. . . You arrive at Iowahawk’s formulation:  Colleges are hotbeds of rape and racism that everyone should attend.

Of the two sets of accusations, the one that doesn’t really concern me is the “racism!” screech.  If Dear Leader and his fawning acolytes in the lamestream media have accomplished one single useful thing in the past six years, it’s having so cheapened the “racism!” ejaculation that pretty much everyone now recognizes it as meaningless.  When everything is racist, then nothing is.  If you want to see genuine “racism” in action, you can watch what’s going on in the Ukraine between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.

The development that concerns me more is the system of kangaroo courts that are even now being set up on campuses across the country, all under ukase from the Holder DOJ.  For those who haven’t been following it, the federal government is now mandating, more or less openly, that colleges address accusations of rape on campus not through careful preservation of crime scenes and other physical evidence until the police (you know, those folks who not infrequently have entire teams of people with specialized training in investigating sexual crimes) get there, but rather through a system of “discipline” that seems designed to do little more than make college administrators (and federal bureaucrats) feel good about themselves.

In truth, these panels and how they operate are easily recognized by anyone who has read his Solzhenitsyn.  They’re neither more nor less than the Cheka’s revolutionary tribunals or the OSO administrative sentencing system (most people sent to GuLAG were sentenced by OSO, and not by others of the organs).  From the linked article over at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E; if you’re looking for a worthy object for your charitable giving, you could do a very great deal worse than these folks):

“Foremost among the demands since 2011 is that colleges use the ‘preponderance of the evidence’” standard of proof for adjudicating sexual misconduct accusations — a 50.01 percent likelihood standard that is our nation’s lowest. (In real courts, rape must be proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ a 98-99 percent likelihood standard.)

This low standard is then used in a disciplinary procedure where students nearly always lack lawyers, no legally trained judge oversees the process, testimony is not under oath, hearsay is freely considered, relevant evidence or even proper notice of the charges may not be given to both parties, students may be forced to incriminate themselves, and whatever ‘jury’ is empaneled may not be of one’s peers.

The task force report from Tuesday actually encourages colleges to make this situation worse. Perhaps recognizing that college hearings are delivering shoddy justice, the task force speaks highly of moving to a ‘single investigator’ model that would entirely dispense with niceties like ‘hearings’ or ‘the ability to face one’s accuser’ by appointing one administrator to act as detective, judge, and jury for campus crimes.”

And that’s just the lousy deal for the guy wrongly accused.  Not mentioned but nearly as objectionable is that the college’s ham-fisted treatment of the case may well irretrievably compromise what otherwise might be a successful criminal prosecution of a genuine rapist.  Remember that state universities are state agencies, their actions can be attributed to the state, and to the extent their functionaries are delegated police powers, you raise all manner of constitutional concerns about how they conduct themselves.  Those constitutional violations — and they will occur, and be legion (hell, colleges nowadays can’t even get the First Amendment right, what with stunts like disciplining students for passing out . . . copies of the Constitution) — are going to create legally cognizable problems for the actual law enforcement agencies when they actually do catch someone who actually has committed a rape that they otherwise could actually prove up beyond a reasonable doubt.  In short, they’ll manage to kick the rapist out of school, but he’ll still be on the street, looking for his next victim.

But none of that matters, though, does it?  Because our administrators can pat themselves on the back and loudly proclaim how tough they are on sexual misbehavior.  And that’s what matters, that educrats feel good about themselves.  That next victim, when he finds her?  She’s just collateral damage, and besides, she may not even be a student.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have three boys.  The oldest is seven years from college (assuming he goes).  Given the half-life of stupid ideas, it’s more or less a certainty that these lynch-mob Chekist systems are going to be still going strong when my boys go to college.  I’d like them to be able to enjoy the experience without having to adopt the survival habits of the zeks.  But this system may as well have been purposely designed for abuse, if not outright extortion.  Remember we’re dealing with the Laws of Very Large Numbers.  How many tens of millions of college students are there at any given time?  Now that a majority of them are female, how many millions of female college students does that work out to be?  By that time it will have been impressed on the female student body over the course of years that if you want to get rid of a male you don’t particularly care for (whether for personal or political reasons, or just because you can, because you’re looking for a scalp) all you have to do is engineer a bogus accusation of sexual assault and you will not only have blown up his college attendance, but you will have ruined his life (job interviewer: Why did you change colleges?  job candidate: Errmmmm, ahem, I, uh, just decided to.  interviewer: I see.).

Any system that is set up to be easily abused will be abused.  It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about tax loopholes, government benefits, military supply contracts, absentee voting, political police-state enforcement, or sexual conduct enforcement on college campuses.  When you spread that sort of opportunity before a sufficiently large population, abuse will occur and it will tend to become systemic as the abusers are seen to profit from it (Hayek’s chapter on “Why the Worst Get on Top” in The Road to Serfdom is a good illustration of the phenomenon in a different context).

I feel as though it’s 1937, and I’m watching my boys get ready fill out their applications to join the Komsomol (the leadership of which was shot, several times over, during the purges, and huge numbers of whose members fetched up in the camps).

. . . When management airily assumed 8-9% annual rates of return on investment to fund its benefit obligations.  Excuse me, that’s Old General Motors, the one that soaked up several billions in outright taxpayers’ money (and was stolen from its creditors to be handed to the UAW in payoff for its electoral support), as well as about $16 billion worth of tax subsidy created by rifle-shot in the tax code (fuller details here).

