Category: Sociology

Inbreeding in Economics

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Over at Fortune magazine, Steve Keen makes a very interesting observation about the state of discourse about the discourse at the higher level of economics.

Specifically, not only did these guys go to the same school, they literally took the same course with the same professor:

Ben Bernanke has recently started blogging (and tweeting), and his opening topics were why interest rates are so low around the world, and a critique of Larry Summers’ “secular stagnation” explanation for this phenomenon, and for persistent low growth since the financial crisis. Summers then replied to Bernanke’s argument, and a debate was on.

So who is right: Bernanke who argues that the cause is a “global savings glut”, or Summers who argues that the cause is a slowdown in population growth, combined with a dearth of profitable investment opportunities, not only now but for the foreseeable future?

I’d argue both of them, and neither simultaneously—both, because they can both point to empirical data that support their case; neither, because they are only putting forward explanations that are consistent with their largely shared view of how the economy works.

And the extent to which they are the product of a single way of thinking about the world simply cannot be exaggerated. It goes well beyond merely belonging to the same school of thought within economics (the “Neoclassical School” as opposed to the “Austrian”, “Post Keynesian”, “Marxist” etc.), or even the same sect within this school (“New Keynesian” as opposed to “New Classical”). Far beyond.

They did their graduate training in the same economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They attended the same macroeconomics class: Stanley Fisher’s course in monetary economics at MIT for graduate students (was it the same year—does anybody know?) Some of their fellow Fisher alumni included Ken Rogoff and Olivier Blanchard.

………

If I were describing a group of thoroughbred horses, alarm bells would already be ringing about a dangerous level of in-breeding. Sensible advice would be proffered about the need to inject new blood into this dangerously limited breeding pool. But the issue would only be of importance to the horseracing community.

Instead I am talking about a set of individuals whose ideas have had enormous influence upon both the development of economic thought and the formation of economic policy around the globe for the last four decades. The fact that so much of the dominant approach to thinking about the economy emanates, not merely from such a limited perspective, but from such a limited and interconnected pool of people, should be serious cause for alarm—especially given how the world has fared under the influence of this thoroughbred group.

This has me thinking that I should take a serious look at Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Hyman Minsky’s theories.

I Don’t Expect Major Changes in Doctrine Under Pope Francis

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It’s clear, however, that, in addition to making changes in tone, he is making very serious efforts to reform the Vatican as an institution.

Case in point, Ex-Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski has been arrested by Papal authorities on pedophilia charges:

The Vatican on Tuesday arrested a former archbishop accused of paying for sex with children while he was a papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic, the first-ever arrest inside the city state on charges of paedophilia. Jozef Wesolowski, a Pole who was defrocked by a Vatican tribunal in June, has been placed under house arrest awaiting a criminal trial, the Vatican said in a statement.

The 66-year-old Wesolowski is the most prominent church figure to be arrested since Paolo Gabriele, a former papal butler convicted in 2012 of stealing and leaking private papers of former Pope Benedict XVI. Unlike Gabriele, Wesolowski has not been detained in the Vatican prison, a couple of rooms attached to a courthouse, but was granted house arrest in a Vatican apartment for medical reasons.

Wesolowski was recalled to Rome by the Vatican last year when he was still a diplomat in Santo Domingo and relieved of his duties after Dominican media accused him of paedophilia.

He had been living freely in Rome, and victims of sexual abuse had called for his arrest, expressing concern he might flee. The former archbishop could face up to 12 years in jail in what will be the first trial for sexual abuse to be held inside the Vatican City.

Cleaning out corruption at the Vatican is a Herculean task (see Stables, Augean), but this is a good start.

