It Shall Be the Fuck Ups

Statue of Benkos Bioho, 16th century slave

Ahh, Fridays.  A fellow teacher in the lounge at lunch told me it couldn't have come too soon.  Slightly overweight, she hobbles around on a prosthetic leg.  This is her 26th year of teaching.  Somewhat of  a polymath, she teaches Earth Science, Life Science and Algebra, depending on the year.  These are lower-level, core subject classes that students take who have demonstrated a history of lower grades and lack of study skills, who would likely not be successful in more difficult subjects.

She doesn't have to explain the weariness in her voice; I know it all too well.  It comes from teaching five subjects a day to students a majority of whom are either failing outright or barely passing, struggle to stay focused, have poor organizational skills, frequently miss class, do the minimum amount of work required (even at a substantially lowered bar), frequently disrupt class and get in trouble, and generally find education repellent.  It comes from struggling to find the line between holding to high expectations yet at the same time recognizing practical realities of what the students can actually do (their "zone of proximal development"), and maybe most importantly, empathizing with what can only be described for many of them as tragic home lives and understanding that this socializing force lies at the root of their relentlessly poor performance,

When I entered education, I did so after having spent my undergraduate years trying to understand the roots of social inequality that I saw all around me as I drove back and forth across the class boundaries clearly demarcating the San Francisco and Oakland neighborhoods in which I worked as a delivery driver.  I was convinced that through education, students could be empowered to transcend the shackles of socio-economic disadvantage.  If they came to love learning, they would set themselves on a path to consciousness.  I had experienced enough brain-numbing, authoritarian teaching in my own education to see the glorious value of empathetic, compassionate and inspiring teachers.

Yet after nearly ten years of teaching, first as a substitute in various districts, then as a teacher in various grade levels, I've come to more fully appreciate the ultimate limitations of education as liberation, especially within the context of traditional instruction.  The brutal truth is that the level of developmental disadvantage and relentless life hardship is so great for so many students, that the educational system by itself is woefully inadequate to address their needs.

The classroom is not the proper arena for social change.  It can be a place of rich learning, socialization and self-discovery.  But this can only happen if children's more basic needs are being met.  If a student has not been reared in such a way as to develop age-appropriate cognitive and emotional skills, or is living in an environment at home which causes high levels of stress, the effects of formal schooling are only going to have marginal impact.  Some students, luckily, will possess the right mixture of luck and temperament to overcome such disadvantage, but on whole, most will not - an empirical truth backed up by fact.  Children have basic developmental needs.  In a recent article for the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn lays out just how powerful this developmental disadvantage is.  Research shows that a good portion of a child's developmental trajectory is laid down in its first two years.

a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.

Unfortunately, these are years that are, among disadvantaged populations, going to be spent - by definition - in a context of developmental disadvantage.  And these are only the first two years of life.  By age 5, development is already deeply behind advantaged peers.  The gap only grows.  By the time the child reaches high school, all manner of life trauma and developmental drought have conspired to bring the full weight of social inequality pressing down upon his neck until he either drops out, destined if not for jail then a life of minimum wage toil, or barely squeaks by with a diploma, however with a penchant for rebellion and nihilism that so diminish his sense of self-efficacy that hopes and dreams seem impossible, if even extant in the first place.  Yes, there are those who escape, providing fodder for myths of free will and self-empowerment free from social constraint.  But upon closer examination these prove little more than feeble justifications for a bias towards a status quo which denies structural effects of inequality and seeks to confirm its own flawed assumptions.

For us to continue to pretend that minor education reforms - those centered around the classroom experience, teaching and curriculum - are adequate to deliver social equality to millions of disadvantaged children in America is to ignore the desperate reality of their situation.  If we take a sober look at what these children truly need in order for them to be successful, our gaze cannot but survey a landscape of broken homes, neglect, family crises, neighborhood decay, substance abuse, and a generalized, creeping sense of communal despair at a future of low-wage work and frustrated opportunity. 

