but this idea that SF is somehow the worst run city anywhere simply doesn't match what people who live here see out the window.

Second, a lot of San Francisco's problems stem from it being one of last places to make an honest, systemic effort to try and do the right thing. There are no homeless shelters in El Dorado Hills. We pay for that, yet for most people who live here it's a significant source of civic pride.

Third, another good chunk of the city's problems come from situations that are far, far beyond the control of city government: housing prices have grown out of control largely due to a) income and wealth inequality, which is a global problem and becoming a national crisis and b) decades of incredibly poor statewide land-use decisions. Or take the city budget, which has been decimated by problems at the state and national level. Due to a combination of Schwarzenegger's incompetence and the 2/3rds budget rule, raids by the state in desperate attempts to the state budget have generated a series of cascading failures for city budgets.

Fourth, most of Kotkin's solutions - aren't. The public employee unions he tears at are the last bulwark protecting good paying jobs with retirement security. You can't complain about working people being driven out of the city while attacking about the only structural force providing anything like security for them, it makes no sense. Pension spiking is at least a problem in certain specific circumstances (Mr Kotkin's articles are very light on data for this), but the overall problem vastly overblown and is always about leveling down rather than leveling up. Furthermore, exploding health care costs are a far bigger budget-buster at both the state and local level.

Fifth, many of Kotkin's other solutions lack any kind of internal consistency. You can't be anti-tax and pro-infrastructure. It doesn't make any sense.

Sixth, his racial politics are seriously screwed up. His attacks on this or that appointed government worker may not be driven by racism but it's hard to tell, and the occasional less than fully competent city employee hardly demonstrates a seriously problem. And his understanding of California's historic racial dynamics goes from insensitive at best to paranoid at worst.

Seventh, he feeds antigovernment narratives in a way that isn't helpful and is even dangerous.

Despite all this, his ideas tie into broader conservative narratives that are unfortunately well established, so they fester and breed, carried in vectors like SF Weekly's link-unworthy "Worst Run City" article. I'm sympathetic to the need for developing a recipe as a thinker; sometimes the project of developing an ideology comes down to figuring out how many different ways you can say the same thing. What's problematic about his recipe is that it invariably results in the same shit sandwich.

The downright weird thing is that Kotkin's writing is occasionally threaded through with actual solutions, hidden in plain sight. From a piece he wrote in 2008 just after Obama was elected:

"California’s state government laid the foundation for its remarkable ascendancy. Progressivism’s pragmatic orientation, the melding of science and technology into government, the large-scale investment in infrastructure, and a strong nonpartisan tradition produced spectacular results."

So, wait. Things worked well when we had strong public investment, were pro-science, results oriented, and progressive? What exactly is preventing us from doing that some more, if not the results of writers like him saying the problem lies everywhere else? He even notes that income inequality is a problem in the same article, ""San Francisco," says historian Kevin Starr, a native of the city, "is a cross between Carmel and Calcutta.""

And yet he'll backtrack a paragraph later and lay the blame for such inequality at the feet of the victims of it:

"Perhaps even more damaging was the cultural rift that developed. Many white middle- and working-class voters felt threatened by the rise of new militant minority and student groups. Riots at Berkeley and Watts deepened resentments against the university and African Americans, two linchpins of Brown’s support."

Rick Perlstein makes a somewhat similar argument in his account of Goldwater's founding of the conservative movement: that the Berkeley riots were where the progressive movement started to go off the rails. Yet it's not as if this came from nowhere: Watts was touched off by the incredible racism of the LAPD, a fact that Mr Kotkin elides, and Berkeley was a response to increasingly tactical escalations and violence against students. Yet Richard Rorty, in Achieving this Country, makes the case that without that moment of the New Left going (in some ways) off the rails, it's possible that we would no longer living be living in a constitutional democracy.

This excision of race is at the heart of Kotkin's cultural rift argument. There is a word for blaming "minorities," who by any conceivable metric have had and continue to have very limited power in this state: this is racism. Not the personal sort - I'm sure Mr Kotkin would be the first to protest that He Has Black Friends. Or perhaps not, given that his consulting firm appears to be comprised exclusively of white men.

Racism comes in many forms, from the kind of raw-power LAPD racism that triggered the Watts Riots, to the quieter but far more pervasive structural racism that leads to whites-only consulting firms or the telling of stories that sound plausible enough, yet consistently place blame on the politically less powerful.

Contrast this with a history of this state where, instead, the responsibility for the course we've been on lies with those who have held actual power who have made the actual decisions. Mr Kotkin is partially right: the public sector unions have had some modicum of power. But they've primarily used this power to prevent the complete defunding and disintegration of the public schools - a small price to pay for some degree of featherbedding on retirement security for their workers. And he minimizes the myriad ways that the privileged classes have asserted dominance over the landscape, a dominance well documented by Gibbs and Bankhead's Preserving Privilege: California Politics, Propositions and People of Color or Peter Schrag's California: America's High-Stakes Experiment.

The real problem is this: since the 1978 passage of Prop 13, this state has been governed with an inflexible, conservative ideology. Not raising taxes has become an obsession. California conservatives have demonstrated that with enough people like Mr Kotkin standing athwart history yelling stop, sure enough, you can slow the pace of progress and even reverse it. You don't even need that many people -- certainly, nothing like a majority -- if you craft your big initiatives ruthlessly enough.

And yet the people have repeatedly voted for better schools. Democratically organized unions have fought for and won benefits and retirement security, but Mr Kotkin crassly suggests we should yank the rug out from under them. It's bad enough to be yelling stop, but making history go backwards? The fact is that fancy SUVs and huge houses far from everything aren't the only things Californians want. We want education, and a great many of us (roughly half, according to polling) like living in cities. The question is, what's the balance between public and private investment, the balance between urban development and suburban. And the question of balance is exactly what the conservative death-cult and its enablers like Mr Kotkin have managed to rule out.

So the unstoppable force of people's legitimate desire for a functioning society has met the heretofore immovable object of the conservative anti-tax coalition. It hasn't been "narcissim." It's a deep and stubborn conservatism that has bent the very structure of our democracy to its ideological ends. Until there's an accurate understanding of the locus of the real problems - a project Mr Kotkin is actively impeding - real progress for our state and city will stay on the distant horizon.

The freeze crosses a line

2010-01-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

The Freeze. This is grim stuff.

First of all, we have to assume the White House is saying something remotely like what it means about The Big Freeze. I'm not going to get into parsing the horse manure that Jared Bernstein was shoveling on Maddow on Monday night. If the White House -- seriously -- is proposing this as nothing more than pure optics with literally zero substance behind it (i.e. they're really not cutting anything, they're just saying they are)... that's such a transparently idiotic move politically that it's beneath critique.

So. Taking them at face value (if for no other reason than because the alternative is too depressing to contemplate), the freeze matters because this crosses a line between weak support or neutrality on a progressive economic agenda and active, even vigorous opposition to one.

There problems are myriad. First, as Obama argued repeatedly during the campaign and as history has proven (whether you look at Clinton or at Hoover), it's lousy policy. It will prolong the Great Recession and keep people out of work for longer. Second, it's going to tilt the electoral landscape for every single Congressional and Senate race towards favorable territory for Republicans. (more on this in a second) Third, and most destructively, over the long term this is going to severely limit the capacity of the nascent progressive movement to make our argument.

Here's how this tilts the entire landscape towards Republicans: think of politics as like a big game that works somewhat akin to Risk. There are territories occupied by each side, and skirmishes affect who is occupying the territories. The basic gameplay mechanism is that you gain or lose territory by effective communication of a coherent argument for how you plan to govern, and then by following through on it. If a candidate in a campaign clearly says "if you elect me I'm going to do X because of situations Y and Z", and you do X, and situations Y and Z get better, you gain ground. Even if situations Y and Z take a while to improve, that matters less, because the main thing voters respond to is the clarity and precision of the argument. For a variety of reasons, you get a lot more points for clearly communicating the worldview than you do for actually delivering the goods.

But there's also a feedback loop built into the game, one in which where the less territory you control, the harder it is to win individual skirmishes. So if you control lots of territory you're always at an advantage. This feedback loop adds something of a winner-take-all component to the game, which tends to make it more frustrating for the losers when they get behind. If you lose territory, the micro-effect on your skirmishes is that all of the sudden the dice are always loaded, you start every game behind a touchdown, or you are fighting every battle up a hill.

In this analogy, the territories correspond to the collective mental landscape of the electorate: what people generally are thinking about the country and whether Democrats or Republicans are offering a better and more clear argument for governing it. The skirmishes are every individual election, especially federal (congressional and senate) races. (Local races tend to be decided generally a little more on local or personality issues, although the overall shape of the mental landscape certainly affects them too.)

Now, progressives don't really know the full shape of their argument yet. One of progressives' favorite pastimes is to call loudly and sharply that we need to develop our agenda now!... while not actually, you know, doing anything to develop such an agenda. In fact just yesterday, the faux-progressives over at Third Way put up this classic of the "call for an agenda" genre. (They also called me "bro" in a reply on twitter, sending me the table scraps their agenda is composed out of. Still not sure what to do with that one.)

While we don't know what our economic argument is very clearly and it's been painfully difficult to get progressives at any level to engage on this question, we do have a hazy outline of it. Just for the sake of this argument, let's say it's something vaguely like these five principles:

Securing basic freedoms like health care and child care.
Strong public investment in education, research and infrastructure.
Democratizing economic power through whatever works: employee ownership, unions, asset building programs, progressive taxation, etc.
Building the green economy.
Common sense regulation for the environment and financial sectors in particular.

One commonality across all of these principles is that they all require government to work. Capitalism by itself tends to concentrate power and tear through natural resources, there's just no getting around it. Our government simply has to work for any of this stuff to get done, for the cause of freedom to be advanced.

Now as it turns out, a democratically elected government is actually a pretty great tool for determining long-term investments in society. It does much, much better than the private markets. In fact that's really one of the core purposes government is for. America's greatness isn't just the strength of capital, it's the strength of our democracy and the wise, long-term investments we've made. If private markets are privileged, we get piles of plastic crap from China and asset bubbles. If public investment is privileged (or forget privileged, if it's remotely balanced or even just not starved), we get better schools, more research and bridges that don't have giant chunks of metal falling off them during rush hour.

So what the freeze does is that it powerfully undercuts the core of that argument. There's a reason Sen McCain spent so much time arguing for exactly this during the campaign: it's a bonanza of conservative message reinforcement. It reinforces the idea that government spending has grown out of control (it hasn't) and that government in general is a bad thing and needs to be reigned in. The President isn't just pandering and flailing throwing out lousy policy; he's actually actively negating our long-term capacity to shift dimension 3 (worldview-shaping) economic power.

