When I was seven years old, a couple of kids in my neighborhood asked me who the ugliest girl in my school was. I unchivalrously told them, and they went into the middle of the street in front of my house, drew a big heart, and put the girl's name and mine inside it, and started chanting that I loved her.
So I can understand Jesse Walker's rage. He's probably a little older than I was when I got mad at those boys, but libertarians don't mature as quickly as the rest of us.
That's pretty sad. Aesop would have a field day with this guy.
ReplyDeleteYour last sentence is 7 words too long.
ReplyDeleteWhat a bizarre little tirade.
ReplyDeleteI haven't spent any time with her most famous text, Nickel and Dimed—I'd rather read an actual poor person's account of her life, not a successful writer's Poor Like Me stunt book
Great! Name some "poor person's account", just one.
*crickets*
Mmm-hmm. And he goes on to show his great respect for Ehrenreich by trying to argue that Frank is putting words in her mouth, when it's just Frank mentioning that a bit from her book about her as a teenager struck him as proto-Randian, and Ehrenreich responding to that. It's sad when someone comes across two intelligent people having a long and, really, interesting conversation and all they can do is sit and wait for a glimpse of their favorite hobby horse--not even really Salon's obsession, but his obsession projected. (And of course you have to love that bit at the beginning where he insists that he's not even that into Rand; of course that's not the point, it's that he gets an opportunity to be butthurt at Salon.)
I had no idea the creation of Black Like Me was a stunt.
ReplyDeleteWalker has an interesting damn-with-faint-praise style: Ehrenreich wires stunt books, and is worthier than most of those able to use the phrase "decade of greed" with a straight face. Oh, and her books have an interesting idea to impart.
ReplyDeleteThat he claims to say more about Ehrenreich than about Rand shows his admiration for Rand. His silence on any subject is the best gift he could bestow.
I'm sure he's offer something by Star Parker as a "poor person's account".
ReplyDeleteJust a question: When the headline on Salon is "Tom Frank interviews Barbara Ehrenreich: "You're the anti-Ayn Rand"", how does he wait for a glimpse of his hobby horse? Do you suppose he snuck into Salon headquarters and changed the headline?
ReplyDeleteJust like conservatives, glibertarians adhere to the notion that offering anything less than unstinting praise and complete adulation is to damn and condemn.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, the whole "I haven't read (or seen) 'X' but a friend of mine told me about it" is the complete stock-in-trade of conservatives.
Jesse Walker's favorite author is Robert Anton Wilson, whose work Illuminatus! parodies Atlas Shrugged in part.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading Black Like Me in highschool and just being devastated emotionally by it. There's a place for people crossing over into other's experiences and writing about it--not because they are trying to take the place of the people they are writing about but because they are serving as a kind of guide to people who would otherwise not be able to cross the divide between their own experience (of class, race, or gender) and that of the "other" described in the book. Ideally we would all read everything in the original language but sometimes we need a translator and a translation.
ReplyDeleteYes. Just like conservatives who consider themselves worthy of being a protected class, glibertarians only believe in a "free market" where "free" means "I shove my ideas down your throat, and you're not allowed to have any ideas at all"
ReplyDeleteI've never been a Randian, and when I take part in
ReplyDeleteintra-libertarian debates about Rand, it's usually to criticize
her.
He's going to deny her three times before the market's closing bell rings.
"Yeah, Ehrenreich is ok, I guess. It's just that she's..." [takes a long drag on a Gitane, exhales slowly] "... not *real* enough for me."
ReplyDeleteThere was a kid who wrote what he thought of as a rebuttal book to Nickled and Dimed. It was interestingly intellectually dishonest and like watching a game rigged in advance.
ReplyDeleteA February 11, 2008 article about the book in The Christian Science Monitor states, "During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company. Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved around $5,300."[2]
If it was going so well why did he have to "quit the experiment" when someone needed him? Because he actually was just barely scraping by. I believe he had no health insurance (for example) and also no family to support and no debts to pay off. One horrible illness and he would have been out of that apartment, out of the truck, and out of the 5 thousand in a heartbeat.
Ayn Rand? I never met the woman.
ReplyDeleteOr just someone who would be harder for everyone to dismiss as a liar.
ReplyDeleteYou'd have to be a peculiar sort of person (where peculiar = asshole) to have a problem with either work.
Suck it, haterz! A guy started a line of questioning that didn't go anywhere, and not only was it not edited out, it ended up in a slightly misleading headline!!11!1!
ReplyDelete(I mean, he's not wrong, and heaven knows that—being in the biz myself—I would love to live in a world where editors always cut tangents from Q&As and headlines were subject to lemon laws. But... I guess I'd choose other battles, even if I was limited to the tiny little realm of 'Salon.')
Not to mention the fact that to start he was young, healthy, and male enough to get a job as a day laborer. And being white probably didn't hurt him either.
ReplyDeleteActually, he wouldn't have been out of the apartment or the truck because he had a credit card with him. That's the part that no one ever acknowledged when discussing Scratch Beginnings - the kid had one hell of a safety net. At the time, conservatives argued that it was irrelevant because he didn't use the card, but then he didn't need to. Having the card meant that he could take risks that a desperate poor person wouldn't dare. A real day laborer can't just exit the life any time he wants, you know.
ReplyDeleteThis week in Salon's troll-the-libertarians business
ReplyDeletemodel:
Yeah.
Reason responds with their "suck-off-billionaires" business model.
~
Oh yeah. I'd love to see him repeat that little experiment when he's in his late fifties and swallowing $800 worth of prescription meds every month. How's your bootstraps now, sonny?