Police Achieve Success by Looking at Failures

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In this case, it happened in Richmond, California, where the police department has reduced policed involved shootings in what is one of the more violent cities in the Bay Area:

……….
A spate of high-profile police shootings nationwide, most notably the killing of a black teen in Ferguson, Missouri, has stoked intense scrutiny of deadly force by officers and driven a series of demonstrations across the nation and the Bay Area. But in Richmond, historically one of the most violent cities in the Bay Area, the Police Department has averaged fewer than one officer-involved shooting per year since 2008, and no one has been killed by a cop since 2007.

That track record stands in sharp contrast to many other law enforcement agencies in the region, according to a review of data compiled from individual departments.

Many observers and police officials attribute Richmond’s relatively low rate of deadly force to reforms initiated under Chief Chris Magnus, who took over a troubled department in this city of 106,000 in 2006. Magnus implemented a variety of programs to reduce the use of lethal force, including special training courses, improved staffing deployments to crisis situations, thorough reviews of all uses of force and equipping officers with nonlethal weapons such as Tasers and pepper spray.

………

More important than luck, said law enforcement expert Tom Nolan, is the culture within a department. If a chief has sent a clear message that instances of deadly force will be scrutinized, you can expect more officers to think twice before firing a weapon, or employ less-lethal means when apprehending a suspect, he said.

“The chief is key in setting policy and tone,” said Nolan, who worked for 27 years as a cop in Boston and now directs graduate programs in criminology at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. “If they haven’t had an officer-involved shooting that’s resulted in death in a city like that, it’s commendable.”

Here is the important bit:

Magnus has done something in Richmond that he believes is not done enough in other departments: He’s been willing to second-guess the deadly force used by other cops.

“We use a case study approach to different incidents that happen in different places. When there is a questionable use-of-force incident somewhere else, we study it and have a lot of dialogue,” Magnus said. “It’s a model that is used in a range of other professions, but in some police circles, it’s seen as judging in hindsight and frowned on. In my mind, that attitude is counterproductive.”

The culture of police tends to mitigate against their examining their own failures.

Instead they circle the wagons, and protect their own, which produces an environment where dysfunction is nurtured, rather than corrected.

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

University of California Study Reveals the Obvious

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Rather unsurprisingly, when protests occur, police frequently provoke violence:

The violence that turns a small-town protest into a fiery national spectacle like the one that has played out this month in Missouri is often unwittingly provoked by police, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.

The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations.

Recent events in Ferguson, Mo., are a good example, the study’s lead researcher said. For nearly two weeks, activists angered by a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager have ratcheted up their protests when confronted by heavily armed police forces.

“Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and he’s carrying an AR-15,” said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science who leads the Deciding Force Project. “It just upsets the crowd.”

Adams said many law enforcement agencies aren’t aware that they set the tone of a protest and end up inflaming it.

I disagree with the last point.

I think that police are very aware that militarized responses encourage protests to turn violent, and that this violence gives a justification to engage in kinetic action to break up the protests.

This has been the norm for police-protest interactions ever since the mid 1800s, when police were used to crush organized labor.

I Think that Hamas is in the Process of Completely Losing their Sh%$

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It’s not been a good few days for Hamas.

Over the past few days, the Israelis have manage to kill 3 Hamas military leaders, and they almost took out Mohammed Deif, the head out of their military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.

In response, Hamas has start executing people accused as collaborators on an industrial scale:

One day after three top Hamas commanders were killed in an Israeli airstrike, at least 18 Palestinians were executed Friday by firing squads in Gaza City, sentenced to death by a “resistance court” for collaborating with Israel during a time of war.

 ………

 A group calling itself the Palestinian Resistance announced on Hamas-affiliated Web sites that 11 alleged collaborators — nine men and two women — were executed by firing squad Friday morning in the courtyard of an abandoned police headquarters.

 Witnesses said seven more men were placed against walls with bags over their heads and shot by men in black Hamas uniforms in front of the Al-Umari mosque, according to local news media reports.

 Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Resistance named the alleged collaborators or offered details of the charges against them. They said they were withholding the names to spare their families shame.

 The Palestinian Maan news agency reported that some of the bodies were later dumped at al-Azhar University and the Shifa hospital.

