Bottom-up

Jim Henley really knows how to look on the bright side:

I’ve become a pessimist. I think our future is Argentinian: a nation’s elites can have very nice lives for themselves if the commonality is financially secure and healthy, but history shows that a nation’s elites can have very nice lives for themselves even if most people live crabbed, fretful existences. You just need more security guards or, if necessary, paramilitaries. Since the financial crisis of last year, we’ve seen that the FIRE sector will work overtime to redistribute wealth to itself while working overtime to keep from redistributing wealth elsewhere. I think that with the normalization of the filibuster in the Senate, we’ve just about completed a revolution-within-the-form that is a much bigger deal than Barack Obama’s personal failings. The government works perfectly well at ensuring the lifestyles of defense contractors and investment bankers. That is its purpose. America may have one more good bubble in it. Or we may go straight to villas and bodyguards for the comely daughters.

The fatalist in my finds this story appealing, but ultimately I don’t think it’s right. To be sure, the insularity of the American elite, and its relative imperviousness to ordinary democratic processes, is a serious problem. And it has certainly been a growing problem over the last 10 or 20 years. But I think if we take a longer view, the problems we’re facing today just aren’t out of line with problems faced by previous generations.

Consider, for example, the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, the South was still in the grips of an entrenched southern power structure that was fighting tooth and nail to preserve Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Act was a major accomplishment, but by the late 1960s riots and assassinations made it seem like the future might hold chaos and bloodshed rather than racial harmony.

The Vietnam war was much deadlier than either Iraq or Afghanistan. Thanks to conscription, the military was able to kill tens of thousands of kids, rather than just thousands. By the end of the 1960s, there was little reason to believe the war would end any time soon.

By the late 1960s, the economy was starting to show signs of trouble too. Inflation was edging upwards and the top marginal tax rate was 77 percent. America’s transportation and communications industries had constructed cozy legal monopolies that allowed them to keep prices up and innovation down. The American auto industry was a cozy cartel not yet facing serious competition.

And let’s not forget that the 1960s were the high-water mark of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which spied on and harassed thousands of innocent people regarded as threats to Hoover or his political allies. The red scare of the 1950s was still relatively fresh in peoples’ minds, and fear of communism were used to justify repeated violations of peoples’ rights.

I think someone standing in August 1969 and looking at the coming decade would have had reason to be very pessimistic. Then the 1970s went better than anyone could have expected, at least from the perspective of making governing elites more accountable:

• Jim Crow was dismantled, and shifting public attitudes ensured it would never come back.
• The continued fiasco in Vietnam turned America against the war and eventually forced American evacuation. As a bonus, America abolished the draft, ensuring that future unnecessary wars would kill far fewer Americans.
• Watergate shattered Americans’ confidence in their government, prompting the Church Committee, which exposed the abuses of civil liberties from earlier decades. Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, and laid the foundations for a (relatively) accountable government over the subsequent quarter century.
• The academic critique of America’s transportation and communications cartels got noticed by policymakers, who deregulated the trucking, airline, and telephone industries, with dramatic effects on the American economy. Japanese competition forced Detroit to start making better cars.
• Pres. Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman, who successfully brought inflation under control by the early 1980s.

I don’t think these were isolated developments. I think four decades of elite arrogance caused the government to finally overstep its authority so egregiously (in the form of Vietnam and Watergate) that it created a backlash that made broad, serious reforms possible.

I don’t think things are as bad today as they were in 1969. Our pointless wars aren’t killing tens of thousands of Americans. We don’t have race riots on our streets. We don’t yet have serious inflation. And as far as we know, the NSA is abusing its power less than the FBI did 40 years ago (although we may learn otherwise at some point). And if the government does continue abusing its power, I think it’s only a matter of time before there’s a Watergate-style screw-up followed by a Carter/Reagan-esque backlash.

My good friend Adrienne offers a personal perspective on the fight for marriage equality in Maine. When two of her female friends wanted to get married, they were forced to go to Canada to secure legal recognition of their relationship. Earlier this year, the Maine legislature recognized that this was unfair and reformed Maine’s marriage laws to include same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, that law now faces a challenge at the ballot box.

