Brian Stouffer

Walter White is in a long tradition of meth-monsters. Fabienne Hurst traces the drug’s origins to the Third Reich:

When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. … From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.

As enticing as the drug was, its long-term effects on the human body were just as devastating. Short rest periods weren’t enough to make up for long stretches of wakefulness, and the soldiers quickly became addicted to the stimulant. And with addiction came sweating, dizziness, depression and hallucinations. There were soldiers who died of heart failure and others who shot themselves during psychotic phases. Some doctors took a skeptical view of the drug in light of these side effects. Even Leonardo Conti, the Third Reich’s top health official, wanted to limit use of the drug, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Manos: The Hands of Fate is one of the worst movies of all time, but it’s probably the best movie ever made on a bet by a fertilizer salesman. Most people know it because it was rightfully skewered by Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Well, puppeteer extraordinaire Rachel Jackson has taken an absolutely dire movie and turned it into an amazing musical puppet show called Manos: The Hands of Felt. Here is her explanation as to how it happened:

It started as a joke. Late in November of 2010, I was riffing on the topic of “puppetizing” various existing shows. I looked down, saw my copy of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 The Essentials and blurted “MANOS - The Hands of FELT”!

I had no idea what I had started.

The next day, I got a vision of The Master as a ping pong eyed, Muppet-style puppet. Then I realized the wife fight could mash-up with The Ballroom sketch from The Muppet Show in a ridiculously satisfying way. Basically the idea took hold of my brain and refused to let go.

Talking to my bandmate Michael about the project, he pointed out that I was going on just as much about the story behind MANOS - The Hands of Fate as I was about the movie itself. Maybe I should try to work some of that into the story, instead of just doing a straight-up puppet adaptation.

It has already had a run in Seattle and we were lucky enough to catch it so we can attest to its awesomeness, but what about the rest of the world? How will you see Manos: The Hands of Felt?

Well, Rachel has started a Kickstarter to release a DVD of the show.

We are asking you to pledge for selfish reasons. We want to own that DVD! For just $5 you’ll get a digital download and for $30 a DVD of your very own.

Click here to see the video and pledge!

Ezra weighs in on Chait’s piece on Josh Barro and the plight of reformists on the right:

If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.

He is indeed a moderate Republican, which is why I’ve always liked his approach to governing and to policy. And that, of course, makes Ross Douthat nervous, because Ross is a smart man trying to engage a party that is currently out of its tiny mind. He reminds me of sane and sober Labourites in the early 1980s. But at least they fully copped to the extremism of their own side.

Ross won’t quite. He disputes Ezra on two grounds: first that the political environment has changed too. He says, for example, that the GOP’s retreat from cap-and-trade is a function of the 2008 economic meltdown, a temporary abatement in warming, the failure of global cap and trade, etc. But that would lead to healthy conservative skepticism of policies like cap and trade, and an attempt to think through alternatives. Jim Manzi represents this line of thinking best. But what Ross’s party has actually done is embrace total climate change denialism. That’s a huge shift toward irrationalism, fueled by fundamentalist Christianity, which, of course, Ross won’t recognize as a core part of the GOP problem. Because if he did, he would be Frummed out of the party altogether.

Then Ross argues that the GOP is more moderate than Ezra claims. So Ross defends the GOP on, say, immigration, because it has a healthier internal debate, which more closely represents public divisions. But, in fact, the GOP base, as Ross knows, is dedicated to destroying immigration reform, just as it did when even Bush was in office. Again, compare this with Reagan’s amnesty and an era where open borders conservatives were mainstream in the GOP (yes, I remember that). The actual Ronald Reagan would not stand a chance in today’s GOP. And the only argument for immigration reform that has any real traction in the party is electoral and arithmetical, not ideological. And those spearheading the effort, like Marco Rubio, face a perilous future in their party.

On taxes, the GOP is relentless, even though the boundaries of the debate have shifted dramatically their way since the 1980s. With revenue far too low, and structural spending bound to increase as we support baby-boom retirees, an absolutist refusal to raise any more revenues is a 10 on the scale of 1 – 10. This is especially true when the GOP is demanding much more spending on national “defense”. Yes, there are, mercifully, a few civil libertarian voices on the right, but surely Ross knows that his party reacted to Obama’s war on terror speech last week as if it were treason. Butters:

“At a time we need resolve the most, we’re sounding retreat.”