 Palestinian militants said the informers were found guilty by local courts, supported by religious clerics, of providing information to Israel that led to the destruction of “resistance houses,” as well as revealing the location of tunnels and rocket launchers.

 The executions came a day after Israeli aircraft targeted and killed three senior Hamas commanders who had gathered in a building in Rafah in south Gaza.

 The targeted killings were celebrated as a major success in Israel and taken as a punishing blow in Gaza, where the Hamas commanders were well known.

 Two days earlier, Israel targeted a house where it believed Mohammed Deif, the top commander of the Hamas military wing, was staying. The Israeli bombardment killed Deif’s wife and two of his children. It is still unclear whether Deif survived the strike.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigade is now claiming that Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teens. Note that he did this from the relative safety of Turkey, where is in exile, and I would take this with a grain of salt:

A veteran Hamas official has said that the Islamist group was behind the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank – an incident that was a major trigger for the current brutal war in Gaza.

Saleh al-Arouri, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, made his comments at a conference in Istanbul, where he lives in exile. A tape of his comments was posted online by conference organisers.

“There was much speculation about this operation; some said it was a conspiracy,” al-Arouri said at a meeting of the International Union of Islamic Scholars on Wednesday.

“The popular will was exercised throughout our occupied land, and culminated in the heroic operation by [Hamas’s armed wing] the Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron.”

His claim has not been supported by any other member of Hamas.

………

Hugh Lovatt, Israel and Palestine coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that while al-Arouri was a significant Hamas figure – serving as the group’s most prominent representative in Turkey – the former militant could have an ulterior motive for making his claim.

“Given the timing I would be very suspicious about his claim. I still don’t believe Hamas as an organisation and its upper echelons sanctioned the kidnappings – something that Israeli intelligence also believes,” he said.

I think that both of these actions are tied together by the recent reverses suffered by Hamas leadership.

Under such situations, there is an organizational imperative to show agency, and both the executions, and the claim or responsibility, are an attempt to demonstrate that Hamas is in control of the situation.

Both of the acts are counterproductive to Hamas’s goals, hence my comment on their losing their sh%$.

In the long run, I do not think that this make a difference though.

The Middle East:  SSDD.

Your Daily Dose of Eric Arthur Blair

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Also known as George Orwell

The US military has banned its personnel from accessing The Intercept website. You know, the place where Glenn Greenwald continues to publish Edward Snowden revelations:

The U.S. military is banning and blocking employees from visiting The Intercept in an apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked government secrets.

 According to multiple military sources, a notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including those with top-secret security clearance—and is aimed at preventing classified information from being viewed on unclassified computer networks, even if it is freely available on the internet. Similar military-wide bans have been directed against news outlets in the past after leaks of classified information.

 A directive issued to military staff at one location last week, obtained by The Intercept, threatens that any employees caught viewing classified material in the public domain will face “long term security issues.” It suggests that the call to prohibit employees from viewing the website was made by senior officials over concerns about a “potential new leaker” of secret documents.

 The directive states:

We have received information from our higher headquarters regarding a potential new leaker of classified information. Although no formal validation has occurred, we thought it prudent to warn all employees and subordinate commands. Please do not go to any website entitled “The Intercept” for it may very well contain classified material.

 As a reminder to all personnel who have ever signed a non-disclosure agreement, we have an ongoing responsibility to protect classified material in all of its various forms. Viewing potentially classified material (even material already wrongfully released in the public domain) from unclassified equipment will cause you long term security issues. This is considered a security violation.

A military insider subject to the ban said that several employees expressed concerns after being told by commanders that it was “illegal and a violation of national security” to read publicly available news reports on The Intercept.

This is bullsh%$, of course.

It’s not unexpected, but it is still bullsh%$ none the less.

Your tax dollars at work.

The Bunco Wing of the Republican Party

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There is a wing of the Republican party which is dedicated to fleecing some of their not particularly too bright follower.