The culprit here is isn't message research or lack thereof. I'm sure this was polled and focused group to death and I'm sure it tests just fine. It's that message research when it's unmoored from any sensible principle or agenda just gives you noise. Garbage in, garbage out. We're never going to make progress until we come to some rough agreement on what direction we're headed; one of the benefits of a principle-based approach is that we don't have to nail down the policy details, we just need some rough agreement that yeah, this is what progressives are about. The five principles there (plus globalizing this approach) might be a starting point, they might be the wrong direction. I don't know. But if you don't stand for something, you'll stand for anything.

One other thing that this means is that national Democrats have managed to learn absolutely nothing at all about how to win elections since 2002. Even September 11th barely woke me from my blissful ignorance of even a modest commitment to citizenship; but it was the craven, limp Democratic response to Republican attempts to gin up the war in Iraq that finally did it for me, when I could feel us slipping towards one-party rule.

This is that same moment of one-party slippage, applied to the economy. That the President's political team is unaware of the resonance and optics and peril of this move is horrifying. I would never say that this November is going to be a bloodbath - who knows what will happen, and a lot of it will depend on each individual candidate and campaign team and their abilities to execute. But if Obama goes forward with this, the messaging terrain certainly just got much, much trickier. Maybe this is some kind of cognitive-dissonance style play, a Chewbacca defense for the economy. But that play works for them by repulsing voters so completely they tune out. I don't see how it's advantageous for us.

When I stood and listened to Senator Obama deliver his speech in Denver 2008, I knew the message wasn't quite there. He didn't run as a progressive and I didn't expect him to govern as one. But I did have a large degree of hope that he wouldn't actively oppose and undercut the long-term direction the country has to go towards. I did have hope that he wouldn't cede large swaths of territory to our opponents. I hoped we weren't going to be looking at eight (or at this rate, four?) years of still sliding backwards.

If you don't believe me, believe Bill Kristol:

"Republicans, in a spirit of bipartisanship, should praise the president for beginning to come to his senses about too much government spending (and for acknowledging at the same time that national security spending can’t be frozen)....Obama’s pseudo-spending freeze is a chance for Republicans to be (refreshingly!) bipartisan, and to take advantage of Obama’s willingness to move the debate over the rest of this year to a terrain—who will constrain big government?--that is good for them, and the country."

And yet as bad as this, today there is news of two amazing victories for progressive taxation in Oregon. What will happen next?

2010: focus and discipline

2010-01-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

Last year I'm pretty sure I asked for "more weekends away and dinners with pals." It wasn't a resolution. More of a request. Looking back at my flickr sets, I got an avalanche of just that: Mexico, DC, Tahoe, Steve and O's deck, Foreign Cinema, New York for PDF, Pittsburgh for Netroots (ok those were worky, but they count), the Hamptons, Ojai, San Diego, Camp n' Sons (twice!), Balsa Man + dinner, Bolinas, Leonard Lake, liminal and then Tahoe again. That doesn't even include all the great meals at our or our friends and family's places. Holy guacamole.

Maybe this request thing is working for me. For 2010 I'm asking for focus, discipline and... something kid-related. I feel like I did alright in the focus & discipline department in 2009 (well enough at least that Jen suggested what I need is more slack!), but I have a completely crazy amount of stuff that needs to get done this year so I have to take it up a notch.

But I'm stumped on what quality I'm going to want after la frijolita is born. If you're a parent or have thoughts on this: what's an intangible you'd like to have (other than time)?

Virginia, Learn from California. Vote Deeds.

2009-10-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

Angelidify: v., a Republican campaign tactic involving early, clear definition of a Democratic candidate using failed conservative economic ideas that sound nice but don't work.

Memo to the Creigh Deeds campaign: there ain't nothing in the middle of the road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

Compare these three ads. First, Schwarzenegger (R) vs. Angelides (D), 2006 for CA Gov - one of the best ads that Steve "we have functional unemployment at 17%... I think Schwarzenegger has been a great Governor" Schmidt ever produced:

Now, McDonnell (R) for VA Gov...

And Deeds (D) for VA Gov...

All three ads hinge on forward/backward and the economy. The Deeds ad is close to getting away with the jujitsu that Obama pulled. Obama's argument on taxes and the economy was basically "we'll do what works, not what Bush was doing." Deeds is trying to take the same line, but there are two problems.

First, the difference isn't sharp enough. Deeds is trying to inoculate with the tax cuts, pro-business blah blah, but my God, how many bailouts are we going to have to suffer through before some kind of Democrat, somewhere cowboys up and says "basta!" You can't say "I'm real different from Bush!" and then follow it by a bunch of proposals that say "I'm exactly the same as Bush!"

It's not quite tone-deaf; clearly there's still a lot of ambient conservative conventional wisdom on economics that Deeds is trying to glom onto (and in the process, reinforce). But there's lots of room between flat-out explaining to people that tax increases are good for the economy and this limp middle of the road stuff, which is costing him authenticity, and in turn both killing him with moderates and draining base passion.

The second difference is that the Obama campaign was running a clinic in sharp political positioning and definition from the moment they got started. That kind of definition gives you a lot of maneuvering room by giving you the capacity to talk about what you want to talk about, not what they want to talk about. Doesn't seem like Deeds has established that, so the last two weeks of this election will most likely be about whatever McDonnell wants it to be about.

Matt Miller wrote a nice book about the tyranny of dead ideas. What he left out was why zombie dead ideas like politicians running on tax cuts refuse to die. The VA Gov race should be a case study. It's another example of an ugly cycle of failure for the left: ideas about a progressive alternative for the economy don't exist, so we run millions upon millions of dollars of ads trying to glom onto the conservative ideas (and that's on top of the millions and millions of dollars of ads that they're running), thereby strengthening them, which in turn reinforces the impossibility of creating an alternative, and on and on.

If Virginia elects McDonnell, they can look to California as an example of what happens when conservative "starve the beast" economics meets a transitioning 21st century economy: start with gross, across the board underinvestment in public education, from pre-K to city colleges & public universities. Pile on deficits because the government needs to spend on is going to be debt-financed. Watch wages stagnate and unemployment climb even in up business cycles, and then shoot up when the business cycle goes flat, because all the tax cuts and resulting mountains of debt prevent counter-cyclical public sector spending. Don't forge the massive, always-growing inequality (and the resulting increases in political polarization) because the tax cuts are always somehow tilted towards either rich individuals or corporations, or both. (Here in CA we've managed to pass $2.5 billion in tax cuts for corporations, while we were billions of dollars in debt and giving teachers pink slips. Awesome stuff.)

Then, get ready to sit in some traffic jams that stretch over the horizon, because those tax cuts that went to the wealthy? They jammed up any investment in public transit or new roads. Even with the Federal government doing the right thing on public investment, you'll be surprised at how much a conservative governor can screw things up. And try not to get stuck on a bridge, too, because all the maintenance budgets are also getting cut.

If McDonnell is really following the Governor Schwarzenegger playbook, you can expect some paper-thin green initiatives that he will make an enormous amount of very public fuss over, and then work to undercut in back room deals, so you're looking at zero progress on investing in green tech or dealing with global warming, but probably some nice tax giveaways for oil & coal. You might even have to close down your parks.

And if any of the workers or anyone in the state house gets organized and call BS on this, expect a bunch of name calling and hissyfits rather than a substantive response.

This is how the conservative economic agenda plays out in reality, underneath their smokescreen of "economic freedom." But the freedom conservatives like McDonnell and Schwarzenegger are talking about always seems to come down to either more stuff or more guns. They're right about one thing: it is our damn money, and it's time we used it to rebuild a functioning civilization and expand real freedom. It's time for American (and Californian, and Virginian) Dream version 2.0, or a second tax revolution. Whatever you want to call it, it's time.

Jerry "Born Again Tax Cutter" Brown is already making noises like he's going to run the same plays next year. California could lose a governor's race to a woman who has only occasionally even bothered to register to vote. Hopefully Virginia can still avoid going through what California's been dealing with for the past five years.

But how many lost elections is it going to take before we start to break this cycle?

Update: From the you have got to be kidding department, Governor Schwarzenegger hath twittered thusly: "Check out this Time article - http://bit.ly/1GJfi9. The California Dream is alive and well." In a state with a bunch of cities with unemployment climbing into the 20% range, and worse in the central valley, this is beyond just Happy Talk. It's an insult.

Yes, Governor and Time magazine, things are great for the rich. The Time piece is right to challenge the idiocy of the corporate press "business-friendliness" rankings, and it rightly identifies some of the silver linings and tectonic changes occurring. But it manages yet again, as the corporate media invariably always does, to miss the growing grassroots progressive movement and Democratic party revitalization, which are the state's brightest and perhaps only hope for true renewal.

When even very well-educated, should-easily-be-middle-class families like ours, who have received every lucky break imaginable, can feel the Balrog of potential economic calamity coming up from the depths reaching up for us, something is deeply wrong. No amount of corporate media cheerleading should paper over the fact that the decisions Governor Schwarzenegger has made have brought about calamity for large parts of the state.

This is not personal, as his star-complex apparently is craving (and Time is so willing to feed). It isn't about schadenfreude or gloating when the jock wrecks his car. It's about leadership that's going to help us build a functioning society or not, and how the Governor's simpleminded clinging to the ideological wreckage of conservatism brought nothing but calamity and stagnation. That's your story, Time Magazine.

Unions, what good are they?

2009-05-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at the Corner, Jonah Goldberg asked:

This is a good faith question: I often hear advocates of unions claiming that unions are "good for the economy." What is the proof of this? ...

You can make the case that unions are good according to other priorities that fall under the jurisdiction of "social justice" and all that...But as a purely economic matter, where's the evidence that unions actually improve the efficiency, productivity, or competitiveness of specific firms or industries or the nation as a whole?

Today's response is a starting point: there are two questionable technical analyses, neither of which (at least from the provided abstracts) seem to take into account the depressive effects of inequality, as these models often don't. This is followed by one from The Makinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank funded by forces who have made the destruction of labor power one of their priorities. Goldberg fails to mention this, although maybe he's assumed his audience is familiar with their ideological presumptions. He does include a solid response from the political director of a union (he doesn't say which one) that's worth reading.

