Kansas State geographers have compiled maps that show the seven deadly sins as practiced in the United States. It popped on the net today, but I found a better set of charts at ChartPorn. Here’s the one for Envy.
Map of Envy in America
Shorter Brad De Long this morning: Those words do not mean what you think they mean.
Brad De Long takes down some of his fellow academics and is too the point.
In case there is any doubt:
- Paul Krugman is reasonably up-to-date on research in macroeconomics over the past quarter century (Levine);
- that spending can spur the economy is part of what everyone who teaches their graduate students about the dot-com boom of the 1990s ora obout the housing-led expansion of the 2009s says, and the government’s spending is as good as anyone else’s as far as this is concerned (Cochrane);
- Christina Romer played a significant role in the design of the ARRA (Lucas);
- there is certainly debate over whether “advancing the science” means what Ed Prescott thinks it means (Prescott);
- Eugene Fama really ought to have paid a little attention to Minsky-Kindleberger at some point in his career (and really ought to be paying attention to Krugman now) (Fama);
- Luigi Zingales needs really, really badly to read John Maynard Keynes’s “How to Pay for the War” before he embarrasses himself further (Zingales); and
- I don’t think “working in those fields means what Michele Boldrin thinks that it means (Boldrin).
Read the whole post to see what Brad is reacting to.
Here’s Inigo Montoya to put paid on it.
When visiting Rome, don’t stay near the train station. We took a train with a late booking from Milano to Roma Termini. The area around the train station is crawing with tourists. As is most of central Rome, but then this is just more so. We stayed in a hotel that was the upper two floors of a building. There were hotels on each of the four floors below us, four of them. Breakfast was contracted out to a restaurant on the corner of the street below and as is often the case for things subcontracted out and not monitored, mediocre. I should list the good things about it: 1) it was dry.
We were able to walk to the things we wanted to see for the two days we were there. To say there are old things to see in Rome is like saying that there are beautiful girls on the beach at Ipenema. At some point, I hit saturation and I think that only Saint Peter walking on the water would have gotten my attention.
Speaking of Saint Peter, I saw his house and, boy, oh boy, did he over decorate. I have a hard time correlating the piety of the poor with the gold plating of the Vatican. It is like one of the previous popes was Midas. On the other hand, the Catholic church has preserved culture of Rome in a way no government could have done. Many object d’art were either donated to or purchased by the Catholic church over the centuries. It is a form of immortality to have your name attached to something for posterity. The source of each of these items in the Vatican’s museum was usually mentioned in the description of it.
With regard to Christianity, I like the way the Roman noble families did a leveraged buyout of the Christian church. In the early days of the church, property donated to the church could be free of taxes, so families did that and had their sons join the church to continue managing the estates. Roman Catholicism adopted many of the characteristics of Roman clinetelism and continued Roman culture for many centuries. Along with the LBO of the Christian church, the Roman church worked hard to gain market share. They were very successful at beating out the competition, literally. Convert to Catholicism or be put to the sword. Modern day marketing people still envy the Catholics for that option.
One of the paintings in the Vatican museum depicted the ‘murder of five priests by Calvinists’. My words were, “Good for the Calvinists.” There weren’t any paintings about the Inquisition. How about a few statues to celebrate the successes of the Counterreformation? Oh yeah, there weren’t any. The premise of the Roman church is that they could replace the Pax Romana with the Pax Christo. But people don’t work that way. Poland is overwhelmingly Catholic because they were under the economic, political and cultural domination of Russia for Centuries. Russia was Orthodox, so there was no way in hell that Poland would be.
My colleague was listening to a guide when I caught up with him, so we fell in with the group for about five minutes. This guide professed a form of Christitanity that was two parts mysticism and one part glamour. She sounded like she was from the East coast, New Jersey perhaps, and prattled on about three secrets of the world that are passed down from pope to pope and how one of the died when he read the three secrets. One of them was that a pope would be shot on a day of the year, and son-of-a-gun, Pope JP II got hit. She showed a picture of her favorite pope, Pope Justin, the warrior Pope. Gee, is that what Jesus had in mind when he said “Love your neighbor as yourself” or was that to be interpreted as “Kill your neighbor before he can kill you.”?
The Sistene chapel was packed to the gills with people, and they were stirred by the most thuggish looking and acting security people in the whole place. They passed through the crowd like paddles, causing a wake of displaced persons when they moved. “No pictures! No pictures!” There were the people shushing people talking. This was weird. It is not like people were practicing a liturgy. This museum turns a profit. They had a flow of people through that was easily 10,000 on the day I was there, at around $20 per person. Many of the people bought trinkets, so you could figure on another $50,000 per day from those sales. Around $250,000 per day. That’s a revenue stream of $90 million per year. I don’t it it costs that much to run the place. They don’t do many acquisitions as many pieces are donated to them. $90 million per year for restorations and staff. Conservative American fundamentalists must be green with envy when they consider this sweet deal.
