…go figure…this could have been an interesting question

How Capitalism Went Off the Rails [NYT]

…but…bedbug boy can fuck up anything…probably has trouble boiling an egg, that guy…still…he mentions some interesting stuff, at least?

Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years. Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

…so…there’s that

“When the price of borrowing money is zero,” [Ruchir] Sharma [the chairman of Rockefeller International and a Financial Times columnist] told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.” To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion – equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.

[…] Since investors “can’t make anything on government bonds when those yields are near zero,” he said, “they take bigger risks, buying assets that promise higher returns, from fine art to high-yield debt of zombie firms, which earn too little to make even interest payments and survive by taking on new debt.” A recent Associated Press analysis found 2,000 of those zombies (once thought to be mainly a Japanese phenomenon) in the United States. Collectively, those companies have a total of $1.1 trillion in loans to pay between now and September.

…just don’t call it a “credit default swap”

The hit to the overall economy comes in other forms, too: inefficient markets that no longer deploy money carefully to their most productive uses, large corporations swallowing smaller competitors and deploying lobbyists to bend government rules in their favor, the collapse of prudential economic practices. “The most successful investment strategy of the 2010s,” Sharma writes, citing the podcaster Joshua Brown, “would have been to buy the most expensive tech stocks and then buy more as they rose in price and valuation.”

…although…oddly…except for nvidia…which seems to be the outlying exception…investing in “AI stocks” still seems likely to have dipped your bottom line

But the worst hit is to capitalism itself: a pervasive and well-founded sense that the system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”

The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.

…anyway…you know how sometimes he gets *this close* to just saying “you know, I seem to be wrong about…uh…shit…sort of everything”?

What happens when both major parties are wedded to two versions of the same failing ideas? And what happens when leading figures of both the progressive left and the populist right seek to compound the problem

…yeah, brett…what happens? …you ought to know…you do it at least a couple of times in any given column…hell, you do it right in that paragraph…that’s why I clipped the end off the last bit…if the headline’s bait, I guess you could say he’s a switch hitter

…as traditions go…long, maybe…venerable…not so much

In the North, that so-called Exception Clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.
[…]
Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock cleaning to skilled manufacturing, for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in several states, for nothing at all. And though members of Congress denounce imported goods made with prison labor in places like China’s Xinjiang province, the offices of many government agencies in Washington and elsewhere are stocked with furniture and supplies made by prisoners in this country. In fact, federal agencies are mandated to purchase goods from federal prisons, just as state or municipal agencies, including public schools and universities, often must consider sourcing from state penitentiaries. In many states, prison-made goods are freely available on the open market and shipped overseas.

Labor that people have no meaningful right to refuse and that is enforced under conditions of total control is, unquestionably, slavery. It’s a different model from the chattel slavery over which the Civil War was fought, but by all norms of international law it is a violation of fundamental human rights.

…it’s not altogether inevitable

Beginning in 2016, campaigns in seven states — Colorado, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Alabama — succeeded in passing amendments that banned slavery without exception, not even for forced prison labor. Amendment initiatives are currently underway in as many as 20 states and also at the federal level, where a joint bill was introduced in Congress in 2020 and at every session since.

…but…as it goes on to point out…outlaw forced labor & some will just try to pay abysmally-low wages to preserve their business model…brett didn’t mention that while wondering what went wrong with capitalism…but then he wouldn’t, would he?

Resistance to the amendments has been surprisingly strong. In some cases, the opposition is from “law and order” legislators who say these measures would coddle criminals. But the overriding concern is cost. This objection became more prevalent after lawmakers punted on the California Abolition Act (which included no wage provisions) in response to a Department of Finance estimate that the cost of paying minimum wage would be $1.5 billion. Ever since then, legislators in other states have been on notice. If the amendments result in substantial wage increases, how much will their states be burdened?

