The Only Winning Move

There are hundreds of ways to be unscientific, but one of the most common is misunderstanding the relationship between theory and practice. Here’s a quote I found on Facebook today - apparently originally from this cogsci paper - that is illustrative of the problem:

Opportunity costs be damned, some trade-offs should never be proposed, some statistical truths never used, and some lines of causal/counterfactual inquiry never pursued.

So on the one hand, this seems to want to have done with the economic way of thinking (”opportunity costs be damned”), but on the other hand, it frames itself in economic terms (opportunity costs, trade-offs). It reads like someone who understands the use of science to a point, but wants to keep some things off limits. Indeed, if you read the paper (which is a summary of “sacred values” research), that is what is intended. This is meant to characterize the religious mindset, which it notes without argument is important to the functioning of human society.

I wonder. I agree that this is religion pure. There are, in general, two classes of superficially science-friendly anti-scientism, which we could call the religious objection and the hyperscience objection. The hyperscience objection is that mindset that thinks that data can speak for itself without a theoretical framework in which to be interpreted - radicial empricists. These people think they’re more scientific than scientists, and they constantly rail against all the “formalism” in science - but in fact they don’t have a goddamned clue what science is all about. Science is NOT simply listing facts - it’s all in the method of interpreting those facts. Just performing some lab tests is not science, in other words - it has to be a controlled experiment with a stated aim to count.

The religious objection is what’s being characterized above. It basically takes a bunch of things that the individual wants to believe for whatever reason and ropes them off limits to inquiry. Specifically, I think the religious thinker doesn’t object to any scientific methods or particular datapoints, he just refuses to reach certain conclusions, no matter how clearly they follow from the data. In general, I don’t mind the religious objectors as much as the hyperscience objectors. Religious people are capable of being - and frequently are - quite scientific, they just have their limits, and at least they are honest enough to admit that those limits exist, and kind enough to tell the rest of us what they are.

I think the limits are often hastily adopted, though, and that’s what I want to complain about. The quoted material is a case in point. It reads like someone who wants to say that there are limits to what economic models can explain about human decisionmaking, but in fact it’s not obvious from the statement that one need depart from the model. There is a way of stating the concern within an economic framework: just say that some costs are infinite.

I should think that there are a number of advantages to this. First, saying that some costs are infinite, rather than saying that thinking about some opportunity costs is “off limits,” begs the question of what happens when two things of infinite value come into conflict in a way that folding your arms doesn’t - and so it invites the thinker to address an important question he was trying to avoid. Second, it avoids the false dichotomy of choosing between “theory” and “reality.” People like to talk about “theory” as though it were some dry, abstract thing that has nothing to do with real life. They’re right that it’s dry and abstract, but wrong that it has nothing to do with real life. The crux of the first point is that theory is valuable because it makes one’s assumptions explicit and thereby points toward important areas of inquiry. And anyone who understands the crux of the first point will have no trouble with the second: theory exists to help us think more clearly about experience; it is neither confusing about experience nor removed from it, but merely a disciplined way of approaching it.

It is clear to me that humans are moving away from explicit religion. But dropping out of church and giving up on God doesn’t mean you’ve left religious thinking behind; the roots run deep. We see this all the time in politics, for example - someone declaring off limits or taboo certain key arguments their opponents need to make their case as a way of short-circuiting the debate. For example, “if it will save even one life, it’s worth it, because you can’t put a price on human life!” It sounds nice, but it’s bollocks, first because you can put a price on human life, at least in terms of other lives, second because their opponents generally aren’t advocating anything like pricing lives in the first place, and third because the speaker of such lines is always very much aware that whatever it is he or she is advocating does have a cost, and they’re bringing this up precisely to avoid discussion of that cost. Just because Marx said it doesn’t make it wrong: religion is the opiate of the masses, and this kind of thinking is lazy and self-defeating.

As an undergrad I took a bioethics class that was cotaught by a philosopy and a biology professor, and the biology professor was not only a Baptist, but he was also openly hostile to any philosophical approach to Ethics. He had been teaching the class alone (for pre-med students) for years, and somehow they’d talked him into sharing it with the Philosophy Department the year I was in it. He clearly thought of it as a way of just talking about weird medical cases to get pre-med students used to thinking about them; he didn’t seem to much like the idea of taking a systematic approach to moral decisionmaking. Which is really weird for a scientist, when you think about it. If you know that you have a class of students who are frequently going to be faced with a lot of very tough ethical decisions, WHY NOT teach them to approach these decisions systematically? The last day of class he and the other professor reserved for giving their own opinions about the issues uninterrupted, and Dr. Shull used his to rail against Philosophy, more or less. At some point he said “now honestly, show of hands, how many of you will really take into account what Kant thinks when making decisions?” Mine was the only hand to go up - which is a point of personal pride, but also a point of disappointment in the others. Shull seems to think that considering what Kant would say is some kind of weakness, as though I can’t think for myself - but to me just the opposite is true. When I want medical treatment, I consult an expert. When I want my car fixed I consult an expert. Why wouldn’t I be willing to consult an expert about moral issues? And indeed, I’m not so much consulting an expert as internalizing his advice and applying it, or not, as it suits me. It doesn’t mean I have to adopt everything Kant says without review, but I find the systematic approach to thinking about moral questions helpful - primarily because it gives me a vocabulary to make my own moral assumptions explicit, like any good theory should - and I think a lot of nonsense in interpersonal relationships and political discussions could be avoided if more people were willing to take systematic approaches to moral questions. At some point I raised my hand to make a counterpoint, and although he hesitated, he stuck to his guns and didn’t recognize me, the floor having been reserved on the last day of class for professors’ rants. But I think my question was a good one, and I would like to hear an answer from a religious person at some point. The question was, “if you just justify everything by an appeal to your feelings, how do you ever expect people to discuss and reach compromises on things since we can’t question each others’ feelings?” Feelings are for friends and family, they’re not for the general public. When someone is deliberately putting something off limits to discussion, they’re generally, in my experience, covering up a fraud. I DID say Dr. Shull was a Baptist…

The truth is, opportunity costs are always important to consider, and while we should perhaps avoid discussion of some trade-offs where possible, we shouldn’t put them off-limits entirely. There is no need to fear statistical truths so long as we understand what statistics really say, and the only lines of counterfactual that shouldn’t be pursued are the absurd or misleading. It’s all on the table, so let’s discuss it. Ostriches stick their heads in the sand to avoid seeing predators, but that doesn’t make the danger go away.

Here’s the situation: a guy at work likes to rib me about being from the South, so he takes every opportunity to imply that I’m racist in some way or another. It’s all in good fun, so I don’t mind, but the other day a different, more douchebaggy cowoker got around to asking why Greg was always calling me a racist. I mumbled something about him thinking with his stereotypes, and here’s where the nonsense started. “You know, though, that there’s a reason there are stereotypes.” Implication being, of course, that stereotypes tend to be true, with the offensive corollary that I actually am racist after all. I mean, I’m from North Carolina, right? He then launches into this diatribe about how he’s half-black (patently impossible - dude has blue eyes, so he’s at most a quarter black) and invites me to guess what was served at his last family reunion. It’s a trap, but whatever, I say “chitlins” and get a gold star. “So you see,” the lesson seems to be, “stereotypes are actually all true.”

It’s sort of incredible to me that after 40 years of civil rights awareness and at least 20 of over-the-top political correctness anyone has still done so little introspection on how stereotypes work that he could really be peddling as insightful the idea that they’re always true. So here, for the statistically challenged, is the right way to think about stereotypes.