Mayor De Blasio has presented his first city budget to the New York City council.  In true leftist fashion, he “balances” it by grinding his seed-corn, specifically reserves left from Bloomberg’s tenure.  I don’t carry a brief for li’l Nanny Bloomberg, but you have to give some sort of respect to a mayor who can squire a city through the upheavals of the September 11 aftermath, the implosion of the industry whose epicenter it is (the financial services industry), as well as five-plus years of general economy-wide decline and stagnation . . . and leave his successor a surplus at the end of the day.

I know that De Blasio is too “progressive” (he used the word something like five times in his presentation) to look back for reactionary purposes like seeing how his notions have played out for others who tried them.  He really ought, I suggest, to ponder the lessons of the Holodomor.  When Stalin announced compulsory collectivization, the peasants did the only thing they could to get at least some benefit from their generations’ toil.  They slaughtered and ate their livestock.  Then came the requisitioning commissions, and they took everything, leaving nothing even to plant for the next season.  How’d that work out?  Read about it, if you have the stomach, here.  Or here.

Also in true leftist fashion, he cranks up spending by 6% while “paying” for it from fantastical assumptions about unknown future revenues and unspecified, unenforceable “promises” from the city’s unions to cut healthcare spending — in the future, of course — by $3.4 billion.  Without any premium increases passed on to the rank-and-file.  This is in a world of “Affordable” Care Act plans the uniform feature of which is they cost fabulously more than what they’ve (compulsorily) replaced, because they’re mandated to cover a smorgasbord of benefits that earlier plans typically didn’t.  Like maternity care for 63-year-old males.  We are told not to worry, though, because if the unions don’t voluntarily comply with that pie-in-the-sky $3.4 billion promise, the cuts are going to happen forcibly.  Actually, the article’s paraphrase of De Blasio’s promise to respect them in the morning is “the city reserved the right to enforce some of the terms.”  Some; get it?

Left unmentioned is how they’re going to fit any of the “Affordable” Care Act’s Cadillac-plan tax burden into that $3.4 billion savings.  Dear Leader can utter executive orders all day long, but unless Congress actually chops that provision from the statute, eventually a large number of those union plans are going to get popped, and hard.  At which point they’ll discover something that the rest of us have long since figured out:  Taxes like that work out to be dead-weight losses.

The provision of the budget that really makes my head spin, however, is the bit about the hand-outs to unions (only the teachers are specifically mentioned, but there may be more).  They’re going to get — pay attention closely — retroactive pay increases.  That’s right; their contracts said they’d get paid $X.  They got paid $X.  Their contracts had expired, and they continued to get paid $X.  But now, after the fact and for no additional performance of any nature, they’re going to get paid $X+Y.  Of course, the teachers union vigorously supported Comrade De Blasio in his campaigns.  But This is Not a Payoff of Money for Votes, you understand?  No!!  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And while the teachers are going to get their money up front — while the Bloomberg surplus lasts, at least — “Much of the cost of retroactive pay for city teachers would not to be paid until the last years of Mr. de Blasio’s theoretical second term.”  Hand the money over now; figure out where it’s coming from eight years from now.  Because we’ve got “more ‘accurate’ forecasting,” you see, so we know what the world, national, and local economies are going to be doing eight years from now.  Eight.  Years.  From.  Today.  You heard it there first, people; the city government of New York City is officially basing its long-range financial commitments on possession of a crystal ball.

On a final note, there’s a line in there about adding in $20 million for “student aid” programs at City University of New York.  For those who don’t recall, CUNY’s original mandate was to provide free or very-low-cost quality higher education to the city’s less-well-off.  For years it did pretty much exactly that.  Oh sure, it’s had its moments of comedy, such as Leonard Jeffries, but by and large it did what it was supposed to, and for many students did an outstanding job.  Those days appear to be ending, if they’re not already over.

Now CUNY is morphing into a comfy slush fund for sinecures, place-men, and political payoffs.  Recently former Enron advisor and populist mountebank Paul Krugman got hired by CUNY to . . . well, that’s the point.  For his entire first year he’s been hired to do pretty much nothing.  Thereafter, he’s obliged to do only nearly nothing.  And for this he’s getting a base salary of $225,000 per year (with summers off, thereby increasing the annualized lick to an even $300,000), plus $10,000 for “expenses.”  So that’s $235,000 (plus payroll taxes, plus other benefits) cash out the door, each year.  Which means that over 1% of that $20 million in “student aid” is actually going to one man.  Who has been hired to do as close to nothing as you can imagine.

This is progress, folks, with a vengeance.

On the one side, we have someone with enough resources to attend Georgetown University School of Law, but who is outraged! that other people don’t want to foot the bill so she can roll in the sheets with whomever she pleases, under whatever circumstances she pleases, without concern over potential reproductive consequences. We are told that our opposition to funding her recreation is a “war on women” (or is it wymyn?).

And on the other hand we have Boko Haram, which kidnaps their female victims by the truckload.  “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah.  There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.”  The Nigerian government has been accused of inaction.  It vigorously disputes that (it has, after all, acted: it arrested a leader of the protest marches).  But lest you think that all Boko Haram is about is selling women into slavery, they want you to know different.  Look up the village of Gamboru.  As of yesterday morning they’re about 200 [Update (08 May 14):  The NYT reports “at least” 336 dead.] residents short; Boko Haram attacked the village and slaughtered the inhabitants. Oh dear.  What will the Religion of Peace think of next?

