Lines are for the Little People

Leave it to the wealthy of Manhattan....

Rich Kids are Doing Fine... And its News?

A few days ago, Sean Reardon shared an observation which he suggested may not surprise you, "the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families."

So let me see... kids who on the whole have the most educated parents, the most affluent homes and best home environments, safe neighborhoods, good schools, and ready access to additional resources if they start to flounder, do better on the whole than the kids who do not have those advantages? Let me guess - the next thing that may not surprise me is that kids who have the least educated parents, the poorest homes and home environments, unsafe neighborhoods, schools that struggle to maintain order and perhaps even to maintain their basic facilities, and who have trouble accessing additional resources even if their parents attempt to find and utilize those resources, bring up the bottom?

The author notes that this is a phenomenon associated with wealth, not gaps in racial achievement or a decline in school performance. He argues that school quality is a small part of the difference.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich....

The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

The author paints an idyllic picture of a typical wealthy family,

Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

I doubt, however, that the phenomenon is explained by the small percentage of wealthy families who employ tutors to prepare their children for kindergarten admission tests. Also, let's note, being tutored for a test can make you perform better on that test, and that can be particularly true of aptitude tests, but what you end up with is not evidence that one group is outperforming another by any measure other than the test. Instead, you end up with an invalid measure. We can talk of, "support[ing] working families so that they can read to their children more often", but in some of those wealthy families the reading is done by the nanny, and I suspect that modeling remains a significant factor - if the only books (real or virtual) you have in your home are the ones you read to your kids, that may indicate both motivation and the possibility that your kids will engage with books in a way you do not; if you have a home full of books and spend a lot of time reading, the odds go way up that your kids will follow your lead.

That said, we already know that giving children an enriched preschool environment can significantly improve a child's performance as they enter school. Despite the anti-Head Start demagoguery (that after the child starts school and you end the enrichment, you see a reversion to the mean over the next few years), we know how to boost a child's academic performance. As various experiments have shown, both in public school and charter school settings, kids from impoverished community perform better in school when they spend more hours in the classroom and receive tutoring. Shocking, isn't it?

Rich people care about education, they can vote with their feet if they don't like the performance of their child's preschool or public school, and they can and largely will avail themselves of resources when their kids struggle. They are also positioned to help their kids pursue their interests, whether academic, artistic or athletic. Basically, if you're wealthy you're much more likely to care about education. "But middle class families value education," you protest? Sure, but our society largely cares about education in the abstract. Education matters, but teachers get paid too much, kids don't really need art or music, and a B is good enough - particularly if you're good at sports.

Although anybody's best laid plans can gang aft agley, there's a difference between hoping your child goes to college and gets a degree, and expecting that your child to attend a top university and proceed to graduate school. It's easy to find public schools that bring kids in several weeks in advance of the start of school for sports, and put significant resources into sports equipment, facilities and coaching. It's easy to find schools where past sports victories are trumpeted, and sports trophies and banners prominently displayed. You rarely find the same sort of priority being placed on academics. Its not an either or - you can push both sports and academics - but our society's choices reflect its actual values.

Let's remember also, the lowest performing children of the wealthy tend to earn more money than the highest performing children from poor families. Wealth has advantages, and those advantages affect motivation and outcome.

Mitt Romney, the Poor Little Rich Boy

As they say, born on third base, thinks he hit a triple.

"Mitt's Cheap. All the Trappings of Wealth... That's all Ann"

I have commented before that I can respect Mitt Romney's reported cheapness, and some of it does appear to be genuine (such as occasionally flying coach), but when you hear a guy chatting up $million dressage horses with Sean Hannity, or has multiple multi-million dollar homes with cars sitting idle at each home, you know that a lot of it is window dressing. Case in point:

Last week, when the campaign stayed at a Marriott Renaissance, he lamented that a cheaper Marriott Courtyard was nearby. He washes his own Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts in hotel rooms. On one recent day, as he dashed to an awaiting car, he grabbed leftover boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and saved a bowl of fruit—not leaving anything for waste.

I find it very difficult to believe that Romney ever begrudged one of his business partners a suite at a top hotel. That is to say, I suspect that this is less about the careful pinching of pennies and is more about "Why do these peons need better than the cheapest room available, especially if I'm willing to bite the bullet." And yes, it's great that Romney is willing to stay at the "cheaper" hotel, himself, but that form of leadership seems only to occur when he's the top dog, not when he's among peers.

The part that most strikes me is Romney's supposedly taking time off from his campaigning and press appearances to wash his own shirts in the sink of his hotel room, presumably hanging them in the bathtub to dry, hauling out the iron and ironing board the next morning, wearing shirts that smell faintly of hotel bar soap or shampoo.... Frankly, if he's not being phony with that claim he's being, as they say, penny wise and pound foolish. It would be an inconsequential expense for him to have his shirts professionally laundered and, if he really thought it was not worth the cost, would be absurd for him not to delegate. It's neither fun nor efficient to try to do your laundry in a hotel room sink and, frankly, Romney's appearance belies the idea that he drip dries his shirts in his motel rooms.

Also, since when is the act of taking extra, sealed boxes of cereal from the hotel's breakfast bar an act of keeping the cereal from going to waste? If that's a form of cheapness, it's the brand that imposes an additional cost on the hotel in order to save a few dollars later in the day when you don't have to pay for a snack. By way of comparison, the guy who stuffs his pockets full of food from a buffet so that he doesn't have to buy another meal that day is demonstrating cheapness, but he only paid for the meal he actually ate at the restaurant.

Let me put it this way: I don't doubt that Romney can in fact be cheap, both at times with himself and more consistently with the people he doesn't deem worthy of largesse, but "I'll bet you $10,000" that this is an attempt by his campaign to oversell a value that "the polls say that voters like" through credulous reporters.

And the idea that every one of Romney's extraordinary indulgences can be written off with, "He likes to keep Ann happy?" Really, the man needs to take some responsibility.

The Divine Right of Boys in the Information Age

It occurs to me that in talking about a David Brooks column I had not originally intended to talk about, I failed to mention the passage that most caught my attention:

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic.¹ The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That is to say, by being pretty much the same as they ever were, schools around the world are suddenly failing to sufficiently engage boys and, while girls (being sugar, spice and everything nice, and predisposed to resist the temptation of a marshmallow) are "verbally and socially sophisticated" in a manner that is allowing them to succeed in college and to reap the rewards of the information age.

My first response is, where were the concern trolls when women, frail, wilting flowers that they are, were excluded from higher education? Brooks' allusion to genetics evokes the notion of past eras that women were biologically unsuited to higher education or to a competitive workplace. And let's not pretend that those biology/genetics arguments have vanished. Also, if the problem is genetic, why does Brooks believe school teachers will be able to "fix" it?

At least when it comes to math, Brooks appears intent on proving himself correct and folks like Larry Summers wrong:

Even so, men make up just over 40 percent of college students. Two million fewer men graduated from college over the past decade than women. The performance gap in graduate school is even higher.