Peter King, the former terrorist-funder turned terrorist scourge, echoes the Ailes line:

“In many ways al Qaeda is more dangerous now than it was prior to September 11.”

Does Ross believe that? Does any sane person believe that? The truth is that the GOP is the most extreme, nihilist pseudo-conservative party I have seen in my lifetime in any developed country.

The GOP, for example, is in favor of torture as a national policy, placing it outside every mainstream right-of-center party in the West. How far have they traveled? Reagan strongly supported and signed the UN Convention Against Torture (and anything even close to it).

On Medicare, Ross is right that premium support, done right, is an arguably centrist position. But we know what Paul Ryan originally wanted – and Obama is the first Democratic president willing to cut Medicare seriously as part of a big fiscal deal. Every time Obama moves to the fiscal right, the GOP moves the goalposts one more time – and then demonize the president for, say, a stimulus package that was one third tax cuts. On social issues, the GOP is now further to the right than it has ever been, while the country has found a new middle. The GOP supports a constitutional amendment to ban gay couples from having any formal rights at all; and a federal ban on all abortions. Again, you have to find a neo-fascist party in other Western countries to see any Western equivalent. The fundamentalists cannot compromise on this – because their God won’t compromise. And the base has no other ideological foundation than fundamentalism of various neurotic kinds.

There’s a case to be made for pure oppositionism. But I truly think Ross under-estimates the depth of the nihilism that truly motivates his party, the thinly veiled racism and unveiled homophobia that courses through its activist veins, and the theocratic impulses that uniquely fire up the base. And I don’t think the fever is breaking. The IRS scandal will deepen and intensify all the defensive and self-defeating paranoia on the partisan right. Issa will be their champion; Ailes the fanner of the conspiratorial flames; and talk radio the defining ideological conversation.

Barro sees this as plainly as day. Ross is making, presumably, another calculation. For my part, I suspect there’s little hope for the GOP; and I increasingly see it as conservatism’s most implacable ideological, radical, destructive foe. I thought it would get worse before it got better; but I see no signs of the pathologies weakening. In the wake of an epic defeat, they appear to be gathering strength.

As surely as Guns N' Roses's "Chinese Democracy" is in the iTunes store and Duke Nukem Forever is on Steam, the fourth season of "Arrested Development" is, after seven years of hints and speculation, finally on Netflix.

The show's always had a political bent and the latest iteration is no exception. But while the first three seasons deal with the Iraq War, what with George Sr. making "lightly treasonous" deals with Saddam Hussein and Lucille forcing Buster into the Army because of taunts from a Michael Moore-like documentary maker, the fourth focuses on what the housing crash did to this family of real estate developers.

Here are a few of the more blatant political notes -- and the real-life events that inspired them. Spoilers abound, so proceed with caution.

Tobias and Lindsay's NINJA loan

In the third episode, "Indian Takers," Lindsay and Tobias Funk decide to make a new start (or, to use the spelling from Tobias' license plate, "ANUSTART") by buying a home together. They inform their realtor James Carr (Ed Helms) that they have no income coming in, no assets, no credit, no jobs, and no work ethic. No matter — Carr offers them a "NINJA" loan, available to borrowers in exactly that position ("No Income No Job and no Assets"). They end up with guest gatehouses and a mansion that looks like this:

NINJA loans are, shockingly, a real thing. Or at least they were, before the housing crash. But they're slightly different from the kind of loan that Tobias and Lindsay get. NINJA loans, also called NINA loans ("No Income No Assets") weren't loans made to people who actually had no income or no assets, necessarily; they were loans where the lender didn't ask for asset and income information from the borrower.

In March 2007, well before the proverbial fan had been hit, my colleague Steve Pearlstein had a great explanation of these products, and other crazy options available to borrowers pre-crisis, like "liar loans" (where, unlike NINA loans, income and asset information was requested but no documentation was required), "balloon mortgages" (where only interest has to be paid for 10 years, and then a big lump sum payment for the principal is due), and "piggyback loans" (where money borrowed in one mortgage is used as a down payment to secure another mortgage).

