What is the Base Rate of Terrorism?

This is dumb

Los Angeles Metro will be the first U.S. transit agency to use a security system created by the federal Transportation Security Administration to scan riders as they enter the system, the agency announced this week. New York and San Francisco has also been testing the technology, which TSA says will thwart terrorism or mass shootings. The agency says it plans to install the system at transit stations around the country, the New York Times reports.

Why is it dumb?

First, ut degrades the experience of passengers by making the environment more hostile, encouraging distrust, and slowing down people's movement. Security theater is dumb, and honestly I doubt it actually makes people feel safer. I suspect that if you act like there is a threat people will assume (not unreasonably!) that there actually is a threat. 

Second, its a misallocation of resources. The thing about security and "hardening" targets against terrorism, is that you can't defend everything because of resource constraints. 

To quote Frederick the Great: "He who defends everything defends nothing".Hardening targets against terror doesn't disrupt plots, it just causes them to shift their targets. In a city there are essentially infinitely many "soft" targets for terrorists.

Security measures like these (if they even work!) cost money but mostly just shift risk around, making places safer without making people safer. That's not always a dumb idea, but in this case it is - about 80 people die in transit rail accidents any given year, whereas there hasn't been a terror attack on any American metro in,  well, ever.

But the main reason that this is a dumb idea, the one that beats out all the rest, is this:

The base rate of terrorism is low

Terrorism is a tactic, it isn't defined by its weapons - terrorists don't have to use bombs.

Alternative definition

Terrorists can use guns, cars, knives, etc. And getting access to all tools of terror in America is frankly trivial.

I'm an Indiana resident writing this in Illinois. I could decide to commit an act of terror at 9, buy a gun in Indiana at noon, eat lunch, and commit an act of terrorism in Chicago before 5.  This would cost $1000, tops. Get me a pre-approved credit card and I'm set.

With even the smallest amount of planning  I could buy a gun on the internet and get it mailed to me, no questions asked. Or I could buy it from some guy at a gun show. Or I could 3-d print the parts and assemble it myself.

I could use a car or truck. If I don't own one I could rent one for less than $100 - or just steal, say, a UPS delivery truck.

I could use a blade,  or hell, I could just take a big stick to the metro and try to shove people in front of the cars.

But I'm not going to do any of those things - because I don't want to.

There's practically no barrier keeping a moderately-determined person committing terrorism. And yet terrorism is rare. Every day, hundreds of millions of Americans drive their cars, tens of millions have access to firearms, and essentially everyone could get access the tools of terror in a week (at most!).

Most days, most weeks, (hell, most months!) terrorist attacks in America do not happen.

Because most people don't want to commit acts of terror.

Maybe they're deterred by the threat of punishment, maybe they have some basic human decency, maybe they're just lazy. But they sure as shit aren't deciding not do it because of security checks at airports and metros.

Solve the Fucking Murders

In 2017, Chicago experienced 650 murders. CPD cleared 17% clearance of those murders.

In 2017 NYC experienced 269 murders. NYPD cleared 77% of those murders.

CPD and NYPD have similar budgets per capita ($400-600 per city resident). They employ similar numbers of officers per resident (~4.4 and ~5.2 officers per thousand, respectively).

And in absolute terms CPD solved HALF as many murders as NYPD did.

A lot of this is resource disparities. I'm going to be sloppy and just divide overall department budgets by the murders. It's my blog - you can't stop me!

NYPD's budget is ~ 5.6 billion. That's $20 million per murder, and $27 million per solved murder.

CPD's budget is ~1.5 billion. That's ~$2.3 million per murder and $14 million per solved murder.

But here's the thing - the whole police department ins't dedicated to solving murders. Resources can be shifted around, things can be reprioritized (e.g. minimal investigation of non-violent crime.). CPD can do their jobs more effectively.

And frankly, budgets can be increased - and spending that brings down the homicide rate is almost certainly a good deal for the city because of how much money murders cost. That study estimated that the tangible costs alone of each murder at $1.2 million - so 650 homicides is HALF the entire budget of CPD. Add in intangible costs and Chicago homicides are costing society more than the entire city budget. Even if you think that those intangible estimates are too high, its still a huge number.

So what does this lead me to think?

1) Chicago should commit more resources to law enforcement - especially solving murders.

2) CPD needs to get their shit together, embrace reform and innovation, and commit do doing whatever it takes for them to solve the fucking murders.

National Mottos

This is a quibbling bit of cultural criticism, but in my opinion, the official US national motto is terrible and should be changed.

I think a good motto is some concise combination of boast, threat, and statement of purpose. Like Quebec's: "Je me souviens" - literally, "I remember". It promises a commitment to maintaining national identity against assimilation pressure, stubborn resistance and a desire/ability to reward friendship and avenge wrongdoing.

Or consider the motto of the Starks from Game of Thrones: "Winter is Coming". This a statement of purpose (we need to try and survive), but also a boast and a threat (b/c the Starks used to be the Kings of Winter).

So what does "In God We Trust" convey in that frame? And how well does it fit?

The boast and threat aspects are fine. A claim of divine favor sorta works for that ("We're so awesome that God's on our side, so we can't lose!"). But as a statement of purpose? Is the US just supposed to go around trusting God all the time? This isn't a monastery!

"In God We Trust" would be a good motto for, say, a crusading order, which risks life and limb to expand trust in some deity at swordpoint. But that's not what America is or should be about!

And the thing is we have a really good national motto just lying around that we aren't using to its full potential:

"E Pluribus Unum"  (from many, one) has been on our national seal since 1794. And as boast ("look at us, we've got our shit together") and a threat ("We're united and therefore powerful") it might be a little squishy. 

But as statement of purpose - hell! as a description of the country - its perfect. The US is federation of states, and I think the highest conception of America is as a country peopled by a diverse array of hyphenated-Americans who despite their different backgrounds are all Americans together, with a shared commitment to liberty, democracy, and prosperity.

TL;DR: "In God We Trust" is exclusionary, "E Pluribus Unum" is inclusionary. America should be an inclusive place!

Why The Green Bay Packers Are Objectively The Best NFL Franchise

I don’t know much about football, but if I know one thing it’s that tI don’t know much about football, but if I know one thing it’s that the Green Bay Packers are objectively the best NFL franchise – and perhaps the best American sports franchise, period.

And this has nothing to do with their players (I couldn’t name any!), their coaching (ditto!), their track record (I’m utterly ignorant), or the skill with which they play (I’ve never seen them play, and even if I did I couldn’t tell skilled play from unskilled play).

No, the Packers are objectively the best NFL franchise because of their ownership structure.

