Tag: The New York Times

Categories
Life

A Status Contest With a Twist

Dacher Keltner in The New York Times:

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human…

Placed into groups, children as young as 2 will soon form a hierarchy — it will be clear even among toddlers who is in charge and who is not. Hierarchies have many benefits — the smooth division of labor and resources, protecting weaker members of the group — but they can be deadly to negotiate. Male fig wasps chop their rivals in half with their large mandibles. Narwhal males loll about with tusk tips embedded in their jaws — vestiges of their status contests. Coyotes engage in heavily coded bouts of play; those who don’t live shorter, ostracized lives.

Given the perils of negotiating rank, many species have evolved dramatized status contests, relying on symbolic displays of physical size and force to peacefully sort out who’s on top. Stags roar. Frogs croak. Chimps throw branches around. Hippos open their jaws as wide as possible to impress competitors.

And humans tease. Teasing can be thought of as a status contest with a twist. As humans evolved the ability to form complex alliances, the power of a single individual came increasingly to depend on the ability to build strong bonds. Power became a matter of social intelligence (the good of the group) rather than of survival of the fittest (raw strength). As a status contest, teasing must walk a fine line, designating status while enhancing social connection.

And my mother always told me not to tease my sister! She didn’t realize it was an essential life skill.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics The Opinionsphere

The Biggest Decision Obama Will Make

Friedman:

The Obama presidency will be shaped in many ways by how it spends this stimulus. I am sure he will articulate the right goals. But if the means — the price signals, conditions and standards — that he imposes on his stimulus are not as creative, bold and tough as his goals, it will all be for naught. In sum, our kids will remember the Obama stimulus as either the burden of their lifetime or the investment of their lifetime. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

I think Tom Friedman understates matters here (which is unusual for him). Aside from some unexpected crisis (which of course is likely), Barack Obama’s presidency will not merely be “shaped” by how it spends this stimulus – but it’s historical significance will be determined by how it spends it. As David Brooks reccomended last week, channeling David Porter of Harvard Business School: “do nothing in the short term that doesn’t serve a long-term goal.”

Health care. Green energy. Energy infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure. Education. Barack Obama has laid out clear goals in all of these areas except the latter.

A crisis is always a time of opportunity – for mischief or ill gains if used exploitively; for needed reform if used wisely. Coming into office, Barack Obama will have more opportunity than any president – I would argue – in history. What Obama is able to accomplish with this opportunity will be his legacy.

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security Politics

Middle-Class Murmers

In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Somini Sengupta of The New York Times reported:

…there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world’s largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Mr. Sanghvi wrote, “I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government.”

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Indians began to question their government – and indeed democracy itself – as a result of these attacks while in the aftermath of September 11, Americans rallied around our government and our president and ignored the obvious indications of incompetence.

But it certainly is significant.

Categories
Barack Obama Election 2008 The Opinionsphere

Reclaiming America

Frank Rich:

[T]he North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

Aside from the schlocky sentence, “The actual real America is everyone,” an excellent column.

Categories
Barack Obama Foreign Policy The Opinionsphere

Your Excuse for Doing Less Than You Could

I’ve just gotten around to reading this Sunday’s news columns – the ones I normally read on either Sunday or Monday. Tom Friedman’s column impressed me a great deal – even though it started out as the saccharine sales pitch I am so used to hearing from him – it ended with this tough talk:

So to everyone overseas I say: thanks for your applause for our new president. I’m glad you all feel that America “is back.” If you want Obama to succeed, though, don’t just show us the love, show us the money. Show us the troops. Show us the diplomatic effort. Show us the economic partnership. Show us something more than a fresh smile. Because freedom is not free and your excuse for doing less than you could is leaving town in January. [my emphasis added]

That last line is the one that gets me. It gets to the heart at much of the more reasonable conservative frustrations with the “international community” and Europe. (The less reasonable frustrations are another story.) But more important – Friedman identifies one of the arguments Obama will need to make in order to translate the goodwill generated by his election to motivate worldwide leaders to help him take on the global challenges we will are facing.

Also – I’ve decided to start linking to the regular version of New York Times articles rather than to the printable format which I prefer. As the Times will likely be facing some financial problems in the near future, I figure it’s the least I can do.

Categories
Barack Obama Economics The Opinionsphere

Krugman’s Hope: Franklin Delano Obama

Not being an economist, I find it a lot harder to argue with Paul Krugman now that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. That makes him a certified top expect – and I am a mere amateur. And while the other Nobel prizes have made some real boners (Yassir Arafat and the Nobel Peace Prize?), the economics prize doesn’t have the same reputation. (Although the award given to Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, the inventors of the “financial weapons of mass destruction” – derivatives –  in 1997, the same year the hedge fund they had helped create went spectacularly bankrupt – seems quite the bad decision today.)

Regardless of prizes though, Krugman’s piece today makes some important counter-points I had not heard regarding the lack of efficacy of FDR’s New Deal. Certainly, my reading of history made it clear that the New Deal had not lifted America out of the Great Depression – but I had never found convincing the traditional conservative explanation that the problem was FDR’s expansion of government. After all, Hoover’s refusal to expand the government had not reigned in the Depression – and it was the massive government expansion called World War II that finally broke America out of the Depression. I’m willing to concede the conservative point that some of FDR’s government interventions may have backfired – such as interference in wages and prices – but as Krugman points out in his column, many of FDR’s reforms have lasted to this day and helped mitigate the effects of the current financial crisis – from Social Security to federal deposit insurance.