The “No on 1” campaign created this video encouraging Maine voters to uphold marriage equality:

Adrienne’s post convinced me to donate a few bucks to the “No on 1” campaign. Perhaps it will inspire you too.

Radley Balko

As we’ve seen, one of the most common accusation that mainstream media outlets level against bloggers is that they simply re-print mainstream content without adding any value. A couple of weeks ago, I linked to Spencer Ackerman’s post giving an example of mainstream media outlet using a blogger’s reporting without crediting him.

This week we saw a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon. For two years, my friend Radley Balko has been doing groundbreaking reporting on Steven Hayne, a crackpot pathologist whose “expert” testimony has put numerous innocent people in jail. Radley works for Reason, a libertarian magazine of ideas owned by a nonprofit organization of the same name.

Yesterday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper picked up the story and did an exposé on Hayne. To be clear, this is a good thing. Hayne deserves to be fired, if not thrown in jail, and any publicity about his wrongdoing helps accomplish that. However, it’s striking that CNN didn’t even bother to mention that Radley did all the heavy lifting on the story. CNN talked to largely the same people Radley has talked to in past stories, and according to two of those sources, CNN first learned about the story thanks to Radley’s reporting. Yet CNN couldn’t be bothered to add so much as a sentence acknowledging Radley’s groundbreaking work.

Steven Hayne

Now this isn’t illegal. Nor should it be. But it is rather unprofessional. And I think it’s a good illustration of what’s wrong with the standard story about large media organizations producing the news and blogs cutting and pasting. Not only does the sharing goes in both directions, but I think people have a skewed perception of which direction is more common precisely because blogs do a better job of crediting their sources. When Gawker builds on a Washington Post story, they don’t try to pretend it was original reporting; they give credit, provide a link, and they’ll often just quote the original story rather than re-interviewing all the same sources. So it’s obvious who’s copying whom. In contrast, when a mainstream media outlet like CNN decides to build on the reporting of an online source, they do a lot of extra (and possibly unnecessary) work to avoid giving credit. One consequence is that only in really blatant cases (like this one) does anyone catch them.

There’s a clear double standard here. If it’s wrong for a blogger to build a story on a mainstream media story with attribution and a link, it’s even more wrong for a mainstream media outlet to build on a blogger’s story without a word of credit. CNN owes Radley a prominent link to his past work. And an apology.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by my friend Katherine Mangu-Ward about RECAP:

Last week, a team from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy took a pot shot at legal secrecy, setting in motion a scheme to filch protected judicial records and make them available for free online. One of the developers, Harvard’s Stephen Schultze, says he went digging for some First Amendment precedent last fall and was shocked by the outdated technology he found. Knowing that “there’s a certain geek cache to openness projects these days,” Mr. Schultze and Princeton computer science grad students Tim Lee and Harlan Yu went straight to work.

My favorite part is the conclusion:

Tech celebs like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have flocked to the Sunlight Foundation, which uses the Internet to improve meaningful access to government. Developer Tim Lee says “there’s just a ton of low-hanging fruit. The hard part is getting the data out. The fun part is doing stuff with it.”

With geeks like these on the job, the time when a farm bill has 31,452 “friends” may not be far off. (Of course, 31,449 of them will be farmers.) Judicial stats may soon appear with scores from the day’s games at a sports-and-courts betting site. Someday your government may have as little privacy as you do.

We can hope!

This post by Ali Savino perfectly illustrates the point I made on Wednesday:

These are the same people who pay large sums for a pint of organic strawberries, laughing off or even defending the “Whole Paycheque” label. They tell themselves: It’s OK to pay double what those strawberries would cost elsewhere, because they’re chemical-free, healthier, environmentally and ethically sound. Whole Foods customers want to feel good about their purchases and believe they are being better citizens for shopping there.

Now Mackey, the face of the company, is not only at odds with a central tenet of progressivism, but a supporter of free-market evangelism that has no space for the community-based, egalitarian solutions his customers support.

Notice she doesn’t even try to explain how “chemical-free, healthier, environmentally and ethically sound” strawberries are at odds with “free-market evangelism.” Nor does she substantiate her claim that “free-market evangelism” is at odds with “community-based, egalitarian solutions.” Probably because it’s false: Whole Foods, after all, exists in a free market, as do thousands of co-ops, farmers’ markets, and CSA programs. There’s no reason you can’t be a fan of both free markets and “community-based solutions.” Yet she seems to regard the conflict between them as so obvious as to require no explanation.