First, “tend to be true” is not the same thing as “always true” or even “true in all but a handful of cases.” Nor, even if a particular stereotype is true, does it actually imply anything about the person sitting in front of you over and above “there is a certain better-than-chance statistical probability that this guy meets a certain description.” So, to take my favorite example, there is a certain better-than-chance probability that any girl seated across a chessboard from me is worse at Chess than I am, just because it so happens that guys are, on average, better at Chess than girls. But the difference in performance is not really that large at the mid-levels (it’s dramatic at the upper levels, but I am not anything like a Chess master, so it’s the mid-levels that I’m concerned about), and in any case the truth of the generalization leaves PLENTY of room for the particular girl seated across from me at the table to be a better Chess player than the particular male who is me. So, if I’m sitting down to play with a girl, the best strategy is … yup! … give it my best, because I really don’t know much about the individual across from me. I know that out of every hundred games with girls I play I can expect to win more than half of them, but I don’t know ANYTHING about this particular game with this particular girl.

Second, generalizing from a single example is NOT VALID. Notice said coworker’s defense of the idea that stereotypes are generally true: his particular black relatives eat chitlins, therefore what? ALL black people do? ALL stereotypes are therefore true because he can cite one datapoint in all of human experience that conforms to one? Balderdash. To be convincing on this point he’d have to show a lot more than one black family eating chitlins. At the very least, he’d have to take a random sampling of black families and a random sampling of families from other races and show that there are some statistically-signifiant greater number of instances of chitlin-eating in the black families than in those of other races. And even that’s being generous, because he’d be failing to control for all sorts of probably-relevant variables like region of origin and socioeconomic status. I’m willing to bet that while it is in general true that more black people eat chitlins than white people, that difference largely disappears when you consider white families of low socioeconomic status from the South. In other words, it’s poor southerners of any race who eat them, and blacks just happen to be disproportionately poor and southern. In any case, NOTHING about this would be convincing on his broader point, which is that stereotypes in general are true. For that, he’d need to test a whole bunch of stereotypes, being careful to control for extraneous variables in all cases, etc. etc. One black family with regard to one popular stereotype is one helluva long way from making the case.

Third and most subtly, there’s some variant of the genetic fallacy going on here too - by which I mean things that were true in the past are not necessarily true now. It is this point that is most aggravating about stereotypes, I think: they have a tendency to outlive their usefulness. “Black people eat chitlins” is actually a case in point. I’m willing to bet that where older black people do indeed eat a lot of chitlins, you won’t find them all that popular with the youth. Tastes change, financial circumstances change, and what was true in the 50s need not be true now. A more accurate thing for my coworker to have argued would have been “stereotypes generally come from somehwere,” where it’s understood that the place they come from might be in the past and no longer relevant to present discussion.

It’s this last point that’s relevant to racism in the South. Certainly in the 1950s the South was quite racist, noticeably more so, probably, than other regions of the country. But a funny thing happened on the way from the 1950s to now: 50 years passed in which the South really changed, largely due to legal pressure from the rest of the country. Is there racism in the South today? Well, yes - and in some parts of it much more than others. But if you want to make a generalization about Southerners - certainly about Southerners from places like Tennessee and North Carolina that weren’t as involved in the Secession project as everyone else - I think you’ll find that what was true in the 1950s is no longer true today. Indeed, I would say that even by the 70s - certainly if the sheer level of violence and subsequent White Flight that accompanied desegregation in Detroit and Boston (both of which were a decade behind any major Southern city) are any indication - the shoe was firmly on the other foot. The South may have started off a lot more racist than the North, but it’s also had to face its problems more directly, and that tends to work better than pointing the finger at other people and saying “well at least I’m not as bad as THEM,” which was, roughly speaking, the Midwest’s strategy for dealing with its race problem.

Fourth and finally, just because a lot of stereotypes started out true, it doesn’t follow that you should believe any generalization that you hear. My favorite comedy expose of this is Dave Chapelle’s sketch on Slavery Reparations, where he imagines what happens if every black family got the $20,000 Jesse Jackson says the federal government owes them. They make a point of showing KFC stock skyrocketing, but then noting that watermelon sales are unchanged. Which pretty much squares with my experience of blacks in high school too: they eat a lot of chicken, but the watermelon thing just isn’t and probably never was true. Sometimes stereotypes are just malicious lies, and I guess the watermelon thing was probably just really funny to some racist types in Hollywood for whatever reason, and so it stuck in defiance of all reality.

So yes, I suppose that it’s true that stereotypes all come from somewhere. But “somewhere” (a) may not be relevant anymore, (b) may be someone’s (malicious) imagination, (c) may be real and relevant in general without being relevant to the case at hand and/or (d) may be a single example that was never even a general trend to begin with.

The moral of the story is not very revealing of course: you have to be careful with stereotypes. What’s incredible to me is that there are still people out there who don’t know that.

Well, the German election is over and I think the results were about the best that could’ve been hoped for. Union (center-right CDU/CSU) gets to ditch its SPD (socialist) coalition partner in favor of the much more like-minded FDP (liberal - in the original sense), Merkel stays on as Chancellor, the SPD’s support falls dramatically leading to its worst post-war result, all three minor parties gained with the FDP gaining more than the other two, and Union also loses seats since last time, though it’s not as dramatic as it is with the SPD. All told, the establishment lost, the alternative parties gained, and the real winner seems to be the liberal FDP. I’m ecstatic.

Matt Yglesias adds the following, which is an interesting and probably correct observation:

I note that following on the European Parliament election results and some other national results, there seems to be a continent-wide crisis of social democracy. In a great many countries, social democrats are really getting squeezed by rising far-left parties and the fact that Europe’s center-right parties tend to be inconveniently non-crazy.

There does seem to be a crisis of Social Democracy, all the more interesting given how successful it was only a couple of years ago. Flash back 5 years and it looked like the “Third Way” would solve all of the center-left parties late-80s woes - woes that emerged when classical socialism collapsed for good, not just in the Soviet Union, but in Western Europe, Canada, New Zealand, India and Australia as well. But now even the Thrid Way politicians don’t seem to be doing so well. Here’s my take:

(1) “Non-crazy” is Yglesias’ codeword for “basically leftist.” A lot of center-right parties have moved some to the left, at least on vote-getting issues like gay rights, global warming, government handouts, etc. And while some of them in some countries might have been “crazy” from time to time, that was never the case in Germany.

(2) Classical Socialism is anachronistic - productivity gains have seen manufacturing shrink as a portion of the economic output of every country; we’re just no longer in a workers vs. managers world, and however “Third Way” the European social democrats have become, they’re still carrying a lot of what I’ll call Old Labour cruft with them. Modern left-wingers aren’t interested in workers’ rights and union power because that battle was so decisively won in favor of the workers (at least in Europe) that they almost sunk their own ship with ballast. Todays leftists are interested in cultural and nanny-state issues - social engineering, really - and those things are better represented by parties like Germany’s Grüne and the UK’s LibDems.

(3) I wonder how much of the recent support for social democratic parties was anti-Americanism at the polls. I’m willing to bet that quite a lot of it was. Certainly in Germany the only reason Schröder won a second term was because he threw out some token anti-Americanisms there at the end. The same could probaby be said for Harper’s first loss in Canada - on track to win, but then suddenly Bush was hugely unpopular and Paul Martin spun three gold bars. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that center-right parties started winning again once it became clear that America was dissatisfied with Bush.