No one likes to be treated unfairly.  Even if they don't understand why, they intuitively know that the game is stacked against them.  This seems a basic cognitive truth, grasped by no less than primitive apes, as this video clearly demonstrates.
What the scientist in the video is illustrating is just how obvious injustice is, even to a monkey, who understands quite clearly that he is being punished for doing the same work.  Now, apologists for the status quo might object, claiming that the disadvantaged don't do the same work.  The students in my class are not doing nearly the work of their more successful classmates.  But this is a misunderstanding of human psychology, and the nature of motivation and reward.  Yes, they are fuck ups.  They draw pictures on the desk instead of thinking about the lesson.  They throw papers at their friends instead of copying down notes.  They smoke pot instead of do their homework.

But what is work?  And what does it take to complete it?  An advantaged student who has been given adequate development in a safe, emotionally satisfying and cognitively rich environment hardly has to work to be successful.  Her heart and mind are quiet as she sits, pencil in hand, her book open and organized to digest the lesson.  She has had no conflict with a family member or friend, no sleepless night, no hangover from an escapist substance.  The lesson makes sense because it meshes smoothly with neural patterns in her memory that have been laid down neatly for years.  She makes it look easy because it is.  For her.

Compare her to a child of disadvantage, whose heart is beating fast, stress hormones pumping through his veins, who never had a father, whose family is poor and suffers the slings and arrows of any number of social problems that might have landed them in poverty, who's found solace in a stance of rebellion and a respected identity as one who is unbounded by external rules and limitations.  He didn't come prepared, and he has no intention of completing his work.  But he knows how to play the game well enough to stay out of trouble just enough not to get sent to the principle, yet who is damned if he is going to sit there and suffer through 50 minutes of academic labor.  Because it isn't easy for him.  If the girl next to him makes it look easy, he knows how hard it is.  Trying to concentrate on the teacher's voice, reading the assignment on the board, remembering to get out his notebook and pencil (if he even remembered to bring it), is the academic equivalent of mining for granite with your bare hands in the hot sun (and considering how hopeless the entire endeavor seems - today, and every day for years now - there is no paycheck to look forward to. 

Work, for him, is just showing up and not punching anyone in the face.  Work is maintaining sanity one day at a time.  Work is struggling to finding a way to squeeze something meaningful and fulfilling out of this relentlessly antagonistic world.  Assuming in him that the task is simple: just do your work and behave, is a vicious insult to everything he has ever learned about the world.

Cohn outlines some good directions for policy in his article.  But we have a deeper problem, one that we have yet to come up with a solution for, and can only fumble to put band-aids on.  We live in a system in which societal capital is leveraged for individual advantage.  In a non-linear trajectory, advantage secures more advantage, while disadvantage secures ever more disadvantage.  A war on poverty, a war on inequality must grapple with this fundamental aspect of our system at large, in which both are built in to and perpetuated by the nature of the system itself.  A system of enormous productive power, it also breeds exploitation of the disadvantaged by ensuring their continued existence.  If there can be distilled a singular dilemma that propels this blog, it is this: Some one must clean the floors.  It shall be the fuck ups.  And we shall fuck them up.

Gifted, Talented, and White

Is it any surprise that New York City's gifted and talented programs are overwhelmingly filled with White and Asian kids?  Of course they are.  Pick any district across the country, and gifted and talented kids will disproportionately come from homes with higher societal capital; they will have parents with more education, higher incomes, more stability, less health problems, less abuse, less crime on their block, etc.

While some students are clearly "gifted" in some areas, this is often going to be secondary to their development overall.  By the time a child has entered public school, her cognition, vocabulary, emotional skills, etc. will have been determined to a large extent by the environment in which she was raised.  A child who has been taught high levels of grit, determination, self-control, for instance, will be in a position to be much more successful in a learning environment.  These simple skills will give them a non-linear developmental advantage, as new opportunities for learning build on themselves in a productive loop.

