JUST A THOUGHT

If I can muster the energy, now that I am teaching two courses [a Learning in Retirement course at Duke on Plato's REPUBLIC and a graduate seminar at UNC in Public Policy], would anyone be interested in a multi-part tutorial, on this blog, on an introduction to the thought of Karl Marx? I don't know whether I can manage it without going through the details of his economic theory [which I did in my book, UNDERSTANDING MARX], but someone might find it useful.

Or, I could just go on snarking.

THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

I should like to make a few remarks about the political landscape in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings and Obama's speech. Those of you who have completely given up on the American political process and consider me a sell-out for even thinking about such things are invited to spend a few happy hours with THE HOLY FAMILY or ANTI-DUHRING.

Objectively speaking, the shootings have no deep political meaning or significance whatsoever, Sarah Palin's bullseye political map notwithstanding. A cursory reading of Loughner's on-line musings about grammar and literacy and syllogistic logic reveal him pretty clearly to be your run of the mill paranoid schizophrenic. He could as easily have chosen to shoot John Boehner for using a tanning machine not explicitly mandated by the Constitution. But events conspired, in the way they sometimes do, to transform this into a moment of truth for both Palin and Obama. Palin failed the test. Obama met it.

Palin first. Many commentators have remarked on her aggressive embrace of the role of victim, in ways that are both infuriating and deeply resonant with her fans. This was a moment when she might have risen above that self-marginalization, and she flubbed it big time. I am as convinced as I can be about anything in politics that she had not the foggiest idea what "blood libel" means. She and her writers picked the phrase up from the loonier reaches of the right blogosphere, and latched onto it because it had a nice ring to it. The result was a speech so completely out of synch with the spirit of the moment, so utterly tone deaf, as to reveal her once and for all as not ready for prime time. So far as presidential politics are concerned, she is toast. She still has the ability to create chaos in the Republican ranks, but she may not even make it to the Iowa caucuses.

Obama, on the other hand, rose to the moment splendidly. His speech was neither profound nor ideologically significant. Its message was, if the truth be told, banal. But it was absolutely pitch perfect. If anyone thinks that is easy to achieve, try it some time. He was also lucky, and in politics that is often essential. There was no logical reason why Representative Giffords should have opened her eyes for the first time just before he was scheduled to speak. Indeed, judging from what the doctors said, it is a miracle she is doing as well as is she is. But there it was -- a punch line from heaven.

The timing of the event is also extremely significant. The Republicans, after recovering from the swearing-in fiasco, which was, after all, very much inside baseball as far as the country as a whole was concerned, were all cranked up to pass a symbolic House repeal of Obamacare as a thumb in his eye going into the State of the Union Address. Instead, they were virtually forced to suspend business for a week and join hands to sing Kumbaya.

I think this terrible event, combined with the extraordinary flood of Lame Duck Session legislation, has more or less permanently stalled the Republicans' momentum. As I said, Obama is lucky, but successful politicians seize on such fortunate moments and turn them to their advantage. Obama has done so. Palin did not.

CALLING ALL UTILITARIANS

I am preparing my first lecture for the seminar I am giving at UNC Chapel Hill in the Public Policy Department. I need to find where it is that Mill attributes to Bentham the formula "each to count for one and none for more than one" or words to that effect. I have searched UTILITARIANISM and ON LIBERTY, I have Googled, I have searched Bentham himself [INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION] but I cannot come up with it.

HEEEELLLLPPPP!

SIGH

Oh well. I did not have anything very deep in mind in my last post. I was just enchanted with the idea of a forger who went around donating his forgeries to museums instead of trying to sell them. It seemed rather sweet and charming. Henceforward, I shall stick to economic statistics and ideological fulminations.

A HAPPY STORY FOR THESE TERRIBLE TIMES

In these terrible times, one must take pleasure where one can. My latest find is a story in the Arts section of today's NY TIMES. It seems that for some years now, an art forger named Mark A. Landis has been going around the country, sometimes claiming to be a Catholic priest, donating to museums and art galleries paintings that he represents as by genuine, minor artists, but which are actually his forgeries. He asks nothing in return, and does not even accept documentation for tax deduction purposes. Sometimes the museums pretty quickly discover that the paintings are forgeries. Sometimes not.

All he seems to want is for his paintings to be hung in galleries and museums. Who can blame him? When shapeless scribbles and blank canvasses sell for millions and are oohed and aahed at by supposed art experts, why shouldn't his genuinely carefully painted works be accepted as genuine?

I am, I openly acknowledge, something of a philistine when it comes to modern art. I do not even like mature Picassos or Pollack dribble paintings, let alone their secondary imitators. The art world is now on to Landis, who has disappeared from view. But sooner or later, the authorities [both law enfofrcement and artistic] will catch up with him, and then they will undoubtedly try to charge him with some crime.

I think I shall pull several of my unpublished essays from my file cabinet and present them to Harvard as hitherto unknown lesser efforts by some minor philosopher. Perhaps I will present them in honor of Willard van Orman Quine, my old teacher. How else am I going to shoehorn my way into the Houghton Rare Book Library?