(3) I agree with Yglesias that Europe is not really moving to the right. It’s certainly moving away from the traditional left, but where it’s headed is anyone’s guess. Ditto Canada and Australia. It’s clear that there isn’t a new wave of support for Capitalism, but I think a fair way to characterize it might be that there is a grudging “new economic literacy.” That is, people in general are economically savvier than they were 20 years ago, which is why Social Democracy just won’t fly anymore. The experiment was tried and failed, and as much as people wanted it to succeed, they’re facing the fact that it didn’t and can’t ever. If I had to take a guess, I’d say we’re entering what’s likely to be a hugely annoying but “mostly harmless” phase in world politics which is vaguely technocratic-progressive, basically a lot of gimmicky plans designed to give rationalizations for government meddling that people know in their hearts is a bad idea, but are strangely addicted to. Expect a lot of smoking bans, cash-for-clunkers, healthcare tweaking, national service “opportunities,” mandatory classes on gayness in high school, etc. Basically everyone trying to sell their pet personal-identity project as somehow economically beneficial, even though they’ll all know on some level that they’re kidding themselves.

The good news is that you can only be clever for so long. Reality always wins in the end. I’m pretty optimistic about where the world is headed, even if I expect to hate most everyone for another 20 years while they speak in bullshit and kill me with a thousand papercut regulations. It’s sort of like Paul Graham talking about programming languages - when he says there are really only two programming langugage models - C and Lisp - and every new generation of programming languages gets more like Lisp than the one before. Well, there are only two government models too: statism and (classical) liberalism, and each new iteration seems to be getting closer to liberalism. Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection…

Matt Yglesias has a post called Political Tribalism that is as brave as it is welcome. He’s in Germany now, and they’re having an election today. Here’s what makes him uncomfortable about the whole thing:

One of the oddest things about being in Germany during an election campaign is that I’m pretty sure I have right-of-center views relative to German politics … But every time I hear a businessman type talk about how he doesn’t like the Social Democrats, I instinctively want to side with the SPD. All my instincts are to side with the union-backed party against the business-backed party and to immediately tune out anyone who’s complaining about “socialism” or making vague assertions that people on the left don’t understand that economic growth is important. I’m just uncomfortable with the idea of being a conservative, even in a country where the policy status quo and the issues are quite different.

If you’re a professional political commentator, like Yglesias is, I think it’s pretty brave to post something like that - because it involves admitting that your political analyses are likely tainted by tribal loyalty. To wit, that you’re sometimes not as critical of your side as you should be and overly critical of “their” side. But I don’t think any less of him for it because this is the elephant in the living room of political commentary. It’s an open secret that a lot of political discussion is not too different from cheering on your favorite sports team, or pop group at a battle of the bands, and I think commentary will get better as more people come to terms with this. And I think I know where to start.

It’s a common theme on this blog that people idolize politicians entirely too much. They say they don’t. People say a lot to give the impression that they’re cynical and detached about politics. But if the staggering number of people willing to just take Obama at his word that healthcare reform will be tax- AND deficit- neutral is any indication, a lot of people who talked like this when Bush was president didn’t really mean it, so long as someone on their team is in the White House. And for their part, I’ve certainly seen a lot of Republicans who are born-again cynics now that Obama’s in town. People who had no problem with Bush’s obviously-bogus budget projections on the Iraq War are suddenly worried about deficits again. It’s all so very frustrating. I think the first step any body politic can take to purge itself of tribal loyalty in politics is just to remember that politicians are career-minded too. They’re self-interested individuals pursuing a career with literally millions of people showing up to the job interview. If you’ve ever fudged in a job interview - done your best to put a good spin on yourself and your qualifications and downplay your weaknesses, which EVERYONE has - you should be able to appreciate why we need to second-guess everything politicians say. If only one person is interviewing you, it’s easy - you only need minimal spin to avoid that person’s deal-breakers. If there are two, it gets a little bit harder sniffing out what the dealbreakers for each of them are and saying things that offend neither and please at least one. And of course the more balls you throw at a juggler, the more he has to concentrate on. It isn’t as bad as if a politician were juggling MILLIONS of interviewers, of course, but he is juggling at least hundreds in the form of the media commentators and reporters who shape public opinion. It’s just really difficult to imagine that anyone could come completely clean under those circumstances, and especially not someone who seeks power over others for a living! Politicians are creeps by definition, and everyone would do themselves a great favor by repeating that like a mantra before their party’s guy goes on TV.

Another useful thing we could do would be to make politics boring. The second-greatest enemy to clear political commentary besides tribal loyalty is love of drama. In truth, very few elections in developed countries are watersheds, and it’s almost never “the election of our lifetimes.” Elections are important, and they do change things - don’t get me wrong - but it’s not the Battle of Endor. And in the context of the today’s German election, I don’t quite know what to think about this. Apparently flashmobs have started showing up at Angela Merkel’s campaign speeches and shouting “YEAH!” really enthusiastically after everything she says, regardless of what it is, or even whether it’s a natural place in a speech to cheer. And sometimes they chant inappropriate words too. For example, in the first video on the link at some point she’s talking about poverty, and the crowd starts chanting “Poverty! Poverty!” Another time she says something about people not working and the crowd goes wild - apparently about not working. You get the idea. It’s funny, and one way to look at it would be a healthy does of cynicism about what is, if you listen, a real say-nothing speech. But some commentators look at it another way: that German youth are protesting the fact that German politics is so boring - and if that’s the case I’m nervous about this. I would LOVE for politics in the US to be as boring as they are in Germany, and I think boring politics are in general the sign of a healthy political culture. If these flashmobs are fed up with boring politics, then they’re basically fed up with one of the few remaining places in the world where politicians can simply state their policy proposals rather than saying their opponents want to steal milk from children, and that’s no good. Politics is not entertainment; people should take it seriously.

On this second point, the media would have to take the lead. Rather than giving favorable coverage to all the cheap shots and puerile jabs that politicians take at each other now, they would have to switch to quoting as “soundbytes” the bits where people are actually laying out policy, and they would have to make the other stuff look childish. It would be easy to do, but it doesn’t sell advertising space, so don’t necessarily count on it.

Libertarians have a lot to answer for. I don’t mean that in the colloquial sense of having done a lot of wrong - I just mean that when you’re a fringe political philosophy, you’re starting with a lot of really different assumptions than everyone else, and so you don’t have the luxury, as, say, Democrats and Republicans do, of simply expounding on your policy proposals. Before you can even talk about policy, you have to justify your worldview - or at the very least clean out a lot of misconceptions your counterparty has about you.

I smacked into another reminder of this over lunch on Wednesday. A friend of mine (also a Libertarian) wanted to know my standard response to the sadly common straw man that without minimum wage laws and maximum work week mandates, workers would toil away at 12-hour shifts six days a week with barely enough renumeration to feed themselves, as was ostensibly the case in 1900. Caught off guard, my response was correct but woefully inadequate: I muttered something (this might even be a direct quote) about how “it’s got to do with worker productivity.” Fine if you’re familiar with economic jargon - but of course people already familiar with the economic jargon are not my target audience! They already know the arguments I’m shorthanding.

