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Adjust your hot election takes accordingly.

Doug Jones’s victory over Roy Moore Tuesday night in Alabama’s special election for US Senate was enough of a shock that most political pundits didn’t have ready-made explanations for why it happened. So in the aftermath, they’re poring over what little data they have to determine which groups of voters helped push Jones over the top by showing up to vote for him, and who hurt Moore worst by staying home.

The easiest way to draw these conclusions is to look at the exit polls conducted while Alabamians were voting. The exit polls are, in some ways, more detailed than the official voting tallies. And because they break down votes by demographic groups, they can often present ready-made narratives — like the idea in Alabama that black voters, and especially black women (who made up 18 percent of the electorate but voted 97 percent to 3 percent for Jones) “saved” the election for the Democratic Party.

One huge problem with interpretations based on exit polls in the Alabama special election is that pollsters simply didn’t conduct exit polls in the state in 2016, so it’s difficult to say how much of what happened in the state is due to, say, energized black turnout versus depressed white turnout.

Exit polls can be useful. But there’s also good reason to be a little skeptical of using them to interpret a vote after the fact — because that’s not what they’re designed to do. Here’s what you need to know.

How the exit poll works

Every November election — and during particularly important special elections, like Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama — exit polls are conducted by a group of media outlets called the National Election Pool: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN, and the Associated Press. They hire a pollster to conduct the exit poll, but they're the ones that own the information — and that get to be the first to report the results.

That is the key to the exit poll. It is designed to allow the media to know as quickly as possible who has won the election. That means that when designing the poll, pollsters don’t focus on collecting as much data as possible — they focus on collecting the smallest amount of data that’s still going to reliably predict who has gotten more votes.

In a national election, that means that safe red or blue states (like Alabama) don’t get the full attention of exit pollsters. Exit pollsters still send people to do interviews there, for the purpose of the national poll, but they don’t collect enough interviews to publish reliable poll results.

So in addition to all the other factors that made the Senate special election so hard for pollsters to predict, the exit poll had the added factor of working in a state that it hadn’t held operations in for several years. That’s one good reason to be skeptical that it perfectly captured the state of the electorate.

The actual polling happens in two parts.

The most visible part of the poll happens in person on Election Day. An army of thousands of interviewers are sent to hundreds of polling places around the country. Interviewers approach a certain number of voters who are leaving the polling place — the exact fraction surveyed is secret — and ask them to fill out the written exit poll survey. In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d interview about 85,000 people on Election Day around the country — obviously, the number in Alabama in 2017 would be much smaller.

But part of the exit poll has already happened before Election Day. As early voting has become more popular, it's gotten harder to predict vote totals just by talking to people who vote on Election Day. So for the past several elections, exit pollsters have started calling people and asking if they voted early or absentee, and then conducting exit poll interviews by phone. (In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d contact about 16,000 voters this way.)

What the exit poll can — and can’t — tell us

The exit poll isn’t just about whom people voted for — that’s why there are interviewers even in safe states. Voters are asked to provide basic demographic information like gender, age, and ethnicity. Furthermore, they're asked some questions about their personal viewpoints and behaviors — like their religion and churchgoing habits — and questions about major issues facing the country.

That means the exit poll data is actually more detailed, in some ways, than the official US Census vote tallies that come out several weeks after the election. It can offer the first hints — and often the most important ones — to what voters thought this election was about. That's very important to pundits as they try to interpret what it means.

In 2004, for example, post-election chatter focused on "values voters." Voters who attended religious services regularly had overwhelmingly voted for George W. Bush. That narrative came out of the exit poll data.

Of course, what voters say is important to them is partly what campaigns have told voters is important. There's political science research suggesting that when a campaign hammers particular issues, those are the issues that the candidate's supporters say are most important to them. But the exit poll is still the best opportunity the national media has, in some ways, to figure out who voted, why, and how.

That said, there are some big questions about using the exit poll to draw sweeping conclusions. The first problem is that the exit poll only covers people who actually voted — meaning that it can obscure turnout problems on one side or the other.

In Alabama, for example, the exit poll showed that white voters overwhelmingly supported Roy Moore — but without more information about how many white voters stayed home because they were unwilling to support Moore, it’s hard to draw a conclusion about the role white voters played in the election.

For the most part, though, the exit poll is a lot more reliable when it comes to white voters than when it comes to nonwhite voters. And this is where it becomes really important to understand the exit poll’s limitations when talking about Doug Jones’s election.

The exit polls’ blind spots make it hard for them to analyze voters of color

There are some particular challenges that exit polls have faced for the past several elections that they still haven't found a way to work out. And as it happens, those challenges tend to involve voters of color.

Early voters. The phone poll for early voters is a relatively new addition to the exit poll— and it’s still a relatively minor one, compared with in-person polling. Early voting itself, meanwhile, has gotten very popular very quickly. In key states like Nevada and Florida, it’s estimated that fewer people will show up to vote on Election Day than showed up during early voting.

The exit poll understands the huge role early voters will play — pollsters estimated to Pew that 35 to 40 percent of all voting would happen early in 2016 — but it’s not clear that their polling can accurately capture who those people are. It runs into the problems any phone poll has — namely, that it's difficult to poll people who only have mobile phones.

Networks can work around the early-voting blind spot when they’re using the exit poll for its intended purpose — which is, again, calling the race accurately as soon as possible. In areas where they know early voting has been heavy, they can delay calling close races even if the exit poll suggests one candidate will win. But the demographic and other data the exit poll provides might be skewed in favor of people who voted in person — who might not be the voters who decided this election.

Small groups. Like any poll, the smaller a sample size is, the less likely it is to be representative. So the exit poll is pretty reliable when it comes to large demographics (men, women, Democrats, Republicans) but less reliable when it gets to small demographics (young voters, Jewish voters).

Voters of color. In addition to the general problems with smaller voting demographics, analysts believe the exit poll has a tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas.

Here's the logic. Even though the public doesn't know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it's possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it's reasonable to assume that it's choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts.

Alternatively, says Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions, exit pollsters might choose a precinct as a benchmark based on the previous cycle. For example, if a precinct voted for the Democratic senator 70 percent to 30 percent in 2008, the pollster might choose to put an exit poll interviewer at that precinct to see if the Democrat is getting less than 70 percent of the vote this time around. But pollsters are not necessarily paying attention to the racial makeup of those precincts.

Here's why this is a problem: The voters of color that pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are "more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters."

Check out the difference in the percentage of nonwhite voters who had a college degree in 2010, according to the US Census versus the exit poll:

Latino Decisions

(The problem is even worse for Latino voters, because exit polls are almost never offered in Spanish — even though more than a quarter of Latino voters prefer Spanish to English. So the exit polls oversample English-speaking Latinos.)

When it comes to the Alabama election, it certainly doesn’t look like the exit pollsters overstated the conservatism of black voters. But they might have made incorrect assumptions about what share of the electorate black men and black women made up, based on where they saw black voters at the polls. Conversely, it’s possible that they overstated the conservatism of certain white groups — like white voters without college degrees — because they were polling in more affluent “swing” areas, where such voters would be more conservative.

Any errors the exit poll made were probably on the margins. It is almost certainly still the case that white voters strongly supported Moore and black voters overwhelmingly supported Jones. But the bigger conclusions one tries to draw from a single race, the more important it is to recognize the limitations of what we know about what actually happened there.

Of all the many deranging spectacles in our national politics this year, one of the most flummoxing is the ready evangelical embrace of GOP nominee Donald Trump. Here, after all, is twice-divorced former casino baron who resembles nothing so much as a poolside Roman emperor, wowing crowds of true Protestant believers everywhere from South Carolina to New York.

Recent polls show the louche GOP nominee with a commanding lead among white evangelicals, beating his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by a whopping 65 percentage points, according to a recent CNN poll. That’s an impressive showing for a Planned Parenthood-backing, money-worshiping avatar of what Ted Cruz called "New York values."

Even Trump has seemed puzzled by the support, remarking, in a bizarre aside in his convention speech last week, "I’m not sure I deserve it." Various explanations have been floated for this odd alliance. So-called values voters share an authoritarian character structure, some commentators have suggested, and so find a strong-man figure like Trump reassuring, no matter how unchristian his temperament and moral make-up may otherwise be.

Or, pundits suggest, the traditional culture-war crusades that have unified the Christian right in past election cycles, such as gay marriage and the defense of the traditional family, don’t cut as deeply as they used to. This makes Trump’s slippery profile on such issues far less objectionable than they would have been in past elections. Some even argue that Trump, in psychological terms, offers the same basic appeal as the God of the Bible to believers — he’s imperious, driven by whim, and demanding of fierce, unquestioning loyalty.

But really, the deeper changes afoot in the American evangelical world have almost nothing to do with Donald Trump’s outsized personality or his alleged family resemblance to the author of Creation. Since the colonial founding of this country, Protestant divines have been singularly obsessed with how to rationalize, justify — and ultimately sanctify — the accumulation of American wealth.

Since the American founding, religion has been entwined with the "spirit of capitalism"

To understand how deeply this ambitious spiritual project goes back in our religious past, it’s crucial to revisit the landmark theoretical explication of how the founding generation of American believers set themselves on the path of plenty— Max Weber’s early 20th-century essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The "Weber thesis," as it’s known in scholarly shorthand, presented a key insight into the spiritual logic of capitalist accumulation in early America: By overthrowing — and demonizing — the vast religious bureaucracy by which Old World Catholicism had organized the worldly system of reward and punishment to uphold upright moral conduct, the Puritans who founded the colonies put the spiritual power to remake the world directly in the hands of ardent Calvinist believers.

The entire religious work of reward and punishment as it concerned individual worshipers shifted inward. It moved from the elaborate Catholic rites of penance and official forgiveness to a regime of rigorously monitored, unceasing self-interrogation. This devolution of power made American Puritans uniquely prone to anxious introspection. And that, in turn, helped transform the heretofore profane sphere of worldly enterprise into a key testing ground of personal salvation.

Calvinism translated Martin Luther’s famous slogan for the Reformation, "a priesthood of all believers" into a prescription for round-the-clock productivity. Business became a crucial outlet for all the many Puritanical anxieties arising from the stubborn opacity of one’s standing in the Kingdom of God.

From dour Calvinism to the "prosperity gospel"

To a striking degree, the manic activity that arose from the formulation of the original Protestant ethic resembles the strange and obsessively wealth-worshipping world of latter-day evangelical faith — from the "positive thinking" gospel of Norman Vincent Peale (far and away Donald Trump’s favorite religious thinker) to the self-hymning splendor of today’s prosperity gospel — a vision of boundless divinely sanctioned individual success now identified with its best-known apostle, megachurch pastor Joel Osteen. But American believers have come an awfully long way from their formative Puritan roots, and the Protestant ethic only goes so far in explaining the strange new frontiers they’ve traversed and settled.

Take, for example, the central paradox lurking at the heart of Weber’s argument: the genius of American Puritans in inventing a new moral code of "worldly asceticism." Ascetics in the Catholic tradition were self-denying monks, who diligently sought to dramatize their devotion by mortifying their flesh and submitting meekly to churchly authority. (For a pop-culture caricature of this outlook, see the deranged Opus Dei monk in Dan Brown’s anti-Catholic potboiler The Da Vinci Code.) The Calvinists cannily redirected such ascetic impulses into the vision of a divinely ordained worldly calling — which, in turn, spiritualized the accumulation of wealth as a means of winning and holding divine favor.

So presto: worldly asceticism. Under this new dispensation, Weber writes, "those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations." Whereas Catholics had seen the working life as the human lot since humanity was expelled from Eden and incurred the "curse of Adam," the ever-enterprising Calvinists upgraded their jobs into a divine heavenly calling.

All the anxiety that Calvinists felt about their unknowable eternal destiny in the hands of an all-powerful, impetuous God worked itself out into the one feature of their spiritual makeup they could control: their work. And combined with the abundant material riches of the New World, and the Calvinist repeal of Catholic strictures on usury and excessive individual money-making, you had all the basic ingredients of the spirit of American capitalism.

But as powerful as the Weber thesis is in explaining the origins of America’s spiritual romance with capitalist accumulation, it has severe limitations as a theory of change. For one thing, Puritanism’s reign in the emerging marketplace of American religious thought proved short lived. Rival sectarian religious movements such as antinomianism and Baptism challenged the Puritans’ spiritual rule almost from the moment of New England’s colonial settlement in the 17th century.

And southern colonies gravitated toward forms of worship well outside the covenantal, anxiety-ridden brand of Calvinist faith — either via the deference-minded high-church Anglicanism favored by the slaveholding squirerarchy, or more universalist brands of evangelism. And a surprising number of early colonial settlers were either unbaptized or unchurched, as historians such as Jon Butler have shown.

Moving toward the "money cult"

By the time that the last state-established church was dissolved in 1820 — in the great Puritan mother colony of Massachusetts — American believers had decisively overthrown the glum spiritual dictates of the old Calvinist order. And throughout the 19th century, the country embarked on its ambitious settlement of the Western frontier, launching a series of critical internal improvements — canals, turnpikes, and railroads — that created a sprawling national market for American goods.

The spiritual expression of this "market revolution," as historians have since dubbed it, was a land rush in free-will denominations all professing universalist schemes of divine salvation — and openly deriding the dour, predestinarian dogmas of Calvinism. The revolt against Calvinist fatalism coincided with the rise of exuberant money-minded faiths such as Mormonism — a fiercely entrepreneurial new religion that operated its own bank during its first Western sojourn in Kirtland, Ohio, and that preached a gospel of personal enrichment as a direct dispensation of divine favor, in this world and the next. (Indeed, Mormon prophet Joseph Smith hymned an afterlife in which the saved Mormon faithful would continue to work and procreate, transforming the historic curse of Adam into a glorious, eternal divine blessing.)

As American markets and belief systems evolved to new levels of complexity and social power, the outlines of a self-administered spiritual regime I call the money cult took firmer and firmer hold. Its early intellectual prophets, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Unitarian divine William Ellery Channing, pronounced a new individualist gospel of personal transcendence, and profound distrust of conventional forms of social obligation. Jeremiah Lanphier — the lead evangelist in the 1858 "Businessman’s Revival" centered in New York’s financial district —preached a scheme of just-in-time salvation for on-the-go Wall Street workers. Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker sought to secure his own vision of pietist consumer repose while instilling a stringent regime of worker self-discipline via his financing of the Young Men’s Christian Association.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

From these diverse tributaries of influence, today’s money cult now flows powerfully within the mainstream of American religion and politics. The great megachurch faith known as the prosperity gospel commands legions of believers who openly court personal enrichment as a badge of divine favor. Osteen, today’s most influential prosperity preacher, presides over the largest congregation in the country at Houston’s Lakewood Church, housed in the former arena where the NBA’s Houston Rockets played.

Osteen discerns the Lord’s anything-but-invisible hand in every imaginable facet of economic life, from nabbing an optimal parking space and airline upgrade to the exquisite market timing that permitted Osteen and his wife Victoria to flip a pair of overvalued homes in rapid succession at the height of the early-aughts housing bubble.

And the Osteen brand of prosperity faith has long since parted company with the receding specter of the Protestant ethic. Instead of hailing stubborn, purposeful work and accumulation as the path to worldly and otherworldly achievement, Osteen preaches a gospel of endlessly replenished divine abundance, while warning his followers off the baleful snare of "a poverty mentality."

By intoning abundance-themed scripture and personal-success maxims, Osteen’s followers learn to comport themselves as capitalist heroes — "more than conquerors" as Osteen preaches, citing a typical decontextualized snatch of scripture in which the apostle Paul was urging early Christians to embrace their fate as martyrs. "Why put limits on God?" is a frequent refrain of the Osteen gospel — which translates in economic terms to, Why put limits on your own dreams of luxury, repose, and comfort? Little wonder that Osteen has delivered what has been described as a "soft endorsement" of the luxury-obsessed Trump, calling him "an incredible communicator," "a friend of our ministry," and "a good man."

Max Weber: right about American acquisitiveness, wrong about secularization

In the famous closing pages of The Protestant Ethic, Weber speculates about the totalizing triumph of the pleasure-hating Puritan worldview in the modern age. As he saw it, the rigors of Puritan belief had long since succumbed to the scientific, secularized worldview that underwrote the eventual triumph of modern capitalism So in the Protestant ethic’s most accomplished homeland, the United States, "the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions," which opens out onto the dismal prospect of a "mechanized petrification, embellished with a convulsive sort of self-importance." This is the specter of life pointlessly squandered in Weber’s fabled "iron cage" of capitalist bureaucracy — and the effective death-by-inanition of the believing spirit of modern Protestant humanity.