You see, unlike every other NFL team, the Packers aren’t owned by some billionaire – they’re owned by their fans and the city of Green Bay. That means that when the city invests millions in a new stadium, the city isn’t borrowing money to enrich a billionaire, but rather its investing in an asset it owns. An asset that the people of Green Bay own. It means that the Packers can’t move to another town or threaten to move unless the city bribes them into staying. And it means that when the people of Green Bay, more than the people of any other American city, root for their hometown town team, they root for their hometown team.

To illustrate all the problems with the non-civic ownership, I’ll talk a lot about the Raiders. I’m not picking on them – they’re responding to the same incentives that every privately-owned NFL team has, and doing the same stuff all the other teams do. Only the Packers couldn’t do what they’ve done.

The Stadium Scam

Professional Athletics, especially the NFL, is incredibly profitable – and it nevertheless receives a variety of government subsidies, both explicit and implicit. The most visible of these subsidies is the public money spent on stadiums.

These subsidies are not trivial. New stadiums cost hundreds of millions – and cities have repeatedly picked up part of that cost. For instance, the Oakland Raiders move to Las Vegas was accompanied by the an agreement with Clark County and Vegas to build a new $1.8 billion stadium, (which will almost certainly end up costing more after the inevitable cost overruns). The public (in the form of Clark County and Las Vegas) is paying 750 million dollars (40% of the sticker cost) through a special hotel tax. And in exchange for this what do the people of Vegas and Clark County get? Some share of the rents, some revenue sharing from the stadium? No. They get nothing. They have taken on a 750-million-dollar liability in order to give the Raiders and the NFL a 750-million-dollar asset. This represents a transfer from the people of Clark county to the millionaires and billionaires who own the team. I can’t even call this crony capitalism – its simply looting. Raiders indeed.

For context: Clark County has a very serious homelessness problem. Given a 3.5% discount rate (about the coupon rate on Clark County bonds), an asset with a PV of 750 million dollars is equivalent to 26.25 a year indefinitely. That would be enough money to permanently house 20-30% of the approximately 6,400 homeless in Clark County.

Defenders of the deal will argue that this giveaway is justified because the stadium will increase economic activity and so bring in more tax. This is true, but it’s true of literally every other business and private-sector investment. If I start running a food truck, while I operate the truck I’m increasing economic activity and generating more tax revenue. That doesn’t mean that the government should pay for 40% of my truck in exchange for nothing! This is special pleading of the worst kind – the franchises and owners making this argument are essentially running a scam, hoping for a giveaway from the government.

Public ownership would make all the difference here. If Las Vegas / Clark County had bought the Raiders, then paid to build a stadium, and then moved them to Vegas, they would be investing in asset they owned. They’d being taking on liabilities in order to acquire assets – a normal sort of financial decision. Not the bullshit giveaway on display in the Raiders deal.

The Problem of Relocation

There’s a lot of civic pride and loyalty tied up in sports teams – but this feeling is not mutual. The Oakland Raiders are not, really, the Oakland Raiders. They are the Raiders that happen to be in Oakland. In 1982 they moved from Oakland to Los Angeles. In 1995 they moved back to Oakland. In 2019 or 2020, they’ll move again, this time to Las Vegas. I wonder how long they’ll stay there? 

This problem of relocation is tightly tied to the stadium scam. Privately-owned sports franchises can and do threaten to move unless their local governments shell out for shiny new facilities. These threats have repeatedly been carried out, and with franchises burning their bridges with local fans in pursuit of greater profits.

For example, consider the Baltimore Colts 1984relocation to Indianapolis The Colts left after a decade of feuding with state and local government over a new stadium. Their owner wanted free stuff from the government, didn’t get it, and so he ran off to Indianapolis.

In 1969 the city of Baltimore announced they would seek higher rental fees for the old Memorial Stadium. The Colts owner at the time, , had been threatening to move for some time and complained that the old stadium was inadequate and wanted the city of Baltimore to build a new stadium. In 1972 the city unveiled its proposal to build a new stadium (the “Baltodome”) which would serve both the Colts and the Orioles.. They estimated this would cost the city $78 million – about $470 million in 2018 dollars. Interestingly, earlier that year, the ownership of the Colts changed hands in a deal that valued them at $16 million (1972) dollars – meaning that the city could have bought them out and turned this stadium giveaway into an actual investment.

The Maryland legislature and the Baltimore comptroller were not on board with straight giveaways. Despite Maryland spending significant public money on stadium improvements, Irsay wanted more public investment (i.e. free capital improvements) in the stadium, so he began to shop around various cities, looking for someone who would bribe him into moving.

Things came to ahead in 1984. Baltimore didn’t have the money to give away a stadium to the Colts, but there was legislation in motion that would give the city the right to seize the team using eminent domain. So Isray quickly packed up and snuck off to Indianapolis under cover of darkness. Indianapolis had bribed Isray with the promise of a $12.5 million loan, a $4 million training complex, and a new $77.5 million training complex – worth $30 million, $10 million, and $188 million in 2018 respectively.

All this bullshit rigmarole wouldn’t have happened – couldn’t have happened – if Baltimore had owned the Colts. Maryland or Baltimore investing in new stadium for the team wouldn’t have been a fiscally indefensible giveaway to wealthy owners.

Civic Ownership or Corporate Ownership?

Cities are financially (through the stadium scam and other mechanisms) and emotionally invested in their sports franchises. I think that this is a, on balance, good thing, since it fosters civic pride and a shared identity, brings in money for cities, and, of course, sports are a recreational activity that people enjoy watching and participating in.

The problem with private ownership of sports franchises is that is that cities are financially and emotionally invested in assets they don’t control. Private ownership is corporate ownership. It means that the team will always be acting to maximize its profits – even if that means betraying the love and loyalty of its fans, or extorting financial concessions from fans or politicians (who might be worried about being blamed for the move) by threatening to move.

Do we think the owners of a business will put civic pride before profits?

Public or civic ownership, by contrast, solves this problem – the people of the city have control over an institution that they are all emotionally invested in. The mentality, loyalties, and identities around a sports franchises aren’t like the mentalities and identities and loyalties around usual private businesses. People think, talk, and feel as if these teams are cultural or civic institutions – because they are.

That’s how sports franchises should be run as as non-profits or under public ownership. Like the Packers.

Why I Support a Land Value Tax

I’m firmly convinced that a land value tax  (LVT) is the best way to finance local government.

Here’s why:

• The land value tax is efficient. Unlike other taxes (including property taxes) it can’t alter behavior, since the supply of land is fixed. A tax on alcohol sales results in less alcohol being supplied, a tax on gas less gas being supplied. But no matter the price of land, there is the same amount of it (at least for areas away from the coasts – and rising sea levels are hardly are response to property taxes!).
• A land value tax taxes rents. In economics, rents are payments that don’t incentivize additional production or economic activity – and thus, from the perspective of society, something akin to wasted money. Again, the supply of land is fixed! All payments to owners of land on the basis of land value (as opposed to structure or improvement value) are rents.