After a week in Milan where it seems that being a pedestrian crossing the street is like playing a game of lotto, where if you win, you get to cross the street and if you lose, you die, I took matters into my own hands, or feet as it were, to deal with cars that cut through the cross walk as I was crossing. We left Roma Termini and crossed the street to find out hotel and a car shot into the cross walk in front of me. I kicked his rear quarter panel. A little while later the same thing happened and I used my hand this time (this car was closer) and I heard a satisfying “sprong” sound as the fender dented in and released. Two times was enough and I refrained from doing it again.
The Roman Forum area is closed off and no longer available for free wandering. There are preservation and restoration projects underway and it was a pleasure to walk that part of Rome. The Curio, the place where the Senate met was striking. The roof has been restored. Some pieces of the original marble still stand. There were many fragments of buildings extant and it was interesting to look at the construction techniques used, particularly arch structures. The Colosseum was grand.
I was humming a Bob Dylan song for most of the two days that I was there. “When I Paint My Masterpeice”. It starts with the line, “The streets of Rome are filled rubble. Ancient footprints are everywhere.”
I am spending two weeks in Milan, working with a vendor on a project for our company. The guys at this company are engineers, like me and my colleague, and it is enjoyable working with them. Engineer humor appeals mostly to other engineers, so I won’t try to describe it here.
I am staying in a monastery dormitory that has been converted into a hotel. The refurbishment is new enough that it feels like a new hotel. It is in the town of Vaprio d’Adda, a town where Leonardo de Vinci spent around 30 years. It is on the Adda river and Leonardo spent a lot of time studying the river and water dynamics. There is a museum for him in the town, but I haven’t been there yet.
Driving here is interesting. Turn signals are taken as a sign of weakness. Lane markers are seen as mere suggestions of where one should drive. Pedestrians are invited to say on the curb and don’t cross the street. The other day, I saw a woman with a baby carriage who was afraid of entering a marked cross walk. Kirkland cops may sometimes act like they want to be in a Mussolini parade, but they will set traps to monitor crosswalks.
Much of the area around Milan is industrialized. I have read that one of the cultural divisions in Italy is that the people living in the north think that the people living int he south are lazy. I haven’t talked to my work partners in Milano about it. If you asked me about Alabama and Mississippi, I would probably point out that while I don’t know if they are lazy, they have poor schools and the schools reflect the mores of the community. The work output per person in the southern states is lower than those of the northern states. All of the southerns states get more in services than they pay in taxes (which is the opposite of most northern states). Faced with poor results in just about any metric available, people from the southern states still have the unmitigated gall to act like their culture is superior to that of the northern states. Go figure. Perhaps it is that way here in Italy also.
From what I can see of Italy, there isn’t a strong visual guide to identifying Italians. Perhaps this is true just in the northern cities. When I lived in Germany, I could tell Russians from Germans and Germans from Dutch. I have been flummoxed in my attempts to identify facial characteristics that I could say are indicative of being Italian. In America, I can often make an educated guess about the ethnic heritage of people, but I’m lost here.
I’m sitting in a former monestary, now a bed and breakfast, in a village near Milan. It is quiet, one kilometer away from the village center and I like that. Except last night when I went out to find some dinner. There was some sort of street fair going on down by the river and there were families out walking everywhere. It was very nice. I’d had about 8 hours sleep in the last 48, and all I wanted was something to eat. Driving was interesting. There are streets in this village that a horse drawn cart would find to be a snug fit.
In general, driving here is interesting. When you wind the rental car up to 160 kph, it starts to beep at you. And when you slow down to a more sedate 140 kph, you get your doors blown off by everything except a Yugo. Lane markings are seen as a mere suggestion of where one should drive. I saw many cars straddling lanes on the autostrada. In the village yesterday, a car came right down the center of a street where there was no reason for him to drive in the middle of the road.
Back to finding food. It was 3 in the afternoon and the only thing that was available was ice cream. Bars on street corners also serve ice cream and ices. I found a place that also served sandwiches, sort of, and had a tortilla with mozzarella and salame. Gut bomb. While waiting for the food, I watched the service staff. There was a rather incompetent waitress who was being continually berated by a young man who was somehow related to the matriarch. The waitress, a pretty young woman, was eating a plate of food when I arrived and had left some number of open tickets when she took her break. Or at least that is what I think was happening. The young man was making various ice cream concoctions behind the counter and flourishing the tickets in one hand, fanned out like playing cards. I had no idea what he was saying, but I can recognize bitching when I hear it. The young woman brought a bottle of Beck’s to my table and knocked it over, spilling the beer on the table and the floor. She left and didn’t return to clean it up. After 10 minutes, an older waiter, say mid-40s cme by and cleaned it up.
