Peter Frase

Recently The Atlantic published a piece about how "a generation of file-sharers is ruining the future of entertainment". The piece is pretty silly, since it conflates "the future of entertainment" with "the profitability of the major entertainment corporations", and in particular the record industry. Marc Weidenbaum has a nice explanation of how absurd that is. But even if you believe that the profitability of these companies is somehow necessary for us to have culture, the concern for their health seems to me wildly disingenuous and misplaced. Their troubles are not a function of "freeloaders" or the evils of the Internet. They are a result of greed and an unwillingness to part with an obsolete business model--an unwillingness that has been encouraged and abetted by the state and its approach to intellectual property law.

Here's my solution for the record companies. All they need to do is offer a service that provides:

• Unlimited downloads of a huge selection of music from both recent years and past decades...
• In a high-quality format...
• With absolutely no copy protection or other Digital Rights Management...
• For no more than $5 per month.

Why do I think this might be a success? Because it already exists. The SoulSeek network is a file-sharing service that contains a huge selection--at least for the kinds of music I tend to like. And though it's free to use, for a $5 donation you get a month of "privileges", which essentially put you at the front of the line when downloading from other users, which makes the whole experience much faster.

I've given a lot of money to SoulSeek over the past couple of years--nearly $5 a month, as it turns out. And I would have happily given that money to a similar service that gave full legal access to copyrighted downloads, and passed some of that money on to the artists. But it doesn't exist, because the record companies still believe they can force us to pay for $12 CDs and $1 iTunes song downloads. They don't cling to that model because it's the only one possible, but because they're too greedy and short-sighted to try anything else.

Of course, the record companies and their apologists would immediately claim that the model I've described isn't economically viable, and they could never make enough money from it to do all the good work they supposedly do to find and develop young artists. But even at $5 a month, there's a lot of money to be made here. If unlimited downloads at a monthly rate caught on, it could come to be something like cable TV that a large percentage of households pay for as a matter of routine. I don't think this is all that implausible: people like music almost as much as they like TV, and what I'm proposing would be an order of magnitude cheaper than cable.

According to the cable providers' trade assocation, there are 62.1 million basic cable subscriptions in the United States. This number of online music subscriptions, at $5 per month, would bring in around $3.7 billion of revenue. In 2005, total revenue from the sale of recorded music in the U.S. was about $4.8 billion. When you consider how much cheaper digital distribution is than manufacturing and shipping physical media, the unlimited-downloads model looks pretty competitive with traditional sales.

Now, maybe this model wouldn't catch on in the way I've suggested. But if people continue to prefer buying their music a la carte, there's no reason a subscription-based service couldn't coexist with iTunes style pay-per-download. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of incentive for the big copyright cartels to move toward the system I've sketched out here, because the Obama administration seems intent on using the repressive power of the state to force people into consuming media in the way the media conglomerates would prefer. Atrocities like the ACTA treaty are moving us toward a world of pervasive surveillance in which our cultural wealth is kept under lock and key for the benefit of a few wealthy copyright-holders.

In light of all this, the correct response to anyone who decries the moral perfidy of file-sharers is derisive laughter. The media companies have chosen to transition into a form of rentier capitalism that requires them to wage war on their own consumers. In that environment, it can hardly be surprising that the consumers fight back.

For years now--decades, in fact--statisticians and social scientists have been complaining about the practice of testing for the presence of some relationship in data by running a regression and then looking to see whether some coefficient is statistically significant at some arbitrary confidence level (say, 95 percent.) And while I completely endorse these complaints, they can often seem rather abstract. Sure, you might say, the significance level is arbitrary, and you can always find a statistically significant effect with a big enough sample size, and statistical significance isn't the same as substantive importance. But as long as you're sensitive to these limitations, surely it can't hurt to use statistical significance as a quick way of checking whether you need to pay attentio to a relationship between variables, or whether it can be safely ignored?

As it turns out, a reliance on statistical significance can lead you to a conclusion that is not just imprecise or misleading, but is in fact the exact opposite of the correct answer. Until now, I've never found a really simple, clear example of this, although the stuff discussed in Andrew Gelman's "The Difference Between 'Significant' and 'Not Significant' Is Not Statistically Significant" is a good start. But now along comes Phil Birnbaum with a report of a really amazing howler of a bad result, driven entirely by misuse of statistical significance. This is going to become my go-to example of significance testing gone horribly wrong.

Birnbaum links to this article, which used a study of cricket players to argue that luck plays a big role in how people fare in the labor market. The basic argument is that cricket players do better at home than on the road, but that teams don't take this into account when deciding what players to keep for their team. The result is that some players are more likely to be dropped just because they had the bad luck to make their debut on the road.

Now, I happen to be inclined a priori to agree with this argument, at least for labor markets in general if not cricket (which I don't know anything about). And perhaps because the argument is intuitively compelling, the paper was discussed on the New York Times Freakonomics blog and on Matt Yglesias's blog. But the analysis that the authors use to make their case is entirely bogus.

Birnbaum goes into it in excellent detail, but the gist of it is as follows. They estimate a regression of the form:

In this model, Avg is your average as a cricket bowler, and HomeDebut is 1 if you debut at home, 0 if you debut on the road.  We expect coefficient B to be negative--if your average is lower, you have a better chance of being dropped. But if teams are taking the home field advantage into account, coefficients C and D should be positive, indicating that teams will value the same average more if it was achieved on the road rather than at home.

And what did the authors find? C and D were indeed positive. This would suggest that teams do indeed discount high averages that were achieved at home relative to those achieved on the road. Yet the authors write:

[D]ebut location is superfluous to the retention decision. Information about debut location is individually and jointly insignificant, suggesting that these committees focus singularly on debut performance,  regardless of location. This signal bias suggests that batsmen lucky enough to debut at home are more likely to do well on debut and enjoy greater playing opportunities.