But there's a more succinct way to explain this, which is that post-depression American economic history can be roughly divided into two phases: before 1980, and after. Before 1980, we had strong economic growth that was broadly shared across all levels of income (these graphs are courtesy of Demos' Inequality.org):

After 1980, things changed. We still had growth, but nearly all of the results of this growth went to the top:

One primary feature of the economic landscape that changed over this time: plummeting rates of unionization. Reversing that trend isn't the whole answer. We need all sorts of policies that democratize economic power, such as employee ownership incentives, asset-building programs, changes in corporate governance and executive pay and a return to progressive income and wealth taxes. But encouraging union formation is the most common-sense and democratic reform to start with.

Goldberg clumsily tries to separate out questions about inequality and ""social justice" and all that" from "purely economic matters," as if it's unthinkable for the purpose of economics to be about improving the lives of ordinary Americans. But there's more to economics than determining the rate at which oligarchs can stuff suitcases of cash into their helicopters. We tried it that way and it didn't work out so well. It didn't even work out so well for a lot of the oligarchs. The Employee Free Choice Act is a key step in making the next few decades look more like the first bar graph and less like the second.

Most conservatives have yet to acknowledge that income inequality is even a problem. For those that do, as David Frum puts it in the last paragraph a September 2008 NYT piece, "Equality in itself never can be or should be a conservative goal." It's a strange statement for a piece that's trying to make exactly the opposite case, that Republicans should be worried about growing inequality. This bet hedging and cognitive dissonace is a direct result of the collision of their governing philosophy with the hard reality of the generally poor results it produced.

There was another example of this kind of thinking this week over at the new Enterprise Blog, a new house organ for the American Enterprise Institute (scroll down the page and note their commitment to racial diversity):

A major cultural schism is developing in America. Not over the issues that divided us in the past, like abortion, same-sex marriage, or home schooling, important as they are. The new divide centers on free enterprise—the principle at the core of American culture. As the recent “tea parties” showed, a growing ethical populism is now brewing in America. Protests are being raised against administration policies that punish “makers” and reward “takers.”

This is flat-out absurd. AEI is funded by the biggest takers in our economy, the kingpins of the financial services and extractive energy industries, and the network of foundations they've put into place to keep the system that allows them to do this taking in place. They wouldn't know an actual maker if one fell on them. If they did, they'd be pushing hard for universal health care and shorter workweeks, the lack of which are two of the biggest impediments to startup formation.

Despite their significant role in helping to elect Obama, most actual makers remain nearly completely politically disorganized. This has to change, because if one side clearly makes an argument and the other side is silent, even if that argument makes no sense it will prevail. There is some hope: places like New Deal 2.0 could become a must-read and lead the process of building a strong counterargument. Conservatives don't have solutions to these problems. Progressives do, but have a long way to go in figuring out how to tell the story.

Update: This is an excellent response to Goldberg about the biggest dislocator of jobs, which is technology. The only long-term answer to that, and the only thing that can protect our long-term global competitiveness, is that firms have to be come democratized learning organizations. It's hard to imagine that happening without unions.

Economic Crop Failure: a Primer for Understanding the May 19th Election

2009-04-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

The six propositions to be voted on in the upcoming May 19th statewide special election are a symptom of a broken political system in California. This post is an attempt to sum up some recent history of this state for the less than fully politically obsessed, in an attempt to provide some basic information for making the most difficult and technical decisions California voters have been asked to weigh in on.

This is not an attempt at an unbiased or neutral history, but a progressive one. I believe the decisions we're making could have an impact on whether our state's political leadership has the chance to broadly once again take up the challenge of transition from a thing-oriented to a person-oriented society - or not.

I write from this viewpoint because I believe it provides the best view of the truth, which is that this is no accident. This state is in the mess that it is in very much by design. This is exactly where movement conservative forces, led by Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform and joined by their elected allies, want this state to be. They have argued, organized and fought for exactly this situation. Their dream of standing athwart history and stopping it has been realized. The question before us is how to re-start the progressive history of our state.

Six data points

The 2008-09 budget is about $105B, and the baseline proposed budget for 2009-10 is $111B. The biggest expenditure are K-12 education ($41B), Health & Human Services ($38B), Higher Ed ($13B) and prisons ($10B). (Governor's CA Budget Summary Charts, SUM-01)

The budget disaster is both acute and structural. The projection for next year, should the May 19th elections fail, is for a $40B deficit. (CA Governor Budget Summary Charts. SUM-01 and subsequent charts that explain the projected effects of the May 19th ballot props.)

We are a moderate tax state: California was 17th out of 50 in total revenue as a percentage of personal income (California's Tax System, CBP 2009 page 18).

We are a low tax country. The US has some of the lowest taxes in the industrialized world. We are currently 17th out of 18 industrialized nations in total tax amount as a function of GDP. (Nationamaster/OECD)

State government is not "growing out of control." It has grown modestly with respect to personal income over the past few decades. (Somewhat out of date, but based on BEA & LAO data, updated data forthcoming when I get a chance to pull it together.)

Recent history

The seeds of the current budget disaster were sown in 1978 under then-Governor and now-candidate Jerry "born again tax cutter" Brown, with the passage of Proposition 13. Prop 13 marked the final end of the era of government investment and growth started by Pat Brown (Democratic Gov of California from '59 to '67) that was then continued by Ronald Reagan ('67 to '75). While Prop 13 included a reasonable fix to increases on residential property taxes that were rising too quickly, it went too far by including a requirement that any tax increases of any kind must pass both houses of the California legislature by a two-thirds majority. This effectively locked the state into a semi-permanent structural deficit: a gap between the funds needed for things that clear majorities of voters want (investment in schools, health care, infrastructure, environmental protections etc) and what the tax system generates, and handed the power to freeze government completely over to a one-third minority. The majorities in favor of investment in society are even stronger if nonvoters are included, as documented by the Public Policy Institute of California's very thorough 2006 report, California's Exclusive Electorate.

The executive and legislative political leadership of the state had managed to more or less deal with these limitations until recently, when continued effective execution by movement conservative forces finally collided with this baseline increase in desire in the electorate for government services. The intensity of this collision has been further exacerbated by the bursting of the tech bubble in 2001 and a limp recovery, which was then followed by 2008's bursting of the housing bubble, which hit California with particular ferocity.

One result of this collision has been the election of an enormous number of Democrats to both houses, to the point that two-thirds majorities may be within reach over the next several election cycles. However, conservative forces took their biggest prize in 2003, when they were able to align around and fund the recall of Democratic Governor Gray Davis, ostensibly because of a deficit nearly the size of the project 2009/2010 deficit. Davis proceeded to lose a one-sided election to Schwarzenegger in an election that turned almost solely on anti-tax fervor whipped up by the Schwarzenegger campaign, an identical tactic that powered him again to victory over Phil Angelides in 2006.

Schwarzenegger's first act as Governor was to cut the unpopular Vehicle License Fee, but with no consideration whatsoever for either corresponding spending cuts or replacing the revenue. This act immediately increased the state structural deficit by at least $4 billion per year and started the state on the course that has led to today's tangled mess. This action was taken as a part of the "starve the beast" strategy demanded by Grover Norquist, which Schwarzenegger even referred to point-blank in interviews with several newspaper editorial boards.

Schwarzenegger may have had some early opportunity to make cuts and weed out inefficiencies. He made two primary mistakes. First was a fundamental underestimation of the difficulty of cutting the budget, because as Schwarzenegger now admits and frequently mentions, very large majorities of voters do in fact want government services. And Schwarzenegger loves providing them; he has even attempted to refer to himself as modern incarnation of Pat Brown. His fatal flaw as a free-lunch conservative has been his repeated denial of the revenue problem that he helped drastically worsen.

His second category of mistakes was that he squandered his considerable electoral mandate with a series of embarrasingly juvenile rookie mistakes early in his administration. He was yet another successful business leader that couldn't adapt to the reality of how to function in and lead a democracy, a lesson that Republican primary voters should (but likely will not) consider in evaluating candidates like Meg Whitman. Schwarzenegger's mistakes were a case study in why a lack of prior political experience should all but automatically disqualify a candidate, however charismatic, from pursuing executive higher office; he could have learned a good part of what he needed to know from a four year stint on a county central committee.

What is at stake?

The election hinges primarily on the passage of Prop 1A, a measure focused on limiting state government growth through an arcane and complicated formula. 1A is substantially similar to Prop 76 from Schwarzenegger's 2005 special election, which was voted down 62 to 38. This is a parallel result to Prop 13's 65 to 35 passage in 1978. California voters are showing a certain amount of rationality here: we understandably don't want taxes that cause acute pain, but we also want to avoid a hard spending cap that would lock in a low level of social investment. Prop 1A is a philosophical descendant of a more draconian national right-wing initiative effort called the "Taxpayer Bill of Rights," or TABOR. Colorado passed this measure in 1992 and has spent nearly every election cycle since then weakening it's provisions, to the point that it has now been substantially repealed.

The key difference between 2009's Prop 1A and 2005's Prop 76 is that the Governor placed some limited protections for school funding in Prop 1A, and by so doing was able to gain the support of (or to put it less charitably, buy off) the California Teacher's Association, the state's largest teacher's union. This move has effectively split the labor coalition that united to defeat the 2005 special election debacle. Both sides are weighing in heavily with millions of dollars of spending, and the TV ads have already started.

Movement conservative forces have carefully shaped this election to specifically exclude the consideration of actual solutions. As the nonpartisan California Budget Project puts it, "Basic economics demonstrates that carefully chosen tax increases are preferable to spending cuts when the economy is weak." Yet even a modest increase in progressive income taxes (for one example) hasn't even been on the negotiating table, or included as part of the solution. Facts like this strain the credibility of those who say this is the best deal we can get.

No on 1A, but why?

California is arguably the state that is farthest along in the historical arc of transformation from a thing-oriented economy to a person-oriented economy - even though most days, it feels like we've hardly started. The electorate's baseline demand for services like education will not decrease, nor should it, given the demands of both our state's commitment to social justice and the practical demands of the 21st century economy. The conservative definition of freedom, with it's nearly exclusive focus on property rights, has to be replaced by a more expansive, progressive and just vision of freedom.

The shoots of a real solution are just now starting to grow out of the weeds of the disaster. They've sprouted but are still growing mostly below the surface, but there's a lot to be hopeful about. Consider the following four developments:

Ongoing huge increases in voter registration and participation in the California Democratic Party (the CDP)

The emergence of five networks of data-driven grassroots organizing groups (PICO, MIV, CA Alliance, the CDP grassroots and Courage Campaign)

Increasing national progressive movement investment in ideas and strategic communications (like The Progressive Ideas Network and New Deal 2.0), and

The prospect of a Constitutional Convention, and Gavin Newsom's publicly-stated, on-his-website, nothing-unclear-about-it support for this idea.

