Now that the saga of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Officer James Crowley has moved to the back-burner, let’s look at three less obvious lessons from Skip and Jimmy’s not-so-excellent adventure.
Understand that government is the use of legitimate force. Not necessarily “legitimate” in terms of morals and ethics, but legitimate in terms of what is legal. Police officers have moral and legal authority to use force in order “to serve and to protect”. At times, they may exceed or fail to exercise their authority. But the nature of their job implies a readiness to apply force.
It follows that one should be on their best behavior around the police. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to know that yelling at police officers will increase the probability that one will be arrested. In this case, even if Professor Gates was treated improperly, he clearly had it within his power to avoid being arrested.
At its root, government policy is about the use of force—whether to regulate behavior, to redistribute income, or to restrict mutually beneficial trade. We can miss this point by focusing on a democratic process where we seem to exercise tremendous choice over those who govern us. Or we can underestimate this point by assuming that government is typically benign.
President Obama’s word choice tells us something about his worldview. His now-famous decision to speak to the specifics of the Gates case was an over-reach of startling proportions.
It was surprising in that Obama “spoke stupidly” when he is usually so careful—often painfully so—with his words. (As a corollary, perhaps it should worry us that he values “diplomacy” so much, but is willing to speak out-of-pocket on awkward and sensitive issues.)
It was odd in that he is the Commander in Chief and chooses the Attorney General to be the chief law enforcement officer in the United States. A president’s default position should be to support the police.
It was sad in that our “post-racial” President botched a key moment for race relations. Instead of sticking to eloquent but general remarks about the underlying issues, Obama extended his comments to inappropriate specifics that created a firestorm and deepened unfortunate stereotypes.
Finally, it seems revealing in terms of what he thinks about his powers of intellect and assessment. This connects to the current debate on health care. In both cases, the President believes that a federal solution is the best way to handle problems. Instead of deferring to the locals who knew far more about the Gates situation, Obama presumed to be able to speak with expertise. In health care, he imagines that a single, grand, federal experiment in a remarkably complex and important arena is preferable to 50 state-wide experiments.
Everyone discriminates.
Labor economists distinguish between “personal discrimination” and “statistical discrimination”. Interestingly, both stem from a form of ignorance. The former is a subjective preference rooted in a socially unacceptable form of ignorance. A person doesn’t like a group of people out of bigotry.
The latter is more interesting because it is based in the reality that all of us make important decisions with imperfect and costly-to-obtain information. Out of varying degrees of ignorance, we make choices with the best information available to us at reasonable cost. Often, our best information about individuals involves their affiliation with groups. So, we stereotype from what we know about a group to members of that group. By definition, all of us discriminate in this manner.
Consider a pool of job applicants. The firm has relatively little information about candidates. So, they generalize from what they do know: where the applicants went to school, their GPA and field of study, the quality of reference letters, job experience, and so on. None of those are definitive; they are only somewhat predictive. For example, will someone with a 3.8 GPA be a more productive worker than someone with a 2.8 GPA? Usually, but not always.
Think about the term “prejudice”. Taken literally, it means to “pre-judge”, implying that someone is making a decision with too little information. At times, such decisions are necessary—and hopefully, people do the best they can with the info they have. At other times, it implies an unnecessary rush to judgment.
In this particular moment of crisis, both parties—Gates dealing with the police and the police dealing with him—were making important decisions with (very) limited information. By definition, Gates and the police were engaged in stereotyping. Of course, it is ironic that Gates did this while self-righteously accusing the police of doing the same. And it is absolutely fascinating that, by their training, both Professor Gates and Officer Crowley are “experts” on racial profiling.
Sadly, in judging the events from the outside, many people have been unnecessarily quick in a rush to prejudicial judgments in favor of Professor Gates or the police. The irony here is greatest among those, including President Obama, who have pre-judged by accusing Officer Crowley of discrimination.
One of my colleagues reduced the Gates situation to the following: Would a 58-year old man, with the same attire, etc.—but white—have been treated the same way? The question is only somewhat helpful. Interestingly, it sets up potential accusations of age-ism, sexism, and “clothes-ism” (or class-ism). Should it have mattered to Officer Crowley if Gates was 18, 38, or 88 years old? Would a similar woman have been arrested in this case? What if Gates had been dressed in a ripped t-shirt or a tuxedo?