How do they reach this conclusion? By noting that the coefficients for the home-debut variables are not statistically significant. But as Birnbaum points out, the magnitudes and directions of the coefficients are completely consistent with what you might expect to find if there was in fact no home-debut bias in retention decisions. And the regressions are only based on 431 observations, meaning that large standard errors are to be expected. So it's true that the confidence intervals on these coefficients include zero--but that's not the same as saying that zero is the most reasonable estimate of their true value! As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As Birnbaum says, all these authors have really shown is that they don't have enough data to properly address their question.

Birnbaum goes into all of this in much more detail. I'll just add one additional thing that makes this case especially egregious. All the regressions use "robust standard errors" to correct for heteroskedasticity. Standard error corrections like these are very popular with economists, but this is a perfect example of why I hate them. For what does the robustness-correction consist of? In general, it makes standard errors larger. This is intended to decrease the probability of a type I error, i.e., finding an effect that is not there. But by the same token, larger standard errors increase type II error, failing to find an effect that is there. And in this case, the authors used the failure to find an effect as a vindication of their argument--so rather than making the analysis more conservative -i.e., more robust to random variation and mistaken assumptions--the "robust" standard errors actually tip the scales in favor of the paper's thesis!

It's entirely possible that the authors of this paper were totally unaware of these problems, and genuinely believed their findings because they had so internalized the ideology of significance-testing. And the bloggers who publicized this study were, unfortunately, engaging in a common vice: promoting a paper whose findings they liked, while assuming that the methodology must be sound because it was done by reputable people (in this case, IMF economists.) But things like this are exactly why so many people--both inside and outside the academy--are instinctively distrustful of quantitative research. And the fact that Phil Birnbaum dug this up exemplifies what I love about amateur baseball statisticians, who tend to be much more flexible and open minded in their approach to quantitative methods. I suspect a lot of trained social scientists would have read over this thing without giving it a second though.

April 1 is "Census Day", the day on which you're supposed to have turned in your response to the 2010 census. Of course, lots of people haven't returned their form, and the Census Bureau even has a map where you can see how the response rates look in different parts of the country.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about the possibility that conservatives are refusing to fill out the census as a form of protest. This behavior has been encouraged by the anti-census rhetoric of elected officials such as Representatives Michelle Bachman (R-MN) and Ron Paul (R-TX).  In March, the Houston Chronicle website reported that response rates in Texas were down, especially in some highly Republican areas. And conservative Republican Patrick McHenry (R-NC) was so concerned about this possible refusal--which could lead conservative areas to lose federal funding and even congressional representatives--that he went on the right-wing site redstate.com to encourage conservatives to fill out the census.

Thus far, though, we've only heard anecdotal evidence that right-wing census refusal is a real phenomenon. Below I try to apply more data to the question.

The Census Bureau provides response rates by county in a downloadable file on their website.  The data in this post were downloaded on April 1. To get an idea of how conservative a county is, we can use the results of the 2008 Presidential election, and specifically Republican share of the two-party vote--that is, the percentage of people in a county who voted for John McCain, with third-party votes excluded. The results look like this:

It certainly doesn't look like there's any overall trend toward lower participation in highly Republican counties, and indeed the correlation between these two variables is only -0.01. In fact, the highest participation seems to be in counties that are neither highly Democratic nor highly Republican, as shown by the trend line.

So, myth: busted? Not quite. There are some other factors that we should take into account that might hide a pattern of conservative census resistance. Most importantly, many demographic groups that tend to lean Democratic, such as the poor and non-whites, are also less likely to respond to the census. So even if hostility to government were holding down Republican response rates, they still might not appear to be lower than Democratic response rates overall.

Fortunately, the Census Bureau has a measure of how likely people in a given area are to be non-respondents to the census, which they call the "Hard to Count score". This combines information on multiple demographic factors including income, English proficiency, housing status, education, and other factors that may make people hard to contact. My colleagues Steve Romalewski and Dave Burgoon have designed an excellent mapping tool that shows the distribution of these hard-to-count areas around the county, and produced a report on the early trends in census response around the country.

We can test the conservative census resistance hypothesis using a regression model that predicts 2010 census response in a county using the 2008 McCain vote share, the county Hard to Count score, and the response rate to the 2000 census. Including the 2000 rate will help us further isolate any Republican backlash to the census, since it's a phenomenon that has supposedly arisen only within the last few years. Since different counties can have wildly differing population densities, the data is weighted according to population.* The resulting model explains about 70% of the variation in census response across counties, and the equation for predicting the response looks like this:

The coefficient of 0.06 for the Republican vote share variable means that when we control for the 2000 response rate and the county HTC score, Republican areas actually have higher response rates, although the effect is pretty small.  If two counties have identical HTC scores and 2000 response rates but one of them had a 10% higher McCain vote in 2008, we would expect the more Republican county to have a 0.6% higher census 2010 response rate. **

Now, recall that the original news article that started this discussion was about Texas. Maybe Texas is different? We can test that by fitting a multi-level model in which we allow the effect of Republican vote share on census response to vary between states. The result is that rather than a single coefficient for the Republican vote share (the 0.06 in the model above), we get 50 different coefficients:

Or, if you prefer to see your inferences in map form:

The reddish states are places where having more Republicans in a county is associated with a lower response rate to the census, and blue states are places where more Republican counties are associated with higher response rates.

We see that there are a few states where Republicans seem to have lower response rates than Democratic ones, such as South Carolina and Nebraska. Even here, though, the confidence intervals are crossing zero or close to it. And Texas doesn't look particularly special, the more Republican areas there seem to have better response rates (when controlling for the other variables), just like most other places.

So given all that, how can we explain the accounts of low response rates in Republican areas? The original Houston Chronicle news article says that:

In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state's most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent.

OK, so let's look at those counties in particular. Here's a comparison of the response rate to the 2000 census, the response this year, and the response that would be predicted by the model above. (These response rates are higher than the ones quoted in the article, because they are measured at a later date.)