ReplyDeleteThat's just it: There's an economic tipping point where, once you fall below a certain level, it's impossible to recover. No car means no mobility (in most places), which means you can't get to any job that's no within walking distance of your dwelling. Cheap housing isn't generally within a block or two of high-paying work, so you're stuck with whatever the low-rent part of town has to offer as employment--which is typically part-time, minimum-wage, no-benefit work. And you're not buying a truck and salting away thousands in cash when you only make $800 a month and have to pay $600 a month in rent.
ReplyDeleteThen, too, our young hero did not work as a moving man long enough to wake up in so much pain from the previous day's work that he just couldn't make it to work today--which generally results in instant dismissal.
Salon's troll-the-libertarians business model
ReplyDeleteAnd to steal a line, Walker falls for it like an egg from a tall chicken.
Actually, I think the headline is there because Ehrenreich's work puts the lie to all the crap about the poor and working class being moochers and takers while business people are the only worthy citizens. Her entire body of work is a refutation of Rand's philosophy, even if Ehrenreich has no idea who Ayn Rand was or what Rand espoused.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good line. I'm probably going to have to steal it, meself.
ReplyDelete~
It is fascinating to see how libertarians react when you bring up Rand. The, let's say baser ones will of course just jump in whole hog in a spittle-flecked defense of her. The savvier ones will just shrug and say, "Rand? She's okay, I guess. I don't know why you liberals are so obsessed with her." It's like how Patrick Bateman usually understands that certain topics aren't for polite company.
ReplyDeleteOnly Reason could fuck up calling out Salon for being click-bait
ReplyDeleteThis, almost inevitably, comes after a couple of weeks of obscenely rich white people whinging non-stop about how pitiful their existences have become because they are no longer being fawned over by the press and the populace, how utterly devastated they are to realize that their inexorable goose-stepping toward destruction of democracy in favor of plutocracy isn't respected.
ReplyDeleteJesse just hates people pulling back the curtain on his favorite wizards.
I've avoided Salon for a couple of years, but I recall they had very enticing, and misleading, headlines for their driveled articles.
ReplyDeleteIt must really surprise and shock the superrich, so accustomed to bowing and kowtowing and slavishly applied flattery, to have someone say -loudly- that they're stupid, greedy asswipes.
ReplyDeleteHe betrayed her to the Statists for thirty Bitcoins.
ReplyDeleteNarrator: 10:30 AM, break time... Tom peeled the Ayn Rind off the turnip based economy....
ReplyDeleteTom: Dagny the Dog, Dagny, she goes with you when you explore... just pull her leash, and go for a walk, she's your Dag, for sure!
Narrator:.... the fruit was seedless and bitter.
Here's a special link that takes you to the good part:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.salon.com/writer/alex_pareene/
Best business model I've ever heard of. Like running a pig farm where the pigs want to be made into bacon.
ReplyDeleteI used to enjoy Salon, and I think they still have a few good writers. However, their website is so awful, so cluttered, so littered with pop-up ads and garbage, I avoid it as much as possible. It's like someone invented a Rube Goldberg device for vomiting trash onto a computer screen. On the rare occasion I actually visit, I instantly hate myself for having been suckered in again.
ReplyDeleteAyn Rand is the preeminent philosopher of teenagers. They love her. She's huge when readers are in high school.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if any of you guys went to high school, but I did, and I can say with authority that Ayn Rand is not huge there. She is not the preeminent anything.
"What's the dog's name?"
ReplyDelete"Dagny!"
(Dagny the dog, etc.)
From Galto! Electronic self-surveillance sold separately
Meh. Ehrenreich is OK, but I can't forget the shitty things she wrote about the Lorena Bobbitt and Susan Smith cases.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I don't see Ayn Rand as lasting much longer no matter how many books the libertarians give away. You can get your soft core longings on so much easier now. I doubt, for example, that there will be too many more objectivist girrrrl wannabes now that you can have Katniss Everdeen and all the self actualizing heroines you want. And the technology in her books is so old its geologic at this point. Do these guys not realize that they are old fogies by this time? The rising crop of 14 year old boys can watch online porn rather than plow (as it were) through Galt's speeches.
ReplyDeleteShe's the preeminent philosopher of people who were social outcasts as teenagers and never got over it. Like Sean Hannity is their preeminent political philosopher and Allen West is their preeminent Negro.
ReplyDeleteThey assign that shit in undergraduate business programs, or hand the books out free. The only people who ever told me"You need to read this book" were the children of large scale tobacco farmers (or hebephrenics).
ReplyDeleteAfter I got out of school and worked at a bookstore that took up the slack for some of the local schools (Duke, UNC, NCCU) I found the demand for those books remained consistent only among the insane.
Firefox+noscript. The website will be ugly in a mid 90s unstyled sort of way, but far, far less annoying. No little
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly, adulation of Rand in the schools may be a bit scattershot, but, in particular, the Kochs buying up political science and economics departments around the country may make that situation worse, rather than better.
ReplyDeleteBut, I still recall being force-fed Atlas Shrugged in a high school honors English class, of all places, back in the early `60s. I hated it, mostly because it was impossibly bad, and boring to the point of inducing catatonia, so I simply could not bring myself to approximate enthusiasm for it, even though the protolibertarian instructor held it in the highest esteem.
That said, if that was happening in a tiny backwater of a high school in the hinterlands, it was happening elsewhere, too.
There's more than a whiff of "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" about this young man; his alma mater costs about $200,000 for four years--was he paying college loans while he was building his little nest egg? Hey, maybe I could have done the same if I'd been able to find the same sort of job that he brags about when I was his age--the well-paying manual labor jobs that family and acquaintances were always telling me about that never seemed to materialize when I looked. Instead, I got the sort of shitty minimum-wage jobs that Ehrenreich talked about.