…well…$1.5billion is hefty chunk of change…fair eno- …what’s that? …brett mentioned 2,000 companies with a collective $1.1 trillion-with-a-T in debt still making money by juicing their stock price by taking on more…compared to which it seems like pocket change? …well…that’s…inconvenient…shit…you don’t suppose there’s…I dunno…a principle at stake?

That kind of question is in a direct line of descent from the complaints of slave owners about the prospect of having to compensate workers for picking their cotton and sugar cane. Then as now, there is a price to be paid for abolishing slavery, but the benefits of paying a fair wage far outweigh the fiscal costs.

…uh huh

For its part, the state would save on the welfare services related to health care, housing and unemployment that are currently expended on people exiting prison with empty pockets. And it would be a boost to public safety because there would be less economic need for people to resort, on re-entry, to illegal activities to support themselves. According to one estimate, paying incarcerated people a minimum wage would produce a net national benefit of up to $20.3 billion per year.

…um…just wondering…of the 20-odd billion…would you say more than…say…1.5 might accrue to california…asking for a friend?

But dwelling on the cold numbers alone does not account for the moral cost of prolonging this nation’s historical tolerance of coerced labor. The basic human dignity that comes from being protected from slavery can be attained only when everyone is free to refuse work assignments, especially when they are unsafe and ill paid. More than 160 years after Lincoln’s proclamation, it is high time to take care of the unfinished business of Emancipation.

End Legal Slavery in the United States [NYT]

…I’m sure it’s on the list…right up there with the gender pay gap…&…actually…this whole list is depressing me so I’ll let you fill in the rest…or skip over it…we have a lot of practice at that…really…takes the edge off?

An awful lot of people seem to dismiss Musk’s juvenile behaviour and incessant innuendo as harmless high jinks. But this is wrong: his misogyny matters. Musk heads multiple influential companies. His behaviour, it seems reasonable to assume, has a direct impact on their working environments. If the big boss thinks it’s acceptable to be crude and misogynistic in public, what message does that send to his employees?

…well…probably depends on what they were wearing*

[* – …yes…given who we’re talking about…in the skeevy sense]

These issues aren’t confined to Tesla. Last week SpaceX (the entrepreneur’s rocket company) and Musk were sued by eight engineers who said they were illegally fired in 2022 for raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women. The plaintiffs allege that they experienced harassing comments from co-workers that “mimicked Musk’s [Twitter] posts” and created a hostile work environment. The court filings claim Musk also participated in a video making light of sexual misconduct which, inter alia, demonstrated the “correct” way to spank a co-worker. “Musk trumpets SpaceX as the leader to a brave new world of space travel, but runs his company in the dark ages – treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” the complaint proclaims. Tesla and SpaceX deny any wrongdoing.

…&…he might even pass one of those polygraph things claiming he didn’t do anything wrong…because he doesn’t see how it is…that’s the charitable interpretation & he still comes out as a veritable roach among men…but…c’mon…how clear does a thing need to be before we metaphorically kick it in the literal nuts?

For a while now I’ve (naively) assumed that Musk’s shenanigans would eventually catch up with him. Surely nobody could go on treating this man, who seems to pride himself in being a raging misogynist, like a genius? Surely shareholders of his company might realise that a guy who seems to think that 50% of the population are nothing but walking wombs might not be the biggest business brain? But, like his pal Donald Trump, nothing Musk does seems to make a bit of difference to his cult-like followers or the wider business community. Tesla shareholders recently approved a $45bn (£35.3bn) pay deal for Musk: the largest-ever compensation package granted to an executive at a US-listed company. The moral to this puerile story? Misogyny pays.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/18/will-elon-musks-incessant-innuendo-ever-catch-up-with-him

…I mean…we know he’s sensitive about the family jewels…anyway…it’s not always complicated…not that we can’t make it complicated

In their recent paper, “Partisan Antipathy and the Erosion of Democratic Norms,” Eli Finkel and Jamie Druckman of Northwestern, Alexander Landry of Stanford, Jay Van Bavel of N.Y.U. and Rick H. Hoyle of Duke make the case that earlier studies of partisan hostility used ratings of the two parties on a scale of 0 (cold) to 100 (very warm), but that that measure failed to show a linkage between such hostility and anti-democratic views.