The first thing I notice is that the Chronicle was fudging a bit when it called these "among the state's most Republican" counties. Culberson county doesn't look very Republican at all! The others, however, fit the bill. And for all three, the model does substantially over-predict census response.  (Culberson county has no data for the 2000 response rate, so we can't get a prediction there.) What's going on here? It looks like maybe there's something going on in these counties that our model didn't capture.

To understand what's going on, let's take a look at the ten counties where the model made the biggest over-predictions of census response:

I have a hard time believing that the response rate in Duchesne county, Utah is really 0%, so that's probably some kind of error. But as for the rest, most of these counties are heavily Republican too, which suggests that maybe there is some phenomenon going on here that we just aren't capturing. But now look at the counties where the model made the biggest under-prediction--where it thought response rates would be much lower than they actually were:

Most of these are Republican areas too!

So what's going on? It's hard to say, but my best guess is that part of it has to do with the fact that most of these are fairly low-population counties. With a smaller population, these places are going to show more random variability in their average response rates than the really big counties. Smaller counties tend to be rural counties, and rural areas tend to be more conservative. Thus, it's not surprising that the places with the most surprising shortfalls in census response are heavily Republican--and that the places with the most surprising high response rates are heavily Republican too.

At this point, I have to conclude that there really isn't any firm evidence of Republican census resistance. That's not to say it doesn't exist. I'm sure it does, even if it's not on a large enough scale to be noticeable in the statistics.  It's also possible that the Republican voting variable I used isn't precise enough--the sort of people who are most receptive to anti-census arguments are probably a particular slice of far-right Republican. And it's always difficult to make any firm conclusions about the behavior of individuals based on aggregates like county-level averages, without slipping into the ecological fallacy. Nonetheless, these results do suggest the strong possibility that the media have been led astray by a plausible narrative and a few cherry-picked pieces of data.

* Using unweighted models doesn't change the main conclusions, although it does bring some of the Republican vote share coefficients closer to zero--meaning that it's harder to conclude that there is any relationship between Republican voting and census response, either positive or negative.

** All of these coefficients are statistically significant at a 95% confidence level.

In light of recent events and the ambivalence expressed in the Health Care Reform thread I started at the Activist, it seemed appropriate to resurrect the graphic from this post:

As a teenager in Minnesota, I attended my first Democratic Party caucus, where we sat in a church basement while a prospective candidate for office appealed for our support. At one point, a member of the audience asked the candidate for his position on the means-testing of public programs. When the candidate responded by asking which programs, in particular, ought to be means-tested, the questioner replied "any that conceivably could be means-tested".

At the time I didn't yet understand what "means testing" meant, but I still found this response a bit peculiar. It suggested that "means testing" was some kind of general point of principle rather than some technical point about implementing specific programs, which is what it sounded like.

I later found out that means testing refers to the practice of making public benefits conditional on one's demonstrated need for them, and on one's financial means of obtaining equivalent services in the private market. Policies that are specifically targeted at the poor, such as food stamps and Medicaid in the United States, are therefore means-tested programs. People like the man at the caucus meeting are in favor of extending this structure to programs which are not currently means-tested, like Social Security. They argue that cash support for the aged should be provided only to those who do not have sufficient income to get along without it.

This position has a superficial plausibility that makes it attractive not only to conservatives, but even to people on the left who are concerned about equality and social justice. It seems unnecessary, even unjust, to provide public benefits to those who are already affluent, particularly when doing so uses up finite public funds that could otherwise be redirected to those more deserving. However, I have come around to the position that means-testing of public benefits is something that the left should essentially never support.

The first justification for this position is entirely political in nature. In short, I do not believe it is possible to sustain the public consensus necessary to defend a generous welfare state regime, if the benefits of that regime are perceived as being directed to a privileged subset of the population. Setting up benefits in this way inevitably breeds resentment among those segments of the working class who pay taxes and do not receive substantial benefits, who then become open to the argument that the poor are parasitic on their hard work. This tendency is accentuated by the fact that the beneficiaries of means-tested programs will tend to be people who are already subject to social stigma and bigotry, such as women and members of racial minorities. The paradigmatic example of this in the United States is the dismantling of "welfare as we know it" in the 1990's. In that struggle, the barely-coded racist imagery of "welfare queens" highlighted a perception that the recipients of welfare were undeserving and opportunistic Others rather than people who could have, with a bit of bad luck, been any of us.

Not all elements of the welfare state suffer the same fate as welfare, however, not even in the United States. Consider, for example, the resilience of Social Security and Medicare in the face of decades of persistent conservative and neo-liberal attacks, culminating most recently in George W. Bush's abortive attempt to privatize Social Security. Those programs remain extremely popular with a broad cross-section of the public, to the point that Republicans will demagogue against Democratic health care proposals by posing as defenders of Medicare.

The difference between Medicare and Welfare, of course, is that Medicare is for everybody. You receive it when you turn 65, with no ifs, ands or buts. It therefore has the character of a social right, an entitlement of citizenship, rather than a special benefit or privilege. If a means test were to be imposed, however, it would convert Medicare into a program like Welfare--or indeed, a program like Medicaid, which, though ostensibly available nationwide, tends to be provided in a quite paltry form in poorer and more conservative states.

I therefore conclude that means testing of public benefits is little more than a trap set for progressives by those whose ultimate goal is the total destruction of these programs. Universal social rights are politically defensible, while particularist benefits are not. This lesson is, I think, supported by the work of Political Scientist Paul Pierson; as Joshua Tucker explains at the Monkey Cage, Pierson "explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate."

There is, however, an additional reason to support universalistic rather than targeted public programs, and this is a matter of principle rather than politics. The problem with means-tested benefits is not only that they are politically untenable, but that they inevitably put the state in the business of judging the worth and deservingness of applicants--and thus, by extension, judging the way in which they lead their lives. If, for example, welfare benefits are made contingent on performing work of some kind, then the state must decide what counts as a legitimate form of work. Does, for example, a mother's time spent raising a child count? Does getting a college education count? If it does, are all majors equally acceptable?

