The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A last, desperate pivot: Trump and his allies go full racist on coronavirus — Amanda Marcotte in Salon: All this racism primarily serves the purpose of deflecting blame from Trump onto Asian people. It also serves an important secondary purpose: Giving conservatives an imaginary narrative where they're the victims, instead of the people who created this problem in the first place by electing an incompetent, sociopathic game-show host to the presidency. The troll game goes like this: Say something wildly racist. When called out for the racism, immediately declare yourself a victim of "political correctness run amok" and start making bad-faith arguments about why your obvious racism wasn't racism. Ta-dah! Now you're debating "political correctness" instead of the wisdom of empowering a lazy, lying wannabe fascist dictator, which is a debate that you, the conservative, will lose.
• What the Government Needs to Do Next — Jamie Galbraith via INET: The first big need is medical supplies, facilities and personnel. That is why we need to finance immediate domestic production of masks, oxygen tanks, ventilators, and the construction and staffing of field hospitals, including the conversion of existing structures such as hotels, dormitories and stadiums, and the hiring and upgrading of staff.
• Coronavirus Exposes the Virulence of American Conservatism — Eric Levitz in New York Magazine: Last week, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party unveiled a plan to keep British workers paid and employed for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The Tory proposal would effectively cover 80 percent of sidelined workers’ salaries, while forbidding employers who accept the government’s help from laying off staff. The policy closely resembles one implemented by Denmark’s Social Democrats, except that Boris Johnson’s wage-replacement rate is slightly more generous than the Danish left’s. Although the Conservatives have a well-earned reputation for sacrificing Britain’s vulnerable on the altar of deficit reduction, even they recognize that social welfare must take precedence over budgetary concerns in the context of a historically sudden and deep economic crisis. On Friday, Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that there would be no limit on the funding available for covering workers’ wages. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” Sunak said. “We want to look back on this time and remember how in the face of a generation-defining moment we undertook a collective national effort and we stood together.” America’s conservatives see things differently.
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Medicare for All is a Great Automatic Fiscal Stabilizer — Nathan Tankus: Last summer I tweeted some things about how Medicare for All would make U.S. fiscal policy substantially more countercyclical than it is now. It turns out those tweets were far more prescient than I could have realized. The basic problem which has gotten far too little attention is that our healthcare system not only costs far more than any other system, we fund it in such a way that we’re vulnerable to large falls in employment and income. We are seeing this starkly now as employment collapses just when people need healthcare more than ever.
• 'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope — Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian: The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits on the pursuit of self-interest. Ultimately, a significant portion of conservatives and corporate leaders regard science as an annoyance that they can refuse to recognise. Some insist they can choose whatever rules and facts they want, as though these too are just free-market commodities to pick and choose from or remake according to one’s whims. […] Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains. I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
• Welcome to the Trumpocalypse — Bob Moser at Rolling Stone: For End Timers, the key scriptures are not the Gospels at all, but a collection of Old Testament prophecies, the Bible-ending Book of Revelation, and (purporting to explain it all in contemporary terms) the best-selling fictional series Left Behind, supplemented by various visions of self-proclaimed prophets. You know, like the ones who, around the time that Trump sewed up the Republican nomination in 2016, began to hear from God that he was anointing the reality-show star as a 21st-century version of an Old Testament “pagan king,” placed in the White house to help speed events along toward the Apocalypse. (Pompeo himself endorsed this idea of Trump as a god-sent “king” in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.) Now, their pagan king is leading us through an actual Biblical-sized plague — with the guidance of End-Time Christians. And while evangelical leaders have echoed Trump’s messaging — don’t worry, a strongman (or God) will save you — he’s also borrowed from theirs, promising of the virus early on, “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Trump-vangelicals’ talk about red states being “exempt” from the virus, while demon-possessed “blue cities” suffered the wrath of God, crept briefly into his talking points. And he crept into theirs: The virus “will come and it will go,” wrote Landon Stradlin, an evangelical music minister who’d been tweeting about how the virus was being used as a tool against Trump—right up until he became one of the first Virginians to die of COVID-19, last month.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• How the Pandemic Will End — Ed Yong in the Atlantic: Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells. Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”
• Trump’s words, bullied kids, scarred schools — Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein in the Washington Post: Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country." Since Trump's rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• The Monetarist Fantasy Is Over — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate: A less skeptical observer than [Kenneth] Rogoff would have looked more closely at proposals to strengthen automatic fiscal stabilizers, rather than dismissing them on the grounds that they will have (bad) “incentive effects” and that policymakers will override them on occasion. For example, a fair observer would at least be open to the idea of a public-sector job guarantee of the sort envisaged by the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the US, which authorized the federal government to create “reservoirs of public employment” to balance fluctuations in private spending. Those reservoirs would automatically be depleted and refilled as the economy waned and waxed, thus creating an automatic stabilizer. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, had it been implemented, would have greatly reduced politicians’ discretion over counter-cyclical policy, while creating a much more powerful stabilizer than the social-security systems on which governments now rely.