So why were banks making these loans to people? Weren't they obviously going to fail? The issue, as explained in Planet Money's great episode, "The Giant Pool of Money", is that the securities that banks turned these mortgages into actually performed really well. That's because housing prices kept rising, so you could always pay for previous mortgages using the equity that accrued to the house since the initial mortgage was made. Mike Francis, a former residential mortgage trader at Morgan Stanley, explained it to Planet Money this way:

It's obvious that they performed well, now, because their property kept increasing in value. And over time, they could continue to take cash out of it, if they needed to, to pay the bill. In other words, they could take out another loan from the bank, against the value of their house, which because of the bubble was now worth more than they bought it for.

These loans, called home equity lines of credit, became very popular in the early to mid 2000s partly because they were easy to get, but partly because people needed them to continue making their original mortgage payments. To pay off their debts, they went into more debt.

But even NINA loans involved checking borrowers' credit scores. And given that the entire series started with Lindsay and Tobias fleeing a hotel because they couldn't pay their bill, I somehow doubt their credit score would have been sufficient for a giant NINA loan even in the glory days of 2006. The foreclosure the F nkes faced, at least, was pretty realistic.

Michael's failed development

Sudden Valley, the development Michael has been working on for the whole show, is finally built by the Michael B Company, Michael's new development firm. Unfortunately, the development is finished just as the housing market comes crashing down. That leaves Michael deep in debt to Lucille Austero, from whom he borrowed $700,000 to finance the development, money he doesn't have because of his failure to sell the homes.

He wasn't the only doomed one. Employment in the residential housing construction sector plummeted between 2006 (when "Arrested Development" was last on the air) and 2009:

And as this excellent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center on the residential construction industry notes, its share of the economy plummeted:

And it was a major drag on economic growth:

Michael actually finished Sudden Valley after the housing market started to fall. By 2007, housing completions were already falling, and starts were in free-fall:

And prices were stagnating, making it harder for companies like Michael B to turn a profit:

That's why the number of companies like Michael B shrunk during the crisis:

The single-family homebuilders that survived have sought out new sources of revenue. BPC found that by far the most popular secondary activity was remodeling existing homes. In 2009, only 8 percent of home building companies reported no secondary activities at all.

So yeah, Michael's prospects were about this dismal, due to little fault of his own:

Selling to sex offenders

G.O.B. thought of a clever way to salvage the Sudden Valley project: sell the plots to registered sex offenders (like Tobias) who won't be barred from living there, due to its distance from schools and parks.

This is actually a serious public policy problem. In Miami Dade county, a law barring sex offenders from living with 2,500 feet of schools, parks, bus stops and homeless shelters led them to take refuge under a bridge, about the only place they had left. The colony was broken up in 2010, but some of its residents are still homeless. As Human Rights Watch has concluded, "The inability of convicted sex offenders to find housing when they are released from prison has become a significant barrier to their successful reintegration into society."

Worse, there is no evidence suggesting that residency restrictions have any effect on sex offender recidivism. A study by the Colorado Department of Public Safety concluded, "there does not seem to be a greater number of these offenders living within proximity to schools and childcare centers than other types of offenders." The Minnesota Department of Corrections analyzed every recidivism case from 1990 and 2002. They concluded, "Not one of the 224 sex offenses would likely have been deterred by a residency restrictions law." Indeed, offenders are likelier to go at least a bit away from where they live in order to avoid being recognized.

Sudden Valley, then, is the unintentional beneficiary of a really disastrous public policy approach.

Drone piloting

Buster Bluth reenlists in the Army and becomes a drone pilot. He's a little too good at it, garnering concern from Zach Woods, who plays another one of the pilots.

You can read more about this in our drone FAQ but it's worth noting a few problems here. One is that the Air Force, not the Army, runs the drone program (though the Army does own a few Grey Eagles). And there aren't any drone bases in Anaheim; the closest one to the Bluths is all the way over in Riverside. But location-wise, the Southwest is the main area from where we pilot drones, with Creech Air Force Base in Nevada running all operations until 2009.