I discussed this a while back with the case of Linda Chavez and her husband Christopher Gersten, who set up a PAC where 99% of the costs went to overhead (them).

Well, it looks like the Tea Baggers have gotten into the act:

When the Tea Party Patriots threw its support last month behind Matt Bevin, the underdog conservative challenger trying to unseat top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, President Jenny Beth Martin vowed the group would be “putting our money where our mouth is.”

So far, its super PAC has mustered just $56,000 worth of mailers in Kentucky on Bevin’s behalf — less than half the amount it has paid Martin in consulting fees since July.

The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, which blew through nearly $2 million on expenses such as fundraising, polling and consultants in the first three months of this year, is not alone in its meager spending on candidates.

A Washington Post analysis found that some of the top national tea party groups engaged in this year’s midterm elections have put just a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they’ve endorsed.

The practice is not unusual in the freewheeling world of big-money political groups, but it runs counter to the ethos of the tea party movement, which sprouted five years ago amid anger on the right over wasteful government spending. And it contrasts with the urgent appeals tea party groups have made to their base of small donors, many of whom repeatedly contribute after being promised that their money will help elect conservative politicians.

Out of the $37.5 million spent so far by the PACs of six major tea party organizations, less than $7 million has been devoted to directly helping candidates, according to the analysis, which was based on campaign finance data provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

I’m not sure why, but when you peruse ads at right wing sites, Worldnet Daily and Glen Beck are among the worst offenders, are chock full of what appears to be transparently deceptive sales pitches.

The Democratic Party establishment lies to its supporters, but they aren’t trying to sell overpriced gold coins and the like.

I’m not sure where there is a cultural difference.  I would think that grifting would cross cultural lines.

The Rich are not the Best of Us, they are the Worst of Us

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An interesting study finds that the more money you have, the more likely you are to ignore rules and endanger others:

What defines low socioeconomic status? Objectively, it means fewer economic resources and educational opportunities, less access to elite schools and clubs, more subordinate positions in the workplace, and increased levels of stress. For the upper-class, it’s just the inverse: more resources, more leisure, less stress.

From the realities facing each group, you might assume that members of the lower-class would be more focused on meeting their own survival needs and, thereby, prioritize their needs over those of others. As a result, you might also expect them to be less trustworthy as compared to members of the upper-class who, given their greater resources, have the luxury to trust. But if you do, you’re missing a central point about how trust really works. Trust isn’t a luxury. It’s a tool we need to get by when we can’t make it on our own; it’s a means of survival for those who must depend on others. Viewed this way, predictions about trust and class get turned on their heads.

………

To relate that to social class, consider this experiment. You’re standing on a corner in downtown San Francisco. It’s a four-way stop, meaning cars are supposed to pause before entering the intersection. As you’re sipping your latte, you look to your left before stepping off the curb. The car approaching is a shiny BMW. Do you cross? How about if it’s a Ford Fusion? The model of trust I’ve been describing suggests you might want to pause if it’s the BMW. There’s really only one way to tell, though. You’ve got to put yourself out there. And that’s just what Paul Piff and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley did.

As cars approached this busy intersection in San Francisco, a researcher would enter the crosswalk. Unbeknownst to drivers, he also noted the make of their car and their perceived age and gender. The main datum for each car was whether the driver paused to let the researcher cross at the stop sign (as is required by the California Vehicle Code) or sped up to cut him off and thereby proceed more quickly toward the driver’s goals. Paul and colleagues divided drivers into five SES categories based on their cars—think Hyundais on one end and Ferraris on the other. The results were quite remarkable.

At the lowest end of the class gradient, every single driver stopped to let the pedestrian entering the crosswalk continue on his way. Midway up the class ladder, about 30 percent of drivers broke the law and cut off the pedestrian so that they could keep going. At the upper end of SES, almost 50 percent of drivers broke the law to put their own needs first. At the most basic level, these findings offer a provocative warning. When you’re vulnerable, upper-class individuals are more likely to disregard the trust you place in them if doing so furthers their own ends.