In an earlier post I linked to a report (also in the FAZ) on the practice of forced marriages in Muslim sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Niger.  Even in good times, as the article reports, fully a third of girls are forcibly married off before they’re 15.  Some are married and delivered to their new husbands before they’ve even begun to menstruate.

And in another post I linked to reports about what happens in a true “rape culture” when a victim (of a gang rape, no less) has the temerity not to know her place and shut up.

I’m not here to argue that Western civilization is perfect.  Or even that it doesn’t need some smithing here and there.  I cannot deny that many men fail, in their ordinary daily lives, to treat women with the respect they deserve as moral free agents and repositories of the divine spark (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”  Gen. 1:27; note that both male and female are created in the image of God, by the way).  I cannot and do not deny that many men in their ordinary daily lives fail to respect the mental attainment and acuity of the women they encounter.  Likewise I cannot and do not deny that many men fail to bring, in their personal lives, a proper sense of awe to their women as the cradle of human life.  And by like token, I sure as hell don’t deny that not a few women out there shamelessly abuse those men who do make the effort to engage women in general and the women they encounter in particular as presumptive moral and mental equals (at least until demonstrated otherwise).

But to pretend that half the human population in Western civilization consists of victims of a “war on women,” when at no time in recorded human history, in no place in the world, have women in general and in particular — even women at the very bottom of whatever scale you choose to measure by — been physically safer, healthier, longer-lived, more independent in their persons and their affairs, and with greater access to coercive power over their fellow humans, is to spit in the faces of those 12-year-old brides, to kick dirt over those 200+ schoolgirls who are to be sold according to the dictates of Allah.

If there were justice in this world, a deputation of mothers of those schoolgirls would drop by Sandra Fluke’s apartment and beat her with pieces of fire wood until she could no longer walk.

[Update (14 May 14):  As if on cue, here we have Mlle Fluke herself on the Boko Haram kidnapping situation.  There are links to the audio, and a partial transcript.  Let’s just say Comrade Fluke does not come across terribly well.]

Haven’t got around to posting recently; I’ve been out of state for the better part of the last two weeks, and in the intervals trying to stay not too far behind things at the office.

I’d intended this to be an update to an earlier post, but the more I thought the more I decided it merited its own.

From our neighbors to the north, we have this article (via Classical Values) on the effect that all the relentless harping on imminent doom and destruction from “climate change” (as if the climate has not been changing for 4.5 billion years or thereabouts) is having on children.  Specifically, the head-shrinks (or what Rumpole calls “trick cyclists”) are noting an uptick in cases of teenagers and younger children presenting clinical anxiety symptoms which the patients attribute to concerns about “climate change.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know.  Remember “Duck and Cover” and all the other civil defense training we pumped into the schools?  The Soviets were targeting American cities for instantaneous destruction and we had millions of civilians at risk.  This was less than twenty years after we wrapped up our strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan, so we had a real good idea of what happens to civilian populations when the bombing starts.  Granted that what can be done, especially when there’s essentially no forewarning of attack, is limited, but Officialdom did what it could by way of getting the word out.  And building bomb shelters, and designating evacuation routes, and so forth.  When my parents moved to our sleepy little town in 1968, far from any conceivable target zone for anything other than “incontinent ordnance,” there was a house that had its own fallout shelter.

And they showed films in the schools of what to do when the Soviet missiles were in-bound.  It must have been terrifying, especially since nearly all of those children would have parents, older siblings, or other close relatives who’d actually seen with their own eyes what was left of Germany and Japan, and could state from personal knowledge that This Stuff Can Happen.

But at least in the 1950s, when we had small children being taught to hide from the glass shards produced by nuclear attack by crawling beneath their school desks, there really, actually was a large group of very well-funded, very intelligent, and highly dedicated people who spent a phenomenal amount of time, energy, and money to be able to — you know — actually do that, viz. drop nuclear weapons on American cities.  It wasn’t just a bunch of computer models that predicted what would happen in a fire-storm.  Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and numerous other cities weren’t just columns of data on some scientist’s computer screen.  Warsaw, Berlin, and cities too numerous to name in the Soviet Union were smoldering testaments to what ordinary aerial bombs and artillery shells could accomplish when applied in sufficient quantities in a small enough area.

Note the tenor of the linked article, though:  It’s approving of scaring the living snot out of children.  One source interviewed favors us:  “The answer, on a personal basis, to this kind of helpless distress is ‘mastery’: that is, helping people to master small tasks that reduce their carbon footprint can lead to a greater sense of control and efficacy for that person – and with that a reduction in anxiety.”  But of course.  Terrorizing youth is good, you see, because it leads them to enlist in the Cause.

While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and cheapen the very real, very immediate catastrophes of the 20th Century, and urge that, in response to computer models that cannot explain the last fifteen years-plus of observable data (the lack of “global warming” since 1998) we all surrender — more or less permanently — the freedoms and rights which we grudgingly and temporarily did to defeat a rabid dog who was literally at our throats.  “Our forebears had the First World War and the Second World War. Another generation dealt with the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. Now the greatest threat to this generation – young and old – is the climate problem, which involves a lot of volatility, and a lot of change. . . .  We have to find the flexibility, the courage and the determination to stand up to that crisis – collectively, not just as individuals. Like our parents did before us.”  Ah!  The collective, the Holy Collective.