But the money cult’s ascendance plainly contradicts this prophecy. Rather than creating a windswept spiritual landscape of secularized "disenchantment," as Weber speculated, American Protestant faith has exuberantly imbued the rites of market capitalism with boundless religious significance. We are no longer living out the legacy of Weber’s edifying tale of Puritan spiritual entrepreneurship, harnessing the ascetic labors of the Old World to conquer a fledgling colonial-mercantile economy. No, we are now well into a consumer economy’s vision of grace abounding: all individual redemption and zero self-denial. This is, unto its innermost parts, a vision of a New Heaven and a New Earth, consecrated in the holy conviction of imperial American prophecy. Is it really any wonder that its latest avatar should be the indifferent Presbyterian but all-purpose success brand—and reborn political culture warrior — Donald Trump?

Chris Lehmann is editor in chief of The Baffler and author of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream.

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias wrote me an email which asked a great question about American politics and the seeming movement to the left of the Democratic Party. In the wake of Bernie Sander’s landslide victory in New Hampshire over Hillary Clinton, Matt’s question seems even more pressing and interesting. With his permission, I quote it below:

What’s your theory as to how the labor-liberal forces inside the Democratic coalition seem stronger than every (Hillary is now against TPP and facing a fierce challenge from a socialist) even as actual labor unions seem weaker than ever. This is 180 degrees the opposite of the trajectory that I and everyone else were forecasting 10 years ago where either there would be a labor revival (card check, etc.) or else Dems would drift right without an anchor.

Here’s how I responded to Matt, with a bit of editing and revision to convert it from private e-mail prose into something a bit more formal:

One should note, too, regarding the context of your question, Obama’s recent executive orders, which have benefited millions of workers. And, of course, the Sanders campaign. It’s a fascinating thing, isn’t it? I think it’s a case of something about which Marx would have been skeptical: a powerful cultural superstructure constructed on top of an emaciated base which, in turn, becomes grounded in a nascent materiality of its own. Even theorists of the base-superstructure divide like Raymond Williams did not imagine that “residual” cultural formations would influence “emergent” ones without themselves passing through a “dominant” ideological stage—but that seems to have happened here in the case of the “old unionism” presaging a “new laborism” atop a weakened contemporary labor movement. So unions and a kind of union ideology have spawned this laborism even as labor’s own political, cultural and economic power continues to wane. Unions have succeeded not in organizing a greater percentage of workers into union members, but, instead, in organizing a significant sub-sector of the educated elite into becoming advocates for labor: academics and writers, and the students that become not only academics and writers, but also go on to work directly for unions. We also see this dynamic in the organizing drives taking place throughout the “new media” landscape, something I wrote about in TNR last year:

For about 30 years, a goal of the most sophisticated sectors of the labor movement has been to import the talents and commitment of the college educated middle class onto union staffs, and to export, via programs like Union Summer, the Organizing Institute, and organizing campaigns on college campuses, the ethos of unionism to colleges and other precincts of the professional liberal elite. One milestone in this effort, for example was the union-intellectuals conference at Columbia in 1996, for example, which called for an explicit alliance between leftist intellectuals and unions and featured keynote addresses by Betty Friedan, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West and John Sweeney, then president of the AFL-CIO. And this strategy worked! Key thinkers and pundits like Paul Krugman became more interested in unions as a lynchpin for addressing income inequality and, even, as institutions of civil society, being a kind of the liberal equivalent to evangelical churches. Lots of public intellectuals, during this period, wrote about labor and union issues in non-academic media.

Meanwhile, college kids, disproportionately at elite colleges and universities, got involved in campus organizing fights and—in another superstructural result of post sixties scholarship—took leftist oriented classes in American labor history and the social sciences. Yale, to name a major example, became a major venue of the new laborism and continues to send undergrads and grad students to union staff positions as organizers and strategic researchers. Both the students and the thinkers like Krugman saw that unions, as an analytical proposition, if not a current reality, were institutions with the national heft, history, and indigenous roots in communities to help ordinary citizens regain some economic and political power. Meanwhile the more recent cohort of college educated, (sometimes post-graduate educated) union officials made the unions less parochial, more ecumenical and open to the post sixties social justice movements—the “race” and “gender” parts of the race/gender/class triad. Unions (some of them anyway) hired more women, people of color, and gays and lesbians. This, in turn, established a deeper connection between unions and college leftism, which is encouraged college lefties looking for social justice work after graduation to give unions a try, as opposed, perhaps, to environmental or public interest groups.

So this all became a virtuous circle—college types go into the labor movement, making it more creative, attentive to recognitional issues of race and gender, and more interested in larger questions of political economy. (For a time, the most creative union presidents were, by common consensus, three graduates of Ivy League universities. Now David Rolf, a graduate of Hamilton College, who got interested in unions in college and has an intellectual partnership with class traitor, billionaire Nick Hanauer, is considered the cutting edge union thinker.) This union glasnost, in turn, interests liberal intellectuals, looking for political and economic mechanism to address wealth and income inequality. The college-educated union based thinkers like Rolf and, before him, Andy Stern, are profiled by liberal media and consulted by liberal academics. Young, labor interested workers in the new knowledge economy, organize their media workplaces. (Note: I am not arguing here in support, necessarily of Rolf’s or Stern’s ideas and policies, only pointing out how they embody this trend.)

Meanwhile, the ranks of both this intellectual infrastructure (“Krugman’s Army”, as I have called it) and its analogous union staff are being replenished with new college graduates, especially elite schools like Yale, honed by campus organizing battles and influenced by labor interested professors. All of this is brought to bear on the Democratic Party. Let’s look, for example at the career Ohio senator, Sherrod Brown. Brown has a daughter who is (was?) an SEIU staffer. He is also an alumni of Yale, which has seen more labor strife than any other American college campus and, as noted, has produced a large cache of union staff members. Brown has supported Yale’s unions during these struggles. Thus Brown pushes laborism within the party and also in a prestigious “knowledge factory.” Writers and scholars take note of Brown and his efforts and support them. Brown’s influence, and the influence of his left laborism—and, of course, the same is true for Sanders—then permeates thinking of congressional staff, Democratic related think tanks, and left-liberal social media.

Alas, actual union membership continues to decline. We can’t know if or when that trend will end. But the social ecology within which unions live now has many thriving components that maintain the idea of unionism and, in turn, influence the Democratic Party to uphold that idea. So what we’re seeing—increased support for “laborism” and the ascent of the Sanders campaign without increased union membership—does kind of make a certain structural sense, but it’s certainly not immediately intuitive or straightforward.

Hillary Clinton and her supporters are getting worried about Bernie Sanders and his.

It's pretty obvious why:

(Huffpost Pollster)

Because of this, the Democratic side of the race is going through a lurching transition.

Until very recently, it was a model primary. The establishment candidate was being challenged by an insurgent, who was pulling her left on a few key issues. It was all issues-based, above the belt, a good warmup for Clinton and a healthy set of debates for the party.

But now Sanders has built organization and momentum that make him more than a protest candidate. There's a chance he could win. He's a real candidate now.

There's a great deal that goes along with that transition, not all of which has been fully digested yet by the US body politic. Here are three obvious implications:

1. The gloves are going to come off, as the Clinton camp's somewhat desperate recent attacks show, and the contest is going to get dumber and uglier.
2. As Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have both argued, Sanders is now going to be pressed to make his policy proposals a lot less hand-wavey and aspirational, a lot more like real governing plans with real trade-offs.
3. Electability is going to come to the fore, in a way it hasn't yet.

But there's a fourth implication I haven't seen clearly articulated anywhere, so I want to lay it out. To put it bluntly, Sanders's transition from protest to serious candidate raises a new question about him and Clinton, namely: Who would be better at being president?

It sounds simple, but it wasn't really a test Sanders had to pass before, so it's not yet been a serious point of comparison between the two. Now it is a relevant question, and worth digging into a little. Answering it depends on clarifying exactly what kind of job a Democratic presidency would be in 2016.

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

A Democratic president will get no cooperation from Congress

Clinton and Sanders are not nearly as far apart on policy as both sides would currently have us believe, as Jonathan Cohn argued in a recent column. And the differences between them pale next to their shared differences with any Republican in the race (hence electability becoming the dominant question).

What's more, Cohn points out, both would spend their time in office staving off Republicans, not passing their dream bills.

The last point is worth expanding.

In 2016, barring some truly disruptive political event (which, who knows, Trump may prove to be), Republicans are going to keep control of the House of Representatives. They may keep control of the Senate as well, though that's less certain, but all they need to block any hope of an expansive legislative agenda is the House, something Obama has learned over and over again.

So there will be no single-payer health care, no national carbon tax, no free college, no reparations. Given the current disposition of the Republican Party, it will be a miracle if regular-order business like budgets and debt ceiling bills can get through — if the government can keep functioning at all.

On legislation, the next Democratic president (if there is one) will mostly play defense, using the filibuster or, if necessary, the veto pen.

What progress there is on domestic policy will come from inventive, assertive use of executive power and smart appointments, both judicial and administrative.

(Shutterstock)

Obama learned to succeed with no help

To see how that works, Sanders and Clinton can consult the current officeholder. For his entire term in office, Obama has faced a stark and unprecedented degree of obstructionism. For the last six years, legislation, certainly legislation of any ambition or scope, was, with a few rare exceptions, impossible.

It took him a while, but he learned to make the best of it. He got good at it, as his record of accomplishment shows.

But getting good at it took a particular disposition and set of skills.

As Ezra Klein points out, Obama won on policy but lost on politics. He got a lot done, but it cost him; polarization remains more poisonous than ever.

I think the right way to phrase it, though, is that Obama won on policy because he lost on politics, or, rather, because he was willing to lose on politics.

Even as their obstruction has hardened into dogma, Republicans have retained a talent for manipulating the levers of Washington opinion, which are designed around a) the presumption of party symmetry, and b) an overwhelming focus on the president as the center of political gravity.

(Shutterstock)

If his party's agenda is unable to attract Republican votes, it is assumed to be the president's fault. He wouldn't meet in the middle, wouldn't compromise.

If political polarization and hostility remain dominant in Washington, it's assumed to be the president's fault. He should have called John Boehner more, schmoozed more.

If a policy passes on a party-line vote, or through unilateral use of executive action, it is assumed to be the work of a power-mad tyrant.

This isn't just a media thing. The public, too, shares a strong heuristic that bipartisanship is a signal of wisdom, or at least acceptability. Mitch McConnell was quite canny in exploiting it, recognizing its power before Obama was even sworn in. As he famously said in an interview about Obamacare:

It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the [health care] bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is OK, they must have figured it out. It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.

That's why he and other Republican leaders agreed, before Obama walked into the White House, that they would oppose his every move in a unified front.

If even a few Republicans strayed, it would lend Obama's efforts the aura of bipartisanship. Whereas if Republicans stayed united and just a few Dems strayed, suddenly it was Obama's opposition that was bipartisan, a crucial public relations advantage.

(Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The media also exploits this heuristic, as does the permanent Washington political class. There is a powerful incentive, so built-in it's almost beyond notice, for the president to chase the approval of Washington's Very Serious People (VSPs) by uniting Red and Blue America, or at least by being seen making the attempt.

The incentive certainly works on many congressional Democrats, who spend much of their time in a defensive crouch, cowering from anything controversial, including Obamacare and Obama.

As long as Republicans kept Obama chasing after that approval and yanking it away at the last minute like Lucy with her football, they were able to effectively neutralize him. It was only after his reelection and — improbably — the Republican gains of the 2014 midterms that Obama finally gave up on it for good.

That's when he developed his rhymes-with-bucket list and got to work. And he has racked up wins ever since, breaking the second-term curse in spectacular fashion.

What it takes to succeed as a Democratic president these days

Obama's success has required two things. One is the self-possession and confidence to weather the disapproval of VSPs and the mau-mauing of Republican opponents. (A big part of this is settling on the right advisers for the inner circle.)

The second is a good sense of the executive machinery and how it might be deployed to positive effect. Most of Obama's second-term domestic victories have been bureaucratic: getting the military to sign off on LGBTQ soldiers and female combat troops, finding new ways to extend the Clean Air Act, raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers, and the like.

(One area where Obama has often been criticized is in his lack of attention to appointments, which will be crucial to the next president's success. There is something to this criticism, though Obama's effect on the federal bureaucracy is often underestimated.)

Determining where executive powers can be pushed, how to bring the bureaucracy along, the best way to structure new rules to make them resilient, the savviest people to run executive agencies and sit on the bench — these are all distinct skills.

Obama made progress through means the media and the public found unfamiliar and somewhat discomfiting, while facing a right-wing politico-media machine bent above all on denying him credit for anything. He won policy but lost politics.

(Shutterstock)

For the left, that is vastly preferable to the inverse. Democrats would be lucky to replicate it.

Time to compare the candidates based on how well they'd do what they could actually do

Which brings us back to Clinton and Sanders. If they are both serious candidates for president, then they should be treated like job candidates, evaluated on the qualities that are likely to affect their performance.

How liberal they are willing to talk during a primary is not one of those qualities. Their opinions on single-payer health care are not hugely relevant, nor are their stances on breaking up big banks, carbon taxes, serious gun control, or reparations for slavery.

How they talk about these aspirational issues can tell us something about their priorities, of course. But in practice, they are going to be hemmed in to the point that circumstances, more than priorities, will dictate opportunities.

Success, then, will come from seizing those opportunities when they arise, and making the most of them. It will come from understanding and manipulating the levers of the bureaucracy, from being ruthless about taking incremental wins wherever they can be found, from taking the long view and not overreacting to the hysterical, endless fluctuations in elite DC opinion.

These are dark arts. It's difficult to predict who might master them.

Clinton seems more likely to forfeit opportunities through an overabundance of caution. Sanders seems more likely to forfeit them through cluelessness about how to run a giant administrative bureaucracy.

Clinton seems more likely to appoint establishment-friendly figures to run her government and cautious centrists to the bench. Sanders seems more likely to get mired in endless, energy-sapping confirmation battles.

Clinton seems more likely to surround herself with a bubble of insiders. Sanders seems more likely to rely on a "political revolution" that is unlikely to endure once he takes office.

And to make matters more obscure for voters, neither is willing to talk about these things directly. Admitting that your presidency will mostly be a rearguard battle, a unilateral executive grind, is not attractive politics. It doesn't make for fun campaign rallies.

But these qualities matter far more, in concrete terms, than the boldness of the candidates' plans or the inspirational quality of their rhetoric.

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Even though idealistic Democratic primary voters may not want to hear it, when it comes to domestic policy, the Democratic contest is about who will be best at securing Obama's accomplishments against Republican attack, exploiting incremental advances when they become possible, and manipulating the personalities and power centers inside Washington.

It's about who will be the best grinder. That's not the job the candidates, the media, and the public are talking about, but it's the job Democrats are hiring a president to do.

The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.

Yes, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in his seventh year in office. Yes, Republicans can't find a credible candidate to so much as run for speaker of the House. Yes, the GOP presidential field is led by a megalomaniacal reality TV star. All this is true — but rather than lay the foundation for enduring Democratic success, all it's done is breed a wrongheaded atmosphere of complacence.

The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won't lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.

Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren't even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don't even admit that they exist.

Instead, the party is focused on a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over whether they should go a little bit to Obama's left or a lot to his left, options that are unlikely to help Democrats down-ballot in the face of an unfriendly House map and a more conservative midterm electorate. The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor.

VIDEO: Democrats list their biggest enemies

Democrats have been obliterated at the state level

The worst part of the problem for the Democratic Party is in races that are, collectively, the most important: state government.

Elections for state legislature rarely make the national news, but they are the fundamental building blocks of American politics. Since they run the redistricting process for the US House of Representatives and for themselves, they are where the greatest level of electoral entrenchment is possible.

And in the wake of the 2014 midterms, Republicans have overwhelming dominance of America's state legislatures.

In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.

Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:

• An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
• The spread of union-hostile "right to work" laws into the Great Lakes states
• New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
• Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats

Admittedly, one of the Democrats' seven states is California, which contains more than 10 percent of the nation's total population. But Texas and Florida combine for more people than the Golden State, and the GOP also dominates Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina — all of which are among the 10 largest states by population. Democrats' largest non-California bastion of unified control is Oregon, home to only about one percent of the American people.*

As of 2012 or so, Democrats thought they had a solution to this. Hard-right GOP governors in places like Wisconsin and Florida had become unpopular and were clearly overreaching — reading a wave driven by the poor economy in 2010 as an ideological mandate for sweeping conservative policy change. And that worked in Pennsylvania's 2014 gubernatorial election — Tom Wolf rode a backlash against then-Gov. Tom Corbett's hard-right policies to victory. But Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, and even Maine's Paul LePage were all reelected. And while the old plan didn't pan out, no new one has risen to take its place.