The fact that the state must adjudicate these issues--and must do so continually over time, since a person's status is constantly subject to change--means that benefit recipients are constantly subject to arbitrary bureaucratic domination. Universal benefits, on the other hand, require relatively little meddling in people's lives: in a country with universal health care, the only consideration for the state is whether or not you are a citizen. One should not, of course, understate the extremely fraught and contentious politics of citizenship itself, which may turn out to be the Achilles' heel of social democracy in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I regard it as a major step forward if we are arguing over who has the rights of citizenship rather than attempting to judge what makes a person deserving of some particular benefit.  I think that ultimately, means tested benefits tend to make the poor less free and less autonomous than the affluent. This is precisely the opposite of the goal we should be aiming at in thinking about the welfare state, which should be about enhancing human freedom and facilitating human flourishing.

This line of argument is, in a certain sense, in sympathy with critiques of the welfare state that have been offered from libertarian, anarchist, and Foucauldian perspectives. Unfortunately, discussion of these arguments tends to become bogged down in a narrow debate over whether one is "for" or "against" the welfare state. By now, however, we should all understand that there is not one welfare state but many, and that different institutional configurations can have very different implications for people's lives. Thus my goal as a writer and researcher is to promote a vision of the welfare state that enables individual autonomy and freedom by guaranteeing a basic standard of living as a human right, while simutaneously critiquing the idea that public benefits are special supports provided only to the deserving poor, and only in those instances where the private capitalist marketplace has "failed".

Photo by Tony Pierce.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's odd declaration that "there are no second acts in American lives" is, as has been said, among the most inaccurate statements ever made about the country. America is defined by its second lives, and almost nothing--not terrorism, not treason, not even urinating on an underage girl on video--can prevent the eternal recurrence of our public figures.

So I was not surprised by the return of Jaron Lanier. I first encountered this asshat in Thomas Frank's One Market Under God, where he appeared as an example of the bankrupt culture of the dot-com bubble: a guy who was celebrated (by bell hooks, even!) for his dreadlocks and his general counter-cultural persona, but whose contribution to public debate consisted of defending the neoliberal conventional wisdom and sticking up for the Microsoft monopoly.

Now Lanier is back to inform us that the Internet is ruining everything. His schtick is mashup of three old chestnuts: that post-modern, sample-based forms of creation are inferior to "real" creativity, that rampant piracy is making it impossible for creative workers to make a decent living, and that online anonymity trashes civil discourse.

The first argument is so stupid--and so redolent of 1950's parents complaining about rock and roll, or baby boomers trashing rap--that I think it's basically self-refuting for anyone under 40. The second strikes me as a potential but not a real problem, since the Internet has notably failed to make a significant dent in the volume of artistic production. To the extent that online "free culture" destabilizes the careers of people I actually respect--Charles Stross, for example--I'm sympathetic, but still not inclined to join the hand-loom weaver defense committee. We need to find other ways of supporting artistic work, rather than clinging to a repressive and inefficient regime of artificial scarcity.

The denunciation of anonymity is the most compelling, however, and you hear it repeated all the time, by people of all ages and political temperaments. It is undoubtedly the case that anonymous trolls have a remarkable ability to disrupt rational discourse; anyone who has ever had their forum invaded by birthers or accidentally looked at the comments on a YouTube video can attest to this.

However, I do not think we should be so quick to give up the power and freedom that comes from anonymity. Opponents of anonymity will emphasize that when your statements are attached to your real name, you are forced to take responsibility for them. This is true, but it has some ominous implications. What makes the question of identity on the Internet so fraught is that when you reveal your identity you reveal it not just to your immediate interlocutors, but to friends, family, potential employers, the state, and anyone who cares to google your name. This point is often lost, I think, on critics of anonymity who are already public figures (often with secure academic or journalistic sinecures of one kind of another) and therefore have little to fear (and much to gain) from associating their comments with their identity.

Moreover, a lack of anonymity is no guarantee of civility. For a case study, see this thread, in which the pundit Jim Sleeper behaves like a colossal ass while denouncing the anonymity of some acerbic but basically civil critics in one of his comment threads.

Critics of anonymity can, of course, propose the alternative of privacy. That is, even if your interventions in public discourse are associated with your name, employers or governments or schools or credit card companies  can be prohibited from using those words against you. Yet I doubt that this is really the right place to make our stand. There is, first of all, the practical difficulty of preventing state and private entities--which now gather almost unfathomable amounts of data on the population--from making use of information in ways that benefit them. But even more than this, what does the concept of privacy even mean today? We still deploy the concept of a "private sphere" as though it denotes some clearly defined part of our lives that is distinct from the "public" part, that is accessible to everyone. But this division depends for its meaning on a particular social structure, in which we have one set of "public" relations--in politics, and the labor market--and another set of "private" social relationships centered on the family. I'll quote what I said in an exchange with Rob Horning, who invoked Herbert Marcuse as a critic avant la lettre of social networking, consumerism, and the concomitant attenuation of privacy:

What does it mean for the individual to be “thrown back on himself alone”, to be able to “think and question and find”? The full explication is too long to draw out here, but I’ve concluded that the sort of non-capitalist individuality that Marcuse is defending only makes sense within a society that still makes a strong distinction between “public” and “private” spheres. It’s important to note that the private, here, is based on the bourgeois nuclear family, not the individual—Marcuse’s debt to Freud and left-Freudians like Wilhelm Reich is really important.

This kind public-private distinction is itself rooted in a contrast between mid-20th century mass consumer capitalism and an earlier form of capitalism in which the public-private distinction still had more salience (at least for the privileged classes). Such a distinction is historically specific to Marcuse’s time—for people my age (and I think I’m about the same age as you, Rob), our frame of reference is just a previous stage of mass culture. These days that’s basically true for anyone under 65. Thus my suspicion that rejecting social networking, the Internet, etc. is really just a nostalgia for an earlier kind of consumer culture.