Herbert Love's 'High/Low' tax plan

Herbert Love (Terry Crews), a clear homage to failed 2012 GOP presidential primary contender Hermain Cain (his campaign manager even has a mustache and smokes), runs for Congress against Lucille Austero on his "High/Low" tax plan, promising low taxes for people with high incomes.

That's not how Cain would have phrased it, but that was the basic effect of his "9-9-9 tax plan. Here's Jared Bernstein's (very long) chart summarizing the plan:

On May 26, 1937, United Auto Workers organizers, including future president Walter Reuther, walked toward the Ford Motor Company’s giant River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan to hand out pro-union leaflets to workers. As they crossed an overpass toward the plant, Ford’s private army, led by his right-hand man Harry Bennett, savagely beat them, then denied it despite photographic evidence and national outrage.

By May 1937, the United Auto Workers was an increasingly confident union. The creation of the CIO and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act had finally given industrial workers access to the unions they desperately craved. Through the sit-down strikes of the previous winter, the UAW had won contracts with General Motors and Chrysler. That left Ford as the last of the Big Three to organize. The UAW set out that spring to finish the job.

Henry Ford once had a pro-worker reputation. He still does today in the popular mind because of the $5 wage. But that is an unearned reputation. By the 1930s, he was one of the most fervently anti-union employers in the country, not to mention his legendary anti-Semitism and intrusion into his workers’ personal lives. Henry Ford had no problem directing violence against union organizers. A 1932 march of the unemployed from Detroit to the River Rouge plant to demand jobs was met with maximum repression by the Ford controlled town police force, as well as Harry Bennett, leading to the death of five people.

Ford was determined to not fall to the UAW as GM had. Ford saw the state as insufficient protection against unionism. GM relied on Flint for police assistance in fighting the strikers. Ford thought this a bad idea since local and state governments, especially in Michigan under pro-union Governor Frank Murphy, as incompetent and unreliable. As for the federal government, well, Ford didn’t even begin to think he could rely on FDR. Adolf Hitler, now there was a man to Ford’s liking.

Henry Ford receiving his Iron Cross from the Nazis.

So instead of relying on the government, Ford thought he would be proactive with the union and use old-school tactics of violence and outright intimidation to keep unions out of his plants. Ford hired 2000 men to his “Service Department.” These were ex-boxers, thugs, and spies, all comprising Ford’s personal anti-union army and police force.

The UAW knew that Ford’s workers were scared of his thugs. So Walter Reuther decided the UAW needed to take a strong stand, whatever the risk, to show that the union was not scared. It hired an airplane and buzzed River Rouge with a loudspeaker, but this wasn’t so effective. So Reuther got a permit to leaflet the plant. Of course, Ford knew all about this and prepared accordingly. So did Reuther, inviting ministers, journalists, and staffers of the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties to join him. At least if something terrible happened, there would be credible witnesses.

Calling for “Unionism, Not Fordism,” the UAW demands on Ford was a pay raise and shorter hours. Ford was paying $6 for an 8-hour day. The UAW was organizing for $8 a day over a 6-hour day. We sometimes think of the 6-hour day as a pipe dream that only a crazy socialist would demand, as if the 8-hour day is somehow natural, but this was a widespread demand during the 1930s and even after, in part to spread work around to more of the nation’s unemployed.

As Reuther and other UAW organizers, around 50 in total, walked toward the plant to leaflet for the 6-hour day, Detroit News photographer Scotty Kilpatrick asked them to pose for a picture with the Ford company sign in the background. As they did so, Harry Bennett and around 40 of his thugs, came up behind them and savagely attacked them. Kilpatrick shouted a warning, but it was too late.

The moment before the attack

Walter Reuther, on the beating he received:

“Seven times they raised me off the concrete and slammed me down on it. They pinned my arms . . . and I was punched and kicked and dragged by my feet to the stairway, thrown down the first flight of steps, picked up, slammed down on the platform and kicked down the second flight. On the ground they beat and kicked me some more. . . “

Richard Merriweather suffered a broken back from his beating. Bennett’s thugs pulled Richard Frankensteen’s coat over his head to immobilize, then beat him, knocked him, and kicked him repeatedly in the ribs and groin.

