Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

Study: Rich pretty sure they’re inherently awesome

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This is one of those studies with results that more or less obvious to those who aren’t the ones being studied, but Matthew Huston’s Slate analysis of it is still an interesting read. Excerpt:

In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness.

[…]

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.

 

I also, in particular, recommend checking out the second page of the article, where Huston gets into assessing the practical ramifications of these findings.

Understanding the psychology of both the wealthy and the reasonably comfortable economic strata will give us a better idea of which rhetoric by supporters of various social justice agendas (and justice system reform agendas) is effective or ineffective, in terms of selling the agenda to the unconverted. That kind of thing — figuring out whether rhetorical appeals are landing or missing the mark within people’s existing worldviews — is right in my area of interest.

There’s also reason to be very concerned about the high levels of wealth in Congress here in America (as well as in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK, according to Huston) in terms of what legislative actions they might take to reinforce existing inequality. It’s one thing to casually neglect a population because you’re just wildly out of touch with the plight of the impoverished. It’s an entirely other and even more pernicious thing to intentionally start rolling back prior efforts to help the poor or propose expanding harsh sentencing targeted at low-income populations and (poorer than the average) minority racial populations because you think they somehow “deserve” their condition and should be kept away from the superior humans. In recent decades, that agenda is exactly what we’ve seen a lot of.

If we don’t figure out the political communication pathway to appeal to the middle classes effectively and convince them that this worldview isn’t true, we’re in for a big resurgence of open social Darwinism.

Global Warming, Snow, and Arctic Chills

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Whenever there’s a severe winter whether event, the conservative cranks start crowing about how this means there’s no such thing as global warming. This view starts from a pretty silly baseline — obviously there will always continue to be outlier events in either direction because that’s what outliers are and weather is not exactly the same as climate — and ignores the other obvious point that winter is typically associated with cooler temperatures than the rest of the year in higher latitudes (nearer the poles than the equator), even if the annual average is rising.

But then there’s just the relatively simple science that explains not only why global warming can exist simultaneously with severe winter weather but how it can cause it to be even more frequent and more severe. This post will explain the basics of two types of events, in the context of global warming.

1. Heavier snow storms
During the course of a year, global warming is evaporating moisture from drier climates. (Right now, for example, we’re seeing record droughts in California instead of winter rainfall to replenish water tables.) During the summer months at each pole, the warming trends are also evaporating meltwater from the ice sheets. This means that, overall, there’s more moisture going into the atmosphere — and it’s going into an atmosphere which is warmer than in the past. The warmer the air (relative to normal temperatures at that time), the more capacity it has to hold moisture.

When the capacity is reached or if the temperature of the air drops suddenly (which reduces capacity), precipitation occurs. In warmer regions or during the non-winter months, this occurs in the form of rainfall. This is why severe rainstorms and flooding have occurred all over the world, even as water shortages are happening right nearby. The moisture is sucked up into the atmosphere on one side of a geographic zone (or not dropped in the first place due to higher carrying capacity) and then dumped out very quickly on the other (usually colder) side, often on opposite sides of a mountain range.

During the winter, in high latitude places, we’re seeing warmer winter months interrupted periodically by very severe snowstorms. During the warm weeks, the atmosphere is collecting a higher than usual amount of moisture. When the temperature finally does dip suddenly, this moisture is released in the form of heavy snowfall (i.e. the much colder version of the heavy rainstorms in the rest of the year). And that’s how we can get an increase of severe snowstorms in some regions during winter, because of (not despite) global warming.

2. Deep freezes
arcticThis past week, the continental United States experienced a very deep and widespread freezing, even stretching sub-freezing temperatures as far down the latitudes as the deep American South. The more northern, higher latitudes had (depending on one’s location) windchills ranging from 15-50 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero. In some places, exposed skin froze within a minute. Very dangerous, very cold weather.

The American media didn’t do a great job explaining how this was happening, in terms of meteorological process, let alone why it was happening (i.e. that it can be linked to global warming). This left the conservatives to snark once again that this was somehow proof that global warming is a myth. But there’s a concise explanation from the blogs of Scientific American.

Essentially, melting Arctic ice in summer, due to global warming, evaporates meltwater into the (warmer than usual) atmosphere. This weakens and disrupts polar wind patterns — known as the polar vortex — that normally “lock” the cold air into the Arctic Circle (or close to it) during winter. Once released, this cold air then pushes southward, way past where it usually is found during these months.