So the recourse to individuality as an alternative ends up sounding like a kind of absurd narcissism when you counsel us to “sit quietly in a room, as Pascal prescribed”. In a society that is already totally atomized, rejecting mass culture means being totally anti-social, which is not what Marcuse was recommending.

I’m not sure anymore that defending “privacy” as such is a useful place to make our stand. Privacy from whom, and for whom? Again, without the bourgeois notion of the “private sphere” it seems arbitrary to make this distinction. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about having every aspect of the self be an open book for Capital. But I wonder if in the 21st century surveillance society, the relevant issue isn’t the right to *anonymity* rather than the right to privacy.

What does it mean to invoke anonymity as an alternative to privacy? One advantage of this move is that it allows us to leave behind the premise that each of us has a single, authentic self. The whole critique of anonymity rests upon the assumption that we can choose one of two ways of presenting ourselves: as our one "true" self, associated with our legal name, consistent and continuing over time, or as an anonymous and irresponsible avatar of the moment, who can drive-by troll a comment thread and then disappear into the night. Neither of these poles represent the way most people actually live, however. Even those of us who never post anonymously online have multiple selves: work self, school self, family self, bar self, fantasy baseball self, or whatever.

The Internet-age culture of pseudonymous handles only codifies this, and in some ways actually makes it more accountable. In the bizarre Jim Sleeper exchange I linked above, a couple of Sleeper's antagonists make an important point: just because their comment-thread handles aren't their real names doesn't mean they don't care about the reputations of those handles. Anonymity isn't a way of avoiding accountability so much as a way of dividing it, acknowledging the reality that we are legion, we contain multitudes.

To the extent that truly one-off, unaccountable, drive-by anonymity is a problem, I think the solution is not to demand that people "take off their masks" but to devise new ways of managing anonymous and pseudonymous communities. That might mean a benevolent monarchy under a blogger like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who presides over the finest commenter community on the political internet. Or it might mean technical innovations like Slashdot Moderation, a breakthrough that I wish was much more widely applied on non-geek sites. But anonymity, I think, is here to stay. And that's as it should be.

Cross-posted from The Activist

"To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." --Marx, Capital

"Are you a good team player/remember the boss is your best friend/kill your head." --Born Against

CBS chose to premiere their new reality show, "Undercover Boss", after the Super Bowl, indicating that they expect big things from it. And the premise is undeniably appealing: sending CEOs out to work entry-level jobs at the companies they control. In the first episode, we follow Larry O'Donnell, president of Waste Management, as he picks up litter, rides a garbage truck, and cleans toilets. As cheap populist theater, it's hard to resist.

Predictably, the show is really an affirmation of the class hierarchy it pretends to challenge. Its core lesson is that, should the benevolent corporate ruler deign to walk among the peasants, he will surely recognize the injustice of their plight and leap to action to remedy the situation. We get copious evidence of the CEO's empathy, his heartfelt desire to improve his employee's lives and help them enjoy their jobs. The episode ends with O'Donnell giving a speech acknowledging the struggles of the workers he has toiled alongside, as he promises to be a different and better leader from this day forward. As the credits roll, we are given brief "happily ever after" messages about the fate of the five rank-and-file employees we have met.

Of course, it's trite and obvious to point out that television tends to portray structural inequalities in terms of personal morality and individual solutions. If that was all there was to "Undercover Boss", it wouldn't rate a post. But what really struck me about the episode was something that relates to my recent post on guaranteed income. This show inadvertently makes the point that there is nothing noble or honorable about being working class under capitalism, despite what capitalist propagandists and even some traditional leftists would have you believe. On the contrary, being forced to work at an unpleasant job in return for wages leads to a degradation of the soul and a deformation of one's character.

This is made painfully evident by the heroes and villains in "Undercover Boss". The heroes--other than the CEO himself--are the everyday workers. And they seem like basically good people dealing with difficult circumstances. But their attitude toward their jobs is, at best, a resigned cynicism, like that of the woman who shrugs her shoulders at being followed by corporate spies and forced to urinate in a can in order to make her quota of trash pickups. And at worst, they show that they've internalized a work ethic that causes them to become complicit in exploiting their fellow workers. One man, who holds his job despite suffering from kidney failure, rides O'Donnell relentlessly for being too slow to pick up trash on a windy hillside, and then fires him after ridiculing him for being a worse worker than a dialysis patient. Even more horrifying is the man who brings a cheerful, can-do disposition to his job of sucking unspeakable waste out of the depths of a carnival porta-potty. O'Donnell commends him for his talent at motivating him to do this dirty job, even making it seem "fun". And one can see why as a CEO, he would this employee so valuable. But watching the two of them interact, one is struck by the gulf that separates a man forced to clean toilets, who adopts a positive attitude in order to make the work bearable, from the CEO who patronizingly approves of his attitude.

The villains in this drama are, in their own way, just as poignant. They are, for the most part, middle managers--pasty white guys who sit a bit higher on the corporate ladder than the spotlighted workers, but many rungs below CEO O'Donnell. In several scenes of "Undercover Boss", O'Donnell puts these characters on the spot and calls them out for various overbearing and callous managerial demands. These scenes fall into a long tradition of vilifying middle management in post-industrial American culture: it's the impulse that animates Dilbert, Office Space, and the Office. Middle managers make easy targets because they're the face of the boss that workers actually see--unlike the top managers who will never meet workers face-to-face outside of the fantasy world of reality TV.

At best, people focus their resentment on middle mangers for the same reason that radicals and oppressed people feel a visceral animosity toward cops, even though they are only foot soldiers for a much larger power structure. But watching the interviews on "Undercover Boss", I was reminded of the stories of Soviet peasants and workers, faced with the brutality of, in turn, the Cossacks and the Communist bureaucracy. They would cling to the notion that the big leader--first the Czar, later Stalin--would be outraged if he only knew what his agents were up to, and would surely make things right.