• Caveat: I’m not going full Georgist here and calling for the abolition of private land ownership. Because, for example, I believe that private landownership is justifiable for reasons of allocative efficiency.

Now why is a land value tax the best way to finance local governments?

• The value of land is “location, location, location”. Thus a LVT aligns a city’s financial incentives with good government by making desirable city a city with the greatest tax base. A well-planned city, with qualitypublic services, amenities, transit, responsive local government, etc. will have higher land values than a poorly-run city.
• This incentivizes density (if that’s what people value), transit-oriented development (and good transit planning), etc. and punishes any overly-restrictive zoning laws.
• It also encourages allocating resources within the city to where they will do the most good – since land value is function of the quality of public services, especially education. For example, $100 more spending per pupil in CPS in the South Side of Chicago will probably go a lot further than the same increase in the North Side. Thus, from the standpoint of maximizing the tax base, a city would be incentivized to allocate resources where they get the most bang for their buck.

• The second virtue of a LVT in the context of local government is that it puts the burden of paying for the city on the people who benefit most from the city – the businesses and individuals who locate there. Unlike a sales or gas tax, which raise money from non-residents, a LVT raises money by taxing assets located immovably within the city – and then spends that money providing services to enhance the value of those assets.

Now I anticipate some critiques and counterarguments (lets debate this!), so let me make some points ahead of time:

• I’m aware of the problems (especially in Chicago) in assessing property values. Tax assessments should be updated when properties are sold, but often aren't. Land valuation would be a similar challenge, although I think it would actually be easier since there is less variation among sites than structures. (e.g. "Why is my 20000 sq. foot lot assessed at a different rate than my neighbors?") It should also be noted that property tax assessors already assess site value.
• There are variety of mechanisms for getting more accurate assessments. For instance, a structures value could be estimated from insurance premiums against total loss. I may expand on this in a later post.
• Additionally, many of the criticisms of a LVT are also true of property taxes. But you have to tax something to pay for the city, and I think that a LVT is the best option. Even if you aren't as in the tank for a LVT as I am, you should compare it to raising equivalent funds from a property tax as a question of practical politics.

Something Topical

I don't usually write topical posts, but I just saw something that stuck in my craw. This latest executive order from the Trump administration is not good.

In a nutshell, it changes the procedures for the hiring and firing of administrative judges in a way that undermines their independence.

In the old system administrative law judges were hired from a list of "generally qualified judges" and had to go through the usual procedures of civil service hiring - competitive selection and examination, background checks, etc.

That changed.

Now agencies can simply appoint (and fire!) administrative law judges without going through any of those proceedures. The executive order justifies this change by citing a 6-3 US Supreme Court decision earlier this year that held that administrative law judges were "officers of the court" not federal employees.

All of that you could have gotten from reading the first link here. Now let me explain why this is bad. 

By volume of text, the bulk of the law in the US isn't statutory (i.e. Congress passed a law) but administrative (Congress delegated rule-making authority in some area to an executive agency, with a certain mandate). Think regulatory agencies like the EPA, the SEC, etc.

When people want to dispute fines, regulations, any matter relating to administrative law, that ends up before an administrative law judge, who is to quote Wikipedia: " a judge and trier of fact". These proceedings are bench trials (that mean no jury). 

So if the EPA alleges I poisoned Lake Michigan and fines me, and I dispute this, an administrative judge decides the punishment I'd receive if guilty, and whether or not I actually poisoned the Lake. Creating the potential for a shamelessly corrupt official to dismiss the EPA's case against me with alternative facts - or decide against me regardless of the facts.

Now administrative judges have always had this power. But before abusing this power was less of a concern - they were career civil servants, insulated from political pressures and subject to the normal constraints and scrutiny placed on civil servants - and protected from arbitrary firing like other civil servants.

Now the President or his appointees can appoint or fire them at will. Bribery is illegal, of course. But you could still sway the decisions by appointing crackpots who believe whatever B.S. passes his desk, as long its on the side of business ("Arsenic is an essential mineral", "kids need lead to grow up healthy", "humans aren't causing climate change").

TL;DR, the administration is undermining the independence of a judiciary, and creating a lot of opportunities for graft and misconduct. You don't have to be a cynic to think they'll take advantage of those opportunities.

Constitutional Totalitarianism (draft, comments welcome)

It should really not be possible to set up a totalitarian dictatorship without violating the letter of the Constitution at some point. But I’m pretty sure you can – given control of the White House and Congress.

Note that it is entirely possible under current law to control the Congress and Presidency with mere pluralities of the vote. Assuming no faithless electors, for instance, its possible to become President with only of ~25% of the electorate.

So, the Party has managed to win control of Congress and the Presidency by the narrowest margins – and immediately sets about engineering permanent 1-party rule.

• The opposition might try to stop you using filibusters, etc. Just eliminate any procedures that may create problems for you and protect the minority – you’re not going to need them.

• Pack the Supreme Court – nothing unconstitutional about that, and this prevents anyone from making inconvenient “violating the spirit of the constitution” appeals.
• Remember the point of this exercise is to do this without actually breaking any laws. Or at least without violating the Constitution – after all, Congress can change the laws.
• Use the “Kansas Plan” to pack the House and Senate.
• Hell, you could stop here, since an aggressive Kansification could allow me to simply amend the constitution however I’d like.

• Use the income tax to seize all income and then use tax code to manage the whole economy
• This is a kludgy workaround compared to GosPlan but it’ll have to do.

• Create some universal, unavoidable felony, and selectively enforce the laws to purge whoever you like
• Like the federal judiciary, legislators, etc.
• E.g. make breathing a felony
• Note that while you can’t directly suppress speech here, you can, by an amazing coincidence, just happen to arrest anyone who criticizes the government too loudly.
• Prosecutorial discretion is actually a tremendous tool of tyranny in the wrong hands. In the Party’s hands, of course, it will only be used for good.

• Since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee a right to vote, simply make it so that only members of the Party are permitted to vote.

The ten-trillion-dollar question in international development

Disclaimer: I am not an expert, so if get anything facts wrong feel free to correct me. Please read me generously, and know that I say nothing maliciously. Feedback is welcome!

So a while back I attended an interview with Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India.

And I was NOT impressed. Because whenever people asked him questions adjacent to (nobody asked him directly) the ten-trillion dollar question, he punted, shrugged, or gave non-answers.

Excuses like the "democracy tax" (if anything, functioning democracy should encourage economic growth) and "China is a special case" came up. But what is special about China? S. Korea, Taiwan, Singapore & Hong Kong traveled along similar development paths. And if there's a country similar to China in terms of economic fundamentals, its India.

And so the ten-trillion dollar question is this: Why China, and not India?