During both world wars, Western society gave up a great deal of what made it, well, Western.  We internalized that Loose Lips Sink Ships, and watched our neighbors for suspicious activity.  We carted off an entire group of American citizens and locked them up in camps.  We turned in our pots and pans to be melted down.  We did without tires for the car, gas for its tank, cuffs on pants legs.  We got used to letters from a father, son, or brother with entire paragraphs blanked out.  We got used to being told what we were going to bring home at the end of the week.  If we made too much of a stink about it, we knew that we were likely to receive a visit from some guy driving a government car . . . and so would our neighbors.  If a household appliance broke, we went without because the factory that might have replaced it was turning out receivers for M-1 rifles instead of irons.  As Paul Fussell noted, about the only thing that wasn’t rationed was alcohol.  But no one, nowhere, in no context was brazen enough to propose that we accept all that as permanent fabric of society.  Everyone knew that those measures were necessary to defeat two of the most wicked societies in recorded history, and we knew that once the war was over so was the police state.

“Climate change” of course is different.  Because you cannot defeat “climate,” because it’s always there and always dynamic, the propounded surrender must be forever.  What is being force-fed to our children is the need for perpetual submission to distant groups of people — “experts,” authorities, panels, supra-national organizations — over whose actions we are to have essentially no say.  Because the science is settled, you see.  “Unlike adults who can put their heads in the sand about what we have been doing to our planet, these kids are very aware of what’s going on. . . .  Because of the Web, it’s not hidden any more. Children often ask me questions that we, as adults, try to evade: What is going to happen to the human race?”

Eugenics was settled science. [Update (07 May 14): Right on cue, here’s a recent article from The Washington Times about Margaret Sanger and her place in the eugenicist movement . . . which was a “global movement” after all, just like what we’re encouraging our children to join.]  Just like Gobineau’s theories of biological racial superiority were settled science.  Just like the four humors were settled science.  Just like the ether was settled science.  If there is nothing left to discuss, then there can be nothing left to debate.  If there is nothing left to debate, then any intrusion into the ordering of society on that point by mere lay people can by hypothesis only be destructive.  As Confucius correctly observed, that which is round can be no rounder.  Thus the moral imperative for representative government fails.  Phrased differently, Jefferson’s dictum, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” no longer applies.  I mean, you don’t “consent” to gravitational acceleration at 9.81 m/sec/sec, do you?  It’s not an abomination to force you to behave as if the boiling point of water at sea level were 212 degrees Fahrenheit, is it?  And therefore it cannot be objectionable to coerce your submission to whatever is necessary to stave off “climate change,” can it?  [Update (08 May 14):  From the explanation of why Dear Leader’s administration is taking the explicit position that Congress cannot stop it from adopting pretty much whatever environmental regulations it pleases, we have the notion of “actionable science.”  As David Harsanyi paraphrases it, “Podesta says this is “actionable science” so separation of powers and consent of the governed and other trifling concerns are no longer applicable.”]

“As human beings we are made to deal with crises collectively, not individually. So we try to help them realize that, yes, we are looking at a global crisis, but you can also choose to be part of a global movement to address the crisis. This is a particularly important message to deliver to children, who are very sensitive to isolation. When a child goes into their imaginative being, they can really magnify their isolation, which can become overwhelming .… We tell them to become agents of transformation and change” (emphasis mine).  Yes, children are very sensitive to feelings of isolation.  But do you counsel your child-patients to turn to their families? their church? their neighborhood or town?  Oh no; those will never do, you see.  Turning to those circles of engagement might entail merely helping your neighbors shovel the mud out of their own living room, or standing in a chain brigade for sixteen hours passing sand-bags, or bringing food and water to the people who are passing them.  It might entail nothing more involved than getting your own hands grubby helping your fellow citizens; it certainly won’t reduce your “carbon footprint.”  What you must do to expiate your feelings of isolation, Dear Children, is turn to “global movements.”  Of course, in a “global movement” about all you’re going to get to do is (i) turn over your own money; (ii) surrender your own freedoms; (iii) advocate the forcible separation of your fellow citizens from their money and freedoms; and, (iv) most of all, obey.

The linked article turns up nearly all of the Climate Movement’s cards face-up, all at once.  You as a mere individual are isolated in the face of immediate doom.  Your family, your faith, your community are of no help to you.  To break from your isolation you must act, and your action must take the form of submerging yourself in the mandates of a “global movement.”  You must not dispute Your Betters because They Know.  Your parents and those beetle-browed people whom you talk to in your daily life must not be listened to, because they’re just hiding their heads in the sand.  “But despite the fact that we live in a world with more volatility and fear, experts say there is hope. And to stay mentally strong, they all advocate not just calling for change, but acting for it.”

And all of this is part of “a particularly important message to deliver to children.”  Pavlik Morozov would no doubt approve.

Over the past few days much has been made about a study published by a couple of professors, one at Princeton and the other at Northwestern.  They’ve conducted some sort of study about “public policy” initiatives and changes from 1981 to 2002, which income quintiles supported or opposed them, and whether they were actually adopted.  Their conclusions, at least as presented by the BBC, are to the effect that the U.S. is an “oligarchy,” in which “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”  Their conclusions are based on what is described as a “multi-variate analysis” and they do in fact reports some interesting findings.