• Tom Toles:
  

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Banks Are Handing Out Beefed-Up Credit Lines No One Asked For — Michelle Davis in Bloomberg Businessweek: Proactive credit line increases, known in the industry as PCLIs, emerged in the 1990s but virtually disappeared after regulators clamped down on the practice following the 2008 financial crisis. But as banks struggled to ramp up lending, PCLIs made a comeback with executives finding more aggressive ways to work within the consumer-protection laws. U.S. issuers boosted credit lines for about 4% of cards in each quarter of 2018, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s most recent data. That’s double the rate in 2012. Subprime and near-prime customers got increases at a higher-than-average pace, according to the agency. That means many of the people getting boosts have blemished or limited histories of paying bills. […] Other countries have rules governing PCLIs. U.K. banks agreed not to offer increases to customers in persistent debt. Canada requires borrower consent. Australia bans unsolicited increases altogether. [Bunch of nervous Nellies! What could possibly go wrong?]
• Libertarians Can’t Save the Planet — John Quiggin in Jacobin: Propertarian thought relies heavily upon the Lockean fiction that property rights arise naturally, before the emergence of a state (defined broadly to include any kind of authority within a group, tribe, or nation). Obviously, no such rights could have existed when it came to the atmosphere, so emissions permits would have to be the creation of national governments working through global agreements. Admitting that states define and enforce property rights was too big a pill for many propertarians to swallow. But the cultural barriers standing in the way of free-market environmentalism were even greater. Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning. Environmentalists who insist that untrammeled individualism of all kinds has malign consequences lie at the opposite cultural pole. However, this created a dilemma for propertarians. Having rejected both state- and market-led solutions to climate change, their only remaining option was to deny that the problem existed at all.
• Hard of Herding — Bizarro by Dan Piraro:
  
• Why Cover Letters Are Such an Important Part of Building a Miniature Town Made of Paper — Andrew Cushing at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: As the lead recruiter for a large corporation, I have hundreds of cover letters cross my desk daily. People often ask, “Are cover letters still really that important?” Well, the answer is a resounding “YES.” Because, while utterly useless as a job application tool, cover letters are an incredibly important part of building a miniature town made of paper. And that’s really what this has all been about. I joined this field with a few simple goals: I wanted to help grow the staff of companies by attracting top industry talent. I wanted to foster a working atmosphere that was pleasant and professional. And, like everyone who chooses this line of work, I’m a small-scale hobbyist who wants to build the coolest miniature town made of cover letters anyone has ever seen. Today, I am pleased to announce that one of these goals is finally within reach.
• Why you need to know about modern monetary theory — James Weir in the Australian Financial Review: When conventional thinking can’t explain something, it makes sense to think unconventionally. In many ways MMT sounds like stepping through the looking glass, but that’s because for almost 50 years we’ve become conditioned to think of our government as facing the same budget constraints we do. MMT not only provides a logical explanation of what’s happening in the world, but with Australian households up to their necks in debt, it offers a sobering perspective on the Morrison government’s insistence on balancing the budget.