Because if I had to bet on which country would be richer today in 1960, I'd bet on India.

First the similarities: Both are large, populous, ancient countries, with long traditions of state authority and shared culture & identity. Both were incredibly poor in 1960. And both were economically exploited by Europeans for a century or so.

In 1960 India had been independent for about 20 years. Prior to that, India had been a British colony. This meant that there was legacy colonial infrastructure, a national government, and economic, educational and other connections to the developed world. An export-oriented development path like the one China is taking now. During the During the Second World War the worst India experienced was the Bengal Famine - which while horrible really doesn't come close to the devastation China experienced before and after WWII. And overall, India's colonial history while terrible, seems much less traumatic and destructive to me than China's "Century of Shame".

Between 1831 and 1950 China was the battlefield where not one, but two of the deadliest conflicts in human history played out. First, the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted 14 years and killed an estimated 20-30 million people. Compare that to the contemporary Indian Rebellion of 1857 which lasted less than 2 years and killed around 1 million people.

And then there's the period between 1927 and 1950. This includes the Chinese Civil War, which killed 8 million people, and was interrupted by the Second World War, (in China, the Second Sino-Japanese War) which killed between 17 and 22 million civilians and millions more military personnel. I'm not going to exhaustively document all the damage and destruction the Second Sino-Japanese War caused China, but I'll just note that the Japanese pursued the so-called Three Alls Policy: "kill all, loot all, burn all".

And then, China was under the control of the Communists, whose economic policy between 1960 and 1980 performed about as well as India's license raj. Which is frankly pretty impressive - in a bad way. India got all the poor economic performance associated with a Communist centrally planned economy


and none of the upsides of Communism in public health:





or education. In 1949 China and India had similar literacy rates, between 15 and 25%. By 1982 the gap between China and India was 20% points, with Chinese literacy at 65% to India's ~41%.



So the ten-trillion-dollar question stands. And while I have thoughts as to the answers, I'll ask the question first.

Sunshine Patriotism

I am ashamed to be an American.

How is that I can be ashamed to be an American?

“These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

Thomas Paine The American Crisis (1776)

I can be ashamed to be an American, because I can also proud to be an American. That pride and shame come mixed together is right and correct. How could I lay some claim to a share of America’s glories and triumphs, our virtues and victories, if I do not also claim a share too of our defeats and failures, our vices and shames? I personally am not responsible for any of these things. Only a person of low and contemptible character would behave in such a way, a sunshine patriot who abandons any cause or loyalty the moment it becomes difficult, who spurns any love that might become complicated. It is easier, I suppose, for such a person to pretend there is no tension between the good and bad of American history, that ours is one of uncomplicated moral rightness and that the American state or the American people have never been in any way villainous, and to subscribe to a simple-minded version of events in which “We” are the “Good Guys” and “They” are the “Bad Guys”.

But I am not such a coward, and cannot turn away from uncomfortable truths. It is a fact apparent to all who care to know that American history is replete with the successes of American science, technology and industry, with triumphs of American arms, and a culture with as much reach and influence as any other in the history of humankind. We put a man on the moon! There is no place in this world far from American soldiery, no place where American music cannot be heard. (Whether this a good thing is another question entirely…). But history is a bottomless well of horrors, and our well might be shallower, but o! how horrible the horrors are. I’ll not trouble your stomachs by describing to them to you in any great detail, a simple list should suffice to remind you.

The violence and endless broken promises with which Americans have dealt to indigenous peoples, the brutal and savage institution of slavery, and the long train of racial injustices that spawned leading up to the present day, the oppression of women, the closing of our borders to people in need, the internment of Japanese-Americans, our involvement in foreign nations, first in Latin America and then throughout the world, which betrayed any humanitarian or democratic impulse to greed, hunger for power, and a pursuit of bloody-handed empire. I cannot ignore these things for the same reason I cannot ignore the sky.

In truth, I do not feel proud to be an American. I cannot make a ledger of virtue and vice, sum up the good and the bad, and hold that America is a thing to proud of on the net. I am not the sort that thinks one can erase an act of evil with an act of kindness – undo perhaps, but erase; never – and what has been done, the suffering that has been caused is to much for me, my heart is to weighed down by shame to feel much pride.

But there is hope. I think that there is some strain of virtue in America, a history too of good intentions and high ideals, and I hope that these things will in the end win out. I am not proud of America today, but it is my hope that I will live to see the America made by the victory of those ideals. An America I can be proud of.

Raise the Damn Minimum Wage

This might not be topical, but I think it’s important.

The real value of the US federal minimum wage peaked in 1968 at $8.60 in 2018 dollars (using a chained CPI - using a traditional CPI measure its closer to $11.50). If you were a naïve optimist, this would be surprising, since the United States is much richer today than it was in 1968, with GDP per person, productivity, and average wages all having grown significantly since then.

In 1968 the US had a (real) GDP per person of $23,000; that’s comparable to modern day Uruguay, Romania, Croatia, and Panama. Today our GPD per person is $53,000. That means that our society has more than twice the amount of resources per person we did in 50 years ago – though it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.

Over the past 50 years, average wages in the US have increased significantly, while the federal minimum has increased, much more slowly.

In 1968, the minimum wage was about half the average hourly wage. In 2018 the minimum is less than a third. Note that this data excludes supervisory workers, so underestimates the growing divergence.

Productivity has also increased since 1968, with output per hour being 2.4 times what is was in 1968. Meanwhile, average hourly earnings are only 1.4 times what they were 50 years ago.

So what’s my point here? That raising the damn minimum wage is hardly the end of the fucking world, and people shouldn’t fucking panic about it.

Assuming perfectly competitive markets (stop laughing!), somebody who was paid $8.60 an hour in 1968 produced at least $8.60 of value an hour in 1968. I’ll be conservative and say productivity growth has been slower for minimum wage work than work on average, so their productivity has only increased by half as much – a mere 70%. Then an hour that created $8.60 of value 50 years ago should create $14.72 today.

Or we could take another track, and ask what the minimum would be if we tried to keep it at half the average. Since hourly average wages in 2018 are 22.60, the minimum wage would be $11.30.

Autism and Egalitarianism

I am a very high-functioning autistic. What that means is that I go through life oblivious to what you find obvious.

You see, dear reader, to me it is as if the people around me are dancing to some silent music and I, I have no choice but to try to dance with them.

So I try very much to be my best self without regard for how others think of me. This is not courage, but necessity. Were I to be concerned with others opinions I would be paralyzed by fear and doubt.
For only with the greatest of difficulty  can I come to know those opinions unless I explicitly ask them - and even then, would I hear the truth?

"Fitting in" for me is thus a fools errand. Better not to try, and be my best strange self. I have some coping mechanisms to help me function in society.