The GOP is flexible

Liberals accustomed to chuckling over the ideological rigor of the House GOP caucus won't want to hear this, but one of the foundations of the GOP's broad national success is a reasonable degree of ideological flexibility.

Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don't want to pay taxes and business owners who don't want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance.

Democrats, of course, are conceptually aware of the possibility of nominating unusually conservative candidates to run in unusually conservative states. But there is a fundamental mismatch. No US state is so left-wing as to have created an environment in which business interests are economically or politically irrelevant. Vermont is not North Korea, in other words.

But there are many states in which labor unions are neither large nor powerful and non-labor national progressive donor networks are inherently populated by relatively affluent people who tend to be emotionally driven by progressive commitments on social or environmental issues. This is why an impassioned defense of the legality of late-term abortions could make Wendy Davis a viral sensation, a national media star, and someone capable of activating the kind of donor and volunteer networks needed to mount a statewide campaign. Unfortunately for Democrats, however, this is precisely the wrong issue profile to try to win statewide elections in conservative states.

Republicans have a plan

Any serious article about the prospects for Democratic Party policymaking in 2017 starts with the premise that Republicans will continue to hold a majority in the US House of Representatives. This presumption is built on four premises:

1. The natural distribution of population in the United States tends to lead the average House district to be more GOP-friendly than the overall population.
2. GOP control of most state legislatures lets Republicans draw boundaries in a way that is even more GOP-friendly than the natural population distribution would suggest.
3. Incumbents have large advantages in House elections, and most incumbents are Republicans.
4. So-called "wave" elections in which tons of incumbents lose are typically driven by a backlash against the incumbent president. Since the incumbent president is a Democrat, Democrats have no way to set up a wave.

One striking fact about this is that the presumption of continued GOP control is so solid that you don't even get pushback from House Democratic leaders when you write it down. Privately, some backbench Democrats express frustration that the leadership has no plan to try to recapture the majority. In their defense, it's not like anyone outside the leadership has a great plan either.

But this isn't just a parochial issue for the House Democratic caucus. It means that the party's legislative agenda is entirely dead on arrival at the federal level. And it's particularly striking that this stronghold of conservatism comes from the exact institution that so frequently generates embarrassing headlines for the GOP. House Republicans act extreme in part because they know they can get away with it.

The GOP, by contrast, has basically two perfectly plausible plans for moving its agenda forward. One is to basically change nothing and just hope for slightly better luck from the economic fundamentals or in terms of Democratic Party scandals. The other is to shift left on immigration and gain some Latino votes while retaining the core of the party's commitments. Neither of these plans is exactly brilliant, innovative, or foolproof. But neither one is crazy. Even if you believe that Democrats have obtained a structural advantage in presidential elections, it's clearly not an enormous one. The 51 percent of the vote obtained by Barack Obama in 2012 was hardly a landslide, early head-to-head polling of 2016 indicates a close race, and there's always a chance that unexpected bad news will hit the US economy or impair our national security.

Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.

VIDEO: Democrats on the biggest threat to national security

The first step for Democrats is admitting they have a problem

In some ways, the Democrats' biggest disadvantage is simply their current smugness. A party that controls such a small share of elected offices around the country is a party that should be engaged in vigorous debate about how to improve its fortunes. Much of the current Republican infighting — embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times — reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it.

On the Democratic side, the personal political success of Barack Obama has created an atmosphere of complacency and overconfidence. If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions — embracing same-sex marriage, rediscovering enthusiasm for gun control, rejecting the January 2013 income tax rate settlement as inadequate, raising its minimum wage aspirations to the $12-to-$15 range, abandoning the quest for a grand bargain on balancing the budget while proposing new entitlements for child care and parental leave — even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.

Whatever you make of this agenda substantively, there's no way to actually enact it without first achieving a considerably higher level of down-ballot electoral success than Democrats currently enjoy.

But instead of a dialogue about how to obtain that success, Democrats are currently engaged in a slightly bizarre bidding war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to see whether Congress in 2017 will reject a legislative agenda that is somewhat to the left of Obama's or drastically to its left. The differences between them are real, of course, and at least somewhat important.

But the much more significant question facing the party isn't about the White House — it's about all the other offices in the land. The problem is that control of the presidency seems to have blinded progressive activists to the possibility of even having an argument about what to do about all of them. That will change if and when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out. But the truly striking thing is how close to bottom the party is already and how blind it seems to be to that fact.

* Correction: Earlier versions of this article said that Minnesota or Washington was the biggest non-California Democratic-controlled state, but in fact the Republicans control one legislative house in both of those states.

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Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan’s forthcoming piece on the ‘superiority of economists’ is a lovely, albeit quietly snarky, take on the hidden structures of the economics profession. It provides good evidence that e.g. economics hiring practices, rather than being market driven are more like an intensely hierarchical kinship structure, that the profession is ridden with irrational rituals, and that key economic journals are apparently rather clubbier than one might have expected in a free and competitive market (the University of Chicago’s Quarterly Journal of Economics Journal of Political Economy gives nearly 10% of its pages to University of Chicago affiliated scholars; perhaps its editors believe that this situation of apparent collusion will be naturally corrected by market forces over time). What appears to economists as an intense meritocracy (as Paul Krugman acknowledges in a nice self-reflective piece) is plausibly also, or alternately, a social construct built on self-perpetuating power relations.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of economists are reading the piece (we’re all monkeys, fascinated with our reflections in the mirror). Equally unsurprisingly, many of them (including some very smart ones) don’t really get Fourcade et al’s argument, which is a Bourdieuian one about how a field, and relations of authority and power within and around that field get constructed. As Fourcade has noted in previous work, economists’ dominance has led other fields either to construct themselves in opposition to economics (economic sociology) or in supplication to it (some versions of rational choice political science). Economists have been able to ignore these rivals or to assimilate their tributes, as seems most convenient. As the new paper notes, the story of economists’ domination is told by citation patterns (the satisfaction that other social scientists can take from economists having done unto them as they have done unto others, is unfortunately of limited consolation). Yet if you’re an economist, this is invisible. Your dominance appears to be the product of natural superiority.

E.g., this post by Noah Smith (who I like lots, but who is being very, very, economisty here). This bit – “A lot of academic disciplines look down on other disciplines—that’s part of the fun of academia” misses the point spectacularly in a very Raj-official-in-India kind of way. And while it’s true that many sociologists have a complex about economics, the tacit imperialism is compounded by this claim:

As for economists’ “influence over the economy,” I am going to take a wild guess and say that it isn’t because of their arrogance or hierarchical insularity or “sense of authority and entitlement.” It’s probably because…drumroll…economics is the discipline that studies the economy. If politicians want to know how to reduce cancer rates, they should go to a biologist. If they want to know how to shoot missiles at Vladimir Putin, they should go to a physicist. If they want to know how to boost productivity at U.S. companies, or increase employment, or auction off broadcast spectrum rights, whom should they ask for advice? A sociologist?

Heaven forfend! After all, it’s not as if there’s a large grouping in sociology devoted specifically to the study of the economy or anything. And if there were such a peculiar tribe of sociologists, economists would surely know all about them!

More broadly, Noah argues that the reason that academic economists make more money is econ 101 – they have skills which are objectively more valuable in the outside marketplace, and hence exit options.

why do economists have the option to go work in consulting and finance? The answer is simple: They have the technical skills to do so. I’m not talking about fancy math. No one hires you to do real analysis—that’s just something economists learn as an IQ test, then never use. If financial companies need someone to do serious math, they will hire a mathematician or a physicist. As for the general equilibrium models that macroeconomists call “math,” well…no one uses those for anything except publishing macroeconomics papers. The technical skill I am talking about is statistics. Economists learn a lot of statistics—much more than anyone else except for applied mathematicians and statisticians. There is a whole branch of economics, known as econometrics, dedicated to statistics. Most of the empirical work that economists do is applied statistics. Statistics is hugely valuable in the real world.

But as Arindrajit Dube points out, statisticians get paid less than economists. Perhaps it’s different when you look at statistics professors versus economics professors, but I doubt it – this data at least indicates that mathematics and statistics professors, on average, earn less money than social scientists, on average. I would guess (and am open to contradiction if wrong) that statisticians’ salaries in the academy are indeed more like sociologists than like economists (and while I’m on the topic, I dunno whether Noah ever cracks open sociology journals, but if he does, he’ll find plenty of statistical work, including work from people whose mathematical chops are unquestionable)

While I’ve no doubt that that external markets do play a role, I don’t think that it’s nearly as much of a role as Noah suggests. Instead, I suspect that much of the assumed authority of economists (just like the authority, in certain policy roles, of international relations scholars like myself), is socially constructed. Expertise is not just a matter of raw talent, whether mathematical or otherwise. It’s a matter of legitimation – of being anointed with the proper sacraments associated with publicly acknowledged expertise in a particular topic. And that is, unquestionably the product of a certain kind of politics, a kind of politics that sociologists have a lot of experience in studying.

One especially unfortunate aspect of economics is that its penchant for just-so stories can reinforce its imperialist blindnesses. If you’ve been trained systematically to look for examples of market efficiency winning out, you’ll likely be inclined to treat your own, and your discipline’s success as examples of market efficiency in action. George Mason University law school’s Moneybollocks mythology provides one cautionary tale as to how this can lead one to systematically overlook the role of politics in determining who wins and who loses.

The underlying point of the Fourcade et al. article is that politics and power play a far larger role in determining both the success of economics and the success of economics than economists are prepared to admit in public. Or, more succinctly, sociology provides a much better account of economics’ success than economics itself does. Obviously, that’s a claim that’s going to be uncongenial to economists, as well as one that many economists will have difficulty in absorbing (they usually aren’t trained to think in that way). If they were better versed in sociology, and also somewhat paranoid, they might want to treat the piece as a meta-Bourdieuian Trojan horse, that inherently elevates sociology at the expense of economics (although these imaginary well-read paranoid economists would still somehow have to deal with Fourcade’s previous work, which has tacitly rebuked economic sociology for its obsession with disproving economics). But the point would still remain – that the internal structures of economics, as well as its external influence, are very far indeed from a free market.

Update: Cosma Shalizi sends links to salary figures for statisticians and economists in the academy. As he notes, “from a quick comparison, academic economists make substantially more, at every level of rank and every level of university, than do academic statisticians.”

The other day at OrgTheory, Beth Berman had a very nice discussion on “inequality in the skies” about how much of space on planes is given over to different classes of passenger. Using seating charts, she calculated some rough Gini coefficients of inequality on board. For example, on a transatlantic flight in a three-class configuration with fancy lie-flat beds up front,

if we look again at how the space is distributed, we now have 21% of the people using about 40% of the plane, 27% using another 20%, and the final 52% using the last 40%. The Gini index has now increased, to 25.

She also noted in passing that, as unequal as that is, it’s “still nowhere near the inequality of the U.S., or the world.” I found myself wondering what a plane with seating laid out on the basis of the U.S. income distribution would look like. So, following Beth’s lead, I decided to get into the aviation business and launch Air Gini, America’s most American airline.

To begin, for context, here’s a regular old Airbus A330-300 in a three class configuration often seen on international flights. It has First, Business, and Economy Class cabins.

A plane with this layout carries two hundred and twenty seven passengers. There are one hundred and seventy seven lucky duckies in Economy, forty two in Business, and eight in First Class. As Beth did, we can see that the seventy eight percent of passengers in Economy get about fifty eight percent of the seating space on the plane. Business Class passengers get just over thirty one percent of the room, and First Class passengers get about eleven percent of the space. Perhaps you’ve flown Economy on a flight like this. As you boarded, maybe you walked past the Business Class seats, and you might also have caught a quick glimpse of the First Class seats way up front. So you have a sense of how much space different passengers have.

How does Air Gini improve on this arrangement? Those eight First Class passengers are about three and a half percent of the plane’s population; the Business Class group is eighteen and a half percent; and the remaining seventy eight percent of this little society are in Economy. So, what if the space on the plane was allocated in proportion to the share of total income earned by each class? With a bit of help from the Census Bureau, Emmanuel Saez, and the Federal Aviation Authority, Air Gini is proud to bring you the future of air travel:

In Air Gini’s three-class layout, some things look familiar and some things are a bit different. Economy Class makes up just under eighty percent of the passengers. Passengers seated there correspond to everyone who makes less than about $97,000 a year. Their share of total income in the US is just below fifty percent, and thus so is their share of the seating space. On the regular airline it was about fifty eight percent, so for these working stiffs the new arrangement is even more cramped than on our ordinary international flight. Economy Class passengers on Air Gini should expect less overhead bin space and more passive-aggressive interactions with the guy in front of them who insists on reclining his seat.

Up with the managers, meanwhile, things have become more compressed, too. Business Class travelers are just over eighteen percent of passengers, but now they get only fifteen percent of the space. That’s obviously still much better than Economy class, but it’s down from the thirty percent or so they had in the original plane. These fliers are almost all in the top quintile: in real-life terms, they correspond to everyone from just below the 80th percentile of the US income distribution up to just above the 96th percentile. Roughly, that’s households making between $97,000 and $280,000 a year. Yet many of them feel a little angry about how little space they have. Strange though it seems, some of those in the seats closest to the front of their section even feel somewhat poor—at least by comparison to those a bit further up the plane. Air Gini understands their situation and compensates them with a complimentary in-flight snack.

What has happened to make Business Class more cramped? The answer is to be found in Ruling Class. Sorry, I mean, First Class. On Air Gini, those eight most-valued passengers—three and a half percent of those on board—get thirty five percent of the available seating space. That’s a lot of legroom. So much, in fact, that as First Class passengers have spread out to take up the first third of the plane, Air Gini has been forced to replace the luxurious Business Class seats in the real-life configuration with still-comfortable but noticeably smaller chairs.

Not to worry, though. Air Gini’s eight First Class passengers can really enjoy themselves, which is the important thing. And yet, even here at the head of the aircraft, Air Gini’s layout hints that inequality may extend all the way up to the flight deck. Two of the first class seats are close to the front of Business Class, and behind a bulkhead. Awkward. Those passengers make about $300,000 a year. The passenger in the very front row, meanwhile, makes a hell of a lot more than that and has even more room to relax in than his peers. All things considered, you have to wonder exactly who is flying this plane—and more importantly, perhaps, who owns it.

The US Postal Service does a staggering amount of work, when you sit down and really think about it: it delivers 158 billion pieces of mail per year, the vast majority of them on time. And it also has some staggering financial problems: the GAO reported earlier this year that the USPS has $100 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities related to retirees' pensions and health benefits.

All of those troubles have a lot to do with digital communications — it's quicker to send Grandma an email or even a text than a card — but there are plenty of other moving parts. Here are 9 charts that explain what's going on with the US Postal Service.

1) The westward spread of postal service

The US post office underwent some fantastic growth in its early years. In this video from data visualization pro Derek Watkins, you can watch the post office grow from 75 offices in 1789 to nearly 77,000 in 1900. The number of offices would peak in 1901, at 76,945, then start to decline after that with the advent of rural free delivery, which eliminated the need for many offices.

So while the USPS closes post offices today due to shrinking revenues and postal service usage, the decline in post offices has been going on for a century. As of 2013, the total number of post offices stood at 26,670. Since 2012, the postal service has closed 141 facilities as part of a cost-cutting strategy it calls a "network rationalization plan." While the USPS had planned on cutting more than 3,600 offices as of 2011, it eventually decided to instead slash hours at rural offices.

2) The fast death of your friendly neighborhood mailman

Source: USPS

Of course, as the USPS grew, so did its ranks of employees. The number of workers skyrocketed as the population (and therefore number of customers) likewise grew, but in the last decade the postal service has aggressively cut back on workers. Today, there are just under 500,000 workers, down by around 300,000 from the nearly 800,000 there were in 1999.

The postal service has been cutting its workforce through attrition — simply not hiring people to replace its retiring workers, as Government Executive reports — and is also offering buyouts to some postmasters, hoping they'll retire early. But the agency could cut some of those workers through layoffs, if they do not accept buyouts or get other postal jobs. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has said he wants ultimately to shrink the workforce down to 400,000 workers by 2017.

3) The check is not in the mail

Starting in 1886, the first year for which continuous data starts to be available (though data doesn't exist for most of 1914-1925), the amount of mail the USPS handled took off, growing exponentially until around 2000. But then email and online bill pay helped drag mail volume down sharply starting in the mid-2000s.