At the end of the day, the police and our President must make vital decisions with information that is far less than ideal. Hopefully, they do the best they can with what they have—in humility and patience—drawing the best, reasonable inferences from a competent worldview, formidable character, and the best available data.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Published in newspapers across Indiana– for example, here and here in the (Jeffersonville/New Albany) News-Tribune…
Excerpts from essay #1:
…We also hear assertions that various forms of government involvement in health care are likely to be effective in the U.S. because they work well in other countries. Aside from whether this is true, it should be noted that these other countries have lower populations and, typically, far less diversity in their populations. So these comparisons are somewhere between somewhat helpful and useless. One of the ironies of the health-care debate is that such comparisons should encourage us to consider state-based reforms (instead of a single, grand federal experiment), since the population and diversity of our states is similar to other countries.
A second myth is far more important: We’re often told that our current health-care system is “free-market.” This is akin to blaming the Great Depression on markets — while ignoring the four tax increases of Hoover and FDR, massive trade protectionism, restrictive monetary policy, laws that artificially increased prices and wages and so on. In both cases, the extent to which we should blame the government is an open question. But ignoring its role in either mess is neither legitimate nor useful.
With health care, there is already massive government intervention. The most obvious example is the double debut of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. In addition, there is a wide array of relatively minor but still significant issues: various labor market restrictions (e.g., you and I are not allowed to receive medical services from professionals who provide the same services to our armed forces), mandated insurance benefits (for everything from in-vitro fertilization to hair transplants), the explosion of medical malpractice awards (and thus, malpractice insurance rates) and so on.
But the most important public policy in this realm? The subsidy of health insurance acquired by workers through the firm….
Excerpts from essay #2:
The current mix of government and markets in health care certainly has an amazing amount of inefficiency. But will bureaucracy and red tape be reduced or enhanced with more government?
It’s difficult to imagine much if any gain. Thus, extending health-care availability will probably involve higher costs or reduced access in other contexts (rationing)….
Barack Obama’s proposal is to subsidize public insurance that would “compete” with private insurance. By definition, subsidized insurance would undermine private insurance to some extent — somewhere between attracting people at the margin and entirely destroying the industry. It would depend on the extent of the subsidy….
One last thought: It’s interesting that we’ve become so fixated on a federal approach to this problem. Why not allow the 50 states to try 50 different experiments rather than betting everything on one grand, federal experiment that would be difficult if not impossible to reverse?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Just in time for April 1st and April 15th, let’s talk about taxes.
On April 1st, the excise tax on cigarettes was increased dramatically—from $.39 to $1.01 per pack. It’s fitting that this occurred on April Fools’ Day, since it served to break President Obama’s campaign pledge not to increase “any form of” taxes on any family making less than $250,000 per year.
Independent of breaking a campaign promise, such a tax is attractive for non-smokers since the costs are imposed on other people and it reduces a harmful behavior.
But the tax is troubling on several levels. First, what are the limits to the government’s paternalism in the consumption of a legal product? Second, to the extent that people reduce their smoking, this will undermine state tax revenues based on tobacco (by an estimated $1 billion)—in a time of already strained budgets. Third, taxes reduce economic activity and jobs, by definition—not a good idea during a recession.
But I want to focus on one final aspect: since smokers are disproportionately low-income, is it fair to increase taxes in such a regressive manner on the poor? And if Democrats are seen as defenders of the poor, why are they increasing their taxes? These are great questions—and ones that should be asked more often, because the government imposes all sorts of taxes on the poor.
Many of these burdens are indirect. Corporate income taxes are borne by consumers as higher prices; property taxes are borne by tenants as higher rent. Environmental regulations and “card-check” legislation would increase costs for firms and thus, increase prices for consumers and drive away jobs overseas. A wide variety of trade restrictions on food and clothing serve to dramatically increase the basic costs of living.
But here’s the biggie: federal payroll taxes. Lower-income families rarely pay any significant federal “income tax”—the tax on income that we celebrate on April 15th. And they face modest state and county income taxes. Meanwhile, they’re hammered by the 15.3% federal payroll tax on income. Every dollar earned by the lower and middle classes is exposed to payroll taxes; there are no deductions or exemptions.
A family at the poverty line is nowhere near paying federal income taxes—and in many states, will not pay state income taxes either. (Unfortunately, a working poor family in Indiana pays hundreds of dollars per year.) Even an upper-middle income family like mine loses more than twice as much money to federal payroll taxes—compared to federal, state, and county income taxes combined!
It’s amazing that payroll taxes receive so little attention given the staggering burden they place on workers, especially those in the lower and middle classes. Why are they ignored? Two reasons. First, half of their burden is hidden as the employer’s share of the tax. (Don’t be fooled; we pay that half too—in the form of lower wages and compensation. Do you think gas stations pay the gas tax for you?) Second, because it is withheld from our paychecks and we never file a 1040, we tend to overlook it, despite its amazing bulk.