• Transporter — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Whatever He Wants — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books: The reason why evidence is irrelevant to Trump’s trial is not just that the evidence itself is inconveniently damning. It is that this doctrine of the president’s will as the source of all authority must not be undermined by the manner of the trial. At the heart of Trump’s defense is the justification that underlies all authoritarian rule. The leader is special. He is not like us because he has unique instincts. His gut (or divine inspiration or mystical ability to discern the true will of the people) leads him to make the right call. And the gut cannot be questioned: the job of everyone else in government is to accept what the leader does first and find the reasons for it later.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Matt Wuerker:
  
• The west is still buying into nonsense claims about Iran’s regional influence — Patrick Cockburn, the Independent: The Shia had risen up against Saddam in the final days of his defeat in Kuwait by the US-led coalition. While they were not expecting full-scale foreign support, they did believe that the coalition would stop Saddam using his remaining tanks and helicopters against them. But the US conflated the Iraqi Shia with Iran, where the Shia are the overwhelming majority, and had decided that it was not in American interests to see the rebellion succeed. Coalition forces stood aside as Saddam’s tanks, with helicopters overhead, smashed their way into Shia cities like Karbala, Najaf and Basra, and then began their mass executions. Three decades later, the US and its allies are still making the same mistake, treating the millions of Shia in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Afghanistan as if they were Iranian agents.
• A “Jeopardy!” Contestant Asked, “What Is Palestine?” The Game Show Gave the Wrong Answer. — Robert Mackey in the Intercept: The producers of the game show “Jeopardy” broadcast a rare, uncorrected error on Friday, when a contestant mistakenly said that the Church of the Nativity, the site in Bethlehem believed by Christians to be the birthplace of Jesus, was in Israel, but was awarded $200 for what millions of viewers were told was the right answer. Another contestant, Katie Needle, looked puzzled as the show then went to a commercial break. That’s because, moments earlier, Needle had offered the correct answer, “What is Palestine?” — putting her response in the form of a question in keeping with the show’s rules — only to be told that she was wrong, and had $200 deducted from her score.
• Matt Bors:
  
• A degree of studying – Students who treat education as a commodity perform worse than their intrinsically motivated peers — Louise Bunce in the LSE Impact Blog: I surveyed over 600 students across several disciplines and universities to systematically explore the impact of consuming education on academic achievement. This was the first study of students studying in England for which they personally, and not the state, were fully responsible for the cost of their tuition (at the time of data collection this was £9,000 annually, equivalent to $11,700 or €10,500). Students completed an online questionnaire to measure their consumer orientation towards their education, adapted from a US study by Saunders (2015). They had to rate the extent to which they agreed with statements such as ‘I think of myself primarily as a paying customer of the university’ and ‘I think of my university degree as a product I am purchasing’. We also asked them to provide their most recent mark for an assessed piece of work as a measure of academic performance. We found a negative correlation between consumer orientation and academic performance whereby the higher their consumer orientation, the lower their level of academic performance. This was after controlling for relevant demographic factors, such as age and gender, as well as situational factors such as year of study and grade goal. Furthermore, we found that consumer orientation mediated the traditional relation between identifying as a learner (e.g. by agreeing with items such as ‘I want to expand my intellectual ability’ and ‘I enjoy studying’) and academic performance: a lower learner identity was associated with a higher consumer orientation, which, in turn was associated with lower academic performance.