Before we get into the substance of the study, let’s note a couple of ironies.  The authors of the study are professors at two universities both of which can legitimately describe themselves as elite.  In the U.S. it so happens that professors from elite universities, and the institutions themselves, exercise a fascination with the policy-making industry out of all proportion to their numbers.  Secondly, the BBC link above is to a blog that calls itself “echo chambers,” which is about as unconsciously self-descriptive of the left-wing mainstream media (but I repeat myself) as anything I’ve heard.  They too exercise an influence out of all proportion to their numbers or their intellectual or moral stature.  It is as much due to them that we have Dear Leader as our president now, a man about whose moral and intellectual antecedents we still know next to nothing, seven years after he burst onto the scene and was adopted as the Messiah by precisely operations such as the Beeb.  It is the singular lack of interest in what happened on September 11, 2012, that is the reason why we still don’t know who left a United States ambassador to die in Benghazi.  It is to the nattering classes that we can thank our lack to this day of an answer to the question so not-famously posed by the Secretary of State whose job it was to protect that ambassador: “What difference does it make at this point?”

The full study is available here.

The authors themselves describe their data and methods as “imperfect.”  “Shoe-horned into a mold” might be a better description, but for the moment let’s leave it as it is.  One of the authors has been for many years compiling a data set that consists of answers to polling questions.  In order to be usable at all for the present purposes, they needed to identify answers that met four criteria:  “dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing.”  In other words, respondents had to give a yes/no answer to a policy question that was specifically identified and not hedged about with if/and/but/whether.  Moreover, the surveys from which the answers came needed to break the respondents out by income/wealth level.  The authors identified 1,779 such data points.  Of course, since the polls in question weren’t all conducted by the same outfits, they had to massage the income/wealth data a bit to reduce them to a common denominator, so to speak.  Through sundry statistical techniques they were able to isolate the “affluent” (90th percentile), the median (50th), and the very poor (10th percentile).  The paper doesn’t describe how they accomplished that but I’m willing to accept they got it right enough to be useful.

Right up front they acknowledge one problem with their definitions: in 2012 dollars you can report $146,000 and still be in the 90th income percentile.  That sounds like a great deal more than it is.  Let’s start with the fact that it’s $146,000 in reported income, which (to borrow a line from molesworth) as ane fule kno is an entirely different animal than cash you get to see, even if only to pay tax on it chiz chiz chiz.  Just by way of personal example:  For 2013, for every dollar in gross income I reported on my 1040 and paid tax on, I had cash gross income of just over $0.685.  At lower income levels that difference is going to get materially smaller, although for self-employed lower income quintiles it will still be significant.  Add in (subtract, in other words) the tax lick, a not extravagant house payment, a couple of kids in private school (for any of several reasons) or with some sort of special need or special talent which needs addressing, a car payment or two for a mid-range sedan and a “family” car, expenses of commuting, some self-employment taxation, and the other expenses of self-employment, and you can burn through $146,000 very fast and never be free of hoping you can find the dollars to pay next quarter’s tax payment.

The authors don’t think their characterization of modesty as wealth to be a problem, because the policy preferences of the 98th percentile (the top 2%) correlate more closely (r=.91 vs. r=.69) with the rest of the top ten percent than they do with the 50th percentile.  Interesting, but they’ve left out the answer to a question your ordinary cross-examiner would pose to them:  How do the preferences of the next 8% (that is, the 90th through 97th percentiles) correlate with the 50th percentile?  I’ll leave to the reader’s own opinion just how meaningful a 22% gap in correlation coefficient is when you’re measuring something like “policy preferences.”  I’d also point out that r=.69 means that over 47% of the variation in the top 2% preferences can still be explained by variation in the 50th percentile’s preferences.  I find it difficult to suggest that when two groups that far apart on the income spectrum Agree on Stuff almost half the time, in a society as enormous and heterogeneous as America’s, it’s at all helpful to characterize that as evidence of predominating “elite” policy preferences.  This is of course just my opinion, but the authors’ data highlight to me what is an extraordinary amount of convergence about policy preferences across enormous swathes of the American population, a convergence that is nothing short of astounding when you consider the fantastic ranges of social, economic, geographic, and ethnic variation among us.

Measuring individuals’ preferences in relation to enacted/non-enacted policies is problematic enough.  The authors here get much further off the reservation when the issue becomes measuring the effect of organized groups of individuals.  And by the way, I lump into “organized groups of individuals” all voluntary associations, from the American Bar Association to the Chamber of Commerce to the National Education Association to the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO to the Roman Catholic Church to General Motors and Sun Microsystems.  There is no logically meaningful basis on which to distinguish a shareholder from a union card holder from a congregant from a dues-paying member of the WWF.  Each willingly associates himself and his efforts (represented by his money or some portion of it) with those of other people with whom he imagines himself to share some commonality of interest.  Period.

The authors do not seem to realize that.  They (in Appendix 1, on page 30) divide the organizations they look at into “business and professional organizations” and “mass-based organizations.”  They then take a big ol’ swig of Kool-Aid and recognize a third category of interest group, which they do not code as being either business- or “mass”-based.  Those three are the National Education Association, the National Governors Association, and “universities” (you know, like their own).  Really?  The NEA is somehow different from the AFL-CIO, the UAW, the Teamsters, all of which are lumped into “mass”-based interest groups?

