whyroots - Walter Lamberson

PROMPT OF THE WEEK: George W. Bush in hindsight

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:56:01 +0700

It’s the last week of President George W. Bush and in 7 days I will be on the Mall welcoming a new administration. It seems prescient to say goodbye to all the things which I could almost forget in this pathetic closing act of a deceptive and failed American president. For so long, reading a newspaper, rather than make your head spin with fear, made your blood boil. In these last days, let’s not forget the duplicitous media tactics we can expect to move beyond.

It’s hard to focus because we have seen so much, but it all seems to add up to our current predicament. And after gripping victory from the jaws of defeat in the 2000 election, it started off on a dishonest note. He invented the “Clinton Recession” clarifying that responsibility for macroeconomic results lies in the hands of the President unless he is a Republican. He then enticed America’s once-well-regarded and ostensibly-non-partisan central banker, Alan Greenspan, to sponsor some breathtaking tax cuts. But that was just the beginning of the lies... and the deficits.

Then the Iraq War. We were warned not to wait for the smoking gun “in the form of a mushroom cloud.” On May 1, 2003, I watched a President in a flight jacket celebrate a “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. A week later, at my high school graduation, I said goodbye to dozens of classmates who trusted the President and left home to protect America from those they were told attacked America on September 11. Some of them never came home.

At about that point, I started wondering how we were letting this happen. We are not a people who tolerate American deaths in big numbers. Six unfortunate deaths in a failed opperation in the Battle of Mogadishu inspired an intollerance for American casualties so severe the US has watched awkwardly the genocidal decimation of Rwanda, Bosnia, Tibet, The Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, North Korea, and Burma. But where was that outrage as this administration racked up casualties in Iraq?

The Bush Administration departed from the respectful tradition of confronting squarely the deaths of US Americans as a direct result of a war the President waged. They achieved this first by simply not talking about it. Bush, somehow, didn’t hold press conferences. And when he did, he didn’t answer question from the press. This remains astonishing.

When he did discuss American death in Iraq, it was presented it as proof that America, freedom, and civil society were in danger. He used death to galvanize people--but not with the honest and credible candor of Churchill addressing a nation making sacrifices for a shared goal. He was the President who peddled a fear that he brought into this world. In this environment, even a military defeat was a public relations victory.

And so we are here. After eight years of conceited politics and warfare this nation has few friends and fewer resources. We ceased raising revenue years ago and racked up an enormous debt of Trillions of dollars that we spent building complicated things that blow-up. But Bush learned from his father that a war wasn’t enough to win re-election; you can’t risk a recession. So the administration conspired in the myopic central bank stimuli of cheap credit that built America’s foreclosed homes and the emasculated regulations that allowed those mortgages to be securitized. This whole business has cost Trillions, will cost more, and unlike any other war in our history, no one who supported it made a bit of a sacrifice--our generation will pay for all of this.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will place his palm on Lincoln's Bible to take the oath of office. Perhaps the only person more excited than I am is President Bush.

--Walter Lamberson

PROMPT OF THE WEEK: Might we be the next "greatest generation?"

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:24:39 +0700

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. encouraged his writing students to make awful things happen to their characters to show the reader what they’re made of. But this recession—and it will be bad—is not enough to prove our greatness.

First, this will be nothing compared to the Great Depression. Unemployment in some areas reached 40% and many people were unemployed for nearly a decade—breadlines and soup kitchens marked New York City and malnutrition was a serious concern. More than that, my grandparents' generation earned their greatness not simply by becoming wealthy again, but by leaving their depression-afflicted towns to fight in an enormous war and emerging in a world free of fascism as the singular super-power. They unlocked the power of nuclear chain reactions, rebuilt Europe and Japan, and—within a decade—saw the yokes of colonialism collapse. Sure, this was not entirely their doing. They watched historical trends come to fruition. But it was a time of greatness. It’s difficult to fathom the permanent and far-reaching consequences of their lives.