I'm not seeing good numbers on college graduation rates (lots on enrollment, not so much on graduation), and I don't want to spend more time at the moment looking. So I'll use a ballpark figure I saw tossed out, that 1.5 million students graduate from undergraduate programs each year. 15 million over ten years. Using the 60:40 Brooks shared, based on enrollment you should see 9 million women graduate and only 6 million men. Brooks is telling us that the number is 2 million and that this means colleges aren't engaging male students? He didn't share a source for his data, but I'm having a difficult time seeing that as a problem for men. I would like him to elaborate on his data and conclusions.

Also, no offense David, but guys like you are well-suited for college. Even if K-12 schools reinvent themselves so that the most rambunctious young men are engaged in ways that don't involve reading books, what do you believe is going to happen when they reach college and are handed a two-inch-thick text book or parked at a Bunsen burner in a chemistry lab?

Meanwhile, we have more than a few years of the information age to look at. Let's compare how women are faring to how men are faring. If I were to look at a list of the founders of the most successful companies of the information age, or a broader list of their executives, what ratio of men to women should I expect to find? That is, once we move past the world of K-12 education, where can I find Brooks' hand-wringing translated into a real-world environment in which women have the advantage?

I suspect that Brooks isn't actually talking about "boys" here - he's talking about boys being raised in low-SES households. Were his own son to struggle in school, I am skeptical that Brooks would be criticizing his son's teacher for requiring him to write book reports about "exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas" (perhaps The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman). Brooks seems like the sort who would read the book with his son, try to engage his son in the literature and instill a love of reading and, if all else failed, hire a tutor to make sure that his son didn't fall behind the rest of the class. (He might even consider private school, assuming that wasn't his child's starting point.)

If Brooks were really talking about Henry V, he would be taking note that the new Henry IV benefits from the modern equivalent of the "divine right of kings" - a system that is set up to favor, privilege, preserve and expand his family's wealth, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Brooks can't argue that it's a zero sum game given his acknowledgment of the associated loss of middle class jobs and diminished opportunity for the non-wealthy Henry IV's. A modern Henry V doesn't need no education - he can and will fall back on daddy's name, money and connections, and a well-rigged tax code.

So let's not pretend that boy-centered K-12 education, whatever that would involve, would be a panacea. Let's not pretend that the modern Henry V's would be stifled in a traditional school while he would flourish in a rigid military academy. And most of all, let's not act as if the fact that the opening of doors, historically closed to women, is a bad thing, even if some men find that women outperform them in the ways that matter to the modern job market.²
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1. There is a sense in which men are genetically "inferior" to women - women get a full set of DNA building blocks, whereas men have lost a chunk of chromosomal material - hence XY instead of XX. That does translate into a set of Y-linked genetic traits, vulnerabilities, abnormalities and eccentricities, some of which can be beneficial and others of which can be catastrophic, with most falling somewhere in the middle. By way of example, see David Brooks' hairline - "male pattern baldness".

2. Brooks likes to talk about "human capital", and the optimization of its value. Brooks may well be able to fashion a K-12 program for kids who aren't college-oriented, and whose parents lack the wealth and resources to prevent that from mattering, such that their "human capital" is maximized. But who says that should be, could be, or is best accomplished through pushing them through college, whether or not they have academic focus, interest or aptitude? If Brooks accepts that his impoverished Henry and Henrietta V's aren't college material, why the lament about men struggling in college?

All You Need to be Rich....

Is to be poor. A bit simplistic, perhaps?

Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills....

Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”

That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.

Wouldn't it be interesting if poor nations, instead of being poor, were... rich? And yet for some reason they're not.

It's pretty amazing to me that Friedman can hear somebody explain that countries like "Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part... because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them", and have that be his takeaway. If you look at nations hit by the resource curse, how often do you find a nation where everybody has a pretty good standard of living? How often do you find, on the other hand, a country with weak institutions of government, kleptocratic leadership, and a population that for the most part lives in conditions somewhere between dismal and squalid?

As is his wont, Friedman also disregards the inequality of opportunity in nations like India and China, the extent to which large numbers of people in those countries have been treated, in effect, as natural resources - cheap labor for international companies. He seems to have retreated into his fantasy world in which any population, no matter how poorly governed, impoverished, downtrodden and oppressed, could transform itself into another Singapore within the space of a few years.

What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.

Say what? Let's turn to the list of nations Friedman singles out as being resource-rich but faring badly on PISA: Qatar, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria. Exactly when was it that those nations had the emphasis on education - the "instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills" - that Friedman would have us believe that they "lost" when they discovered their natural resources? Perhaps this reflects the fantasy thinking that led Friedman to believe that Iraq could be turned into a progressive democracy within a few years of a military invasion - the extent to which a nation's culture, history, governance, and the population's present education level factor into its chances of flourishing and producing a population of highly educated, innovative citizens.

David Brooks and the Class Divide

David Brooks has been reading Charles Murray, so it's time for another of his another "tenth grade quality book book reports".... Call it an oversimplification if you will, but having built his reputation (so to speak) on a sloppily reasoned book suggesting that African Americans struggle because they have low IQ's, Murray has a new book contending that poor white people struggle for sociological reasons. Brooks, of course, makes no mention of Murray's history, instead lavishing his new book with praise.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today....

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Get that? Murray's limiting his data to white people allows him to be "at his best", lest "complicating factors" such as race and, um, "other" confuse his thesis. Perhaps by showing, for example, that The Bell Curve is every bit as bad as its critics contend.

Two things to note at this point: First, Murray's story is that of "white people", and second... why 1963? Did the world begin in 1963? Weren't there white people in American prior to 1963? Or did what Brooks describes as Murray's "incredible data" reveal to him that if he started his story in any other year it would be weaker or completely undermined. We could, for example, compare unemployment rates during the Great Depression to those of today, but that wouldn't work so well for Murray's thesis that white society has somehow grown apart. So, why not pick the peak year for the argument that America used to look somewhat like Ozzie and Harriet, and go from there.

Brooks, predictably, accepts Murray's arguments as proof of his own theories about the nation, and that social norms that emerge from a snapshot reflect the norm of human history up through the present era. Now... something is causing the country to "bifurcate[] into different social tribes" and the rich don't spend enough time associating with the poor. What's more, people tend to marry within their social and economic class. Shocking, really. Except that's the story of human history. To the extent that a couple of world wars flattened things out for a while, we've never lived in a country or world in which class and money didn't matter and didn't affect social relationships and behaviors.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

With the difference between now and the rest of history being the location of the enclaves? Does Brooks believe that "in the good old days" an Eton boy would go to Oxford, graduate, then marry a scullery maid and settle in Yorkshire? Does he believe that families with surnames like Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Delano, Carnegie and Astor are known for their humble abodes, modest lifestyles, and marriages with members of the working class?

