Month: November 2014

Rich Weinstein, Jonathan Gruber, and Consent of the Governed

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2014-11-17 Jonathan Gruber

Bloomberg has a long piece on Rich Weinstein, whom you probably have not heard of. He’s the guy who unearthed the footage of Jonathan Gruber (one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act bragging about how the American people had to be misled in order to pass the bill because they are too stupid to k now what is good for them. You can find lots of videos on YouTube now, but I’ll give you just one as an example of the category:

Weinstein, for his part, is not a journalist, blogger, or political activist of any kind. From Bloomberg:

“When Obama said ‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period’—frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said ‘period,’ there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”

He did his own research, found a bunch of guys who called themselves architects of the law (Jonathan Gruber was one of them), and then started fanatically looking for everything that any of them had ever said about the law. Eventually, he found the clip above. The University of Pennsylvania yanked the video once it started making the rounds, leading to a classic case of the Streisand Effect, and the rest was history. Three thoughts.

1. I agree with Weinstein that it’s disturbing no one else found these videos. As he put it: “It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is.”

2. To be totally honest, I have a lot of sympathy for Jonathan Gruber. As much as the Fox News crowd might jump all over him for calling the American people stupid, he’s got a point. It might be unkind, but it is–when you’re talking about economic concepts–completely accurate. I’m just as exasperated as he is with American ignorance of basic economics, which leads to such wonderfully silly policies as the minimum wage and corporate taxation continuing to be wildly popular. I empathize with both his frustration and with his glee in successfully pulling an end-run around the electorate and accomplishing something that (in his view) is beneficial for everyone. He’s not a mustache-twirling villain. He’s a guy who was trying to do the right thing, and was willing to be sneaky to get results.

3. As a lawyer friend of mine pointed out, if you get someone’s consent through deceit, you don’t actually have their consent. And for us Americans, the principle of consent of the governed is one of the bedrocks of our entire system of government. If the people are willfully misled–and Jonathan Gruber makes clear the law was intentionally written to do just that–than this is an attack on American democracy.

Sometimes the partisan angle is actually accurate, and this is one of those cases. Conservatives have long warned of the arrogance of liberalism, centralized planning, and a do-gooder technocracy that knows better than you do what’s good for you. Trying to provide healthcare for more Americans is one of the most noble imaginable motivations, but if the process is fundamentally anti-democratic that’s just not good enough.

Economic Theory in First-Person Shooters

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2014-11-14 Halo 5

In recent years there has been no shortage of interest in the intersection of video games and economics, but usually the research focuses on MMORPGs which often include extensive in-game economies and also involve virtual property that can have substantial real-world value. CCP Games (the guys behind EVE Online) even have a full-time in-house economist.

That’s not what this article is about. Nope, I want to talk about an amazing little paragraph I came across in an early preview of Halo 5. Here it is:

Halo 5 also includes an unexpectedly awesome addition: in-game audio cues for enemy locations and weapon spawns. It’s subtle and not immediately noticeable, but it’s a brilliant mechanic that I didn’t even know I wanted. If your teammate gets sniped, in-game audio from his Spartan will announce where the bullet came from using classic callouts like “Red Street” and “Mid.” It will take time to learn these cues, but I think they’ll make playing solo a much more enjoyable experience. It reminds me of audio I’d hear watching a Major League Gaming match, which makes sense considering 343 recently hired a few very accomplished Halo professionals to work on Halo 5.

I agree that it’s brilliant, but I think it’s even more brilliant than the author realizes.

Here’s the problem: one of the things that makes team-based games fun is teamwork. But teamwork requires coordination. In particular–since communication in FPS games is strictly voice-based–it requires a common vocabulary. If you see a bunch of bad guys running towards one spot on the map, you might want to tell your team. In an incredibly fast-paced game, how do you do that? What do you call the particular area they are running towards? What do you call the particular area they are running from? No one has time to bring up their map and read off grid coordinates, so you need to have a commonly accepted set of place names. There’s a name for this problem. It’s called the coordination game, and it’s one of the classical scenarios in game theory.

Coordination games are games where everybody wins by cooperating, but there’s no reason or effective method to pick one particular solution. The classic example: which side of the road should you drive on? Joking aside, it really doesn’t matter if you drive on the right (America) or the left (the UK). Either one works perfectly fine, as long as everyone agrees on the same thing.