The point is greatness requires more than returning to 3% GDP growth. It is unlikely we will earn our greatness by expanding our geopolitical dominance. We have to offer permanent solutions to big problems and turn pages of history. I can think of a few goals that might enable us to earn our greatness:

First, and perhaps this is obvious, we ought to make it our national business to pioneer great technological progress. There was a time when the brightest minds and organizations of a generation worked to cure polio or put men on the moon. Now, they trade derivatives. I’ll be the first to argue that trading derivatives has social value up to a point, but only up to a point and maybe this depression will help us draw that line and reconsider the social norm of following all the other bright boys to Wall Street. There are great technological problems to be solved and it will take great-big subsidies, leadership, and creativity to solve them. Alternative energies, disease, climate change, global transportation are proper challenges for us to assert our greatness in a way that has a lasting impact around the world.

Second, our generation is well-positioned to earn its greatness bolstering international law. I am weakly optimistic that this will have renewed importance under the Obama administration and as the U.S. finds long-term solutions to our situation in Iraq. The first step to bolstering international law would be obeying it. And the first step there would be closing Guantanamo, which seems like it’s going to happen. The U.S. can hope to reclaim the moral high ground and strengthening international organizations—thinking beyond the pathetic shape of the UN or the IMF—would be an accomplishment we can point to in 60 years.

And third: I think the most important work Americans can do while we endure this depression is reflect on our lifestyles. We are the wealthiest nation around and we spend it living in great big houses in the suburbs, driving big pieces of steel that weigh thirty times our body weight to run quotidian errands. We support a medieval monarchy to afford this situation but even so it’s not easy to sustain what is probably the greatest misuse of resources in history. This model is being mimicked in the suburbs of Beijing today, Bombay tomorrow, and Brazzaville after that. It isn’t working and we need to admit it. Fixing this problem will require more than a miracle technology. We need to restructure the way we live and accomplish things.

All signs point to major government works under this administration both because we need them and because we need a massive stimulus package. Jason Furman says it will be on the scale of Eisenhower’s interstate highway project. But please, let’s not build more roads.

-- Walter Lamberson

Critical: The next Secretary of Transportation

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 22:30:35 +0700

While I have little time for it lately, I caught up on news today to find that the internet is full of discussion of the next Cabinet but there is no discussion of what should be a critical post in the next four years: Secretary of Transportation. Today, I want to world to think more about the invaluable role of the Department of Transportation and its Secretary (Sec Trans?).

Historically, this is among the least interesting cabinet positions reserved for political appointees whose names we will never remember unless you study trivia. The DOT isn't even in charge of the TSA anymore! But this is a cabinet-level position that could and should rock this term: everything is on the table with respect to how Americans go everywhere (and pause for a moment to consider how central to our lives going is). The auto industry is huge and going to be retooled, demolished, or bailed out and the government may own enough of it to sit in the driver's seat (perhaps uncomfortably). Detroit will try to finance its recovery by selling at fire-sale prices the huge stock of SUVs it built in recent years under the direction of myopic and uncreative fools whose idea of the future is the Detroit suburbs. Meanwhile, we live amid a climate crisis that seems out of sight on the back burner again, the probable return of an oil crisis as soon as we have an economy, and a certain political problem with how we get energy, most of which we use to move people and things from place to place.

It will be easy to make bad decisions (read: do nothing) because oil is, for now, cheap and we have a lot of SUVs that Detroit needs to dump on the market in order to keep the lights on.

I get the distinct feeling we are about to do something we will later regret. Remember when we said never again to the 8-cylinder engine in the 70s oil crisis? What if we had actually learned from our mistakes? Where would we be today? Not here! In as much as the government can help us, the Secretary of Transportation should lead the way.