What’s going on here, I think, is a kind of crude tribal politics, where everyone has to be categorized as either one of “us” or one of “them.” If you’re a “free-market evangelist,” then you’re one of “them,” even if you also support some of the stuff that “we” support, like chemical-free strawberries and community-based solutions to the world’s problems. In fact, your “free-market evangelism” is evidence that the chemical-free strawberry thing was just a ruse to get gullible progressives into your store.

The real world doesn’t work this way. Not everyone fits into one of two rigid ideological categories. John Mackey’s egalitarianism and his fondness for chemical-free strawberries is every bit as genuine as his free-market evangelism. I think it reflects poorly on progressives that so many of them seem eager to question Mackey’s motives, rather than wondering whether there might be some kind of connection between his Whole Foods values and his antipathy to government-control over health care.

Bill Zeller points me to this rant by Jason Scott about Wikipedia. Scott basically tried being a Wikipedia editor, didn’t enjoy the experience, and concluded that it was “a failure.” He has various complaints about the way the Wikipedia process works, but since he doesn’t offer any specific examples, it’s hard to evaluate his complaints. He is, by his own admission, a “moody loner,” which is probably not the kind of person best suited to be a Wikipedia contributor.

What I found particularly interesting is the comments:

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that your definition of Great Failure doesn’t really mean very much. I’ve avoided doing any “work” for wikipedia because, well, I have a life and a job and my own weblog, and much prefer to focus my energies there. But as a -user-, I’ve found it to be an invaluable resource. So as a -user-, I call it a success. I could care less whether there was lots of “lost energy” in creating the articles I used, as long as in the end they’re accurate, and as long as they keep coming.

And Scott basically agrees:

You are correct; from the outside, to someone who is looking for basic information, a lot of Wikipedia will be ‘good enough’. Mistakes made will not be any more intensely different than anywhere else, that is, shallow take on the topic, common misperceptions (that are in a lot of sources) and so on.

I think Scott’s mistake is failing to distinguish between the micro and macro perspectives of the Wikipedia process. At a micro level, a lot of what happens on Wikipedia looks wasteful and irrational. Smart people sometimes contribute good content and their contributions are screwed up by idiots. What Scott fails to appreciate is that guaranteeing that no good edit is discarded would be vastly more expensive than the edits themselves. Rather than having an expensive process in which every edit moves in the right direction, Wikipedia has a dirt cheap process that moves things in the right direction on average. That obviously works in the aggregate. But if you look at it up close, it’s not hard to find examples that seem grotesquely irrational.

Some progressives are pledging to boycott Whole Foods over an op-ed that CEO John Mackey wrote about the health care debate. Radley and Julian have made some great points on the subject. Like Julian, I was surprised by the vitriol Mackey’s op-ed provoked. People do business with lots of different companies, and corporate CEOs have political opinions just like everyone else. We’re a big, diverse country; people don’t generally consider this kind of run-of-the-mill political disagreement sufficient grounds to organize a boycott. It would be silly to boycott Target because Mark Dayton is a Democrat, just as it would be silly to refuse to drink Coors because Peter Coors is a Republican.

John Mackey

The issue with Mackey seems to be not just that liberals disagree with him, but that they feel like they’ve been deceived. As one of Matt’s commenters puts it, “Every dollar John Mackey has ever earned has come from ‘pandering to his customers’ political prejudges.'” Actually, this is completely wrong. I shop at Whole Foods on a semi-regular basis, and I’ve never seen posters touting Whole Foods’s support for the Democratic Party or the progressive agenda. What I have seen is posters pointing out that Whole Foods stocks local and organic food, offers good pay and benefits to its workers, gives to charity, and helps to protect the environment. This is not a political agenda. It’s a set of values that have nothing in particular to do with public policy.