Ford thugs beating Richard Frankensteen

After they finished with the UAW leaders, they started beating women who arrived to help pass out the leaflets, as well as the media. The Dearborn police, wholly owned by Henry Ford, did nothing, saying that Ford was just protecting its property from intruders. The thugs then tried to hide all of the evidence of the beating, destroying photography plates. But the Detroit News photographer who originally asked for the posed picture managed to hide a bunch of plates under his car seat, while giving empty ones to the thugs. When the photographs came out, outage ensued.

What was great was Harry Bennett’s response to the pictures:

“The affair was deliberately provoked by union officials. . . . They simply wanted to trump up a charge of Ford brutality. … I know definitely no Ford service man or plant police were involved in any way in the fight.”

This despite the photographic evidence and dozens of eyewitnesses!

Ultimately, Ford suffered little from the Battle of the Overpass. He suffered a rebuke from the newly formed National Labor Relations Board and was ordered to stop violating the Wagner Act, which was supposed to stop this kind of anti-union violence. But ultimately Ford didn’t much care and of course denied all involvement despite the evidence. It did increase support for the United Auto Workers, both in Detroit and around the country. But Ford managed to hold out against a contract until 1940, when he finally caved.

Kilpatrick’s photos of the beatings convinced the Pulitzer Prize to establish a prize for photography. Interestingly, the first winner, in 1942, was of UAW strikers beating a member of Ford’s Service Department.

This is the 62nd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

Larry Ball makes the case that we would be a lot better off with a 4 percent inflation target rather than the 2 percent that is now central bank orthodoxy. Intellectually, this position is hardly outlandish; indeed, Ball’s case is very similar to the case Olivier Blanchard made three years ago, just stated more forcefully and with more evidence.

The basic point is that a higher baseline for inflation would make liquidity traps, in which conventional monetary policy is up against the zero lower bound, less likely and less costly when they happen. Ball estimates that if we had come into this crisis with an underlying inflation rate of 4 percent, average unemployment over the past three years would have been two percentage points lower. That’s huge — it amounts to millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of extra output.

There are two main arguments against a higher inflation target. One is that events like the current crisis almost never happen. My view would be that the costs of this crisis are so large — and the difficulties we’ve had in responding so grotesque — that even if they were once-in-75-year events, that should be enough to warrant different policies. But Ball also argues that the risk of liquidity-trap events is much greater than conventional wisdom would have you believe. Just looking at US experience, the last three recessions were all “postmodern” recessions caused by private-sector overreach, not Fed tightening — and in each case the Fed had a very hard time getting traction. Both 1990-91 and 2001 were near misses in terms of the liquidity trap; 2007 onwards was actually in line with what had become the normal pattern, not a bizarre exception.

By the way, one point Ball doesn’t mention is that to the extent that we consider Japan’s issues partly demographic, that’s becoming the norm too: low fertility and, perhaps, low resulting investment returns are also becoming standard among advanced countries. Again, this calls for a higher inflation target.

The other argument is some kind of slippery slope thing: you decide that 4 percent is OK, and the next thing you know you’re Jimmy Carter, or maybe Weimar. As Ball says, there is really no evidence for this fear. It’s true that it’s what almost all central bankers believe; but they can’t really explain why, and we should never forget that there was once a time when almost all central bankers believed that going off the gold standard would mean the end of civilization.

The point is that the conventional 2 percent target is a prejudice, nothing more; it once rested to some extent on studies suggesting that 2 percent was enough to make the zero lower bound a non-problem, but we now know how utterly wrong that view was; so we’re left with a target that’s considered respectable because it’s what all the respectable people say, and is what all the respectable people say because it’s considered respectable.

What do we want? Four percent! When do we want it? Now!

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George Packer enumerates a long list of “technological advances that make life easier, tastier, more entertaining, healthier, longer; and socio-political changes that have made the [United States] a more tolerant, inclusive place”:

The bottom line in all these improvements is freedom. In America, that’s half the game.