I teach lower-level high school students, those who have not demonstrated an ability to be successful in higher-level science classes.  Many of them I would indeed consider very intelligent, possibly gifted.  However, due to any number of individual life and developmental issues, they would not be successful in a gifted program.  On the other hand, I could imagine a student's simple ability to remain focused and complete her work would find her in an excellent position to excel in a gifted environment of higher-level thinking, problem-solving and creative learning.

As we near the end of the semester, around half of my students are at serious risk of failure.  This is not due to their inability to comprehend the work, but rather their lack of academic focus and ability to complete relatively simple assignments.  Why is this?  Why can't they simply complete their work?

The answer to this question is key to understanding American socioeconomic and political philosophy.  In the article on gifted programs I linked to above, a professor of education was paraphrased thusly:

looking at the gifted landscape in New York City suggests that one of two things must be true: either black and Hispanic children are less likely to be gifted, or there is something wrong with the way the city selects children for those programs.

A co-worker of mine, my hunch a Republican who nonetheless understands the degree to which these students are severely academically dysfunctional, commented to me that these kids have a choice to make if they want to be successful in life: either get right and do well in school, or continue to slack off.  To the extend that they have a choice, he is right.

But how much choice do they really have?  To me, the professor of education got it nearly right: either poor and minority students are less likely to be truly gifted, or that we have a highly stratified socioeconomic system in which citizens' life success is determined by how much societal capital they have.  There is really no evidence for the former, and by all accounts truly "gifted" individuals are equally common across race and class lines, with socioeconomic effects on development largely crowding out genetic effects.

Yet there is overwhelming evidence of the effects of societal capital on human development.  Unfortunately, little of it seems to have had much impact on the assumptions of modern conservatism, which holds to the notion that the effects of class are marginal, and that ultimately every individual makes a choice.  This allows them the convenience of being able to ignore the effects of power relationships that inevitably become increasingly entrenched in capitalist societies, as capital is able to be leveraged in a non-linear way so as to rigidify class lines and limited mobility.

Unfortunately, too, the current progressive coalition has so watered itself down with neoliberal apologists for capitalism and the magic of markets, that it has lost sight of the very real and serious implications such a system has for the disempowered and de-capitalized individuals, in both the societal and financial sense.  The entire education reform movement, with its emphasis on market-oriented solutions to the achievement gap such as teacher accountability, high standards, curricular narrowing to core subjects, and charter schools, is predicated on deliberate, strategic ignorance of underlying dynamics of societal capital.  To do so is, according to the movement's gallingly hubristic proponents, simply "making excuses".  When a car is heading for a cliff, its brake lines cut, would the observation that pumping the brakes is not the real problem be considered to be "making excuses"?

We currently do not know how to rectify our socioeconomic dillema: how to promote equity of societal capital in a system in which the unequal distribution of societal capital is key to its being leveraged for individual social gain.  Gifted programs are perfect example of this reality.  As the article points out:

Ms. Lindner, the fifth-grade teacher, said she was “always surprised” when she saw more than two or three white children in her general education classes. 

As a parent herself, and a resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she said, “there’s no way I’d put my kid in a general-education class here, no way, because it’s right next to the project and all the kids in general education come from the projects.”

She said her experience was that many of the children in her general education classes were at grade level or below and did not get the same support from their parents that the children in the gifted classes got. “They’re tougher kids,” she said of the general education students in the school. “They’re very street-savvy. They don’t have the background; their parents are hard on them but don’t know what to do with them.”

This is the inconvenient truth of education in America.  Socioeconomic effects, societal capital leveraging are real and fundamental to how we live our lives, and it isn't pretty.  People don't strive to move into the projects, they strive to move out of them.  We want the best for our children.  We want them to have every advantage in the world.  How could we do any less?  And in a system of competitive leveraging, this is going to create barriers to entry, and entrench power hegemony. 