 
Unfortunately, both of these types events will become more frequent in the near-term due to global warming, as long as there’s still ice to melt up there during the rest of the year and as long as the temperatures are still sometimes getting cold anywhere during the winter.

Individual episodes of these weather events can’t always be tied specifically to global warming. But as a whole, in terms of trendlines, we can correlate them statistically to rising average global temperatures. And by understanding weather science, we can see how there’s also a plausible causal link. So the parallelism of the trends isn’t coincidental. And the near-universal view of the professional climatology community is that global warming is increasing and results directly from human activities such as industrialization of production and agriculture.

 
Note: This analysis is intended to help lay readers understand the general concepts involved. It is not intended to be a 100% technically rigorous article. Some shortcuts and elisions in the science have been made for ease of mass communication.

Op-Ed: Chinese Antarctic Rescue A Positive Signal

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My latest op-ed in The Globalist:

Last week, a Chinese helicopter crew rescued 52 people trapped on a Russian icebreaker stuck in Antarctic pack ice.

A difficult mission like this would, in the past, usually have fallen to the United States – and indeed, a U.S. ship is in turn now rescuing the Chinese crew from their own trapped vessel. But China has now joined the small ranks of those nations with the capacity to help in such a situation.

This situation – a Chinese air transfer of an international team on a Russian ship to a waiting Australian icebreaker, accompanied by a U.S. follow-up mission – is symbolic of international cooperation in Antarctica as a whole.

 

Read the full text here.

2022: Slavery World Cup

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2022-world-cup-logoAs ethically bad as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia are going to be, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar is going to be worse. Several years ago, that Persian Gulf absolute monarchy, a country the size of Connecticut, won its bid to hose the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament for the summer of 2022.

Most criticism at the time focused more on the superficial (though valid) points about how hot the desert country would be in the middle of the summer and how that might affect the tournament. There was also consternation over the government’s human rights laws (the lack of them) and some allegations of possible bribery in the bid. But more recently, concerns over labor conditions in the World Cup preparation stage have pushed to the fore.

Current estimates say hundreds of marginally compensated foreign laborers preparing for the tournament have already died during construction and as many as 4,000 may be dead by the time construction ends. Some workers haven’t been paid at all in the past year and a half and all live in dangerous, packed tenements. 

This is, to be clear, not a problem solely restricted to the World Cup, though that’s the angle with the most global ramifications. The overall foreign worker population in Qatar is more than six times the size of the ruling Qatari population, at about 1.65 million to 250,000. The foreign population has grown very sharply in the past few years so the numbers are a bit hard to track.

Due to oil wealth and concentrating it in native hands, Qatari citizens are among the world’s wealthiest populations. But they’ve also preserved their wealth by chronically underpaying (even enslaving) the huge migrant worker population. According to IMF data, even if the national wealth were distributed annually over the whole population, including non-citizens, everyone would still be making well over $100k a year, even adjusted for purchasing power.

Instead, through pure avarice, the kingdom is determined to keep its foreign workers — who make the country function daily — in horrid conditions.

If Qatar doesn’t make a big change soon, there’s going to be an awful lot of blood on the hands of the world through the World Cup’s presence there. And sadly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Surprise! The “surge” in Iraq never worked.

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iraq-map-ciaNew York Times headline today: “Qaeda-Linked Militants in Iraq Secure Nearly Full Control of Falluja”

The city of Fallujah, located on the Euphrates river, is 43 miles west of Baghdad, the capital, which is on the Tigris. It’s a major Sunni city and was the site of heavy civilian casualties in the 1991 Gulf War and then of bitter fighting in 2004 between the United States military and Sunni insurgents aligned with al Qaeda. The United States lost control of the city then, but regained it with a very heavy push that year, which included the intentional use of chemical weapons against insurgents and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes. The city has now essentially fallen to Sunni insurgents once more.

Remember how conservatives just spent the last five years insisting that George W. Bush’s “surge” actually “won” the War in Iraq and made it possible to leave? It’s pretty clear right now that that was a bad assessment.

I mean, on its merits it was clear to me that it always had failed, because it never achieved its primary goal of creating space for political solutions to the civil disarray. Well, it may have created the “space” but no solutions — or even dialogue — ever happened. And that was the entire premise upon which success should have been measured.

So we just left later than we should have, with a higher body count than before the surge and nothing to show for it. But conservatives kept insisting it was a huge success. Anyone who disagreed was supposedly just a Bush-hating liberal who couldn’t admit being wrong.