The authors’ blind spot about the nature of organizations goes deeper.  They lump the U.S. Chamber of Commerce into “business and professional interests,” implying of course that it’s Citigroup driving the cart.  Had they drilled down to find out more of whom the C of C is representing they might well have observed how much of the membership is of tiny businesses, mom-and-pop outfits.  Even the vaunted American Trial Lawyers Association (or as it now tries to call itself, the American Association for Justice) has for its members overwhelmingly small firms and solo lawyers.  Yes, there are some enormous plaintiffs’ shops out there, and some huge insurance defense firms.  But the vast majority of its membership consists of the three guys with their shingles out two blocks off main street.  And by the way, the median incomes of lawyers in private practice isn’t that far off what your garden-variety public school teacher makes, especially when you factor in the economic effect of summer vacation (I saw a number of years ago a figure of just under $40,000, at a time when our little country school system was paying roughly that for a teacher with six or eight years’ experience).  And so forth.

On an even more basic level, in determining how to characterize these groups’ efforts — are they to be counted with the oligarchs or with the “masses”? — they might have asked themselves a basic question about the American population:  What percentage of working Americans are at least partially self-employed?  About a decade or so ago I saw the figure 35%.  Hmmm.  That puts a bit of a different color on the horse, doesn’t it?  If you actually ask yourself whose interests are these organizations representing (you know, kind of a critical threshold question for whether these data make any sense at all), you find that while they might be of assistance to the kind of people who backed President Wall Street, they’re also very, very much of assistance to the family of five sitting two pews behind you in church.  Because when you make it harder for ordinary people (you know, that 50th percentile) to buy a house, what you’re doing is making it harder for the members of the National Association of Realtors (one of our authors’ “business interest groups”) to make a living, which means that you’re making it harder for the mother of that family to use her realtor’s license to make some money on a part-time basis while the kids are in school.  Here we might also observe that close to half of all small businesses are owned by women.  Yep, boys and girls:  “Business interests” are women’s interests.  And while not a woman, I’d wager that most women would trade being able to make a decent living being their own bosses for having to shell out $25 a month for birth control pills, Sandra Fluke notwithstanding.

But how did the authors come up with their list of associations to score in the first place?  That was really scientific.  Rather than doing the grunt work of figuring out the total resources devoted to promoting or fighting a particular issue, they used a proxy.

“Fortunately, however, Baumgartner et al. found that a simple proxy for their index – the number of reputedly “powerful” interest groups (from among groups appearing over the years in Fortune magazine’s “Power 25” lists) that favored a given policy change, minus the number that opposed it – correlated quite substantially in their cases with the full interest group index (r=0.73).”

Let’s ponder that.  They outsourced that portion of their thinking to Fortune magazine.  Sort of as if the International Panel on Climate Change decided that getting to the raw data was too much work, so they’d just see what Popular Science had to say about it, and go from there.  But there’s more:  This proxy index “correlated quite substantially” with the full interest group index.  R=0.73, after all, guys.  Wait?  Remind me what was r as between the Top 2% income group and the 50th percentile?  Wasn’t that r=0.69?  Why yes, yes it was.  So we may say that the policy preferences of the Top 2% “correlated quite substantially” with the policy preferences of the median, no?  I refer Humble Reader to my remarks about the convergence of opinion across income groups.  Does that support or contradict the theory of America-as-oligarchy?  Let’s hear it from the authors themselves:

“It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites (see Table 2.) Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for economic elites) want the same things from government. This bivariate correlation affects how we should interpret our later multivariate findings in terms of “winners” and “losers.” It also suggests a reason why serious scholars might keep adhering to both the Majoritarian Electoral Democracy and the Economic Elite Domination theoretical traditions, even if one of them may be dead wrong in terms of causal impact.”

I’ll let the reader slog through the specific findings of the paper.  My quibble is not with the outcomes of their statistical model, but rather with the usefulness of the model itself.  It confines itself to asking whether, when various income groups and interest groups supported or opposed a particular policy, that policy actually came to pass.  “Our dependent variable is a measure of whether or not the policy change proposed in each survey question was actually adopted, within four years after the question was asked.”  But how do you determine whether, if something “passed,” it was the question that was posed?  “We want healthcare reform!”  OK.  Do you want socialized medicine, or the “Affordable” Care Act as originally proposed, or the act as it was actually passed, or some fundamental changes to the current system not involving a federal-level take-over?  Homosexual marriage?  How many different potential “policies” are there actually out there?  “Immigration reform”; let’s think of all the possible ways in which you could “reform” America’s present bastard system.  Unfortunately our authors don’t do a very good job of explaining how they coded whether a specific “policy” was enacted or not.  They also don’t explain how they accounted for whether a specific part of a policy that might have been of critical importance to a particular segment of their income/interest groups got enacted.

Finally, and in terms of drawing useful conclusions about whether “elites” are running the show or not, the entire model ignores a central fact about the United States, viz. its divided sovereignty.  It makes a tremendous difference where you live in the United States on a host of issues that are of tremendous importance in the day-to-day lives of Americans.  In fact it makes not a small difference where within a state you live.  I’m going to suggest that in order to be useful, in the sense of getting an idea of whether “ordinary” Americans actually get to run their own show, or are buggered around by Them Awful 1%ers, you can’t weight all of the authors’ 1,779 issue points the same, and you can’t weight those the same as the issues that occur at the state and local levels.  What matters more to our 50th percentiler in his life today, after all:  Whether CAFE standards are increased to 42 m.p.g. by 2025, or whether Common Core is crammed down his local school system, or whether his local grocery store sells wine, or whether, as a solo house-framer he’s now required to pay $8,500 per year for worker’s compensation insurance for himself?