Just because we may not know how to address such deeply tragic and predestined systemic inequities from a policy standpoint, we cannot pretend that they do not exist, or that they are only of marginal import.  Rather, we must face the brutal truth that they are the locus of modern inequality.  Only then will we be in a position to seriously take on the notion that unless every citizen receives at least somewhat equal access to societal capital, he or she will not be truly free.

The Year In Media: Part 4, Music

I had originally intended this series of posts to be focused on a list of my favorite albums of the year.  However, looking at media in general turned out to a more lengthy exercise.

But here we are.  I should start with an embarrassment.  At my particular age and space and time, I've somewhat lazily come to depend pretty much primarily on pitchforkmedia.com's album recommendations.  I've been following that site for over a decade now, and am generally satisfied that I'm not missing out on much that they don't catch.  (Although, one might ask, how would I know?)

But in the end, it really comes down to the amount of new music that I really have time to digest.  Between listening to four decades of popular music in alternating rotation, and discovering older material for the first time, there is only so much time in the day to properly involve oneself with brand new albums in an intimate way.  The albums on this list earned their status only after repeated listens, each of which is a great album in the classic sense: that it is generally excellent from start to finish.


Julia Holter - Ekstasis
The Men - Open Your Heart
Grizzly Bear - Shields
Frankie Rose - Interstellar
Lotus Plaza - Spooky Action at a Distance
Beach House - Bloom
Stina Nordenstam - The World Is Saved
Joyce Manor - Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired
Perfume Genius - Put Your Back N 2 It
dissapointments: Wild Nothings, Twin Shadow

One of my favorite experiences in the appreciation of music is the rare occasion upon which an album that seems dull, or even downright awful, on first listen grows on me more and more until something suddenly switches and I fall in love with it.  It is a strange and beautiful feeling, and at a larger level makes listening to music that much more exciting, as first impressions are not necessarily to be trusted, especially negative reactions.  An element of abandon is introduced in which I must give in to the process, trusting that the art itself, and not my reaction to it, will lead me to its beauty.

This happened in part with a few albums this year.  Julia Holter's Ekstasis felt oddly removed and alien, its avante garde stance feeling at first maybe gimmicky in the way that studiously fragmented classical new music can.  But rather quickly its emotion began to resonate and a strange beauty shone through.

Open Your Heart, by the Men worked in a somewhat opposite way.  It unfolded as a series of songs that felt kind of pedestrian at first.  Been there, done that, maybe.  Bonehead guitar solos were fun enough on the first couple of tracks, sliding then into countryfried psychedelia jamming.  Its like the Supersuckers took a break and channeled the Spacemen 3.  But out of this, midway into the album the tone becomes a bit more fragmented and dissonant, with abstract vocals, and sounding more like Sonic Youth.  Abruptly then, the jangling noise hardens into a thick mass of distortion, with delicate harmonies melancholically spinning above.  One can only think of My Bloody Valentine, a high honor indeed.  In its final half, the album plays with each of these themes, blending them together at times, in a mixture of emo/thrash and post-punk/shoegaze.  That these disparate elements can be pulled together with such consistent dexterity is quite a feat.

Joyce Manor's Of All This I Will Soon Grow Tired is classic hardcore emo, and as such, you have to be up for its in-your-face, heart-on-its-sleeve emotional exposition.  I suppose my listening habits have strayed in the past ten to fifteen years since bands like Fugazi were on heavy rotation.  As such, Of All This... felt somewhat of a throwback, and I probably will not ever be as excited about it as I might once have.  Nonetheless, it is enormously well-made.  The songs are short and sweet, and filled not just with hooks but with an admirable gravity.

Perfume Genius' Put Your Back In 2 It is a sad record.  It is beautiful, raw, and earnest, but terribly sad.  It may be that this year has been an emotional struggle for me in many ways, but I'm not sure I've still really been up for meeting the album on its own terms.  It's also a very gay album.  There's such a sense of fragile outsiderness to it, singer Mike Hadreas pouring out his vulnerability in a lilting, delicate tone.  Gospel progressions give the songs a sense of deep pain, struggle and triumphalism.  But all of this, not to mention the sort of Castro disco pseudo-R&B number pun in the title, makes me feel like I am listening to a gay record.  Again, an album to be taken on its own terms.