There are also wildcards, such as the role Organizing for America could play, although it's unclear how their current focus on supporting the President's agenda and community service could connect to the biggest problems facing our state.

Given the massing of these progressive forces, the question then comes down to this: what will better accelerate this process? Senator Darrel Steinberg and Assemblymember Karen Bass are strong progressives, and the architects of this deal for the Democratic caucuses in their respective houses. It's tempting to trust the people who have studied this problem the most and who know it from the inside out. Right now, that's Assemblymember Bass and Senator Steinberg, who claim this deal truly is the best we can do.

But this deal is the result of their best efforts in a deeply broken system. This may very well be the best deal that they could get. But it is not the best deal that we can get.

The passage of these propositions step backward for our state. The California economy is facing a form of crop failure. Prop 1A would lock us into a drought when we need to be opening the gates and letting the irrigation waters flow. We need real solutions: we need to plant roots that will lead to progressive taxation, and either end the two-thirds requirement, achieve two-thirds majorities in both houses, or both. Voting no won't accomplish any of this, but your participation will. It's time to plant some seeds of a governing philosophy that will work for this state.

Resources

Calitics Endorsements: No on everything.

Courage Campaign Endorsements: No on everything. (and see their nifty multi-group slate)

SF Bay Guardian Endorsements: No on everything.

The California Budget Project has a lot of very detailed information, including an 8-page analysis of 1A.

The Governor's Budget Summary Charts page

The best arguments in favor of Yes on everything, via Sacramento consultant Steve Maviglio.

Converting a shapefile into one kml file per feature

2009-03-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

Below is some python/GDAL code for an easy way to split a GIS shapefile (such as those found in the CA Statewide Database) into a bunch of kml files, one for each feature found in the file. For example, this can be used to create individual precinct maps from the county and whole state files in the SWDB, which can then be rendered in either Google Earth or Google Maps.

This code is a long way from perfect; it's finding some MultiPolygons where there should be polygons, and GDAL barfs out some missing symbol errors (but keeps on truckin' anway). But I didn't see a ready solution for this posted elsewhere, so enjoy (sharp sytax highlighting via http://pygments.org/):

Your browser does not support iframes.

There are a bunch of different ways to get into the guts of a shapefile and start mucking around with it. If you have an ESRI ArcMap license you can sort through the numerous ESRI .Net APIs, which is how I've ordinarily done it. But it can be slow going, and you do need the license. As far as I can tell this has to be the easiest, fastest way to get there with open source. And writing python is a lot more fun C# or VB anyway.

If you'd like to try this at home, this GDAL API tutorial from the geodjango site is invaluable. And if you're on a Mac, for the love of all that is holy don't try to compile GDAL and all its dependencies. Download the "KyngChaos Binaries" instead. Yes, they sound like warez but they seem to work fine and will save you hours of wandering through Makefiles.

"It's gonna fail."

2009-03-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

"People ask me if I hope [Obama's economic plan] is gonna fail. I tell 'em, I don't have to 'hope' anything. It's gonna fail."-- Tom DeLay

One week from today, I am going to place either a formal prediction a bet over at Long Bets, a site designed to keep track of exactly this sort of thing. Here's the draft wording of it:

Prediction: The Obama administration will exceed the Bush administration's performance over all of the following social and macroeconomic indicators: better rate of job creation, better rate of GDP growth, lower poverty rate, lower child poverty rate, greater rate of S&P 500 growth, fewer total number uninsured, fewer net oil imports, less public debt, less public debt as a percentage of GDP, and greater per capita attendance at four-year college.

Tom Delay is only the tip of the veritable iceberg. Many conservatives are saying that the President's agenda WILL fail, that they hope it fails, and that people should even sign up to work for it to fail. Although Rush isn't even saying whether it would be a good or bad thing for it to fail, which makes me think that perhaps the words success and failure are just getting beaten to death here.

So ok: time to put up, folks. I'm making it easy for conservatives and tough for Barack. He has to do better than Bush on all ten metrics. And in a few cases, Bush put up some solid numbers, like a 41% increase in GDP. If Barack is really destroying "economic freedom" and wealth on a heretofore unthinkable scale, he can't possibly do better than that, right? This is hardly fair. It should be an easy bet.

I've tried to make these numbers conservative-friendly. Other than jobs, health care, energy independence and education, these aren't particularly my priorities. For example, one of my priorities is income inequality, which is usually measured by something called the Gini index. But since a solid source of year over year US data for it isn't even available on the web, I'm not including it. I could personally almost care less what happens with the stock market, although the amount of pain that people who are near retirement are experiencing is unfortunate. (Even if I did have money, I wouldn't be in the market for the same reason I don't gamble much when I go to Vegas. Both Vegas and Wall Street can be a lot of fun but that they mainly exist to eat small players for breakfast.)

But the fact is that I think the Obama administration will do right by Wall St. once the current mess is fully unwound - he's just not going to do it at the expense of Main St. Like Barack said in his acceptance speech, "for those of you whose support I have not yet earned, I intend to be your President too." So I'm including the S&P 500 as well as the GDP. Flawed as the GDP is as a gauge of what matters, reliable, recent GPI (genuine progress indicator) figures also aren't available, so I'm not including that either. Nor am I including total hours worked per week, which I'd like to see decrease. And I'm staying away from social issues, although I'd guess we'll have more guns and fewer abortions than the Bush years, too.

I was thinking of including some numbers regarding how much better the Obama administration will do, but it's taken long enough to pull this together already. And with Obama starting down by three touchdowns because of the mess that more than forty years of conservative economic orthodoxy has made, he's got his work cut out for him. If someone wants to take the bet but only on conditions of proposing how much better Barack will do, fine, propose some numbers and I'll think about it. And if someone wants to crunch similar numbers for the Reagan adminstration, I'd consider that bet too.

There is a very real chance that the bottom is going to completely fall out of things. A $50T+ market is collapsing and we've been underinvesting in society for decades. That is putting us in uncharted economic territory. It'd probably be smart to wait a couple of weeks and see where things go. But I'm not being smart. I'm making this bet now, when things are looking all bad.

The details are below. If anyone wants to dispute these numbers or add a few more before taking the bet, please leave them in the comments. (and please feel free to check my math!) I tried to use direct government figures wherever available, and as close to January 2001 to January 2009 figures as possible. If you'd be willing to take the bet, propose an amount. I propose that the money go to build.org, which seems like something both progressives and conservatives can agree is a good thing.

Incidentally, if you're working on government transparency, the difficulty of tracking down these numbers (including the unavailability of the Gini index & any kind of a recently updated or transparent GPI) would serve as an interesting case study.

Update: if the Obama administration is only four years long, then I'll run the numbers based on Bush's yearly average.

Job Creation
Jan 2001: 132.469M jobs / 285.0M pop (464.8 jobs per thousand ppl)
Jan 2009: 134.580M jobs / 304.1M pop (442.6 jobs per thousand ppl)
+2.111M jobs (263k jobs/year)
-22.2 jobs per 1000 people
BLS

GDP Growth
$10.0125T (Q1 2001)
$14.2003T (Q4 2008)
+41%
bea.gov

Poverty Rate
11.7 (2001)
12.5 (2007)
+ 6.8%
census.gov & cbpp

Child Poverty Rate
16.3% 2001
18.0% 2007
+1.7%
CBPP

S&P 500 performance
1,335.63 January 2001
865.58 January 2009
-35%
Political Calculations

Increase in uninsured
2001: 38.4M
2008: 45.7M
+19%
webmd.com

Net Oil Imports
2001: 10900 barrels/day
2007: 12040 barrels/day
+ 10.4%
EIA

Public Debt
2001: $3.3196T
2008: $5.8029T
+74.8%
CBO

Debt as a pct. of GDP
2000 58%
2008 74.6%
+16.6%
wikipedia

Enrollment in four-year college (pct. per capita)
2001: 15.928M (5.59%)
2008: 18.264M (6.01%)
nces.ed.gov

Population (for college & job creation per capita figures)
July 1 2001: 285.0M
July 1 2008: 304.1M
census.gov

Thoughts on the bottom

2009-02-23T13:03:00.000-08:00

I don't think we're at the bottom, but I think we can probably see it from here. Three data points, and some thoughts on this.

One, stocks are still expensive by historical standards. Maybe after today's selloff they'll be more in the ballpark, but despite all the hysteria we're still above historical P/Es:

"By this measure, the P-E ratio of the S.&P. 500 is now about 14.5. It’s below average [which is 16], but not enormously so. By comparison, this ratio fell to 6 during the 1930s and 7 during the early 1980s. In short, stocks are a little less expensive than their historical average. But they are far more expensive than they were at the worst points of the other two worst recessions of the past century."

Two, housing prices are way down, but somewhat incredibly, sales are brisk:

"An estimated 29,458 new and resale houses and condos were sold in the state last month, an increase of 53.9 percent from the year-ago period, DataQuick said."

Three, the stimulus is going to work very well, and the bank & housing plans are going to work well enough. Richard Norton's The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth has a collection of very clear charts illustrating the benefits of demand side tax cuts. It is not the whole story since it mostly leaves out the advantages of investing in society, but it's a good start. Unfortunately none of the charts appear to be available online, although this page seems to have at least some of the data he collected. But basically, business investment goes up, unemployment goes down, real income & GDP growth goes up, and so on and so forth.

US stocks & housing were both overvalued because for decades, there was so much loose money in the top of the economy that it had nowhere to go but chase sketchy deals. But this week is budget week. Obama is going to propose - and pass, with or without Republican support - a modest tax increase on the wealthy. We are finally shaking off supply-side and taking money that was chasing its tail in the bubbles and investing it, in the old sense of investing (i.e. putting money to work). The next phase will be a wringing out of excesses, Volcker-style, which will involve pain but is the only path towards putting the economy back on a long-term path to growth.

Stocks coming back into line with historical averages is going to be part of that process. If anything they should be well below historic P/E averages, because there are still a lot of things that could go horribly wrong. Obama and the Democratic leadership successfully navigated the stimulus past the neo-Hooverites and the Santellis, but now for it to be effective we have to get it past the kleptomaniacs. It's not at all clear that our democracy is up to the task. And the Santelli types are disorganized and inchoate at the moment, with little to lose they have an opportunity to take bigger strategic risks. They're going to pitch a thousand hissyfits over the budget.