So what might be the most important aspect of this gameplay innovation is that it will solve the coordination problem by teaching all the players a single, accepted set of place names to describe the map. These place names tend to evolve on their own over time, by the way, but that process can be really long (since it takes time for various, vague alternatives like “the red house,” vs “the farm house,” vs. “grandm’a house” to compete with each other for universal acceptance.

Of course there are lots of unrelated problems with voice chat in video games, but I’m excited to see if this approach leads to a measurable increase in strangers coordinating with one another to try and win games, as opposed to just slinging racist and homophobic insults. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be an in-house analyst for a big video game publisher…

New Brookings Essay Series

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The Brookings Institution has an essay series on character and opportunity. As the site describes it,

This essay collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the fields of economics, psychology, social science, and philosophy. It provides a kaleidoscope of views on the issues raised by a policy focus on the formation of character, and its relationship to questions of opportunity. Can ‘performance’ character be separated from ‘moral’ character? Should we seek to promote character strengths? If so, how?

Definitely worth checking out.

Suffering, Evil, and God

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why

I’m not going to answer how they can co-exist. Sorry to disappoint.

Actually, my answer is that I cannot completely know why suffering and evil exist. There’s plenty of good answers that I believe cover areas of evil, such as how evil can result from human moral freedom, suffering can bring about greater good, etc. but sooner or later we reach what we would call pointless suffering–suffering that seems to serve no purpose.

But today it dawned on me that labeling suffering as pointless is presuming knowledge a human being cannot possibly possess if God does indeed exist. I just finished reading the book of Job, and the deeper I grow in faith, the more God’s answer seems completely justified:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Gird up your loins like a man,
    I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone,
7 when the morning stars sang together,
    and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Truly, who can fathom why God made the world the way he did? Can we see all ends and declare with utmost certainty that we know suffering is pointless, that God had no point in allowing evil? Logic is a powerful human engine, but even logic has its limitations. Can any one human being presume to see all ends and render judgment on whether suffering has a purpose or not?

What’s more, if we presume God exists, I would argue instead that no suffering can be pointless by definition. Any suffering we endure can be offered to the glory of God. I still don’t why suffering exists, but I now know what I can do with any and all suffering that comes my way. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:

My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.

It’s not an easy philosophy to carry out by any means. But I don’t think rejecting God makes the situation any better. In fact, I’d argue it makes it worse. Saying God doesn’t exist in response to the problem of evil doesn’t solve the riddle to why we suffer. It simply removes any right or basis we could possibly have for questioning why we suffer. Nature certainly doesn’t care one way or the other if we suffer and die.

The above may seem like an argument from ignorance. I don’t know, so I give up. Actually, I think it strikes a middle way: I don’t know, so I won’t presume to know in order to answer why we suffer. I think there’s much value in knowing what you cannot know, and if God exists, I definitely do not have the knowledge, either empirical or theoretical, to see all ends and explain why all suffering has ever happened and will continue to happen. But that ignorance doesn’t really bother me. As an atheist I said we shouldn’t invent answers where we simply don’t know, and I will continue to assert the same as a Christian. Better to say I don’t know than invent a false answer that presumes knowledge beyond my capacity.

As a final thought, I remember talking to a deacon who had given funerals for children. Parents often ask why their child died, and the deacon always answers, “I don’t know.” He said it’s the best answer because, truly, he doesn’t know, and trying to discern or invent an answer to a child’s death will do nothing but hurt already bereaved parents. I think that’s a good approach. There’s a real temptation for Christians to have an answer for all suffering because God is so often called to account. We should resist that temptation. Instead, let us weep with those who weep and remember that even the very wise, as Gandalf famously said, cannot see all ends.

My Theory: Aptitude is Preference

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2014-11-15 Aptitude is PreferenceHere’s an article from The Atlantic debunking the myth that math is somehow about genetics. It’s not. It’s about practice. I agree with this, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The message of this post is part of a larger  movement contrasting static vs. fixed mindsets. Static mindsets hold that our abilities are innate. Children with static mindsets are afraid of hard tasks because failure will reveal weaknesses about who the are. This leads to a lack of hard practice, and a negative feedback spiral goes downhill from there. Growth mindsets hold that our abilities can be changed with hard work. It greatly reduces the negativity associated with failure (which no longer reflects on your identity) and this–combined with a message that hard work can help you improve–lead to a positive feedback loop.

I don’t disagree with this at all. I’m just not really sure that these messages go far enough.

