I Accept Bribes/ Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch

Am I being bribed? I mentioned Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, "Bait and Switch" in an earlier blog and a representative of her publisher sent me a free copy.

Is it a bribe? I think there's enough moral fiber inherited from my Presbyterian minister forebears that I'd reject money, but free books are another thing entirely. I guess the logic is: read it, blog it, all publicity is good. If that's so, I'm corrupt, because I have read it and am now commenting on it. If you don't want to compromise your own integrity, browse another site.

Economists, particularly conservatives, talk of "creative destruction" as characteristic of the free market system. Capitalism allocates money and labor to where they can be best used, which means cutting off inefficient units and encouraging efficient ones. When Ehrenreich and I were young, Ma Bell was the biggest company and Bethlehem Steel, New York Central, Westinghouse, and Univac were all big names in the economy. Telephone operators and secretaries were big occupations and blue collar manufacturing was unionized and paid well, while retailing was dominated by local stores and regional chains. Today those companies are gone; those occupations are gone or diminished. Instead we've Microsoft and Intel, Fed Ex, McDonalds, and Walmart and everyone is her or his own secretary and phone operator.

In evaluating such changes:

• Conservatives focus on the "creative" side, all the wonderful advances in living standards over the years and the elevation of people from poverty in the East Asian countries. They tend to use absolute standards, saying that anyone with a large screen TV and indoor plumbing can't be "poor". They look at all the Microsoft millionaires and say life is grand.
  
• Liberals tend to focus on the "destructive" side, all the psychic harm suffered by those not empowered by capitalism. They tend to relative standards, saying that anyone whose life is insecure is poor. They look at all the people who lost their jobs at Enron and ATT, who lost their guaranteed pensions, and who have no health insurance and say something must be done.
  

Ehrenreich is definitely liberal, as a matter of fact she's a member of Democratic Socialists of America, not that there's anything wrong with that. However she never admits her age (according to Wikipedia a tad younger than I--i.e., 64) in the book. (Why she would want to move from Charlottesville, a town rated the most livable in the country, she never says.)

Ehrenreich is an interesting writer and this is an interesting, though frustrating, book. She says her purpose was to look at the world of the middle-class, white collar America, having documented the struggles of the low wage employees (cleaners, Walmart sales, etc.) in her previous best seller, "Nickel and Dimed". Her strategy was to make up a fake resume as a PR freelancer and proceed through the world of job searchers documenting the weird flora and fauna she found there.

In short, she fails in her quest, but the journey is interesting. She gets some opportunities in sales, but fails to get the $50K job with health benefits she desired. She encounters both the jobless and those seeking to change jobs or occupations, but the more entertaining are the entrepreneurs (French for "shark") who navigate these waters. People losing jobs and seeking jobs create their own market, a market for tests and advice, counseling and contacts, support groups and mailing lists, all sorts of supposed solutions. The whole thing reminds me of the anthropologist who wrote on the function of "magic" in "primitive" societies. Another parallel is a book called "The Witch Doctors"which discussed the gurus who try to sell solutions to management (management is as gullible as some of the people Ehrenreich runs into). It seems any time people run into a risky situation with no clear solution, magic comes to the fore, whether it is the hapless white collar job seeker, or the corporate boss. (Ehrenreich recognizes that, if she were searching for real, rather than as a subject for a book, she would feel much more desperate and, perhaps, therefore more open to some of the nostrums being peddled.)

She has great fun in mocking the people she meets and refuses to take herself too seriously. I would have preferred more open discussion of the age issue. But admitting her age would have changed the subject to age discrimination, not her topic. As I said in my earlier blog, she criticizes advisors who say a job seeker should change herself to meet the company's needs instead of joining others to change the company. But that focus on the individual goes way back in America--Ben Franklin tried to make himself acceptable to the gentry of Philadelphia when he arrived there, he didn't organize the apprentices to go on strike.

The irony is that, despite herself, Ehrenreich's book shows the genius of capitalism. There's no doubt that she's a much better and more interesting writer pointing out the faults of American society than she would have been writing corporate press releases. So, the bottom line is that capitalism is making the best and highest use of her many talents.

Fearsome Government, Part II, France

The reporting on the riots in France is interesting, but lacking context. (That's always a safe sentence to lead with.)