The flip side:

[W]hen the results are distributed as unequally as they are at this moment, when the gap between promise and reality grows so wide, when elites can fail repeatedly and never lose their perches of privilege while ordinary people can never work their way out of debt, equal opportunity becomes a dream. We measure inequality in numbers—quintiles, average and median incomes, percentages of national wealth, unemployment statistics, economic growth rates—but the damage it is doing to our national life today defies quantification. It is killing many Americans’ belief in the democratic promise—their faith that the game is fair, that everyone has a chance. That’s where things have unquestionably deteriorated over the past generation.

Samuel Goldman argues that social equality actually encourages economic inequality:

[I]t is hard for a society characterized by ethnic and cultural pluralism to generate the solidarity required for the redistribution of wealth. People are willing, on the whole, to pay high taxes and forgo luxuries to support those they see as like themselves. They are often unwilling to do so for those who look, sound, or act very differently. In this respect, the affirmations of choice and diversity that now characterize American culture, tend to undermine appeals to collective action or shared responsibility. If we’re all equal in our right to live own lives, why should we do much to help each other?

Which is where my libertarianism cedes to conservatism. At some point, freedom must be tempered if its impact undermines the very social contract that allows it to exist. The inequality we are experiencing as a function of globalization, technology, recession and a tax system so complex it beggars understanding is a real and direct threat to our social coherence and stability as a democratic society. It seems to me conservatives should be among the first to recognize this danger – as Bismarck and Disraeli once did – and forge a public policy to counter it.

This conservatism would embrace universal healthcare as a bulwark of democratic legitimacy in an age of such extremes; it should break up the banks and bring back Glass-Steagall; it should drastically simplify the tax code, ridding it of special interest deductions; it should construct an international agreement to prevent the egregious and disgusting tax avoidance of a company like Apple; and it should seek to invest and innovate in education and infrastructure.

Some of this inequality cannot be stopped, the globalizing forces behind it are so strong. But mitigating its damage is a real challenge. And conservatives who believe that we are one nation should rise to it.

Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff's regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system, is being written by Ezra Klein today. Sarah, unfortunately, is doing some firsthand reporting on America's dental system. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here.

For all the speculating in Washington about how the Affordable Care Act will work — much of it, I admit, from me — there's been too little attention given to the best evidence we have on the subject: How the extremely similar reforms in Massachusetts have worked.

Take employers. There's real concern that companies will see the Affordable Care Act as an opportunity to drop health insurance for their employees and let taxpayers pick up the tab. For those with more than 50 full-time workers, that'll mean paying a $2,000 to $3,000 penalty for each one, but that's a whole lot cheaper than paying for health insurance.

The Massachusetts reforms, if anything, were even friendlier to this sort of dumping. The penalty for employers was a paltry $295 per worker. Compared to the average cost of an employer-provided health plan in the Northeast — $17,099, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2012 Employer Health Benefits Survey — that's a pittance. It seemed almost irrational for employers to keep offering coverage.

"The benefits we were giving guys who left employer-sponsored insurance were way more generous than what the federal plan gives them," says MIT's Jonathan Gruber, a health economist who helped design the Massachusetts reforms. "And we didn't have much of an employer penalty. I predicted employers would drop coverage."

But they didn't. To Gruber — and everyone else's — surprise, employers expanded coverage. "In the seven years since Massachusetts enacted its law," says a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, "the number of people covered by insurance through the workplace increased by about 1 percentage point, running counter to the rest of the nation, which saw employer-based insurance decline by 5.7 percentage points."

The report argues that people simply misunderstand why employers offer health-care benefits. They're not doing it as a favor to employees. And they're not doing it because anyone is making them. After all, prior to the Massachusetts reforms, employers could stop covering their employees without penalty. That's true now in every other state in the nation, too. And yet 61 percent of firms offer health-care coverage. If anything, the Massachusetts and national reforms are making it pricier, not cheaper, for them to drop insurance.

Employers offer health insurance because employees demand it. If you're an employer who doesn't offer insurance and your competitors do, you'll lose out on the most talented workers. An employer who stopped offering health benefits would see his best employees immediately start looking for other jobs. That was true before the Massachusetts health reforms. And it turned out to be even truer after them.

PricewaterhouseCoopers found that Massachusetts's individual mandate had two unexpected effects. First, it led to a lot of employees signing up for employer-based coverage they'd previously rejected. "About a quarter of the uninsured are offered employer-sponsored insurance and don't take it," Gruber says. "If the mandate will affect anyone, it will affect those guys."