Let me start with two examples.

In high school, I joined the track team for one season. One of my closest friends was also on the team but, unlike me, he was insanely good. He wasn’t very competitive, so the coach never put him in individual events. But he was very loyal, so the coach often put him in relays because then he would go all-out for the sake of his team. Our team was good, and we often competed at the state championships. I remember that when the coach told the team to take a day of rest from training, he would often assign one or more of the runners to check up on my friend during the day to try and prevent him from running, because if you didn’t watch him constantly, he would run anyway. He was always in his running clothes, he ran multiple times per day, and he would routinely chalk up more than 100 miles per week.

I majored in math as an undergrad. In one of the most difficult courses in the program (abstract algebra II), the professor would call people up to work homework problems on the board. I was part of a group that spent hours working on the problems ahead of time. They were hard, and even working as a group we would often decide that a couple of them were just too much to figure out. We’d do the ones we could, and just hope we weren’t called for one of the tricky ones. But there was one kid–a perfectly humble, warm, nice guy–who didn’t do his homework with a group and often didn’t seem to do his homework at all. If he got called then–almost no mater what problem it was–he’d crack open the textbook, read the problem, stare off into space for a minute, and then get this absurdly pleased grin on his face when he figured it out. It was a totally innocent grin, a lot like my children get when they’ve figured something out, so there was nothing arrogant or showy about it. Then he’d go up and work out the problem on the board.

These guys were geniuses at two very different things, math and running. And they shaped my perceptions of effort, enjoyment, and talent.

The insight came for me when I got temporarily obsessed up with some puzzle or other that was a tangent to a mathematical concept from one of my classes. The concept wasn’t directly related to the course, wouldn’t help me in any way I could see, and I was sure that it was something any serious mathematician would be able to dispatch easily. And yet it held me captivated. I found myself thinking about it between classes, when I was eating, when I lay down to go to sleep. I didn’t just want to know the answer, I wanted to find the answer myself. Eventually it hit me: is this what the kid from abstract algebra thinks about all the time? It was totally out of character for me to think about math for fun when I didn’t have to, but if that grin of his was any indication, this was the kind of thing he did all the time just for fun. Just like my running friend in high school simply loved to be out on a run, period. It’s what he wanted to be doing.

So here’s the thing: the growth mindset philosophy is–as far as I can tell–about encouraging kids to buckle down and do their assigned work. Put in the effort, don’t be afraid to fail, and if you do you’ll get competent at things people think are hard. But this is (1) focused on visible effort (e.g. doing a homework assignment) and (2) results in competency rather than genius. My theory takes this a little bit farther. I think that genius (not just competency) is what results when people spend not just big chunks of time on visible effort, but vast swathes of their free time in invisible effort. My guesss–and it’s been born out by observations since then with other standouts that I’ve met–is that for most practical purposes the concept of talent just refers to people who genuinely like an activity so much that they do it incessantly. Coach had to almost literally force my friend in high school to stop running, because running is what he loved. And the mathematical geniuses I’ve met spend a lot of time just thinking about math because they like it.

The idea of enjoyment is crucial because I don’t think that it’s really possible for people to use self-control to dedicate such huge amounts of time to invisible effort. There’s just no practical way to remind yourself to think about math (or whatever) every time you’re waiting for a meeting to start, or on every drive to run an errand, etc. For me, the connection is so strong that I think in the long run aptitude really boils down to just preferences: we’re good at what we like doing.

There are limits and exceptions, of course. I am not saying that genetics pays no role, and obviously environment can be crucial. Some people also spend so much time doing something that they get very, very good at it and then lose all enjoyment of it. So it’s possible to be good at something you don’t like, but I think that’s the exception.

The plus side of that observation, however, is that preferences can change. This leads me to believe that if you want to be very, very good at something you first have to acquire the taste for doing that thing. I think one real downside of the way we do education now is that we don’t spend enough time exposing kids to the wide, wide variety of different kinds of work. And we don’t spend enough time telling kids that for almost any kind of work you can think of, there are people who really like doing it. Take accounting, for example. I never knew a single thing about accounting until I happened to cover some aspects of it that were relevant to a graduate course in international taxation. And lo and behold, it was actually fascinating to me from a philosophical standpoint. That sounds crazy to me as I type it because accountancy has such a bad rep, but it’s the truth. How do you value intangible capital, like a brand name? How do you make sure that you’re setting a good price when subsidiaries of the same parent company “sell” to each other? There are so many fields and disciplines I’ve only learned about in my late 20’s and 30’s that could have been fascinating to me when I was much younger. I want to do a better job of making sure my own kids get a chance to hear all kinds of people talk about all kinds of different work that they are passionate about, just to see what strikes their fancy.