France is different than the US, being a unitary, not federal state. The only politicians getting in news with respect to the riots are the mayors of Paris and other cities and the national government. No state governors to interpose their authority, to decide to request (or not request) national aid, federal troops, etc. Further, the national government could invoke a national policy of curfews with no question of its authority.

For those of us who remember the urban riots of the 60's, it's a vast difference. Once again, it points up the weakness of the U.S. national government compared to those of some other countries.

AMT--How Soon We Forget

The Alternative Minimum Tax is an orphan these days, no friends at all. Allan Sloan in the Post is just the latest:

A Right and Wrong Way to Kill the AMT: "The hideously complex AMT was added to the tax code in 1969 to stop a few rich people from avoiding taxes entirely. But this year, it will afflict 3.6 million families, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Next year, 18.9 million. In 2010, 30.9 million. That's not a handful of tax dodgers; it's the masses. "

But there was a reason for the AMT, based in bureaucratic facts. The truth is that no single scheme (nod to Brits) can enmesh reality. The mind of man the rulemaker cannot encompass all possibilities, so there are ways ("loopholes") to get around every tax law. Because there are, the rich have long evaded taxes. After all, they have every incentive to act "rationally" in an economic sense, to become "freeloaders". Every tax dollar they save is a net gain. All this leads to the situation where very rich people, wealthy either in terms of income or of assets, pay no taxes. A democratic country considers that to be wrong, particularly in a time when people are dying to protect the rich. (Isn't that what our troops are doing in Iraq--dying to benefit us, including the rich?) Hence the AMT in 1986. Hence the idea of doing away with the AMT strikes me as base and immoral.

Let me offer a counter suggestion: Many discussions of the AMT point out that it was never "indexed" for rising levels of income, which brings more and more people within its scope as time goes by. Given that fact, we could "fix" AMT by retroactive indexing--jigger its parameters to gradually reduce its scope over the next 10 years until it gets back to where it was in 1990. That would solve the "freeloader" problem. It would leave the Bush problem in plain view; the Bush problem being his erosion of the tax structure to the point where it doesn't support the government, certainly not Sen. Stevens' "Bridge to Nowhere".

What Fearsome Government?

Two items today that show the weakness of the government, ironically both from relatively conservative commentators:

One is Sebastian Mallaby, writing an op-ed in the Post on the problems of preparing for a flu pandemic:

A Double Dose of Failure: "Like Hurricane Katrina, the preparations for avian flu expose the weakness of American government. Pressing dilemmas get passed back and forth between executive and legislature, and between federal government and the states; lobbies get multiple chances to confuse and paralyze policy. Flood walls don't get built. Flu preparations don't get done. Government lets people down, and people don't trust government."

The other is Diane Ravitch, writing an op-ed in the Times on the problem of assessing students progress:

Every State Left Behind - New York Times: "WHILE in office, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton both called for national academic standards and national tests in the public schools. In both cases, the proposals were rejected by a Congress dominated by the opposing party. The current President Bush, with a friendly Congress in hand, did not pursue that goal because it is contrary to the Republican Party philosophy of localism. Instead he adopted a strategy of '50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests' - and the evidence is growing that this approach has not improved student achievement. Americans must recognize that we need national standards, national tests and a national curriculum."

(Incidentally, GAO just did a report on the problems the Department of Education is having in standardizing data elements across the country so they can pull educational data into a national system.)

Of course, the founding fathers didn't want the government too powerful. See Federalist 10. The problem is that, if we can agree on a goal, the government can work. See the military knock off opposing military. But if we don't agree, as Ravitch and Mallaby find, the government does not work well.

Is Rational Evaluation Possible?

Read a piece in the Times yesterday that confirmed my prejudices, but which I forgot to link to. It was on conglomerates, saying that academic research says that conglomerates don't do well because the management tended to allocate capital more evenly among subsidiaries than they should, based on potential returns on investment. In other words, instead of rationally assessing the situation, these ruthless economic men {sic} tried to avoid hurt feelings and conflict by spreading the money around.

Use that as background for the ongoing controversy over performance evaluation plans in the federal government (see here for Wash Post article today). Unions and employees fear that bosses will play favorites; the other reality is that they won't bite the bullet and reward performance adequately. In my experience, the second is the reason that the Carter civil service reforms failed. (There's a notable failure by the current administration to examine those lessons.) Favoritism played a factor in the special awards but spreading the money around was the rule in handling the within-grade increase money.