The other albums on the list were pretty much known quantities, constructed with the same brilliant dexterity as the artists' earlier works.  Bloom, by Beach House might just be my favorite of their yet.  Victoria Legrand seems to keep getting more and more powerful and determined with each new album.

Frankie Rose far surpassed anything with the Dum Dum Girls, creating in Interstellar a hugely dynamic and fascinating electro-pop orchestra. There has been a movement in recent years that might be called "Better Than the 80's", in which contemporary artists pick up the synthesized sounds, guitar tones, simple beats of eighties pop and, well, do it better.  There was always something haunting and melancholy about that era's production values and awkward danceability of its beat.  Shades of The Smiths, Depeche Mode, The Cure, as well as sillier pop acts like The Go Gos, the Bangles, The Eurythmics or Cindy Lauper echo throughout this new sound.  Frankie Rose works heavily in this area, sharing space with DIIV, Wild Nothings, Twin Shadows.  Other bands work deeper angles, such as Washed Out and M83's more ambient, Krautish sound, or How To Dress Well's thoroughly deconstructed R&B.

Which of course, can get old.  Disappointingly, Wild Nothings' album this year was unremarkable.  And Confess, Twin Shadows' follow up to 2010's gorgeous Forget, was, apart from its generally great first track, Golden Light, an often times aimless, unlistenable mess.

All in all, here's hoping 2013 is more interesting.

The Year In Media: Part 3, Books

Late this year I started a book club on Meetup.com called "The Society Book Club", with an emphasis on social, political and philosophical issues.  We meet every couple of months, and it's been fun.  The group dynamics are however interesting, as some members tend to Bogart the discussion.  As the de facto leader I do my best to promote everyone's voice, but I probably contribute to the problem to a degree.  Part of the issue is that a number of the members have rather "broad" political leanings.  By this I mean that, while everyone is generally liberal, these members seem enthralled with a type of cheap political analysis that relies on broad generalizations and grand theories of causality, where nuance and skepticism is sacrificed for a simplicity of moral confidence. 

Hence, the term "they" is often referred to as the source of most social ills, "they" being an amorphous liberal bogeyman equal parts corporate boardroom and wealthy 1%.  In this world view, these puppet-masters control what we think, what we buy, how we feel, what our priorities are, and how we behave.  Every social ill is thus easily explained by a larger pattern of social decay set in motion and determined by a small cadre of profit-hungry, greedy capitalists. 

One can see the allure of such a view.  It is indeed partially true.  But it is absurdly simplistic.  Not only does its convenience blind itself to nuance and general causal diversity, but it misses larger structural explanations that place blame not with rational individuals, but with larger, deeper systemic dynamics in which no one is to blame individually, but rather agreements and assumption we have all implicitly accepted as governing model for how we want to structure society.  The problem with seeing this larger structural narrative as a primary causal agent is that it is enormously unsatisfying.  Not only is it difficult to understand, but there is no one to really point our collective fingers at in blame.  And worse still, there is no clear vision for how to replace this structure.  For most progressives, there indeed are very specific policy proposals, in general looking like a more social-democratic, European model (however, even there social ills still remain).  But standing in the way is not necessarily any shadowy corporate malfeasance, but rather an enormous plurality of Americans who just profoundly disagree with the progressive vision, both in cause and solution.  It can be argued that these Americans are mere "sheep" to corporate advertisement, but the reality is that modern conservatism is a cohesive ideological narrative with deep historical roots that stands on its own, needing little help from corporate benefactors to promote its anti-progressive message.