Brooks overtly breaks from the right-wing dogma that "liberal elites" are ruining the country's morals.

Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

That assertion is consistent with my position that, on the whole, people who disfavor legislation of morality are better at moderating their own behaviors and impulses as compared to those who view it as a necessity, and don't want others peering into their bedrooms. The Republicans who want to legislate morality are speaking to a population that is more than happy to pretend that "liberals" are condescending to them, even when the opposite is at least as often the case, and feels, for whatever reason, that people cannot be trusted to behave in a socially acceptable manner unless they are placed at risk of serious consequence, most notably pregnancy or jail.

Brooks, as you might expect, overstates his case for the moral righteousness of the "cultural elite", as it's easier to get married, stay married, remarry after divorce, and remain within the confines of what Brooks would deem a "conservative, traditionalist" life if you are wealthy, or at least financially stable. Nonetheless, this is probably the most honest criticism I've seen Brooks offer of his party - that it's rhetoric about liberal elites is pure demagoguery.

In the name of false equivalence, what the left hand giveth the right hand must take away:

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent.

Funny, although you certainly do hear about the uppermost echelons of wealth these days, most economic analysis I see still looks at wealth quintiles. The "Occupy" movement gave additional attention to the top 1%, with the real story of being the 0.1%, but that's a different story than the one being spun by Brooks.

If Brooks wants to make the claim that "Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite", perhaps he could do us the favor of identifying the Democrats of whom he speaks. While there's definitely concern on the political left that tax policy favors the wealthiest Americans, that concern has the virtue of being true. While there's concern on the left that the last three decades have seen the wealthiest Americans siphon corporate profits for their own benefit while workers' wages have stagnated or declined, that also has the virtue of being true.

Perhaps Brooks believes what he is implying, that human nature has somehow changed such that economics are irrelevant, but it seems to me that he's offering a red herring. For most of human history there has been great disparity between the wealth of the rich and poor, and throughout that time there has been suggestion that many or most of the poor are undeserving, victims not of society but of their poor values. I suspect Brooks knows he's offering a canard, because he proceeds to acknowledge the role of economics in the present state of society:

The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

The central role being what? Brooks has already told us that the "cultural elites" stand as good role models for hard work and moral behavior. What's left but economics? The top 20% are faring quite well, thank you very much, even as other quintiles have struggled.

From this point, Brooks devolves into what might be called "claptrap":

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

But Brooks told us earlier,

In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

How can Brooks argue both that "members of the lower tribe" as a class are simultaneously dropping out of the workforce and working hard? Surely it's one or the other.

Really, it seems fair to say that most people work hard, particularly those in menial jobs in which their bosses view them as expendable and easily replaced, but that the fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, and more notably a lack of jobs that people with less education and academic inclination can use as a stepping stone to the middle class. Brooks may want to pretend that this is a matter of sociology - that all we need to do is imbue the poor with the proper values and they'll be working hard and forming stable families - but you cannot honestly compare 1963 to the present without admitting that you're comparing a period of boom times for blue collar workers with a modern era in which anti-union measures, automation and outsourcing have decimated the blue collar middle class.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years.

Yet another version of, “Even though I didn’t want to, didn’t have to, and personally did not do what I’m suggesting, in order for more people to grow up with my values I think all young people should have to spend years of their lives jumping through hoops I will now arbitrarily define.” Public service, national service, military service, menial jobs.

In other words, even though Brooks tells us that the problem is not an "underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites", the way to fix the problem is to force young people, rich and poor, to spend years of their lives performing some form of community service while living in some form of MTV-style "Real World" communal housing. That will surely fix everything.

Privilege and the Race for the White House

Colbert King is upset that Steven Colbert is (sort of) making a satyrical run for the White House.

I fail to see the humor in Colbert urging South Carolinians to vote in Saturday’s primary for businessman Herman Cain, who dropped out of the presidential race but whose name remains on the ballot. Throwing away votes degrades a system already brought low by the unprecedented airing of negative ads so early in the nominating process.

That, I think, underestimates voters. The classic accusation made against anybody who votes for a third party candidate is "You're throwing your vote away," but that presupposes both that the person casting the vote believes that their candidate can win, and that the voter sees no value in casting a protest vote. On the whole, but specifically in relation to the suggestion that people vote for Cain in South Carolina, I don't think that's true. Realistically speaking, nobody who followed the suggestion would believe that Cain was going to reenter the race, and everybody doing so would recognize their vote for what it was - a protest against the rest of the field.

Colbert used wealth and position to elbow his way into the race? Sure, but what else is new.

Colbert's candidacy reminds me of the Rhinoceros Party in Canada, a satyrical party whose leading promise was the paradoxical, "Our first promise is to break all of our promises." As I recall, they stopped running when they came close to winning an election - they knew that they were a protest vote, as did everybody casting a vote in their favor, but winning would spoil everything. Colbert is going out of his way to ensure that he cannot win - his name was not on the ballot, the protest vote he urged was for a candidate who was no longer in the race, and nobody voting for Cain would have believed that vote would be counted. If Colbert wanted to be a disruptive influence, rather than illustrating some genuine problems with our political process, he could have used his wealth and position to get onto some ballots.

King should give other voters some credit. He recognizes the Colbert campaign as a joke, even if he doesn't see the humor - but the joke is "in your face". Everybody is already in on the joke.

After noting that the constitutional requirement for becoming President is pretty simple to meet, King states,

The road gets rockier from there, however.

There are the personal sacrifices of time, family and privacy, and the wear and tear on the body and psyche.

It’s a marathon that only a few are built to run.

I'm not sure that's true, as I recall any number of candidates with dubious physical and mental health nonetheless making a run for the presidency, sometimes on a perennial basis. It's not for everybody, but if King were to shift his perspective a bit he would see that what to him looks like an endless, wearying chore is, for others, a source of fulfillment, ego enlargement, and reputation-building. Does King believe that all of the candidates for the nomination, this time or in pretty much any other contested national primary, are in it to win? It's not that they wouldn't all take the victory if offered, but some are clearly in the race for other reasons. I suspect that, were he to think about it, King could probably even come up with the names of some historic presidential candidates whose motives were significantly less honorable than Colbert's.

And of course, once again, there’s the money.

Acquiring the millions needed to get a presidential campaign off the ground requires grueling hours of asking people and groups to part with their treasures on behalf of your cause.

Here's where I really have to part company with King. The money? King specifically identifies "Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Cain and now Perry". Let's see... Romney's "grueling hours" of asking himself for money and, as his campaign gained traction, asking his fellow multi-millionaire and billionaire financiers to inject money into his campaign and SuperPAC. Jon Huntsman's "grueling hours" of petitioning himself and his father for a few million to seed his campaign. Michelle Bachmann's "grueling hours" of having people blast emails to her supporters and contributors to "tea party" organizations asking them to give money to her campaign. Cain, once again, asking himself for money. Perry being drafted into the race by monied interests who, had he proved to be a viable candidate, would be continuing to shower money on his campaign.