I’m in the breakfast room and the waitress just came by to check on the food line that is on a counter by the wall. There is a nice arrangement of fresh fruit and rolls, a toaster oven with a moving rack that squeaks rhythmically, juices, bottled water. She speaks very little English and I haven’t taken time to learn that much Italian. She was asking if I wanted things and she said “bacon? speck?” Speck is the German word for bacon. She was doing what I do when I encounter someone with a different language. My first impulse is to speak German as it is the only other language I know.
One of my favorite bumper stickers from the 1980’s (back when bumper stickers were hot) was one that said, “Like having a weekend? Thank your labor union.”
Today is Labor Day and I saw this on the Rude Pundit, who wasn’t being profanely rude today, but was still good. I don’t normally copy and paste whole posts, but I’m like John Coltrane on this one, that I don’t know where to stop.*
No, This Is What a Socialist Says: Eugene Debs Would Kick Your Ass:
For Labor Day, as people who don’t actually understand a thing about socialism keep spouting that vaguely moderate Barack Obama is some unholy descendant of Cesar Chavez or Emma Goldman (did she ever go to Kenya?), the Rude Pundit is offering some quotes from a real socialist, Eugene Debs, who ran for president as, you know, a Socialist Party candidate five times between 1900 and 1920, getting nearly a million votes in 1908. See, real socialists aren’t exactly known for subtlety in their rhetoric. They don’t want to trick workers into uniting. They want to show workers the failure of the capitalist system, which will make them willingly join. And, as you can see below, Debs will kick your ass (and he’ll take your name, since organizing was the foundation of the socialist movement):From an August 27, 1912 campaign speech in Fergus Falls, Minnesota:
“[Capitalism is] a confidence game the professional politicians have been playing with the workers of all nations all these years. To keep them in subjection by playing upon their ignorance is the rule that governs their campaigns for votes among the workers. The ‘issues’ upon which they keep the workers divided into hostile camps are of their own making.”From a June 16, 1912 campaign speech in Chicago:
“The baseness, hypocrisy and corruption of these twin political agencies of Wall Street and the ruling class cannot be expressed in words. The imagination is taxed in contemplating their crimes. There is no depth of dishonor to which they have not descended – no depth of depravity they have not sounded.“To the extent that they control elections the franchise is corrupted and the electorate debauched, and when they succeed in power it is but to execute the will of the Wall Street interests which finance and control them. The police, the militia, the regular army, the courts and all the powers lodged in class government are all freely at the service of the ruling class, especially in suppressing discontent among the slaves of the factories, mills and mines, and keeping them safely in subjugation to their masters.
“How can any intelligent, pelf-respecting wageworker give his support to either of these corrupt capitalist parties? The emblem of a capitalist party on a working man is the badge of his ignorance, his servility and shame.”
From a February 21, 1925 speech in Chicago:
“The class now in power cannot rule honestly. They must rule corruptly. They are in the minority. They have not the votes of their own to put them in power, but they have the money with which to corrupt the electorate. They have the money with which to corrupt the courts and to buy the legislators, and to debauch all our institutions. They have the power to do this because they have the money, and they have the money because they own the means of production and distribution. The great mass of the workers depend upon them for employment. In this system no working man – we boast of every man having the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and yet in this system that has been alternately supported by both of the capitalist parties, no man has a right to work. He can only work on conditions that the master who owns the tools he works with grants him permission to work, and the man who works by permission lives by permission, and is in no sense a free man.”Yeah, Debs had his dreams, man, and most of them failed. The point is that because Debs and so many others were there, much got transformed for workers because of the fear of those in power that there might actually be a socialist uprising. Now, the loudest “movement” is a group of people who may as well be an army of scabs and Pinkertons, so slaveringly do they do the bidding of the powerful. They have been completely co-opted by those who despise them. They are lambs willingly announcing that the wolves are their friends. God, how Debs would wonder when a real leader will rise to the occasion. God, how he would wonder if we could rise to it.
*Supposedly, Miles Davis complained to John Coltrane about the length of Coltrane’s solos. Coltrane told Davis that he didn’t know when to stop. Davis told him, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.”
I’m somewhat ambivalent about Dana Steven’s use of the word ‘atrocities’.
One day, a documentary filmmaker will produce a full accounting of the atrocities perpetrated on the American economy in the 30-plus years since the Reagan administration deregulated the financial markets.
