Simple Answers to Complicated Questions

Ezra Klein:

... [I]f you believe that Reagan substantially transformed American politics, what features of the state or trends in the economy do you consider the strongest evidence for your thesis?

From Keith Poole's talk "The Polarization of American Politics"

Income inequality (the red line) was close to its all-time measured low at the time of Jimmy Carter's inauguration. It rose slightly during his presidency, but really took off during the Reagan years, and has shown no signs of turning back, other than a brief respite in 2008 when the financial meltdown sapped income of the financial class. (Update: here are some more charts on income inequality, most of which show things starting to spin out of control in the Reagan years).

Some of this can be attributed to a new mindset at the Fed, which prioritized keeping a lid on inflation over maximizing employment. But changes in tax and regulatory policy, particularly in finance, have also played a role in widening inequality, and for those I think we have The Great Communicator to thank. In retrospect, eliminating the top tax bracket has been a godsend for the ultra-rich, who now can have solidarity with upper-upper middle class when it comes to raising the top marginal rate.

Update II: just a note on the correlation here. This shows that political polarization is highly correlated with measures of income inequality. For metrics where we have data going back to the early 20th century, the correlation is weaker but still easily visible, mostly because the inequality measurements we have aren't as good. This part of the chart has nothing to do with Reagan ushering in a new conservative era. It's just a convenient side effect. Reagan seems to have presided over an initial rise in inequality, which help drive political polarization.

Mohamed My Friend

When there's some tumultuous but promising news event that happens in a faraway land, it's easy to fix on the one cool famous person you know from there and hope that they'll come to power. (You see this happen in Senate primaries a lot -- remember Paul Hackett?) This can be a mistake, as perhaps there are lower-profile good folks who for complex reasons are actually much better suited to rule. Confession: I'm feeling that way regarding Egypt and Mohamed ElBaradei.

How often does successful anti-authoritarian sentiment break out in a country and you have a Nobel Peace Prize winner on hand who has been staking out an anti-regime line? ElBaradei has spent his career trying to get the nations of the world onto the right side of one of the biggest issues facing humankind - nuclear nonproliferation. He called Bush on the WMDBS during the Iraq War and took a very firm line against attacks on Iran.

The downside is that he's spent many of his years outside Egypt doing nuclear nonproliferation stuff rather than sticking it out in the country doing anti-regime stuff, which damages his cred among some Egyptians who've actually been suffering under the regime. So maybe there's some awesome revolutionary leader who's been Victor Laszloing his way around Egypt, always one step ahead of Mubarak's thugs as he stirs up pro-democracy activism, and who'd make a really good president or whatever they're going to call it after the revolution. That's the sort of person who gets regarded as most legitimate by the populace in these situations.

But there's a lot of ways things can shake out. And maybe the strategic thinking will be that the best thing to do is to put ElBaradei at the top to secure international support, and the politics of revolution will allow that outcome. If so, cool!

Friedman-Induced Singapore Blogging

Unfortunately at a certain point in this op-ed about how Singapore does education well, somebody presents a metaphor to Tom Friedman and he runs with it.

Things that are true: the government here is very smart about running a mixed economy well, education is good and well-funded, public servants get paid very well at the top, and corruption is between low and nonexistent. Also, it's a real hub of biomedical research. It's one of the places stem cell research came when America started restricting it for silly reasons.

Don't Worry About The Decline Of Manufacturing, Worry About Republicans

Back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people might've been surprised that we're now lamenting a decline in manufacturing jobs. Back then, factory work was dangerous both in terms of immediate dismemberment and long-term health, and poorly paid for long hours of toil. Due in part to effective labor organizing and progressive political activism, we managed to turn it into a good life for lots of people, to the point that it sounds to us like a good example of the kind of employment we hope we can make available to ordinary folks.

There's no reason we can't do basically the same thing for service sector employment (well, no reason except that it costs various people money and they'll support right-wing politicians so they can stop it). Making manufacturing jobs good is in many ways a bigger leap than making service jobs good, as safety issues on the manufacturing side present nontrivial technical challenges that really don't have an equivalent on the service side. And while we might have to do things like updating health insurance provision to fit a more fluid economy where you don't work at the same job all your life, this is well within the capacity of a properly functioning mixed economy. There's no reason why the decline of the manufacturing base has to result in the decline of the middle class, unless people on the left just get destroyed at politics.

Information Feudalism

My esteemed senior colleague John Holbo: "What strong IP protection generates is not a free market but something more like information feudalism: a market-unfriendly clusterfuck of fiefdoms and inescapably inefficient lord-vassal terms-of-service arrangements that any friend of freedom, in any ordinary sense, ought to look upon with disgust."

To add to the metaphor, if copyright protections on something last the author's life plus 50 years, there'll be a hereditary copyright nobility who enjoy the vast riches won by their ancestors without having to produce anything useful themselves.