There’s a big caveat, of course, which is that a lot of the time people are in love with the trappings of work rather than the work itself. Take writing, for example. Everyone and their dog has a novel they are working on. But amateur writers are famous for talking about their writing as opposed to, you know, actually writing. Lots of aspiring writers like the image of being a writer, or like the lifestyle that they think comes comes with writing, or just view writing as kind of a default exemption from real-life, boring jobs. Writing is, in a sense, the form of art any old idiot can do. Try to put paintbrush to canvas or chisel to wood and you’ll be able to tell in an instant the difference between someone with skill and someone who has no idea what they’re doing. But since we all learn to write English with basic competency in grade school, writing is the art form everyone is qualified to dabble in. This is one reason I’ve started tracking my time spent writing in Toggl: I want to get an accurate picture of how much effort I’m really putting in. I want to know if I’m just another self-deluded wannabe, and I figure one aspect of that is getting an objective assessment of how much time I spend doing the actual writing.

So you have to learn to like the actual activity that you want to excel at, not just the things that surround that activity. But I think that that is really more doable than people might suspect. Want to eat healthy? You have to invest the time to find aspects of healthy eating that you actually enjoy. One trick, of course, is to be starving right before you eat whatever you want to acquire a taste for. Do that a few times, and you’ll be surprised how much you can learn to crave a salad. Want to exercise? Take the time to try out lots of different styles and approaches to find one that appeals. If that’s not enough: get philosophical about how you approach it. I’m slowly becoming a distance runner (as an adult, I never got good at it in high school), and a large part of the reason is because I learned to approach distance running as a kind of meditation. Some of my most sincere prayers and spiritual experiences have been while I’m running. For me, running acts a lot like fasting: the physical discomfort of running (like that of hunger and thirst) can be a focal point for concentration and a steady reminder of my weakness and dependence on God. Trying to push myself to go up one more hill or put in one more mile is practice for all the other hard things I try to make myself do.

Here’s the thing: will-power is great, but research indicates it’s a finite resource. So if you want to accomplish lots of goals,  you’re going to want to be as efficient as possible. There’s a certain macho appeal of just running face first into difficult things and overcoming them, but the irony is that the same principle applies. If you like that sensation of challenging yourself then you’re actually not contradicting my strategy. You’re following it. If you don’t enjoy doing things the hard way just for the thrill of it, then you’re going to need to get sneaky and use every dirty trick in the book to fool yourself into doing what it is that you want to get yourself to do.

I love the growth mindset. I’m all about it. I sincerely hope to continue to throw myself at new skills as I get older, and to never stop learning and challenging myself and improving. If it takes about 10 years to get really good at something, then I figure that’s at least 3 or 4 things I can get really good at in the time I’ve got left. I think that maybe if more people believed that 90% of what looks like talent or genius was really about doing what you’ve learned to intrinsically love and therefore do again and again and again, then more people might be encouraged to think seriously about what it is they love and then invest even more passion and enthusiasm into it.

That’s my plan, anyway. I don’t see it as a way of making life easier or taking shortcuts. I just see it as a way of trying to maximize the good that you can do with the finite resources–time, energy, and will-power–that you’ve got.

Five Books on War

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poppy-fields

Reflecting on Armistice Day, that is, Veteran’s Day, I want to recommend two memoirs, two novels, and one stage play dealing with war. Something a little outside the obvious choices.

 

Bugles and a Tiger – John Masters.

John Masters was one of the last British officers in India, where his family had served for generations. In the book he relates how he became an officer in a Gurkha regiment, how he came to love his men, and how he himself grew into a man. For Masters, this meant honour and loyalty. He bitterly regretted not defending a subordinate early on in his career. “I discovered now that being ashamed of yourself is worse than any fear.  Duty, orders, loyalty, obedience – all things boiled down to one simple idea:  whatever the consequences, a man must act so that he can live with himself.” The Gurkhas were mercenaries from Nepal, and their wives were frequently loose. Masters explains that he resisted the temptation by remembering that to act on it would be to betray the trust of his men. The depiction of his first assignment in the Afghan frontier in the 1930s is superb. Masters was a warm, intelligent, and sensitive writer who never lost track of how every person is an individual.

