It took about fourteen hours longer than it was supposed to to get it done, but we have launched the online version of the Washington Monthly‘s November/December issue. Go check out all my hard work. There’s a team of exhausted folks who have been working long hours deep into the night this weekend to get this accomplished. Take a look and tell me which party and which candidate you think is the right one to take the case to the American public that greater societal equality is the best recipe for greater societal prosperity.
Seriously. Give me some feedback.
The answer is neither, but you go to war with the party you have.
Always the optimist.
Well there is this much: I no longer favor the creative destruction I did 6 years ago because I don’t doubt the result would be even worse.
First impression — there’s more there that I want to click and read than most websites present. But your brother’s piece got my first click — and now must go read.
Good review of Gawande’s new book. Particularly liked the last paragraph that points out what Gawande doesn’t grapple with.
As the news of Brittany Maynard exercised her right to Death with Dignity broke today, it requires serious think for all of us.
Nit: In Tilting at Windmills, p 3, the title for The biggest known unknown about Hillary ’16 is not titled, it is italic.
The piece itself is excellent and points out a category that voters use for vetting candidates but partisans rarely do–management style and ability to get staff to work together. FDR used competitive tasking to generate options and as a check on bad advice. Too many people judge candidates for office with a checklist of what they say. Or their philosophical alignment. The ability to push the string of delegated authority is what distinguishes presidents.
Great cartoons – pointed at the right issues.
Rachel Fishman’s article on post-secondary education focuses on higher education as job preparation. That is a reduction of what a liberal education and a common school education were intended to do for American civilization. Yes, people used to worry about American civilization. The Clark Kerr multiversity assumptions that pervade higher education stress its servitude to the business community that funds it philantrhopically or through taxes. The crisis in student loans reflects the fact that that business community is (1) MIA and (2) increasingly narrow in how it evaluates workers for positions that used to be filled by people with a broader education.
And too tight a coupling with business educational wish lists results in a situation in which people have to seek retraining to move from one oversupplied occupation to another, permanently lowering earnings and ability to pay off debts. Think of how the IT recession in 2001 came about.
Crunch Time ignores the issues faced by many single parents who are putting together multiple part-time or full-time jobs at different locations with long commutes between jobs. This creates permanent latch-key children in near suburban communities like my own and Ferguson, MO, which affects educational performance and increases intensive policing. One doesn’t see this reality from studying think tank and university studies. One has to get out and talk to people in different sorts of communities.
Alan Blinder is predictable. And misses the fact that what has happened over the past 40 years is that employers have appropriated almost all of the increased productivity of labor because there was not politically counterbalancing political power (like effective labor unions) to prevent it. A corporation is internally a political structure as well as an economic one, and corporations do not have internal markets for anything but use bureaucratic methods (politics) to allocate resources. Economist R. H. Coase began writing about the economics behind these political decisions in 1937. Whatever it is, it is definitely not a market in which the prices are unknown by both parties until the transaction is complete. What he offers is conventional wisdom, and that has failed for the past 40 years.
The Discounted Seniors article should make it clear that employer-based fringe benefits (golden handcuffs) are a thing of the past and should be quickly brought to an end to be replaced with government-provided income maintenance infrastructures financed out of progressive taxation. The fraud of underfunded employer and labor union pensions is most dramatically illustrated by what the State of Michigan did to the retirees of the cities of Detroit, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, and Flint. And what the federal government did to GM and Chrysler employees. And what almost every corporation has done to its employees either through buy-outs or phony bankruptcies. And what the Congress did to Postal Service employees.
The 401(k) program is a fraud and a joke that benefits high-income employees and no one else and provides huge boondoggles in management fees for Wall Street. Congress should end these tax boondoggles.
Michael Konczal’s article is a good analysis of some of the problem, but talking about “investors” obscures that not all investors are created equal. And that management typically holds control in its pocket.
The nit I mentioned at the top is the only one I saw. Good job to you and the others who put this together.
Who could make this case to the American public?
Well certain Bill Moyers can and Robert Reich.
But political candidates? And parties? That’s a tough one.
A little known state Senator from Durham NC named Mike Woodard could, but not by 2016.
You can write off all Republicans because of the ideological litmus test that they apply.
So who among Democrats could carry make that political case. Here’s a list.
Maria Cantwell
Al Franken
Elizabeth Warren
Deval Patrick
Sherrod Brown
Thanks for the Windmills tip.
Rachel Fishman’s article on post-secondary education focuses on higher education as job preparation. That is a reduction of what a liberal education and a common school education were intended to do for American civilization. Yes, people used to worry about American civilization. The Clark Kerr multiversity assumptions that pervade higher education stress its servitude to the business community that funds it philantrhopically or through taxes. The crisis in student loans reflects the fact that that business community is (1) MIA and (2) increasingly narrow in how it evaluates workers for positions that used to be filled by people with a broader education.
She works for the New America Foundation? No wonder she gets the problem wrong. She’s not going to piss off donors. A college degree doesn’t guarantee anything. Has she ignored these past 6 years?
Wish I could rate that post with a ten, but four is as high as it goes.
Looks great to me.
Looks good. I’d like to see a piece (that I don’t have time to research and write) that talks about how a bad economy is a feature of Cheap Labor Conservatives’ politics inasmuch as it puts downward pressure on the cost of labor. i believe you can go back to the Civil War and before and see a consistent philosophy among Cheap Labor Conservatives. The affiliated parties may have changed over time but Cheap Labor Conservatives have been about the same thing since indentured servitude and non-consentual gardening were created.