• How climate change influenced Australia's unprecedented fires — Dana Nuccitelli at Yale Climate Connections: California’s drought was made worse by a persistent high-pressure system off the coast known as the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” That high-pressure ridge diverted storm systems to California’s north, leading to years of low precipitation. Researchers have suggested that climate change may cause such blocking systems to form more frequently. A 2018 study led by UCLA’s Daniel Swain found that as temperatures continue to rise, California will see a shift to less precipitation in the spring and fall and more in the winter, lengthening the wildfire season. The situation in Australia is again strikingly similar to that in California. Researchers have shown that global warming is expanding an atmospheric circulation pattern known as the Hadley cell. This circulation is caused by hot air at the equator rising and spreading toward the poles, where it begins to cool and descend, forming high pressure ridges. In Australia, this process creates what’s known as the subtropical ridge, which as CSIRO notes, has become more intense as a result of global warming expanding the Hadley cell circulation. A 2014 study, CSIRO’s David Post and colleagues reported that stronger high-pressure ridges have been decreasing rainfall in southeastern Australia in the autumn and winter. The significance? The lack of rainfall creates more dry fuel for fires and lengthens the bushfire season.
• Bizarro — By Wayno and Piraro:
  
• How the Health Insurance Industry (and I) Invented the ‘Choice’ Talking Point — Wendell Potter: Those of us in the insurance industry constantly hustled to prevent significant reforms because changes threatened to eat into our companies’ enormous profits. We were told by our opinion research firms and messaging consultants that when we promoted the purported benefits of the status quo that we should talk about the concept of “choice”: It polled well in focus groups of average Americans (and was encouraged by the work of Frank Luntz, the P.R. guru who literally wrote the book on how the Republican Party should communicate with Americans). As instructed, I used the word “choice” frequently when drafting talking points. But those of us who held senior positions for the big insurers knew that one of the huge vulnerabilities of the system is its lack of choice. In the current system, Americans cannot, in fact, pick their own doctors, specialists or hospitals — at least, not without incurring huge “out of network” bills. […] Recently, the industry launched a campaign called “My Care, My Choice” aimed in part at convincing Americans that they have choice now — and that government reform would restrict their freedom. That group has been spending large sums on advertising in Iowa during this presidential race.
• Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It — Bruce Schneier in the Atlantic: In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission had an online public-commenting period for its plans to repeal net neutrality. A staggering 22 million comments were received. Many of them—maybe half—were fake, using stolen identities. These comments were also crude; 1.3 million were generated from the same template, with some words altered to make them appear unique. They didn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. These efforts will only get more sophisticated. In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.
• Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
  
• Debunking the ‘Productivity-Pay Gap’ — Blair Fix: In this post, I debunk the ‘productivity-pay gap’ by showing that it has nothing to do with productivity. The reason is simple. Although economists claim to measure ‘productivity’, their measure is actually income relabelled. As a result, the ‘productivity-pay gap’ isn’t what it appears. It claims to be a gap between productivity and wages. But it’s not. It’s really a gap between two types of income — (1) the wages of workers and (2) the average hourly income of all Americans. This gap is an important measure of inequality. But it has nothing to do with ‘productivity’.
• A New Book Takes on the Problematic Academic Discipline of “Jihadism” — Murtaza Hussain at the Intercept: “The heart of the problem is the refusal to recognize the participants in these conflicts as political actors,” Li said. “We just suck all the politics out, latch on a word like ‘jihadism,’ and then place it into a category of evil existing outside of space and time.” The study of jihadism generally takes for granted that organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic State, al-Shabab, the Afghan Taliban, and various Iraqi Shia militias should be grouped under one category. This grand category also happens to include solitary individuals engaged in acts of violence not directed by any organization. Huge disparities of geography, language, sect, and politics are more or less ignored in favor of a narrative understandable through the single term of “jihadism.” “Consider for a moment three different things: the Irish Republican Army, the Republican Party in the United States, and Plato’s Republic,” Li told me, by way of analogy. “All of these employ the term ‘republic,’ and all of them somehow have a connection with violence. If you lumped them together and claimed they represent an ideology called ‘republicanism,’ that obviously wouldn’t make any sense. Yet that’s what the category of ‘jihadism’ essentially does.”