Yes, presidential candidates often have to engage in fund raising, and to schmooze and promise favors to big donors in exchange for the money they need. King may see that process as unpleasant, unseemly, a lot of work. But having seen how professional politicians can work a room, I suspect that their perception is a bit different. They're the center of attention, people want to bring gifts, kneel before them, kiss their ring and beg favors. For some candidates I expect that process is more fun than actually serving in office.

King complains that Colbert fails to take "the political process seriously". If King means a sober process that's supposed to result in voters being able to select the best, most capable candidate with the best policy, that's a sin Colbert shares with most candidates for elected office. And if King means to bring policy into the discussion - the idea that having Colbert (sort of) in the race will somehow prevent the candidates from discussing the issues - when was it that the candidates were actually discussing the issues, let alone policy formation?

If King is complaining that it's not fair that rich people who are in the public eye have "the prominence and enough dough to form a super PAC", while other candidates have to struggle for years to get into that position, isn't that Colbert's point? He, like half of the Republican candidates, is able to enter the race and be backed by a SuperPAC by virtue of his public profile and personal wealth. Lo and behold, the result is that columnists like King are writing columns analyzing whether that's appropriate or fair. Granted, Colbert probably expected them to focus their attention on more than his own sort-of candidacy, but this is a start.

Absolute vs. Relative Economic Mobility

A while back, Matthew Yglesias wrote that, in response to the fact that our society does not have much income mobility,

The smartest conservatives, ahead of the curve, are reframing the issue again. Maybe it doesn't matter whether sons are able to move up the hierarchy from where their fathers were, maybe what matters is whether kids generally grow up to have higher absolute incomes than their parents.

I can see where Yglesias is coming from, in arguing that those attempting to reframe the issue fall among "the smartest conservatives". Yglesias, himself, has sympathy for the position and the article that inspired Yglesias's comment identifies the smart conservative, Reihan Salam, as one of the proponents of this redefinition.

But no, it's not going to happen.

Why not? First, because the "Horatio Alger" myth is central to Republican policy - tax policy, social policy, educational policy.... Consider how, four years ago, "Joe the Plumber" became the poster child for keeping taxes low on the rich. An average, blue collar guy who had aspirations of joining the 1%. You don't get the masses to rally behind regressive policies if you're blunt with them,

"You'll never benefit from these budget cuts and tax preferences, and your boss probably won't either, but rich people will keep a lot more money in their pockets. And your children will fare marginally better than you did, unless present economic trends continue in which case all bets are off."

Second, once you start offering up the nation of "relative social mobility" you lend credence to the concept of "relative poverty", and for that matter to indexing the minimum wage to inflation, to "living wage" laws, and other measures to ensure that your promise of that modest economic improvement become a reality. By the same token, people want "more than that" for their children. People want to believe that their kids could grow up to be successful, even to become President. If while running for office you puncture those dreams with a, "Yeah, your kid might win the lottery, but odds are his life will only be marginally better than yours," even if it's true you're not going to see the working masses embrace your campaign.

Third, you open the door to people challenging you by pointing to past eras of greater income mobility, or other countries that enjoy greater income mobility, and asking "What's the biggest difference between then and now". If your answer boils down to, "The biggest difference is income inequality, and our tax policies and subsidies - which we are not going to change - have so significantly skewed that balance in favor of the rich that as long as you keep voting for us things won't get better and will probably get worse," once again people aren't going to embrace your policies or campaign.

Should our politicians be more honest both about the limits of income mobility and how present policy creates and perpetuates a de facto class structure? Probably so. But it's unlikely enough that Democrats are going to be that honest about a structure they helped create. It's simply not plausible that the modern Republican party is going to be that honest about the results of its key policies.

Class and Income Rigidity in the United States

I don't want to pick on Megan McArdle, as I think her heart's in the right place on this one, but.... In an effort to explore inequality, some time back, Megan McArdle argued,

The old aristocracy was, I think, at least dimly aware that it wasn't quite fair for them to have what they had by mere virtue of being born to the right parents. But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard. (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.)

Has McArdle ever worked at a job that paid by the hour?

When Eric Erickson made a fool of himself by arguing that he worked three jobs, it wasn't just his white T-shirt that was intended to send the message, "I'm just a working guy". It's typically those who work in hourly jobs who can legitimately claim to be working multiple jobs. Why? Because their employers have only so many hours of work to offer, and when the schedule fills up you can only get more hours by changing jobs or moonlighting. If your a non-exempt employee, such that you're entitled to overtime, your employer also has a strong incentive to cap your work week at 40 hours, leaving you with more time to find and work a second job - not that you would find that to be an ideal use of your time, were you in that position, but if you need the income that's how you'll get it.

When the economy is booming, a lot of the workers that McArdle suggests aren't "work[ing] very hard" in fact put in ridiculous hours. I know some people in the construction trades who were working seventy or more hours per week during the boom. Some now have difficulty finding full-time employment, and an even harder time finding employers who are willing to pay overtime. They didn't get lazy - the economy changed.

As for those hard-working white collar types, one of the big reasons why they work more than forty hours is that they are exempt and thus their employers can require them to work more hours without paying them any additional money. Yes, some people who are chained to their desks do work very hard. Others put in a lot of face time. Others do work that's pretty mundane and could easily be distributed to other workers, but for the fact that hiring additional help would increase the employer's costs. (Perhaps McArdle has forgotten the Bush Administrations expansion of jobs that could be classified as exempt, and has overlooked the frequency with which employers are accused of cheating workers out of overtime pay - it's a big deal.)

In speaking of poverty and income inequality, McArdle argues,

I don't care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor -- whether they are hungry, cold, and sick. But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine. And I'm not sure why anyone should.

McArdle's examples seem a bit odd. I can't recall hearing anybody argue that either Gates and Buffett are undeserving of their wealth. On the one hand, McArdle seems to recognize that the two issues are unrelated - and in fact that inequality of income and wealth is what allows some entrepreneurs and investors to come out on top. But on the other she appears to be suggesting that if you're concerned about anything beyond absolute poverty, you're engaging in some form of class resentment whereby you want to strip wealth away from people like Gates and Buffett. The disconnect is highlighted by the fact that McArdle wants people to have equal economic opportunity, independent of their economic status. If McArdle's statement is meant to be, "As long as there's a reasonable path from poverty to wealth, I don't care about income inequality," fair enough. But if her statement is taken literally, surely she is aware that there is a tipping point at which income inequality will pretty much lock the class structure in place.

