The bubble economy

Eric Janszen, a former venture capitalist, has an entertaining article on how the American economy has developed to run on bubbles.  If you like breezy historical overviews– this one goes back to WWI– you’ll love it.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908

These days, as Janszen puts it, we’re all orthodox free marketers on the way up, but Keynesians on the way down.  That is, a modern bubble starts with deregulation (and Fed complicity) and earnest explanations of how the old rules don’t apply and the favored market will keep rising forever.  When it cracks, everyone wants the taxpayers to bail us out. 

 

Only we’re in a far worse state now than when the dot-com bubble burst: in contrast to the 6% Funds Rate, high dollar, high taxes, and government surpluses of 2000, we now have a 4.5% rate, a weak dollar, deficits, and insufficient taxes.

 So we need some kind of austerity program to deal with the loss of $12 trillion in fictitious value, or at the least a return to sensible regulation so financiers don’t keep messing up the economy?  Nah, we need a new bubble.  The best bubbles, Janszen says, are already in place, popular, and have a favorable tax treatment.  There’s only one industry that’s poised to take off: alternative energy.  Now you know where to put your millions.

 

Offense and BS

Given the debased standards of the last 16 years or so, the surprising thing about this election season has been its gentility.  The top candidates in both parties have been pretty careful about taking the high road.  That’s a sign that the electorate as a whole is tired of partisan nastiness.  

On the other hand, people have been taking offense as if Karl Rove was still in control.  Some advisor will say something impolitic, there’s a furor, and they’ll get canned by the candidate (who gets to show that they’re above the fray).  Timothy Noah has a good article in Slate on Obama’s very smart response to the latest incident. 

 This reminds me of the rather artificial righteousness that’s often on display after a forum goes through a split or a nasty flamewar.  Everyone’s on their best behavior– but it’s not a level of behavior that can be sustained, and really, getting offended can be just as aggressive and disruptive as trolling or flaming. 

Sometimes we need polite fictions.  Other times, they’re BS.  The brouhaha over Geraldine Ferraro or Jeremiah Wright strikes me as mostly BS.  Racism and sexism still exist, sometimes in pretty virulent form.  Obama is quite right to underline that things have improved and can continue to do so.  But pundits aren’t doing anyone any good when they take offense at some people’s continuing anger or bitterness over these issues. 

 Often a person’s views are not right or wrong, good or bad, but just part of their personal context.  As the first major-party female VP candidate, Ferraro very naturally sees things in terms of gender.  As a black pastor, Wright will see things in terms of race.  To the next generation, maybe these preoccupations look outdated… in fact, let’s hope they are.  But there’s still something to what they’re saying, even if their rhetoric is overdone.  Racism and sexism aren’t removed by punishing any rhetorical discussion of the topic; that just drives the anger underground and paves over politics with a layer of polite BS.

 

Play campaign manager in your own home

Here’s a neat toy from Slate that allows you to predict the results in the remaining primaries and see if Hillary or Obama wins.  You can be sure that a bunch of folks in each campaign are obsessively running similar tools with WoW-like intensity.

http://www.slate.com/features/delegatecounter/

Despite this week’s bad news for Obama, Hillary in bad shape, mostly due to the fact that the Democrats apportion delegates proportionately– so e.g. Obama’s 44% loss in Ohio still got him 59 new delegates.  I tried guessing the upcoming results based on those of neighboring states, and Obama ends up ahead 1677 to 1532 pledged delegates; the tool helpfully notes that he’d need 348 superdelegates to win. 

Hillary could win every remaining state in a 61% landslide and still lose the nomination.

 If you want to make your own predictions, this results page from CNN will help: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/#D

 

Be Bugs, not Daffy

Amusing article in Slate, by Jeff Greenfield, arguing that whenever presidential candidates resemble Bugs Bunny and DaffyDuck, the Bugs-like candidate wins:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185720/

It’s probably not going to make it into poli sci courses any time soon.  But I think it’s true that voters prefer cool and optimistic candidates to frenetic and pessimistic ones, and don’t mind a little slyness.  On the other hand, they also tend to prefer the candidate who projects genial warmth over one that seems smart: cf. Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, JFK vs. Nixon, or any Republican since then vs. any Democrat except Bill Clinton.