 

Quartered Safe Out Here – George MacDonald Fraser.

George MacDonald Fraser was nineteen when he was sent to fight the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. Genteel and academically inclined, he was the youngest in a section of very hard men from the

In one incident, MacDonald Fraser had been made to carry a large, unlabelled tin of fruit, and fallen down a ravine. After being nearly blown up by a Japanese ambush because of his youthful stupidity, he brings the fruit tin back to his unit. The ‘gastronomes’ and ‘Epicureans’ expect to add some fruit to their condensed milk, and are not at all pleased to discover that the tin contains carrots in brine.

The book is a powerful window into the experience and mentality of soldiers during war. MacDonald Fraser freely admits that the campaign in Burma was nasty, ugly, and brutal. He really has no patience for what he terms “virtue for mere appearance’s sake,” and explains very persuasively how attitudes were different in his generation.

 

The White Guard – Mikhail Bulgakov.

This is first and foremost a deeply spiritual book. It is also semi-autobiographical. The novel tells the story of a family in Kiev during the chaos of Russian Civil War, and portrays the collapse of old values, embodied by the officer’s ethos. People abandon their honour for self-preservation and their ideals for opportunism, and it is all subtly shown to be the outward manifestation of a massive spiritual crisis leading up to Judgment Day. Bulgakov is my favourite Russian writer and his ability to tell a story is unrivalled. One of the most moving passages involves the officer of a cadet unit. When the cadets are abandoned by the rest of the army during battle for the city, the officer commands them to rip off their insignia and flee for safety. He dies covering their flight with a machine gun, and this sense of duty- honour- is shown to be love, and ultimately godly.

 

The Good Soldier Schwejk – Jaroslav Hasek.

Without this book there would be no Catch-22, or any other book on the absurdity of military service and war. Schwejk is a middle-aged Czech in 1914, when they still (unhappily) belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He joins the army, it seems, with the sole purpose of making it a laughing-stock. He plays the good-natured fool, but always manages to subvert Austria’s oppressive authority. For example, when he receives a draft notice, Schwejk claims to suffer from rheumatism, but insists on being pushed to the recruiting center in a wheelchair. Along the way, he brandishes his crutches shouting patriotic victory slogans. Schwejk’s deliberate misadventures are vastly entertaining, and Hasek was one of Eastern Europe’s masters of the absurd.

 

Journey’s End – R. C. Sherriff.

There is no war play more powerful than this. Since 2014 is also the 100th anniversary of the First World War, it would be a disgrace not to mention Journey’s End. Ten years ago I visited a good friend in London who took me to the West End to watch a revival of Sherriff’s play. I was absolutely floored. The play is set in an officer’s trench in 1918, several months before war’s end. By this point, the cast has practically seen it all. They are four years into a war where going over the trenches is almost guaranteed to be a death sentence. The boredom is excruciating, but who wants to replace it with action? What they are all trying to do is to escape from the realities of war. Some plant flowers, some read, and some drink. Raleigh, a new, very young officer arrives at the front to serve under Stanhope, a man who is dating his sister, and whom he worships. Stanhope knows that as an officer, his duty is to stand by his men, and his obligation to society requires that he display nerves of steel. He refuses to take leave in order to escape danger like others are doing, but he has become an alcoholic. He is deathly afraid of letting people down. Raleigh is excited to be selected for a raid behind enemy lines, but when almost everyone else is killed, his naïve enthusiasm is gone, and he is killed shortly after. The play intersperses the horrors of war with flashes of brilliant, dark humour, and deals with topics from food to love to honour and cowardice. None of the characters are caricatures, and Sherriff is not preachy. The British comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, is actually a tribute to the play, which is where it gets most of its ideas and characters.

Happiness Is Not Utility

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2014-11-14 City and Rural Area Happiness

In recent years, economists and policy makers have started to measure happiness (“subjective wellbeing”) and design policies to maximize it. In a paper for Vox, researchers point out that happiness isn’t the same thing as utility or welfare. This means that a government’s attempts to maximize happiness may work to undermine social welfare.