Despite her implication that professionals work harder than hourly workers, McArdle does recognize that there's a lot more to the picture than that. She suggests, in my opinion quite rightly, that higher wage earners are apt to give their children better education and better opportunities, and in many cases "the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else". I read a comment a while back, I believe from one of Donald Trump's children, describing how he had proposed attending a college that would have allowed him more time to pursue sports or hobbies. He was told to go to the best college he could get into. Did he necessarily get a better education there? Perhaps, but probably not. But "The Donald" has a very clear understanding of the value of branding. Trump provides an example of how somebody can benefit not just from family money, but from entering the same business as their parent. Trump's father was a successful real estate developer in New York City, so it's far from a surprise that Trump became a real estate developer in New York City. And with some hard work, luck, no small amount of ego and force of personality, along with dad's money and connections, Trump succeeded (and failed) on a much larger scale than his father. The lesson to be inferred is less that Trump received an unfair advantage, and more that children will often follow a career path consistent with that modeled for them by their parents. And yes, if you learn the ins and outs of any job from somebody who already holds it, you're more apt to succeed in that job.

Children of the wealthy are also more likely to get a level of support unavailable to the rest of us - a job at their parent's firm to help establish them in their parent's profession. Yes, about forty percent of sons at some point work for one of their father's past employers, but it should go without saying that at the bottom end of the labor pool that is more likely to establish you as a lower-end wage earner than to help propel you to the top 1% (where the number of sons working at dad's current or old employer approaches 70%).¹

Also, it's not like the top 1% through the remaining 32% of their children to the wolves. A couple of "sons of bankers" come to mind, one of whom was sharp as a tack but uninterested in banking. His father put him through law school and funded his founding of a law firm. Another was not very bright or motivated. His father bought him a commercial janitorial services company. It's much easier to enter into a profession, or to succeed as an entrepreneur, when your path to success is greased with family money.

The benefits of having wealthy parents can't be avoided and, even if you believe it should be, it's difficult to impinge a cure that would not be worse than the disease. But let's recognize that if Donald Trump's dad were a shift manager at a restaurant, Trump would be a success if he became a general manager. He would be a phenomenal success if he became a successful restauranteur - but probably still somebody we wouldn't have heard of. Trump moved from third base to home plate - but unlike most of the rest of us, he started on third.

While McArdle professes some level of surprise that although "Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd," inequality persists, perhaps she should consider both that the Ivy Leagues have not eliminated preferences for the children of alumni, and that the number of people who can attend Ivy League schools remains insignificant - even though the signal drawn from attendance is massive. Using McArdle's own anecdote from another piece, quoting Bryan Caplan's finding that "Super-elite credentials matter much more than your academic record",

You see this in Washington all the time -- a friend who went to a lesser-known state school said he could always tell the people he wasn't going to like when he met them at cocktail parties, because the minute he told them where he'd gone to school, they became extremely interested in going to get another drink or find the cheese dip. This is one of the smartest, most consistently interesting and original, most talented writers I know. Having actually attended one of those elite schools that apparently make you fascinating, I can attest firsthand that statistically, the elitists were vanishingly unlikely to be as interesting as the person they abandoned because he'd gone to a state college.

The first question that comes to mind: Why do McArdle and her friend keep going to those parties? (The answer, of course, is obvious: They're hobnobbing with rich, powerful people and it benefits them to "see and be seen".) The second question is, why does her friend keep dropping the name of his undergraduate institution into discussions? It's truly difficult for me to believe that, as a matter of course, the people at these parties are changing the subject from his scintillating conversation and saying, "This is a nice conversation and all, but unless you went to Harvard or Yale I have to move on to more important people or, if you went to a state college, the cheese dip."²

When McArdle observes that middle class parents would be horrified if their children, like those of the bottom quintile, had only a 17% chance of achieving a household income of $90,000 or more, she's correct. But that also highlights how she misses the boat on income inequality. The more education your parents have, the more wealth they have, the more business and political connections they have, the more they can do for you - even if simply by example³ - to land you among the nation's highest wage earners. If you truly don't care about income inequality, and truly don't care if the bottom drops out on the middle class, you cannot credibly claim to be concerned about the associated collapse of opportunity to rise.
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1. Admittedly the figures are from Canada, but I expect that the experience is about the same in the U.S. and U.K.

2. Unless, perhaps, these conversations involved his lobbying various political insiders for a nomination to the Supreme Court, but that's another story.

3. Most will do much more than act as role models.

I'll Bet You $10,000....

That Romney's "bet" line during the debate was carefully scripted and calculated, intended to catch the attention of the media and to shut down a "zombie lie" that had been repeatedly used against him. I will (rhetorically) bet you $10,000 that Romney and his team weighed what dollar amount to use... they didn't want anything too small because it might sound silly or suggest Romney thought he might lose, but they didn't want anything too big because it might sound like something a child might say while also magnifying Romney's wealth. Heck, if we increase by orders of magnitude, you would probably have to make it, "I'll bet you $100,000,000", before you reached the point where Romney's long-term budget would be affected by the loss, $1 billion before it would actually be more than he could cover.

It's no surprise that Rick Perry is trying to build a comeback on the bet,

Perry on Fox News Sunday called the bet "a little out of touch with the normal Iowa citizen." The Perry campaign also produced a web video focusing on Romney's position on the health insurance mandate and the debate moment. While ominous music plays and images of Romney flicker, words on the screen read, "One bet you can count on... the truth isn't for sale."

What's missing from that? Any concession that Romney was right and Perry was wrong. Amazing, Romney tried to kill a lie and it's his tactic that gets all the attention. The truth? Who cares, right? (At the same time, Romney has suggested that a mandate would be a good approach for many, perhaps most, states, so Perry's mistake was in focusing on an imagined contradiction between versions of the book as opposed to focusing on Romney's past statements about mandates. Although, given Perry's new tack of "I'll win this by bashing gays," perhaps the real problem is that he doesn't understand that a "mandate" doesn't involve being compelled to date men.)

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman -- who is trying to gain momentum in New Hampshire, where Romney currently leads -- went so far as to create an entire website slamming Romney for the debate moment: 10kbet.com.

Yes, featuring headlines like "Romney's $10,000 bet highlights personal wealth". Thanks, Jon, for letting us know that rich people shouldn't run for President and... that you'll be dropping out of the race? Seriously. Perhaps you should be taking notes from Newt Gingrich, yet another out-of-touch rich man, that you shouldn't be saying and doing things that suggest that you, also, are out of touch. I'll grant, Gingrich has a number of money-related issues that Huntsman has avoided, but I doubt that Huntsman really wants the eyes of the nation focused on his wealth and lifestyle.

Romney's comments over the years have confirmed that, as a phenomenally rich man, he is out-of-touch with the financial situation of an average person. Which, in terms of national politicians positioned to gain a presidential nomination, is par for the course. The shock these days is when somebody whose net worth is probably only in the seven digits manages to prevail. If "Romney's rich and out of touch" is a real story, worthy of potentially taking down his bid for the nomination, why only now? To me, it seems like the media is following, and thereby magnifying, the buzz rather than covering the story.