First, I use  intellect when others would use  instinct. Happily, I'm intelligent enough for this to work, but deciphering social relations intellectually does not help me participate in real-time interactions. For that, I have other strategies. I am kind and generous, I try to be polite and when I do give offense I seek to make it clear that there is no malice.

Essentially, I try to be a nice, likable person, so that people will be patient with me, interpret my words and actions generously, and generally put up with my excentriccities. And I am honest. An effective lie is only effective if I can juggle who knows who, who "knows" what, and what people want to believe. Thus keeping up even a small lie is for me very burdensome. Or to quote Mark Twain: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything".

How does this inform my politics?

Well for one, I'm an egalitarian. Now, I could offer various moral or practical arguments for this position. But I won't. Because fundamentally, my egalitarianism is an instinct born of my autism.

How am I supposed to move through the dance-floor if there is not single tune music and dance, but different musics and different dances that change depending on, say, relative social status?

I cannot.

The present world is an unequal world.  It tries to force me to navigate social hierarchies and power relations, relationships between superior and inferior, to divine and then flatter the sensibilities of the powerful.

I rebel against this world. It is cognitively difficulty for me. I long for a world where it is enough to enough for me to treat people as people, with kindness and generousness, and none find that confusing or remarkable.

That world I could bear.

How Automation Will Change Management

So, for my job I do quite a bit of reading about “the future of work” and I have some opinions about how some emerging management challenges that future implies. Now the key feature of work in this future, which has been coming at us, really, since the start of the industrial revolution, is automation.  Continual progress in labor-saving devices, increasing productivity, allowing us to all enjoy a higher standard of living (at least in the long-run). And the ultimate in saving labor, of course, is automation, performing a task without any human input at all. This has been the trend since steam-power replaced muscle power. As time goes on, the easiest jobs to automate are automated away, and humans do more work that’s difficult or impossible to automate.

What’s easy to automate? Machines excel at routine and predictable tasks – anything that can be fully described in formal, logical, precise terms (“if this do that”) or are totally repetitive (“every 1.74 seconds swing downward with between 1000 and 1050 kiloNewtons of force) is, bluntly, a job perfectly suited for machines – and a job that will be automated away as soon as economical. But sorting good art from bad, understanding spoken language, driving a car – any sort of work that might at any point require a modicum of actual thought (which is quite a bit of “unskilled labor” in the service sector) is difficult or impossible to automate completely. Answering a question like “is this a good investment” is something only a human can do, even as that human uses (hopefully!) a variety of sophisticated machines to help them make that decision.

Why is all this a problem for management? Because the work that’s being automated away is also the work that’s easiest to manage. Evaluating performance is easy for predictable and routine tasks, observing effort is straightforward when the work takes place almost entirely outside a worker’s head. Traditional management techniques and organizational structures are well suited to incentivizing effort (using Motivation 1.0 and 2.0, for those of you who’ve read a certain book) and evaluating performance.

But increasingly, more and more work will take involve complicated tasks that are costly or difficult to monitor, and more of that work will take place inside people’s heads. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but managers will have to lean increasingly on intrinsic motivation (Motivation 3.0) in order to accommodate this. And bluntly, I don’t think business leaders (or at least American business leaders) are able or willing to deal with this problem. Grappling with this problem requires a (in the American context) radical rethink of employer-employee relations; conceiving of an employment relationship a social as well as economic relationship. The fundamental human in human relationships is reciprocity – why should workers be loyal to your company and emotionally invested in its success, if the company doesn’t feel the same way about them?

The alternative response is for management to spend whatever it takes on monitoring in order to 

avoid giving up any sort of control over workers and the workplace – even if it would be costlier. 

Hopefully profits are more important to capitalists than power.

When is intrinsic motivation bad?

Intrinsic motivation – the desire to do a thing for its own sake – is often regarded as the ideal motivation in the context of designing incentive structures. But there are some cases when a reliance on intrinsic motivation leads to adverse selection.

Consider policing. How many cops are sociopaths? The rate in the general population is about 4%. If police were representative a naïve estimate might be that 4% police are sociopaths. But police are not drawn at random from the population – people choose to be police. This has interesting implications.

Suppose police operate under “low-powered” incentives, thus intrinsic motivation is a larger component of why people choose to become police. This could be desirable if the effort exerted by police is difficult to monitor, thinking along the lines of “we trust police to try and catch bad guys even when they aren’t monitored, because police actually want to catch bad guys”. And we might believe that they want that because if they were “in it for the money” i.e. not (at all, there are degrees) intrinsically motivated they wouldn’t have chosen a career in law enforcement in the first place.

The problem is that low-powered incentives can select for intrinsic motivation, but not for particular kinds of intrinsic motivations. You might want to become a cop because you want to serve your community and keep people safe – or you might want a cop because you want to be able to beat, harass, and bully people with impunity. That is to say, you’re a sociopath sitting pretty in the middle of the “dark triad” of narcissism, machiavellianism, and sadism and despite low-powered incentives would so enjoy abusing others that you do the work anyway.

What can you do about this adverse selection problem? If you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak) and keep selecting for (public-spirited) intrinsically motivated cops by using low-powered incentives then you need effective and rigorous screening and accountability measures to weed out those who want to be cops for the wrong reasons. If you can’t or won’t do that, then you need to consider whether it would be worth it (or even possible) to switch to “high-powered” incentives and do away with intrinsic motivation altogether, good or bad. In the American context, with an extremely fractured patchwork of law enforcement agencies that vary wildly in professionalism and accountability, this is particularly a problem – a “bad cop” can just get a job at another department. One department could be doing everything right, and another 20 minutes away could be doing everything wrong – and then cops sort into departments that match their behaviors.

Should we rely on the intrinsic motivation of police? To make the judgement, you have to ask yourselves “Do I think there are more public-spirited people who want to become cops than sociopaths?” or “Do I think there are more public-spirited cops than sociopathic cops?”

I can’t answer those questions. But I think the answer is probably that the proportion of cops who are sociopaths is greater than x. Police unions fight tooth-and-nail against every measure of accountability, no matter how small – and I have little doubt that plans to consolidate police departments into larger, more professional organizations would provoke howls of protest. But more fundamentally, I just think that the temptations of the power given to American police – in practice, the power to deprive another of life, liberty, and property with near impunity – is so much more tempting to the sociopath than the public-spirited person’s desire to use a badge and a gun to actually help people. I guess I just think there are a lot more shitty people out there than really good ones, so if you set up an incentive structure that mostly attracts shitty people or good people, you’re going to end up with a lot more shitty people than good.

There’s a lot of jobs like this consider the case of prison guards – we want prison guards to only be in it for the money. People who enjoy being jailers probably shouldn’t be.

Just some food for thought.