Krugman posits that FDR failed to get us out of the Depression because he did too little rather than too much. He points out that overall government spending did not increase as much as is commonly understood:

The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

Which leads Krugman to the conclusion that:

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

Krugman has me convinced of his thesis for now. It certainly makes more sense than the alternative explanations I have heard about the New Deal and the Great Depression. But the last word – and the final prescription – should come from Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself:

It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

This is my hope for an Obama presidency – one that I saw as far back as December when I posted this quote – and one that his campaign has born out.

Categories
Election 2008 McCain Obama Politics

Appalachia

[digg-reddit-me]Yglesias gets there before me – pointing out the similarities between this map from the New York Times showing the areas of the country that voted more for McCain than for Bush between 2004 and 2008 and some other maps:

Here’s a map of those areas where Hillary Clinton overperformed during the primary (as of May 2008). She later overperformed in two of the remaining blank states here – West Virgina and Kentucky.

And here’s a map of Appalachia:

Notice – this isn’t a map of Republican areas. It’s a map of those areas where Hillary Clinton did exceptionally well, and a map of where Republican voting in 2008 exceeded that of 2004.

This issue seems a lot less urgent now than it did even last week.

But it’s worth remembering.

Categories
Election 2008 McCain Obama Politics

You don’t need to boo, you just need to vote…

[digg-reddit-me][W]hen his Democratic crowds jeer at the mere mention of Senator John McCain, [Obama] offers a gentle scolding, “You don’t need to boo, you just need to vote.”

From Jeff Zeleny’s New York Times piece today. Contrast this with McCain’s and Palin’s escalating rhetoric and their seeming embrace of much of the negative attitudes of their crowds. McCain finally had enough and tried to calm some people down as the vehemence and extremism of his crowds became a political issue in and of itself – but you can still see him reveling in the boos at the mention of Obama, The New York Times, or other liberal bogeymen.

One of the essential elements of what makes Obama’s politics so compelling is that it is not toxic – as so much political dialogue today is. His attempt to raise the level of political discourse and to engage in respectful political dialogue has become one of his trademarks – even though his campaign has often failed to live up to this high standard.

Obama has proved that he is willing and able to hit back hard – and to land some low blows. But his focus has always been on the substance – for example, treating Keating Five as a distraction – producing an ad and holding it until McCain started his personal attacks on Obama.

All this reminds me of the story of the pro-life protestors at an Obama rally in New Hampshire the day before the primary election versus Hillary:

…the day before the New Hampshire primary, a group of pro-life protesters interrupted an Obama rally. They refused to stop chanting to allow Mr. Obama to speak, and after a few minutes, they were removed by security. The largely Democratic crowd was clearly on Barack’s side in this – booing the protesters, drowning their chants out. But after they left, Mr. Obama gently scolded the crowd:

Let me just say this though. Some people got organized to do that. That’s part of the American tradition we are proud of. And thats hard too, standing in the midst of people who disagree with you and letting your voice be heard.

Another story of Obama’s politically unnecessary grace comes Peggy Noonan wrote last Friday:

When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd “I have no comment,” or “We shouldn’t judge.” Instead he said, “My mother had me when she was 18,” which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn’t have to.

Let me be clear – Obama is no saint. But there is an uncommon grace about him, especially in contrast to our politics.

It is this grace that is the essence of Obama’s particular brand of post-partisanship. It is this grace that deflates the hyped-up fears that people like Fouad Ajami try to foment as they recall how leaders harnassing the power of crowds have brought down Arab societies. What Ajami misses is the relationship Obama has to the crowd – which makes all the difference.

Continue reading “You don’t need to boo, you just need to vote…”
Categories
Domestic issues Politics

Fascinating Fact of the Day

From the New York Times op-ed written by Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry:

Starbucks pays more for health care than it does for coffee.

My first question is – who the hell actually wrote this piece and thought that these were the three guys to get together to sell it? The Kerry-Gingrich thing works. But where does Beane come in, aside from thematically? I presume all three must be on some board together.

Categories
Economics Politics

Unintended Consequences

The law of unintended consequences has been demonstrated once again as the healthy banks are using the infusion of cash from the Treasury not to make loans as they were supposed to, but to buy up other banks – or so claims a New York Times reporter, Joe Nocera, who managed to sneak onto an internal employee-only conference call at JPMorgan Chase.

The centralization of the finance industry is one of the factors contributing to this ongoing crisis – and it was the mistakes of companies too big to fail that forced the government to intervene to stabilize the entire financial system.

Now, after this crisis has passed we are likely to be left with fewer and bigger companies – ones that absolutely cannot be allowed the fail.

After this crisis has passed we need to figure out what to do with institutions that are so big they can cause systematic damage if they fail. Whether that means we need to break them up or regulate them further – we cannot allow the power to destabilize the entire financial system to rest in the hands of a handful of executives in a few firms with no accountability to the people who will be affected by their decisions – a kind of market-enabled tyranny.

I don’t know that there is an easy solution to this – but after the financial emergency has been dealt with, we have to remember that it was the centralization of power in a handful of banks that contributed to this mess.