The unbearable whininess of rich people

This amazing blog post by a University of Chicago law professor complains how unfair it is to characterize people like him as rich and how his family will be badly hurt by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning over $250,000. Michael O’Hare and Brad De Long deduce that the complaining professor earns around $450,000 and deliver much needed rebukes.

[Update: The law professor Todd Henderson has since deleted his post and given up blogging as a result of the response to his post, and also because he says his wife strongly disagreed with him and did not consent to him posting in the first place.]

As the effort to make the rich even richer gets under full swing this fall, we are going to hear a lot of whining like this as the December 31st expiry deadline draws near. A lot of smoke is going to be blown about what constitutes being rich and so it is good to bear in mind the facts of income distribution in the US.

20% of households earn less than $19,178
20% of households earn between $19,178 and $36,000
20% of households earn between $36,000 and $57,568
20% of households earn between $57,568 and $91,705
20% of households earn over $91,705

The median household income is around $50,000. (‘Median’ means that half earn below and half above that figure). If we break down even further the people in the very top brackets:

10% of households earn between $100,349 and $138.254
5% of households earn between $138,254 and $329,070
1% of households earn between $329,070 and $482,129
0.5% of households earn between $482,129 and $1,401,635
0.1% of households earn between $1,401,635 and $6,473,710
0.01% of households earn over $6,473,710

So the Chicago law professor’s family earns about nine times the median income, is in the top 1% or so of income earners in the country, and yet whines about how tough it is for him to get by. This curious combination of greed and entitlement of the rich seems to be getting worse. In a previous post, I showed how the income share of the top 10% has increased greatly since 1979, a period that is referred to as ‘The Great Divergence’. Kevin Drum provides a chart that breaks it down even more.

blog_income_shares_1979_2007_1.jpg

It is clear that the rich have been making out like bandits and they still want more. Anyone still doubt that we have an oligarchy? How bad must it get before people like the anti-tax zealots among the tea partiers realize that they are being played for suckers by the oligarchy?

The last goal post?

One of the fascinating things about watching how the science and religion debate has evolved is to see how religious apologists have been backpedaling, shifting the goal posts, trying to find ways to avoid having god become redundant. This process has been going on ever since scientists no longer saw their role as reconciling science with religious revelations and started pursuing their lines of inquiry wherever it led. This decoupling of science from religion began in the mid-19th century as the new sciences of geology and biology made it impossible to believe in a 6,000 year-old Earth or in the special creation of species.

This began the inevitable process of scientific explanations contradicting the religious ones that had been used as evidence of god’s actions. As various inexplicable phenomena and miracles that had been considered evidence of god’s actions came under scientific scrutiny, they were found to have natural, physical explanations. And science has the huge advantage over religion in that it is reliable and predictable, unlike god explanations. As Stephen Hawking says in this interview, science will win over religion because science works.

The more sophisticated theologians and religious apologists realized that having their faith depend upon the existence of such gaps in knowledge was a losing strategy that was causing religion to look silly because it required constant shifting of things that were supposedly inexplicable by science (‘intelligent design’ being the most recent manifestation) and ‘the god of the gaps’ became a term of derision, with even religious apologists disavowing it. As Isaac Asimov said, “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”

As an example, in response to the publicity surrounding the book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow that claims that god is an unnecessary concept, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was quoted as saying that “Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.” (I have just started reading The Grand Design and will provide a review when I am done.)

Williams’ comments were supported by other religious leaders in Britain. Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, said “The ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.” Similarly, Fraser Watts, an Anglican priest and a scholar in the history of science at Cambridge University, said that “A creator God provides a reasonable and credible explanation of why there is a universe.”

These apologists’ words signal a shift to what may be the last goal post. Rather than looking for specific inexplicable things to ascribe to god’s actions, a strategy that has not worked well for them in the past, they have gone big, for the Hail Mary, saying that the universe itself, either its physical existence or the reason for its existence or both, is inexplicable without god. The cartoon strip Jesus and Mo recent points out one obvious problem with this approach.

(Another response to Hawking’s claim that god is unnecessary is to adopt a world-weary ‘So what?’ attitude, and suggest that these questions are not even interesting. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation … The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.” Sacks also tried to pooh-pooh the support for atheism generated by Hawking’s book, telling the London Times “What would we do for entertainment without scientists telling us with breathless excitement that God did not create the universe as if they were the first to discover this astonishing proposition.”)

So sophisticated modern theologians have been reduced to claiming that god has to exist as the ultimate creator of the universe, which is no different from one of Thomas Aquinas’s old proofs of god that said that you needed something to produce the something of our universe out of a prior nothingness. This argument may have seemed plausible at one time. After all, the universe has a lot of stuff in the form of planets and stars. How could all this stuff suddenly appear? Surely their sudden appearance must violate the laws of science and the only way this could happen is because of the actions of some divine being?