The irony here is that on some level (and apologies for this, Senator McCain), the fundamentals are strong. The question is how dig do you have to deep to find them (and the other question is how tone-deaf of a politician do you have to be to say that at the beginning of a mini-depression). A $50+ trillion "market" collapsed over the past few months. That's a lot of horseshit, but at the center of it, there is still a $15T pony under there. That pony is the greatest consumer market the world has ever known. This is why sales of California housing is brisk. Even with wave after wave of foreclosures, there are either enough people who saw this coming and waited patiently on the sidelines to drive demand, or the speculators are getting back in. Hopefully it's the former.

Yes, there will be rubble from the collapse. The best technical bookstore in San Francisco, Stacey's, is right across the street from my office. It's closing and this is a terrible loss. We may skip along the bottom for a while. But while we will get through it in some fashion, the big outstanding question is whether we can use the crisis to put our economy (and our lives) on a more sustainable course.

Preliminary thoughts on Beinhocker's Origins of Wealth

2009-02-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

Someone - or perhaps many someones - could make a career out of turning the "very interesting research plus partially thought-through policy proscriptions" genre into ideas with real political impact. Maybe this is a recipe for a new think tank: scan for this stuff, develop the ideas the rest of the way, determine how to best get them across and then run advocacy based on that research. Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth and Dan Arielly's Predicatably Irrational both belong to this emerging category and would have tremendous potential for this approach.

Beinhocker's biggest win is the sheer size of the ideas. From the preface: "I...believe that just as biology became a true science in the twentieth century, so too will economics come into its own as a science in the twenty-first century...this book will argue that what we are witnessing in economics today is in fact the early stages of...a paradigm shift." He sets the controls of the heart of economics and goes far in making the case that the very core of the discipline is rotten.

What's at stake in this shift is decidedly not comparable to the turn of the century revolution in physics, where in moving from Newtonian to Einsteinian models, everything basically lined up except for the edge cases (i.e. for things moving near the speed of light or things that are very small, near the Planck length). The assumptions that traditional economics makes often don't match reality either close up or from a distance. The Complexity Economics Beinhocker describes basically rips out the Walrasian equilibrium models, and replaces them with complex adaptive systems. These systems and the models they generate both line up better with how economies work at the human, individual micro- level as well as at the historic macro- level.

Wealth is created from the interplay of what Beinhocker dubs Physical Technologies, Social Technologies and Business Plans, which function as a sort of wealth-creating DNA. Wealth is "fit order," created through jointly meeting 3 conditions: irreversibility, locally decreasing entropy and fitness. This is far too brief of a summary but it is a gorgeous idea: supple, flexible and with a grand historical scope. It's the math behind the history of human cooperation in Robert Wright's Nonzero, a book Beinhocker references frequently.

In terms of the math and the science, there are clear gaps that need filling, which Beinhocker clearly indicates. Equilibrium-based models work for a great many purposes and will continue to do so even as Complexity-based models become more useful. But despite the out-of-control nature of evolution and complex adaptive systems, the key to his analysis of the implications of Complexity Economics is this:

We may not be able to predict or direct economic evolution, but we can design our institutions and societies to be better or worse evolvers.

Policy Implications

The policy side of the book has two big problems. One is structural and likely nothing more than a function of the current state of the research. The other, based on a total misunderstanding of the progressive position on markets, is less understandable.

First, his telling of Complexity Economics seems to gloss quickly over the clear role democracy plays in economic evolution. He divides the processes that sort business plans according to effectiveness into two categories: Big Men and markets. Yet over the course of a few pages devoted to the role of democracy, he points out that "in 1700, America's GDP was 5 percent of Britain's and, by 1775, was 40 percent.."one of the highest growth-rates the world has ever witnessed." (297) - and that this was due in large part to the politics and culture of the colonies.

For another example, consider the growth and broadly shared prosperity of the post-war US economy. The fitness functions of a functioning democracy in a mixed economy seem to have the ability to shape the economy far more effectively than a dictator. But the interplay between functional democratic institutions and economic growth merits only three pages. There is a clear but unexplored connection to Sen's concept of substantial freedom, for another example: in fact it may be that substantial freedom could be defined as the degree to which one can deflect the fitness order with one's preferences. Arguably this is all outside the scope of Origins, but it's certainly an area for more study.

The more incomprehensible problem is that the one chapter specifically devoted to policy implications is built around a somewhat jarring end to left-right/end of history artifice. Maybe this only reads so strangely in the decidedly post-Fukuyama world where Obama is president: Origins was published in 2007. But it relies on a particularly flimsy anti-market strawman of the left that was no more accurate in 2007 than it is today, as if he mistakes the anti-globalization WTO protesters as the left's entire argument. If this isn't an indication that the left needs more aggressive idea marketing, I don't know what is.

Incidentally, as they say on Battlestar Galactica, this has all happened before. Bob Kuttner's April 2003, "Beyond Left and Right: a Guide for the Unwary" picks up the same pattern in discussing the lefty approaches offered up by the New America Foundation as centrist:

"...Lind doesn't deign to address the political obstacles. The very phrase, "Imagine a federal program ..." is a nonstarter in the current Bush era, let alone a program of national economic planning. (If you want to imagine something, imagine the Republican catcalls at the presumption of large-scale social engineering.)

We're in a different moment now, to be sure. An $800B stimulus was unthinkable six months ago and will be signed into law on Tuesday. But in Origins as then, the Rawlsian-compliant opportunity and social-capital expanding proscriptions he offers - such as "efforts to encourage voting and political involvement" or "[r]eforms to make workplaces more family friendly" or "better public transport" and more urban-friendly land-use laws - are all utter nonstarters with what's left of the conservative movement in the US.

Ultimately these two issues may be a quibble. The point is that we can design our institutions across the business, government and nonprofit sectors to evolve more quickly and vigorously

Movement Implications

There are powerful implications for the movement here, both at the movement strategy and the organizational development levels. His conception of strategy as a portfolio of experiments, while brutally difficult to implement, manage and execute, sounds like a key success factor as well as exactly the kind of strategy that a revamped conservative movement (with less to lose) could adopt.

At the organizational level, the key to this is creating organizational cultures that allow for increased evolution. Beinhocker covers so much ground so quickly that he doesn't have a chance to get into this in too much detail, but he does provide 10 commandments of evolutionary culture as a starting point (371):

Performing Norms
1. Performance orientation
2. Honesty
3. Meritocracy

Cooperating Norms
4. Mutual Trust
5. Reciprocity
6. Shared Trust

Innovating Norms
7. Nonhierarchical
8. Openness
9. Fact-based
10. Challenge

There's a clear connection to the Learning Organization school of organizational development: evolutionary optimization and strategy as a portfolio of experiments both sound like tools for executing and evaluating the learning organization. Again there's a lot of room for further analysis here. And this points towards an organization focused on horizontal movement communication, organizational development and spreading best practices around evolving strategy as another serious movement-level gap. (although one that a group like the Democracy Alliance could perhaps step into relatively easily)

Thinking Big, Thinking Forward

2009-02-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was privileged to attend Thinking Big, Thinking Forward, put on by four of the groups doing the best work on the economy in the movement: the Economic Policy Institute, the Institute for America's Future, Demos and the American Prospect.

I'm not going to try and get into the content, because there was just too much of it for me to cover remotely adequately here. I posted a few real time reactions to twitter with the #thinkingbig tag (which no one else took up - more on this later). Overall, it was an outstanding event. There was certainly evidence of the somewhat chaotic pile-of-silos approach progressives ordinarily employ in endeavors such as this, but it seemed like there was a strong effort to move beyond that. The great preponderance of the presentations were well crafted and interesting. I agree with presenter Mark Schmitt's observation that thinking big, to him, means putting the whole thing together somehow, and it may not have quite gotten there, but more on this later too.

So here are a few points of unsolicited but hopefully constructive feedback:

1) Racial and gender diversity. I know this is a big challenge, and I'm sure Larry, Miles, Bob & Roger and Bob Kuttner have known each other for years. Every last one them are progressive champions and on the whole, they did better than most events of this nature. One of the more interesting panels had Jerome Ringo of the Apollo Alliance and Michelle Collins of ShoreBank, and Dr. Manuel Pastor Jr. of UCSC and Deepak Bhargava of the Center for Community Change presented in the afternoon. So while there was relatively good panel diversity, the concern here is top-line leadership diversity. Why not elevate CCC or the Apollo Alliance (who were represented on panels), or for that matter, Green for All, Opportunity Agenda or PolicyLink? (who weren't) I know these things get geometrically harder to plan with more groups, but it is incumbent on movement leadership to keep the fact that if we're not connecting with women and racially diverse communities, we're not just doing it wrong, we're not going to get where we want to go. The only way to do that is to bring diverse leaders and groups in at the foundational, leadership and strategic levels.

2) Presentation Quality. You would think at a meeting where people are putting out lots of complex information that there would be a better mix of visual communication. We can't all be Al Gore or Steve Jobs, but we can all learn from how they communicate. For the few folks who did have slides, many of them could have used an overhaul. (hint: if you have to apologize for how much text there is on a slide... revise the slide!) Presentation Zen is a good starting point. Also, a switch to a more TED/EG style model of 15 minute presentations rather than a panel might encourage more concise storytelling.

3) Social Media Exposure. While it's unlikely that this kind of event would generate much earned corporate media coverage even if the Vice President had been able to make it, it does seem like there's a lot of room for better social media exposure. Of the 900 some-odd folks there, from the searches I ran there were only a half-dozen people using twitter, and not even a critical mass of people to pick up the hashtag I proposed. There were no facebook pages or invites as far as I could tell. This is a movement wide problem, and it does seem that the right is outflanking us already in social media usage on the movement/organization side (if not on the campaign side). While yesterday's content was likely too technical for a broad audience, we should be doing a better job of reaching people like the person who practically begged the presenters for better communications tools at one point in the Q&A.

It seems like ideas marketing (broadly conceived) is still a gap that no organization is yet quite filling, even while many orgs have it as part of their missions. More effective use of social media could be a low-cost way of making this happen. We have to do a better job narrowcasting to the group of people who are already interested this, meet their needs, and then start figuring out how to grow the size of the audience we can reach effectively.

One other general thought: for a long time, I have chalked up the left's lack of a forceful, clear argument for a progressive economics to... I'm not sure what, but something internal to the movement. A short list might include ossified and/or thick-headed leadership, structural issues around what does and doesn't get funded and why, some variant of beltway fever (maybe a "not invented here" strain) that repels solutions-oriented thinking from outside, historical divisions and structures, and even (everyone's favorite excuse), the good old fashioned lack of resources.

