My experience with numbers is based on what I learned in school. They are precisely defined, susceptible of manipulation for the purpose of drawing conclusions about the world, and useful for purposes of real-world decision making...unless they are coming from economists or politicians. In the case of politicians, the only numbers you will hear any of them talk about are the ones that favor their positions. As for economists, they all seem so engaged in applying their chosen dogmas that they never analyze their choices of the numbers they emphasize nor, more disturbingly, do they bother to determine the true significance of those numbers by evaluating their derivations. I am thinking at the moment about a number, or references to that number, that quantifies the rate at which people are ceasing to look for work these days. That one number is cited every month by Republican nay-sayers who will say anything to undermine the Democrats, Barrack Obama in particular, but they say very little about why those people have stopped looking. For example, when someone retires, that's not a bad thing in economic terms, is it? Yet, those people are lumped in with others for purposes of this single number on which those looking for reasons to be pessimistic rely. And the media, who should be looking for such tendentious analyses say nothing about it. In fact, often times they report the same numbers without analysis as if everyone understands that none is needed.
An example of that kind of shoddy thinking, two of them actually, were published in the New York Times this Sunday. One was by a guy named David Leonardt, who is one of The Times stars, and actually, he did pretty well in limning the recently published popular-economics treatise of a French economist named Piketty, which book everyone is talking about. Piketty seems to be the John Kenneth Galbraith of the day...popularizing subject matter that academicians in the field of economics have long seemed to suggest was too complex for us common men...and women of course. Piketty's thesis seems to be that income inequality is nothing new, and that it can be addressed by progressive taxation and promotion of education for everyone. He sees education as the great equalizer when it comes earning capacity, if I understand Leonhardt's synopsis correctly, and progressive taxation as the great leveler of an economic topography that is already inequitable. While the observation that there is nothing historically anomalous about the current stratification of our society in terms of a disparity in the possession of wealth may be something of a revelation, his proposal for remediation of income inequality through tax policy and universal education seems little more than reiteration of what has become progressive dogma in this country...hardly novel solutions to the problem. And while Leonhardt may not have set out to demystify Piketty's work, that was the effect of his article on the subject in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine, in which he demonstrated some skepticism of his own, most of it healthy. But deep in his exposition of Piketty's book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," was an imbedded canard that betrayed Leonardt's tendency toward hackneyed ideas rather than the ostensible cutting-edge thinking with which his 41 year old brain has been charged by The Times. He said, when talking about Piketty's reliance on progressive taxation as a remedy for the tendency of our free market, like every other free market according to Piketty, to stratify our society economically (wealth begets wealth, Piketty apparently opines as if that is something revelatory), that our current efforts at progressive taxation "often stealthily through the payroll tax" place too heavy a burden on the poor and middle class. But as you probably know, though Leonardt seems not to, the "payroll tax" is the amount withheld from everyone's paycheck for Social Security, and though it is denominated a tax, that isn't what it is any more than a private payment into an annuity is a tax. Even Ronald Reagan knew that and so stated during and before his presidency, but the idea that forced savings--which is what the payroll tax is--is tantamount to taxation keeps resurfacing among conservatives as a pretext for their efforts to eliminate the social safety net in general, Social Security in particular, and now with Leonardt, one of The Times' more recently coronated intellectual leading lights. If he doesn't get that, what else doesn't he get, and if there are other things, why should we be reading what he thinks, whether The Times thinks he's a great thinker or not. Just another case of shoddy thinking.
And then there's Frank Bruni, another editorialist whose thoughts have been deemed worth reading by The Times. His Sunday Review piece was about the perception that America is in decline...that our children will inherit a lesser nation than we did, and that we should rethink our national withdrawal from the leadership roll internationally and from the hegemony in all spheres of activity that our country has "enjoyed" over the past century or so. The piece is essentially a paean to the America that was, toward the end of encouraging us to "refuse to go gently into that good night" of parity with the other nations of the world when it comes to responsibility for what happens in it. It's kind of Reaganesque in that it suggests, as Charlie Daniels sang when Reagan was in his first term, that we "talk real loud and walk real proud again," never mind the fall that that pride has recently gone before. Bruni even acknowledges the fact that in much of the world we have been reviled for the conceit in which we have indulged that we know best what everyone else should be doing and how they should be doing it, but he seems undaunted by 9/11 and the overt opprobrium shown us in much of the world today. Paternalism is still our calling in the mind of Frank Bruni...another Times new-era star. One more case of encouragement to follow the primrose path just because it is popular.
Conservatives, and Republicans in particular, seem convinced that the New York Times is a liberal journal, biased, if not obscenely slanted, toward the left. But people like Leonhardt and Bruni, both of whom are ostensibly of the ilk complained of by the right, demonstrate that there is no liberal slant at The Times. There may be some misjudgment as to what constitutes profound thought, but there is no liberal slant.
Your friend,
Mike
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