ReplyDeleteThe only flaw in your argument is that there will always be people who feel just slightly guilty about being greedy and selfish--and those are the people who will always provide a market for Rand's validation and celebration of greed and selfishness.
ReplyDeleteWe read Anthem in high school. The teacher just mentioned The Fountainhead. It was left as an exercise to me, the reader, to look them up, which I did at the end of my senior year of college, when I had nothing else to do.
ReplyDeleteI've grown up since then.
Wingdamentalists really do like to reduce everything to an Us vs. Them pissing contest.
ReplyDeleteA perceived liberal comes up with the incredible hypothesis that society fucks over poor people and in general being poor sucks.
Shut up you liberal! howl a bunch right wing shriek monkeys. Being poor is easy and fun. Look, we'll prove it by having some kid sort of pretend to be poor until it is inconvenient.
Then they wonder why people didn't react well to Rmoney's 47% comment.
Huh. It hadn't occurred to me that Rand was actually assigned anywhere; she doesn't really qualify as literature. Of 20th-cent lit, we read The Stranger, Godot, Portrait of the Artist -- existentialism and Roman Catholic theology were necessarily part of the course material (and it was a public HS). It might be interesting to teach Objectivism and one of Rand's books, but if the teacher is worth anything (my HS had very good English teachers), the students would be in a critical state of mind. For one thing, Joyce & Camus & Beckett were basically descriptive w/r/t life, whereas Rand is prescriptive. That would have been noted, and I don't think she'd've fared well in the ensuing classroom discussion (I've only read Anthem, when I was 25, and I found it full of unsustainable contradictions). I am fairly sure I would have seen her as third-rate and her philosophy as just a curiosity, solely because her sentences aren't any good. (I had a similar reaction to Dreiser, and actually to Beckett, who I did not grok at 17.)
ReplyDeleteIf I had a point when I started typing, who can guess what it was. Let them teach her; it'll be a nice ego boost when students see they can be third-rate and still get famous?
"... it'll be a nice ego boost when students see they can be third-rate and still get famous?"
ReplyDeleteAh, you may well have pinpointed a substantial part of her appeal.
Oh good Christ. I had to read A Tale Of Two Cities for class no less than three times in junior high and high school. Never, never, was an Ayn Rand selection among the lot, else I might have picked it out of sheer desperation, already having outgrown Rand by age 10.
ReplyDeleteDid the Koch crow three times yet?
ReplyDeleteI don't think he wants to be Frank...
ReplyDeleteOr AdBlock Plus. People complaining about ads on web sites baffle me until I get a new computer and see what's out there. Then I break a wrist in haste to download the current version.
ReplyDeleteThanks, both of you. I use Firefox but not any add-ons. The Salon site is by far the worst of any site, though TPM is starting to run an annoying number of scripts too.
ReplyDeleteThe WPA slave narratives are a multi-volume set of "poor person's accounts."
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, so did John Howard Griffin. Though, granted, not as instantly accessible. His "whiteness" was available, but not quickly enough to hold off a bunch of Klansmen. Then again, it might not have helped, given what he was doing...
ReplyDeleteSome small percent of the boys get attached to it--or her--and never manage to let go. I never read AS, and nobody I went to HS with ever mentioned it. (I was a readin' fool, and I would have bugged the Librarian for a copy.) That was rural Indiana in the mid '60s, but if she was such hot shite, surely one of the brainiacs I hung with (no, I have no idea why) would have been up on it.
ReplyDeleteExactly. I'll hire your kid if you hire my kid. That's the way it worked where I was. I washed dishes.
ReplyDeleteOf course. The Ruling Class has always depended upon intimidation and fear to hold power over others. Public mockery threatens that hold. That has been the cycle of history since the first neurotic monkey hoarder collected enough coconuts to pay other monkeys to do his dirty work.
ReplyDeleteHere's the thing that started bugging me a few weeks ago, though - it's not just that they're bringing on the destruction of democracy; they're going to bring on the destruction of the entire fucking planet while they're at it.
ReplyDeleteI think what brought this up was the whole looking for the missing jetliner thing, where they kept finding "just regular" ocean garbage floating around. I of course have known about the Pacific garbage patch for a number of years, and that has been bugging me for a long time - the fact that no one seems to think it should be cleaned up, that it's not their responsibility, etc. That shit is floating out there because industrial and relatively prosperous societies have been using metric fucktons of plastic and have not been particularly concerned about where it ends up. Plastics producers have a profit motive in creating more, businesses who use it have a profit motive when it helps lower costs, consumers benefit from slightly lower prices, etc. Yet none of them takes responsibility for cleaning it up.
I extended the idea out, and the inescapable conclusion I reached is that the planet is being utterly destroyed so the richest fraction of a percentage of humans can get more. Look at fossil fuels - we had the chance to really develop sustainable technology starting way back in the Carter administration. He supported it and even had solar panels put on the roof of the White House. So what happens? The fossil fuel industry and the rich people who own it get behind Reagan; he gets in office and declares that sustainable energy is for pussies - real men pollute - has the solar panels ripped off of the White House, gets to work on dismantling other laws and regulations targeted at improving energy efficiency & etc., and 35 years later, the polar icecaps are melting. The entirety of life on this planet will pay for what was essentially done to move money into the pockets of a very small group of people.
And this holds true across the board. Yes, it's true that there are more people on earth than ever before, and the only reason the planet can even minimally support that many is because of technological advancements, some of the very same ones that are now changing the climate and causing destruction in other ways. But it's so much worse than it needs to be or should be because so much of what gets done, and the way it gets done, has to do with some insanely wealthy fuck deciding that he just doesn't have enough yet.
For some 14-year old boys, literature that reinforces their belief that they are special geniuses exploited and unappreciated by those around them is their pornography.
ReplyDeleteI bet one-thousand Quatloos on this comment!