More importantly, Greenfield annoyingly credits Chuck Jones with Bugs’s look and personality.  This is a base calumny.  Bugs’s look is due to Robert McKimson, and indeed, Jones’s own drawings (especially in the post-Warners period) make him look freakishly pudgy and feminized.  And the personality was a group effort, but the essentials were put in place by Tex Avery.  (Though it’s true that the ironic suavity that Greenfield wants to apply to politics was largely due to Jones; other directors made him more of a screwball wise guy.)

 

Dare to Bondage & Discipline

A report from Slate’s William Saletan: being spanked or hit as a child correlates with mascochistic sex, sex without a condom, and sex with multiple partners.

http://www.slate.com/id/2185599/

 This could tell us some very interesting things about the “family values” people…

 

Foilheads for Nader!

This is about the most annoying piece I’ve read lately: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902786.html

In brief, Shoen, the author of a book about “the end of the two-party system”, considers with glee the prospect of independent candidacies from Ralph Nader and Ron Paul.  He complains that some pundits have dismissed Nader’s chances with scorn.  But no!  He can act as a spoiler,  just as in 2000!

 Shoen points to a poll taken six months ago that suggested that Nader could get 4% of the vote.  Why would this be a good thing?  He even concedes that Nader won Bush the presidency– an enormous setback to Nader’s own causes. 

Unless our election process is changed (and good luck with that), the only thing a third-party candidacy is good for is publicity; and really, why not just write a book or get on Oprah?  The human reaction of party leaders to a flanking movement among the extremists is not, I would say, to embrace their position.  It’s annoyance.  Nader’s last four presidential runs have not m0ved the Democrats closer to his positions.; if they’ve had any effect at all, it’s to accelerate their move rightward. 

Someone’s put it much less nicely here: http://www.suspect-device.com/blog/?p=2014

 

How Hillary threw it away

Wow.  Frank Rich at the NYT has a devastating critique of Hillary Clinton and her campaign:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html

Executive summary… er, without PowerPoint I guess it’s just a summary: Hillary arrogantly assumed she’d coast to the nomination; she never found a reasonable way to differentiate herself from Obama; Obama was many times more organized.  It’s a sorry performance from someone whose chief selling point is supposed to be her political experience.

 

Smokin’ hot

Wow– with Wisconsin and Hawaii, Obama has ten victories in a row.  Of course, as we learned from the Pats season, that doesn’t mean that you’ve wrapped up the big prize.

 It looks to me like Democratic voters have been, over the last couple of months, slowly giving themselves permission to vote for Obama.  Last year Hillary was consistently outpolling him; she seemed like the safe choice.  But once he started winning, people slowly decided that he was actually viable.  With each set of primaries he breaks more barriers.  He’s won over voters in all areas of the country; he’s getting white votes; now he’s beating Hillary among men and among low-income voters.

 Hillary does not seem to be rising to the occasion.  Her response seems to be to go negative and start thinking about dirty tricks (like counting the Michigan delegates Obama didn’t compete for).

 

The Campaign for Real Primaries

So Huckabee is resisting the calls to bow out:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/15/huckabee.mccain/index.html

 Good for him.  I find this insistence of party elders (in both parties) on a coronation to be quite insulting.  People like to participate, to make a choice.  How many voters feel alienated because they didn’t even get a chance to vote for their best candidate?  And isn’t our campaign season too damn long already?  Do we need to have six months of the two nominees attacking each other rather than three?

 Besides, it’s really entertaining to watch the Republican base express its unhappiness.

 

A choice of anti-Bushes

Andrew Sullivan has a nice analysis of the Republican and Democratic fields, focussing on how the winning candidates are largely defined by not being Bush:

And now we have the three potential Bush replacements: John McCain, the man who ran against him in 2000, voted against his tax cuts, excoriated his torture policy and assailed his Iraq occupation; Hillary, the wife of the man Bush succeeded and who beat his daddy; and Barack Obama, a young, charismatic JFK-liberal whose eloquence and erudition are almost textbook negatives of Bush’s folksy, faux-ignorant charm.

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article3340969.ece

Interestingly, Sullivan is hot for Obama.  He likes the way Obama gets people fired up across party lines, and he thinks Hillary will be both too cautious and too divisive.