The Coming Automation Crisis

The coming automation crisis is not a technological crisis. Rather, it is a crisis of governance in the most basic sense. A fairly recent report from the Mckinsey Global Institute makes this obvious - though they studiously avoid drawing attention to this alarming conclusion.

Overall, MGI anticipates tens of millions of workers will be displaced by automation over the next 10-15 years, depending on the speed of automation. At the high end of their estimates, 73 million US workers (a little less than half of workforce!) would be displaced. Most of those displaced would have to switch occupations entirely. Their middle-of-the-road projection is still dramatic: only quarter of the workforce displaced, and with half of those switching occupation entirely.

The MGI report has plenty of suggestions for policy responses, but the US has essentially no public or private sector apparatus up to the challenge of smoothing this transition. The American government spends the least of any OECD country on labor markets. That money is used for job training and placement, for hiring subsidies and hiring in the public sector, and for unemployment benefits. Of the little money that is spent, only a tenth of that goes to job training – less than half of what Canada spends, and less than a sixth of what Germany spends, and a tenth of the amount France spends. The only tools that that remain are monetary policy and educational policy. 

Using monetary policy to maintain full employment is problematic for practical reasons and political reasons. The political problem is that central bankers tend to be more concerned with inflation than unemployment - witness the recent preemptive interest rate hikes by the US Fed. God forbid we should wait for robust wage growth before panicking about an inflationary spiral!

Even if by some minor miracle the Fed changed course and pursued a policy of full employment at all costs, the for-profit sector in the United States is not up to dealing with this crisis. MGI highlights a few firms who invest in employee development, but these anecdotes are misleading. Overall the share of workers receiving on-the-job or employer-sponsored training has declined sharply since 1996, and stagnated since 2004. You will note that this period includes part of the 1990s boom, and 2001-2007 boom. This is entirely rational behavior on the part of firms, since a worker who receives valuable training could find work elsewhere. And since firms show no loyalty to their employees, it would be sheer madness to expect workers to show loyalty to their employers,

This leaves only educational institutions and workers themselves. And educational institutions are not ready for this either. For people entering the labor force, the future looks bleak. Only about 36% of Americans age 25-29 have 4-year college degrees or more. For the majority American's associate degrees, high-school degrees, and the nebulous term "some college" are the highest level of educational attainment. For such people, quality high-school vocational programs are invaluable. But MGI’s best guess, since US data are hard to come by, is that less than 6% of Americans in secondary schools are enrolled in a vocational program, which would give those with only a high-school degree a fair chance That’s a smaller share enrolled than Brazil(!), and a tenth(!) of the Swiss level of enrollment. As far as post-secondary education goes, the federal state governments have systematically pulled back on support for public higher education for decades, exacerbating spiraling tuition costs and miring a generation of graduates in debt. What about community colleges, where displaced middle- and low-skill workers will most likely go for retraining? Data here are hard to come by, for the same reasons that data on high schools are hard to come by, but the ability of community colleges to handle the crisis does not look good. Tuition is not trivial, though it varies wildly across states - about $5,000 for in-state public schools. Student debt, graduation rates, and transfers to 4-year schools for community college graduates also looks terrible. About 10 million people are enrolled in community colleges in the US in any given year, with about 2.5 million full-time students. Remember we're talking tens of millions of workers displaced by automation over the period, with half that number needing to switch occupations entirely, requiring extensive retraining. I doubt our current educational system even has the capacity to cope with so many students, let alone provide a good education to all of them.

The MGI report helpfully makes two forecasts; a trend-line forecast where things continue as they are going and a step-up forecast where the government takes active measures to reduce the impact of automation on employment. Only the step-up forecast doesn't result in net job losses.

Read all that and tell me you aren't worried.

This is what I mean when I say the automation crisis is a crisis of governance. No problem described above cannot be addressed, even solved, by straightforward policy responses. Not  government that cannot act, not government that does not know how to act, but government that for structural and ideological reasons - political reasons! - will not act. This is the American Crisis today.

Some notes on information and policymaking.

I was going to post this on Facebook, but it got too long...

This post is to lay out some key points and ideas for my classmates, who apparently were disappointed by today's lecture.

First read Hayek's classic paper on tacit knowledge. This describes the essential informational problem in economics (and generally): information is dispersed and impossible to perfectly transfer.  That information needs to be aggregated into some form useful for decision-making.

This is an especially relevant problem for policy-makers, who (ideally) try to choose and design the best policy for the most people. Without good information, success in that isn't about skill but dumb luck.

The wisdom of crowds is the simplest method of aggregating information, relying on some statistical ideas (the most likely single value for a random variable is its mean, and that over- and under- estimates will tend to cancel each other out) and some cognitive psychology (lying is generally more cognitively burdensome than honesty, so people will tell the truth unless they have some other reason to lie).

The classic example is from a contest held in 1906 in rural England. Now apparently rural England is quite boring,  and there is a prize after all, so a crowd 800 people decided to try to guess the weight of a cow. Now along comes a statistician, Francis Galton, who decides that it would be fun to analyze the guesses of the crowd. He does this, and discovers that the mean of the crowds estimate (1197lb.) was almost exactly the measured weight of the cow(1198lb.) and even more interestingly, was closer than an individual person's guess.

The contest aggregated the diverse information of the crowd into information more accurate than what any single person possessed. This is one of bases of the argument that "diversity trumps ability" (there is some academic argument around that, but that it is not immediately obvious is itself somewhat startling).

The cow-contest also illustrates the problems of this method. Almost immediately people begin trying to cheat: sabotage, bribery of the owner of the cow, and all manner of rural shenanigans, since a person can better improve their odds by attacking the structure of the contest, instead of, say, practicing their cow-weight-guessing skills at home.

The cow-contest also illustrates the problem of groupthink very clearly. In the original contest, participants wrote down their guesses of the cow's weight and submitted them privately - each person using their private information. In other contests, where peoples guesses were not private, the wisdom of crowds failed. Why? People were communicating with each other, and while a lie is cognitively costly, social discord is even more costly - thus agreement is more important than honesty. I am sure we have all experienced the social pressures of the white lie.

I could explain this by references to human evolution (better to go along with the tribe in a bad decision than strike out on your own), to social dynamics (people like other people who agree with them, even about trivial things), and of course, to sabotage and intimidation (one way to rig the contest is to circulate false information, or to threaten to break the legs of everyone who doesn't guess 0).

Now, in general, markets also perform this function - especially when talk is not cheap, and agents are sophisticated or engaged in frequent and repeated transactions. This is the idea behind decision markets.

Informational problems are also fundamental to political systems. One way to think about democracy (and about the importance of secret ballots) is as a way of aggregating diverse tacit information.Even in authoritarian systems, like China, the Communist Party uses secret ballots and elections for Party and local elections.