This is the first of a number of tests executed by Professor Piff did.

The better off someone was, the more likely to act in a completely self-absorbed and untrustworthy manner.

It applied to cars, lying to a potential job applicant about a job, or cheating at a gambling game.

It is precisely the opposite of the Calvanist ethos that grips the right wing.

This is the Best News Ever!!!!!!

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I’m an engineer, and I have seen way too many PowerPoint slides.

So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations:

A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.

That’s why, about six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks.

“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”

In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.

“We all feel inundated by PowerPoint,” Askew says. “With only a whiteboard, you have your ideas and a pen in your hand.”

If Zombie Osama bin Laden were to were to wage Jihad against PowerPoint, I would gladly join his evil minions.

Google Realizes That it Has Created a Monster

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They are now giving glassholes instructions on how not to to be complete jerks:

Google, in perhaps a tacit realization that it has spawned a small army of particularly insufferable cyborgs, has issued an etiquette manual for the first generation of Google Glass users (or “Glass Explorers” as they’re called).

 With a list of unsolicited “Do’s” and “Dont’s” posted on Google’s Glass website, the tech giant highlights a number of central concerns around the subjectivities its wearable computing system is creating. High among them, the fear that “Glassholes” start living their lives as nonstop surveillance robots.

 One “Do” and a corresponding “Don’t” advise “explorers” to not use Glass to record others in their vicinity without permission:

………

 Dont: Be creepy or rude (aka, a “Glasshole”). Respect others and if they have questions about Glass don’t get snappy. Be polite and explain what Glass does and remember, a quick demo can go a long way. In places where cell phone cameras aren’t allowed, the same rules will apply to Glass. If you’re asked to turn your phone off, turn Glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers.

It appears that Google is beginning to realize that its early adopters have all the social skills of a toaster, (perhaps less than said kitchen appliance if one considers the toaster from Red Dwarf), and this does not make them good ambassadors for the technology.

Occupy Wall Street Might Have Actually Won

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And the evidence comes from that Mecca of Capitalism, Davos, Switzerland:

Agree or disagree with the aims and means of Occupy Wall Street, but the movement changed the way we think about our world forever.

 For proof, look no further than the upcoming World Economic Forum in Davos. Each year, the organization puts out a report indicating what it believes are the world’s biggest risks.

 For the past three years, income inequality has been the #1 global risk.

 But prior to 2012, inequality wasn’t even on the list. Those protests in 2011 clearly had a profound on global thinking, right up tot he elite level.

The corrupt capitalists at Davos appear to have learned fear.

Good.

Some People are Terrified by Women’s Sexuality

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Case in point, the developers of a drug called, (I am not joking here) Lybrido, which is intended to increase sexual desire and response in women.

I don’t have a problem with this, though the idea that insufficient desire might be pathologized as hypoactive sexual-desire disorder (HSDD) is a bit troubling.

That being said, this following quote is even more troubling:

But of course swallowing a tablet can take us only so far. Chemically enhancing a woman’s desire might play out in all kinds of ways within a relationship. Some couples might feel closer, others might feel desolate because, despite more sex, their bond isn’t stronger. Wives might yearn for the old seductive efforts of their husbands, even if those gestures stopped working long ago. Women might feel yet more pressure to perform: Why not get that prescription? their partners might ask; why not take that pill? And men, if they are willing to confront the truth, might not be so happy about the reminder, as their partners reach for the pill bottle, that their women need chemical assistance to want them. All the agonies that have existed since the dawn of monogamy will still pertain, many of them coming down to the craving to feel special.