But as the liberal economist Brad DeLong likes to say, "the Cossacks work for the Czar". The squirmiest parts of "Undercover Boss" are the interludes where O'Donnell expresses his shock and dismay at the brutal policies implemented by underlings as they attempt to implement the productivity targets that he himself has imposed. He behaves as though all of these nasty outcomes are the fault of small-minded managers, who simply misunderstood his benevolent motives.

In the end, then, no-one on this show comes off looking good. The boss looks like a smarmy and self-satisfied hypocrite; the managers look petty and cruel; and the rank-and-file look either beaten-down, brutalized, or brainwashed. The secret lesson of the show is that the powerlessness of workers has horrible spiritual consequences both for them and for their bosses. I think a lot of people are reluctant to make this argument--I'm reluctant to make it too--because it seems disrespectful of people who are generally less privileged than those of us with the time to write rambling blog posts about TV shows. But that's a risk I'm willing to take, if the alternative is to patronize people by romanticizing their work even though, in all honesty, I wouldn't for one second consider trading places with them.

The healthiest reaction to the plight of the people featured on "Undercover Boss" is to fight for a society in which people aren't forced to clean out toilets and then pretend they enjoy it. One way to do that is to build strong unions that can stand up for the rights of people who will never be lucky to appear on a CBS reality TV show. But the left needs to think hard about other models, including the one I raised the other day--a minimum income that allows everyone enough to survive on, no matter what. It's hard to imagine that people would be so eager to oppress their fellow workers, or feign enjoyment of their crappy jobs, if they had the same choice given to the star of "Undercover Boss": the choice not to be there.

[Cross-posted from The Activist]

Serious debate about our visions for the future is always welcome, so it's nice to see Jason Schulman and David Schweickart debating "market socialism" and related things on this site. I don't have a lot more to add about formal models of the socialist economy, because frankly I'm not all that interested in them. Schemes for socialist economies--whether market or planned or whatever--tend to come off as a a bit of an exercise in what Marx derisively referred to as  "writing recipes for the kitchens of the future". Trying to predict exactly what socialism will look like is foolhardy--and moreover anti-democratic, since it pre-empts the actions and decisions of the actual masses who will have to make a post-capitalist world happen. So while these thought experiments about alternative economic models can be useful in clarifying our principles, I don't think we need to take the details all that seriously.

Rather than trying to draw up a detailed blueprint of a socialist economy, I prefer to think in terms of what Andre Gorz called "non-reformist reforms": changes to the system that can be implemented under capitalism, but which set the stage for further radical transformations. And I want to highlight one particular such reform that's associated with Gorz, and which commenter R. Burke brings up in the comments of Jason's recent post: the guaranteed minimum income, or "Universal Basic Income" as it's sometimes called.

This is just what it sounds like, an income that every citizen would be entitled to, independent of work. And I find it compelling because it directly addresses one of the most fundamental objectionable things about capitalism, namely the fact that it makes almost everyone dependent on performing wage labor in order to survive. This is despite the fact that we live in a society that is more physically productive than any other that has ever existed. Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes was predicting that the greatest problem his grandchildren would face was what to do with their abundant leisure time.  Instead, we are all working more than ever.

A guaranteed income could begin to reverse this state of affairs by giving people the option of opting out of the labor market, which today is only possible for a wealthy few. It would therefore address a goal that Pat Devine mentions in a passage Jason quoted: reducing the amount of unpleasant labor that people are forced to perform. As I already noted, I think this goal is of such paramount importance that I'm baffled by any theory of a socialist economy that doesn't make it absolutely central.

Which brings me to one thing I found quite unappealing about the vision David Schweickart presents. His description of economic life seems to assume that the ideal way to live is to have some job that you go off to for 40 hours a week for the rest of your life. If labor is unpleasant, the solution is to give workers more control, rather than giving them the option of opting out of work--"voice" rather than "exit", to use Albert Hirschman's lovely phrase. Now maybe this makes sense to people who grew up in the mid-20th century, when the labor market was less volatile and careers were more stable. But it doesn't make any sense to me. Even if full employment is possible, why would it be desirable? If there's not enough work to go around, why would you go and create more? And maybe it's true that if we make the workplace democratic, then work will be fulfilling and people won't mind it. But in that case, why force them?

It's at this point that you're supposed to start talking about "material incentives", to take Schweickart's choice of jargon. It usually starts with some troll objecting that socialism is impossible because nobody will do any work without the fear of starvation. The socialist then comes back with some argument about how socialism is going to motivate everyone to go out there and work hard. For Schweickart's system, the answer is that "one’s income is directly tied to the success of one’s firm", and so you work hard for the material reward. Jason doesn't explicitly address this issue, but I'm sure he could come up with a response.

But approaching the problem this way gets the whole issue backwards, by proposing solutions before we have understood what the actual problem is.  If you just talk in general terms about giving people "incentives to work", you're neglecting the reality that while some work would have to get done in any kind of desirable society, other kinds of work should actually be dis-incentivized. Broadly, I'd say that paid work in capitalism falls into at least the following categories:

1. Things that people want done, but which nobody particularly wants to do.
2. Things that people would do voluntarily provided they have enough time, even if they weren't paid.
3. Things that are useless or destructive, and happen only because they facilitate capital accumulation and people need jobs.
4. Things that people may want done and/or may want to do, but which have destructive effects on other people or the environment.

The discussions about material incentives are relevant to things in category 1. But much of the labor in modern capitalist societies falls into the other categories--more of it than we think, I suspect. I'd argue that a lot of artistic and knowledge work falls into category 2. So does child care, although just who does it voluntarily is another matter, which is why feminism is a core part of socialist analysis. Financial engineering, telemarketing, and basically anything that happens at a private health insurance company fall into category 3. So does much of the estimated 25% of U.S. employment that's taken up by what economists Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call "guard labor": supervising workers, running the prison-industrial complex, providing private security, and other stuff that is mostly about preserving current power relations and maintaining inequality, rather than making anything useful. Driving a car or burning coal for electricity may fall into category 4.