I hope this has been fun, informative, or useful.

The Intellectual Death of Conservatism

I was going to write an ambitious, highly speculative piece tying together brain drain, anti-intellectualism, and disinvestment from education in the context of rural America. All that assumed that rural people are more anti-intellectual. But this paper from Jay A. DeSart of Utah Valley University blows that assumption out of the water.

If I’m reading his table right, he finds that rural people not significantly more likely to be anti-intellectual per-se, only that they’re more focused on practical education. But since rural America is older, less-educated, more religious, and more conservative, it looks like that at first glance. But some regression analysis to control for various factors causes that to drop away. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) after controls for, e.g. education income too is unassociated with anti-intellectualism.

So now I’m dipping into the literature to see what there is to see. DeSart’s paper, very helpfully, reports the strength of his findings and finds only 4 clusters of factors that are relevant with high confidence: Education, religiosity (church attendance, biblical literalism, etc.), political beliefs (ideology, sense of power over one’s life, trust in institutions, etc.) and gender.

So this is a cross-sectional snapshot. What about over time?

Enter Gordon Gauchat of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has a 2012 paper examining trends in politicization of anti-intellectualism and distrust of experts over time. SPOILER ALERT: American conservatives have been gradually getting more anti-intellectual and less trusting of experts since the 1990s. Liberals have trended in the opposite way. Quoting from the abstract:

“Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative.”

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X17719507

A more recent and in-depth study by Matthew Motta of University of Minnesota-Twin Cities finds the same thing in 2016 and shows further that support for Trump was associated with anti-intellectualism above and beyond the support for Trump from conservatives in general. That is, more anti-intellectual Republicans were more likely to support Trump.

So where does that leave the project that motivated this exploration? Sunk and gone. There are two real questions. First: why has conservative anti-intellectualism has grown and hardened? And second, what does this mean going forward. Here I will resume wild mass guessing – since after all I write this for my own amusement.

You may remember this poll that found that a majority of Republicans, for the first time ever, said they thought higher education was bad for the country.

Here’s one hypothesis: pure tribalism. Education tends to make people less conservative, and less anti-intellectual. If you want to keep people in the “tribe” of conservatism, you want to keep them away from higher education. This is, on an individual level, fairly rational. Of course you want to avoid the strife, the arguments, the emotional distance and social fracturing that will result from little Connor going off to college and forming a worldview that differs from your own. 

But this is somewhat hard to do, since it’s a well-established result that higher education generally leads to higher earnings and better life outcomes.

So, what you have to do is say to Connor “college is bad.” Not bad for Connor – because it plainly isn’t – but bad for society, bad in general.

You can see the shape of the intergenerational dynamics of this: the most intellectually inclined “educate out”  on the margin, becoming less anti-intellectual and less conservative. Leaving the rest more conservative and anti-intellectual.

But how did anti-intellectualism become so intertwined with American right? It could be religion, if religiously motivated anti-intellectuals have sorted into the GOP since the 1990s.

But my guess is that it is something more fundamental.

The death of expertise in the GOP and the anti-intellectualism of the conservative movement are intertwined. Why do you need experts? Because you care about what’s true and understand that the world is complicated and difficult to understand. But what if what is true is (politically) inconvenient? You could change your beliefs. Or you could change your beliefs about beliefs, and cease to care about the truth at all. But if the truth doesn’t matter, if facts don’t matter, if ideas are no longer tested by experience – why have experts? Why seek to know, why welcome knowledge at all?

And if your party doesn’t care about the truth, about knowledge, and intellectuals, almost definitionally, do, then of course you aren’t going to have much support among them, and every new cohort is going to look at the existing cohort and think – “why bother, they don’t care about my work”.

The GOP’s position on a host of issues follows this pattern – with climate change being the most clear-cut and obvious example. The entire trajectory of the policy minds around that man in the White House follows this pattern and I think it’s important to point out that this is not a break with the norms of the American right, but rather a continuation of decades-long trends.

So now for the second question: What does this mean going forward?

I don’t know, but I doubt its good. One possibility is that the conservative movement suffers an intellectual “death spiral” with each round of intellectuals exiting (or not entering) causing more hostility or indifference to intellectual thought, leading to more exits, etc.

That leaves a political movement that’s nothing but a seething ball of white rage with absolutely no regard for the facts and even the minimal restraints of reality. That seems… bad.

Another possibility is that intellectual collapse proceeds political collapse, and from the rubble a new, saner, coalition can be built. That would be a good outcome, but I imagine the process would be chaotic and uncertain.

One thing I do not see happening is this trend reversing anytime soon. For now, this is American politics.

I thought we won the Cold War?

In 1992 the Soviet Union finally collapsed. And so did life expectancies for Russian men. Between 1990 and 1994 life expectancy at birth for males fell by 5 years, plummeting to less than 60 years.

Why?

The collapse of the Soviet Union caused tremendous (momentous!) social and economic disruption. Workers, places and firms were thrown from a predictable planned economy into the open water of free-market capitalism. It was sink or swim – and many sank. The death rate for employment-age men shot up, driven by cardiovascular disease, drug and alcohol consumption, accidents, homicides, and suicides. This collapse in male life expectancy cost 2.5-3 million lives. I want to restate that for everyone. If death rates had stayed what they were under the Soviet Union 2.5 million deaths would have been avoided.

And what does this pattern of deaths look like? It looks like rusting out Russian factory towns dying on the vine, like millions of men thrown out of work and dropping out of the labor force, and like thousands of factories shuttering- unable to compete in a global economy. And all alongside millions of men dying quiet deaths of despair. It looks like country where since 1992 the number of drug addicts has risen 9-fold, where the rate of HIV infection has doubled every year since 1992, where today 6% of the population are drug users, a country that has a GDP per capita less than a quarter of the United States' but is home to as many billionaires per capita than the United States.

This is what it meant for Russia to lose the Cold War.

So why does that story sound so familiar to Americans? Why does Magnitogorsk remind me of Youngstown? Is this what winning means?

Why has America been plagued by “deaths of despair”. Why is it that, for the first time since the end of WWII, life expectancy at birth declined in 2015, driven by suicides and drug use? Why have rates of opiate addiction and death increased sharply? Why has male labor force participation declined and not recovered? Why are Americans more depressed than the citizens of other developed countries? Why is our infant mortality rate so high, why are our bridges falling down, why this, why that, why the other?

Didn’t we win the Cold War?

I can’t answer those questions. That’s a project for a whole pack of scholars. Some of those links try to. But I want to ask the big question, the fundamental question, for myself and for anyone who’s reading this. For 60 years the United States was locked in a titanic, life-or-death, global struggle with the Soviet Union that repeatedly threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. Both made massive investments, and implicitly and explicitly, massive sacrifices, to pursue that struggle. The Soviet Union lost. But looking at these statistics, at America, I have to ask: did we win?