In a series of novel experiments and surveys, Benjamin et al. (2011, 2012, 2013) conduct surveys about actual or hypothetical choices people make and measure the expected happiness associated with each choice. They find that actual choices and happiness-maximising choices are positively correlated. But they are not identical. Respondents are prepared to sacrifice happiness in furtherance of another objective, such as a higher income (Benjamin et al. 2011).

The researchers conducted their own research into choices people make about where to move and confirmed the basic finding: people are willing to move to unhappy places if there is an economic incentive to do so. This means that happiness is only one variable that people are trying to maximize in their lives. They have other goals. Income might be one but, as the researchers note, other ideals like “freedom, nobility, and self-respect” might also play a role.

This isn’t just academic. It’s actually another stern lesson about the limits of centralized planning to improve our lives. Underlying this entire discussion is one simple fact: no one actually knows what human beings are trying to maximize. The concept of “social welfare” is undefined, and so efforts to use policy to maximize it are suspect, at best. A better aim is probably to try and maximize freedom so that people will be best able to maximize their own welfare as they choose to define it, rather than relying on some universal definition being imposed society-wide.

New NBER Study on Minimum Wage

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On the heels of Nathaniel’s latest minimum wage post, I thought I’d point to a brand new NBER working paper titled “More Recent Evidence on the Effects of Minimum Wages in the United States.” As one summary explains,

For years, [David] Neumark has battled claims by other economists, such as University of Massachusetts professor Arindrajit Dube, that minimum wage hikes have no effect on employment. This latest paper offers more evidence that employment prospects for teenagers are diminished most by the minimum wage. 

Even though teenagers are generally not relying on minimum wage income for living expenses, jobs give teenagers their first opportunity for work experience that is crucial for becoming a productive worker later in life. For disadvantaged teenagers, a minimum wage job can develop skills that provide an opportunity to move out of the lower-class.

While state and local minimum wage increases deprive some of jobs, even more young people would be out of work if the federal government increased the minimum wage nationwide. Income levels and cost of living vary widely between states. The hourly median wage varies from a high of $37.59 in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, to a low of $10.81 in Brownsville-Harlingen, Texas. The federal minimum wage is an attempt to impose an oversimplified, cure-all prescription to the complex and diverse causes of poverty.

…Neumark’s new paper shows once again that flashy sound bites such as “Raise the Wage” make for quick political slogans, but raising the minimum wage will continue to price teens out of jobs.

The minimum wage, like other price controls, has unintended consequences.

 

2014 Republicans: Not So Old, Not So White, Not So Male

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But don’t expect to hear much from most media sources:

Among the winning candidates are the youngest female ever elected to office, the first black Republican woman elected to the House (also the first Haitian American to serve in Congress), the first female Senator from West Virginia and the first female Senator from Iowa. A Jewish Republican from New York defeated his opponent by 10 points and an openly gay Republican is in a neck-and-neck race to represent a California district. You have a markedly young incoming group of Senators, including 37-year-old Tom Cotton of Arkansas and 40-year-old Cory Gardner of Colorado. Sen. Tim Scott was elected the South’s first black Senator.

Lower turnout at midterm elections can explain some of the demographic shifts, but not everything:

Part of the Republican improvement can be traced to lower voter turnout, because younger Latinos and Asians simply don’t show up as much in non-presidential years. But black voter participation this year actually went up from the last midterm election, rising to 12 percent of the electorate, compared with 11 percent in 2010. The new GOP strength among non-black minorities was to some extent the product of aggressive outreach in minority communities by the Republican National Committee and various state parties. In Texas, GOP senator John Cornyn carried the Latino vote by a single percentage point, while Greg Abbott, who is married to a Latina, lost it by only ten points in the race for governor. Abbott carried the Asian-American vote 52 to 48 percent.

…

California Republicans surprised some observers in this election by mustering enough strength to block Democrats from winning a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate and Assembly, thus giving their members in those bodies a voice in tax increases and budget matters. An analysis by KPCC Radio found that the accomplishment resulted partially from “the victories of two Republican candidates from Orange County — both women, both Asian American.”

Republicans still have much more to do, and presidential election years will be harder. Regardless, the future looks hopeful for building a coalition with all citizens of the United States. Onward and forward!

Edit: Moments after I wrote this article, my friend and co-editor Monica posted this article:

A headline on the Cut announces that the midterm election results were “Bad News for Women.” Under it, Ann Friedman argues that even though there were several “prominent victories” for Republican women this week—including combat veteran and hog castrator Joni Ernst in Iowa, black Mormon Mia Love in Utah, and youngest woman to ever be elected to Congress Elise Stefanik in New York—because they do not support abortion rights and are pro-gun, that means their wins are not a boon for women.