ReplyDelete"But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved around $5,300."
ReplyDelete'If it worked out for me it must work out for everyone who deserves it!' -every dumbass in history
You know, if someone has a big systematic problem with their life I might think there are things they could do to handle it better, but what kind of jerk's first instinct is to 'prove' that it wouldn't be a problem for them?
It could also be aliens "terra"forming the planet.
ReplyDeleteOccam's Razor by someone or other.
I believe you're describing an episode of the Superfriends.
ReplyDeleteThat's an insult to a lot of social outcasts who never got over it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't think I even knew who she was in high school. Certainly I didn't see anyone I knew carrying those books around, and it sure as hell wasn't assigned reading either. Maybe that was a stereotype from a few decades back.
ReplyDeleteThe right-leaning nerds I remember from high school mostly played Starcraft or Everquest. The biggest Rand devotees I've ever met have all been grown men who have no excuse.
One of the cornerstones of modern laissez-faire economics is that profitability increases when costs are externalized and, conveniently, that school of economics is largely silent on who should pay those externalized costs. What you're describing is a manifestation of that view.
ReplyDeleteThe distribution of benefits resulting from that externalization has always been a rigged game. The economists say this is necessary to keep costs down for the masses, but the inevitable benefit is pennies for the peons and billions for the wealthy, so the policies enabling same persist.
The problem isn't that the wealthy don't "have enough yet." It's that there's never enough for them. Our grandchildren will grow into a world where the top of Forbes 400 is a trillionaire, and in not too long a time, most of those 400 will be the same. But, there won't be a Forbes magazine to tell them, because no one will be able to afford a magazine subscription except the 400 or so trillionaires. They will have taken it all. At that point, they will be starting wars to take it from each other. And when the last old white guy gets all the money, he'll still feel that he deserves more.
Even after he revealed his real identity and everyone knew who he was, he got plenty of threats from racists. Some racists hate 'race traitors' more than people of other races, and someone like Griffin who did what he did to try and increase understanding and empathy between racial groups probably ticked them off most of all.
ReplyDeleteI think they really believe that They will be able to use their wealth to escape the planet-wide devastation, and still be rich. I bet they're buying real estate in the very high & low latitudes, planning special billionaire enclaves.
ReplyDeleteMakes me wonder, because a lot of these guys are old-the Kochs are in their 70s, Sheldon Adelson is 80, Jim Walton is 65, etc. Maybe they all think that vast scientific advancements in immortality or transhumanism are just around the corner-they're certainly the type to think like that.
ReplyDeleteThere are a little under 500 billionaires in the United States: a little over one ten-thousandth of a percent of the population. If you read in a history book about a society where one person would sacrifice the lives of 9,999 others so that he could have slightly more luxury, I assume most people would think 'what an asshole' and/or 'no wonder that society went extinct.'
ReplyDeleteBoy, that is a pleasant dream. The old bitch and her rotten books just wasting away in the dustbin of history. Horatio Alger was kind of similar: his books with their simplistic just-world morals informed America's most basic beliefs about itself (anyone can make it big, good things happen to good people) for a long, long time, but now he's a historical artifact and his books read today as so much hokey bullshit. Would that Rand suffer the same fate.
ReplyDeleteI think it might be different, though, because Alger's books were aimed at the middle class. His characters' rise to fame and fortune usually ended in the upper middle class, not in an all-powerful oligarchy. And he was very popular in the mainstream in his time. Rand, on the other hand, has always been reasonably obscure, except for a small sliver of society who believes they're destined to dominate the world the way John Galt did. All well and good, except they tend to be the kind of people in seats of power. Rand's writing is meant to directly jack into the pleasure centers of power-hungry and greedy rich people, who have the cultural clout to make sure she hangs around forever, like a cockroach.
Yeah, that's why a lot of the trendy philosophies in anti-prejudice philosophy leave me scratching my head. "Don't deny people the chance to tell their own stories" is all well and good, but it seems to be flung indiscriminately, and often rather hatefully, at any Group X person who wants to talk about Group Y problem at all, not even looking at their motive or the quality of their ideas. Or the context: This was a much, much bigger deal in 1961 than it would be today, and Griffin was, as far as I can tell, mostly addressing white people, telling them to stop being such dicks.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I also don't like it because d-bags like this guy find it so useful: squirm out of talking about poverty or class by zeroing in on the writer's insufficient purity or working-class bonafides. That's like half of any given McArdle column, and Reason also loves it.
Possibly, but I think that "If I have to die I'm gonna take everybody down with me" is up there, too.
ReplyDeleteBetter even Sandy Frank than randy frank.
ReplyDeleteSay hello to Thomas Piketty.
ReplyDeleteTry as I might, I just can't get inside the head of someone who is the sixth-richest person on Planet Earth and wakes up every day thinking "I want more. More more more." It's inexplicable to me, completely insane. So who knows what's going on in that crazy old fuck's head.
ReplyDeleteAssuming it's not sheer malice, it seems like the rich-guy version of 80's conservatives rooting for nuclear war with the USSR, or fundies rooting for the rapture: if they're going to die, they might as well go out in a blaze of glory. Problem is, that theory is usually applied to people whose lives are kind of pathetic otherwise and need mass tragedy to provide meaning and purpose. That theory slips a bit when you're one of the most materially wealthy people in human history. I don't know, maybe he's worried about his legacy or something, but if the AGW apocalypse ends up happening, his legacy won't be a good one, if he has one at all.
There's also two kind of related theories: One, people are hard-wired as a species to keep gathering and gathering, because deep down in everyone's brain stem there's a small hairy primate whose primary fear is starving to death. This is true to the point where the brain intentionally dulls any pleasure earned from things you already have or do, so you're constantly motivated to get more. This instinct apparently never shuts off for the mega-rich, even though they're no longer in any physical danger of dying from exposure or starvation or whatever.
