The last time we raised the minimum wage was 1997. In constant dollars though we are back where we started. This is one of many interesting little economic facts found in the nice little series of Economic Snap Shots from the Economic Policy Institute.

I wonder if the term “projection” first arose in psycology or in mathematics. In math it is used to describe the process of mapping the members of one set say {north, south} into another set say {rich, poor}. In psycology it is the name of a syndrome where the individual projects his own world view onto others. For example if I am greedy I presume that others are greedy. Projection is a thrifty ways of looking at problems. You take something you have a rich model for and you project it on some other problem your not familar with.

Doing this rewards you with a comfortable model you can work with in the new domain.
For example if we have our {north, south} -> {rich, poor} mapping in hand then we can start making all kinds of silly inferences. The north is cold, so the rich are cold. The south is humid so the poor are wet. The north has seasons so there is a business cycle. It’s all a little silly; but yet somehow plausible.
Project gives you good stories to tell and allows you to seem fluent in domains about which you know little.

Projection of one’s beliefs on others is common. For example when the right wing accuses the left of dominating the press they do so because they expend so much energy doing just that. They announce that the supreme court is dominated by liberal justices because they have labored long and hard to see to that it isn’t. So this is why the right’s accusations about liberal ideas seem so bizarre at first blush. They are not statements about liberal ideas they are about the right’s ideas.

With that in mind look at this amazing, but incomplete, list of “what conservatives really believe“.  No wonder they accuse liberals of being pessimistic.

I need to ask my sci-fi reading friends if this plot twist has been used yet. It’s obvious once you think of it. In the corporate police state of the future when the police will round up suspects and interogate them they will call it market research. Welcome to Florida.

And should that fail to be sufficently bizzare for you: guess who’s building the detention camp in that place outside of all international law – Guantanamo Bay? Go on guess first, then take a look.

It would be bad to become paranoid.

Manichaeism: A dualistic philosophy dividing the world
between good and evil principles or regarding matter as intrinsically
evil and mind as intrinsically good.

Simple models are a big help in reasoning about stuff. They help
you visualization. They generate analogies. They are easy to teach.
They give course work an outline. Often they can be tested. They
provide a coloring book that the scholar or student can then fill
in.

The simplest models are the Boolean ones, the dialectics: good and
evil, black and white, rich and poor, north and south, left and
right. These are great for debating clubs. They are much easier to
project into each other: good, black, poor, south? Of course
projection can be dangerously simplistic. While models are good for
graduate seminars dialectics are good for PR messaging.

That said this is a thought
provoking essay by Robert Kagan on the growing culture gap between
the United States and Europe. There is little doubt which overly
simplistic dialect he’s projecting this into.

Continue reading →

The Republican Party in New Mexico tried to bribe the Green Party there to run cantidates. No need for the Republican party chairman to resign –
he was just acting as a messenger for an unidentified source in Washington, D.C.

I don’t have much sympathy for third parties. We have a two party system here and third parties are very disruptive. If you want change then you have to change one of the parties.

The Republicans were buying a far left cantidate with two purposes in mind. First: the Democrat would lose votes on his left. Second: if he moved toward the left in an attempting recapture those votes he would lose votes on his right.

This is what George Wallace did on the right during the civil rights era and what Nader did on the left in the last election.

The top 1% own just about half of everything. That’s really hard to think about. Everywhere you look; half of that is owned by only 1% of the population. Cars, trees, radio, TV, bytes; half of all of it. Can that be good? Kevin Phillips new book talks about this in depth. The reviews are good, the interviews are interesting and I’ve been collecting links and interesting quotes from them:

Assorted reviews of Kevin Phillips’s book WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY: A Political History of the American Rich.

A review in New York Review of Books by Jeff Madrick. “the fabulous personal fortunes of the 1980s and 1990s now rival and in some ways even exceed the mythical fortunes of the Gilded Age.”