Second, it led some workers to march into their boss's office and ask for insurance. The study notes that "the percentage of small employers offering coverage in Massachusetts rose from 45 percent to 59 percent between 2005 2011," even though insurance premiums actually rose for small employers.

The Massachusetts experience might not prove an apt guide to the national experience. Though the Massachusetts reforms are architecturally similar to the Affordable Care Act, they didn't have to contend with a political party working relentlessly to undermine their implementation. Moreover, Massachusetts is a relatively rich and liberal state that already had a fairly high rate of health insurance.

That said, there are a couple other reasons to expect that employers won't be eager to drop coverage. First, because employer-provided health benefits are not taxed, employers can pay their workers more by paying them partly in health-care benefits. Let's say an employer decides to stop offering health benefits but, in a bid to keep employees happy, promises to give them the cash value of their coverage. The employer would have to spend more on the wages than it spends on the benefits, as the wages are taxed. For the record, I think this is a very stupid way to construct our tax code, but that's how it works.

Second, the fraction of employers actually affected by the health law's mandate is very small. "You've got 5.7 million firms in the U.S.," says Wharton's Mark Duggan, who served as the top health economist at White House's Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. "Only 210,000 have more than 50 employees. So 96 percent of firms aren't affected. Then if you look among those firms with 50 or more employees, something on the order of 95 percent offer health insurance. So it's basically 10,000 or so employers who have more than 50 employees and don't offer coverage." Those companies probably employ around one percent of American workers.

Which is all to say that, for most companies, the Affordable Care Act won't bring much change at all, and so there's little reason to expect their behavior will change, either. And if it does change, it might not change in the direction we expect. "What happened in Massachusetts is not what I predicted," Gruber says. "But it happened."

KLEIN NOTES: Top health policy reads from around the Web

No sticker shock here — just affordable insurance premiums. "Predictions of an Obamacare apocalypse seem a little less credible today, thanks to California. On Thursday, officials in that state offered the first detailed glimpse of what consumers buying health benefits on their own can expect to pay next year. And from the looks of things, these consumers will be getting a pretty good deal." Jon Cohn in the New Republic.

How to vaccinate an aging society. "From 2000 to 2025, the over-60 demographic segment will double from 600 million to almost 1.2 billion. By 2050, it will nearly double again, surpassing two billion and accounting for an incredible 22% of the total global population. A society this 'old' has never before existed, and it is a social, ethical, and economic imperative to keep older adults healthy and engaged. It is timely for the global public health community to re-align its thinking, policies and activities to this new demographic reality." Michael Hodin, Javier Garau, and Alexandre Kalachec at Health Affairs.

The secret history of Max Baucus's "Train Wreck" quote. "What would cause the "train wreck"? Insufficient awareness of how the law worked. Not the law itself. Neither at that hearing nor in the month since has the (always pretty mush-mushed) Baucus said the law itself would be a disaster if implemented. But that's how Republicans used the quote." Dave Weigel in Slate.

Carol Matlack reports on the recent move away from flat taxes in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria:

The lesson: Flat taxes seem to work pretty well when an economy is growing—but not so well when it is stagnant or shrinking. Across Central and Eastern Europe, “every country is in need of more revenue because of debt and public deficits,” says Andreas Peichl, a senior research associate at the IZA think tank in Bonn, Germany. “There is a feeling that the crisis has affected poorer people more than the rich and that the rich should contribute more. But that is not easy to do if you only have one tax rate.”

Given the extremes of inequality we are now facing – and likely to intensify as technology cuts yet another swathe through entire industries that sustain a middle class – I have to say I am pragmatically against such a tax now, even though I have consistently supported one in the past. I’m only flip-flopping, I hope, in the best way. A flat tax remains theoretically and symbolically deeply attractive to me. I still believe that penalizing people for succeeding in our economy is unjust to those individuals. But in our current contingency of accelerating inequality, a flat tax would be socially destructive.

And a true conservative seeks to avoid social destruction more than he enshrines ideological purity (which is why I really have no love, and a lot of distaste, for the current GOP). Nonetheless, we clearly, desperately need simpler taxation. And surely that is one area of potential compromise for both the GOP and the president, if the GOP hangs on in the House.