Libertarians miss tons of opportunities like this all the time. Someone asks a sincere question out of the blue, and you have a golden oppotunity to set the record straight about a bunch of stuff, only you DON’T because you haven’t rehearsed the argument recently. It’s the same affliction that we see so often in professors in technical fields (especially Math- and Computer-related, it seems). By the time the professor is in a position to pass on his knowledge to students, the concepts are alread so much old hat to him that he can’t remember what the difficult points were, let alone how to explain them coherently. It’s obvious to HIM that, say, functional programming languages are superior to imperative langauges, but when asked to justify this position he mumbles something about “scope ambiguities” which is incoherent without examples, and of course he can’t think of any off the top of his head. It’s a lecture that has to be prepared for.

OK, I’ve had two days. Here’s a concise version of why I believe that we didn’t need minimum wage laws and overtime restrictions to ensure decent working conditions and decent pay for our workers.

I think where people go wrong on this question is in comparing conditions in factories now to conditions in factories then. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, people - it’s a fallacy. Just because minimum wage laws passed and then working conditions improved, it doesn’t follow that minimum wage laws are the cause of the improvement. And in fact, there’s plenty of counterevidence: working conditions were improving before the federal minimum wage passed, so it’s actually unlikely that the change in statute had anything at all to do with it. Probably all it achieved was increasing unemployment a bit - which in 1938 was exactly the WRONG time to be throwing people out of even low-paying work. What can I say? Democrats have never cared about the little guy past election day.

Ah, but WHY do working conditions improve on their own? As I said, it has to do with productivity. Now for what that actually means. A worker is more productive when he produces more per unit of time. Simple, right? And workers become more productive primarily through innovation. Either they get better at their jobs or, more commonly and dramatically, someone invents something that enables them to do their jobs more effectively. Now, if you’re the factory owner and your workers get more productive because of a new manufacturing technique that you introduced, how do you take advantage of this? Well, you can (a) produce more of the thing and lower the cost to consumers, undercutting your competition and providing the public with more affordable goods. Or you can (b) produce the same amount as you did before but pay fewer workers to do this, also lowering the cost to consumers. Or you can (c) do some combination of (a) and (b) - cutting a few workers and also producing more. Or maybe the market is such that you can (d) lay off some people, produce exactly as much as before, and simply pocket the difference for yourself.

Here’s the catch. In all cases but (d), the price of your goods to the general public goes down. Which means, in effect, that you’ve given all the workers in the country a slight pay increase - because the money they earn now buys more than it used to. And it’s easy to see that as time passes and it’s not just your factory but every factory that makes productivity gains, workers are able to buy more and more with the same amount of money year after year. Among the things that smart workers can do with this surplus is squirrel it away for rainy days, which, when you think about it, gives them more bargaining power vis-a-vis their bosses. A worker who absolutely depends on his next pay check to even survive doesn’t have much bargaining power. But if you can go three months or even a year without work, you have a lot. And remember, the neat thing about productivity gains is that they benefit the whole economy - so it’s not just a handful of workers who are able to save more, it’s ALL of them. Over time, this puts employers in a difficult position - because labor is a traded service like any other. When faced with an entire workforce that can get by without working for a couple of months, they have to offer more money and better working conditions to entice anyone to sign on at all. And it is in this way that productivity gains find their way into workers’ pockets.

But what about case (d)? After all, this is the “cutthroat capitalist” strawman that most Socialists have in mind when they’re scaring people into supporting economic idiocy like the minimum wage. Well, let’s think about this. Presumably the factory owner wants to cut jobs and keep output steady so that he can have more money for himself - which is to say, he’s greedy. Fine - there are plenty of such people. But why does he want this money? As far as I can see, there are two broad categories of reasons: he might want to consume more stuff (food, prostitutes, houses, cars, whatever he’s in to), or he might just get a kick out of having a large bank balance. If it’s the first, he’s going to spend his money, which means the money goes to some other industry that employs people, and these people now have it to spend - yay for them. So he lays off some of his workers, but enables people in other industries to employ more, as it were. OR - if it’s the second case, he’ll know that it’s smarter to reinvest his money - because then he’ll make even more - as opposed to sewing it in a matress, in which case it just sits there and never gets bigger (indeed, if there’s any inflation at all, it in fact gets smaller). If he invests his money, of course, then he gives it to other people who open new factories and - YUP! - employ more people. Either way, his money continues to employ people - even if they don’t work at his factory anymore. Now I guess there’s a third option - he’s just spiteful and enjoys hurting people, and so he keeps his money sewed in the matress just to make sure it can never, ever benefit anyone. I have never, ever - and I mean not ever - met anyone like this outside of a Charles Dickens novel - and neither have you. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume there are such creatures somewhere. Here’s what happens in a market economy: either their goods benefit people and people buy them, or they don’t and they don’t. Competition will eventually force him to lower his prices or go out of business, so even if he’s trying REALLY HARD to make life miserable for people, he won’t be able to do it for long. Either his factory closes, he makes no more money, and his workers go on to find better jobs, or else he grudgingly cuts his prices, thus passing the productivity benefits on to the larger economy after all.

That’s the main lesson about Capitalism, kids: there’s just no way for evil to win. The deck is stacked in favor of good - of productivity, technology, and healthier, easier lives. Even the guy who actively TRIES to use Capitalism for evil - call him Uncle Scrooge - can’t get away with it without the government’s help.

So it’s actually inconceivable to me that the minimum wage has anything to do with anything, really. Productivity gains may benefit some people more than others, but they benefit everyone, and there’s just no way around this. So you on the left need to relax. Even if you do nothing - actually, ESPECIALLY if you do nothing - the benefits of innovation will spread to everyone. Barring really stupid life choices - which, as a matter of both principle and practicality I do believe people should be allowed to make - everyone gets richer as time goes by. The trick is to realize that money and value are not always the same thing. What’s important isn’t the number at the bottom of the pay check but how much that number allows you to buy (just ask anyone currently living in Zimbabwe what the point of being a paper millionaire is when there is no bread for sale at the grocery). The sooner Democrats and Republicans master this simple fact, the more dedication there will be to eliminating unnecessary inflation - which is the REAL enemy of the worker, and the only effective trick in the playbook of anyone who wants to deceive people into thinking they’re better off when actually they’re not (*cough* Keynes *cough*).

Libertarians have a lot to answer for on this issue, but nothing to apologize for, because it is WE who are the real friends of the working man, and WE who are the real friends of the factory owners too. And that is because WE are the only ones who see that the long-term interests of both the workers and the factory owners are aligned in favor of productivity gains. At best, the minimum wage simply puts into law a number that was in the cards anyway. At worst, it throws people out of work when some employers can’t afford to pay the new non-optional rate, or else raises prices on goods to cover the new rate, thus effectively lowering everyone’s wages. What it has never done in all of history is helped more people than it’s hurt. Let it go.

So why do so many people get this wrong? Well, as I said earlier, I think it’s because they’re making the wrong comparison. They’re comparing conditions in factories in 1900 to conditions in factories in 2000 and pitying the workers of 1900 on that basis. What’s important to remember is that workers in 1900 were never in a position to make the same comparison. They chose the jobs they chose on the basis of comparing their available options and going with the one that seemed best. As for why so many of them flocked to the factories - I can only think that it was because farming was in general even worse. At school you get all kinds of romantic notions about life on farms, but in reality it just plain sucked. Surviving the winter was a struggle, and summer was endless, back-breaking work. Life expectancy - assuming you made it past 4, which most people didn’t - was in the 50s. You were born, and you worked until you died. Factory life might have been hard by comparison with modern factories, but it doesn’t even begin to follow from that that it was a step down from everything else available at the time.