The World's Simply Not That Just (Sorry, Ross)

Something that appears with some regularity in Ross Douthat's column is his notion that we live in a meritocracy, in which "the best and the brightest" rise to positions of power and fortune, and all the undeserving folks who don't manage to achieve that type of wealth or position should simply accept their lot - and certainly not suggest that the elite contribute even slightly more of their presumptively hard-earned wealth to the commonweal. Thus when Douthat makes statements like this,

The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

At least if my current interpretation is correct, I was a bit unfair in accusing him of engaging in a form of class warfare, as he appears to sees accumulated wealth as something that is deserved - the war is thus not between classes, as such, but between the deserving and the undeserving. If you deserved more money you would have more money, and wouldn't need to join a union or suggest that rich people should pay more taxes. Undeserving seniors get Social Security and Medicare benefits that, in Douthat's eyes, they haven't earned. Rich people aren't selfish, even if they advocate a world in which they pay no taxes, because they don't have anything that they don't deserve. One might mistake him for a Calvanist.

It seems odd that would in all sincerity refer to the people who drove our economy into the ground or who have ruined companies and bankrupted investors as "the best and the brightest", given that the phrase was popularized by David Halberstam as an ironic reference to the well-educated members of the Kennedy Administration who pursued disastrous policies. After overt reference to "Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science", Douthat proclaims,

...for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.

Only ten years? It's been known for quite some time that giants often have feet of clay.

While Douthat reminds us that "pride goeth before a fall", it seems to me that Douthat confuses hubris with intelligence. That is, some people who profess to be intelligent, appear to be intelligent (often through the advantage of intensive coaching and tutoring, the use of professional speech writers, having questions submitted to them in advance, and the like), and even take great pride in their intelligence, turn out to possess less than impressive intellects. Douthat's example of "The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history" seems, to me, to be an example of exactly that phenomenon - bursting with pride, perhaps, but few of them appear to have been particularly bright.

Douthat urges that we, or perhaps I should say the Republican Party, seek

...intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.

Perhaps, though, we don't need "the best and the brightest," assuming we could measure it, let alone whatever subset of that class of people we could deem to have progressed sufficiently down the path toward becoming philosopher kings that we could trust in their humility. Perhaps what we need are people who are genuinely interested in the welfare of our nation and it's people, who have a clear sense of right and wrong, and who will attempt to bring the best solutions to the nation's problems without resorting to prevarication and hyperpartisanship. Above average intelligence would be a plus, but you can do a lot better than most of the present lot without being a genius.

As I previously indicated, Douthat's thesis extends into the world of business and finance, and he attempts to breathe new life into the Horatio Alger myth:

For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.

Reading that you would hardly know that upward mobility is in decline and has been for many years.

When Douthat observes that the "for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good", it's as if he cannot even conceive an alternate theory. Such as, some of the elites weren't as bright as he thinks. Such as, some of the brilliant people brought into the financial industry (e.g., physicists hired to create derivatives) were charged with to creating financial instruments that could not be understood by investors or regulators, not because they wanted to improve the economy but because it's easier to sell somebody a sow's ear if you first disguise it as a purse. That some of the people who were publicly denying a housing bubble were playing the same role as the tobacco industry executives who used to deny any connection between smoking and cancer - lying to make more money, and comfortable that even if others were harmed they, themselves, would continue to become richer. If Douthat paid more attention to the mindset of many wealthy people, and what a driving force money is in their lives, perhaps he would be less apt to confuse wealth with virtue.

I'm not sure what to make of the time frame Douthat proposes - while it is true that the dot com bubble and the housing bubble both burst during the past ten years I somehow doubt that Douthat, a self-described Republican, would argue that the Clinton Administration represented "the best and the brightest" doing things right - bright people making good decisions as a result of having "somehow learned humility along the way" - that he sees as absent from that same class of leaders starting pretty much when G.W. Bush took office.

Writing a defense of Joe Paterno, and of Catholic priests who covered up the sex abuse scandal in the church, Douthat takes a position that doesn't seem to square with his Catholicism, but does square with his idealization of the wealthy and powerful:

Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate. Having already cut so many corners, the thinking goes, what’s one more here or there? Why even aspire to virtues that you probably won’t achieve, when it’s easier to remain the sinner that you already know yourself to be?

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.

It's not a matter of original sin, or that we're all sinners subject to temptation. People are either good and heroic, or are mediocre to bad. Deserving or undeserving. It's only after you decide that a person is "good" or "bad" that you can determine whether his sin reflects the cutting of corners and disinterest in aspiring to virtues, or if the sin reflects the person being so blinded by his own goodness that he simply cannot see that what he is doing is wrong.

Apparently it's easier for Douthat to perceive this "too good to do anything about horrific sin" phenomenon when he's looking at those who turn a blind eye to the horrific acts of others, as opposed to those who commit the acts. So he excuses a cardinal who helped cover up child sex abuse, who "praised a French bishop for refusing to denounce an abusive priest to the civil authorities, because that cardinal had previously done good things for the poor of Colombia. He similarly excuses Joe Paterno, who, according to a biographer, "'lived a profoundly decent life' and 'improved the lives of countless people' with his efforts and example", and can therefore be presumed to be "a good man", despite allegedly covering up the abuse of children by Jerry Sandusky.¹

Wait a minute, you might interject, there are lots of very bad people who live lives that outwardly appear to be "profoundly decent", who devote time, energy and money to the aid of others, earning praise and adoration, who are ultimately revealed as frauds. A biographer might have described Jerry Sandusky as having "'lived a profoundly decent life' and 'improved the lives of countless people' with his efforts and example", but for the fact that this scandal broke. The same goes for Bernard Madoff. Even when someone repeatedly covers up misconduct, including the sexual abuse of women and children, that person cannot be presumed to be a human, and thus (as Douthat's church teaches us) a sinner. Douthat would instead project an odd version of the Madonna-whore complex onto the world at large, with some of us so pure that any sin could only be the "their very goodness", and the rest of us "bad or mediocre" whose objectively identical acts reflect our moral weakness.

Douthat asks in relation to the church cover-up, "How did the man who displayed so much moral courage in Colombia become the cardinal who was so morally culpable in Rome?", but he doesn't back away from his notion that the cardinal was a good man simply trying to do right by his church:

It was precisely because Castrillón had served his church heroically, I suspect, that he was so easily blinded to the reality of priestly sex abuse. It was precisely because Joe Paterno had done so much good for so long that he could do the unthinkable, and let an alleged child rapist continue to walk free in Penn State’s Happy Valley.

There appears to be a tribalistic element to Douthat's perceptions. That is, I don't believe he would look at the wealthy and powerful of nations like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Hussein's Iraq or Gadhafi's Libya and believe that the leadership represented a meritocracy who should not be asked to make a greater contribution to the less fortunate people of their nations, or whose bad acts can be excused out of a recognition of their saintly goodness. I doubt that he would extend that charity to the leaders of Greece and Italy. But when it comes to the financial industry, the Republican Party and the wealthy interests it serves, or popular football coaches, the blinders go on.