Beyond what might happen in millions of bedrooms, it’s even more difficult to foresee what societal transformations might be stirred. Just as with the birth-control pill, a foreboding not only about sex itself but also about female empowerment may be expressed in a dread of women’s sexual anarchy. Over the last decade, as companies chased after an effective chemical, there was fretting within the drug industry: what if, in trials, a medicine proved too effective? More than one adviser to the industry told me that companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering.

“You want your effects to be good but not too good,” Andrew Goldstein, who is conducting the study in Washington, told me. “There was a lot of discussion about it by the experts in the room,” he said, recalling his involvement with the development of Flibanserin, “the need to show that you’re not turning women into nymphomaniacs.” He was still a bit stunned by the entrenched mores that lay within what he’d heard. “There’s a bias against — a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman.”

Yes, giving 70 years erections to unleash upon the rest of society is a great profit center, but if women start wanting sex, it can create “societal splintering”.

So, men suddenly want to copulate with anything with a hole in it: Good.

Women wanting to have sex: Scary.

Someone needs to get their heads out of their ass.

How Restaurant Management Explains the Republican Party

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The New York Times has a rather interesting article on restaurants moving away from tips in 2008.

I don’t mean a service charge with an option to tip, I mean a full service restaurant that has a service charge, but does not accept tips at all, the Linkery, which operated for 8 years* in the San Diego.

Its proprietor closed up shop and moved to the Bay Area this Summer, he’s starting a new restaurant shortly, and he penned took the free time to pen a fascinating series on his experiences with his experiment. (It’s a long read that I highly recommend but the nickel tour is that he sees it as an unalloyed success.)

What is interesting about all this is his observation that there are some (mostly unlamentedly former) customers who were in an absolute rage about the fact that they no longer can tip. (Part 5 of his series)

This is where it gets interesting to me:

“This isn’t about money,” the man would say.  [Almost always a man — MGS]

 He’d be the one person in a thousand, or in ten thousand, who’d get angry about our fixed service charge. Angry about his lack of control over the price, angry about not being the final arbiter of our service. You could count on him being male, at least when we’re talking about public scenes. (I’ve heard of a few women who got pretty mad about it in private.)

 And his go-to line was so predictable, we would wait for it, anticipate it. “I always tip way more than twenty percent!”

 If that was the case, why were these guys so mad about paying only 18%, far less than they otherwise would? What was it about not choosing the amount they tipped, that infuriated them, even when they were getting a discount?

 It had to be at least partially about lack of control. Or, more accurately, lack of imagined control. This guy thought that, in a tipped environment, his server would perform better in order to get more of his money. That idea is false, as shown both by repeated studies and common sense, but that was irrelevant. His anger could not be redeemed by mere facts.

 Then what was this rage so primal that no exposure to reality could relieve it?

It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that there is a certain sort of person who demands control in the restaurant relationship.

In postscript 1†, we have a restaurant reviewer who got a wet behind the ears waiter, and decides to call the waiter out by name:

What blew my mind was that she called him out using his real name (which I’ve redacted here), even though she was writing from behind a shield of anonymity. It was, in my opinion, bad enough for the worker to have made a mistake at his job; even worse that he has to find out his mistake was to a reviewer; but now he’s been ridiculed by name in the paper, in an attempt to have his parents, siblings and friends all shame him, as well.

Of course, the server was a really great guy, a college student with minimal serving background, who we were trying to train on the job. He was doing his best, and whatever errors he made were my fault, for putting him a difficult position without giving him the tools for success. I knew that, and I expected that a professional reviewer would have, too.

I emailed the writer.

I wrote something along the lines of, hey, I get that you had a bad experience, but that was out of line to call the server out by his real name. You could have easily made the same point while using a different name for him.

She wrote back along the lines of, I write my experiences; just because you have good intentions I’m not going to hold back my criticism. It’s your fault for not having trained him properly.

I responded, I agree that the bad service is my fault. I’m saying you should have ripped on me and not him. I’ve apologized to him for putting him in that position, but it is still not right of you, writing under a pseudonym, to publicly embarrass him using his actual name.