Think about the central role of transportation in a nation and economy and even peoples' lives: when you retool your transportation plan, you change what people buy--fresher, more local food, for example--and how you live--I think the entire suburban lifestyle of moving a 4000 lbs piece of steel every time you want to do work or eat food is up for debate. But no one is talking about it and it's making me mad.

So far, the most comprehensive coverage of this debate comes from the WSJ, CNN, and the Huffington Post... no wait, no. I got that wrong. They haven't said a word! The most complete coverage is form a bike blog in Texas... WTF?

So who should the Secretary of Transportation be and what should he or she aim to do?

UPDATE: Current bailout talks are currently struggling with the idea of an government "Auto Czar."

-- Walter Lamberson

PROMPT OF THE WEEK: $5 billion to spend on any one issue

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:19:06 +0700

We are better at identifying problems than solutions. Many—perhaps most—of the people I know share the Bono-Jeff-Sachs consensus that the best, most humanitarian way to spend a dollar is in foreign aid; they would privately admit to feeling guilt for all the other causes we fund—health care for Americans, the arts, NASA—when they contrast them with the importance of foreign aid. There is an excellent reason: The biggest human problem is obviously the enormous share of humanity (~2 billion people) that struggles to maintain its very existence. It's compelling. But we need to consider the price of solving the problem before we decide not to fund other worthy causes.

I'm not optimistic about foreign aid. Countries that benefit from it don't need it and countries that need it don't benefit from it. Theoretically, foreign aid donations are small even relative to the savings of those we aim to help (the economist Hernando de Soto estimates that all foreign aid given by all nations since WWII—including the Marshall Plan—amounts to 1/40th of the savings of the poorest billion people on earth). Even the very poor save—the problem is they don’t have an infrastructure to make use of their savings. In rural China, I had tea in the home of villagers in Jianxi Province. The home was full everywhere with bags of rice, which is how they saved their income. In Bogotá it was bricks, in India gold, and in East Africa they save in cattle (note: the word "capital" comes "cattle"). These are not productive investments—they reflect the bad access to capital markets, which is a reflection of developing societies’ weak institutions.

Two-hundred and forty years ago Adam Smith proposed a startlingly simple recipe for economic development. As he put it, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." He was right. We in the developed world are not so different from the individuals in the developing world. Most of them would do just fine among first-world institutions, especially after a generation. The difference is in our institutions—we have secure property rights, peace, and low taxes, which translate into opportunities for trade and investment and access to capital, which is everything any developing society needs. Last week I said I was grateful for our institutions--this is why.

I'm not saying there isn't work to do—this is the biggest problem in the world—but it needs a more radical solution than giving bags of beans to bureaucrats. Those radical solutions may be risky and intolerable to many.

So this is a plea for all the causes that my friends privately resent: health care and education for comparatively wealthy people, the arts, and science. One can argue that these also are attempts to solve problems that won't be solved by throwing money at them. This is wrong: The Democratic Republic of Congo is a problem that won't be solved by throwing money at it. The Oakland Unified School District? Let’s throw the money that way and not look back.

-- Walter Lamberson

PROMPT OF THE WEEK: Thanksgiving 2008

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:05:15 +0700

Generally speaking, anyone alive and using the Internet today is among the wealthiest fraction of human beings ever to walk the earth. We have so much stuff but our gratitude is often misplaced.

A college professor and mentor liked to put things into perspective by asking me to imagine the typical day of a medieval royal, a person who, in his time, counted himself among the most fortunate mammals in history. Take a royal in medieval England, who might wake up in a September morning cold. For breakfast, he may eat his fill of salted herring and wash it down with wine--the only beverage he could trust not to give him cholera (only the most wretched drank water). I am no royal, but I will wake up tomorrow to shower in some of the cleanest water known to man, heated effortlessly with fuel pulled from deep underground and shipped across the sea. I enjoy a cup of coffee from another climate and ride a bicycle down a beautiful network of streets and stop-lights--hundreds of thousands of us running in all different directions each day with virtually no problems. I trust--not naively--that everyone respects the rule of the red lights, and ride ceaselessly through the green without concern for my life. I ride to a job that secures my livelihood with little risk or effort (Imagine what it would mean to hunt these hills or till these fields or fish this bay.). And if I fail at my job--or if my job fails me--I am comforted by a safety net that ensures that I will live better than the royals of yesterday could imagine. Compared to almost anyone who has ever lived, my life is indulgent... and I still haven't told you about the iPhone.