Even though I can sketch out examples like this, in general it's pretty hard to differentiate these different kinds of labor in capitalism. That's because capitalism creates a situation where all work is "good" because it provides jobs, which people need in order to survive. However, these different kinds of labor wouldn't get differentiated in Schweickart's version of market socialism either, since he still assumes that everyone is forced to work--moreover, the idea of government as "employer of last resort" implies that we'd be actively creating useless category 3 work for people.  Devine's alternative, meanwhile, would attempt to use a convoluted planning process to differentiate between desirable and undesirable uses of labor. That may be necessary in some cases, but I don't think it should be our first solution--attempting to comprehensively micromanage every aspect of production strikes me as undesirably bureaucratic.

More importantly, I don't think it's necessary to go down this road at all. Rather than starting with these complicated issues of economic planning, we should start with the thing that's actually most desirable: making people less dependent on wage labor. Social Democracy has already gone part of the way in this direction, by removing things like health care and education from the market. But to really attack wage labor at its root, you need something like the guaranteed minimum income--perhaps in combination with reductions in the length of the work-week. 

At this point we get back to the incentives business again, with the critics screaming "but nobody would do any work!" At one level, I think this is just silly. For one thing, at least in the short run, most people would want to make more than the guaranteed minimum, and so would continue to work. For another thing, it's clear that people do various jobs for lots of different reasons that don't have to do with money, and some kinds of work would get more popular if people didn't have to worry about having the money to meet their basic needs. Some jobs really are enjoyable, in other words, and people would do them for free if they could. Other kinds of work give their returns by conferring status--for example, for all but the most famous artists, making art is more about gaining recognition than making money.  One appealing aspect of a basic income is that it would start to sort out the distinctions between the different kinds of labor outlined above. If some jobs start being things people do as hobbies, then great! If some jobs disappear, and we don't miss them, then great! If you have to pay people more to make them take crappy jobs, great!

Which isn't to say that basic income is a one-shot magic solution to all the problems of capitalism (although for the argument that it could be, check out a weird and provocative article called "The Capitalist Road to Communism"). Indeed, he best thing about a guaranteed income is that it stands a pretty good chance of provoking major economic disruption and social crisis--that's what makes it a "non-reformist reform."  In a world with a guaranteed income, it could very well turn out that there are some things that just aren't getting done. It's not clear that you'd be able to find enough people to clean office bathrooms or work the night shift at 7-11 if they had access to a basic income, no matter what you paid them.

Some people invoke the above scenario as an argument against the basic income, but let me emphasize that this is a problem I would love to have. Once it becomes clear what kind of work is both desired and undersupplied, we can have a political struggle about how that work will get done. By offering special rewards (i.e. "material incentives")? By creating some kind of national service requirement in exchange for the basic income (you have to go clean toilets or work the night shift once a month, say)? By finding clever new ways to automate these jobs? Or by deciding we can really do without some things we thought we "needed"?

I can't predict in advance what the solution would be. And I don't have to. That's really the most important point I want to make here.  I think the lesson of history is that momentous social change never happens because someone came up with a detailed plan for the future, won people over to it, and then implemented it. The chaos of real people making their own history always overwhelms such neat plans.

And I want to suggest that socialists, armed with an analysis of capitalism and a set of basic principles for the future, shouldn't be afraid of a politics that aims to provoke a crisis without knowing exactly where it will lead. The idea of a basic income that breaks our dependence on wage labor is a proposal for pushing toward that productive crisis, and for that reason I find it far more compelling than all the sterile blueprints for economic democracies and democratic plans and Parecons and what have you.

Leaving aside the economics, is a guaranteed income politically feasible? It's certainly a long shot--but then, so is any kind of radical economic change. It at least has the virtue of being straightforward and easy to explain. As I noted above, in some ways it's really just a an extension and completion of the historical project of Social Democracy: conferring a "social right" to the necessities of life and reducing the dependence of individuals on the labor market. And oddly enough, some on the right--like Milton Friedman and  the notorious Charles Murray--have endorsed versions of guaranteed income (although with some important differences from the leftist variants). Moreover, if it could be won it would be very difficult for the capitalist class to undo, because truly universal social programs are generally quite popular and nearly impossible to roll back.

Regardless, I think it's something worth talking about and agitating for. And who knows--if the current predictions of a long, high-unemployment "recovery" are borne out, perhaps people will begin to look more favorably on the idea of separating income from employment.

Today Matt Yglesias revisits a favorite topic of mine, the distinction between U.S. manufacturing employment and manufacturing production. It has become increasingly common to hear liberals complain about the "decline" in American manufacturing, and lament that America doesn't "make things" anymore:

Harold Meyerson had a typical riff on this recently:

Reviving American manufacturing may be an economic and strategic necessity, without which our trade deficit will continue to climb, our credit-based economy will produce and consume even more debt, and our already-rickety ladders of economic mobility, up which generations of immigrants have climbed, may splinter altogether.

. . .

The epochal shift that's overtaken the American economy over the past 30 years  . . .  finance, which has compelled manufacturers to move offshore in search of higher profit margins . . .  retailers, who have compelled manufacturers to move offshore in search of lower prices for consumers and higher profits for themselves

. . .

Creating the better paid, less debt-ridden work force that would emerge from a shift to an economy with more manufacturing and a higher rate of unionization would reduce the huge revenue streams flowing to the Bentonvilles (Wal-Mart's home town) and the banks . . . . The campaign contributions from the financial sector to Democrats and Republicans alike now dwarf those from manufacturing -- a major reason why our government's adherence to free-trade orthodoxy in what is otherwise a mercantilist world is likely to persist.

. . .