FACTS AND FIGURES

One of the most illuminating publications of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the Current Population Survey, "a national monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics." I have just been looking at the annual summary for 2009, the most recent set of tables now available. In the past, I have written impressionistically about America becoming a "banana republic." I should like to supplement those remarks with some data drawn from the tables. I find these data extremely illuminating, and perhaps you will as well.

The first datum that jumped out at me was the total number of full-time wage and salary workers sixteen years or older, in 2009. The number comes in just a tad under one hundred million -- 99,820,000, to be precise. This is, when you think about it very low for a country of three hundred million. Even when you subtract those under sixteen, those sixteen or older who are in school, those retired, and also -- an important group -- those who are self-employed in one way or another, it still always surprises me that only a third of the total population consists of full-time workers being paid wages or salaries [the distinction is whether a worker is paid by the hour or gets an annual salary].

The median weekly earnings for this one hundred million were $739, which, assuming a fifty week work year, comes to $36,950. The crucial word in the last sentence is "median." It means that half of all those employed full-time -- fifty million, or so -- earned $36,590 OR LESS, and the other fifty million earned $36,590 or more. The mean, or average, weekly earnings, annualized, are roughly ten thousand dollars more, because the high end includes people making simply enormous salaries. I say "annualized" because, of course, there is no guarantee that all of the workers full time employed when the survey is taken are able to sustain fifty weeks of full time employment in that year.

As you would expect, when the figures are broken down by age, by gender, and by race, we see wide variations. The median for those 16 to 19 is $344; for those 55 to 64, it is $841. The median for all white workers is $757, for Hispanic workers, $541, barely 70%. The 13.6 million workers who are members of unions have median weekly earnings of $908. The 84,9 million not represented by unions have median earnings of $710, more than 20% less. Men as a whole have median earnings of $819, women of $657. And so on.

When these statistics are discussed, attention is usually focused on the racial and gender disparities, and with good reason. But I want in this brief discussion to talk a bit about what is revealed by that term, "median." Since half of all workers were making less, on an annualized basis, than $36,950, it seems to make a certain intuitive sense to call that a "middle class annual wage or salary," and yet virtually everything said by politicians, media commentators, economists, and others treats $75,000 or $100,000 as a "middle class" income. In 2009, to find workers who, on an annualized basis, earned in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year, one must look to the top tenth [the tenth decile] of all workers.

To be sure, these are not figures for household income, which one would expect to be rather larger as a result of households sending two or even more wage earners into the labor market. So it is. In 2009, median household income in the United States was $49,777. But that is still half of the $100,000 that the media routinely treats as "middle class."

The simple fact is that America is a good deal poorer than is commonly supposed. Because we are a nation of more than three hundred million, even the top tenth has thirty million people in it, so it is very easy for the media -- and for economists as well -- to treat that small fraction of the total population as the norm. Then too, the more money people have, the more space they take up, what with housing, second homes, acreage around their larger homes, and the like. So casual visual evidence seems to support the illusion that $100,000 buys a family an average, or "middle class," existence.

The Current Population Survey is an enormous document, and one can fruitfully spend a great deal of time paging through it and making little calculations. How many Black dentists are there in the United States? What percentage of Hispanic women have college degrees? What is the range of salaries earned by people doing "managerial" jobs? If you are weary of endless political commentary devoid of factual content, I recommend spending a few hours with it.

Thus URL should get you started: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2009.pdf

A DISTINCTION

Why do I snark at the right but not at the left? The answer is simple, but important. There is a fundamental difference between the connections and commitments of the people who are appointed to senior positions in an Administration as economic advisers or policy makers, and the follies and stupidities of the current brood of rightwingers. This is elementary, but it is useful to keep it in mind.

We live in a capitalist state. The fundamental purpose and object of the state in a capitalist economy is to serve the interests of capital. The state is, indeed, the executive committee of the capitalist class. This is true under Democratic Administrations, and under Republican Administrations. It is true when the policies of the Administration are progressive, and when the policies of the Administration are reactionary. I was born in the year that Franklin Delano Roosevelt first took the oath of office, and what I have just said has been true of every Administration from his to Obama's [as well as of previous Administrations, but I wasn't alive then.] You may dislike that fact. I do. You may want to see America fundamentally transformed so that it is no longer true. I do, and have written about that for fifty years. But viewed with a certain detachment and from a certain distance, it makes very little difference to the fundamental capitalist orientation of the government whether the President's economic advisers come from the manufacturing sector, from the financial sector, or from the tenured ranks of America's elite universities. I feel no impulse to call attention to the Goldman Sachs affiliations of a new Administration appointment because to do so is, by implication, to suggest that Administration policy would be importantly different were the President to tap a different source of advisers.

I snark at Republican wingnuts for two reasons. First, it is fun, and these days there is little enough to laugh about. Second, for reasons I have already stated on this blog, I think it makes a difference, within the confines of the capitalist orientation of the state, whether Democrats or Republicans have the upper hand in Congress. A Democratic sweep unseen since the days of FDR would not change the fact that the state serves the interests of capital, not even in Dennis Kucinich were to become Speaker of the House. But it would make possible certain ameliorations that would ease the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

There are some who imagine that Democratic electoral victories are actually a setback to the cause of revolutionary change because only if things get much worse will they get much better. I do not share that view. I lived through the aftermath of the transformation of Weimer Germany into Nazi Germany, so I am not sanguine about the revolutionizing potential of misery.