“Phillips then goes on to argue that such excesses of wealth and greed and inequity have helped bring down–or may even have been the chief cause in bringing down–virtually all flourishing great powers in the past”
Yale historian Paul Kennedy writing in the LA Times

Phillips writing in a
Q&A sidebar to that article: “Conservatives tried to make class conflict something to frown on in 1896 and 1932, but without great luck. The turning point came when the success of the New Deal greatly reduced the share of wealth and income going to the top 1%, and as democracy and a middle-class ethos carried into the 1950s and 1960s, “plutocracy” began to seem like an old threat that no longer existed. Now the concept of an economic “over-class” is as relevant again as it was in 1896.”

Bruce Reed’s review from Washington Montly “… a funny thing happened on the way to the class war: The rich won.”

From Princeton economist Paul Krugman’s editorial in the New York Times “an influential body of opinion has reacted to global warming and the emergence of an American plutocracy the same way: ‘It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, nothing can be done about it.'”

Kevin Phillips, “Market Extremists Amok,” The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 13, July 15, 2002. Kevin sure can write a full scale rant. “Extreme politics, in this new form as in others before it, has a distinct regional home. As much as the ideological excesses of the left in the 1960s evoked Berkeley, and the militia groups on the right were a Rocky Mountain phenomenon, the market mania of the last two decades has centered on Texas — economic Lone Ranger country, where market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism have joined to create a uniquely strident culture.”

Paul Magnusson’s review review in Business Week. “Phillips compares the U.S., post-September 11, to Holland in the early 1700s and Britain in the 20th century, when each nation, at the peak of its economic power, expended its energy and treasure in a burst of warfare.”

Phillips quoted from the transcript of Bill Moyers’ interview on PBS: “a dynasty is a dynasty is a dynasty and these problems are there, and this incredible amount of money is … is just staring this country’s historical role in the face ”

NPR interview (real audio) “a ten fold increase in wealth in seven years” for the top 400 in the nation; never before.

Audio interview (real audio) from Radio Nation. 47% of the nations wealth is in 1% of the population’s hands.

Amazon Editorial Reviews, Customer Reviews

Joe Conason’s review in

New York Observer writes: “What makes Mr. Phillips’ analysis so radical is his insistence on examining the roots of the great fortunes’and revealing the state power that underwrote so many of them.”

Price compairson: addall and abebooks. The author’s web site for the book.

Interview on Minnesota public radio.

Chapter One appeared in the Denver Post.

Diane Rehm’s interview from WAMU in DC.

KCET – Life & Times Town Hall SpecialTranscript. “In 1981, the average of the ten highest compensated corporate executives was $3.45 million. In 1988, the average of the ten highest compensated was $22 million. In 2001, the average of the ten highest compensated was $155 million. You know, that’s a 45-fold increase.” or “Middle fifth, the average household cash income in the middle fifth, sort of your medium household, $31,700 in 1979, $32,600 in 1989, $33,200 in 1997. Now we got to the top one percent, $256,000 in 1979, $507,000 in 1989, $644,000 in 1997.”

Article from LA times by Kevin Philips circa 2000. “In the 2000s, just as in the 1970s, the 1930s and the 1890s, a tough bear market and its aftermath could be what brings about an economic, governmental and regulatory overhaul. A serious stock-market decline always serves as a political as well as financial indicator. Brother bear–the Ursa Major of economic disillusionment–has been the power behind populist and progressive booms from William Jennings Bryan through Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

July 8th 2002 Article from The Nation Dynasties! by Kevin Phillips. “Only at first blush is there silliness to the idea of the United States–the nation of the Minutemen, John and Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson–becoming a hereditary economic aristocracy.”

Review by Scott London. ‘The growing ineffectiveness of American government is part of a larger “reversal of fortune” where political and economic influence has shifted from the grassroots of America to a new “guardian class” in Washington.’

Atlantic Monthly: A wordy dialog between James Fallows and Kevin Phillips.

Audio interview and call-in on The Connection, a radio program on NPR. “The top 10% own about 80% of the publicly traded stock.”

Kevin Phillip’s is one client of the Leigh Bureau. Here is his biography from their speaker’s catalog.