I normally think of atrocity as a crime against humanity, but perhaps she is correct. The dictionary doesn’t restrict the use of the word to descriptions of crime. It is about wickedness. I’ll give her a pass on it.
She continues:
American Casino (Table Rock Films), written and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, is not that movie, but it will do just fine in the meantime.
I need to see that movie.
I would like a documentary filmmaker to address one of the sound bites that was emblematic of the Reagan Administration. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” The cynicism in that quotation has poisoned the body politic since the President spoke it. Conservatives love to quote it. It is a deeply undemocratic sentiment. It is saying that the government can’t do anything right. Who are the government? We, the People. It is saying that we can not govern ourselves. People who believe that saying are not worthy of the sacrifices that have been made to establish and defend this experiment in self governance.
Josh Marshall asks the question:
It also points back to the question (a frustratingly good one) of why the advocates of a public option and just reform in general have not simply explained this as allowing people to buy into Medicare at any age. Because, essentially, that’s what it is. And I think I could pretty much guarantee you that if the question in the public mind was “Would you like the option of buying into Medicare before you turn 65?” the opposition would be vastly diminished.
David Lindorff adds some good reasons:
Now I’ve been accused of lecturing (laughs and applause), and I don’t want to sound like a college professor here, but let me just highlight a few reasons why simply expanding Medicare to cover all of us makes not just moral but economic sense. If we were to make that change, we could immediately eliminate the Medicaid program, which as you know is funded by the states, and costs them (and you) about $400 billion a year, mostly to cover low-income families and individuals. Now that money would not be totally eliminated, because Medicare currently doesn’t cover all health care costs–just 80%. And Medicaid covers the remaining 20% for those elderly and disabled people who cannot afford to pay for Medi-Gap private plans. Even so, eliminating Medicaid for the poor, who would be switched to Medicare, would save at least $300 billion. We could also eliminate the Veterans Administration–which incidentally is an excellent example of true government healthcare, with publicly owned hospitals and doctors on salary, and it runs very well and very efficiently.
Something those folks at last month’s town meetings who were saying government can’t do anything right should think about. (wild applause from Democratic side)
Sorry. I just had to say that. (more applause)
Anyhow, eliminating the VA would save another $100 billion so we’ve already saved more than half the amount that was added to the cost of Medicare in order to cover everyone. (applause)
But there are far more savings.
One of the biggest would be the elimination of about $300 billion that is spent each year by hospitals and doctors to provide care to people with no insurance who end up in hospital emergency rooms. The cost of this “charity care” is factored into higher hospital and physician bills, and ultimately into higher insurance premiums paid by the rest of us. Since all those people would now be covered by Medicare, that expense would vanish.
American companies currently pay about 25 billion a year in workers compensation insurance–money that ultimately comes out of workers’ paychecks. That would no longer be necessary, because people injured on the job would be covered by Medicare. (smattering of applause mostly from Republican side)
Car insurance rates would be dramatically lower, because car insurance would no longer have to pay for medical costs following an accident. The same is true for homeowners insurance, which would no longer have to cover the costs of someone being injured on your property. (applause from Pennsylvania delegation, with among the highest car insurance rates in the nation)
And of course, the biggest savings of all–about $3000 per person or $12,000 per family every year–namely the cost of private insurance premiums paid by you and/or your employer, would be gone. Think about that a minute: no more co-pays, no more annual deductibles, no more employee share of insurance premiums for yourself or your family. And for businesses that provide health care coverage, a huge savings that will make them more competitive in the global marketplace, and that will also allow them to pay higher wages to their employees. (prolongedapplause)
Read the whole thing.
The Republicans have their priorities.
The point isn’t that, say, $80 billion a year is nothing. Obviously, that’s a considerable amount of taxpayer money. Rather, the point is, lawmakers don’t hesitate to make that kind of investment when it suits their larger goals. In Ezra’s example, conservatives — from both parties — think $75 billion a year to cut the estate tax is fine, but a similar amount for American families with no health coverage is not.
As Matt Yglesias added, “Specifically, all the Republicans plus Senators Baucus (D-MT), Bayh (D-IN), Cantwell (D-WA), Landrieu (D-LA), Lincoln (D-AR), Murray (D-WA), Nelson (D-FL), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), and Tester (D-MT) thought nothing of adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit when the beneficiaries were a tiny number of already wealthy households. But quite a few of these people seem very concerned about the idea of spending similar amounts of money on making health insurance affordable to middle class Americans.”
That makes me want to be a socialist.
Ali Soufan, former FBI special agent:
Public bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.
This is a good article by someone who knows what he is talking about. We tortured people and got nothing for it.
We need to stop calling it “enhanced interrogation techniques” and start calling it by its true name, torture.