All those are certainly very real issues (although I think the thick-headedness is less of a problem, and the lack of resources moreso), but I'm also thinking that there's simply a natural, historic progression to these things. Maybe reading Beinhocker has me thinking that every big, complicated process is an evolutionary one, but it seems like this probably really is. Arguments evolve. While there are numerous factors that can increase & decrease the rate of evolution (and what those factors are would be an awfully interesting analysis), evolution takes time. The right's arguments are so clear, powerful and resonant - even now, amongst the obvious economic devastation that governing under their argument has led to - simply because they've been at it for so long and have been able to boil their arguments down to their most simple and persuasive cores.

I suppose I'm being a little more zen about this, which might be helpful to the process of reading, synthesis, execution of research and writing that we need so much more of. Maybe we need Top Thinker, the progressive economics version of Top Chef. Or how about an unconference of some kind, perhaps FooCamp (closed, elite invite list) or even one BarCamp (open invite list) style? I found myself awfully curious about where people in the audience were coming from and why and how they were there. An unconference could help figure that out.

So while arguably no one was really able to pull it together in a satisfying way yesterday, maybe the big takeaway is that we're headed in more or less the right direction, and how helpful it is to get folks in a room and talking.

Foundations III: Ten Progressive Principles (A Response to Russell Kirk)

2009-01-21T08:20:00.001-08:00

[Originally posted at Speak Out California 8 June 2006.]

With the roots of the philosophy of progressivism - interdependence and expanding substantial freedom - covered now in slightly more detail, here's a first take on a full progressive response to Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles that dates originally back to 1957, the hazy dawn of movement conservativism.

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries.

The ideology dodge here is a little bit of a funny tactic. Kirk protesteth a bit too much and he returns to it again and again. Don't look behind the curtain, there's no idelogy here! But there's more:

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word "conservative" as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

If ideology is just a group of ideas, then conservativism is the negation of ideas? I doubt that's what Kirk meant. But if this whole "see no ideology, hear no ideology" game is appealing to you, then progressivism is in the same boat...

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

Ditto for progressivism. We lefties love to make up our laundry lists, and there is value in doing so. But the project here is more at the level of worldview and narrative. What is the story that progressives have to tell? What are our values, our identity? Kirk does do a fair job at that.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.

Mr Kirk, I'll see your Milton reference and raise you one. The progressive is simply one who is fascinated with Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. Not to say that we deny the continuity and value of our history; nothing could be further than the truth. The expansion of substantial freedom was at the core of the American revolution and everything that's happening now is just a continuation of that spirit. But progressivism is surely about looking and moving forward into the unattempted and undiscovered country. Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!

...the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. What particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era. The following ten articles of belief reflect the emphases of conservatives in America nowadays.

As with progressives. Lakoff's six(ish) types of progressives (socioeconomic, identity politics, environmentalists, civil liberties, spiritual and antiauthoritarian) have a lot of work to do to really nail down what our principles and narrative are going to be. This is only a start:

1

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.

Nothing too shocking there if you've read Lakoff; this really is conservativism in a nutshell. This is where the conservative predilection for control that manifests itself in issues from women's rights to foreign policy comes from: It's all about defending the moral order. Progressives, instead, are about the broad expansion of substantial freedom.

That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.

Some moral truths are permanent, and some are discarded through the arc of history. Slavery is a good example; someday the way we currently treat economic refugees will be as well.

This word order signifies harmony.

What it really signifies all too often is dominance.

There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth... Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.

The connection between the internal and outer orders is true enough. But the most hideous acts of the 20th century were largely a result of our desperate clinging to the old moral orders in the face of new emergent challenges to humanity, not the other way around. What was Nazism but the defense of a strict moral order, an assertion of racial superiority? What was the cold war but a contest for the dominance of two competing moral orders, neither of which provides the answers? The path to the future is towards the devolving of these grim and oppressive hierarchies, not their embrace.

A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society...

This is conflationary sleight of hand. Personal conviction towards justice and honor and a strong sense of right and wrong by no means lead to slavish devotion to some rigid moral order. The thirst for justice can lead only to questioning and working toward the eventual dismantling of such orders, to the extent that they hold people back.

2

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.

This one is easy: Progressives are unafraid to think critically, question authority, customs and continuity. The painfully critical need for this in the world today is blindingly obvious.

3

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.

Progressives believe in the principle of interdependence, which gives rise to a very different approach than this:

Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription‚Äîthat is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity‚Äîincluding rights to property, often.

This is the first mention of property rights and there will be more on this alter. But this is a particularly grim passage...

Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste.

The historical ramifications for this are astounding. Think of the breadth of artistic, scientific and technological endeavors just over the past few years, let along the course of history. None of these count as brave new discoveries? If Kirk were still alive I'd send him a gift subscription to iTunes. Democracy may not be a new idea but as a species we surely have a long way to go in figuring how to make it work. How this can happen without new moral and political discoveries is unfathomable.

4

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.

Progressives are guided by their thirst for justice and by their curiousity and wonder. The rationale for this paragraph is a litany of do-nothingism:

Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away...The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences.

Of course there's nothing wrong with reflection and planning. But when enterprises of great pitch and moment turn awry and lose the name of action, as they have so often recently, things have gone too far.

5

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.

It's a little hard to tell exactly what Kirk is talking about in this one. Maybe this is an area of agreement, and yet conservatives...

...feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.

So Kirk goes on and on about enforcing the moral order and then turns around to complain about narrowing uniformity, but pins the blame on the other guys. And what the heck is remotely deadening about egalitarianism?

Regardless of what sort of point Kirk was trying to make here, it's clear that progressives value maximum diversity. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations isn't just for Vulcans. Progressives value diversity innately; life is just better with real variety, not whatever conflicting surface variety Kirk may (or may not) be trying to make the case for here.

6

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.

Again, this sounds like excuses, reasons to give up on moving things forward, which accounts for a lot of Kirk's approach really. It's somewhat amazing that something so uninspiring could have had such an impact. The obvious alternative: progressives accept the principle of imperfectability, but never allow their dreams of abundance to be shackled by it.

This is another interesting bit that illustrates some of the basic negativity and even near-delusion at the core of conservativism:

The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.

To the extent that the 20th and 21st centuries have a hellish component, it's more than a little disingenuous to pin that on "ideologues" of whatever stripe. Bad things happen when our vision is too narrow, not when it's too broad. The short term biases of capitalism as it's currently implemented, for just one example, are far more responsible for what's gone wrong than whichever unnamed ideologues Kirk is trying to blame. Without more detail on what Kirk considers hellish though, it's a bit hard to tell what he's thinking.

7

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.

Progressives appreciate the incredible breadth of freedom. It's telling that it took Kirk six other topics (starting with moral order!) before finally getting around to any kind of meaningful discussion of freedom. For as much blathering as conservatives do about freedom, it isn't really a top priority of theirs. Even when it is, they miss the point of it, as the freedom linked to the ownership of property is among the most vulgar and coarse of freedoms. The cognitive freedoms - freedom of speech, freedom to learn, freedom of and from religion, freedom of thought - as well as freedom from want and freedom from fear are the progressive pillars of the infinite taxonomy of freedom. Those are the substantial freedoms and form one of the two core philosophies of progressivism.

This isn't at all to say that private property shouldn't exist, of course! It just means that property rights have to be placed alongside other rights and freedoms. This gives rise to a certain critical but generally positive approach to capitalism: it needs to be housebroken, not smashed.

8

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

This issue, tied to the notion of coercion, is something more conservatives, especially those of a more libertarian stripe, seem to lose a lot of sleep over. What they don't seem to undertstand are some of the basic truths behind taxes and democracy. In any democracy, and indeed any society where the aforementioned property rights that Kirk values so highly are respected, there must always be some degree of "coercion." Things are never going to go your way 100% of the time and it's almost childish to think that they could; most of us learn this pretty early on in school. Ditto for taxes. Since the great majority of Americans are not in fact anarchists, we're always going to support some degree of taxation and are willing to have a discussion about exactly how much or how little that is, and what the most beneficial level is. Voluntary taxes would lead obviously and inevitably to free-rider problems.

So what to focus on instead? Progressives are pragmatic and grateful for all that civilization has provided. The unswerving hope for a better future that all progressives share is always tempered by their unending commitment to understanding an ever more complete picture of reality. For progressives, justice is of far higher priority than the thinness of focusing solely on property-linked freedom. The penniless monk who owns nothing is certainly no less free than the rich corporate executive.

9

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.

Another area of large agreement, but with a slight twist: The progressive believes in the unlimited power of human passion, and in restraint provided via countervailing powers. A large, thriving, complicated economy needs a large, thriving public sector as a countervailing force to keep corporate power in check. Capitalism does very much right but there are many basic needs that are not well met by markets, and government sets the ground rules for markets. But passion is what drives the game that is then played inside the boundaries of these rules: this is why there is a connection between a knowledge based economy and progressivism. Unlocking human potential and expanding cognitive liberty simply makes good business sense now. With power pushed out to the edges, the smarter the edges are the better we all do.

10

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

Basic agreement yet again. However:the thinking progressive understands that extreme concentrations of wealth and power can throw the process of reconciling permanence and change badly out of whack. The development of a modern American oligarchy is at the root of what has slowed progress in this country to a near standstill. Crashing the gates - the breaking of the stranglehold this oligarchy has on power and the restoration of democracy - is a top priority for progressives.

So that's it. A couple things are clear: one, Kirk may have been influential, but a lot of his thought seems to be on pretty murky ground. And a whole lot of it sounds like elaborate excuses to quit trying. Maybe that will end up being one of the core values of progressivism: get off your butt and keep working! The arc of history is long, and it sure bends away from Russel Kirk.

Foundations II: Substantial Freedom

2009-01-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

[Originally posted at Speak Out California, 20 May 2006.]

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every from of tyranny over the mind of man."
-Thomas Jefferson

One of the most destructive legacies of the conservative movement is the diminishing they have inflicted on the concept of freedom. This seems counterintuitive, perhaps, but all the relentless yammering that emanates from conservatives about freedom is perhaps a signal of their weakness on this issue, one of fundamental and historical importance to the American project.

Since the beginning of the conservative movement, the conservative conception of freedom has been intimately and intrinsically tied up with property rights, almost to the point of excluding anything else. This goes back all the way to Russell Kirk: "...conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked" is one of his ten principles, and the only mention of freedom throughout his ten conservatives principles.

One of the obvious attributes of the idea of freedom that this misses is its incredible breadth. True freedom goes far, far beyond just the connection to property, or stuff. The connection between stuff and true freedom is even tenuous since we don't just own our stuff, our stuff owns us as well. Who is more free: the apostle who owns nothing and lives in an intentional community, or the typical American, surrounded by the amazing output of our consumer economy, but saddled with levels of debt not seen since feudal Europe?