And she came back with the clincher: Well, with your fixed service charge you didn’t give my any choice. I couldn’t give him a lower tip. How else could I punish him for his mistakes?

That made it all clear. She, like some other patrons, felt the burden of having to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Obviously, some people like that role, and some people don’t, but at the very least our culture has trained diners that it is their job. When you go to restaurants, you are responsible for rewarding and punishing your server.

(emphasis original)

From a cultural perspective, it is fascinating, but it also says a lot more about our society and our politics, asaimai at No More Mister Nice Blog observes that this explains Republicans as well:

Why are Federal Workers a special case and a problem for Republicans?  In the case of Federal Workers I’d argue that its not merely that  they are workers (who are always despised) its because they are workers who for the most part don’t conform to Republican ideas of the right boundaries for workers. The right boundaries for workers are that they know their place, that they can be fired capriciously, and that they exist primarily to make the employer feel good about himself  and, further, that like waiters in a restaurant and prostitutes with their johns their job is also to make the employer believe that he is receiving an extra good form of treatment not accorded to others diners or johns.

Federal workers violate those central principles because they can’t be fired directly by “the employer” because the individual Republican tax payer isn’t the direct employer. They also can’t be humiliated and made to feel vulnerable because of civil service protections and unionization. And in the matter of interactions, one on one, the taxpayer can’t command good treatment by offering money (bribes) and thus often feels vulnerable and weak because there is no way to play the “do you know who I am” card which (like tipping) is an attempt to force a generic servant to give non generic attention and service to one class of people. So Federal Employees create an extra level of status anxiety for Republicans when they come in contact with these “employees” who can’t be fired or rewarded and therefore are not obligated to be extra nice to the individual Republican.

Of course there are lots of kinds of Federal Employees, some more obvious than others, and many of whom don’t come into contact with ordinary citizens very often (Scientists at the CDC vs. Park Rangers, for example). I’d argue that the antipathy I’ve described goes for both the kinds of Federal Employees that ordinary citizens encounter–and this is at the root of the really quite bizarre attacks by Republican Congressmen on individual Federal Employees like the now infamous attack on the the Park Ranger by the Texas Congressman. He explicitly challenges her and accuses her of failing to give special consideration to (some) clients (tourists/vets) when she is, of course, contractually obligated to treat all persons identically and has been ordered to shut down the monument. We’ve also seen this hostility directed by individual Republican Congressmen at high level Federal Employees during committee hearings. These attempts to create a hierarchical relationship which puts the “employee” below the “employer” even when the employee has specialized knowledge and skills that the employer does not are too numerous to mention.

I’d even argue that Reince Priebus’s absurd “offer” to pay for a few employees to keep the military site open for the honor flight vets was an example of a perfectly logical extension of the tipping principle: that people with money should get better treatment than ordinary customers. That the government’s attempt to treat everyone uniformly in both the Sequester and the Shut Down is, to the Republican way of thinking, a greater affront than almost anything else. It flies in the face of the “do you know who I am?” principle which underlies Republican thinking about the nature of the world.

So what can we do about this? Nothing, alas. Republicans will continue to see the Government, and experiences of Government work and workers, as a drama in which the employer must punish the employed in order to enjoy his superior status, and the rest of us will have to suffer as they choose to act out their petty desires by shutting down the government and refusing to “tip” our Federal Workers by, you know, actually paying them for work performed. ………

(emphasis original)

This explains a lot.

The only question is how corrosive this is to society as a whole, and how we minimize the impact of these attitudes on the rest of us.

*It’s like 80 years in restaurant years, as most restaurants do not make it 2 years.
†Like I said, not a short read, but well worth it.

