Mark Thompson

Seeing as I disliked both teams in The Big Game equally, I was unusually interested in the halftime show this year. I am not a terribly big fan of Madonna’s, but I’ve always appreciated her influence and capacity for showmanship, the latter of which was why I thought she would be an all-too-rare good choice for the halftime show. I have to say that not only did she fail to disappoint, but she turned in what was in my view the most enjoyable halftime show ever, Super Bowl or otherwise. That is a low bar, but I thought she actually put out the first halftime show befitting of a game annually responsible for the year’s largest TV audience.

Apparently the buzz today is about one of her guest performers flipping the bird (which I missed) and her making a bit of a misstep on the rafters (which I didn’t), but that would seem to ignore the awesome spectacle that was the rest of the show. The marching band was my favorite touch, but there were no shortage of other pretty cool moments. And can I just say how happy I was that she made no attempt to have the on-field audience that always seems to make these halftime shows so especially awkward?

For the readers: now that Madonna has set the bar and shown that it is possible to put together a non-awkward and outright enjoyable halftime show, what other artists are out there who can pull this off? Presumably Gaga (aka Madonna 2.0), but who else?

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I don’t know why, but I’ve been rediscovering early Barenaked Ladies and early Pat Green the last week or two. I can’t say that I care much for what BNL have done since (and including?) “One Week,” nor that I care much for what Mr. Green has done since around 2003, but “Old Apartment” still makes me want to start singing – badly – at the top of my lungs, and early Pat Green still gets me to fall in love with my wife all over again.

 

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This CBO study is being touted as proof by conservatives that the answer to this question is a resounding “YES!”  Going nearly as far is Megan McArdle, who nonetheless argues that “the CBO’s data suggest that we could probably get workers with a bachelor’s or lower for less money than we are now paying, and not suffer much decline in quality.”

A quick summation of the study’s results: on average, the federal government paid about 16% more in total compensation (wages + benefits) than a theoretically comparable private sector company would have paid after adjusting for thing like employee experience and education.  On average, federal wages (ie, not including benefits) were only about 2% more than in the private sector, but were 20% higher for employees with no more than a high school diploma, and 23% lower for employees with graduate or professional degrees.  The big difference came as a result of significantly higher benefit costs, which were on average almost 50% higher in the federal government, though benefits for employees with professional degrees were comparable in both the private sector and the federal government.   Benefits for those with a high school diploma or less were nearly 75% greater than in the private sector on average.  Moreover, though benefit costs in general make up the bulk of the difference in total compensation, most of that difference appears to come from the federal government’s offering of defined-benefit pension plans and the fact that it subsidizes retiree health insurance.

So does this mean that federal workers are overpaid, or that “we could probably get workers with a bachelor’s or lower for less money than we are now paying, and not suffer much decline in quality”?  I’m not at all certain.*

To be sure, it’s clear that the market has no more than an indirect role in setting federal compensation levels.  But the study actually explicitly rejects even McArdle’s relatively squishy claim, saying that an “assessment of how changes in the amount or composition of total compensation would affect the government’s ability to recruit and retain a qualified workforce is beyond the scope of this analysis.”

I think the CBO is right to make that disclaimer, which makes the actual utility of this study quite limited.

As the study notes, different employees can place vastly different values on compensation and wages, and the actual quality of an employee is ultimately unmeasurable in any meaningful way for purposes of a study like this.  Moreover, because the lion’s share of the discrepancy comes from retirement benefits increasingly unavailable in the private sector, any discussion involving the caliber of the federal workforce is going to require a discussion as to the benefits of a workforce where  workers have a strong incentive not constantly looking to change jobs the second something better comes along.

While it’s common to assume that job stability encourages laziness, the fact is that it also discourages experienced, quality, and yes, hardworking, employees from having a wandering eye.  That means a workforce more dedicated to their employer, and less in need of constant retraining.

This is a dynamic that gets ignored in these types of discussions all too easily, I think.   There may well be something to be said about the bad incentives created by job protections that make it difficult to impossible to fire a bad employee, but even with those bad incentives, it seems clear to me that the average new employee in any career path, no matter how much experience and training that employee possesses, is going to make boatloads more mistakes than the average employee with 5, 10, 15, 20 years experience working the same job or type of job for the same employer. [click to continue…]

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….Which is why I definitely did not see a bumper sticker this morning proclaiming that “All I needed to know about ISLAM I learned on 9/11,” right next to another bumper sticker admonishing one to “Work Harder…Millions on Welfare Are Depending on You!”  I definitely did not see this while driving around a state with one of the nation’s highest percentages of Muslims.