There may be no answer to this question, but conservative thought would have us believe the answer is definitely the latter...

Yet a major facet of the perennial wisdom (the core wisdom that most religious traditions share) is to not get too connected to stuff. All major religions have vigorous, unambiguous warnings about becoming overly concerned with property, such as this from Matthew 6:19: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."

What conservatives have done with freedom is pulled out this tiny slice of what freedom really is, just the parts related to property rights, and elevated just that as being practically the whole notion. It's as if, in the process of trying to define life, they took one species of fern out of an entire complex rainforest ecosystem and said "this is it -- this is life."

The progressive understanding of freedom is far more broad. True freedom is an unbelievably broad concept, a whole ecosystem of understanding. It encompasses practically every aspect of the human condition, so much so that it's difficult to even get one's head around it. FDR's four freedoms are a good start: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship. Sexual and bodily freedom are critical to progressives too. Freedom of the press and freedom of thought (or cognitive liberty) are also critical, and figure into our understanding of this in an even more important way.

It's a little tempting to leave the progressive notion of freedom at this point, with just an emphasis on the true breadth of it. But freedom of thought is key to this in a certain way that has been explored much further by Harvard economist Amartya Sen. In his Development as Freedom, he lays out an idea of substantial freedom that is much more useful for progressive expansion than simply appreciating the true breadth of the idea.

It would be difficult for me to do justice to this whole concept, and the link above is a succint and clear deeper explanation of it. The basic notion of substantial freedom is that the objective of civilization is for citizens to become "fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions [capacities for deliberate choice] and interacting with--and influencing--the world in which we live." Maximizing and expanding that kind of freedom is what progressives are about.

Like with interdependence, this is an idea that touches a lot of progressivism. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, for example, are the philosophical underpinnings that give rise to unionism. It's impossible to restrict unionism without severely curtailing one or both of these basic freedoms. Freedom of the press underlies a lot of what's happening on the internet. Freedom of religion translates into defending the establishment clause, because a secular public society is the best and only way to truly protect this cherished freedom. Coginitive liberty underlies our strong belief in education, our understanding of culture, the importance of mental health and is the basic criticism of the socially destructive war on drugs.

Substantial freedom is also is a pointer to progressivism's relationship to capitalism. Obviously capitalist societies can generate great amounts of substantial freedom. But it has its limitations, so progressives just want to housebreak capitalism, not smash it.

But at the root of it all is this idea of substantial freedom, and closely linked to it, cognitive liberty. The two ideas laid out so far, interdependence and substantial freedom, form what could be the backbone of the progressivism that's developing now.

Foundations I: Interdependence

2009-01-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

[Originally posted at Speak Out California, 3 May 2006. Crossposted on dailykos.]

About a year ago, I came across a couple of references to conservative thinker Russell Kirk. His ten conservative principles, first published in 1957 and last updated in 1993, was reportedly a great influence on the thinking of Barry Goldwater and others at the dawn of movement conservativism.

Apparently, no one on our side ever wrote a response. I'd like to be proven wrong, but if someone did, it isn't showing up on google.

I've drafted the first part of such a response, a ten progressive principles approach that answers Kirk point by point. But I want to start with just one principle...

...because I think it pulls together a lot of progressive thought and action, and that is the principle of interdependence.

Interdepence is simply the state of being both apart from something and connected to it simultaneously. It seems simple but it's an extraordinarily powerful spiritual/philosophical idea, and thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., M. Gandhi, Jesus and business consultant and author Stephen "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" Covey have made both general and specific references to it. The link just above is to a wikipedia entry that I've been editing to include some of these quotes.

Interdependence is a spiritual idea with serious political consequences. One of the most powerful of these is that it yokes together two of the largest issue-driven parts of the progressive movement: social justice and environmentalism. Interdepence is found everywhere in ecosystems; as John Muir put it, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." It's also the idea behind the vision of social justice that MLK expressed in his 1963 letter from Birmingham jail:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

The added emphasis there is to illustrate how this idea points to the kinds of real policies that progressives need to be supporting. The current battles over immigration throw this in a clear light: injustices visited upon these new arrivals to our country affect all of us. This feeling of mutuality was powerful, almost overwhelming at the marches; even the pictures seem infused with it. We will be continuing to work out the exact ramifications of this for our economic and immigration policies and further establish this idea as a foundation of the progressive worldview.

In Stephen Covey's approach, independence is a good thing, and a stage that people, and by extension, societies, need to go through. But further growth requires an awareness of the reality of interdependence. The future of our state and country depends on it. There is no way forward except with all of us working together. ¡Sì se puede!

If you're still tempted to vote for 77... (Speak Out CA, 2005)

2008-11-18T15:39:00.000-08:00

[Prop 77 was a redistricting proposal, similar to Prop 11 2008, which passed. This post was a response to progressive support or ambivalence to this measure at the time.]

...please, read this entire post (from dailykos) very carefully. It's the compactness criteria that would really cause the problems; this thing is a power grab, plain and simple. It's every bit as bad as what Rep. Tom DeLay did in Texas, it's just much more carefully dressed up to look reasonable.

There's an interesting intersection with land use policies here. One of the most remarkable aspects of the 2004 election was just how incredibly blue the cities were and just how red everywhere else was, which was best illustrated by this map...

Not much has been written about why this is, but one theory is the almost complete elimination of interaction with the public realm in the suburbs. It's possible to walk into the garage, hop in the car, drop the kids off at school, go to work, and then repeat this process in reverse at night without ever having any kind of interaction with the public sphere that you're aware of. (of course the roads and the schools wouldn't exist without the government, but it's easy to not think about this) Alternatively, most city dwellers interact with the public sphere from the moment they set foot out the door. This may be part of what gives rise to these two very distinct worldviews.

So if California were to suddenly start building walkable and transit-friendly new urbanist type neighborhoods - instead of sprawl - this might not matter as much. Pockets of this are happening locally, but since there's been no statewide initiative, it's certainly not widespread. We will get there, but since this is really nothing less than a realignment of the American dream, it's going to take a few years. In the meantime, the sly gerrymandering they're trying to make happen here will further cement their majority in congress.

However, it is possible that the when the true hideousness of Republican economic principles starts to settle in, the results are going to turn out to be so incredibly bad for so very many people that it won't matter whether you take the bus to work in the morning or hop in the SUV. This is already happening, and the SF Chronicle has another excellent story on it in today's paper. The political ramifications of this middle class squeeze could end being very far reaching. The authors only touch on it, but the fact is that the Republicans don't have a single answer for this problem. Shoveling more money at rich people really isn't cutting the mustard, and people are starting to wake up to that.

In an act of perhaps intentional editorial irony, the Chron also chose to run this incredibly frustrating and lengthy interview with Bush apologist and economist Michael Boskin. Like most right wing economists, this guy comes off like a complete tool. He sounds so out of touch that he must've conducted this interview from mars. He's certainly missing the story that the Chron ran on the front page of the same edition he's in the business section of.

The only thread that ties all of the initiatives together is Governor Schwarzenegger and the Republican-coporate machine's overall objective, which is to consolidate his freak victory of 2003, structurally realign politics in this state and flip it permanently to the right - regardless of how many more lefties there are and where they live. 77 is part of that. Nix the first six - and that includes a big old NO on 77.

Seriousness (Speak Out CA, 2007)

2008-11-18T15:23:00.000-08:00

In Sunday's SF Chron, clever seeming anti-urbanist critic Joel Kotkin tells an increasingly familiar story about the tarnished reputation of the Golden State:

Our magnificent state may still be the home to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the nation's largest port complex and the world's richest agricultural valleys, but by many critical measurements the state is slipping.

What are the problems, and how can we move forward through them? Is Mr Kotkin or anyone else in the state proposing serious solutions?

The list of troubles he runs through is sort of a narrative version of the Corporation for Economic Development's Development Report Card project's report card for California. (hat tip to the champs at the Progressive States Network for putting this in my inbox). This is a deeply considered and superbly executed project that basically looks at all of the factors that go into high road economic development. Shocking as this might be to conservatives and their tax cuts solve all problems approach, there is of course a whole lot more to this than just that.

The report cards starts out with a fundamental truth that often gets forgotten: "California has consistently been an outstanding place to conduct business." We lead in unsurprising categories like numbers of PhDs, venture capital investments, average annual pay, per capita energy consumption (topic of a terrific recent Paul Krugman article, behind the TimesSelect paywall), patents issued, etc etc.

But we have big problems, too. This is a smattering of the state's weaknesses and where in the ranking of all 50 states we come in:

41 Working Poor
41 Uninsured Low-Income Children
43 Employer-Provided Health Insurance
45 Income Distribution
46 K-12 Education Expenditures
49 Homeownership Rate
49 Voting Rate
50 Change in High School Attainment
50 Affordable Urban Housing

One of the reasons this project is so helpful is that list, an unusually handy version of what elected leaders, activists and citizens who are serious about moving this state forward should be putting forward.

Back to Mr Kotkin, who, in the finest New America Foundation, pox on both their houses tradition, assures us that "neither political party seems to have a clue about any of this." He accuses Republicans of bashing immigrants and obsessive focus on Prop 13 protection. True enough. But besides calling Democrats names, he repeats a disproven assertion about businesses leaving the state, and ominously yet vaguely accuses the Dems of shadowy "redistribution" and "regulatory excess." He doesn't mention what exactly the Democrats have gotten themselves into that's so awful. Progressive taxation? Support for labor? Support for the environmental protections favored by huge percentages of voters here?

If Mr Kotkin's political analysis is flawed, his "solutions" are worse: deregulate housing, and give up on creating opportunity for more kids to go to four year colleges. The only thing he gets right is investment in infrastructure, although he doesn't mention the difficulty of making the case for the tax increases that this investment would require. (The Governor's solution so far - slap it all on the credit card - makes a certain brutal political sense but isn't a genuine, sustainable solution) Mr Kotkin also somewhat bizarrely suggests that we're in danger of losing our port trade volume to Houston and Norfolk, Virgina, both of which are currently still located entirely on the other side of the continent.