But that argument is simply not credible anymore. Theologians think that since there is matter in the universe that did not exist before the universe came into being, this must constitute a violation of currently accepted scientific laws and thus requires some agency to create it, and thus is evidence for god. Of course, as I have argued before, saying ‘God did it’ is not an explanation for anything in the first place but in the next post, I will show why this hope is misplaced even on scientific grounds because the creation of the universe does not violate any laws.

Joke contest results

When it comes to jokes, I prefer one-liners and other short gags to the long form that requires an elaborate set-up. The BBC recently reported on a joke contest and here are some of the one-liners that I found funny.

“Why did the chicken commit suicide? To get to the other side.”
“How many Spaniards does it take to change a light bulb? Juan.”
“As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn’t afford a dog.”

My personal favorite was: “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”

The joke that won the contest (“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”) I did not find particularly funny, while two of the above jokes were selected by the judges to be in the worst jokes category, which shows that when it comes to humor, there is no accounting for tastes.

An inside look at election coverage

Labor Day used to be the traditional kick off for political campaigns though we now live in nonstop, year-round campaign mode. But as we approach election day in November, we should steel ourselves for an even increased focus on the trivial and sensational.

If you want to better understand why election coverage is so vapid, see Michael Hastings’s excellent GQ article Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter on his experience in the 2008 elections.

Hastings is the reporter whose story in Rolling Stone resulted in General Stanley McChrystal being fired from his job in charge of the war in Afghanistan. In 2007, he was assigned by Newsweek to cover the front runners in the 2008 election and although this was considered a plum high-profile assignment, his increasing disgust with the kind of access politics that was required resulted in him quitting midway through and moving to another beat.

“Please don’t upset me by saying there is no god”

In her regular column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on September 15, 2010, Connie Schultz demonstrated once again the curious sense of entitlement that religious people have. She began as follows: “Years ago, I criticized atheists who wanted to dissuade believers of their faith. My argument was always the same: Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

In response, I wrote her a personal email:

Dear Ms. Schultz,

I read with interest your column today that started by saying that years ago you criticized atheists who did not leave you alone but wanted to dissuade you from your faith.

What exactly were these atheists doing to bother you? Were they coming to your door? Were they stopping you on the street to hand out their literature? Do they have TV and radio shows that preach their viewpoint and warn of dire consequences if you do not convert to their point of view?

As an atheist myself, it doesn’t bother me when people express their ideas in the public sphere, or even in the private sphere. Those people think they have the truth and want to convince me and that’s their right. Similarly atheists think that they are right and seek to convince others of it. These kinds of exchanges are no different from debates over politics or anything else, where the goal is to win hearts and minds.

It also does not bother me that your newspaper provides almost saturation coverage of religious matters, especially concerning the recent closing of Catholic churches or religious festivals and parades in Little Italy. In fact, after an initial swipe at a few religious people, your entire column today was a paean to the virtues of religion. Despite the cutbacks in the size of the paper, it still has a Saturday page devoted to religious matters, with a column dedicated to advancing religious views. Do you think atheist views get anywhere near that level of coverage? Would they even consider allowing an atheist regular use of that Saturday column space?

So I find it a little odd that when atheists speak out about their disbelief, religious people feel as if they are being imposed upon, as if they have the right to be shielded from opposing views. Are they so insecure of what they believe that they need to be surrounded only by affirming views?

There is no reason why religious beliefs should be privileged and shielded from criticism. Surely we all benefit from a full airing of a wide diversity of views on issues?

Sincerely,

Mano Singham

No response yet.

The state of the nation’s party politics

Now that the primary season for the 2010 mid-term elections is over, it might be good to revisit the question of where the Democratic and Republican parties are. While the basic pro-war/pro-business one-party oligarchic nature of politics is still intact, there have been some interesting developments in how the two factions have evolved.

The Democrats are still pretty much where they have always been, trying to faithfully serve the interests of the oligarchy while pretending to be concerned about the rest of us. As I warned a couple of months ago, it is the Democrats that the oligarchy use to really stick it to the poor. In this case, we see that Obama has stacked his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with people determined to reduce social security benefits. The commission will deliver its report on December 1, conveniently after the elections. The plan seems to be that the Democrats can campaign on ‘protecting social security’ and then cut the benefits after the election is done.

Republican Party politics has been more turbulent. Immediately after the 2008 election I wrote a series of posts about what its future might look like. In December of that year, I wrote that there were four groups vying for leadership in the wake of their election debacle.
[Read more…]

Another sign that we have an oligarchy

Over at Slate Timothy Noah writes about the growing income inequality and the reduced social mobility that now characterize the United States.

In 1915, the richest 1% of the population obtained about 15% of the nation’s income. “This was the era in which the accumulated wealth of America’s richest families—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—helped prompt creation of the modern income tax, lest disparities in wealth turn the United States into a European-style aristocracy.”

But now the top 1% gets 24% of the income. The rising share of the oligarchy can be seen in this graph of the income share of the top 10% over the last 100 years.

incomeinequality.gif

As Noah says:

When it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick…

According to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States.