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In response to Mike’s emergency preparedness post, BlaiseP discusses the role of community in emergencies and specifically his experiences with the Amish in his area of Wisconsin, writing;

The Amish around here have been off the grid for a few centuries now.  Their proscriptions on being connected to the electrical grid don’t prohibit them from generating Amish Electricity with diesel motors.  They’ll make telephone calls for business, from someone else’s phone.   Lots of us give them rides here and there.   They’re intensely interested in how the rest of the world is doing things.

Talking to the guy who made my oak table, he says their unwillingness to modernize in certain respects is mostly to keep their own sense of community intact.

Blaise’s comment provides a pretext for the only smile-inducing 9/11 story of which I’m aware.  In so doing, it permits me finally write the 9/11 memorial post I just couldn’t bring myself to write a few months back.

About a year after 9/11, I switched to the night program in law school so I could work a full time job during the day.  I wound up working as a law clerk for a government agency in downtown DC a few blocks from the White House and got to be acquainted with one of the HR folks.  Naturally the subject of 9/11, and what we were each doing on that day, came up for discussion.

He explained to me how, immediately after the Pentagon was hit, all of the government offices were evacuated more or less at once.   The Metro of course was also simultaneously shut down and the Mother of All Traffic Jams created for those with vehicles.  So of course the only way for most people to get home was to walk.

For almost anyone who worked on the opposite side of the Mall from where they lived, this inevitably meant crossing the Mall in some fashion.  As a result, about 15 minutes after the Pentagon was hit, four massive walls of humanity descended more or less simultaneously upon the Mall in varying states of panic.  Prior to this, the Mall itself was unusually empty for a beautiful September day due to most tourists being transfixed by the attacks in New York.

Empty that is, except for a single Amish family calmly wandering around the center of the Mall, with the patriarch staring intently at a giant unfolded tourist map.  By this point the black smoke emanating from the Pentagon would likely have been visible from the Mall – it certainly dominated the view from my apartment in North Arlington.

The patriarch looks up finally and sees this mass of humanity converging upon him from all sides.  He smiles and stops the first person whose attention he can grab, which was my acquaintance.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but can you tell me how to get to the Museum of Natural History*?” [click to continue…]

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I had hoped to avoid a formal foray into the inevitable dissection of Ron Paul, his newsletters, and his ties to the far right that seems to have hit right on schedule.*  As one who at the time was pretty well plugged in to the libertarian blogosphere, the first incarnation of that process, in January 2008, was more than a little exhausting and brought a lot of ugly things about libertarianism to the surface that I’d rather not relive.

However, Steven Horwitz, whose posts on the subject in 2008 were critical to my own turn towards left-libertarianism, has entered the fray with a fairly detailed – and relatively widely linked – history of Ron Paul’s newsletters and their not-insignificant role in libertarian history.  If you haven’t already, you should read it.

Horwitz explains how the newsletters, along with the related Rothbard-Rockwell Report, were representative of a critical era in libertarian history during which Murray Rothbard sought to grow the libertarian movement in the early post-Communism era by more directly fusing it in a coalition with working and middle class conservatives, using “cultural” issues as the bait to get the conservatives to come along.**  Horwitz argues that this fusionism was deeply corrupting to libertarianism, destroying its inherent liberalism, and concludes:

It’s time to reclaim our progressive history from the hands of the right:  from the Old Right of the 40s, to the Reagan era LINOs, to the paleolibertarianism of the 1990s… [T]he heritage of libertarianism is properly a progressive one.

I could not agree more with this sentiment.

Ron Paul’s newsletters, as well as his successes in the last several years, should tell us quite a bit about libertarianism, past, present, and future.  Certainly, that he is doing as well as he is at present by emphasizing civil liberties and anti-militarism, and indeed doing especially well at recruiting liberals and independents to his cause, not to mention coming out increasingly in support of gay rights (though not as much, perhaps, as one would hope) and speaking passionately about the effects of the Drug War on people of color, should demonstrate that there is a surprisingly large constituency for a left-libertarianism.  Though his newsletters, and his close ties to racists and anti-Semites rightly disqualify him from the Presidency and make him a questionable protest vote at best, such success clears space for future candidates without that baggage to pick up the mantle in future elections.  That is not nothing, and is why I ultimately will still vote for him in the primaries next year, just as I did last time around.