There's also a David Foster Wallace quote, something like "When a solipsist dies, the whole world dies with them." He was just talking about John Updike, but when applied to someone like the Kochs, it's not that they're actively trying to maliciously destroy the world or think that their massively harmful actions won't actually harm the future: "the future" just doesn't register to them. Once they're gone the rest of the world may as well not exist because they no longer have a use for it. This also solves the "what more do you think you can gain" question. They know they'll be dead within twenty years and it's because of that, not in spite of it, that they just can't stop fucking us all over: from their perspective there is absolutely no negative consequence because soon it will no longer matter to them, and by extension everyone else. Maybe if they were both 50 years younger and they knew they'd have to live in the world they've made they'd be less assholish. Who knows. I also don't doubt that they're scientifically illiterate when it comes to climate science, just like your average bubba, except they have so much money they can literally shut down and stop cold scientific research they don't like.
So add it all up and you basically have rich people driven mindlessly by both the human fear of death and the animal instinct to hoard, who are incapable of considering the effects of their actions on the world around them or on the future because they're so isolated from both they may as well not exist. Honestly I'd prefer the 'cartoonishly evil mustache-twirler' model of corporate overlord rather than this unkillable bundle of primal fears and solipsistic stupidity.
Wikipedia claims that about 2.9 million copies of Rand's books were purchased by the Ayn Rand Institute for free distribution to schools.
ReplyDeleteAs I noted in a screed a couple of years back, what it all boils down to is that we're allowing a bunch of transparently mentally ill people call all the shots. But most people never notice this, because this society trains everyone to want more and to aspire to be one of those who has a huge hoard of wealth.
ReplyDeleteI've gassed on before about the epiphany I had when I realized that the desire to continue piling billions upon billions, long past the point where any possible human want, need, or desire could be fulfilled, is essentially the same illness as the physical hoarding shown on all the TV shows. People just don't see it because the billionaire isn't living in a garbage dump, but the illness is the same. I'd like to see that idea get some real traction and attention, because I think it really does have the power to make people think about wealth, and wealth inequality, and consumer society, and more yet, in an entirely different way. I know in my real day to day life, every person I've shared this idea with has seemed to think of it as a revelation.
I heard him interviewed on NPR about a week ago, and it really pissed me off, because his big idea seemed to be that only people who can afford to invest can become wealthy. Something I had figured out by the time I was 20 - and had never taken an economics course of any kind.
ReplyDeleteIf that comes as a revelation to someone who trained as an economist, it's no wonder the system is so fucked.
Not to disregard Piketty or the rest of his work, with which I have not yet become familiarized ... but that interview was a total DUH.
Or maybe, these addled bastards just watched entirely too much of Robin Leach's "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."
ReplyDeleteSomething tells me that the NPR filter made him look clueless. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason I posted that link was because apparently he's making the argument that concentration of wealth isn't just about a cadre of individual billionaires who'll die one day and go away. They're creating dynasties.
(I haven't read the thing yet; I'm just relying on Krugman.)
All anyone needs to know is that a paperback version of Atlas Shrugged contained a card-stock printed insert urging the sucker reader to join up with the Objectivist whateverthefuck. Ayn Rand was only a slightly more sane version of L. Ron Hubbard.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention that the credit card means he had a credit rating, which likely helped get the apartment, the truck, and maybe jobs as well.
ReplyDeleteLike John Stossel: "I dressed up like a homeless person and panhandled for a few hours, and made a decent haul. It's all a scam!"
ReplyDeleteWe had to read Dickens. But no Fenster...
ReplyDeletebut that interview was a total DUH.
ReplyDeleteSo, I understand, was the book, to a certain extent. Kevin Drum struggled to finish it to review it, because most of the premise was stated very early on, and after that it was charts and graphs saying the same thing over and over.
He who has the most toys when the Earth dies wins...
ReplyDeleteStrictly speaking, Walker isn't wrong about Frank injecting his own opinions into the talk with Ehrenreich. And yes, in a lot of circumstances that would be bad interview form. What he misses is that Frank is a pretty big name himself among progressive writers, and in all likelihood Salon wants him to talk about himself, even as an interviewer.
ReplyDelete"The Arrival", David Twohy. Though the aliens explain that the process of rendering Earth uninhabitable was basically a human initiative; they're just hurrying it along.
ReplyDelete"If you can't tend to your own planet, you don't deserve to live here."
Riiight. Where'd you sleep that night, John?
ReplyDeleteHad to move to Mexico for a while till things cooled down.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure being John Stossel is all a scam. Maybe one of these days I'll glue on a shiny mustache to prove it.
ReplyDeleteNo site that employs Alex Pareene and recently started carrying Digby can be all bad. But yeah, pages take forever to load. Also there's this hairshirt aspect to a lot of their articles that I think the left would do well to avoid.
ReplyDeleteLast Xmas I was in the checkout queue at Fry's and the guy in front of me said (the regular version of that). I pointed out that we were standing less than five miles from Bill Gates' house. Still want to judge winning by material goods?
ReplyDeleteAdblock is good, but it's a different problem from noscript. Of course I am more easily annoyed by stupid little pop up "would you like to subscribe to this" windowns that the average Kardashian viewer is.
ReplyDeleteOr, if you've run out of bubble gum, John Carpenter's They Live.
ReplyDeleteUmm, check the math. The "of a percent" has thrown you, I think. At a population of, roughly, 317 million, that's one of the bastards for every 634, 000 of us.
ReplyDeleteSame point as yours, just magnified by an additional factor of 63.