Yesterday morning on my way in to work, I saw an interesting sight.  A song bird, a tiny little song bird, was dive-bombing a crow.  The battle paralleled the center stripe of the street, so I got to see it play out.  This crow must have outweighed his attacker by a factor of at least ten.  I mean, the crow just dwarfed the song bird.  And yet that tiny little song bird ran his country ass off.  It was obvious what was happening.  The song bird had a nest of eggs to protect.  He had a Big Dog in the Hunt.  The crow was just after breakfast, and if he couldn’t crack open that nest’s eggs, somewhere else he’ll find others.  Or even something to eat other than eggs.  I’m going to suggest that metaphor is not unhelpful in trying to make sense of the authors’ data.  Individuals and organizations will pour tremendous effort into attending to what is important to them.  They may agree or disagree with any particular thing to a greater or lesser degree, but their determination to carry their preferences is going to be a function of its importance to them.  I may strongly disagree with federal policy X (or mildly disagree).  But whether I put my back into getting my way is going to be a function of what difference it makes to me.  I just don’t see that these authors’ data or model accounts for that fact of life, and that failure to account for it seriously undermines its utility in understanding the world I see around me.

Now, let’s see if we can come up with some data points on Undeniably Major Issues that might tend to falsify the authors’ hypothesis that elites exercise a significant independent influence on federal policy-making and the rest of us proles don’t.  Because after all, as Popper teaches us, you can’t say something is true if it cannot be false, but you can say something is not true if you can show it to be false.  Since what we’re talking about is something as squishy as “policy preferences” and degrees of support/opposition, we’re not going to get a scientific refutation.  But we might look around for something that is both Extremely Important on Any Objective Basis, and which is inconsistent with the authors’ conclusions.

One which immediately comes to mind is the current battle over amnesty for all the illegal immigrants tooling about the place.  The wealthy and the business interests favor it.  After all, Juan from Ciudad Juarez is not going to be competing with the authors of this paper for a comfortable seat in the faculty lounge; he’s going to put Joe Six-Pack out of work.  Juan will go to work for the homebuilders, not in competition with them.  Granted, we don’t at the moment have an outcome on this, but I think you can derive some meaningful thoughts on our authors’ hypothesis from the number of congresscritters who are running from amnesty like scalded dogs.  If the paper’s hypothesis is correct, that elites and “business interests” exercise a major moving force over federal policy decision, while Us Proles and “mass-based” groups don’t, then we’ll see some significant form of amnesty passed, and passed soon.

One day Dr. Johnson and some friends were discussing one of the then-recent philosophical arguments that the physical world isn’t real, in the sense that what we see we only think we see.  It’s all conception, not reality.  The question arose of how to refute that argument.  Johnson observed, “I refute it thus,” turned, and kicked a nearby large stone so hard his foot bounced off it.  If the United States was truly an “oligarchy,” in which “elites” ran the show for their own benefit, how do you explain that, since 1986 the share of all federal tax dollars paid by that nefarious, oligarchic top 10% of income earners has increased from 54.6% to 70.6% in 2010?  And it’s not that they’re paying a larger share of a smaller tax bill, either.  By 2010 the federal government was consuming a proportion of the country’s GDP (over 23%) not seen since 1946, when we’d just started de-mobilizing from fighting a two-front world war.  That nasty ol’ top 10% is paying a 29.3% greater burden of tremendously larger bill.  In fact, as of 2009, a year in which continued a trend of a declining share of total income by the top percentiles, “The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI equal to or greater than $154,643), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 31.7 percent of the nation’s adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.”  Those top-fivers are paying in taxes nearly twice their proportion of the income.  By the way, note further that in 2009 it took only $154,643 in nominal dollars to get you into the 95th percentile.  We see further evidence of the “oligarchic” tendencies of American society in the fact that,  in 2009, “[T]he top 1 percent no longer pays a larger percentage of total income tax than the bottom 95 percent.”  Aw.  Isn’t that just awful?

That’s a pretty sorry-assed oligarchy we’ve got here, if it can’t keep itself from getting increasingly plundered over years and decades.  I defy the authors of this article, and I even more defy all the out-of-breath reporters, at the BBC and elsewhere, to demonstrate any other recognized oligarchy in which the “ruling elite” that runs rough-shod over the toiling masses permits itself to be used so shamelessly as a piggy-bank.

I could go on about all the other respects in which the authors’ data and model do or do not help us think about what kind of society we have in the U.S. or what kind of society we ought or want to have.  But I’ve got to go make some of that $0.6855-per-dollar-of-reported-income.  Suffice it to say, thus, I refute it.

One of my favorite reads since the mid-1980s has been Paul Fussell’s Class.  In fact, I’ve liked it so much I’ve lent it to multiple friends, which is why I’m on my sixth or seventh copy of the book.  Not all my friends are as punctilious about returning loaners as one might like.  [Pointless aside:  Sometimes when I like a book well enough, I’ll just give copies to my friends.  I’ve bestowed several copies of The Most of P. G. Wodehouse and Life at Blandings on the deserving select, and when The Joy of Drinking came out I just ordered about eight copies up front and played Santa Claus.]