To take one example that doesn't involve a detour around Cape Horn, what of Mr Kotkin's proposal to deregulate housing. The state is dead last in affordable urban housing, so perhaps this would help. In fact, it would do nothing of the kind. San Francisco is becoming a classic example of deregulation gone horribly wrong. A lot of housing is getting built here, but it is almost to the last unit entirely the wrong stuff: all "luxury," with 1BR apartments starting at about half a million dollars. The only remotely viable solution is fixing the inclusionary housing ordinance, something the money interests backing Mayor Newsom probably won't let him do. The untenability of this situation (far more than his personal problems, which at the end of the day most San Franciscans could hardly care less about) has the potential to spark a loss for the Mayor this November.

For more nonsolutions, consider conservative ideologue Senator Tom McClintock's new project. In the kickoff speech for the organization, he proposes a strategy around (if you're familiar with his record you'll never guess what's coming here) more and louder whining about taxes. Now look again at the biggest problems in the state, according to either Mr Kotkin or CFED. Not a single one of those problems will be fixed by the agenda that either the Senator or Mr Kotkin are pushing.

The pragmatic progressive, high road agenda is truly the only serious, organized effort around to actually fix these problems. Economic democracy through progressive taxation and support for labor and employee ownership. Covering basic needs via a responsive, efficient public sector. Regulating where it's needed. Building the green economy. Creating opportunity by innovating and by investing in kids and basic research. And the progressive organizations in this state are the only ones working on increasing civic engagement to budge us off our rock bottom 49th in voting.

As Einstein put it, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." This is the essence of progressivism: taking the intellectuals, public servants, activists and citizens that are serious about solving these problems, hooking them together and making change happen. Conservativism may not have started out this way, but it has become alternately about the denial of these real problems, and the putting forward of programs that will in no way address them. Articles and projects like Mr Kotkin's and Sen McClintock's are signposts that the conservative historical arc is indeed drawing to a close, and that it will be dead - dead like Communism is dead - in a future that is by no means certain but could be coming very soon.

Update: Steven Johnson puts an artistically thorough smackdown on another gibbering anti-urbanist, David Brooks. And don't forget the deliberate political ramifications of anti-urbanism.

Posted by Dan Ancona, February 26, 2007

If you can't organize your data...

2008-11-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

"When Carson hired field organizers for the campaign, he said that he looked for people with unusual backgrounds—“I try to throw out all the political-science majors when I do hiring.” During a lull in the primary season, he set up a three-week “data camp” in Oregon for Obama staffers. “We had the best data operation of any campaign,” he said. “You can have the most inspirational candidate, you can have the best organizing philosophy in the world, but if you can’t organize your data to take advantage of it and get lists in front of the canvassers and take these volunteers and use it in a smart way and figure out who it is we’re going to talk to—I mean, the rest of it is all pointless.”"

-OFA Field Director Jon Carson

"Election Day is Usually Boring"

2008-11-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

This morning, one of the most highly regarded progressive bloggers on the planet had this throwaway line in his morning-haul post:

"Election day is usually really boring, with lots of poll-watching and sign holding and waiting around until vote counting starts."

For a great very many progressive organizers, election day isn't boring at all: it consists of repeated trips to the polling place, checking off who has voted against a list of targets, and then going into the neighborhood to try and convince those folks to get out and vote. This process is known variously as "election day get out the vote," (aka "e-day GOTV") "poll watching" or (my favorite description), "knocking and dragging." (note: while you do knock, no actual dragging is involved.)

Here's are five reasons why this is worth doing:

1. It really does help. To understand the math of why e-day GOTV is actually helpful, consider this: the unit political element in most states is a precinct, a small political district comprised of (usually) 500 to 1000 voters. In cities, a precinct is usually a couple blocks on a side. In most cases there is one polling place per precinct.

Take the example of precinct 3832, right in the heart of the supposedly super-voting city of San Francisco. This is a turnout map of 2004 (large-ish .pdf), and if you look at that you can see that turnout even in our fairly engaged precinct could best be described as "eh." In 2004 it was 82%.

If you peer into the voter file for this precinct, the party breakdown as of about a month ago was 522 Democrats, 186 Decline to States (or "DTS") and 33 Republicans. Most counties publish lists of everyone who has already voted early or by mail, so we also can figure that as of Friday, there are 429 Dems and 161 DTS left to try and turn out.

Now, I know this precinct reasonably well, and I know those Decline to States have overwhelmingly declined to state their party because they're somewhere to its left. They have a long-standing disgust with the Democratic Party and its inability to stand up and clearly articulate an alternative to the conservative movement (this disgust has softened quite a bit in the past few cycles, and quite a bit more this year). But if there's progressive stuff on the ballot, odds are turning those Decline to States out is going to be as helpful as turning out the Dems (if not more so).

That gives us a stack of voters (or in the parlance of organizers & consultants, a "universe") of 708 folks. If 83% turn out again this year, that means 592 voters will show up. If it goes up to 90%, that means 637 votes. So even if there's historic-record turnout of 90%, there's still 71 voters spread out over a couple blocks that might just need that one last nudge that we're going to go out there and give them.

2. The message it sends definitely helps. Someone once put it this way to me: the ability to vote is what separates us from slavery. I always find myself coming back to that. One of the most inspiring parts of Obama's message is that for the first time really in my life, a candidate at the top of the ticket is saying yes, we the people do have a say over our economic system. It's not working for us. We can change it. We do not have to be left to whatever the market decides for us. We do not have to be trickled down on. Every person in the field on e-day is a walking, knocking reminder of this fact.

Campaigns and movements run on perceptions, and actions really do speak louder than words. All campaigns say every vote counts, but far too few actually behave that way. If you've ever heard grizzled organizers complaining about election night parties that are scheduled to start even a minute before the polls close, this is why they feel that way.

3. People really do get confused. One of the recurring themes you hear from the chattering class around this part of the cycle is "how could anyone possibly be undecided?" This betrays a real lack of understanding of where most folks are at. For great numbers of people (even in San Francisco), they've only started thinking about Obama vs. McCain in the past few weeks - let alone the onslaught of propositions or other state and local races. Combine that with questions about absentee voting (no, you can't mail your ballot at this point, but you can drop it off at a polling place, yadda yadda), and you're going to find plenty of ways to make yourself useful.

4. Election day GOTV is solidarity made visible. Like many forms of collective action, knocking n' dragging would be utterly boneheaded for a lone person to do it. If I'm only able to persuade one person in my precinct to go who wouldn't have, that's one vote. But there are a little over 33k precincts in California. If we managed to cover all of them and get 2-3 extra votes per precinct, that could be more than 50k votes. In a race like No on 8, where as near as anyone can tell the polling is basically exactly tied, that effort could easily be the ballgame.

5. It beats reloading web pages. Really: what else are you going to do? If you care at all about this stuff there's no way you can concentrate anyway. (yet another reason why it's ridiculous that it's not a holiday; hopefully it will be soon.) You might as well get out, enjoy the fresh air, get a chance to interact with your neighbors a bit, and give yourself a somewhat mind-numbing task to take your mind off hitting that reload button.

To get started, all you have to do is call the local party or campaign office of your choice. Even if you can only chip in a few hours in the evening, that's entirely helpful. And one last benefit: the results party really is a lot more fun if you've been out doing this stuff all day. If you haven't had that feeling of doing your last poll check at 7:58 and calling in your last set of numbers, you really should try it.

Good luck everyone and get on out there tomorrow!

I Double Dog Dare You

2008-10-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Conservative Friends,

I have a bet for you. $1000, donated to a charity of your choice, four years from now. The bet is that on the macroeconomic indicator or indicators of your choice - job creation per capita, major stock market index, GDP growth, average family income, poverty rate, whatever you want - should Obama win, his administration's average yearly economic performance in four years will exceed that of Bush's over eight. In fact I'll even spot Bush 10%, even given the fact that we're apparently headed into at least a recession if not a depression.

Ye who are yammering on about what a socialist Barack is, about how the markets are ruined in anticipation of his economy-crushing policies, about how the guy with Warren Buffet advising him is such an unholy pinko: time to put it up or shut it up. Drop me an email and we can sort out the details.

Incidentally, no, we can't afford to put $1000 towards charity right now. The fact that I think in four years we'll be able to is part of the bet.

Best,
Dan

Joe the Plumber's Customer Base

2008-10-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Joe,

Senator Obama did explain this, but I think it's worth exploring a little more: it's not just your taxes that matter. Think about it, Joe. Maybe you're going to make $250k, $280k this year, and that's great. But Obama's going to cut the taxes of your entire customer base. You can see how this would be good for your business, right?

Joe, I don't know what kind of plumber you are. Yes, people are always going to need the plumber when the shower gets so stopped up that the goo you get from the hardware store doesn't fix it, or when the toilet runs all the time unless you jiggle the handle just right. But it sounds like you have big goals, it sounds like you probably want to expand beyond just being a toilet fixer and sink unclogger. If lots of people get a real tax cut, instead of just a few very rich folks: presto, you've got hundreds more prospective customers. That's how bottom-up economics work.

Now the argument in favor of giving that tax cut to the rich is that they'll invest it. Maybe in a small business like yours, even. But the simple fact is that if you need to borrow money, you're going to be able to. There's no supply-side crisis. You can get investment if you know how to spend it. In this country the challenge to small businesses isn't obtaining capital: it's finding customers that have money and want to spend it on what you do, and doing what you do well. A huge tax cut to the five richest folks in town is not going to do anything to affect that.

The opposite of spreading wealth is hoarding wealth. That's what conservative activists like you have been arguing for since the mid-sixties, that's what we've been trying for the past thirty years on and off and the past eight years in particular. It hasn't worked. It hasn't even worked out well for the wealthy and it sure hasn't worked out for everyone else. If we spread the wealth around instead of hoarding it, everyone wins.

And as for this being socialism? Come on, Joe. Did Barack say he was going to nationalize your business? Was he saying that the Great State of Ohio should seize your means of production? Was he proposing your business be forced to join the People's Plumbing Collective and serve at the pleasure of the Federal Plumbing Czar? Of course not. That's a ridiculous, baseless argument.

I just went on over to taxcut.barackobama.com and plugged in some numbers for you. I'm guessing you've got a kid or two and still owe some money on your house. And I run a small business too, so I know sometimes you don't make quite as much as you think you're going to make your first year out. If you make just under $250k it looks like you're going to get a nice tax cut, too. If you do get above $250k, well, maybe you can feel good about not just the fact that you had a good year, but that you're doing your part to help support our effort in Iraq and keeping our roads and schools from falling completely apart as well.

So give it some thought, Joe. Would you rather have five customers who can afford a fancy new bathroom, or those same five customers who can go fancy plus hundreds more who can afford modest improvements? That's the choice we're making in this election. I hope you'll think it through.

Best Regards,
Dan

First post

2008-10-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

Ah, that fresh new weblog smell.