The funny thing is, Rand didn't exactly mince words in ranting about how no decent person cared a whit for the admiration of others - all that mattered was that he knew that he was perfect in every way. Desiring public regard was a clear sign of being a commie superstitionist who thought that reality could be changed by what anyone thought or said.
ReplyDeleteThen again, she also fumed mightily over the fact that some people said mean things about the wonderful Captains of Industry, and insisted that harbouring opinions that were even a single degree off the one true course would inevitably lead to disaster, so I suppose if you focus on those bits instead of those other bits, it all makes perfect sense.
Alger's an interesting case. Apart from the fact that he was a Unitarian minister who was run out of his parish as an accused child molester before turning to fiction to pay the bills, his books, while often held up as models of rugged individualism and how grit, hard work, and determination always pay off, are usually anything but. The usual Alger hero may set off seeking his fortune, but he usually finds it by fortuitously saving some industrialist's child from a runaway horse or something and being given a job out of gratitude. I suppose, "find someone rich to suck up to and attach yourself to him like a limpet" is as good a piece of life advice as any, but it's a hard sell in a country that at least pays lip service to to the Protestant Work Ethic, so I can see why he's been purposefully misrepresented down through the ages.
ReplyDeleteWell yeah, that is how the stories go a lot of times, but I think for the people who really believe in Just-World stuff with all their heart, there's not really a contradiction there. Do good, and good things will happen to you. Those good things don't necessarily have to be ones you achieved through your own hard work or talent, just a sign of higher justice smiling on you.
ReplyDeleteAnd for that matter, the creative geniuses of Atlas Shrugged made their dough off of a perpetual motion machine and a steel alloy that might as well be Mithril, i.e. completely unrealistic plot devices that are nevertheless supposed to inspire the readers to take the morals of the story to heart in real life. Despite writing books where the whole point was that Worldview X was the only path to success, neither one was good at showing that through the plot in any realistic way.
It's pitched at a slightly lower level of sophistication, but Ayn Rand's Adventures in Wonderland is good for a larf: http://wonkette.com/415825/thats-objectivist-ayn-rand-in-the-21st-century
ReplyDeleteBlowhard businessmen and politicians are one thing, but Krugman always points out how an entire generation of macroeconomists are just so completely ignorant of the basics of their own profession because they're all drunk on Milton Friedman juice. It's not depressing so much as horrifying, like finding out that the world's most prominent astrophysicists all secretly believe that the earth is flat.
ReplyDeleteIf Piketty repeats himself, I can forgive him because he's saying what needs to be said: the ultra-rich are actively trying to control and rig the economy at large. Meanwhile you've got the likes of Robert Lucas saying that even discussing income inequality is dangerous and "poisonous." Not even "Here's the conservative position on why income inequality is not as big a problem as you might think", just "Don't talk about it! Don't even think about it! Such thoughts are anathema!" Christ almighty.
My understanding of Randian theory is based on one or two Randian trolls at science blogs like Respectful Insolence...but if they are any guide, the theory does not admit the concept of Externalised costs at all.
ReplyDeleteThe informants tend to wax indignant at the suggestion that a polluter should be called upon to compensate people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the pollution. If someone has invented a machine that pulls static electricity out of the air and makes that air unbreathable in the process, the answer is not to sue, but to invent another machine that turns electricity back into air, and sell it to the newly-created market of asphyxiating people so that everyone profits.
From their perspective, the "tragedy of the commons" is the existence of a non-private Common in the first place.
I...have no idea what that comment means.
ReplyDeleteMy personal theory is simply that if you are the sixth wealthiest person in the world, chances are you have spent a great deal of time working on getting richer. That means that working on getting richer is what you do. It's your identity and your purpose. So why would you want to stop?
ReplyDeleteMy personal favourite is the "method to restart depleted oil wells," which goes beyond science fiction and into the realm of the entirely unimaginable. Rand really was relentless in her insistence that there was never any good reason to rein in personal greed. Diminishing natural resources? Boulderdash - there'll always be more natural resources! ALWAYS!
ReplyDeleteThe economists over at Crooked Timber are very excited by it- saying it's the best economic analysis of capitalism since Marx.
ReplyDeleteA good review of it is at The Philosopher's Stone. It covers how the current setup is re-instituting "patrimonial capitalism" - i.e. inherited wealth is starting to push out earned wealth.
"Externalities? What externalities?" It's also nice when you have the state government <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-08/duke-energy-north-carolina-appeal-coal-ash-ruling.html>in your pocket.</a>
ReplyDelete*Free* distribution?
ReplyDeleteIrony wept.
From their perspective, the "tragedy of the commons" is the existence of a non-private Common in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAnd always there's the assumption that the libertarian troll in question is going to be the one who comes up with the invention (at either end of this example). No libertarian anywhere, ever, will end up working in the factory that produces said invention. Nor will said libertarian ever asphyxiate before completing his or her wondrous machine.
I think you're being entirely too kind to these people. There is no way in the rational universe that someone with unimaginable wealth who wants to get his hands on my measly Social Security entitlement--and befoul the earth in the process, even though these two seem unrelated--can be anything but a criminal sociopath. Balzac's famous quote about great fortunes and great crimes comes to mind.
ReplyDeleteAh, well, the moment you try to argue with them on what you think are sensible terms, you're doomed, because they cannot admit to your terms at all. This is a corollary of the old adage that you cannot argue with crazy people, because you have no stable frame of reference on which to agree.
ReplyDeleteEveryone who thought I was just an English major (who couldn't possibly have aced math and nuclear chemistry, too) was invariably in for a rude surprise....
ReplyDelete"... it all makes perfect sense."
ReplyDeleteExcept, of course, that she was wrong, in the whole and in substance, and was, for the most part, a coddled moron.