 So, articulating all of that has become my hobby horse at our meetings.  Books we've read:

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules You Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinov
The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz
The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
How Much Is Enough: Money and The Good Life, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky

Books I personally read this year:

The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger
Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kaufman (didn't finish)
Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees
A Universe From Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss
Ben Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson
Neuromancer, by William Gibson

As you can see, I went on a bit of a sci-fi kick.  I was basically let go from my job at the continuation school, which I wrote about at the time, and needed some escapism to combat the profound despair I was feeling in the first few months of the year.  Philip K. Dick was gloriously savage in his deconstruction of the interaction between the psyche and the physical world, exposing again and again what we take for granted.  There is a spiritualism here, where the harsh mystery of science and the natural world bumps up against the feeble glue of human consciousness.

I then took on the universe, reading Kaufman, Rees and Krauss, in a succession of what I can humbly describe as fascinatingly vague explications of the physical nature of the universe and reality itself.  Fun, and profound, but nothing I can say I understood all that well.  What I did understand, though, was a beautiful vision of a cosmos the vastness and complexity of which we cannot but be humbled by.

Ben Franklin was a lot of fun.  Mostly however, not so much from an appreciation of the man himself, but from the world and events within which he was traveling.  I was struck by a picture of Philadelphia as a small town of a few thousand people.  Franklin the man was indeed a great mind, but in the end he was a somewhat tragic figure, forming few close bonds and basically leaving his family behind while he spent over a decade in Europe - unlike, say, the resolutely cranky John Adams, who was deeply connected to his family. 

William Gibson was sort of brilliant to read, thirty years later, the digital age well upon us.  His prose was ambitious, albeit messy and too often silly.  But he was establishing things that clearly came to fruition, not in the least the implosion of time and space itself as digital reality compresses all of our understandings of and interactions with our surrounding environment.

The Year In Media: Part 2, Television and Film

2012 seemed a pretty lackluster year in cinema.  I honestly can think of very few memorable films.  Now, I'm not a huge movie enthusiast.  My tastes are regularly quite pedestrian.  Looking over rotten tomatoes list of  100 top rated films, these are the best I could come up with, of the few I'd actually seen:





Moonrise Kingdom
The Avengers
Bernie
Lincoln
Safety Not Guaranteed
Chronicle
Wreck It Ralph

I suppose there are two things I think about with film.  And this is probably true with art more generally.  First, is it entertaining, and second, is it important.  By important, it might be accomplishing different things; it might be doing something new.  There might be a particular aspect of the production of the piece that pushes the art forward.  Whether it is entertaining, is, well, pretty simple.  As I mentioned, I'm not a huge film fan.  What I mean by this is that I like to be entertained by film much more than I want to appreciate it's importance.  While I certainly love interesting cinematography, compelling characters and narratives, set design, etc., I'm ultimately not very forgiving of a film if it isn't entertaining enough.  With music, by contrast, I'm much more forgiving if I feel there is something important going on, even if I find the finished product lacking.

So what to make of the list above?  It seems embarrassingly low-brow. Lincoln and Moonrise Kingdom were maybe the only films interesting in being "important".  However neither seemed particularly interesting.  Daniel Day Lewis was brilliant as usual, and the historical recreation was fun.  Moonrise Kingdom was cute, but Anderson's precious shadowboxes were lacking in emotional depth this time out.  Bernie and Safety Not Guaranteed were I suppose too comedic to rise to that level.  Not that comedy precludes high-art, but it might get in the way of serious themes or artistic expressions by sacrificing depth for irony.  The other three films on the list are decidedly juvenile.  But I'd have to say they were more memorable.  There were moments in the Avengers that were possibly highlights of the year for me.  Being a life-long gamer, Wreck It Ralph couldn't have been more clever.  Chronicle, was beautifully inventive.


I rarely watch anything on cable television anymore, aside from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.  Netflix has come to dominate my viewing habits.  This past year has found me culling British and Foreign detective shows like George Gently and Wallander (the original Swedish version), as much I suppose for their convenient predictability as for their entertaining characters and mild intrigue.