Now Iraqi violence is the highest it’s been in five or so years and large parts of the Sunni areas are falling like dominoes to a miniature, transnational Syria-Iraq militant empire affiliated with al Qaeda. It’s the successor group to the old Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia unleashed after the U.S. invasion in 2003, except now they’ve gotten control of giant sections of not one but two countries, away from the respective non-Sunni national governments of the bordering countries.

Does the US still have leverage in South Sudan?

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South Sudan: This is the house that Jack built. If the house is a new state in sub-Saharan Africa and Jack is the United States.

The New York Times identifies one of the more pressing problems in the current crisis:

The problem, analysts say, is that the United States does not have the influence it had before 2011. Then, the South Sudanese needed American aid and support for a referendum. Now they have independence and more than $1 billion a year in oil revenue that used to go to the north.

“Very quickly after independence, we saw increasingly authoritarian instincts, not just on the part of Salva Kiir, but all the members of the South Sudanese political elite,” said Cameron Hudson, a former State Department official who is now the policy director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This time around, powerful neighbors like Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are taking a lead role in trying to broker peace.

 
south-sudan-map-ciaOn the one hand, I think that reinforces the need for oil purchase partner China to get involved — particularly as I don’t trust those regional powers to be fair brokers.

On the other hand, it’s also a cautionary tale for the United States in future. That’s a point explored in more depth in the key read from The Guardian, How Hollywood cloaked South Sudan in celebrity and fell for the ‘big lie’.

The distance we’ve come on poverty

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The United States still has a long way to go on reducing poverty in the United States, but all things considered, things have gotten better. On a number of key underlying metrics as well as quality of life standards, we’ve seen improvements since the beginning of the “War on Poverty,” fifty years ago this month, under President Johnson.

It’s worth keeping this knowledge in mind when the “War on Poverty” social programs — Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, Job Corps, welfare, etc. — that have provided safety nets and opportunities for low-income and struggling Americans are coming under attack today. They’re often dismissed as ineffective because topline poverty hasn’t moved very much since 1964 (though it also hasn’t exploded out of control, despite much higher levels of inequality, which is a good sign). So knowing the positives is key to defending them.

The New York Times published a short piece today summarizing the successes and failures of the anti-poverty efforts since January 1964.

The good:

Still, a broad range of researchers interviewed by The New York Times stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, malnutrition has all but disappeared. After all, when Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.

Many economists argue that the official poverty rate grossly understates the impact of government programs. The headline poverty rate counts only cash income, not the value of in-kind benefits like food stamps. A fuller accounting suggests the poverty rate has dropped to 16 percent today, from 26 percent in the late 1960s, economists say.

 

So on the brass-tacks/basics/fundamentals level, we’ve seen big improvements. And being poor, while certainly still no picnic, isn’t as horrendously bad as it was a half century ago, when it was still only a step or two away from “Grapes of Wrath” territory.

Then, the bad:

But high rates of poverty — measured by both the official government yardstick and the alternatives that many economists prefer — have remained a remarkably persistent feature of American society. About four in 10 black children live in poverty; for Hispanic children, that figure is about three in 10. According to one recent study, as of mid-2011, in any given month, 1.7 million households were living on cash income of less than $2 a person a day, with the prevalence of the kind of deep poverty commonly associated with developing nations increasing since the mid-1990s.

 

However, I still think on balance it’s been more successful than not, and we should keep fighting for more gains and not turn our backs on these programs by mythologizing their failures.

There’s a lot of wishful, rose-colored-glasses nostalgia surrounding the 1950s and early 1960s, in terms of glamorous economic good times. There’s at least some truth to that, in that the United States was the only industrial economy left standing for a brief time and high-paying jobs were plentiful for many segments of the workforce. But it was, in reality, also a period (as noted above) where large parts of the country still didn’t have electricity or other basic features/services of modern society.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotations:

“In the world of politics, nostalgia is a kind of quitting. It says, ‘I can’t deal with today, can we go back to yesterday?’ But a particular yesterday, without its attendant problems.”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

The War on Poverty hasn’t done as much as we had hoped it would. But it has made a difference for many millions of Americans over the past fifty years. I also agree with those who say that broader economic efforts — including raising the minimum wage need to be made to reduce poverty more widely. Even so, I still want prioritize protecting and strengthening these social programs, not gutting them.