However, those successes cannot be divorced from the successes of the newsletters, the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and Rothbard’s fusionism more generally.  To the contrary, they are built upon those successes.  And, let me be clear: the one area where Horwitz and other commentators who have put Ron Paul’s newsletters and ties to racism in context are wrong is in suggesting that those newsletters and ties were in some way a failure.  The fact is that they were more than a little successful.  Those ties provided Paul with a national fundraising base that allowed him to raise more than twice the amount of money for his Congressional campaigns than the average House member between 1996 and 2004, an amount that would go especially far for someone seeking election in an obscure district in East Texas.  In other words, those newsletters and ties to fringe groups and Alex Jones types are largely responsible for Ron Paul’s presence in Congress at all.

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I see that Elias has jumped on the study making the rounds that the net worth of America’s wealthiest family, the Walton’s, is greater than the combined net worth of the bottom 30% of Americans combined.  I must admit that upon first glance, I was just about equally shocked by this statistic.  It certainly seemed that it was quite proper to tout the study as a particularly outrageous example of the severity of income inequality in this country.

But then I looked at the study a bit more closely.  It turns out that the study really may be indicative of a severe problem in this country.  But the statistic most being cited about the Waltons’ wealth in fact turns out to say extraordinarily little about inequality.  Instead, it mostly stands for the proposition that in 2007, just before the housing market crash, around 18% of Americans had more liabilities than assets, and that the next 12% had a net worth just large enough to cover the negative net worth of that 18%.  Believe it or not, had the report used the estimates on wealth in 2009, the percentage of Americans with a lower combined net worth than the Waltons would be even more sensational sounding – probably close to 40% – thanks to the devastating effects of the housing crash on net worth.

The study – the full version of which seems to be here – is based on a combination of data from the triennial Survey on Consumer Finances and, for calculation of the Waltons’ wealth, from Forbes magazine’s estimates.  As you will see, the Forbes estimates of the Waltons’ wealth are basically irrelevant.  Instead, what is important is how the wealth of the rest of us is calculated.  ”Wealth” is susceptible to any number of different meanings and manners of calculation, many of which are laden with all sorts of normative values, but for purposes of this study, it seems that “wealth” was quite reasonably defined as “net worth,” i.e., current asset values minus current liabilities. Income and expected future income are essentially left out of the equation entirely.

It is entirely reasonable to rely upon this definition of “wealth,” as it is an accepted definition that is mostly devoid of normative valuation problems.

Unfortunately, by defining “wealth” as “net worth,” it is very difficult for any resulting comparison to tell us much of meaning about inequality.  This is because of simple math: if a sizable number of people have negative net worth because of student loans, mortgage payments, or car payments, then it will take a sizable number of people with small positive net worth to make the combined total reach a positive number.

So when we say that the Waltons have more wealth than any given percentage of Americans combined, without knowing the specific amount of the Waltons’ combined wealth or the specific amount of wealth owned by that given percentage of Americans, it is actually possible that the Waltons’ combined wealth was zero or even, for that matter, negative.  In other words, when we say that the Waltons have a combined net worth greater than the combined net worth of 30% of Americans, what we may well really be saying is just that around 30% of Americans have a combined net worth of zero.  As it turns out here, the source study indicates that in 2007, about 18.6% of Americans had zero or negative net worth, with an additional  11.4% of Americans having a net worth of less than $12,000 (2009 dollars).  In other words, these same statistics could be used to say that someone with a net worth of $1 had more wealth than about 30% of Americans in 2007.

Nor was this bottom 18.6% necessarily “poor” in any meaningful sense – it’s going to include renters with car payments, and just about anyone with student loans to pay off, regardless of their income or future income expectations.   In other words, that percentage would include a second year associate at a big law firm making $125,000+ a year in salary.  Indeed, such a person would have an especially negative net worth.

And, for that matter, it’s not even necessarily true that those who are poor were within this bottom 18.6% – a family on welfare who had a 30 year old, fully paid-for piece of crap car (or no car at all), rented their home, and having ancient, but fully paid-for furniture and maybe a couple of hundred bucks in a bank account somewhere could easily have a positive net worth.  Merely by having that positive net worth, they, too, would be “wealthier” by this definition than almost 30% of Americans combined.

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Since it’s Opposite Week still, at least nominally, I figured today is as good as any to post my favorite explicitly pro-socialist anthem of all time. Larry Kirwan’s voice has a tendency to be pretty polarizing, which combined with his outspoken political lyrics is probably why Black 47′s appeal has always been limited, but dammit count me amongst the group’s fans.

And while we’re on the subject of Irish singers, I don’t think it’s possible to pass up an opportunity for a Pogues song (though Fairy Tale of New York right now would be a bit too obvious, methinks):

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I know this is a few days old, but while we’re on the subject of internet trolls, it seems worth pointing to this masterpiece of the anti-trolling genre from one of our old friends at Popehat.

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