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It’s a PDF, and it’s 22 pages, but John Quiggen of the University of Queensland makes the fascinating point that the great financial centers of the world, primarily New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo, exist because the concentration of the financial industry facilitates corruption and cronyism of the managing class:

Recent developments in the global system of cities present a curious paradox. With the cost of communications declining almost to zero and substantial, though less dramatic reductions in transport costs, there is now little technical requirement for most kinds of production to be undertaken in any particular location, or for elements of production chains to be located close to each other. This fact has had dramatic consequences for the organisation of manufacturing industry. Simple production chains involving the import of raw materials, usually from developing countries, for processing in a specialised centre, have been replaced by far more complex structures.

Yet, in important respects, the dominance of a small number of ‘global cities’has never been greater. In this paper, it is argued that the dominance of global cities reflects a desire for clustering on the part of finance sector professionals and corporate executives. It seems likely that such clustering provides private benefits by enhancing the value of personal contacts, but reduces the efficiency and profitability of the corporate sector

 ………

 These concerns are even more pronounced in relation to personal networks connecting financial enterprises with their clients. It is reasonable to assume that such personal networks facilitate the development of business relationships between the firms in question, leading to flows of payments on services based on relationships of personal trust and shared interests, rather than on formal and transparent contractual relationships.

Such a system is commonly referred to as ‘relationship capitalism’ or, more pejoratively as ‘crony capitalism’. In general, it is viewed favourably during booms, when the disregard of process tends to facilitate rapid generation of wealth, and less favourably during recessions when the exchange of personal favours and the evasion of formal controls tends to be reclassified (often retrospectively) as corrupt.

Basically, if you are in an environment where you can run into a potential co-conspirator at a restaurant, or at a party, where small talk can allow you to tease out a deal that will benefit you, and your friend, but not your clients without the sort of transaction trail that you would see with phone calls, and emails, etc.

Essentially, it turns out that centralized financial district are a particularly criminogenic environment in terms of control fraud.

A few casual conversations at a party with, for example, a stock analyst, and that IPO you are pumping up, or the stock price of the company in which your stock options have just vested, and Ka-Ching, there you are with a vacation home in the Hamptons, a yacht, and a Ferrari.

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Libertarian Paradise:

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This is a devastating take-down of the culture of high finance. What’s more, it does so from a sociological and anthropological perspective, as opposed to a conventional economics analysis, which suits my temperament better:

The excessive pay can be interpreted as a sign of unfair or inefficient markets. It is that, but I think the deeper cause is not so much economic as sociological. Financiers have persuaded the broader society that they are modern aristocrats. Pampered lives are part of the package. They go along with an unthinking sense of entitlement and a mix of self-righteousness and self-centredness, with just a hint of condescending tolerance for limited criticism.

Of course, today’s financial aristocracy is different from traditional nobility. The contemporary titles (partner, managing director) and privileges (first-rate education, political influence) are not exactly hereditary, and long hours on the job have replaced a life of leisure. But I believe the commonalities are more significant.

………

In my view, the sociological analysis provides more insight into the industry’s condition than the more common argument about “heads I win, tails you lose” incentives. I rarely meet financiers who would admit to being reckless or wasteful. What I observe is sublime and blind self-confidence.

Living largely with other members of their caste, they rarely have doubts. To them, more finance is always better than less and higher margins always better than lower. They welcome the development of more complicated financial products; they don’t worry much about the effect of these products on the rest of the economy.

Read the whole thing.

I think that his analysis is spot on, though his last ‘graph is a bit too optimistic for my taste.

The Opposite of Noblesse Oblige

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In the Guardian, George Monboit talks about his experience as a student in a British public (private) school, and notes that this sort of background creates people who are completely disassociated from the wants and needs of the rest of society.  I can’t really do justice through excerpts, but here are two paragraphs to give you a sense of this:

Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”

………

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

He draws his net a bit narrower than I would, he ascribes these characteristics pretty much exclusively to conservatives, while I would apply it more generally to our ruling class.

It explains why we see so many cases of, to quote Pete Townshend, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”

As you ascend the political pyramid, your world increasingly becomes that of the rich elites, and increasingly, their needs become your needs.

Go read this.