…as ever, though…”pick a number” seems like a methodologically flawed way to assess the meaning behind people’s answers to these sorts of questions?

The first set of questions measures what the authors call “othering.” The most extreme answers are:

• “I felt as if they and I are on separate planets”
• “I am as different from them as can be” and
• “It’s impossible for me to see the world the way they do.”

The second set of questions measures “aversion”

• “My feelings toward them are overwhelmingly negative”
• “I have a fierce hatred for them” and
• “They have every negative trait in the book.”

The third set of questions measures “moralization”:

• “They are completely immoral”
• “They are completely evil in every way” and
• “They lack any shred of integrity.”

…we contain multitudes, indeed

How, then, to identify voters high in anti-democratic views? Prototypical questions here are: “Democratic/Republican governors should ignore unfavorable court rulings by Republican/Democratic-appointed judges” and “Democrats/Republicans should not accept election results if they lose.”

…where’s the nuance?

…if they lose…straight up? …they should accept that shit…all in the game…yadda yadda…but…if they lose like al gore lost to roger stone…eh…acceptance might have been the wrong call…benefit of hindsight notwithstanding…I seem to remember that one being the first time it struck me that an unwillingness to admit the system was being gamed to…save face…preserve the dignity of the office…whatever you call it…could look an awful lot like an achilles heel in the right light…but don’t mind me

“Following Finkel et al.,” Campos and Federico write in their recent paper, “A New Measure of Affective Polarization,” partisan hostility consists of “more than an undifferentiated tendency to feel more negatively about out-partisans than in-partisans, and we believe that the broad concepts of othering, aversion and moralization provide a good starting point for identifying the multiple components.”
[…]

Finkel et al. conceptualize moralization as seeing the out-party as evil or morally corrupt. Instead, we focus on the belief that one’s own partisan identity is rooted in fundamental moral values, beliefs about right and wrong, and so on. Research on “moral conviction” in psychology strongly suggests that intolerance and inflexibility toward those who disagree (and a willingness to reject democratic outcomes that differ from one’s own preferences) is rooted in a tendency to moralize one’s preferences.

…hard to talk about nixon’s #1 fan & moral conviction at the same time…but…I got a string of convictions I’d love to see in the same sentence(s) as his given name?

…anyway…somehow your man campos there has team (D) down as more sinning than sinned against…which…almost seems like I can see it

In his email, Federico argued that the third dimension of partisan animosity, “aversion — a tendency to dislike and want to distance the out-party from the in-party — is the strongest predictor of anti-democratic attitudes […]

…could it be that when it comes to induced aversion it’s them that feels it the keenest…yeah…I’d buy that…but…the end of that sentence

[…] and support for violence.”

…begs just so many questions

Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political scientist whose 2012 paper, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization“ (written with Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes), is a seminal work in the study of partisan hostility, stressed in an email responding to my queries that one of the most significant dangers it poses is

the weakened ability of partisans to hold their leaders accountable. The crux of the problem is that partisans have come to view the opposing party in such harsh terms that they are unwilling to sanction leaders of their own party who engage in unethical or illegal activity.

…remind me again how hunter got off scott free but don jr was smart enough to prosecute…sorry…what about my notes should I be checking…& why do you keep mentioning gym jordan?

In a separate study, “Unsorted Partisanship and Anti-Democratic Orientation in the American Public,” Ariel Malka of Yeshiva University, Thomas Costello of M.I.T. and Federico found that certain types of Democrats and Republicans are most drawn to anti-democratic views:

…so…which is it…a tautology or an oxymoron…or is an anti-democratic democrat just a perpetual motion machine endlessly rotating around the center line in order to spend equal time with “both sides”?