I think Socialists tend to forget that before you can redistribute stuff, someone has to make it. In the modern world of technological wonders, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that stuff just comes from nowhere. But reality is that it’s a long, uphill struggle to get to the level of productivity we have today. So it’s just folly to look at 2000 and wonder why people couldn’t live like we do back in 1900. All the stuff we enjoy and take for granted hadn’t been produced yet, that’s why! You can’t consume stuff that isn’t there, just like you can’t apply for cushy office jobs that don’t exist.

A good way to put this in perspective, I think, is to think about North Korea. Media portrayals of the place are of some kind of hellhole of unending suffering - and yet North Koreans themselves seem to be quite happy. What gives? Again, the problem is one of which comparison you’re making. North Koreans don’t get to see the rest of the world, so as far as any of them know they have it pretty good. And - wouldn’t you know it - compared to their grandparents they actually do! Korea circa 1940 was basically just a mudhole. Even the DPRK is an improvement. The operative word here, of course, is ‘even.’ The injustice of North Korea isn’t that Kim Jong Il is forcibly starving people on some absolute scale. Rather, it’s that they’re doing so much worse than they COULD be doing under a better government. They’re doing better than their grandparents any way you look at it - it’s only shitty when you compare it with the rest of the world. Of course, it’s the comparison with the rest of the world that’s relevant, which is why their regime spends so much of its GDP keeping its people isolated.

I often wonder how much worse we’re doing than we could be under a less socialist economy, and it makes me really angry.

There’s a post that’s making the rounds about the perennial issue of tipping. Apparently 15% is no longer enough, and people should start thinking of 20% as the base rate.

That’s no problem for me, since I’ve been thinking of 20% as the base rate for years now. I tip 20% by default, rounding up or down a bit depending on how the math works out, or how much is in my pocket (which, here in the modern world, means how my accumulated credit balance looks on that particular card). I leave 15% or even 10% for crappy service, 0% for extremely crappy service, and as much as 30% if the service was really stellar (though that’s rare, usually it’s 25% when I’m impressed). But I only do this because I was once a server and I empathize. In reality, these prices are entirely too high for service, and the tipping system just makes for deceptive pricing. It’s the same kind of annoyance as sales tax, only on a much higher scale. When you see the price listed, it’s helpful if that’s the actual price you’re charged, not just the base to which you have to add all kinds of taxes and service charges.

It’s an interesting question why the base tip rate raised from 15% to 20%. When I was in Canada, I was actually told it’s 10% there. I have no idea, obviously, how generally accepted that is. One of my (Canadian) friends took me to breakfast and left a Toonie on the table, and, seeing the look on my face, felt the need to explain that servers only expect 10% there. Whatever. I have the impression, actually, that tips are lower up here in the North (Indiana) compared to at home (North Carolina) too, so maybe it’s a graded geographical effect, to which I assume New York and Chicago form exceptions. Another concept no one up here seems to have heard of is the minimum tip. I’ve always had the impression that you tip a minimum of $2 no matter what the price of your order - just because you’re occupying a table and some of the server’s time. That’s true whether you order just a glass of tea or a full meal, so it’s polite to tip $2, even if that’s roughly the price of your tea. But no one I’ve met from outside the South seems to have heard of this, so maybe it’s a Southern thing. The overall point being that I have some annecdotal information that tipping customs vary greatly by region, so maybe the 20% tip isn’t as national a baseline as this author thinks, and maybe tip inflation has only happened in some parts of the country.

It’s interesting that tip inflation is separate from general price inflation. Since tipping is a percentage, there’s no need to adjust for inflation: the total amount received on a 15% tip keeps pace with the rise in menu prices. However, I think the linked article may be dismissing general price inflation as a cause here prematurely. It may be that when menu prices started to rise some of the cheaper customers started tipping less than 15% as a way to make up the difference - perversely taking it out on the server rather than the restaurant - and so everyone else started raising their tipping percentage by way of compensation, and it all met at 18-19% (supposedly the national average now). It would be an interesting thing for an economist to study: do gratuities inflate faster than other prices?

Regardless, I’m writing this to make some of the standard grumbles about tipping as a method for compensating servers. First, as I said, it’s just annoying in general to be presented with nominal prices on a menu that aren’t the actual prices you’re going to end up paying. That’s true for consumption taxes too, and I really wish we could switch over to a system more like in Japan, where stores are kind enough to add the sales tax on to the price tag, so you just pay what’s written.

Second, tipping enables cheapskates, and that’s really frustrating. It just presents cheap people with an opportunity to opt out of paying for something that they’ve received without feeling like they’ve stolen anything. The price on the menu is not negotiable - you either pay it or dine elsewhere. I don’t see why the same can’t be true for service. Related to that point - tips send mixed signals. In theory, they’re a good way for customers to communicate with their servers about how good the service was. But that only works if everyone is on the same page about how much to tip, and in reality servers have a hard time “reading” tips just because people have very different ideas about how to do it. Some people tip 20% even when they’re angry at you. Some people have recently come into money and get a kick out of leaving generous tips. Some customers are planning to be regulars and are tipping to establish a reputation as a generous tipper, so it’s more of a downpayment on future service than feedback on their current server. Some people are just cheap and skimp on tips no matter what. Some people plain don’t tip. Some people are members of ethnic groups who have a reputaton for not tipping and are trying to overcome the stereotype by overtipping to compensate. Some people are genuinely unaware that tips are 20% now. Some people are drunk and can’t count. Etc. etc. etc. It’s broken as a signaling system.

Tipping is also anachronistic. I don’t know this for certain, but I can well imagine that tips evolved for services that the enterprising unemployed offered to make ends meet on coming to the city and finding themselves unable to quickly land a job. So, maybe you hover around a hotel offering to carry bags or whatever. The hotel owner doesn’t mind since he doesn’t have to pay the guy, and upper class people get services performed on their own terms, etc. Once the practice becomes accepted, even regular hotel employees will come to expect tips, etc. Now that what is expected in terms of service is largely a negotiation between the establishment and the customer, however - now that service is “in house” rather than farmed out, as it were - what need is there of tipping? Customers can simply complain to the manager about bad service, and the manager can fire repeat offenders.

Tipping leads to irrational pricing as well. This is related to the earlier point about the $2 minimum tip that seems to exist in the South but nowhere else. If you sit at a table and order tea and continue to drink your free refills for hours, you might technically only owe $0.40 on a $2 tab, but the server had done A LOT more than $0.40 worth of work for you - especially when you consider the opportunity cost if you’re occupying a table in an otherwise busy-ish restaurant that could’ve been filled by people ordering more expensive items. It’s also sort of perverse that a waiter who delivers a hamburger gets paid the same 20% as one who delivers gumbo, even though the gumbo might cost twice as much - meaning that for the same amount of work (carrying a bowl of gumbo is no more difficult than carrying a plate with a hamburger on it) the one server gets paid twice as much as the other. Now, to the extent that the restaurant turns a larger profit on the gumbo, I guess that’s fine as it creates an incentive for the waiter to try to sell expensive items. But if the profit margin is the same on the hamburger as on the gumbo? Or even less? A higher menu price doesn’t necessarily mean the restaurant is making more money off of the item; the price may be explained by more expensive ingredients.