If we are not grateful to our parents for their sacrifices and investments then we are either ingrates or fools. But the true source of our material wealth is our good fortune to live in a place where a civil order prevails. It's only in the comforts of that order that we make progress. All of my gratitude comes back to this. I live in a place where I have the comfort of knowing that you will stop on your red light; the comfort of knowing that a primitive lock will protect my bicycle while I work; the comfort of knowing that if I loose my job the safety net will save me; the comfort of knowing that if my bank fails, my savings are secure; the comfort of knowing that even when the fiber of our economy is rattled by crisis, the greatest intellectual resources are coming to the helm to restore it because I live in a place where I have the comfort of knowing that when I vote the old order out of office, they will leave peacefully on January 20th.

PROMPT OF THE WEEK: Gay Marriage: What now?

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:58:59 +0700

I should begin by clarifying that I advocate same-sex marriage on a normative basis and as the correct interpretation of the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. I was therefore disappointed by Proposition 8's success in California. While plenty of arguments have been offered to defend Proposition 8 on moral, natural, and familial grounds, it seems clear that the only honest motivation was religion (and perhaps the popular defense, "yuck").

The most common religious defense is that homosexual marriage threatens the institution itself. The tragedy is that many people do feel that the state recognition of homosexual marriage changes the nature of their own marriages, they have good reasons, and it's our fault for not being crystal-clear about the separation of church and state.

American Protestants have enjoyed centuries as the cultural and political heirs to the United States: The nation was founded and (until this century) owned and operated by White Protestants. And while Protestantism is hardly the only religion to blur the distinction between church and state (the Catholic Church is just as active in lobbying to change public school curricula, for example), I believe marriage is an issue over which Protestants feel uniquely entitled because they have no need to distinguish a political marriage from a religious marriage: the United States has largely codified into law the Protestant institution.

Other groups—for example Catholics and Orthodox Jews—have religious practices which are not codified into statute (Catholics do not believe in divorce but have their own church process for Annulment, Orthodox Jews have no divorce but men may grant a get). These differences remind those groups that a political marriage differs from a religious marriage.

Catholics and Protestants had very different opinions about Proposition 8. Most White Catholics in California opposed Proposition 8; White Protestants supported it with an overwhelming 85%. My explanation is that Protestants understandably feel that the recognition of homosexual marriage threatens their institution of marriage because they are rarely reminded that these two institutions are not the same thing. I believe them when they say that this will change the foundation of their marriage from one with a basis in a moral code to one with a basis in civic bureaucracy. Protestants, in short, grew too comfortable with the idea that a political and a religious marriage where the same thing.

This is hardly a decent argument against gay marriage; it has no more merit than the argument that the U.S. is a Protestant nation—or California a Protestant state—and we are therefore committed to Protestant traditions. Instead, it should be a reminder of the political problems that are created when we allow church and state to be blurred. Generally speaking, it's easy to disparage a strict secular tradition: I don't think a nativity scene in a public school in a 100% Christian community offends anyone subjected to it. That's not why I would oppose it. I oppose it because we confuse people.

When we mix religious and political traditions and space, we allow people to forget which traditions are religious and which are political. This can lead even the most liberal of electorates to deprive individuals of basic human rights.

PROMPT OF THE WEEK: What does "progressive" mean anymore?