This April 15th, feel free to toss a few choice words at the Tax Man. But make sure to spend some time looking at your pay stub and thinking about payroll taxes.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Brief excerpts from Lawrence Reed’s classic 1981 article on the Great Depression, published in The Freeman and now republished by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (which I just received in the mail)…
Reed divides the GD into four phases:
To properly understand the events of the time, it is appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive depressions rolled into one. Professor Hans Sennholz has labeled these four “phases” as follows: the business cycle; the disintegration of the world economy; the New Deal; and the Wagner Act. The first phase explains why the crash of 1929 happened in the first place; the other three show how government intervention kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade.
Then, Reed deals with myths about Hoover as laissez-faire and Roosevelt delivering what he promised…
Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands off the economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions of people on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.” Contrary to the modern myth about Hoover, Roosevelt and Garner were absolutely right.
Can any serious scholar observe the Hoover administration’s massive economic intervention and, with a straight face, pronounce the inevitably deleterious effects as the fault of free markets?…
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election in a landslide, collecting 472 electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover. The platform of the Democratic Party whose ticket Roosevelt headed…called for a 25 percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency “to be preserved at all hazards,” the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered….
Reed’s wrap-up:
The genesis of the Great Depression lay in the inflationary monetary policies of the U.S. government in the 1920s. It was prolonged and exacerbated by a litany of political missteps: trade-crushing tariffs, incentive-sapping taxes, mind-numbing controls on production and competition, senseless destruction of crops and cattle, and coercive labor laws, to recount just a few. It was not the free market that produced twelve years of agony; rather, it was political bungling on a scale as grand as there ever was.
For more on this post, click here…
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A little more than a year ago, I wrote a really nice piece on this topic– on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the nation’s first eugenics law (in Indiana).
Now, more historical context from Jesse Walker at Reason…
In 1888, a social reformer named Oscar McCulloch delivered a speech in Buffalo titled “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation.” Indianapolis, McCulloch declared, had been infected by a “pauper ganglion,” a depraved clan that survived “by stealing, begging, ash-gathering”…They also received “almost unlimited public and private aid,” which merely “encourag[ed] them in this idle, wandering life, and in the propagation of similarly disposed children.”
The speech had lasting implications for both the poor people of Indiana and the budding pseudoscience of eugenics. It also was largely untrue, reports the historian Nathaniel Deutsch in Inventing America’s “Worst” Family (University of California Press), an insightful new study of the Ishmaels and their interpreters….
McCulloch was an early advocate of both eugenics and the social gospel, a toxic combination that foreshadowed the pending Progressive Era….a self-proclaimed socialist—even as he increased his contempt for, and willingness to use the law against, paupers who preferred to remain outside the wage economy….
But his most influential contention was not that the Ishmaels were a social evil. It was that they were a social evil with a biological basis…
Such ideas had consequences. In 1905 Indiana restricted marriages by former inmates “of any county asylum or home for indigent persons.” In 1907, influenced by McCulloch’s studies, the state adopted what may be the world’s first compulsory sterilization law….
For more on this post, click here…
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A staggering piece by Stephen Baskerville in Touchstone…
I’ve written at length that marriage has been damaged much moreso by divorce than by calls for (or movements toward) “same-sex” marriage. Baskerville expands on that and discusses the initial “grand experiment” on marriage– the policies behind the move toward easier divorce.
G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another. That day has arrived.
Chesterton was writing about divorce, and despite extensive public attention to almost every other threat to the family, divorce remains the most direct and serious. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”
Most Americans would be deeply shocked if they knew what goes on today under the name of divorce. Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.
Some four decades ago, while few were paying attention, the Western world embarked on the boldest social experiment in its history. With no public discussion of the possible consequences, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that effectively ended marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family. The government can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other….
This startling fact has been ignored by politicians, journalists, academics, and even family advocates. “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” wrote Gallagher. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.” No American politician of national stature has ever challenged involuntary divorce….
For more on this post, click here.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
An awesome piece from Mary Eberstadt in First Things…
She starts with a description of the intellectual elite’s thoughts about communism before the fall of the Berlin Wall– despite the evidences. She then cites Jeane Kirkpatrick’s contemporary analysis in her essay of the title echoed by Eberstadt: “The Will to Disbelieve”. From there, Ebestadt draws an analogy to “the sexual revolution”– “the powerful will to disbelieve in the harmful effects of another world-changing social and moral force governed by bad ideas”.
As Eberstadt notes about “the benefits of marriage and monogamy” and the impact of single-parent homes on children:
…the empirical record by now weighs overwhelmingly against the liberationists…an empirical record has been assembled that is beyond refutation and that testifies to the unhappy economic, social, and moral consequences….Yet in both cases, the minority of scholars who have amassed the empirical record and drawn attention to it have been rewarded, for the most part, with a spectrum of reaction ranging from indifference to ridicule to wrath.