Further, it obscures the relationship between the server and the restaurant. I suppose the trick to any customer service position is making the customer happy within the limits set by management. There’s always a tension there: sometimes what’s right for the customer is not allowed by management. But this tension is especially accute when you’re a server since the management isn’t paying you directly. As a server, your wage really does depend on making customers happy, and in my personal experience this just made me resent it all the more when management asserted some sort of arbitrary new authority over dress code or drink refill policy or whatever else. Out of one side of their mouths, management sells serving as a job that gives us an unlimited ceiling on earnings, but then every time they institute a cost-cutting measure that benefits the company, waitstaff feels the pinch. It’s unfair.

For another thing, tipping makes shift changes awkward. A server can spend a bunch of time on a table only to find he stays past the end of his shift, and then it’s just ugly because either he gives up his tip to the next guy, or he stays on longer for only a modicum of marginal compensation.

Finally, tipping creates annoyances for customers - at least, customers of a certain type. I’m the kind who likes to be left mostly alone. The server should hover about, but otherwise be as unobtrusive as possible. You know, fill my drinks, tell me what the specials are, come and take my plate away as soon as I’m finished - that kind of thing. I strongly dislike all the things associated with tip-seeking, though - the stupid chit-chat, the constantly checking by to see if everything is OK, etc. There is the kind of service the customer wants, and the kinds of things servers do to remind you they need to be paid, and these two groups are often at odds.

So tipping is just a bad system all round, and I wish it would go away. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to - not so much becuase it has an ardent defenders, but more just because we’re stuck in a local minimum: geting away from tipping would benefit everyone, but no involved party has an immediate incentive to get rid of it. So how do we go about it?

My suggestions are these:

(1) Fancy restaurants should not get rid of it. Tipping is appropriate to upper-class establishments, where patrons have money to spend on service and would like to be able to purchase it at variable cost, as suits their needs. The best servers can start small and graduate to these establishments, which afford them an opportunity to make decent pay for extra efforts. The signaling system is not broken in these establishments because wealthy patrons are familiar with the customs, and neither the pricing nor manager/employee relationship distortions exist since top-dollar establishments don’t need to engage in as much cost-cutting to compete and don’t typically worry as much about profit margins. Everyone wins.

(2) Mid-range restaurants could take the first step by offering two pricing options: one with tip included and one without. They could also add service charges to meals below a certain amount - since losing “campers” (customers who occupy tables for a long time without ordering much) has never adversely affected anyone’s bottom line. Either the menu could contain two prices, or the receipt could contain a suggested tip (with the service charge for orders under, say, $10 included automatically) of 18% or so. The suggested tip could be calculated according to profit margin rather than nominal price, eliminating the price/payment distortions.

(3) After (2) has gained currency, it would be easier for restaurants to switch to an automatically-included service charge. This could simply be built into the prices with something written on the menu explaining that tipping is discouraged. There is nothing stopping restaurants from instituting a bonus system for more items sold so that effective servers can continue to get paid more than ineffective ones. If several establishments in a locality passed through step (2) before going to this step, I think most restaurant-goers would find they prefer just paying what it says on the priceline, and business would not be affected.

A modest proposal.

Via Radley Balko, here’s Kerry Howley on David Brooks’ reaction to Kanye West and Joe Wilson.

There is nothing telling, interesting, or indicative about two men acting out at a couple of awkwardly staged performances. The way millions of people react to them, on the other hand, matters very much. And if you’re like David Brooks, you’ll see the attacks on West and Wilson as a collective outcry against the vulgar monstrosity that is our culture. If you’re like me, you’ll see this reaction as a collective insistence on deference to authority, a pathetic inability to tolerate the meekest of incivilities.

Ok, she’s right that two unconnected outbursts in a week do not form the basis for a reasonable cultural diagnosis. And she’s right that the reactions of millions do. But how is being irritated by West and Wilson indicative of “a pathetic inability to tolerate the meekest of incivilities?”

I think it’s an interesting question what counts as “meek” in the domain of civility. Civility is like a shadow morality - it has the formal properties of a system of ethics but without the substance. Which is a fancy way of saying that the same metarules apply, but there’s less riding on the outcome of the game.

Why do we prohibit theft? One influential theory that I find persuasive holds that it’s because if we allowed theft, private property would become a fiction. Allowing anyone to take something from its rightful owner at whim and declare it his own is incompatible with the idea of ownership. So you have to decide - do we recognize property rights and therefore outlaw theft, or do we tolerate theft and give up on perfect property rights?

Since civility is the same kind of formal system as ethics, we can pull the same thought experiment here. What if we allowed people in general to interrupt awards ceremonies about which they had strong feelings without comment? Obviously it’s incompatible with the notion of a staged ceremony that people can come up on stage uninvited and rant. So it’s one or the other: either the ceremony is staged and free rants are not allowed, or free rants are allowed and it’s not a staged ceremony. Attending a staged ceremony signals, or ought to signal, one’s acceptance that certain rules of decorum are understood. So I don’t really see the problem with ridiculing West over this. He knew what the rules were and agreed to them and then broke them, and if it goes uncommented, is imitated and becomes more normal, then something fundamental about how we hold ceremonies will have changed. Since this is manners and not ethics, it’s up to individuals to decide how important this is to them - and so I guess if Kerry Howley is not bothered that’s her business, but why does it make anyone else “pathetic” to have decided differently?

The same analysis goes for Joe Wilson. You can have a concept of taking turns to speak, or you can allow interruptions - and while it might not matter which way you choose, it has to be agreed that the two are incompatible. The House of Commons (UK) is an example of what happens if you choose differently. There outbursts are not only allowed but encouraged (by tradition, not by the rules), and the result is that it is someone’s designated job to put the brakes on things when there’s so much shouting that the designated speaker can’t be heard. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it’s not how Congress operates, and allowing Joe Wilson’s outburst to go uncommented would signal a shift in that operation. Wilson himself isn’t big enough a fly to effect a sea change in the floor rules of Congress, of course, but that isn’t necessarily the point. On the practical side, trends have to start somewhere, and it’s always easier to head them off before they get underway. And on the philosophical side, there’s a sense in which allowing the Joe Wilsons of the world to flaunt the rules with impunity means one is comfortable allowing the rules to change. Again, if Kerry Howley is not bothered that’s fine, but it isn’t how Congress operates, and I don’t see what’s “pathetic” about the present arrangement.

Howley’s individualism is the simplistic version. There’s authority and there’s individual will, and any tension between the two must be resolved in favor of individuals … for fear of losing street cred, apparently. But there is a more refined version of individualism that holds that individuals can and often should consent to authority without loss of integrity if doing so benefits them in some abstract sense. And so if I go to a restaurant and they tell me my clothes are unacceptable and I leave without comment, this is not a pathetic deference to authority but rather reasoned agreement on my part that restaurants are private property and have the right to set their own rules of decorum. To the extent that I do recognize the proprietor’s rights, I consent to his authority over even cosmically inconsequential matters like dress code as a condition for entering his property. A junior high punk makes a scene as a social statement, because when you’re in junior high everything is about you. A civilized adult sees the bigger picture and values the system of property rights more than he values responding to this minor frustration of his id, and so he leaves without comment. The individualism is in the motive - it’s compatible with either action.