4) Lots of work for far fewer workers

The number of postal workers may be shrinking, but the efficiency of the USPS has grown relatively steadily since 1926. Today, the USPS is handling nearly 325,000 pieces of mail per worker, compared to around 104,000 in 1926. And the trend is still upward, so even as the postal service has shrunk in the last few years, it has grown more efficient by this measure.

5) The ever-rising (but really quite stable) cost of postage

(U.S. News & World Report)

The USPS (through Congress) keeps ramping up the cost of postage, and with each hike, there is some degree of backlash. But when you adjust it for inflation, the cost of postage has been relatively stable since the 1980s and is in fact cheap today compared to the mid-1970s. The above chart from 2013 shows how much today's 49-cent stamp (then the "proposed" rate) would cost in comparison to the past. While it continued the upswing in the cost to send a first-class letter, it really didn't raise prices out of the ordinary.

6) Revenues vs. expenses

Starting in 1971, the USPS stopped receiving taxpayer dollars and became an independent agency of the US government. And in the last decade or so, the USPS's finances have gone from the black to the red. In 2012, the postal service lost a record $16 billion.

The internet certainly helped kill postal revenues, but the question of whether the USPS should have to undertake the costly step of prefunding retirement benefits is very controversial (see chart 8 for more). Congress in 2006 passed a law mandating that the USPS prefund pensions and health benefits for its retirees. The postal service and many of its supporters argue that it's silly to require the USPS to do this — no other government agency is required to do so, nor is any business. But proponents say it's necessary to keep taxpayers from eventually having to bail out the postal service.

What all of this really highlights is the odd no-man's-land that the USPS occupies, somewhere between being a business and a government entity. Congress has made it "independent" but still maintains heavy control over it. For example, Congress has nixed USPS plans to cut costs by cutting Saturday delivery. But then as the USPS cuts costs other ways and shrinks, it reduces service to many Americans, like those in rural areas. That raises the question of what sort of a postal service Americans have a right to.

7) Packages are helping the USPS stay afloat

The postal service isn't hurting on all fronts; in fact, its package business has been one bright spot for the agency. According to data from the USPS's 2013 annual report, package revenue grew by around 8 percent from 2012 to 2013. Partnerships with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS all are helping the USPS keep its parcel business thriving.

But it will take a lot of Amazon and eBay purchases to solve the postal service's fiscal problems. As the Wall Street Journal's Laura Stevens reported earlier this year, the postal service was designed for letters, not packages. First-class mail is simply more profitable than packages; currently, it takes around $3 in package revenue to make up for $1 in lost first-class letter revenue.

8) Prefunding retirements

(Government Accountability Office)

The US Postal Service has long railed against the requirement that it prefund employees' pensions and health benefits. This chart shows exactly how big those liabilities are (i.e., huge). As of 2013, the postal service owed nearly 1.5 times its annual revenues in retiree benefit funding.

9) Postal banking

(USPS Inspector General)

One plan the USPS has to boost its income is postal banking. In a proposal released earlier this year, the USPS inspector general pointed out that around one-quarter of all Americans are unbanked or underbanked — that is, they either have little or no access to financial tools like bank accounts or loans. That's a huge potential customer base, and the plan could benefit both the post office and poor Americans who rely on expensive payday loans. The above chart is an example from the proposal of what loans from a post office would look like — i.e., much less predatory than those from a payday lender.

One of the most longstanding hopes (on the left) and fears (on the right) about democratic politics is that voters of modest means will use their electoral weight to level the economic playing field. In a market economy, the median voter's income will invariably be below the national average creating an apparently compelling opportunity for a politics of redistribution. This makes the sustained increase in income inequality in the United States and other developed countries a bit of a puzzle. One common suggestion, offered recently by Eduardo Porter in The New York Times, is ignorance. Voters "don't grasp how deep inequality is."

But while Americans understanding of economic trends is certainly imperfect, the data suggest that the broad trends are known to the population. Nathan Kelly and Peter Enns, for instance, find that when asked to compare the ratio of the highest paid occupation and the lowest, Americans at the bottom of the income distribution do believe inequality is high and rising. In 1987, Americans as reported that the highest-paid occupation took home 20 times what the lowest paid occupation did - by 2000, they thought the gap had grown to 74 times.

A recent Pew survey finds that 65% of adults agree that the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased in the past 10 years, only 8% say it has decreased. A Gallup poll from earlier this year suggests that 67% of Americans report that they are either "somewhat" or "very" dissatisfied with the income and wealth distribution in the U.S.

If ignorance doesn't explain inaction, what does? These five factors are the most important culprits:

1) Upward mobility

(Sean McElwee, data from Engelhardt & Wagner)

According to research from Carina Engelhardt and Andreas Wagner, around the world people overestimate the level of upward mobility in their society.

They find that redistribution is lower the when actual social mobility is but also lower where perceived mobility is higher. Even if voters perceive the level of inequality correctly, their tendency to overstate the level of mobility can undermine support for redistribution. In another study Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara find that, Americans who believe that American society offers equal opportunity (a mythology) are more likely to oppose redistribution. Using data from 33 democracies, Elvire Guillaud finds that those who believe they have experienced downward mobility in the past decade are  32% more likely to support redistribution. A relatively strong literature now supports this thesis.

2) Inequality undermines solidarity

Enns and Kelly find, rather counterintuitively, that when "inequality in America rises, the public responds with increased conservative sentiment." That is, higher inequality leads to less demand for redistribution. This is perhaps because as society becomes less equal, its members have less in common and find it less congenial to act in solidarity. Bo Rothstein and Eric Uslaner argue that, "the best policy response to growing inequality is to enact universalistic social welfare programs. However, the social strains stemming from increased inequality make it almost impossible to enact such policies."

As inequality increases, the winner-take-all economy leads voters try to look out for their own children. The period during which overall inequality has risen has seen a massive increase in more affluent families' spending on enrichment for their own children.

(Sean McElwee, data from Lars Osberg)

Chris Dillow points to research by Klaus Abbink, David Masclet and Daniel Mirza who find in social science experiments that disadvantaged groups are more likely to sacrifice their wealth to reduce the wealth of the advantaged group when inequality was lower than when it was higher. Kris-Stella Trump finds that rising inequality perpetuates itself, noting that, "Public ideas of what constitutes fair income inequality are influenced by actual inequality: when inequality changes, opinions regarding what is acceptable change in the same direction."

3) Political misrepresentation

Ideological factors can't tell the whole story. Many Americans support redistributive programs like the minimum wage and support for the idea that hard work leads to success has plummeted in the last decade. A further important reason for the lack of political response to inequality relates to the structure of American political institutions, which fail to translate the desires of less-advantaged Americans for more redistribution into actual policy change. Support for this thesis comes from many corners of the political science field, including Martin Gilens, Dorian Warren, Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kay Lehman Schlozman. Research by five political scientists finds that status quo bias of America's often-gridlocked congress serves to entrench inequality.

More simply, lower-income Americans tend to vote at a lower rate. William Franko, Nathan Kelly and Christopher Witko find that states with lower turnout inequality also have lower income inequality. Elsewhere, Franko finds that states with wider turnout gaps between the rich and poor are less likely to pass minimum-wage increases, have weaker anti-predatory-lending policies and have less generous health insurance programs for children in low-income families. Kim Hill, Jan Leighley and Angela Hilton-Andersson find, "an enduring relationship between the degree of mobilization of lower-class voters and the generosity of welfare benefits." Worryingly, Frederick Solt finds that, "citizens of states with greater income inequality are less likely to vote and that income inequality increases income bias in the electorate." That is, as inequality increases, the poor are less likely to turn out, further exacerbating inequality.

4) Interest-group politics

The decline of labor unions has decreased the political importance of poor voters, because unions were an important "get-out-the-vote" machine. A recent study by Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler finds that the decline in union strength has reduced low-income and middle-income turnout. But labor's influence (or lack thereof) is also important when the voting is done. Research finds that policy outcomes in the United States are heavily mediated by lobbying between interest groups, so organization matters.

Martin Gilens writes, "Given the fact that most Americans have little independent influence on policy outcomes, interest groups like unions may be the only way to forward their economic interests and preference." His research indicates that unions regularly lobby in favor of policies broadly supported by Americans across the income spectrum, in contrast to business groups, which lobby in favor of policies only supported by the wealthy.

(Sean McElwee, data from Martin Gilens)

It's no surprise then that numerous studies have linked the decline in union membership and influence with rising inequality.

5) Racial conflict

A recent study by Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson finds that when white Americans are reminded that the nation is becoming more diverse, they become more conservative. Dog-whistle phrases like "welfare queens" have long driven whites to oppose social safety net programs they disproportionately benefit from. Research from Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam indicates that racial bias among white voters is strongly correlated with hostility toward means-tested social assistance programs. Another study by Steven Beckman and Buhong Zhen finds that blacks are more likely to support redistribution even if their incomes are far above average and that poor whites are more likely to oppose redistribution.

In other words, a massive public education campaign about the extent of income inequality is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve the kind of redistributive policies liberals favor. The real obstacles to policy action on inequality are more deeply ingrained in the structure of American politics, demographics, and interest group coalitions. Insofar as there is a role for better information to play, it likely relates not to inequality but to social mobility which remains widely misperceived and is a potent driver of feelings about the justice of economic policy. As John Steinbeck noted, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Stronger unions, more lower income voter turnout and policies to reduce the corrupting influence of money on the political process would all work to reduce inequality. It will take political mobilization, not simply voter education to achieve change. The wonks have interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.

On return from a long spell away from the Internet, I was going to recommend that you read Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Hillary Clinton, and not just the setup but the transcript as a whole. But such a recommendation is hardly necessary, since for several days the interview has been making news worldwide.

There are two ways to think about the political and policy implications of Hillary Clinton’s deciding to say what she did, during this strange limbo period when she is clearly preparing to run for president but has more to lose than gain by officially saying so.

• One approach would be to think that we’re primarily witnessing a media event—journalists doing what journalists do. It's in our nature as reporters, even when representing an institution as august as a 157-year-old magazine, to highlight what has changed rather than what’s constant, what is controversial rather than what’s agreed on, the one juicy, taken-in-isolation sentence that will make people stop and say, Did you see that? And it is in nature of the political commentariat to seize on any sign of rancor or big-shot melodrama.

Therefore if our Atlantic site runs a headline suggesting that Hillary Clinton is all but blaming Barack Obama for the ISIS/ISIL  menace (“Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS”), or if we emphasize the few places where she departed from his policy rather than the many more where she supported it, maybe we’re just revealing the way we journalists think. When politicians start complaining that some comment was “taken out of context,” this is the point they’re trying to make. And in fairness, anyone who reads the whole transcript will find that the tabloid version of her comments—weakling Obama lost Syria!—is cushioned in qualifiers and complexities.

If this is the way the Clinton camp feels about our presentation of the interview, they are perfectly well versed in all the the formal and informal ways of getting that message across. Indeed, just this afternoon, a little while after I started typing this item (but several days after the interview ran), the first such indication appeared, in a "no criticism intended" story via Politico. 

•  The other approach is to think that Hillary Clinton, as experienced a figure as we now have on the national scene, knew exactly what she was saying, and conveyed to an interviewer as experienced as Goldberg exactly the impression she intended to—including letting the impression sink in through several days' worth of op-ed and talk-show news cycles before beginning to offset it with an "out of context" claim. 

That impression is a faux-respectful but pointed dismissal of Obama's achievements and underlying thought-patterns. It's a picture of the president approximating that of a Maureen Dowd column. It also introduces into Democratic party discourse the “Who (re-)lost Iraq?” “Who lost Syria?” “Who lost Iran?” and “Who is losing the world?” queries that the Republicans are perpetually ready to serve up. All this is presumably in preparation for Clinton's distancing herself from a "weak" Obama when she starts running in earnest to succeed him.

If the former interpretation is right, Clinton is rustier at dealing with the press than we assumed. Rustier in taking care with what she says, rustier in taking several days before countering a (presumably) undesired interpretation.

I hope she's just rusty. Because if she intended this, my heart sinks. 

It sinks for her, that she thought this would make her sound tough or wise; it sinks for the Democratic Party, that this is the future foreign policy choice it’s getting; and it sinks for the country, if this is the way we’re going to be talked to about our options in dealings with the world.

The easiest and least useful stance when it comes to foreign policy is: Situation X is terrible, we have to do something. Or its cousin: Situation X is terrible, you should have done something. Pointing out terribleness around the world is not even half of the necessary thought-work in foreign policy. The harder and more important part—what constitutes actual statesmanship—is considering exactly which “something” you would do; and why that exact something would make conditions better rather than worse; and what Pandora’s box you might be opening; and how the results of your something will look a year from now, or a decade, when the terribleness of this moment has passed. 

E.g.: Yeah, we should have “done something” in Syria to prevent the rise of ISIS. But the U.S. did a hell of a lot of somethings in Iraq over the past decade, with a lot more leverage that it could possibly have had in Syria. And the result of the somethings in Iraq was … ? A long story in the NYT tells us that the current leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph himself, drew his political formation from America’s own efforts to “do something” in Iraq:

“He was a street thug when we picked him up in 2004,” said a Pentagon official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. “It’s hard to imagine we could have had a crystal ball then that would tell us he’d become head of ISIS.”

At every turn, Mr. Baghdadi’s rise has been shaped by the United States’ involvement in Iraq — most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action. And now he has forced a new chapter of that intervention, after ISIS’ military successes and brutal massacres of minorities in its advance prompted President Obama to order airstrikes in Iraq. 

Of course everyone including Clinton “knows” that you should only do something when it’s smart and not when it’s stupid. In her books and speeches, she is most impressive when showing commanding knowledge of the complexities and contradictions of negotiating with the Russians and Chinese, and why you can’t just “be tough” in dealings with them. In those specifics, she can sound like the description I just came across, in Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, about some pre-World War I Balkan leaders: “It is a characteristic of the most skillful politicians that they are capable of reasoning simultaneously at different levels of conditionality. [One Serbian figure] wanted peace, but he also believed—he never concealed it—that the final historical phase of Serbian expansion would in all probability not be achieved without war.” 

But in this interview—assuming it's not "out of context"—she is often making the broad, lazy "do something" points and avoiding the harder ones. She appears to disdain the president for exactly the kind of slogan—"don't do stupid shit"—that her husband would have been proud of for its apparent simplicity but potential breadth and depth. (Remember "It's the economy, stupid"?) Meanwhile she offers her own radically simplified view of the Middle East—Netanyahu right, others wrong—that is at odds with what she did in the State Department and what she would likely have to do in the White House. David Brooks was heartened by this possible preview of a Hillary Clinton administration's policy. I agree with Kevin Drum and John Cassidy, who were not. Also see Paul Waldman.

But really, go read the interview. Either way, the presumptive nominee has, under Jeffrey Goldberg's questioning, shown us something significant. 

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/two-ways-of-looking-at-the-hillary-clinton-interview/375906/

Do people know about social impact bonds? I hadn’t heard of them till recently. Since then, though, I’ve developed a train-wreck fascination. They have the potential to combine all the worst features of the public and private sectors. And they can be securitized, to boot!

Let’s take a step back. What is a social impact bond, anyway?

Well. Imagine you have a social problem you’d like to solve. Say that you want to reduce recidivism among young people in prison. That sounds good, right? The problem, of course, is that taxpayers don’t want to pay for rehabilitative programs, and there’s lots of disagreement about what kind of program would actually help solve the problem, anyway.

The government says, Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody would take care of this for us, and we’d only have to pay them if they actually succeeded?

Enter Goldman Sachs.

To oversimplify a bit, Goldman Sachs (or some other investor) puts up the money to implement the program for youth in prison. (This is a real example.) They provide the money to a social service agency that actually carries out the program. There’s a target that indicates success—let’s say, cutting recidivism by 10%. If the target is hit, Goldman gets paid back—with interest. 22% in this case, and Bloomberg Philanthropies is being nice enough to cover most of the potential loss. Yay, profit! But if the target isn’t met, Goldman doesn’t get paid back in full. Boo, losing money.

Sounds good, right? Goldman takes the risk, everyone has incentives to succeed, and taxpayers only have to pay for successful programs. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I can think of a couple of things.

First, social program success is difficult to measure and very game-able. When an investor has a large interest in hitting some narrowly defined “success” target and little or no inherent interest in the actual, long-term outcome, there are going to be efforts to game the system.

Think of law school deans trying to beat the rankings in ways both frank and fraudulent—and one assumes that they are not only in it for the money.

Or think privately funded charter schools where the investors only get payouts if test scores hit a certain target.