But of everything I watched in 2012, maybe the most important and compelling was a little documentary produced for PBS' Frontline called The Interrupters.  Made by Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams, it follows the eponymous group of inner-city social workers who literally go out into the streets of Chicago and intervene in violent conflicts, trying to deescalate violent conflict between rival gangs and individuals.  Having come from the same neighborhoods themselves, they bring a depth of understanding and moral gravity into situations that are often minutes away from tragedy.  I showed the unedited version to my continuation students to completely rapt attention.

The Year in Media: Part 1, Politics and Discussion

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at some of the more memorable media I've been digesting for the past year.  Aside from music, books and film, it occurred to me for a second that I might include media journalism in this category, but I quickly realized how daunting a task it might be to find and collate everything interesting I've read in the past 12 months.  I could however, simply list my sort of regular, go-to sources for information:


Online:
NY Times
Reality Based Community
Kevin Drum
The Awl
Science Blogs

Print:
The Week

Television:
Up w/Chris Hayes
Daily Show
Colbert Report
NBC Nightly News

Podcasts:
Bloggingheads
The Liberal Oasis
Little Atoms
New Yorker Outloud
The Slate Political Gabfest
On the Media
Fresh Air
Point of Inquiry
Vox & Friends

It's kind of interesting to see someone's little media universe.  I, of course, am not completely limited to these sources as there are always stories posted to my facebook feed, or otherwise linked somewhere.  And the NY Times doesn't tell you anything very specific about my information habits.  I will say that I've spent much less time reading about education.  Other than the fact that the level of public discourse around the subject is maddeningly misinformed, there just seems less and less to say.  Honestly, I don't know that I haven't said about all I have to say on the topic on this blog, and where I am at on the issue seems incredibly distant from where the front lines actually are in the debate, in terms of Democrats and Republicans largely thinking about the issue in similar ways.  And ultimately, the self interest of middle class Americans and the fact that the problem of education is at root a structural problem with capitalism itself makes the issue much more scary than most Americans are really interested in dealing with.

But back to media.  I listen to the bloggingheads podcasts a lot.  Doing dishes.  Mowing the lawn.  Driving to work.  The basic premise, for those who haven't checked it out, is to try and get really smart people on the left and the right to debate important issues of the day.  It tends to be moderates from both sides, with a good deal of libertarians sprinkled in.  Some of the regular participants are too annoying bother with, and my ears generally glaze over during the wonky foreign affairs discussions.  But overall I find the serious back and forth across partisan lines fascinating. 

Other mentions on the list: The New Yorker Out Loud podcast  is probably the closest I'll ever get to actually reading the magazine.  The authors themselves being interviewed is, while maybe not quite as good as the real story, a special thing in its own right.  I do most of my commenting on the Reality Based Community site.  The community of commenters there are top-notch, and often as interesting as the original post.  Up w/Chris Hayes is sometimes a bit too wonky, and for a supposedly inclusive talk show, gratuitously liberal, but Hayes is very sharp and fun to follow as he tries in earnest to pull out the substance from all sides.  Little Atoms is my most recent discovery and now one of my favorites.  The baseline is secular humanism and free thought, but the range of topics is vast and the conversations always intriguing.

I think I'll stop here and leave the "arts"  - music, books and film for next time.

Wrestling Snakes

So, Gerard Depardieu recently moved to Belgium to avoid paying taxes in France.  How much would he have to pay?  Well, according to him, he's already paid $190 million over his career, and new rates are about to go into effect raising the marginal rate to 85%.  What this means is that for every dollar he will earn over one million dollars, the government will take $.85.  To many, this is outrageously unfair, an outright theft.  Depardieu calls it insulting.

"I am leaving because you consider success, creativity and talent grounds for sanction."