Now, as it happens, it’s a set of values that a lot of progressives find appealing. And some of them seem to think that Mackey has simply been pretending to support those values as a way of luring them into the store. But there’s no evidence for that. And indeed, Mackey has never hid his libertarian politics. Why would he? As he’s written at length, there’s no conflict between libertarian politics and the liberal values Whole Foods promotes. In particular, there’s no logical connection between one’s opinion on organic food or the environment and one’s position on the desirability of a “public option” for health insurance. As it happens, people who shop at Whole Foods tend to be Obama’s supporters, but that’s not because Mackey has advertised Whole Foods as an Obama-friendly store.

Partisan politics also seems to blind people to the distinction between values and public policy. Liberals understood that it was absurd when conservatives accused them of being “objectively pro-Saddam” for opposing the invasion of Iraq. Many liberals (myself included) pointed out that there are many good reasons to oppose the invasion that don’t entail support for the Hussein regime. Yet Democrats seem downright eager to turn the tables, demonizing anyone who criticizes the sausage currently being made on Capitol Hill. The idea that people might sincerely disagree about the best way to improve health care seems to be an alien concept.

I’m late to the party, but I wanted to weigh in on the vital question of whether the human race (specifically, unskilled workers) are in danger of being rendered useless by robots. Greg Clark says yes. Ryan Avent says no. Tom Lee says yes.

Ryan is right, and makes some excellent points, in particular that machines consume raw materials and energy, which will continue to be expensive. But I think all these guys are missing what is probably the most fundamental advantage people have over machines: that people like to interact with other people. Tom makes an argument that I think actually illustrates my argument pretty well:

Certainly some subset of tasks currently performed by humans will be difficult to automate for a long time yet. But not only will technology improve, as Ryan acknowledges, but we can simply eliminate many tasks that are resistant to automation. A computer can’t have a conversation with a person the way that a customer service representative can. But instead of resigning themselves to this fact, businesses have simply moved to eliminate this class of commercial interaction, substituting for it with websites, IVR systems and brutal indifference.

Remember that the story here is that highly-skilled workers and the holders of capital are rapidly growing wealthier, leaving unskilled workers behind. But if it’s true that machines will continue to be unable to handle phone calls as well as unskilled workers, and I think it is, then at some point the gap between skilled and unskilled wages will grow large enough that customers are willing to pay extra for products and services that come bundled with human beings answering the phone.

Similarly, notice that one of the most important difference between a mid-range restaurant and an upscale one is how labor-intensive it is. The mid-range restaurant might have just two or three overworked waitresses. The upscale one probably has a Maître d’, several waitresses, a couple of people going around refilling water glasses, somebody scraping crumbs off the table, etc. Having more people wait on you makes the dining experience more pleasant; the reason most of us don’t do it very often is that human labor is too expensive.

There are lots of other examples like this. There are, for example, millions of couples that would hire nannies if they could afford to do so. Similarly, there’s lots of room for growth in the demand for masseuses and pedicurists, security guards, tour guides, and the like. And a little higher up the skill spectrum, there will be a virtually unlimited demand for nurses, executive assistants, interior decorators, wedding planners, lifeguards, personal trainers, and so forth.

Indeed, I would make a stronger, albeit much more speculative, claim: the market for low- and medium-skilled labor is likely to remain robust even if the “strong AI” problem is solved some day. True, a strong AI robot would be able to perform many of today’s common low-skilled tasks, such as truck driving and construction work, far better than any human being. But people are never going to want robots to serve as nannies or nanniesnurses. People are hard-wired to have strong emotional reactions to other people, and as a consequence, they’ll always have a strong demand for labor that involves human contact and interaction. And that means that there will always be jobs for people willing to work, even if they lack formal education.

Alex Jones

I was listening to today’s episode of “Fresh Air,” which featured the journalist and publisher Alex Jones (not the crackpot radio host). Jones is worried about the future of the newspaper business, and in his interview he made an argument that brilliantly illustrates a point I made last week about the way newspaper partisans think about the decline of their industry:

I think virtually any investigative report is done in opposition to somebody, usually somebody or some institution very powerful. It can take a lot of legal expense and a lot of Freedom of Information Act inquiries, a lot of reaction in the form of boycotts, and this is not just at the New York Times level.

I tell the story in the book of the Idaho Falls, Idaho newspaper, which is a small newspaper in the heart of Mormon country, just north of Salt Lake City, in which they took on the Boy Scouts, which were essentially an arm of the Mormon Church, because the Boy Scouts were shielding some Scout leaders who had been guilty of abusing, sexually abusing some of their charges.