Or, closer to (Goldman’s) home, think ratings agencies who will lose important clients if they don’t come up with ways to produce favorable ratings on financial instruments.

Investors whose payout depends on hitting a number + social service agency whose revenues depend on demonstrating “success” = lots of potential for bad behavior.

Second, if social impact bonds catch on in any significant degree, they are going to end up creating all sorts of new groups who have a big interest in creating bonds and only a secondary interest in long-term social outcomes. The folks promoting these should be reading Josh Pacewicz’s excellent work on tax increment financing.

Tax increment financing is a now-common way of financing municipal economic development projects. It allows cities to sell bonds secured by the future increases in tax revenue that are expected to result from a development project. So the city borrows money for, say, waterfront development, and promises to pay it back with the tax revenues that it projects will come from the newly developed waterfront. But if the revenues don’t materialize, the city isn’t on the hook. Like social impact bonds, part of the appeal is that the risk is shifted away from the taxpayer.

The problem, though, is that cities have gone overboard with TIF. This means high debt levels and committing most of the tax revenues resulting from development to paying back the debt that made it possible.

According to Pacewicz, TIF didn’t take off because of huge investor demand for the debt. Its expansion was driven by a new group of economic development professionals who worked for cities. TIF gave these professionals influence because it made municipal finances more complex—to the point where they gained control over city budgets because no one else understood them.

These professionals are very aware that TIF is overused—that projections of tax revenue increases are too optimistic, that cities are taking on too much debt, and that many development projects are basically corporate welfare. And they regret it. But they advance in their careers by putting together big TIF projects. So they put together TIF projects, even when they think it’s bad for the city.

How does this apply to social impact bonds? Well, if SIBs take off, we can expect to see a new group of government professionals emerge whose job it is to create social impact bonds. And they, too, will most likely want to advance their careers by creating big, splashy SIBs. This could lead to the replacement of plain-vanilla government-provided social services with privately financed services, even if the latter cost more or involve more layers of bureaucracy than the original ones.

Finally, if you’re not convinced that social impact bonds will go very wrong in either of those ways, here’s the kicker. They can be securitized! Massachusetts is structuring its social impact bonds—also targeted at recidivism—like collateralized debt obligations, to expand the pool of potential investors by creating lower-risk tranches. What could possibly go wrong?

The killer is that this is really an initiative coming from the left. It’s Rockefeller-supported and championed by the Center for American Progress.

I have no doubt that many of the people involved—maybe even at Goldman—are genuinely and deeply motivated by a desire to find innovative solutions to social problems. (Okay, maybe not at Goldman.)

But this kind of solution reflects way too much faith in our ability to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful programs—which is absolutely key to the whole thing working. And it involves way too little cynicism about how hard it will be to create a structure that works the way it was intended, and does not simply become self-perpetuating, regardless of cost or degree of success, by creating lots of people who have an interest in keeping the thing rolling along.

It’s possible social impact bonds won’t go anywhere. One of the earliest recidivism experiments in the UK just announced that investors won’t be paid back yet, though they’re on track to be paid in two more years. And so far most of the actual support for SIBs has come from philanthropists, not private investors.

Nevertheless, SIBs have the flavor of the next big thing. They promise to encourage private capital to support innovation in publicly supported social services. What could be more broadly appealing?

If only people’s enthusiasm for evidence-based policy extended to policy innovations designed to promote evidence-based policy.

From Josh Barro:

One of the factors that keeps car theft going in the United States is the reliability of old Hondas.

Think about the advertising possibilities! Hondas are built so tough that thieves want them no matter how old they are. If you're wondering what this is all about, Barro is explaining why car thefts in New York City have declined by 96 percent over the past couple of decades. In a nutshell, the answer lies in high-tech ignitions:

The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car.

Criminals generally have not been able to circumvent the technology or make counterfeit keys....Instead, criminals have stuck to stealing older cars. You can see this in the pattern of thefts of America’s most stolen car, the Honda Accord. About 54,000 Accords were stolen in 2013, 84 percent of them from model years 1997 or earlier, according to data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau.

This has created a virtuous circle. Only old cars are vulnerable, and they aren't worth much. That makes it less lucrative to run illegal chop shops, which makes it harder for thieves to sell their cars. This in turn allows police forces to concentrate more resources on the small number of thefts (and chop shops) remaining.

In any case, it turns out that Hondas remain the most stolen cars in America because they're still worth something even if they were built before 1997. Looked at a certain way, that's a badge of pride. In another decade, though, even Hondas from the Seinfeld era won't be worth stealing. And that will put car thieves almost entirely out of business.

Rudy Kurniawan is a rare wine dealer who was convicted of defrauding his billionaire clients by pouring cheap wine into faked-up bottles and pawning them off as rare vintages. Yesterday he was sentenced to 10 years in prison despite his attorney's plea for leniency:

“Nobody died,” Mr. Mooney said. “Nobody lost their job. Nobody lost their savings.”

Judge Richard M. Berman interrupted him to ask, “Is the principle that if you’re rich, then the person who did the defrauding shouldn’t be punished?”

Stanley J. Okula Jr., a federal prosecutor, said it was “quite shocking” that Mr. Mooney was arguing for a different standard for those who have defrauded rich people. “Fraud is fraud,” he said. “There is no distinction in the guidelines, or in logic, for treating it differently.”

Quite right. As we all know, the law treats the rich and the poor equally. And the rich especially equally.

The Economist interviewed President Obama this week, and Clive Crook was discomfited by this snippet:

The Economist: We see a lot of business people and they do complain about regulation.

Mr Obama: They always complain about regulation. That’s their job....The business community does have broader responsibilities to the system as a whole. And although the general view today is that the only responsibility that a corporate CEO has is to his shareholders, I think the American people generally sense—

The Economist: Do you really think that's true? Because when I talk to corporate CEOs, that’s one of their complaints. If you ask for a complaint about the White House, they’ll say it is the attitude. Every CEO nowadays is involved in nine different social responsibility things—it’s ingrained in most public—

Mr Obama: Well, I think—here’s what’s interesting. There’s a huge gap between the professed values and visions of corporate CEOs and how their lobbyists operate in Washington. And I’ve said this to various CEOs. When they come and they have lunch with me—which they do more often than they probably care to admit (laughter)—and they’ll say, you know what, we really care about the environment, and we really care about education, and we really care about getting immigration reform done—then my challenge to them consistently is, is your lobbyist working as hard on those issues as he or she is on preserving that tax break that you’ve got? And if the answer is no, then you don’t care about it as much as you say.

Oddly, Crook is upset because he thinks this demonstrates that Obama is indeed anti-business, just as his critics claim. Here's what he has to say about that:

Interesting to see a politician accuse business people of insincerity. Even on the view that executives are entirely self-serving, by the way, you'd expect them to care a lot about education and immigration reform. Aside from that, how peculiar of Obama, pausing briefly from his busy schedule of political fund-raising, to criticize businesses for the effort they put into lobbying. If lobbying didn't work, businesses wouldn't do it. It works because politicians are receptive. That's their job.

Think about what we have here. The Economist interviewer is apparently taking at face value business complaints that they never get credit for the immense amount of social work they do. That's an odd bit of naiveté for a normally cynical business publication. Then Obama points out the obvious: what corporate CEOs say and what they do are rather different things. If you want to know what their real priorities are, take a look at what their lobbyists focus on.

Sensible enough, you'd think. But Crook doesn't agree. And here's the weirdest part: he thinks that it's somehow unfair of Obama to criticize business lobbying when, after all, it works. On this reading, the tidal wave of pseudo-bribery that lubricates Washington DC is beyond criticism precisely because politicians are so eager to accept all these pseudo-bribes. How can you be pro-business, and at the same time be critical of the endlessly parochial goals of corporate lobbying?

Those seem like perfectly compatible positions to me, so I don't really get this. Perhaps it gets to the difference between being pro-market and pro-business. These are rather different things, but they often get mushed together without much thought.

In any case, I have no doubt that Obama doesn't instinctively venerate the business community the way George Bush (or even Bill Clinton) did. Nevertheless, pointing out that most corporations aren't quite the social visionaries they claim to be is hardly evidence of anything other than a clear view of the world. After all, as Crook says, lobbying works. That being the case, surely Obama is right: if they really cared about the environment and education and so forth, they'd be mounting big lobbying operations and demanding that Republicans support them if they ever want to see another dime. But for the most part, they haven't. Money has spoken.

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber's off-the-cuff comments about Obamacare's subsidies are the exception that proves the rule: they're getting so much attention precisely because they're the only example where anyone even appears to believe that Congress, without telling anyone, decided to turn Obamacare into an absolute disaster by withholding subsidies from states that didn't set up their own insurance exchanges.

The result is perverse: in recent days, Gruber's comments are getting more attention than testimony from the Democratic and Republican congressional aides who wrote the bill. They're getting more attention than what the Congressional Budget Office (which Gruber advised) was told by Congress. They're getting more attention than the recollections of the very best reporters who covered Obamacare — notably Sarah Kliff and Julie Rovner. They're getting more attention than the debate in every state that chose to use a federal exchange. They're getting more attention than the way the Obama administration understood (and implemented) the law. They're getting more attention than the way the Supreme Court interpreted the law in 2012.

Gruber's comments aren't getting so much attention because anyone actually believes them

They're getting more attention, in fact, than everything else Gruber has ever said or written about the law. This is a guy who cared so deeply about Obamacare's success that he literally published a comic book about it. His most important contribution to the Obamacare debate — technical simulations used by HHS that modeled how many people would get insurance under different scenarios — always assumed subsidies reached into every state. No journalist who interviewed Gruber (myself included) ever heard him mention that states that don't set up exchanges don't receive subsidies. He himself says he never believed that and the off-the-cuff comments were "speak-os".

This is like uncovering tape of Michael Bay saying there's nothing he hates seeing more in a movie than an explosion. It requires us to throw out pretty much everything Gruber has done publicly and instead believe that he thought dozens of states would be implementing Obamacare without subsidies — a nightmare of a policy outcome that would have given him a nervous breakdown — but the only times he ever mentioned it were at two Q&A sessions in 2012.

Gruber's comments aren't getting so much attention because anyone actually believes them. They're getting so much attention because some people want other people to believe them.

The real Obamacare debate

Jon Gruber’s Obamacare comic book weirdly left out that Jon Gruber thought Obamacare dozens of states wouldn’t get subsidies. (Scan by Harold Pollack)

It would be much simpler if the argument about Obamacare could simply be about what it's actually about: some people believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a good law. Others believe it's a bad law and they would like to see it repealed.

The problem is that the people who believe it's a bad law haven't won the elections necessary to repeal it. So they've turned, in desperation, to the courts. But the Supreme Court doesn't strike laws down for being bad. It strikes them down for being unconstitutional, or incomprehensible. And that's forced Obamacare's critics to make some very weird and very weak arguments.

The Halbig challenge has led to one of those arguments. There's a version of this challenge that makes some sense. The argument is that Democrats, in their haste to pass the bill, worded a key sentence poorly. Congress's intent is perfectly clear in the law but the Supreme Court's five Republican appointees should rely on a "plain text" reading of the law as an excuse to gut the bill. (As is often the case in legal fights over politically polarized topics, opinions on the legal question are driven by opinions on the political question: I have yet to find anyone who believes the Supreme Court should rule for Halbig who doesn't also believe Obamacare should be repealed.)

This is less a serious theory about Obamacare than an attempt to pull off a Jedi mind trick.

But Obamacare's opponents don't feel very good about making that case. It sounds too much like winning by cheating. And what are conservatives who previously condemned "legislating from the bench" to say if the Supreme Court's five Republican appointees overrule Congress's clear intent so they can take health-insurance subsidies away from millions of people?

And so a stronger version of the Halbig claim has emerged: that Congress really did intend to withhold subsidies from states that didn't set up their own exchanges — they just didn't tell anybody or ever debate it, no journalists or health wonks found out about it during the legislative process, and no one involved in the writing of the bill thought to mention it while Obamacare was being implemented. This is less a serious theory about Obamacare than an attempt to pull off a Jedi mind trick.

This stronger version of Halbig was mostly ignored until Gruber's comments: his remarks are the first that even plausibly seem like they back this thesis, despite the fact that they're not reflected in any of Gruber's work and Gruber says he misspoke.

But then the point isn't that anyone actually believes the stronger version of the Halbig claim. Rather, there are a lot of people who believe Obamacare is a bad law, and right now, pretending to believe the more ridiculous version of Halbig seems like the most promising path to wounding it. And so here we are.

A story that has gotten weirdly little play in the US (I can’t speak for the UK press or the press in other countries) is the pushback by the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms against the democracy movement in Hong Kong. On July 1, over 100,000 people marched in protest against Chinese plans to curtail democracy in Hong Kong. But the Big Four had not only made it clear that they didn’t like the protests – they had threatened that business would pull out of Hong Kong if the protests continued.

The big four global accounting companies have taken out press advertisements in Hong Kong stating they are “opposed” to the territory’s democracy movement, warning that their multinational clients may quit the city if activists carry out threats to disrupt business with street protests. In an unusual joint statement published in three Chinese-language newspapers on Friday, the Hong Kong entities of EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC said the Occupy Central movement, which is calling for electoral reform in the former British colony, posed a threat to the territory’s rule of law.The group of pro-democracy activists is calling for 10,000 people to block traffic in the central business district as part of a campaign to put pressure on the Hong Kong government, although if and when this will happen is still under discussion. In the advert, the big four firms warned that protests would disrupt the Hong Kong stock exchange, banks and the headquarters of financial and professional services firms causing “inestimable losses in the economy”. It added that clients of the four firms had reflected further concerns about the wider impact of the protests: “We are worried that multinational companies and investors would consider moving their regional headquarters from Hong Kong, or indeed leave the city entirely. This would have a long-term impact on Hong Kong’s status as a global financial centre,” the joint statement said.

This is a quite remarkable initiative. It was published in Chinese rather than English – presumably both to speak more directly to potential protesters, and to make it less likely that it would seep into the English speaking press. According to one of the firms, it was pushed by local branches rather than the accountancy groups’ international management. Even if this is true, the statement is signed in the names of the firms and have not been publicly repudiated.

Of course, this isn’t the first shameful decision made by Western companies looking to build business in China – see Bloomberg’s squashing of a story on corruption among family members of senior Chinese leaders, or, for that matter, Rupert Murdoch’s instruction to Harper-Collins not to publish Chris Patten’s memoirs. But this goes substantially further than quiet acquiescence, to public and active opposition to the pro-democracy movement, and the issuing of threats intended to stifle it. It would be nice to see Ernst-Young, KPMG, Deloitte and Price-Waterhouse Cooper put on the spot by US politicians and journalists about their Hong Kong offices’ unrepudiated public statements opposing pro-democracy protestors.

Over at Scatterplot, Jeremy’s been writing about his life gamification experiment, which involves giving himself points for various activities he’d like to be doing more of. I find this sort of thing totally compelling and have to admit I’m now giving myself all sorts of points in my head. (Finish unpacking one box — 5 points! Send an email I’ve been procrastinating on — 5 points!) Although not in 100 million years could I get my husband to play along with me, even for brunch, of which he is fond.

Anyway, the game brought to mind this post from Stephen Wolfram, in which Wolfram presents a bunch of data from the last 25 years of his life. Here, for example, are all the emails he’s sent since 1989. (Note the sharp time shift in 2002, when he stopped being completely nocturnal.) He’s also got keystroke data, times of calendar events, time on the phone, and physical activity.

Fascinating to read about, but perhaps not terribly healthy to pursue in practice. Although in Wolfram’s case, it sounds like he was mostly just collecting the data, not using it to guide his day-to-day decisions. Others become more obsessive. I don’t know if David Sedaris has really been spending nine hours a day walking the English countryside, a slave to his Fitbit, or if he’s taking poetic license, but it’s a heck of an image.

Clearly there are a lot of people into this sort of thing. In fact, there is a whole Quantified Self movement, complete with conferences and meet-up groups. One obvious take on this is that we’re all becoming perfect neoliberal subjects, rational, entrepreneurial and self-disciplined.

For me, though, what is fun and appealing as a choice — and I do think it’s a choice — becomes repellent and dehumanizing when someone pushes it on me. So while I’ll happily track my work hours and tally my steps just because I like to — and yes, I realize that’s kind of weird — I hate the idea of judging tenure cases based on points for various kinds of publications, and am uneasy with UPS’s use of data to ding drivers who back up too frequently.

It’s possible that I’m being inconsistent here. But really, I think it’s authority I have the problem with, not quantification.