Now, I suppose Howley could have meant that the country has better things to do than think about Kanye West and Joe Wilson - and if that’s the case then I agree with her - the media could find better things to report on, and no doubt it would if people were less interested in these things. But this is the Age of Communication, and everyone famous is on TV pretty much all the time now. The the whole point of both the Video Music Awards and Obama’s speech to Congress is that people were watching. Celebrities don’t show up to awards ceremonies for any other reason than to get attention, and presidents only make speeches in Congress to try to railroad through their policy preferences because they know they will be speaking to the voters directly on national TV. If the Video Music Awards were the random opinions of any old schmuck, they wouldn’t be noteworthy, wouldn’t need ceremonies and speeches, and wouldn’t be on TV. Kanye West is doing something like stealing: he’s taken a platform set up, participated in and voted on by an entire industry and arbitrarily changed the rules without asking anyone. Ditto Joe Wilson. He’s taken an existing institution that he didn’t set up and prestige that he hasn’t earned and that isn’t provided for him under the existing political arrangements and arbitrarily changed the rules. Obama went through a grueling campaign to get the approval of a majority of the nation’s voters to stand behind that platform and use it for a well-established presidential perrogative. Joe Wilson only asked South Carolina, and then he stepped outside the bounds the institution they sent him to set for him. Whether or not we agree with Obama’s policy preferences is a separate issue from whether or not we generally support the system that allows him to stand before Congress and articulate them without being disturbed, and whether or not Kanye West likes the outcome of the VMAs is a separate issue from whether he supports the idea of an industry awards ceremony in which industry products are voted on by industry peers.

The reason I’m an Objectivist individualist and not a Nietzschean individualist is because I recognize that there are other individuals inhabiting this world with me who also have their own desires and concerns, and I recognize that my self-actualization is best achieved in a framework that recognizes their right to strive for theirs. The point about the restaurant isn’t that the patrons of the restaurant have no say in what the dress code is. They very much do. The point is that no SINGLE patron gets to make that call. The restaurant proprietor can only earn a profit so long as the atmosphere and service he provides align with what a critical number of people in the public want. People for whom they don’t align are free to go elsewhere, and it is respect for this kind of arrangement that keeps the greatest number of people as happy as possible - because it is only in this way that we can simultaneously respect the conflicting preferences of great numbers of people. The system works only so long as the majority of us agree with it - which is to say, it depends on a mature consent to certain forms of limited authority in order to function. And the same is true of the Video Music Awards and the floor rules in Congress. It isn’t that the Video Music Awards are not decided by the general public - they very much are. The point is that no SINGLE member of the general public gets to decide the outcome. And ditto Congress. The point isn’t that no one has a right to speak in Congress - they very much do. The point is that people only listen to what’s being said in Congress by virtue of a system of rules that apportions floor time. No SINGLE member of Congress is allowed to decide when and how he takes the floor. Systems depend on rules to function effectively, and if we wish to share in the benefits that these systems produce, we should agree to consent to the rules that make those systems possible, petitioning for such changes in them as we think would be helpful in the established ways so that other participants can give the input they are due. After all, the rules and systems function with their consent as much as mine. Kanye West is free to criticize the VMAs after the fact in the media, just as Joe Wilson is free to criticize the president after the speech in the media. They didn’t want to do it that way because they were afraid they couldn’t get the attention they craved - which is a bit like seeing a car you want and stealing it because you’re unwilling to earn the money required to buy it.

As I said, breaches of ettiquette are not breaches of ethics, and so maybe there is some sense in which the reaction to West and Wilson is overblown. But I don’t think so. I think the public made the right call in both cases, and for the right reasons. Telling us that we’re “pathetic” for reacting negatively when selfish people throw public temper tantrums is representative of a kind of individualism, I suppose, but it’s not a very useful or workable one, and I think Ms. Howley probably knows that. Probably what’s going on is the same kind of grandstanding that West and Wilson engaged in, but on a smaller scale. What we’re meant to take away from Ms. Howley’s column is not a policy recommendation or a bit of useful advice about how things ought to be, but just a general impression of how edgy and tough she is. OK, so let’s all be impressed for a bit, and then go back to living in our orderly, more functional world.

Our most annoying ex-president thinks that racism plays a major role in opposition to Obama. Right - this time it’s racism. As opposed to … whatever it was when Clinton failed to pass national healthcare. Or … whatever it was when Johnson failed to pass national healthcare. Or … whatever it was all those times Ted Kennedy tried and failed to get national healthcare bills started. Obama’s black, ergo it’s racism when HE fails.

Anyone besides me think maybe it’s Jimmy Carter who’s the racist?

This is my response to an open question on Radley Balko’s blog. The question:

This story raises an interesting question: Is there anything inherently wrong with collecting Nazi memorabilia? Would you think differently of someone if you were made aware they were a collector?

The answer is no and no: No, there is nothing inherently wrong with collecting Nazi memorabilia and no I would not think differently of anyone if I were made aware they were a collector. And in fact it bothers me quite a lot that we even have to ask this question.

It bothers me because of any and all of the following:

• Ostalgie: a very real phenomenon in Germany where it’s trendy to pine for the “good old days” of the DDR. People break out their old Pioneers uniforms on TV, they collect tapes from old East German bands, they wear party medals, watch old TV, etc. etc. etc.
• Soviet Chic: the Russian version of Ostalgie, more a hit in the West in the 80s than now, but it’s very much still around.
• Che Guevara shirts: the link goes to a store that specializes in them.
• Mao Kitsch: it’s all the rage in China and abroad.
• Koryo Tours: a tourist agency that specializes in trips to North Korea that mostly involve setting people up to be filmed gaping at statues and get false history lessons in government museums.

If it’s OK to indulge in kitsch from other murderous regimes, I don’t see what problem there should be with collecting Nazi knick-knacks. If we can trust that the guy down the street who owns a vintage blood-stained 1968 copy of Mao’s little red book means us no harm and just wants it as an ironic piece of history, it should be OK to extend the same courtesy to guys who have signed copies of Mein Kampf in their safety deposit boxes. What, honestly, would we do with Nazi junk otherwise? Burn it as objectionable???

Julian Sanchez has weighed in on this before:

Jim Henley dissents from the oft-heard libertarian complaint about hipster appropriation of Soviet iconography, which typically comes in the form of the observation that nobody would dream of trying this with Nazi imagery. I think it’s worth stressing that it’s not communism that’s exceptional here, but Naziism: Its resistance to our tendency to turn everything into kitsch seems unique.

He goes on to speculate on why that is - what’s so special about Naziism that makes it off limits to commodotization? - and comes up with the following:

1. The Soviet Union just kind of turned out murderous, but it wasn’t in the blueprints. The Nazis, by contrast, always intended for there to be mass killings.
2. The US is home to large numbers of people who survived the Nazi regime. The same is not really true of any communist country.
3. The Soviet Union survived for long enough that it’s not exclusively associated with the mass killings of the Stalin and Lenin years.
4. Naziism was in many ways an aesthetic movement - Soviet kitsch is mere symbology while Nazi kitsch is the whole point.
5. We think of Naziism as a kind of madness, a mass hysteria, whereas the Soviet Union is just a failed political experiment.