Fussell’s book shines the light on the fascinating clues about and intersections of status strata in a society that — aggressively at times — insists it has no class system.  As Fussell points out, that very insistence is one’s first clue that (i) there is such a system, and (ii) its contemplation makes people very, very uneasy.  The book, which he later described as tongue-in-cheek, is both outrageously funny and painfully insightful.  Ever since reading it I’ve paid attention to things like “prole jacket gape,” the separation of a man’s suit jacket from his neck and shoulders.  Even more than the exhibition itself is the failure to realize it as an issue.  Sure enough, in almost every instance in which I’ve observed it, the wearer has been someone who, either from personal acquaintance or by other visual or aural clues I can tell is someone who does not wear a jacket with any sort of regularity. 

The upper and lower strata don’t come in for very much ragging in Fussell.  The fellow on Buckley who, as Fussell recounts, kept saying, “pro-MIS-kitty” and, “I am a prole,” at the same time comes in more for regret than censure.  The ones whom Fussell flays from stem to stern, so to speak, are the middles, the ones who are desperately and pathetically ambitious to climb a rung or several, all while terrified of slipping down one or more pegs (to mix a couple of metaphors).  As The Blogfather would say, read the whole thing.

For today’s purposes Fussell’s most important observations concern the nearly-unbridgeable chasm that separates those Americans whose young men were sent to die in the mud of Vietnam from those whose youngsters sat the war out on indefinite student deferments (here it helps to understand that Fussell had been an infantry lieutenant in World War II, and sufficiently badly wounded that he was classed permanently partially disabled . . . although he was slated to take part in the invasion of the Japanese home islands).  He also points out in the segment on work and its class implications that all work can divided into two broad groups: (i) those occupations where the material threat of death, dismemberment, or permanent disabling injury is a normal part of the daily life; and (ii) those where that threat is absent.  As he points out, what would America say if every week several dozens of college professors were maimed or killed in front of their classes?  What would be the uproar if after twenty or so years of dentistry a dentist’s arms and hands could no longer hold his instruments because of various work-induced trauma?

All of which is to say that Victor Davis Hanson has once again driven the ten-ring.  The poor O-pressed students at Dartmouth have finally had enough of the “micro-aggressions” that come with spending four years at a country-club style elite university, enough of the attacks on their fragile sensibilities that arise from “racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, trans-homophobic, xenophobic, and ablest structures.”  No, seriously; someone actually wrote those words in that order . . . and thought himself “speaking truth to power.”  Their precious little “bodies are on the line.”  Do tell.

The downtrodden have presented written demands (in a 72-point manifesto; Martin Luther in launching the Reformation could only manage 95 theses) to the administration for the amelioration of their condition.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The demonstrators had a 72-point manifesto instructing the college to establish pre-set racial admission quotas and a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum for all students. Their other inspirations are for more ‘womyn or people of color’ faculty; covering sex change operations on the college health plan (‘we demand body and gender self-determination’); censoring the library catalog for offensive terms; and installing ‘gender-neutral bathrooms’ in every campus facility, specifically including sports locker rooms.”

Prof. Hanson does his usual masterful job of exploding these fatuities.  And before one looses the charge of hypocrisy against Hanson, it’s useful to bear in mind an anecdote he’s shared of the day he returned from Stanford, a freshly-minted Ph.D. in classics.  His father, a farmer as had been his grandfather before him, greeted him in the driveway with (I’m speaking from memory here) a ladder and the observation that there was a shed that needed a new roof.  I’d wager Hanson’s had more barked knuckles and squashed thumbs over the years than the Dartmouth student body has seen. 

As Hanson points out, these shattered hulks of micro-aggression victims are the creatures of the very “oppression” that they claim to decry.  Their world — a world in which a Dartmouth degree is a magic decoder ring that can open doors shut to 99.99998% of their peers — can only exist by reason of the fact that those peers are not able to attend a school like Dartmouth.  Put very plainly, you can only be elite in comparison to something or someone else.  It’s those someone elses that the professor invites us to contemplate: the guy atop the tractor in 105-degree heat, or the 19-year-old infantry private in some flea-bitten, sand-blown hell-hole in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the 60-year-old manning a cash register at Wal-Mart near the tail-end of a full shift, gamely trying to remain cheerful amid the crush of humanity.

You don’t have to accept the postulate, as the “Occupy” movement purports to do, that somehow these little snot-nosed whiners at Dartmouth have caused the misfortune of those of whose existence Hanson so unceremoniously reminds us.  In fact they didn’t, and neither did those who are paying the freight for them to get their certified-organic cotton, manufactured-in-a-workers’-cooperative-paying-a-living-wage panties in wad over the horrors of not being able to ogle the sweat-stained bodies of one’s fellow students of both sexes.  But for them to pretend to misfortune in the circumstances of their daily lives, all while enjoying the up-side of a brutal and life-long invidious comparison to all those Someone Elses is monstrous.

A number of years ago Jacques Barzun, a Frenchman who fetched up teaching at Columbia for 184 years or so, wrote a book, From Dawn to Decadence, a history of Western civilization from 1500 to the present.  While it’s sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that the book’s unwritten alternative sub-title is something along the lines of “How the French Invented Civilization and Everyone Else was Just Along for the Ride,” it’s still a mighty read and I highly recommend it (to go along with all the other books about how nation X, Y, or Z “saved civilization” or “invented the modern world”; I’ve got books on my shelves making or suggesting such arguments for the Irish, the Scots, and the Germans . . . and of course Barzun’s plea for the French; I have to wonder if any such books making the Chinese and/or Japanese cases are available in translation).  At any rate:  This nonsense at Dartmouth, engaged in, encouraged, and funded by the “elites” of our present society, are precisely the decadence in Barzun’s title.

God save the mark.