Paul Krugman was writing a bit last week about the enduring appeal of economically harmful hard money policies and whether there was some way you could tie to this to the class interests of the super-wealthy. I'm skeptical, largely because as you move into the further reaches of crankery you find plenty of hard-right monetary views that clearly make no sense.

For example, the new issue of The Weekly Standard has a piece urging the GOP to "Go Bold With Gold" as in the gold standard.

This idea pops up in right-of-center circles constantly, but it's a pure figment of ideological thinking totally devoid of upside to anyone at all. Here are 7 reasons it's a bad idea:

1) A gold standard wouldn't stabilize inflation

There is essentially one-to-one overlap between gold standard enthusiasts and people worried about inflation. But there is no reason to think that pegging the dollar to the price of gold would systematically stabilize prices.

As an example, above you will find the price of a barrel of oil measured in troy ounces of gold. You can see that gold does not have some magical property that causes this to be stable. Gold is just another commodity and using it as your currency offers no guarantee of protection against rising prices, especially of the kind of rising prices of staple commodities that most bother people.

2) A gold standard wouldn't stabilize exchange rates

One property of the classical gold standard that people are sometimes nostalgic for is that it prevented exchange rate fluctuations. But that's not because the United States dollar was backed by gold, it's because all major currencies had their value pegged to gold. It's the common pegging that's doing the work there, not the gold.

The argument that it would be better to ditch floating exchange rates and return to a system of fixed exchange rates would be interesting to make. But it has nothing to do with gold, and would constitute a massive regulatory intervention — not a step toward freer markets.

3) There's no inflation problem to cure

I whipped inflation with fiat money (Universal images)

The Standard spends considerable time dwelling on the fact that a return to gold was part of the original supply-side agenda of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But it doesn't consider the question of why it fell off the agenda. But the answer is pretty clear. In the 1970s, the collapse of the Bretton-Woods exchange rate regime was followed by a big burst of inflation. That led to a surge in thinking of ideas about how to curb that inflation. When Paul Volcker proved in 1980-82 that he was perfectly capable of ending inflation in the context of a fiat money system, people lost interest in novel inflation-fighting measures.

Then when Volcker's interest rate cuts led to a massive economic boom in 1984 and a landslide re-election for Ronald Reagan, most conservatives sensibly realized that there's a lot to love about countercyclical monetary policy. These days the inflation rate is very low — in the 1-2 percent range — so there's no inflation problem for gold to fix.

4) There's nothing stopping you from writing gold contracts

This could be you (Seth Anderson/Flickr)

Goldbugs sometimes profess to believe that the official inflation statistics are somehow rigged. But one of the pleasures of living in a free society is that you don't have to follow official statistics. Businesses could pay their workers in gold or gold-linked instruments. They could demand payment in the same. Workers could try to demand gold-denominated salaries. In practice, nobody does this. In part nobody does it because it would be a hassle. But people put up with lots of hassles for the sake of money — that's the whole premise of working for a living.

If it were actually the case that the Federal Reserve was systematically debasing the dollar in a way that could be easily avoided by pegging its value to gold, you would see people attempting to exploit this in their economic interactions. The fact that nobody is doing this is sending us a powerful message about the suitability of the Fiat Dollar as a currency.

5) Gold recessions could last for years

The recession associated with the 2007-2008 financial crisis lasted a long and painful 18 months. The recession that started in October 1873 during the heyday of the classical gold standard lasted a shocking 65 months. It was followed by a 38 month recession from March of 1882 to May of 1885. The Great Depression lasted 43 months, and only ended when the United States quit the gold standard and allowed itself to reflate the economy.

The Federal Reserve is a far-from-perfect manager of the economy, but it does a lot better than that.

6) The gold standard wouldn't eliminate political money

These guys ditched gold, and their successors could too (Universal Images Group)

One of the alleged virtues of the gold standard is that it would eliminate the discretion of politicians and their appointees over the value of money. This would only be true, however, if the United States adopted a gold standard that was somehow irrevocable. A mere law fixing the price of dollars in terms of gold would be subject to repeal and controversy just like any other law.

In the past, sticking with gold required the country to endure long grinding recessions that lasted for years on end. 19th Century politicians were willing to put up with that because they were genuinely uncertain of the consequences of various proposals to issue fiat money or silver-backed currency. Today, however, we know that fiat money works fine. So whatever concern you have about political manipulation of the money supply would not be addressed by shifting to gold — future leaders could always shift back.

7) Gold-backed money reduces the supply of gold

Scythian bling, first century AD (Heritage Images)

In the grand scheme of things, gold is not an especially useful commodity. But it's not totally useless either. People like gold jewelry, for starters, and gold has some limited industrial applications.

That means forcing banks to hold their reserves in terms of giant piles of physical gold would impose a cost on the real economy. Gold held in bank vaults is gold that is not available for industrial or decorative uses. This isn't a huge deal economically, but it's not nothing either. Fiat money, being totally useless outside the context of a monetary system, is an ideal thing for banks to hold in reserve. The government can always make as much of it as we want. By contrast, clashes between gold-as-money and gold-as-commodity are a drag on the economy and encourage wasteful expenditure of effort on smuggling.

The relationship between surveillance, big data and state power has been vociferously debated in both academic and popular press over the past several months (Boellerstoff 2013 and Crawford et al. 2014 among others). But what of instances where states leverage big data without an explicit surveillance focus? What kinds of questions should we be asking when big data appears in a project that doesn’t focus on, say, “security” (which we associate directly with surveillance) but on “welfare” or “development”? In this post, I explore this theme in the context of the ongoing Indian Unique Identification (UID) project (also known as “Aadhaar” or Foundation). The state-backed UID project wants to issue biometric-based identity numbers to all Indian residents, arguing that an ability to uniquely identity individuals is critical to the efficient administration of public welfare schemes. The biometric dataset that the UID is putting together towards its goal is already the largest of its kind in the world.

Speaking of Big Data

Enrollment agent at an enrollment center in a central Indian state
(Photo credit: Aditya Johri)

The UID project was initiated in 2009 and has three concurrent phases currently underway: (1) enrollment of individuals; (2) issuance of IDs; and (3) use of IDs to avail government and private services through authentication [1]. Targeted at a population of about 1.2 billion people, the UID project has issued 600 million+ identification numbers so far. In a world lately enamored by big data, a project of this scale has attracted attention and much hope, repeatedly being labeled a “game changer” for Indian governance.

Now, collecting data to make a population “legible” is not new in itself (Scott 1998, 2002). It has long been at the center of statecraft and states have traditionally sought to achieve such legibility along dimensions they needed to monitor in order to govern a territory: population census and land measurements, for e.g., facilitated military conscription and tax collection. Over time, the state’s ability to “see” its population became increasingly intertwined with its capacity to provide welfare benefits (Foucault 1978; Gupta 2013; Scott 1998, 2002). In the UID case, a further assumption is that only a “unique,” universal identity (rather than one that makes sense primarily in a local context) will allow for the efficient and just distribution of public services and welfare schemes. This rationale has been largely successful in making the collection of biometric and other details palatable and even acceptable to the political class and the Indian population at large. However, the UID project has its critics and they have pointed to a range of concerns with the design, goals and implementation of the project including the constitutional standing of the UID administration, privacy and security, and the high costs relative to the questionable benefits offered by the project (Khera 2011; Mukherjee 2011; Ramakumar 2011).

My own concern regarding the project goes further back, to the fundamental assumption that powers it: that access to information about a population can dramatically change the quality of government services offered to it, all else being equal. To me, this line of argument, now increasingly popular, feels uncomfortably close to technological determinism. I am going to term this belief – that access to information leads to certain predictable, largely positive, outcomes –“information determinism.”

A Case of Information Determinism?

What does information determinism look like for the UID and why should it matter? I would argue that it (a) attributes an intrinsic value to information, and in the process, (b) devalues the agency of actors and the social relations within which information circulates. Disregarding the role played by actors and relations is particularly important for a project of the scale and scope of the UID, whose design and implementation involved people in different social/geographical locations. The conception and design of the UID project happened in city offices in a relatively centralized fashion, while the enrollment phase of the project took place at over 30,000 enrollment stations all across urban and rural India, each station enrolling on average 50 people a day i.e. overall, a million enrollments a day on the field. (UIDAI 2014, 89). A 100,000+ trained and certified operators and supervisors conducted these enrollments. In a recent paper, we examined the enrollment phase of the project, focusing on what UID designers designed for, what enrollment agents encountered on the ground and what was left unaccounted for (Johri and Srinivasan 2014). We show that the focus on data is what aligns the often-separate goals and motivations of designers and enrollment agents towards a common goal. [2]

Project designers had anticipated the need for a balance between standardization and flexibility, given the diverse enrollment locations. In response, they put in place a number of measures to ensure an enrollment process that complied with minimum standards, while allowing for some customization based on local realities. For e.g., all enrollment agents had to complete a standard training module but were also required to be familiar with a specific region and its dialects.   

But, in spite of these attempts to factor in local realities, we found that Scott’s observations about projects aiming for legibility held: the enrollment process could not capture metis or practical, experiential, local knowledge. Most crucially, they did not account for people’s existing relations with the state, which significantly shaped why people enrolled, what procedures they expected to follow and what they expected of their UIDs. We found, for example, that residents queued up for hours to get these IDs because they had heard that having the ID would translate to freebies from the state and that not having one would block them from services (in spite of the fact that by law, the UID cannot be made mandatory for availing these services). Worried that they would be left behind, some attempted (unsuccessfully) to bribe enrollment agents to process their IDs.

Lining up in front of an enrollment center in a central Indian state
(Photo credit: Aditya Johri)

Meanwhile, the enrollment firm had already worked with the government in the region on other projects. As a consequence, it was able to use state buildings as enrollment centers, which would not have been possible without its contacts. Even access to electricity for the center was managed through the firm’s pre-existing networks. We argue in our paper that these past experiences influence how agents and residents relate to the UID enrollment process. The point here is not that the ID or the process should have captured all manner of relations of enrollees. Rather, I suggest that these can never be fully captured. And that is precisely why the availability of information cannot be said to determine governance outcomes. In ignoring these relations and their inherent politics in shaping governance outcomes, I argue, information determinism proves potentially dangerous.

Technological determinism has long concerned researchers studying technology and society. Researchers of technology in development initiatives, in particular, have always worried about technology depoliticizing development (Ferguson 1994, Li 2007). We need to ask if information determinism might operate in a similar way and whether data might potentially become the next “anti-politics machine.”

Works Cited

• Ferguson, James. 1994. Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.
• Foucault, Michel. [1978] 2006. “Governmentality.” In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, 131-143. 1st ed. MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Duke University Press Books.
• Johri, Aditya and Janaki Srinivasan. 2014. “Aligning with Data: Populating the ‘Unique Identity’ Infrastructure in India.” In ACM Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Baltimore.
• Khera, Reetika. 2011. The UID Project and Welfare Schemes. Economic and Political Weekly XLVI (9).
• Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Duke University Press Books.
• Mukherjee, Arindam.  2011. Aadhar, A Few Basic Issues. Outlook, Dec 5.
• Ramakumar, R. 2011. Aadhaar: on a platform of myths. The Hindu, Jul 17.
• Scott, James C., John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias. 2002. “The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (01): 4–44.
• Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
• Unique Identification Authority of India. 2014. Aadhaar Technology & Architecture. Principles, Design, Best Practices, & Key Lessons. Planning Commission, Government of India.

Notes: 

[1] The new Modi government is now considering folding UID into the National Population Register initiatives, with IDs issued only on the basis of citizenship.

[2] However, as critics have pointed out, this focus on data ignores larger questions such as the need for identities to be unique and how the portability of material goods associated with certain schemes (such as the public distribution system for food-grains) will be ensured to match the portability of identities across locations.

(Janaki Srinivasan got her PhD at the School of Information at Berkeley.  Her dissertation is titled “The Political Life Of Information: ‘Information’ and the Practice of Governance in India.”  She studied the UID project during her post-doctoral work at Virginia Tech.)

Marc Andreessen likes to talk about the Awesome Robot Future without addressing the essential question: who owns the robots?

(Tom Raftery / Flickr)

Hi, Marc.

I grew up using your work. Thanks to one of my parents being employed by a university, I got to use Mosaic to browse the early Web way before most people had even heard of it. My first software development internship was a summer spent using beta versions of Netscape technologies — what was then “LiveScript”and “dynamic HTML” — to sketch new interface elements for a protean web collaboration app. I rooted for Netscape when Microsoft came barging in to the browser market. When you started A16Z a few years ago I was excited to see what you’d invest in.

You’ve got a big audience of admirers. I’ve counted myself among them, but lately you’ve made it a challenge. I just can’t square with the way of looking at our industry, political economy, and the future laid out in your latest post.

You seem to think everyone’s worried about robots. But what everyone’s worried about is you, Marc. Not just you, but people like you. Robots aren’t at the levers of financial and political influence today, but folks like you sure are. People are scared of so much wealth and control being in so few hands. Wherever you and other gatekeepers of capital direct your attention — towards robots, 3D printers, biotech, whatever — you’re going to detect a fearful response as people scramble to determine the impact of your decisions and whims.

The debate is, as ever, really about power. So let’s set robots aside, and with them your black and white dichotomy of pro-growth, pro-tech heroes versus regressive Luddites. In our country, most people have positive sentiments about science and technology while simultaneously being concerned about unemployment.

Citizen Consumer In Neoliberal Tomorrowland

You come out swinging in your post, quickly invoking no less than the ghost of Milton Friedman to claim the last two centuries as an unqualified win for capitalist progress.

[A]dvocating for slowing technological change to preserve jobs equals advocating for the punishment of consumers, and stalling the march of quality of life improvements.

We could go back and forth all day on what exactly defines technological change — I certainly have before. But what labor wants is self-determination, not a slowing of technological change. Taxi drivers protesting Uber aren’t saying that they want apps out of their cabs. They want leverage to negotiate wages and working conditions so they aren’t barely scraping by. The pushback is on exploitative business models, not technology.

“Let markets work,” you say, “so that capital and labor can rapidly reallocate to create new fields and jobs.”Well, we’re three decades into an era of systemic deregulation and financialization. The result? Global recession, lingering structural unemployment, and an accumulation of wealth at the top. In this climate, capital has indeed “rapidly reallocated”…into hard-to-tax, hard-to-regulate asset classes like fine art. Public sector workers are under attack and austerity reigns while tens of billions in corporate profits sit in off-shore tax shelters.

The “severe macroeconomic downcycle, the credit crisis, deleveraging, and the liquidity trap”that you mention in passing? We “let markets work,” and that’s what we got in return. It’s been a failed experiment for everyone but the 1%. Dismissing “the crisis of inequality”as just a “pessimistic economic theory”has not, historically, gone well for aristocracy.

The Means of Production

While I didn’t jibe with your take on recent macroeconomic history, I was heartened to see that you’re interested in empowering individuals through technology:

[T]he current technology revolution has put the means of production within everyone’s grasp. It comes in the form of the smartphone (and tablet and PC) with a mobile broadband connection to the Internet.

If we’re going to throw around Marxist terminology, though, can we at least keep Karl’s ideas intact?

Owning a smartphone is not the equivalent of owning the means of production. I paid for my iPhone in full, but Apple owns the software that runs on it, the patents on the hardware inside it, and the exclusive right to the marketplace of applications for it. If I want to participate in their marketplace, Apple can arbitrarily reject my application, extract whatever cut of my sales they see fit, and change the terms whenever they like.

Same story with their scant competitors. It seemed like a lot of people were going to get rich in the “app economy”. Outside of Apple and Google, it turns out, not so much. For every WhatsApp there are thousands of failures.

The real money in tech is in platforms, network effects, scale. Sell pickaxes and jeans to the miners, right? Only today it’s Amazon selling the pickaxes. The startup with its servers on EC2 is about as likely to find gold as a ’49er panhandler. Before the startup goes out of business, Amazon gets paid.

Investors, shrinking in number but growing in wealth and political influence, own the means of digital production. Everyone else is doing shift work and hoping they still have jobs tomorrow.

You spent a lot of paragraphs on back-of-the-napkin economics describing the coming Awesome Robot Future, addressing the hypotheticals. What you left out was the essential question: who owns the robots?

Robots and Safety Nets

To ensure we all get by in Awesome Robot Future, you think we should:

Create and sustain a vigorous social safety net so that people are not stranded and unable to provide for their families.

Yes! Absolutely. With you one hundred percent.

The loop closes as rapid technological productivity improvement and resulting economic growth make it easy to pay for the safety net.

You lost me again.