I find this list imperfectly compelling. There’s something to each of these points, but none of them bear as much of the explanation as Sanchez seems to think, and all could stand with some revision and clarification. Take the first one. Yeah, OK, I suppose the need to kill off the landed bourgeoisie isn’t written down as such anywhere in Marx’s own work, but it’s certainly not hard to find in the works of many of his popularizers. And if we ask for too many specifics on when the Soviet Union “turned out murderous” exactly, we’ll realize that while the Nazis actually passed laws and laid plans for their killing - which didn’t really get underway in earnest until almost a decade into the regime - the Soviets got down to business immediately. They started with the starving and the deportations to gulags and the show trials and denunciations pretty much 10 minutes after taking office in 1919 and kept it at a brisk jog until the mid 50s. True, they didn’t approach the job with anything like the zeal or efficiency with which the Nazis went after the Jews, but the terror lasted much longer, and the final body count was higher. There’s something disingenuous about passing off the Soviet killings as a “phase” or a “growing pain” or “not an integral part of communist ideology.” After all, if we can reasonably believe that the Soviets stopped killing once things “settled down” and they more or less had society moulded to what they wanted, it’s not much of a leap to see that the same would’ve been true of the Nazis had the war ended in a separate peace.

All of which speaks to reason 3. It certainly sounds plausible on the surface, but actually sympathy for the Soviet Union started off higher than it finished up. It’s ironically during the Great Famine and the Moscow Show Trials - the height of the Stalinist terror - that international support for the Soviets - especially among intellectuals - was highest. It should be noted that leading up to the war vocal international support for the Nazi regime was also neither rare nor taboo. So here’s what really happened. When the war was over, the Nazis’ crimes were exposed in one shocking broadcast, and the world was so horrified that even a modicum of consideration toward the regime became unacceptable. Nothing similar ever happened with the Soviets - at first because their crimes were actively covered up by western governments, and later because it was old news, Stalin had died, and the regime could make a plausible claim to have changed. The points being: (1) credible monstrosity doesn’t necessarily chase off the kinds of people who indulge in totalitarian chic and (2) it isn’t so much that the Soviet Union outgrew or outlived its initially nasty reputation, it’s more that its nastiness was never exposed in a dramatic pulling back of the curtain in quite the same way. We got fed small doses of it over a long period of time, sort of like that old experiment where you can boil a frog in water comfortably provided you turn up the heat slowly enough. It’s not because we associate the Soviet Union with other things, it’s more just that we got so used to hearing semi-credible reports of attrocities from the Eastern Bloc that they stopped being news.

Reason 2 is the easiest to take at face value, but it’s incomplete. I would say it isn’t a question of the numbers so much as organization. The victims of the Nazis in this country may or may not outnumber victims of the communists, but they’re certainly more organized. This is partly because being a victim of the Nazis is more personal than being a victim of the Soviets. The Soviets killed pretty indiscriminately; the Nazis took more careful aim. And where Nazi victims came over here in droves in a pretty fixed timeframe, Soviet victims sort of trickled in over the course of 70 years (most of them, of course, had to stay in the Soviet Union). More importantly, perhaps, the Soviet victims don’t really have any propaganda stake in keeping memories of the old regime alive. At least a vocal minority of the Nazis’ victims are involved in this Israel project, and it helps a lot with that to keep public sympathy for the Jews up. Victims of the communists don’t share any kind of common cause for which being a victim of the communists helps.

Reason 4 is true enough, but not in quite the way Sanchez means it, I think. He’s right that Naziism was light on substance. Hitler himself famously dodged every question about what Naziism was really about - cryptically telling petitioners to listen to Wagner if they wanted to know what the NSDAP really stood for. Of course there’s that book of his, but it’s not really systematic, or coherent … even by comparison with Marx. Yes, Naziism was about feelings, so I guess it’s fair to say it was an aesthetic movement, and that Nazi kitsch is in that sense the method by which it was transmitted. Where I stop following this analysis is at the assumption that communism was NOT a comparably aesthetic movement. Honestly, did Sanchez miss all the May Day parades, the Kim Jong Il and Mao Tse Tung badges, the distinctive way communist leaders dress, the medals, the posters, the seas of flags, and Socialist Realism? What does he think these things are if not an aesthetic? And does he really believe that most party cadres applied for their jobs after reading some convincing books?

And Reason 5 treats the sympoms rather than the cause. Of course what he says is true. The first image in my mind of the Nazi years is usually a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth religious fanatics doing their “Sieg Heils!” When I think of the Soviet Union, it’s more run down buildings and rotten cabbage. But this begs the question why? It’s not like communism is short on mass hysteria. Julian Sanchez needs to watch some videos from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or watch some of the North Korea mass games, or footage of when Kim Il Sung died, and learn something interesting. What happened in Camodia is SURELY mass hysteria, no? Sanchez is right that these aren’t the first images that come to mind, but just saying so is to dodge the question. Nazi Germany could, after all, have been immortalized in our minds as stacks of useless papers shuffled between bureaucrats according to Kafkaesque rules that even they didn’t understand - the überbureaucracy. So why is it the mass rallies? It’s far from the only country to have held them!

As I say, I think there’s something to all these points, but Sanchez is still (purposefully) ignoring the elephant in the living room. Left-wing craziness gets a pass that right-wing craziness does not. Fondess for or admiration of the Soviet Union is politely disapproved of, sure, but say nice things about the Nazis and it’s like you have leprosy. The reaction to Garlasco’s Nazi memorabilia collection just underscores this point. It’s an unjustified double standard - not because the Nazis deserve a freer pass, but because the Communists DON’T.

There are two ways we can go about rectifying the problem. We can get alarmist about Soviet Chic, the way Radley Balko sometimes does (he’s alleged to have written to Target complaining about some Soviet Chic he saw on sale there once), or we could decide to treat Nazi symbology with the same sense of detached irony we give to Che shirts. Given my pick, I’ll opt for the latter. And how.

Look, like I said, I think there’s something to each of the points Sanchez raises, and I think the point about Reason 4 is that cool medals as a recruitment technique won’t work once every gym tough is sporting one. As much as we libertarians like to complain about all the douchebags who go around wearing Che shirts, it’s at least possible they’re doing us all a favor. Once something is a pop icon, it’s hard to take it seriously enough to vote it into office, much less fight and die for it. Che is more effective these days at giving girls excuses to sleep with crashing bores when the party’s over and their choices are limited than he is at heading up firing squads, and I have to say it’s an improvement. The problem with Nazi kitsch is that it’s genuinely scary. If a guy walks in with an Adolf Hitler shirt on, you leave him THE HELL ALONE. Because even if he’s a 120-lb. weakling, the assumption is that he’s batshit insane and/or a member of a gang of huge and permanently pissed-off pugilists. If people would go around wearing swastikas the same way they wear Che shirts, it would stop being a free ticket to barroom respect. Which is to say, it would lose all of its appeal. Now, maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe Nazi kitsch serves the ironic purpose of being our society’s version of a yellow Star of David. We can’t always tell who the dangerous racists are, but they’re kind enough to wear identifying markings so we can stay the hell out of their way - that kind of thing. But I’m inclined to think that on balance it’s better if kitsch is just kitsch, and we don’t get too worked up about it. If you’re a loser headcase and want respect, have the decency to commit a real crime so we can put your ass in prison sooner rather than later. Just wearing medals doesn’t give the police much to work with. Or at least, that’s how it would be if only people didn’t get their knickers in such a bunch about an otherwise harmless medal collection.

So yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Scooby Doo Where are You!, a show whose importance for my childhood (despite the fact that my parents didn’t let me watch it, or pretty much any TV) cannot be overstated. Here’s a link to my favorite episode on YouTube.

Actually, I’ve never even seen that one, but how different can it really be? Scooby Doo truly put the “formula” in “formulaic.”

But what a great formula for kids!

And I make no apologies for thinking that the film version was the best big-screen comedy of the 2000s. Happy 40th, Scooby Doo!