Douthat does not argue that sins committed "in the name of a higher good" are not sins. He instead argues that "No higher cause can trump" the obligation to serve natural Justice, "'what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt'" and that "not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark". That conclusion seems irreconcilable with Douthat's assertion that some people are so good and godly that they can be excused from moral judgment for doing exactly that, on a colossal scale, engaging in cover-ups that they had to have known would cause many additional children to suffer. While Douthat sees this as the result of a cognitive distortion ("they somehow persuaded themselves that protecting their institution's various good works mattered more than justice"; they are "led into temptation... by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind" and "in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away"), for those who fall within his preferred tribes he cannot perceive the possibility that their motivations could be impure. He does not recognize that the patterns he describes - earlier lies or thefts or adulteries [that] make the next one that much easier to contemplate - are exactly those he claims would identify his idols as "bad or mediocre people".

Something Douthat does not appear to consider, at least with the context of his preferred tribes, is that some very bad people (and some who have no moral compass) work very hard to create a facade of being good and charitable, as the facade facilitates their gaining wealth, power and authority. There is no shortage of narcissists and psychopaths in our nation's board rooms, and some of them are extremely charming people. Douthat implicitly recognizes that the guy who creates a charity to help children in order to gain access to them for sexual purposes is a bad person. But what about the guy who creates a charity, not because he cares about its good works but because it will help his public image, because he knows he will be praised for his "good work", or because it will help him trick people into believing in his inherent goodness even as he schemes to deprive them of their money?

Douthat admits that among the good people of the Catholic Church there are "bishops in love with their own prerogatives, priests for whom the ministry was about self-aggrandizement rather than service", but how do you distinguish them from the others? Absent a scandal, from the outside it can be difficult to distinguish a charismatic psychopath, driven by lust for wealth, control of others, power and praise, from a true altruist who has risen to a position of authority, and scandals don't always come. But as scandals go, if covering up the sexual abuse of children isn't a sufficient test of who is good and who is mediocre, what is?

Douthat should consider that theodicy not only makes us ask why bad things happen to good people, but why good things happen to bad people. Particularly in terms of the distribution of wealth and power, the world is nowhere near as just as he assumes.
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1. To me, the cover-up of scandals by powerful institutions exemplifies how "earlier lies... make the next one that much easier to contemplate", and even make the next lie necessary. Once you choose the path of the cover-up, you not only have to continue to conceal the original scandal, you have to conceal the cover-up. Also, institutions that cover up one atrocity rarely have covered up only that one - often it's their success in covering up nine out of ten such scandals, or ninety-nine out of a hundred, that inspires them to believe that they again engineer a successful cover-up. A cover-up, revealed, can do great harm to an institution, usually greater than that which would have resulted from initial full disclosure, but that harm may be less than what would occur were all of the scandals revealed to the public as they occurred.

The Self-Indulgence of the Rich, Powerful and Famous

There seems to be a point in every dictator's life when his biggest worry is whether his toilets should merely be gold-plated or if they should be solid gold - cases in point include Moammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, the Emir of Kuwait, and I'm sure there is no shortage of gold-plated potties in Saudi Arabia. But as Donald Trump and many others can assure you the gilded life isn't just for dictators. And as Michael Jackson might have argued, who says you can't take it with you? Nothing in this is new - gold isn't a particularly attractive metal when used ostentatiously, it's not a practical metal due to its softness and weight, but it's expensive, so screw that "King Midas" allegory and "gild me up".

The fundamental issue is that when they have accumulated so much wealth (by whatever means) that how they spend the money simply doesn't matter any more, and whether or not the money is technically theirs to spend, some people will find absurd, self-indulgent ways to squander the money, whether to satisfy their troubled senses of self-worth, to flaunt their riches, or to selfishly indulge their eccentricities. There's a non-pathological part of this that is human nature ("keeping up with", or perhaps one step ahead of, the Joneses), as humans by nature seem to be materialistic and tend to like things that are shiny and expensive. But there's pathology at play as well. ("I can't simply have tigers - they must be white tigers." "The 'Elephant Man's' skeleton is for sale, you say? How much would it cost to buy it, and is it gold-plated... yet?" "You say that I can choose between a $20,000 toilet seat that plays music, automatically sends cleansing jets of water to my delicate areas then gently blows them try, perfumes the room in case I have guests whose leavings actually stink, and maintains itself at a comfortable temperature such that my cheeks will never be cold, or $6 million for a solid gold toilet seat that is icy cold and would make even a commercial airplane lavatory seem inviting.... What's the upside of the cheap one, again?")

I would like to say that this is simply the quaint way that the ultra-rich live their lives and spend their (or their country's, or their shareholders', or your) money on expensive self-indulgence that creates a bizarre form of trickle-down to the vendors of the absurdly overpriced trinkets. But as you know, when you look at the people who live in this manner their eccentricities and self-indulgence very often extend into the rest of their lives (with the notable exception of Donald Trump who is a billionaire and is the bravest, kindest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known). Reading about the manner in which Gadhafi came on to women is creepy, and his apparent regard for Condoleezza Rice as if she were a gold-plated toilet seat with diamonds is perhaps creepier. Michael Jackson's sleepovers, whatever happened? Creepy. Sex scandals in the Catholic Church (distinguished, unfortunately, by the size of the church, not by the nature of the scandal)? Penn State? How creepy can you get.

Speaking of Penn State, I read somebody rationalizing Joe Paterno's apparent indifference to Jerry Sandusky's reported conduct, with "He was so focused on football, he probably forgot about it." Because, yeah, when you hear something like that about somebody you work with, it's in one ear, out the other. Apologists, it seems, are easy to find. It reminds me of the saying, "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Except that in most situations to which that phrase would apply, if you do nothing you're not a good man.

Moamar Gadhafi was not a good man, and it would seem fair to say that his sons were the rotten fruit of the poisonous tree. One particularly horrible story involves one of his son's (the one presciently named Hannibal) nannies, horribly burned as a punishment for refusing to beat one of Gadhafi's grandchildren. There was a good man in the household, but it would seem only one:

Eventually, a guard found her and took her to a hospital, where she received some treatment.

But when Aline Gadhafi [Moamar's daughter-in-law] found out about the kind actions of her co-worker, he was threatened with imprisonment, if he dared to help her again.

Here's the thing: the guard who tried to help the woman knew that he was putting his job at risk, and perhaps risking a much more serious consequence, when he chose to help the woman. But people who have fame, power, money and celebrity are typically surrounded by sycophants and enablers. Even in the case of a Gadhafi, there were people who could have stepped in and said, "That's over the top." Some of the statements made by Gadhafi or, for another dictator who seemed to be deep in denial up to the end, Nicolae Ceausescu, indicate that his sycophants kept him in a bubble, "protecting him" from a truth that he would have seen had he simply been willing to open his eyes. They did nothing because it profited them to do nothing. In the case of a Jackson or Sandusky, you don't have to fear imprisonment, torture or death - the worst that could have happened from taking appropriate action would have been a possible career setback. It's only if your profession is "hanger on," or "enabler in chief" that "outing" the boss (or even confronting him in private) becomes a significant problem, because the next pathetic celebrity will know that you can't be trusted to keep your mouth shut and your opinions to yourself, let alone to be complicit.