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:37:23 +0700

I can think of two possible origins of "progressive" as an ideology. First, Theodore Roosevelt’s “Progressive Party,” which was founded on egalitarian principles in 1912. The second comes from economics: a “progressive” tax is a tax scheme that burdens in the wealthy more heavily than a proportional tax. These two uses are consistent, and this etymology speaks to the unifying progressive principle: active egalitarianism.

In America, two major principles have emerged as touchstones for egalitarian progress. The first comes from the 18th to the late 19th century, the equality of opportunity. That principle accepted inequality of income, health, and other circumstances as natural but maintained that people of low-status could rise to the top through industry. Abraham Lincoln, before his first inauguration, said that that the principle that held the union together was the promise that “all should have an equal chance.” This principle was appropriate for a nation that was largely agrarian and in which an empire of land lay unexploited, cheaply available on the frontier.

Three constraints ultimately limited the upward mobility of Americans. First, owing to new technology and larger markets, the scale of American industry expanded dramatically with the rise of the steel, railroad, and oil industries and new workers could no longer expect to one day own their businesses. Second, increased immigration from Europe lowered wages in cities. Most importantly, the Frontier was declared closed in the 1890s and with that went the once infinite source of possibility--the West, which had enabled opportunity for centuries. Equality of opportunity was a false promise shortly after the civil war.

These constraints gave raise to a new principle whose touchstone was equality of condition rather than of opportunity: this was the birth of the progressive movement, in my mind. Greater equality of conditions was largely to be achieved through government policy (restricting child labor, limiting the work week, restricting immigration, and strengthening unions). Income was also to be transferred from the rich to the poor through progressive income tax. Abraham Lincoln signed Revenue Act of 1862, which instituted the first federal income tax--before being overturned by the Supreme Court some thirty years later. William Jennings Bryan and his Populist Party fought for a more progressive income tax in the late 1890s, Theodore Roosevelt founded the Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party) in the election of 1912, and in 1913 Congress passed the 16th Amendment, which enabled a non-apportioned federal income tax.

The progressive movement’s legacy is not simply an emphasis on redistribution; it was the realization that the old ethos did not work for the modern economy. So to me, what distinguishes a progressive is not the lonely and simple goal of “more redistribution” to the extent of the modern welfare state (that’s not Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressivism), nor even a strict defense of equality of condition. Rather unifying principle is an adapted notion of egalitarianism that recognizes that the promise of equality of opportunity will no longer be fulfilled by an abundance of wealth and capital beyond the frontier. Rather, the state must actively enable equality of opportunities.

More recently, the older, do-it-yourself version of egalitarianism has come back to favor, enabled by a marriage of convenience between a wealthy elite who are not interested in egalitarianism, and a coalition of evangelicals whose faith emphasizes personal responsibility. All I can say for the former group is that their politics are consistent with their interests. As for latter, who have become the most powerful political coalition in American politics, their emphasis on personal responsibility is based on the insane and willfully-dishonest notion that equal opportunity is possible without government support. The most important plank of progressive ideology rejects this laissez-faire approach to egalitarianism.

Fire the missiles...

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:27:23 +0700

So we've been asked why we are here. For me, the answer is easy: I'm humbled by the aptitude, passion, and creativity of the group. Creative people with strong opinions are reason enough for me. No one knows what will come of the project, but I think on that basis alone it aims to fill a space that needs filling.

To be sure, the world -- the Internet! -- is not short on commentary, but there is a paucity of collaborative, diverse commentary. CNN's self-proclaimed "best news team on television" doesn't do it for me. This project isn't staged to create predictable, talking-point conflagration à la Hannity and Combs, nor are we here because we already agree. I think of it as an unscripted conversation -- which, aside from being far more enjoyable and enlightening, is somehow unique, even on the web.

As a note for this personal blog, I hope to use it in part to continue the main-page discussion and in part for general current-event analysis or otherwise interesting-to-me thoughts.

Anyway, these are exciting times and there are important things to understand. I look forward to what follows.