I’m not sure I agree. If you are against everything Joni Ernst or Mia Love stand for, then this election was bad for you, and the policies you care about, not bad for women. It should be obvious, but “women”—half the population—are not a uniform voting block with uniform ideas about what is best for them….

Hacked Photos and Conservatives

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2014-11-07 FTND JLaw

Compromise and innovative solutions are both more likely when a problem is seen as important but not intrinsically partisan. Unfortunately, Democrats have decided to try and turn women’s issues into a partisan issue by declaring a Republican “war on women,” and an overwhelmingly liberal media has been complicit in legitimizing this narrative. I’m not going to commit the same mistake in reverse: I understand that many social liberals (1) care deeply about these issues and (2) have perspectives and ideas that can be part of a common-ground, consensus-building approach.

Instead, let’s look at how a socially conservative voice reacted to the hacked photo scandal. I’m using the word “scandal” intentionally because there is a scandal, and the scandal was the fact that so many people went out and looked for nude photos of Hollywood stars that had been illegally and immorally stolen from their private phones. Fight the New Drug–the anti-porn site I’ve cited frequently before–was clear on this point from the very start:

Note that we don’t use the word “leaked photos” in this post. That’s because the term “leaked” is a soft, misleading word that implies that these photos somehow found their way onto the internet by the celebrity or someone close to them. Not the truth. These photos were illegally hacked and stolen, unknowingly to those violated.

The post goes on to directly address those who “are judgmental and [say] that if the women hadn’t taken these photos in the first place, that they wouldn’t be in this position.” A lot of people took this position, and I think there was an unspoken perception that it was predominantly conservatives who would leap to blaming the victims. But FTND–a very conservative group–demonstrates that victim blaming isn’t a partisan issue, or at least that it need not be one.

The story got a little more interesting after Vanity Fair released an interview with Jennifer Lawrence. In the article, Lawrence wrote–probably in an offhand way–that “either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.” That was the line that prompted the open letter response from Fight The New Drug. The letter starts by emphasizing again that Lawrence bore no guilt whatsoever for the hacking of her phone The letter then goes on:

We’re sorry that society has been “pornified” and that we are living in a culture that thinks that hacked and stolen photos of naked people are something to seek out, cheer for, laugh about, and spread around. With a society that thinks a woman is only as good as her body, it’s easy to see why you would feel like your boyfriend would turn to porn even when dating a talented and beautiful woman like yourself.

Think about this question, Jennifer. Should any person ever have to feel that they need to give their partner something because if they don’t then their partner will turn away and get it from someone else?

That’s a pretty damn good question, if you ask me. And I think the point it raises is a very important one, and one that conservatives are perhaps uniquely able to draw attention to. As Lawrence told Vanity Fair, she had people she knew personally who looked at the pictures online. To me, that is one of the most disturbing details of the entire story. We’ve reached a point as a society where our appetite for voyeuristic photos has reached a point where even people who personally know the victim of this “sex crime” apparently see nothing wrong with participating themselves.

On the other hand, however, that incredible moral blindness does have a kind of twisted logic to it. Lawrence framed the central problem with the theft as being one of violated consent:

It does not mean that it comes with the territory. It’s my body, and it should be my choice, and the fact that it is not my choice is absolutely disgusting.

She’s absolutely right that no one has any right whatsoever to look at sexual photos that are stolen. But what about the implied other side of that coin: do we really have a moral right to look at sexual photos that aren’t stolen? I don’t think that we do. I think that it’s a horrible myth to believe that, just because a woman gives consent to have sexual photos taken and publicized, that she is somehow empowered. There is an intrinsic violation in using the image of another human as a means of sexual gratification. Sexual imagery is always dehumanizing, not just when the photos are stolen.

No one has any excuse to look at the stolen photos of Lawrence (or the other stars), but I–along with FTND–question whether any one should be looking at sexually explicit photos of any kind. Once you accept that pornography is OK, the moral blindness sets in. Once you are living in a paradigm where it is acceptable and routine to treat human beings as means to ends and that it is OK to sexually objectify anyone, you’re already starting down a slippery slope. And, as we’ve learned, no matter how much consent should matter it is reduced to little more than a speed bump in that paradigm.