Whatever you think of Michael Jackson, he's an example of somebody who would have benefited on numerous occasions from a purging of the enablers in his life. "No, Michael, no matter how innocent, after the accusations made against you and your criminal prosecution, you can't have sleepovers with children. Even without the scandal, it's obvious that you have attachment and relationship issues you need to address, and this isn't healthy." "No, Michael, there is nothing more a cosmetic surgeon can do for you that differs from manipulation, and no ethical surgeon would operate given your body dysmorphic disorder, so if you insist on more surgery you're going to be overpaying a hack to mutilate your face." "No, Michael, even if you're in pain and can't sleep, it's not healthy to become dependent on propofol - if you need a surgical anesthetic to go to sleep, let's start addressing the actual physical, psychological and chemical dependency issues that underlie the problem." By all appearances, Jackson kept himself in a bubble similar to Gadhafi's. At some level he had to know he was surrounded by yes men, sycophants and enablers, but if you see the pathetic man who was so easily manipulated by Martin Bashir in his infamous interview, you have to deal with the astonishing reality that Jackson genuinely believed himself to be in some form of Neverland and that the interview would help the world recognize his normalcy.

Similarly, once Sandusky was shielded from criminal investigation on the times he was reportedly caught in the act, it seems that he pretty much took for granted that the protection would continue. His friends and colleagues who knew of the reports chose, "My friend, some kid... My colleague, a scandal for the football program..." and seemed to find it easy to make the wrong choice. Wrong, that is, from a human perspective. Right from the perspective of "What will keep me better positioned for my career, for making money, for keeping power and authority." And for an awful lot of people,¹ that's all that counts.

Update: Although I don't want to focus unduly on Paterno and Sandusky, their story does share some lessons about human nature that help explain how rich, powerful and famous individuals and institutions can obtain and maintain support that seems blind to the facts. At LOG, there's considerable discussion of that aspect of human nature. Tod Kelly has posted a thoughtful essay about tribalism, and why people often engage in denial and defense of the indefensible, and the remarkable ability possessed by human beings to cling to opinions that fly completely in the face of known, obvious facts. He's correct, that the tribal aspects of human nature and our unwillingness to listen to people outside of our tribe is "part of the problem" when scandals such as those involving "Herman Cain, Bill Clinton, Joe Paterno, Rick Perry, or... Steve Garvey" break.

Mark Thompson reminds us that we don't have to be defined by our worst acts (or omissions), even if our poor choices end up tarnishing or overshadowing our achievements. I'll argue a bit with this point:

A week ago, this man’s remarkable loyalty to his institution was deemed one of his most admirable traits; today, that loyalty has quite rightly cost him his job and his legacy and, most importantly, has been shown to have had unthinkable consequences for innocent children. That is precisely what should scare us the most if things like this are ever to become less frequent.

Paterno was willing to risk a scandal when he passed along the report of Sandusky's alleged conduct. He did not cover up that act out of loyalty to his institution. But when his institution chose to cover it up, he was loyal to the cover-up, and turned a blind eye to compelling evidence that Sandusky's misconduct continued. The longer things were covered up, and the more that was covered up, the worse the consequences of the truth coming out - and hence the greater the need to perpetuate the cover-up. In retrospect, doing the right thing - making sure that there was a full police investigation of Sandusky - would have been the best thing for Paterno, his (nominal) supervisors and the football program. But instead they gambled on the possibility that the truth would not come out.

E.D. Kain collects and shares some wisdom about the outrage at Paterno, and shares some thoughts about the genesis of tribalism.
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1. You can read that phrase in one of two ways; both are apt.

Larry Summers and the Harvard C Students

They're probably his favorites:

The A, B and C alums at Harvard in fact could be broadly characterized thus, he said: The A students became academics, B students spent their time trying to get their children into the university as legacies, and the C students—the ones who had made the money—sat on the fund-raising committee.

I'm reminded of somebody else's observation:

“One of the speakers at my 25th reunion said that, according to a survey he had done of those attending, income was now precisely in inverse proportion to academic standing in the class, and that was partly because everyone in the lower third of the class had become a Wall Street millionaire.”

I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.

That article goes on to suggest that, as big bucks went to Wall Street jobs, so did the smart kids:

“When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.”

But apparently it was the C students who gave most generously to Harvard during Summers' Presidency, and who paid him (a grown-up smart kid) millions to... I guess help them understand derivatives? Something like that.

Fritter and Waste

The New York Times is infamous for its articles expressing sympathy for people who have suffered the fall from being truly wealthy to being, say, merely upper middle class. I hardly know what to make of this one. The opening suggests that the subject of the article is living a modest, meager existence, which in fact appears to be true... for now. It then explains,

It is a far cry from the life that Mr. Martin and his family enjoyed until recently at their Adirondacks waterfront camp at Tupper Lake, N.Y. Their garage held three stylish cars, including a yellow Aston Martin; they owned three horses, one that cost $173,000; and Mr. Martin treated his wife, Kate, to a birthday weekend at the Waldorf-Astoria, with dinner at the “21” Club and a $7,000 mink coat.

That luxurious world was fueled by a check Mr. Martin received in 1998 for $14 million, his share of the $600 million sale of Martin Media, an outdoor advertising business begun by his father in California in the 1950s. After taxes, he kept about $10 million.

The article goes on to describe various indulgent and wasteful decisions that largely frittered away that inheritance, with an allusion to the housing market as if to suggest that this was simply a case of bad luck. Having poured more than half of the inheritance into building a luxury home, which is nonetheless subject to a seven figure mortgage, a prospective buyer has offered them barely more than they owe. But if they accept the offer and they're lucky they'll end up with six figures in the bank, which puts them in pretty rare company these days.

Did this heir never heard the admonition, "Don't spend the principal"? I know, that oversimplifies economic reality. Sometimes it's necessary and even sensible to spend part of the principal. But not on six figure cars and racehorses, and self-indulgent luxury housing that, even in a good market, could not reasonably be considered as an investment with a sale unlikely to result in massive losses. There is no reason a family of four cannot be set for life based on a $10 million after-tax windfall.

In seeing how people handle (and mishandle) money, I have come to the conclusion that if you redistributed all of the nation's wealth equally among its citizens, you would be back to the same, skewed wealth distribution within two generations, possibly one. Many among the wealthy would object to this "wealth redistribution" not because they reject that probable outcome, but because in their hearts they know that regaining their wealth and privilege would require luck, sacrifice, and possibly even hard work. That is, once wealth again approaches its current distribution, there would be a significant shift in who ended up wealthy and who ended up less privileged.