These numbers do indeed sound big.  When we imagine ourselves being taxed at such rates, it seems entirely unfair.  And has he really paid $190 million already?  That might seem unfair.  But looking at the math, it seems less so.  According to the best source I could find, his current net worth is $200 million.  He's clearly made a lot of money.  In order to get to $200 million, he would have had to average $5 million a year over 40 years - and that's just in taxes paid.  I haven't been able to find any better details on his career earnings, but we can only assume that it was an enormous lot.  Remember that this is an increase in French taxes, and still merely a marginal rate of 85%, after an income of one million.  So his career average income would have to be closer to 10 million a year.

But let's assume for argument's sake, that his average after-tax income was an incredibly conservatively estimated to around 1 million a year.  That is an outrageous amount of money.  We're talking about $83k a month.  That's twice the average middle class pre-tax yearly salary.  Can you even imagine having that kind of money to spend?  This is the kind of income that makes luxury spending like this seem reasonable:

"The average jet setter spends nearly $30,000 per year on alcohol (wines & spirits.... hotels and resorts ($157,000 a year), or events at hotels and resorts ($224,000 a year). Spa treatments even fetch more jet-set dollars....$107,000 a year at spas around the world....$147,000 a year on watches....$117,000 on clothes....a whopping $248,000 a year on jewelry."

Are these people really victims?  Is this lifestyle being unfairly hindered?

There are a few things at work in debates over progressive taxation, falling into two main categories.  First, there is the utilitarian argument over what the actual effects are of progressive tax rates.  Do tax rates like those in France (and, it is worth remembering, those we paid her in the US a few decades ago), disincentivize the most productive investors, hinder overall growth, contributing to higher unemployment, higher prices, less innovation and lower standards of living overall?  Or do they actually boost productivity by decreasing income inequality, spreading wealth out into middle class communities and paying for common-good investments like infrastructure and social programs that boost public welfare overall?  The answer to this seems empirical.  Yet, as is often the case with issues that involve a moral component, as we'll get to next, the empiricism is easily lost in the moral intuition.

The second argument is of course one of morality and principle.  Are the rich really deserving of their large incomes, such that forcing them to pay far higher rates is indeed unfair and akin to a form of theft?  Are the middle class really deserving of their modest incomes, and thus deserving of their lower rates of access to things like quality communities, quality services and generally drastically lower standards of living?  The answer here is again empirical, to a degree.  For while there are plenty of cases of individuals obviously inheriting their wealth, and the ability to leverage and thereby access more of it, there are harder cases, those of seemingly genuine wealth creation through more intrinsic, self-generated means. 

However, it must be asked then where did this apparently highly valuable self-agency come from?  At this point many will begin hand-waving about simple free will and choice and self-determination.  More compelling to me, is the social research that gives lie to this concept, as well as the philosophical and neuro-scientific research that paints a much more deterministic picture of human agency.  When looking at any one successful individual, there always seems to be something in their life, come by some kind of environmental or biological fortune, that paved for them their street with gold.  As a larger social matter, the kinds of economic, political, social and cultural institutions in society are enormously determinative in their power.  Even if not entirely determinative, they are at least so much so as to more than justify the moral position that current levels of income inequality in our country are truly unfair, and allowing one to make at least $1 million dollars a year, or $83k a month is perfectly reasonable enough reward for whatever truly self-determinative, and thus morally "earned" productive activity they have engaged in.

At this point, however, those engaged in a moral argument for the rich deserving their riches tend to return to the first argument, that of utility.  And unfortunately, the empirical nature of that debate seems always to be biased by the moral subtext and intuitions regarding fairness and desert.  It seems an endless sort of loop, a tautological ouroborous in which one's righteous position is the only thing that matters.  I couldn't possibly argue that I myself am immune from what I can only assume are my own intuitive, Marxist biases. 

Yet, there is truth in the end.  We cannot all be right.  As concerned as I am with compassion and empathy - my thoughts tending toward humility and the imagination of the other - I place a good deal of faith in these attitudes as allowing me more room for rational objectivity than a posture of self-interest and self-projection onto others might.