In other words, those whose views conflict with those of their own party are most critical of democratic norms. I asked Federico if he could explain this, and he emailed back that he found no clear answer in the data but was willing to suggest two possibilities.

First:

Citizens who deviate from their own party’s position on a set of issues tend to be less politically engaged. Less politically engaged individuals also tend to be less supportive of democratic norms. So, part of this may simply be that economically liberal Republicans and socially conservative Democrats are less engaged and thus less likely to have absorbed democratic norms.

…uh huh

Second:

Populist beliefs — i.e., a combination of cultural conservatism and economic liberalism — also tend to be associated with lower support for democratic norms. Democrats with culturally conservative attitudes and Republicans with economically-liberal attitudes both fall into the populist belief pattern, so what we see in these two groups may simply reflect their greater populist bent.

…hmmm

In their 2023 paper “Professed Democracy Support and Openness to Politically Congenial Authoritarian Actions Within the American Public,” Malka and Costello explore a fundamental contradiction in American politics.

…the clue is in the name, I guess

“Professed opposition to democracy was relatively rare and most common among citizens who felt disengaged from politics,” Malka and Costello write, “but a different pattern of findings emerged for attitudes toward flagrant, politically congenial authoritarian policy action and election subversion framed with a pro-democracy justification.”

In these cases, the authors find that “anti-democratic attitudes were relatively common, related to cultural conservatism among both Republicans and Democrats, and — consistent with an ‘involved-but-ignorant’ hypothesis — highest among those who combined strong political interest with low political sophistication.”

…you don’t say…I mean…it’s the way…scientific method…due dilligence…yadda yadda…but…really?

Malka and Costello based their work on a 6,010-person survey conducted five weeks before the 2020 election

…they couldn’t just…I dunno…”read the room”…there’s a whole internet out there clamoring for attention…if that survey was online 6,010 isn’t a lot of people, if we’re trying to be rigorous?

Cultural conservatism was a relatively strong positive predictor of support for authoritarian actions and election subversion among both Republicans and Democrats. Willingness to flagrantly degrade democracy for political ends seems to be less a matter of partisanship than a matter of outlook with respect to traditional vs. progressive cultural conflict.

…so…that one that had the anti-democrats being mostly…uh…democrats…seems like something there doesn’t quite track…unless there’s a secretly progressive soft center to the MAGA candy…which…I can’t say as I’ve noticed?

The Americans most likely to support such democracy degradation were those who combined low political knowledge with high subjective political involvement, a finding that was consistent across Republicans and Democrats. Strong involvement with politics may be favorable for giving lip service to democracy but may also energize support for politically congenial anti-democratic behavior among those who are unsophisticated.

…that part, on the other hand…has a ring to it

In their new book, “Partisan Hostility and American Democracy,” five authors — Druckman of Northwestern, Samara Klar of the University of Arizona, Yanna Krupnikov of the University of Michigan, Matthew Levendusky of the University of Pennsylvania and John Barry Ryan of the University of Michigan — argue that “animosity toward the other party works to undermine political accountability since the actual behaviors become secondary to partisan signals.”

…might have to read that one…if only to figure out how…compared to the bit above…from this sort of thing

In addition, “animosity consistently matters; as animosity increases, so does the belief that the other party should compromise and, even more so, that their party should not. At the highest levels of animus, partisans reject the possibility of their party compromising from their ideal point.”

At the same time, Druckman and his co-authors find that demography does not play a strong role: “The most striking finding is the lack of clear relationships between demographics and animus. For education and income, there was basically no relationship with animus for either party.”

They did conclude that “respondents with higher animus were more likely to hold extreme positions and to identify as extremely liberal or conservative.”

…tommy b edsall somehow contrives to see

Other scholars have reached different conclusions.

…because to me?

…whatever I’m missing…it’s clearly a pivotal point…like the period in this quote

these effects were modest, not massive, and a minority of respondents at even the highest levels of animus held such beliefs. Apparently, high-animus partisans are not necessarily those who consistently hold the most extreme positions.