Sure, technology that enhances productivity can make products and services cheaper. Emerging technologies can also create demand for things that are inherently expensive – cutting-edge medical procedures and treatments, for example – driving up costs in entire economic sectors.

Unless we collectively choose to pay for a safety net, technology alone isn’t going to make it happen. Though technological progress has sped up over recent decades of capitalist expansion, most people on the planet are in need of a safety net today. The market hasn’t been there to catch them. Why is this different in Awesome Robot Future? Did I miss one of Asimov’s Laws that says androids are always programmed to be more socially-minded than neoliberals?

I appreciate that smart, ambitious people like you are thinking about a future of universal prosperity. You borrow terminology from finance in saying that you’re “way long human creativity.” While I’m creeped out by the commodification of our species’ ingenuity, I appreciate the sentiment. If our industry stops painting anyone who questions our business models as Luddites and finds creative ways to build products and services that sustainably address real needs, maybe we can hold on to the receding myth of triumphal disruption.

Hopefully we can agree that there are many more meaningful quality of life improvements technology has yet to deliver on before we can start brainstorming the “luxury goods markets” of the future.

Meanwhile, we don’t need to wait until a hypercapitalist techno-utopia emerges to do right by our struggling neighbors. We could pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow. Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution.

Liberals are outraged about the 5-4 decision handed down by the Supreme Court in the case of Hobby Lobby v Burwell mostly for valid reasons. Progressives want contraceptives to be broadly available, and the case makes that harder. But the case has also reignited popular outrage and mockery over the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, an issue that's been the subject of intense — but mostly wrongheaded — liberal scorn ever since the Court's citation of the principle in striking down certain campaign finance laws in the Citizens United case.

1) Corporations obviously aren't people

This is what people look like (Ian Forsyth/Getty)

The reason that corporate personhood is so popular as a punchline is that, obviously, it's not the case that corporations are people! Vox Media is a corporation. The people who work here are people. This isn't hard.

People are members of the species homo sapiens. Corporations are legal abstractions.

2) Non-people can be persons

Robots aren't people any more than corporations are. But when Captain Picard stands up for the idea that his Android shipmate Data should have the legal rights of a person, we're supposed to sympathize with Picard. Corporate personhood, similarly, is not a question of biology but of public policy. Forming corporations wouldn't make much sense unless corporations had many of the legal rights of persons, including most notably the right to own property and enter into contracts.

3) Corporate persons need constitutional rights

Corporations need rights to keep Bill O'Reilly on the air (NBC Newswire)

The basic functions of a corporation — including contracts and property ownership — would be useless unless corporations enjoyed basic constitutional protections. If corporations didn't hold the same due process rights as human beings, the idea of firms holding property and entering into contracts would be worthless.

By the same token, the idea that corporations have a right to free speech is essential to preserving the values of the First Amendment. It's imperative that not only do Fox News' anchors have the right to criticize the Obama administration, but that Fox News as a corporate entity has that right. Otherwise, censors could effectively silence critics by heavily fining hostile broadcasters and publishers even while leaving the human critics unmolested. Similarly, NARAL Pro Choice America and the National Organization for Women are themselves corporations. It's critical to the democratic process that they are able to criticize Supreme Court decisions, lobby congress, and otherwise act as constitutional persons.

4) Corporate personhood actually cuts against Hobby Lobby's argument

Corporations don't really go to church (Scott Olson/Getty)

The legal doctrine of corporate personhood is important to the Hobby Lobby case, but in precisely the opposite way from how many people think. It's clear that corporate executives and owners have religious beliefs and free exercise rights. It's also clear that non-profit corporations formed explicitly to advance religious ends (a synagogue, say) have free exercise rights. But if you think of a for-profit business as a person, then it's hard to conceive of it as a religious person.

What the court did in Hobby Lobby was argue that in this respect a closely held corporation actually isn't a person, and the government needs to respect not the corporation's non-existent religious beliefs but the corporation's owners' religious beliefs.

5) Liberals think equality is more important than religious liberty

For all the huffing and puffing about corporate personhood, it is highly unlikely that liberals would be any more sympathetic to the kind of free exercise claim being made here there were no corporate angle at all.

Most liberals support laws that would ban discrimination against gay and lesbian couples in employment. Liberals would like to see such laws applied to unincorporated businesses (which are very common) as well as to corporations and would be unhappy with judicial rulings that create religious exemptions to employment discrimination law. Whether the exemption applies exclusively to unincorporated businesses or to corporations isn't what would drive liberal thinking about the outcome. There is simply a persistent tension in American life between liberals' commitment to equality norms and certain kinds of religious belief.

These tensions get resolved in different ways in different contexts — as far as I know, nobody is proposing to apply employment discrimination law to the hiring of clergy — but the basic tension exists completely separate from the question of which businesses are and aren't incorporated.

Elsewhere at Mother Jones, Dana Liebelson collects the eight best lines from Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in the Hobby Lobby case. Here's what I consider the most telling passage from Samuel Alito's majority opinion:

Kinda reminds you of Bush v. Gore, doesn't it? Alito takes pains to make it clear that his opinion shouldn't be considered precedent for anything except the narrowly specific issue at hand: whether contraceptives that some people consider abortifacients can be excluded from health plans.

I think it's important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he's making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you're probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

This is not a ruling that upholds religious liberty. It is a ruling that specifically enshrines opposition to abortion as the most important religious liberty in America.

Remember the eurozone crisis? You don't hear much about it anymore, which could easily lead you to the conclusion that the problems have been solved. And to an extent they have been. Nobody thinks the eurozone is going to collapse anymore, and nobody thinks there will be a worldwide banking panic.

The only problem is vast swathes of the continent remain an economic disaster area. They saved the eurozone, but not the economies that it comprises or the people who live there.

The highest unemployment state in the USA is Rhode Island at 8.7 percent

The eurozone has ten countries — including big ones like France, Italy, and Spain — that are doing worse than Rhode Island. Greece has 11 million people — making it more than 10 times the size of Rhode Island — and an unemployment rate of almost 27 percent. Meanwhile, Finland is considered one of the healthy eurozone economies but only Nevada and Rhode Island have unemployment rates higher than Finland's, and they're close.

Saving banks and politicians

So what happened? Well, recall the problem. A bunch of countries that had previously been considered substantially less creditworthy than Germany joined the euro, and immediately saw a huge reduction in their borrowing costs. That led to irresponsible budgeting in Italy, a lot of private borrowing in Spain and Ireland, and a bit of both in Greece. Then after the global financial crisis hit, all these countries wound up in recession.

The bad economic climate started to push budget deficits up. And it became clear that contrary to the hopes of international investors, the German government had no interest in guaranteeing southern Europe's debts. The combination of rising deficits and reduced confidence led investors to demand higher interest rates to lend money to these governments. The higher interest rates made the deficits worse. A downward spiral was under way.

In stepped Mario Draghi, chief of the European Central Bank, with a speech and a plan. The plan was called Outright Monetary Transactions and the speech said Draghi would do "whatever it takes" to prevent a eurozone government from being forced into default or out of the eurozone.

What it meant in practice was that as long as a national government was committed to a fiscal austerity plan — tax hikes plus spending cuts — the ECB would commit to potentially unlimited levels of bond-buying in order to prevent its interest rates from spiking. In one of those magical moments of monetary policy, the existence of the commitment meant Draghi never really had to test it. Speculators stopped betting on default and collapse, governments wrote austerity budgets, and interest rates steadily declined.

The result was that banks that owned eurozone government debt were saved, and so were institutions around the world that relied on the European banking system not collapsing. All in all, a job well done. Meanwhile, politicians got to take credit for keeping their countries in the Eurozone and for falling interest rates while pushing the blame for unpopular austerity policies on Draghi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Nicely done.

People left behind

The only problem is that the downward spiral didn't start with high interest rates, it started with bad economic conditions. When people don't have jobs, they can't pay taxes and that puts pressure on government budgets. But the budgetary consequences of sky-high unemployment are only scratching the surface — the real problem with sky-high unemployment is the widespread human misery.

So what caused the economic problems? Conservatives will point to high taxes, a generous welfare state, strict regulations, and other structural policies they don't like as the source of Europe's woes. And it's true that Europe has long had a higher unemployment rate than the United States perhaps for these reasons (though America's unemployment edge is partially offset by having far more people in prison, where they don't count as unemployed) but the gap shifts over time:

Europe didn't suddenly turn socialistic over the past four years. If anything, the opposite. Since the onset of the crisis, Europe has been doing market reforms and the United States has been expanding its welfare state. The gap is growing because as America recovers from the economic crisis at a frustratingly slow pace, Europe is recovering even more slowly.

The failure of austerity and reform

Eurozone officials have preached a gospel of budget austerity and "structural reform" to ailing economies as the cure for the crisis. By making central bank assistance contingent on willingness to adopt a plan that the European Central Bank approves of, the ECB has in part managed to turn this into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Everything has gotten better since governments agreed to the ECB plan, and a government that tried to abandon austerity would likely find itself abandoned by the ECB and thus worse off than ever.

The success of these programs, oft-claimed by European officials, has largely come by setting the bar low. What is true is that among the hardest-hit countries, the ones who've most enthusiastically embraced the austerity and reform agenda have done the best:

At the same time, even plucky Ireland has an extraordinarily high unemployment rate. It is true that the scale of the construction bubble and subsequent bust in Ireland made a considerable amount of economic pain inevitable, but Iceland outside the eurozone had an even bigger bust and unemployment is now down to below six percent.

A country doesn't manage to achieve Greek or Spanish levels of economic misery without some complicated political and economic problems. But the striking thing about the eurozone is how poorly the countries that are "doing everything right" are nonetheless doing. Underneath the particular pathologies of the crisis areas is an overarching pathology — the single currency.

The sudden stop

The eurozone's troubled economies suffered from a version of what's known in international economics as a sudden stop. The way it works is that first global investors get really excited about a particular country for some reason, and start pumping money into it. Typically this happens without a lot of detailed local knowledge, so rather than financing specific projects they lend to local banks who presumably do have the knowledge about what to finance. But as the local banks get pumped-up with more and more foreign money, they start getting sloppy. For a while, it doesn't matter. So much money is rushing in to finance projects that old investments tend to pay off regardless of the merit.

But then comes a Wile E. Coyote moment when everyone realizes that there's nothing but sheer enthusiasm backing all these flows. Suddenly foreigners don't want to invest anymore, and to the extent possible want to get their money back. Now the whole investment boom runs in reverse.

If this happens to your country, something bad is bound to happen.

The normal bad consequence — the one that's happened to Iceland — is that the value of your currency plummets. Suddenly vacations, imported cars, and even basic agricultural commodities get very expensive. Almost everybody needs to cut back their spending and live a more humble lifestyle. Fewer consumer goods, fewer trips, more rice and beans for dinner. But the falling currency does have some upsides. Suddenly it's cheap for foreigners to visit your country, and cheap for them to buy your export goods. So people who lost jobs in the collapse can gain new jobs in the sectors that benefit from a currency collapse. It's not pleasant, but it doesn't last forever.

A cross of euros

The problem for Ireland, Spain, and Italy is that they don't have currencies to collapse. They use the same currency, the euro, as Austria and Germany and the Netherlands and other countries that never had the inflows of hot money and thus aren't suffering from the negative consequences of a sudden stop.

If you're a Spanish person who hasn't lost his job — maybe you're a surgeon or you have a safe gig in the Finance Ministry — this is great news. The value of your euro-denominated salary doesn't collapse, so you can still afford that BMW or trip to London. But the fact that you're vacationing in England rather than locally is bad for your fellow Spaniards, and especially bad for Spanish people who lost their jobs when the crisis struck. And because Spain hasn't had a currency collapse, it doesn't suddenly become a discount vacation spot for Germans and Americans and demand for Spanish wines and ham doesn't surge.

The only way to regain competitiveness is for the sheer weight of unemployment to start dragging nominal wages downward across the economy. In an enthusiastic, well-behaved country like Latvia or Ireland this is a grinding medium-speed process. In a reluctant country like Spain or Greece it's agonizingly slow. Either way, it's much more painful than a currency depreciation because only some prices adjust — people with old debts or long-term contract obligations get totally screwed.

These problems of excessively valuable money used to occur globally during the gold standard era whenever there was a slowdown in global gold mining. In a famous 1896 speech, presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan alleged that American farmers and workers were being crucified on a cross of gold — made to endure avoidable suffering for the sake of the principle that gold was the only true judge of wealth. Today, unemployed Irish, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese people are being crucified on a cross of euros. The single currency project has political motives that go beyond macroeconomic management, and keeping the project together requires someone's interest to be sacrificed.

Draghi's "everything it takes" is a commitment to save the eurozone as a political project, not to save the eurozone's citizens from mass unemployment.

Two more structural problems

The problems with the eurozone aren't simply the single currency. An American state like Nevada has the same inability to devalue its currency as you see in Ireland. Nonetheless, even the best-performing European crisis country is doing far worse than the worst-performing American states.

To understand why that is, you need to look for non-monetary factors — language and the welfare state.

Here in the United States it is relatively easy for an unemployed person in Rhode Island to try to move to a more prosperous area in search of a job. It's not easy by any means. But it's relatively easy. They'll speak English and watch the same TV shows wherever you go. It's much harder in both practical and psychological terms for a Portuguese person to go find a job in Munich. The eurozone has one currency, but a whole bunch of languages and national traditions.

The other issue is the welfare state. Both the USA and European countries redistribute income from those who have a lot to those who have a little. In the USA, this operates across states. So when a particular place suffers a particularly acute jobs crisis, it ends up with a lot of poor people and extra money flows in. This helps the local economy. If unemployed Rhode Islanders couldn't get food stamps, for example, local grocery stores would probably need to lay workers off and exacerbate the problem. In Europe, the welfare state redistributes money from rich Austrians to poor Austrians, but not from rich Austrians to poor Italians. So this kind of automatic stabilization doesn't take place.

On top of all that, a mistake

Something that's often missed in assessing Europe's economic mess is that problems are actually getting worse in countries that weren't originally hit by the sovereign debt crisis. Take a look at joblessness in France and the Netherlands, two countries that were never involved in the eurozone crisis' acute phase:

Because rich Americans tend to disapprove of France and to especially disapprove of Socialist Party President François Hollande's policies, you often hear France's woes blamed on Hollande's initiatives. But the Netherlands has followed the exact same pattern. Rising unemployment as the recession hit, then a slow recovery, then backsliding.

The issue is that over and above the inherent difficulty of a whole bunch of countries sharing the same currency, the European Central Bank has implemented monetary policies that are too tight for Europe as a whole. The ECB is supposed to be targeting an inflation rate of 2 percent, but actual inflation has plunged far below this target:

For the crisis countries to recover without independent currencies, local nominal prices need to fall so that those countries can improve their competitiveness. But the math is a bit tricky. While the eurozone as a whole averages 2 percent inflation, inflation has to be higher than 2 percent somewhere else for it to all work. That would be uncomfortable for German citizens and politicians, and the ECB is widely thought to cater to German preferences (for example it is located in Frankfurt, Germany rather than in Brussels with the other major European Union institutions).

But this explanation only gets us so far. German inflation has been above average recently, but still below the ECB's 2 percent target.

High unemployment and below-target inflation aren't unique to Europe by any means. The same pattern exists in the United States due to somewhat hazy concerns about financial stability. But the Federal Reserve has been much more aggressive than the ECB in attempting unconventional monetary policies and it's no coincidence that Europe's unemployment rate is higher and inflation rate is lower as a consequence.

How does this end?

European policymakers have largely lost interest in what their critics on this side of the Atlantic have to say, primarily because widespread predictions that the eurozone would break up absent more dramatic integration measures have been debunked. But the reason American economists tended to underrate the viability of the European approach is not that they misread the economics — they misread the politics.

Both the European Union in general and the eurozone in particular are foreign policy projects that happen to have large economic implications. For Finland or Latvia, membership in the eurozone is an implicit guarantee that (unlike Ukraine) Europe will have their backs in a showdown with Russia. For Spain and Portugal it's a symbol of their successful transition to democracy and developed country status in the 1980s. For Greece it's something to hold over Turkey. For Ireland it's a sign of independence from the United Kingdom. In the face of these political imperatives leaders throughout Europe have decided that economic pain is bearable.

Nevertheless, the economic aspects of the situation look untenable. Economic forecasters project that crisis-stricken countries will grow in 2014 and 2015, which some take as a sign of a return to normalcy.

But earlier this month the European investment bank Natixis observed that this is wrong. On the current course, Italy should regain its 2007 level of unemployment sometime around 2020. Portugal will have to wait until 2036 and Spain until 2029.