And the newspaper, you know, it suffered terribly: boycotts, denunciations and so forth. But they stuck to their guns, and they were able to do that in part because they were an institution that made money, and I think that people, you know, when – I’m all for nonprofit journalism, but I think that when you’re talking about doing journalism in opposition, having the resources is vitally important and something that I think is not well understood.

Jones gets the implications of this story completely backwards. It’s only because newspapers are large, profitable, commercial enterprises that the kind of intimidation techniques he talks about work at all. Imagine it’s 2020 and the Idaho newspapers have all gone out of business, and they’ve been replaced by several hundred bloggers, most of them amateurs. A whistleblower discovers some evidence of wrongdoing by a prominent Mormon official. Is it easier or harder for the whistleblower to get the word out?

Barbara Stresand's House

Obviously, it’s easier. She can anonymously email the evidence to a dozen different bloggers. Those bloggers don’t have to all prepare long “investigative journalism” write-ups; some of them can just post the raw documents for others to look at. Once they’re widely available, other bloggers can link to those raw documents and provide commentary. The official being criticized has three big problems. First, taking legal action will be vastly more expensive because he’d have to sue dozens of bloggers rather than just one newspaper. Second, many of those bloggers won’t have any assets to speak of, so he’s unlikely to recover his legal costs even if he wins. And finally, if he foolishly presses forward, he’ll discover our friend the Streisand Effect: the fact that he files the lawsuit will cause a lot more people to cover the original allegations.

Likewise, the threat of a boycott only works because newspapers are for-profit operations with significant overhead. Threatening a boycott against, a blogger who writes in a his free time is no threat at all. And even if we’re talking about for-profit online publications, boycotts will become less effective as the web gets decentralized, because there will likely be at least a few online media outlets whose readers skew against the party being criticized and will become more loyal as a result of the controversy.

What we’re seeing here is the same pattern I pointed out last week: newspaper partisans assume that the news organizations of the future will need to do their jobs exactly the same way as the news organizations of the past did, and then they worry that there won’t be enough money to fund all their activities, be it a large legal staff or plane tickets to Toronto. But the whole reason Internet-based news sources are winning in the marketplace is because they’re finding ways to cut these kinds of expenses. Asking how to pay for them is getting the story completely backwards.

Kevin Donovan points me to this article about last summer’s “cyber-attacks” against Georgian websites during the South Ossetia War:

what I don’t really understand is why it’s so hard to accept the fact that a bevy of nationalistic Russians may have decided to take revenge on Georgia after reading the news of the war WITHOUT coordinating their actions with the Russian government. Why did they need to coordinate anything if they were capable of launching DDOS without government assistance? By the same logic, we should be theorizing that the hordes of people who launched DDOS attacks on the Iranian government’s web-sites two months ago were also being led by DOD or the State Department. How many reasonable people believe that this wouldn’t have happened if the US government didn’t get involved?

This may look silly, but every time I hear of such theories, I am reminded of the famous conversation between Napoleon and the French astronomer Laplace. When the emperor asked the scientist why he didn’t mention God in his vision for the comprehensive world system, Laplace quipped that he had no need for that hypothesis.

Kevin points out that this is an example of the intelligent design fallacy at work. I think this is a smart point, with the caveat that there’s also basic politics at work. It’s convenient for Russia critics to accuse the Russian government of engaging in an underhanded manner. And it’s convenient for people who think the US should beef up its “cyber-warfare” capabilities to exaggerate the scope of the cyber-warfare threat. Postulating Russian government involvement makes the activity seem more sinister than it otherwise would.

This also illustrates the fact that people are most likely to commit the intelligent design fallacy when talking about subjects they don’t know very much about. After all, DDOS attacks are not difficult to pull off, and are particularly well-suited to crowdsourcing; you certainly don’t need the resources of the government to do it. But if you’re a reporter with only a hazy idea of how the Internet works, and someone breathlessly tells you there’s a “cyber-attack” in progress, that sounds like the sort of thing that you’d need the resources of a government to pull off. And so the press magnifies petty vandalism into a potential threat to national security.