…[their] words and formulations like them have been fighting words among sociologists, with the majority lining up, sometimes ferociously…It’s not that they are unaware of the evidence. It’s just that they feel forced to explain it away. Such is the deep desire to disbelieve that shapes—and misshapes—so much of what we read about sex today….
Eberstadt continues by noting a few ironies and making suggestions on language and tactics (creatively borrowing from a provocative source)– before concluding with an appropriately hopeful note.
For more on this, click through to my blog &/or to Eberstadt’s piece.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
In case you’re interested, I wrote and just posted a five-part review of Miller’s book, Finding Darwin’s God.
enjoy! eric
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A friend persisted in asking me to read The Shack. Although it has been a “#1 New York Times Bestseller”, it came on the radar when I was in a busy season, so I’m not sure I would have read it or even noticed it– without his encouragement.
I’m really glad I read it. Beyond enhancing my “cultural relevancy” (LOL!), The Shack was thought-provoking. Although I’m not sure I agree with everything in it– especially where one must speculate a good bit to draw inferences– I’m a wheat & chaff guy. And for whatever chaff Young delivers, he brings a lot of wheat to the table as well.
Young’s book is well-crafted and an easy read. On occasion, the conversations come off as stilted, but that’s difficult to avoid in a book so dominated by dialogue. And the book might not be easy to handle emotionally or theologically for some people– an important point to which I’ll return shortly.
In a nutshell, comparing it to some other relatively famous books, I’d say it’s:
1.) 50% The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis;
2.) 30% The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee or The Saving Life of Christ by Ian Thomas; and
3.) 20% Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen.
1.) The Shack is a cousin of Lewis’ book on Heaven and Hell in that it speculates on biblical topics that are vital but not clearly delineated in the Scriptures…
And like Lewis, Young works (effectively) to give himself wiggle room within his artistic portrayal. (Young uses basic literary devices at the beginning and the end of the book.) This is absolutely key because it indicates the speculative nature of his work– and it signals that Young does not take himself or the details of his picture too seriously.
2.) The Shack points to the importance of the “Spirit-filled life” within “sanctification”. I benefited tremendously from more traditional, straight-forward works like Nee and Thomas. But Young is trying to communicate some of the same principles through narrative/fiction.
This is both vital and vastly under-sold within the Church. Too often, people try to “live out the Chistian life” in their own power– “the flesh”. The result is sub-optimal in terms of outcomes, motives, perseverance, energy, and so on. But it isn’t meant to be that way. Christ himself said that it was for our own good that He would leave the Earth– so that the Spirit would come to empower believers to live that life through us (Jn 14:26, 16:7)….
3.) Young’s work is like Osteen’s in that it can be misread by some– and is, at the same time, especially relevant for certain audiences. I’ve already argued this in my review of Osteen’s book. I would recommend both books to most people who have been “wounded” by circumstances, a church, or the Church– especially if they can read it alongside a mature believer.
That said, the book could easily be misunderstood and misapplied by those who tend to read things (too) literally. Despite the ample praise the book has received, I think that’s the reason for the bulk of the criticism launched at it….
Derek Keefe provides a nice overview of the debate on the Christianity Today blog….
Among other things, this growing backlash broaches important questions about the proper relationship between art, theology, and the Church for evangelicals and their close kin….Switching directions, we must also ask what it means for Christian traditions and communities to be faithful to artists and their craft. This, too, is a theological question: How does the Church show good faith toward those sub-creators in God’s human economy whose very creative inclinations are evidence that they bear the image of a God who delights in creating?…My hunch is that we probably see a failure to keep faith on both sides here, and that it would be a good thing for all of God’s Church to discuss the when’s, where’s, why’s, and how’s of our mutual infidelities.
In a word, I’d recommend The Shack to those who are mature in their faith, those who have seen Christianity as duty and religion, those who are not prone to take things to literally/seriously, those who have endured profound pain and disappointment, and those who have been “burned by the church”.
In any case, may God use The Shack as a blessing to those who read it.
For the full review, click here.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Unemployment hit 7.2% in December, the highest since January 1993– as the economy was recovering from the pseudo-recession of 1991-1992.
In November 1982, the unemployment rate was 10.8%.
Since the “natural rate of unemployment”– the part of unemployment you can’t get rid of (at least without severe long-term consequences)– is generally thought to be 4.0-4.5%.
So, today’s unemployment rate is 2.7-3.2% higher than the natural rate– less than half of the unemployment above the natural rate in 1982 (6.0-6.3%).
And of course, we’re nowhere near the unemployment of the Great Depression when the rate was in double-digits for more than a decade, including 19% in 1939– the 6th year of the (wildly over-rated) “New Deal”.
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