Well, that's a good argument for why a small subset of top people will always be pretending to read her books and pushign them on underlings to try to force them to read her. Its basically like scientology if Rand had been the kind of person to care about ruining people's lives after her death. Or the bible, for the matter of that. Most people who blather on and on about Jesus and God have never really read the thing--only their favorite passages that come pre-interpreted for them--and when they do really read it in its original language they often fall away from a strict literalist interpretation.
ReplyDeleteSo I think, agreeing with SL, that the old guard billionaires who read Rand at an impressionable age will continue to refer to her and push her on their underlings (a Rand in every 15 years of service Fruit Basket) and that younger tech billionaires will not read her at all but will cite her with chinese fortune cookie style approval. Rand argued X will become a staple of their political and cultural moralizing. But I doubt very much that a significant number of rising 14 year old boys will be reading her unless they are well on their way to idiot/killer/sociopath and can't be satisfied with other current YA literature. And even if there are such boys its not really the case that they are going to make it to be billionaires. They will get hung up on some lower rung of libertarian greed. Without objectivist girls to join them they will die without reproducing.
He was too much of an outsider
ReplyDeleteHe was too much of an insider
He is an unreliable narrator because he cared too much
He is an unreliable narrator because he cared too little
Several years ago--like under Bush II, I listened to a few minutes of some hearings about global warming and the fate of New Hampshire and New England when less snow, and less reliable snow, would mean the death of a precarious tourist based economy. The Republican politician who showed up to testify perkily insisted that this was all for the best in the best of all possible worlds because tourists would just start coming up to enjoy the new tropical New Hampshire highlands or something. Rainforests! Exotic animals!
ReplyDeleteThere is, at base, a refusal to acknowledge that when things start going bad because of human action they can't just be set right by human inaction.
Toss in what it costs to keep his hair and pornstache in properly dyed condition.
ReplyDeleteHoward Hughes for a real life example.
ReplyDeleteThe marvllous book "Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things"http://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Compulsive-Hoarding-Meaning-Things/dp/0547422555/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397312425&sr=1-1&keywords=stuff+compulsive+hoarding+and+the+meaning+of+things Has a pair of extremely wealthy brothers in it, both of whom suffer from a compulsion to hoard.
Yeah, can you expand that a bit, Mike J?
ReplyDeleteThis came out during a discussion of taxing Hedge Funders money at the same rate as income--the amount one hedge funder was not paying in taxes could fund (IIRC) 230,000 teachers in NY State. Mind boggling.
ReplyDeleteSince there were 206,000 teachers in the state (as of the last available statistics, in 2012) and, let's say, for speculation's sake that the average wage + benefits per teacher was $75K, that's $15 billion or thereabouts, so, no, there's no single hedge funder making that kind of money per year, let alone paying--even at top income rates, which they aren't--that amount of taxes on it.
ReplyDeleteIf, say, one of the top hedge fund traders, maybe Steven Schwarzman, for example, were to pay 39.6% on his yearly income of around $2 billion, he'd be paying for (at the above estimate) roughly 10,500 teachers.
Now, keep in mind that because Schwarzman and his ilk are paying next to nothing in taxes because of deferred withdrawal of carried interest, they're not paying much at all toward those teachers' salaries, or any other part of the state and national budgets--including the huge costs for defense--which idiots like Schwarzman think is keeping their wealth safe, but for which he and they don't think they should pay anything, and, perforce, think the peons should pay for the privilege of defending their money, which they deign to share with no one.
That's the real problem.
Well, that's the whole problem with capitalism, isn't it? It's a system that assumes unlimited growth, which can only occur with unlimited resources and unlimited population growth, both of which are impossible.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Montag2, as soon as I had typed those numbers I began to feel as gullible as any little old lady who watches fox news. I had definitely added a zero and then some to my faulty recollection of the story when it came out.
ReplyDeleteFair enough. I'm just trying to come up with an explanation that doesn't lean on "because they're EEeeevil!" Not because they deserve sympathy but once you start looking at one person that way it becomes easier to look at other people that way.
ReplyDeleteIn my day that was probably Joe Strummer
ReplyDeleteEr, I was talking about how Rand's fans follow her teachings, and that the way they do it make sense once you remember that she was prone to wanting to eat her cake and have it to. :P
ReplyDeleteOh, that's far from the whole problem with capitalism, I'd say. :P But it's certainly a particularly big and glaring part of the problem.
ReplyDeleteShe'd have penned The Frackist if she'd lived into this century.
ReplyDeleteNow that's some logrolling.
ReplyDeleteThis is why you're not a Titan of Wall Street. If you listen to the market analysis every day, these geniuses are convinced that EVERY company should be posting double-digit profit growth every quarter. Failure to do so (say, showing "only" 9% profit growth in a quarter) results in your stock price being devalued and investors running away.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed.
ReplyDeleteJesse Walker ought to read it himself. Instead, he says "I'd rather read an actual poor person's account of her llfe, not a successful writer's Poor Like Me stunt book."
First of all, I doubt that he would honestly like to read any poor person's account of anything. Secondly, most poor people wouldn't be able to tell the story of minimum-wage living in the same way that Barbara Ehrenreich did.
While she was living this thankless kind of life of humility and disrespect, she realized that she didn't really deserve it and that things don't have to be this way. Sadly, many poor people don't realize those things, and live broken-spirited lives of shame and self-recrimination.
After all, this is America, so if you're poor, it's your own dang fault.
I suppose I'm splitting grammatical hairs when I perceive "makes sense" to be different in kind from "understandable." Kind of like, I can understand why insane people behave the way they do, but, still, the way they behave doesn't make sense in any logical framework. Rand's philosophy--and her fans' perception of it--doesn't make sense. It's understandable, however, that hypocrisy is an essential element in defending the indefensible, because the ideas themselves don't bear scrutiny--for precisely the reasons you describe.