[Sen. Sherrod] Brown . . . acknowledges that as manufacturing employs a steadily smaller share of the American work force, "younger people probably don't think about it as much" as their elders . . . . Politically, American manufacturing is in a race against time: As manufacturing becomes more alien to a growing number of Americans, its support may dwindle, even as the social, economic, and strategic need to bolster it becomes more acute. That makes push for a national industrial policy -- to become again a nation that makes things instead of debt, to build again our house upon a rock -- even more urgent.

I don't dispute that manufacturing has become "more alien" to the bulk of American working people. But I question Meyerson's explanation for why this has happened, and I wonder whether we should really be so horrified by it. The evidence suggests that the decline in manufacturing employment in this country has been driven not primarily by offshoring (as Meyerson would have it), but by a dramatic increase in productivity. Yglesias provides one graphical illustration of this; here is my home-brewed alternative, going back to World War II:

This picture leaves some unanswered questions, to be sure. First, one would want to know what kind of manufacturing has grown in the U.S., for one thing; however, my cursory examination of the data suggests that U.S. output is still more heavily oriented toward consumer goods over defense and aerospace production, despite what one might think. Second, it's possible that the globally integrated system of production is "hiding" labor in other parts of the supply chain, in China and other countries with low labor costs.

But I don't think the general story of rapidly increasing productivity can be easily ignored. To really reverse the decline in manufacturing employment, we would need to have something like a ban on labor-saving technologies, in order to return the U.S. economy to the low-productivity equilibrium of forty or fifty years ago. Of course, that would also require either reducing American wages to Chinese levels or imposing a level of autarchy in trade policy beyond what any left-protectionist advocates.

Needless to say, I think this modest proposal is totally undesirable, and I raise it only to suggest the folly of "rebuilding manufacturing" as a slogan for the left. As Yglesias observes in the linked post, manufacturing now seems to be going through a transition like the one that agriculture experienced in the last century: farming went from being the major activity of most people to being a niche of the economy that employs very few people. Yet of course food hasn't ceased to be one of the fundamental necessities of human life, and we produce more of it than ever.

And yet I understand the real problem that motivates the pro-manufacturing instinct among liberals. The decline in manufacturing has coincided with a massive increase in income inequality and a decline in the prospects for low-skill workers. Moreover, the decline of manufacturing has coincided with the decline of organized labor, and it is unclear whether traditional workplace-based labor union organizing can ever really succeed in a post-industrial economy.  But the nostalgia for a manufacturing-centered economy is an attempt to universalize a very specific period in the history of capitalism, one which is unlikely to recur.

The obsession with manufacturing jobs is, I think, a symptom of a larger weakness of liberal thought: the preoccupation with a certain kind of full-employment Keynesianism, predicated on the assumption that a good society is one in which everyone is engaged in full-time waged employment. But this sells short the real potential of higher productivity: less work for all. As Keynes himself observed:

For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come-‑namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to‑day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.

. . .

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent prob­lem‑how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Productivity has continued to increase, just as Keynes predicted. Yet the long weekend of permanent leisure never arrives. This--and not deindustrialization--is the cruel joke played on working class. The answer is not to force people into deadening make-work jobs, but rather to acknowledge our tremendous social wealth and ensure that those who do not have access to paid work still have access to at least the basic necessities of life--through something like a guaranteed minimum income.

Geeky addendum: I thought the plot I made for this post was kind of nice and it took some figuring out to make it, so below is the R code required to reproduce it. It queries the data sources (A couple of Federal Reserve sites) directly, so no saving of files is required, and it should automatically use the most recent available data.

manemp <- read.table("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/MANEMP.txt",
   skip=19,header=TRUE)
names(manemp) <- tolower(names(manemp))
manemp$date <- as.Date(manemp$date, format="%Y-%m-%d")
 
curdate <- format(as.Date(substr(as.character(Sys.time()),1,10)),"%m/%d/%Y")
 
outputurl <- url(paste(
   'http://www.federalreserve.gov/datadownload/Output.aspx?rel=G17&amp;series=063c8e96205b9dd107f74061a32d9dd9&amp;lastObs=&amp;from=01/01/1939&amp;to=',
   curdate,
   '&amp;filetype=csv&amp;label=omit&amp;layout=seriescolumn',sep=''))
 
manout <- read.csv(outputurl,
   as.is=TRUE,skip=1,col.names=c("date","value"))
manout$date <- as.Date(paste(manout$date,"01",sep="-"), format="%Y-%m-%d") par(mar=c(2,2,2,2)) plot(manemp$date[manemp$date&gt;="1939-01-01"],
   manemp$value[manemp$date&gt;="1939-01-01"],
type="l", col="blue", lwd=2,
xlab="",ylab="",axes=FALSE, xaxs="i")
axis(side=1,
   at=as.Date(paste(seq(1940,2015,10),"01","01",sep="-")),
   labels=seq(1940,2015,10))
text(as.Date("1955-01-01"),17500,
   "Manufacturing employment (millions)",col="blue")
axis(side=2,col="blue")
 
par(new=TRUE)
plot(manout$date,manout$value,
   type="l", col="red",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="",lwd=2,xaxs="i")
text(as.Date("1975-01-01"),20,
   "Manfacturing output (% of output in 2002)", col="red")
axis(side=4,col="red")

Via the Monkey Cage, an interesting and comprehensive new database, the "KOF Index of Globalization". I'm generally a bit leery of attempts to boil down complex configurations of political economy into a pat "index", but this one is reasonably straightforward, measuring both "economic globalization" (economic flows and trade restrictions) and "political globalization" (participation in international institutions and diplomatic relations.) The example graph at the Monkey Cage is interesting, but I immediately thought it would be better represented like this:

This could be cleaned up to deal with the overlapping names, and additional information might be useful (such as the average globalization score of all countries in each year, and the maximum and minimum scores), but I think this is pretty informative. You can see the overall political and economic integration of these countries into the capitalist world, for example. There's also the increasing distance between the main cluster of countries on the one hand, and the insular autocracies of Belarus and Uzbekistan on the other.