Meeting and Bureaucracies and Nazis (Wannsee)

Bureaucrats are supposed to love meetings. By this criteria, Simon Ramo, a major figure in aerospace who has written a book on meetings reviewed in the LA Times is no bureaucrat.

"During his 69 years in the aerospace industry, Simon Ramo figures he's attended more than 40,000 meetings — an average of two or three per workday.

About 30,000 of those meetings could have been shorter or not held at all, he laments."

By bureaucratic criteria, the Nazi's Wannsee meeting, which is dramatized in the HBO movie "Conspiracy", which we watched last night, was very effective. Of course in a tyranny a man like Heydrich (played by Kenneth Branagh) can bribe and threaten to get a bunch of bureaucrats to agree on a course. What was interesting, and effective, in the movie was the differing perspectives brought to the movie by the various participants (the lawyer (Colin Firth) who'd done the original Nazi race laws, with their careful and bureaucratic categorizing of Jews and near-Jews, was especially interesting. What was horrible was the duality: on the one hand watching the tactics and concerns of the bureaucrats; on the other remembering the reality behind the bureaucratic language--that all of this led to 6 million dead.

Good News from Iraq--It's About Time

I learned in the 60's not to overestimate the military's intelligence. This piece in today's Post is good news (note the past tense), but it's rather late. You'd think Rummy and Victoria Clarke would have figured out that the single bit of evidence most useful to those who oppose the Iraq venture was the fact it wasn't safe to drive this highway.

Easy Sailing Along Once-Perilous Road To Baghdad Airport: "BAGHDAD -- It used to be the most dangerous highway in Iraq, five miles of bomb-blasted road between Baghdad International Airport and the capital cityscape. It was a white-knuckle ride, coming or going. To reach Baghdad or leave it, you had to survive the airport road first."

Why Does Time Switch Screw Up Traffic?

Mickey Kaus in Slate posts on the idea that:

"traffic in Los Angeles (and, perhaps, elsewhere) gets horrifically jammed every year right after the switchover from Daylight Savings Time. What's interesting is that this seems to be a purely sociological phenomenon rather than a technological one. As best as I can figure it out, what happens is roughly this: [some people get up by the clock; some by their body rhythms. That results in a changed distribution of drivers, meaning jams.]

As a retired bureaucrat who no longer drives in rush hour traffic and who lives 2500 miles away from LA, I'm well qualified to correct Kaus' answer:

It's also the strangeness. People get used to driving under certain conditions--the amount of sun in your eyes, the glare, the general ambience. Changes to and from DST upset that comfort level--all of a sudden the sun is in your eyes, you slow down as you flip the sun visor down. In near saturation traffic, it requires only the smallest disturbance in traffic flow to upset the whole deal. Change will do that.

Fat Epidemic--Challenges to Conventional Wisdom

MSNBC.com cites a study of the ratio between waist and hip, which correlates to heart risk. Buried in it is a possible indication that we aren't as fat as conventional wisdom says:

"Overall, waist measurements recorded by the researchers were about 90 percent of the hip measurements. People in China scored best at 88 percent, followed by 89 percent in southeast Asia, 90 percent in North America, 92 percent in Africa, 93 percent in the Middle East and 94 percent in South America."

LA Times has a review of a new book that also challenges the conventional wisdom. But I prefer to trust my eyes and my memory--Americans are getting heavier.

Michael Brown's Dogs

Both Times and Post report on the release of some of Michael Brown's emails yesterday, which show he was concerned about his image on and about a dogsitter (apparently for the time he was going to be in Louisiana for Katrina).

It's easy to mock, but, as a great President used to say, the easy course would be wrong. Bureaucrats are people, too, and have a private life. In other contexts people who try to balance their work life and their home life would be praised, not mocked.

Usually workers have spouses who can handle dog care, as my wife has handled cat care over the years. Brown could be criticized for not having planned ahead, or not having previously had the occasion to go out of town to a disaster (that's assuming his spouse wasn't out of pocket or that he was recently separated). Certainly the teams that FEMA and the Red Cross put in the field in response to disasters should be expected to make provision for pet care and house sitting. And true that the head of FEMA should be a model for employees. By that standard, Mr. Brown fails, but not in love for his dogs.