ReplyDeleteAh, well, I think it shows well enough in her writing that fiction to her was little more than a hastily assembled set of contrivances through which she could voice exceedingly longwinded and desperately pedantic diatribes. Cardboard scenery and wooden characters do not a novel make.
ReplyDeleteIn Alger's case, his stock formula was used to a different purpose, that of demonstrating the virtue of pluck and, all too often, the innate saintliness of the wealthy, who invariably lift up his young lads from poverty and plunk them down in respectability. I find it interesting that his books sold well in hard times--in the wake of the 1893 crash and the years immediately following the 1907 panic, and interest in them had petered out almost completely by 1920--but, oddly, there was no resurgence when the Grand Slam crash of `29 occurred. My own feeling is that the urban realism of James T. Farrell, especially in his Studs Lonigan books, rang a good deal more true in hard times than Alger's predictably anodyne tales ever could.
Indeed. There were probably a lot of reasons why the CEO of Compaq got bounced (I think this was before Hewlett-Packard bought them), but I still remember an interview with him during which he expressed incredulity that Wall Street was expecting more than 15% growth in profit every quarter and were issuing recommendations to sell because he was only able to achieve a +15% increase over the last quarter.
ReplyDeleteThat, as we say, is seriously fucked up.
Well, sometimes pop-cultural trends just get forgotten.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't surprise me because I think it's been proven sociologically speaking that a country's politics tend to drift rightward in times of economic disaster: looking for scapegoats, hanging tight onto what they have left, and so on. But beyond that, the late 19th century was a time when it was easy for Americans to believe in ever-increasing technological progress. In 20-25 years, people saw the invention of lightbulbs, radio, cars, and telephones, America's arrival as a global military power, a huge boom in mass culture entertainment, a growing middle class and so on. By the early 20th century, the reformers of the era realized that things actually weren't so great for a whole chunk of people, and decoupled (arguably for the first time) the concepts of a nation's strength or "greatness" and the quality of life for its everyday citizens. The '29 crash obviously didn't do pro-capitalists any favors, by the cracks were staring to show well before that.
I gather it's sort of "the rich get richer, and everybody else gets poorer" (which we already knew) but with equations to prove it.
ReplyDeleteMy father died when I was 17,everything he had went to keep my mom going and put my sister through college,and I was a high-school drop-out with no back-up, but I never worried.
ReplyDeleteOTOH I was living in British Columbia in the 1970s, where there was plenty of good union jobs, national health care, and a working man (emphasis on 'man' intended) could make enough money to buy a house and raise a family.
I hear ya. We can thank the Bush administration for our latest concept of "evil," one of his typically juvenile explanation for things that might deserve deeper scrutiny. 'Course, it's only liberals who might want to figure out why fabulously wealthy people want to indulge in raping the economy and the political system for their own benefit and harm to everyone else. It makes me think of the WalMart/McDonald's situation where the corporations don't want to pay their employees a decent wage because it will force them to raise prices by two cents per item. That's your reason, Waltons? You refuse to share your obscene wealth for that? Well, no, that can't be it; they're not that dumb. People like that are greedy and selfish, locked in some cocoon where the normal rules of morality and ethics just don't touch them. That's why we need--desperately--an extension of the estate tax. Thomas Jefferson may have had his failings, but he was damn right about that. Holy shit, now we've got judges who won't send rich people--fifty-year-old trust-fund babies!--to jail because it might disturb their sleep or something.
ReplyDeleteI think I get it. If we're judging our success by material goods, we lose. There's Gates, there's the Kochs -- we're not even playing in the same league as the guys who win every time. We might buy ourselves a more comfortable life, with iPads and a fourth family car and so on, but at some point we're trading away other very real things (e.g., a sustainable environment, a more decent life for other people) in order to get that comfort. So what is the gain? Is it worth it? Generally we don't think about the Koch's tax rates, sweatshops, environmental degradation, etc etc -- we just want the toy. Which we lived without fine so far. So to some extent wanting all that stuff is childish at best. (Full disclosure: I have an iPhone, 2 computers, and a stupid-fancy clock that tells me the temperature which it knows due to satellite uplink.)
ReplyDeleteYes. OK, I see that.
ReplyDeleteChrist, you didn't read The Fountain Head in hi-skool? I sure did. It was boneriffic!
ReplyDeleteIt helps the cause of the plutocrats if the rest of us can be induced to believe that our interests align with theirs if we can afford to buy a few toys. And they believe, with good, solid precedent, that what they call their base can be bought cheaply.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteHere's a little secret: Once you accumulate a certain amount of money, it simply becomes a magnet for more money.
ReplyDeleteI'm fortunate enough to have many extremely wealthy friends--people who are most definitely in the 1%. Most do not spend their time working on getting richer because they don't have to. One of my friends wakes up every morning with another $3,000 in his bank account, solely as a result of the investments he's made.
I think the problem is that we have a comparative handful of extremely wealthy people (like the Waltons and the Kochs) who actually are working to get richer and tilt the playing field ever more steeply in their favor. That table tilts in favor of all the wealthy, not just the Waltons and the Kochs.
Of course, another problem is that the financial machinery of the federal government is firmly in control of Goldman-Sachs, and has been ever since Bob Rubin was Treasury Secretary. Can we get a president who doesn't keep appointing Goldman alumns to staff The Fed, Treasury, and his cabinet?
That's perfect
ReplyDeleteAnd the comments... [shudder] Usually it's best not to get out of the boat. Between the wingnut trolls, the smattering of holier-than-thou liberals, and the people who appear to be flat-out nuts, it's a disheartening experience. The only time I used to venture in was to read comments savaging the latest inane Camille Paglia article (the article itself not being worth reading, of course).
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