…because…as heel turns go…from “respondents with higher animus were more likely to hold extreme positions and to identify as extremely liberal or conservative” to “high-animus partisans are not necessarily those who consistently hold the most extreme positions” seems like quite the swerve when you literally just said higher animus correlates to higher chances that they “identify as extremely liberal or conservative“…so…sure seems like you squared up to some circular thinking somewhere around the unassuming little dot around which that managed to pivot…hard enough to pull Gs like maverick that time he was “inverted”

…either way…I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s talking about…us, folks

Those with high levels of partisan animosity are both politically engaged and knowledgeable.

…hate to break it to you over breakfast & all…but…we’re extremists now?

They “had more animosity, discussed politics much more frequently, posted about politics on social media much more frequently, expressed greater interest in politics by stating they were extremely or very interested, and possessed substantially more political knowledge as captured by being in the top quartile of a scale of factual knowledge items.”

…look…I don’t want to pretend these aren’t clever people doing clever stuff…but

“We argue,” Robertson wrote in an email elaborating on her work with Van Bavel and her colleagues, “that the unnatural or ‘supernormal’ scale and distance of the internet distorts basic moral processes like the instincts for compassion and punishment. It’s less that the normal responses aren’t available, but more that our normal responses have unintended consequences.”

…there’s an alternative hypothesis that has a pretty remarkable explicative fit…which is that academics can’t parse internet the way that increasingly comes naturally to the ones living & breathing the thing

In the “Funhouse Mirror Factory” article, Robertson explained, “We’re arguing that the structure of the internet makes more moderate opinions practically invisible online. Pew research found that about 97 percent of all political tweets were posted by the most active 10 percent of users.”

While the “people who post about politics online tend to be more ideologically extreme, and are highly identified with their political party, Roberston continued, “in real life, extreme partisanship is actually rather rare.”

The distorted reality of the internet, Robertson argued, feeds into what she called “ensemble encoding,” an instinctive drive to detect and then abide by social norms: “Ensemble coding is beneficial because it is cognitively efficient, allowing people to encode a single average representation of a series of stimuli, rather than requiring encoding and memory for every item in a set.”

While an efficient method of detecting social norms in day-to-day life, ensemble coding can become distorted online due to the structure of the normative information. False norms emerge, in part, because social media is dominated by a small number of extreme people who post only their most extreme opinions, and do so at a very high volume, while more moderate or neutral opinions are practically invisible online.

…so…anway

“When people use this skewed online information to form a model of the average, normative opinion on an issue, their average opinion is also skewed toward the extreme.”

In a separate email, Van Bavel wrote: “We are trying to figure out a broad set of principles about how social media drives conflict and distorts our perceptions of norms.”

As humans, he continued, “we evolved in small, interdependent groups. Our sense of morality is designed to navigate and regulate social life in small communities and this simply doesn’t scale very easily to the large, synthetic world of social media.”

Normal responses are not available, Van Bavel contended, “because the internet is inherently not an in-person form of communication and, more importantly, the structure and incentives of the internet are to exaggerate moral violations and to focus on them as a dominant aspect of life.”

…if this is true

The average user is online for 3 hours a day and scrolls through roughly 300 feet of news content — the height of the Statue of Liberty.

We are just starting to understand how this impacts our relationships and sense of identity, let alone society and democracy. Although the effects might be small on a daily or weekly basis, there is reason to think it might matter a great deal on the scale of years or decades due to the large user base.

Political Scientists Want to Know Why We Hate Each Other This Much [NYT]

…& even the pareto principle is trailing the 97:10 compression ratio achieved by the terminally online shit-stirrers in chief

…apologies in advance for the groan-inducing pun…but…was all that just a really long-winded way of saying the long tail is wagging the dog

…because…I feel like some people might have been screaming that from rooftops for a while now?