Because this is not what success looks like. Where is our peace dividend? All the sacrifices we made, the resources we spent, the civilian projects and peaceful goals once sidelined to confront the Soviet Union –  was this all that was gained, waiting out the Red colossus until it collapsed under its own weight? Why haven’t we enjoyed the fruits of peace? To ask the question it to express my disappointment (this cynic is ever disappointed, but seldom surprised) and anger that this has come to pass. The United States of America does not have to resemble – should not resemble! - a broken-down, declining superpower, limping along with a legacy nuclear arsenal, run by a regime of authoritarian oil-loving kleptocrats, plagued by corruption, drug addiction, and violence.

Book Review: Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinksy

One sleepless night last week I read “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky – that bugbear of a certain segment of the right. I write this now, after some sleep, while the book is still fresh in my mind.

It says something about the Alinsky’s life and work that decades after his death his name is still spoken with such vitriol in certain reactionary circles. And reading this book I can see why! Alinsky’s tactics were disquieting. That was the entire point! Alinksy sought to change the status quo by discomforting those comfortable with it, disturbing people who should be disturbed by the present situation but aren’t. If you’re going to use protest and activism to try and force changes (the other uses of protests are for elsewhere) it can’t be something people can just ignore. Alinsky’s politics made him enemies, and he spent his life fighting them. Many of the same sorts who so resented say, holding shop-ins (packing department store with discriminatory labor policies with black shoppers to spook affluent whites) are still alive and circulating in American politics today. That Alinsky was on the right side of history apparently still galls them.

But at the same time, separating the book from the author, “Rules for Radicals” is fairly… I don’t want to say banal, since truthfully it is a well written and useful manual, but it is nevertheless a manual; and similar sorts of advice could be found reading other treatises on strategy, tactics, and political maneuvering. What might be especially useful is that it places these concepts in the context of organizing and provides many illustrative (and entertaining!) examples. Still, what is useful is not new to a 21^st century reader. For example, Alinsky was quite enthusiastic about the possibilities of the then new tactic of campaigning for proxy votes. But those tactics are now well known and widely used, precisely because they were effective.

The advice in “Rules for Radicals”, like all advice, is easier to give than to follow. In no particular order, and with no guarantee of completeness, I’ll try to summarize and comment on the key notes.

First, the organizer is advised to always respect the personhood and dignity of others. That this advice needs to be given is somewhat embarrassing. That it is not always followed is downright shameful. The organizer must be liked by the organizees, since there is no power to compel they must freely give their support.

Second, the organizer is advised to have a pragmatic, even cynical view of human nature – the sort of view you can find, expressed mathematically, in most economic models. At the same time, people are reliably irrational and you can use that. For example, Alinsky believes that people seldom right thing for the right reasons. However, you can get them to the right thing for the wrong reasons, and once that is done they’ll rationalize their behavior so that in their mind they were right all along. There’s much more than that, but this is a review and a summary, so if you are curious you’ll have to read up on these things yourself.

The third piece of advice is to meet people where they are and stay within their frame of reference. This is part of the art of organizing – different communities will have different experiences, and so different things will be possible. Essentially the organizer must have low expectations. The best organizing involves the uninvolved, which is hard enough to do when all you need is signature, let alone a more substantive contribution. So make things as easy as possible for people.

There is one other thing that stands out in Alinsky’s understanding of organizing, and of politics in general. Alinsky understands that politics, especially politics in a free, democratic society, is about more than power and incentives, substantive gains and losses. It is about theatre. Showmanship, the emotional appeal, the narrative presented to the mass audience is just as important. Maybe more important. To quote Napoleon:

“A man does not get himself killed for sixpence a day and a piece of ribbon. You must speak to the soul to electrify him”.

"Are we the baddies?"

So Trump's pick for CIA director is a veteran torturer. Feminism in the 21st century - now women too can be clear-cut villains.

               In Star Wars, how is it established that the Rebels are the “good guys” and the Empire are the “bad guys”? That is, what shortcuts are taken over the length of feature film that allow the audience to identify the morality of each side of the conflict? Oh, certainly we are inclined by mere familiarity to sympathize with Luke, a humble farmboy from a backwater planet dreaming of the stars. But Imagine if you will that you were watching the film de novo, (difficult I know). Luke casually remarks that he is thinking about becoming a pilot for the Empire! If the villainy of the Empire isn’t immediately obvious to Luke, our sympathetic protagonist, how is obvious to us?

                First is the style of the empire, meant to evoke the Third Reich. “Stormtroopers” and cleanly cut grey uniforms – the assumption being that the audience would make the association with fascism, and with fascism to plain evil. Another trick for managing our sympathies are the face-concealing masks of the stormtroopers, meant to dehumanize the antagonists.

                But it is in the conduct of the Empire that its essentially villainous nature is laid bare. The audience is expected to immediately and unambiguously look at the actions of the Empire and go: “They are the bad guys, only bad guys would do things like that”.

                So, what does the Empire do? In the pursuit of vital intelligence, the Empire kills innocent civilians, tramples on civilian authority, and tortures suspects. With the aim of intimidating its enemies it a weapon of mass destruction and demonstrates it on a target of limited military value. It tramples on democratic rights and institutions in the name of peace and order.

                But save the last, the United States has done all these things. The secrecy of the security state, warrantless wiretapping and mass-surveillance, the absurdly broad war-making powers in the post-9/11 AUMF altogether seem to constitute, if not trampling, then at least walking, on civilian authority. The drone war – in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and other places, may or may not keep America safe, but it certainly sheds a lot of innocent blood. And of course the United States used – perhaps is still using, for such things are kept secret – torture with the aim of obtaining vital intelligence. We developed nuclear weapons and used them on targets of limited military value (Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen precisely because for that reason they had been only lightly damaged in previous bombings). And after demonstrating our power, we used our to advance ourselves at the expense of others. And the American government has in the past, and continues in the present, to be much more talk than action on human rights – even the rights of its own citizens.

               

            Now, all of these things, it is argued, were done from necessity. Perhaps so. But I am somewhat concerned that the American people did not, do not, balk at these acts, that we do not turn our heads and go: “No that is not us, we’re the good guys, the good guys don’t do that”. It suggests that, at least for some, the reason why the Empire is the villain of Star Wars is not because the Empire is bad, but because the Empire opposes the protagonist. That because of the choices of the storyteller we do not sympathize with Luke because he is the “good guy”, but rather he is the “good guy” because we sympathize with him. That the same story could be told as a tragedy, with Empire doing everything it has to, yes, even unpleasant things, to protect itself, but despite its sacrifices is still overthrown. That you could easily make Vader the hero, and Luke the villain – and that people would believe it.