The politics of this look untenable. And yet no major political party in any country favors withdrawal from the eurozone. In turn, one consequence of this has been a rising tide of support for a range of unorthodox political parties ranging from Greek neo-Nazis to Catalan separatists to a surge in votes for the far-right in France in the latest European Parliament elections.

But thus far in countries where upstart parties that deviate from the consensus have won support, mainstream parties have proven willing to set aside their differences with traditional rivals and form grand coalitions in defense of the status quo. For all the problems, the consensus around the European project has proven remarkably durable. Europe's leaders — starting with Draghi and Merkel but extending to an extreme wide range of policy elites in a range of countries — have done the seemingly undoable. They saved the single currency without fixing any of the problems that seemed to make it unworkable.

Google structures so much of life. What we can Google about something is nearly the same thing as what it is.

And it's not just text: With Google Images, you can see what anything or anyone looks like instantly, by algorithmic selection. This is how our children will teach themselves about the world. And yet I wonder. What kinds of warping of the meanings of words takes place in this context? If Google Images is a lens through which to view the world, what is its curvature and focal length? How does it distort what we're looking at?

To figure that out, I took a look at a simple ABC book -- My First Book of ABC and 123 -- the most popular one on Amazon that assigned a single word to each letter. Then I ran each of these words through Google Images to create a Google Alphabet book, the latest in a long line of abecedarians, stretching back hundreds of years.

Some of my findings from this experiment were expected. The Google Alphabet book is more corporate, for example, than any kid's book would be. Apple's logo has replaced the actual apple as the first result for that word. Monster energy drinks has pushed out the fictive beasts of childhood. Wikipedia and Wikimedia make a very strong showing. Google is very dependent on these non-profits for structuring certain types of basic information for the company. The dog image, for example, is simply the photo that appears on Wikipedia's entry for 'dog.' National Geographic's topic pages for animal species also appear high on the list.

But some of Google's choices are bizarre and interesting. Take a look at the entry for violin. The image is from Eofdreams.com, an ad-heavy website purporting to offer dream interpretation that seems to use Google Images as a traffic drift net. Underneath every riff on dreams is a table of random, clearly labeled images on the topic in question. Eofdreams.com appears shockingly high in many a search for common words from violins to hot dogs.

Many of these searches deliver you to the oxbow lakes of the Internet: an out-of-date site for an ice cream company, a Bureau of Labor Statistics page about nurses, a beekeeper in a Cambridgeshire village, the good works of a Swede, a gaming page dedicated to the lions of the game Animal Crossing, a British journalist's military blog.

Making these searches is like taking a road trip through the Internet, trying to avoid the major highways. Sure you end up on I-Wikipedia sometimes, but most of the hours are spent trundling along some forgotten state route finding stories about teenage yo-yo stars and nude portraits of people with octopuses.

Every ABC book is defined by its simplicity, including this one, but nothing is simple when it's embedded in a global network.

A is for apple.

Top Image: Apple's corporate logo.

Appears on: Forbes.com

This image appears in a story entitled, "Debt-Averse Apple Sets 6-part Bond Deal To Establish Funding Yield Curve." The iteration of the logo dates from shortly after Steve Jobs' return to the company in 1997. Welcome to the new alphabet. 

B is for bee.

Top Image: A photograph of a common worker honeybee.

Appears on: wmconnolley.org.uk

This image of a honeybee appears on the personal webpage William Connolley, a resident of the village of Coton in Cambridgeshire in the UK. Connolley is a beekeeper, he says, and maintains a very simple (like 1990s simple) webpage with information about the beekeepers in his village and some general information about bees ("Bees are cute furry little creatures and generally quite safe"). It's in that section that we find the honeybee image. It's unclear when it was taken. (The homepage comes with the disclaimer, "Hello, and welcome to my web page. Its sadly out of date, and is likely to stay that way.")

C is for cat.

Top Image: A long-haired cat sitting on a white comforter.

Appears on: Petfinder.com

This is a stock image from Getty Images' Thinkstock, apparently. It appears in an article about how to pick a cat litter and a few dozen other places around the Internet, but I could not track down the source image (despite several searches for "self-satisfied cat"). Perhaps appropriately, the canonical kitty remains mysterious.

D is for dog.

Appears on: Wikipedia.org

This photograph was taken by the Wikipedia user, Elf, who "spent over two intense editing years (Jan 2004-April 2006) here as a Wikipediholic, primarily focusing on dog-related articles." This photography was taken during October 2004 in Turlock, California at the Nunes Agility Field. It's also the top image on Wikipedia's dog page, making this dog one of the more Internet-famous canines in the world.

E is for elephant.

Top Image: An African elephant.

Appears on: NationalGeographic.com

National Geographic maintains an encyclopedia of some animals, including the African elephant represented here. The image was captured by the South African filmmaker and photographer, Beverly Joubert. She and her husband, Dereck, make conservation films in Africa. They are explorers-in-residence at NatGeo.

F is for fruits.

Top Image: Still-life of several fruit varieties on a black background.

Appears on: Wikipedia.org.

Bananas, pears, strawberries, grapes, oranges, and apples all make an appearance in this image, which I must admit screams, "Fruits!" The photograph is the work of Bill Ebbessen, who creates a lot of images for Wikipedia under the username atomicbre. In addition to his work with fruits, Ebbessen has provided photography for many articles in the nuclear field.

G is for guitar.

Top Image: An acoustic guitar.

Appears on: Wikimedia.org

Frankly, this one is a little disappointing. Of all the guitars in the world, we get this folksy number. It's a "'Di Giorgio classic guitar', model 'Amazonia', made in Brazil" according to its photographer, user PJ. PJ is Swedish and one of his other wikihobbies is recording common phrases in Swedish like "God jul och gott nytt år," which means "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year," and uploading them to Wikimedia.

H is for hats.

Top Image: A big, red hat.

Appears on: Fanpop.com

Fanpop is a network of niche fan clubs for everything from Justin Bieber and Arrested Development to ... umm... hats, including this one. The hats club is rather small, 168 members, which makes sense. Not that hats are not loveable -- I have several hats, myself -- but do hats really need a fan club? They don't hand out autographs or scandalize the bourgeoisie. Also, they are inanimate objects.

One fun fact from the Hats fan club: 83 percent of its members like floppy hats, according to a poll on the site. 

I is for ice cream.

Top Image: Two scoops of chocolate ice cream with whip cream and a waffle slice in a tall glass

Appears on: Arcticicecream.net

Arctic Ice Cream is an ice cream maker near Trenton, New Jersey. They've been around since 1931 and bring dairy delight down the shore. Why has their ice cream image become the canonical one? This one is more mystifying than the rest of these images. Most of these scream whatever they are, but this one is actually more complex than the other images on the page, like this simple cone in third place.

J is for jack-in-the-box.

Top Image: A plush Jack-in-the-box.

Appears on: Wikipedia.org.

Score another one for Wikipedia (how dependent is Google on Wikipedia? Very, very). But wait! This image actually was created by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and was released along with a 2003 recall of 63,000 Jacks in boxes. "A spring mechanism attached to the lid can break and detach from the toy, posing a choking hazard to young children," the CPSC wrote, although no injuries were reported.

K is for kangaroo.

Top image: A kangaroo with a joey in the pouch.

Appears on: CuteOverload.com NationalGeographic.com

Google loves NatGeo's animal summary pages, apparently. But this is definitely the cutest photograph in the list. It was taken by renowned wildlife photographer Nicole Duplaix.

L is for lion.

Top image: A male lion's head.

Appears on: Wikia.com

Well, no arguing here. That's the lioniest lion I've ever seen. But it's embedded on a page for the Nintendo game, Animal Crossing. Why? "Lions are a species of villagers in the Animal Crossing series. They are one of three types of large cat that appear in the games. The Lion characters are all males because they have all a mane( female lions, called lionesses, don't have manes.)," Wikia says. Or at least, this is one of the many pages on which the image appears, none of which appear indicate the provenance of the photograph.

M is for monster.

Top Image: Monster energy drinks logo.

Appears on: http://istandardproducers.com

It's not exactly Where the Wild Things Are. And yes, that breaks my heart. And it doesn't even appear on Monster's own site! iStandard Producers is a company's that purports to help out up-and-coming music producers.

N is for nurse.

Top Image: A nurse with a pen talking to a doctor

Appears on: BLS.gov

This nurse appears on a page maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics about the occupational outlook for registered nurses. We find their median pay was $64,690 in 2010, for example. There are several images of nurses on the page, but for whatever reason, Google found this one the nursiest, despite an irrelevant file name.

O is for octopus.

Top Image: An octopus.

Appears on: Howstuffworks.com

This octopus illustrates a story on "How octopuses work," but it's originally a stock image by Corbis. Sadly, I searched through all 1,804 Corbis images labeled octopus, but couldn't find it. Strangely, there's a disturbing number of naked people with octopuses in the Corbis archive. Search at your own risk is all I'm saying.

P is for panda.

Top Image: A panda.

Appears on: Worldwildlife.org

Well, this one makes sense. The panda image appears on a World Wildlife Fund page dedicated to saving the 1,600 that remain in the wild.

Q is for queen.

Top Image: A portrait of Queen Elizabeth (of course)

Can I be faulted for being a little disappointed that Freddie Mercury was not the top result? (Queen, the band, was the #2 image.) In any case, this image appears on military blogger Michael Yon's site. It's embedded in a post that jokingly begins, "In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately." Fair enough. But it turns out that the text Yon posted has a "long and convoluted" history, including a false attribution to John Cleese, according to the Snopes entry on "Revocation of Independence."

R is for robot.

Top Image: A Sony Qrio Robot 2

Appears on: Wikimedia.org

Congratulations, Sony! Your robot from 2004 remains the canonical representation of the robot in Google Images. This particular photo was taken by a German user at RoboCup 2004 in Portugal. Then another user named Jorge Barrios excised the background, leaving just the robot floating on a transparent background.

S is for sock.

Top Image: Drawing of a white sock with red accents

Appears on: lbrm.org

This sock appears on the website of the Long Beach Rescue Mission, a group that helps the homeless in southern California. It illustrated a post about last summer's "sock drive," sponsored by Disney. The drive ended last September; no word's been posted on how many socks were collected for the needy. The sock drawing is a common, though far from ubiquitous, illustration on the web.

T is for toy.

Top Image: Rubik's cube

Appears on: Wikipedia.org

Nerds always win on the Internet. QED.

U is for unicorn.

Top Image: Beautiful white unicorn with flashing dark eyes in full rear

Appears on: Giantbomb.com

Tell you what: that's a beautiful unicorn right there. It appears with many other unicorn images on a videogame website owned by CBS Interactive called Giant Bomb. It's one of the site's "concept" pages on a wiki; the concept is the unicorn itself. And we learn the following delightful things about the unicorn.

The Unicorn is one of the few magical creatures not meant to inspire fear, unlike dragons, or chimeras. In most video games where Unicorns appear, they are enchanted, tranquil beasts. Their horns commonly have magical properties. In Castle Crashers, for example, a unicorn horn can be employed as a weapon. Conversely, in Viva Pinata, Unicorn horns can be used for healing," someone wrote. "According to Leonardo da Vinci, the ideal method of capturing a Unicorn was to have a virgin in your midst. A Unicorn that sees a "fair maiden" is said to lower its inhibitions, and fall asleep in its lap shortly afterward. This would give you an opportunity to catch the Unicorn."

That's some good unicorn summation, no? Conversely, it could be said that you would not be prepared to deal with a unicorn in real life or a videogame on the basis of this crappy stub.

V is for violin.

Top Image: A violin

Appears on: Eofdreams.com

This is a stock image of a violin. It appears on a *dream interpretation* site. "To see or play the violin in a dream means that your home will always be full of peace and harmony," a content farmer wrote. "For a young woman, to dream of playing the violin promises generous gifts to her. If eerie sounds are produced by a bow signifies that her hopes are not fated to come true. A broken violin portends possible serious losses and separation."

Another interesting thing about this dream interpretation site is that after each description of a particular object's significance, there is a set of ads and then a table of images of the thing described. So, after you learn that eating a hot dog in a dream means "in reality you don't differ with fastidiousness, and you prefer practicality," you can see 10 apparently random images of hot dogs stolen from somewhere all nicely labeled hot-dog-01, hot-dog-02, etc. Why do they do this? Do they think you can dream of hot dogs but not know what they look like? No, my suspicion is that they use Google Images to bring people to the site; this is a dream interpretation site search-engine optimized for Google Images specifically. (Side note: what would dreaming about Google mean?)

W is for watermelon.

Top Image: Three watermelon wedges.

Appears on: Souplantation.com

This image appears on the blog of a restaurant chain called Souplantation. (They must have a less fraught relationship with the word and idea of a plantation than I do?) The post details the local watermelon grower the company uses in Texas, but the image is a stock watermelon photograph.

X is for x-ray.

Top Image: An "x-ray" image of an adult human and child

Appears on: Time.com

This image comes from a gallery that Time.com ran of photographer Nick Veasey's work. It's quite beautiful, but Veasey says he embellishes his images, so it may not be the best representation of an actual x-ray. For that, I'd recommend this image.

Y is for yo-yo.

Top Image: A kid yo-yoing, apparently at a competition.

Appears on: Wikipedia.org

"1A (string tricks) division finalist, Augie Fash, at the 2004 US nationals in Chico, California." If you're wondering, Fash, who was known as El Yo-Yo, is still around. He appears to have quit the yo-yo game with this intensely dramatic YouTube video in 2012. But he's back and *sponsored* by C3YoYoDesign, the "the first Professional Yoyo company in Hong Kong." They "create high-performance yoyo for professional players" like Fash. According to one blog post, Fash is "prepping a new video that will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF!" Here's the damn-near heroic teaser.

Z is for zebra.

Top Image: Several zebras, one braying.

Appears on: NationalGeographic.com

This may appear to be a boring ending to this strange journey through the Internet, BUT it turns out this image was taken by Chris Johns, the editor-in-chief of National Geographic since 2005.

A few weeks ago, in a post that was mainly a response to Jonah Goldberg's dismissive attitude toward renewable energy, I mentioned a recent study showing that although liberals and conservatives were about equally likely to buy an energy efficient CFL lightbulb even if it cost more than an old-school bulb, conservatives were less likely to buy the bulb if the packaging included the message "Protect the Environment."

That's what the abstract of the article said, anyway: "Conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled." But Tim Carney points out that there's a little more to it than that:

Most of the coverage of this made it sound like only conservatives were turned off by the label, and that it was clearly for petty reasons. While really, most people, including generally liberal people, became less likely to buy the bulbs with the label.

The green line in the chart shows how likely people are to buy the bulb with the environmental message. And Carney is right: It crosses below the gray line at an ideology score of -0.6, right in the middle of the liberal spectrum. Just about everyone was turned off by the message except hardcore liberals.

That's actually kind of interesting. And it also shows the danger of relying on a journal abstract when you don't have access to the full paper. It's not that the abstract was wrong—increased conservatism was associated with increased resistance to the message—but there's more to the story.

Dylan Matthews highlights a fascinating little chart today. Roughly speaking, it plots two things for 18 different countries: (a) how much the rich have gotten richer over the past 50 years, and (b) how much tax rates on the rich have gone down during the same period. Guess what? It turns out that in countries where the rich got the richest, they also enjoyed the biggest tax cuts:

How to interpret this is a difficult question to answer.... Lawrence Lindsey and Martin Feldstein have argued that cuts in rates led to increased economic activity among top earners, leading to more growth and income. That's the conventional supply-side story. But you could also tell a story where lower tax rates increased the after-tax income of the rich, and that in turn increased their political power, which produced still lower rates.

It's possible, of course, that there are data interpretation issues here, so these results should be taken tentatively for now. Still, the cross-section of countries is fairly large; the results don't depend solely on the effect of the United States; and the slope of the line is pretty dramatic. So there's probably something here.

But what? I can only guess, but I'd offer a third possibility. It's not just that low taxes produce harder-working rich people, or that richer rich people produce the political power to cut taxes. It's broader than that. Essentially, when an entire country gets persuaded that what's good for the rich is good for everyone, that creates support for a wide range of policies that benefit the rich. Low tax rates are one of them, but I suspect you could draw a chart like this for a number of other public policies as well (unionization rates, financial deregulation, etc.).

In the United States, the conservative movement has been astonishingly successful at persuading the public that "free market" policies which benefit the rich will trickle down to everyone. In Germany, not so much. As a result, public policies in the U.S. benefit the rich, and the rich also get ever richer. In Germany, they don't.