You would have to make it revenue neutral at first. But taking not a scalpel but a sledge-hammer to deductions, especially corporate welfare, could finally create a tax code that is comprehensible to most citizens.

It is deeply damaging to our core democratic legitimacy that the average citizen has no hope of understanding the tax code. If we cannot understand it, we cannot truly monitor it. And thereby lies one root of profound distrust of government, of the way in which powerful interests, like Apple, can find ways to avoid tax, while the struggling middle class has no way out. Yes, we need new revenue. Desperately. But if the actual politics prevent it, why not the next best thing: radical tax simplification. Some may argue that this could ultimately hurt the Democrats’ leverage for more revenue. So be it. We have four years of what could be stalemate – and this framework could unite sane people in both parties to make our tax regime comprehensible, reduce the income of lobbyists, and restore a sense that the game is not rigged. Those are important – close to indispensable – elements of a functioning democracy.

Francis is living up to his promise.

Spencer counts up the topics Obama should address in his upcoming national security speech, particularly his scroll of emergency war powers authorizing detention and surveillance:

To date, the Obama administration hasn’t talked about rolling back any of the emergency powers it enjoys. Those powers, and the rebalance of liberty and security they represent, have already outlived Osama bin Laden. The basic inertial forces of American politics position them to outlive al-Qaida. Just two years ago, cabinet officials talked about being ten or 20 kills away from strategically defeating al-Qaida. Now senior Pentagon aides talk about a war that will last ten to 20 years.

“Enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” Obama said in his second inaugural address. Rhetoric like that is cheap, and arguably cynical, considering Obama’s geographic expansion of the war on terror. If Obama wants his speech tomorrow to surpass empty rhetoric, he can at least acknowledge that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war powers, either.

I hope Spencer is pleasantly surprised tomorrow. I think Obama understands that one of his critical legacies will be unwinding the “perpetual emergency” and to normalizing our relations with the rest of the world so we can return prudently to a pre-9/11 posture again. The ferocious critics of the drone strikes do not, it seems to me, acknowledge the role of drones in this process. The drone strikes really did help wipe out the human infrastructure of al Qaeda as a formal network in Af-Pak while allowing us to draw down troops in that region. There came a point, of course, at which their success in undermining the formal institution of al Qaeda actually fortified the informal Jihadist movement, and its support in Muslim countries, and even here, as in the Tsarnaev losers. Since that inflection point, the drone war has been reduced enormously.

This has been a terribly difficult needle to thread, and I wish some of the president’s critics would occasionally acknowledge that difficulty, instead of getting more and more shrill in blanket condemnations. Obama wants both to end the Bush-Cheney “war on terror” rubric without letting our guard down against Jihadists. That’s why I’m not too outraged by the fanatical pursuit of national security leaks.

If we are to defang Jihadist terror – and it is real and resilient – without the horrible error of occupying Muslim countries with troops, we have to use intelligence, infiltration, espionage and superior data analysis to prevent plots before they bear bloody fruit. When the existence of informants are exposed by the AP, the chances of keeping terror at bay by these least worst means dwindle. Which means the temptation to return to war and torture would remain, in the hands of future presidents. This may be hard for purists to grasp. But if Obama is going to unwind the full Bush-Cheney apparatus of the permanent war, he needs to be able to fight Jihadist terror on traditional intelligence grounds as well. And that requires some secrecy.

But it also requires more boldness than Obama has shown so far. He needs to have Gitmo closed and bulldozed before he leaves office. That may require some truly difficult calls – but that’s what the executive branch is for, especially in its control of the release of prisoners. Maybe this cannot happen until the near the end of his term. But if Gitmo is left open, its legacy of brutal torture, murder and violation of core American values will remain for a future Republican to reboot. Obama has already come a long way in unwinding much of this. But before he leaves, he must ensure that no trace of the Cheney gulag remains.

Alex Mayyasi thinks millennials are more deserving of a discount:

The United States only began measuring poverty in the 1960s, so we lack standard figures dating farther back than that. But it’s recognized that the trend of decreasing poverty among seniors dates back to the thirties and forties. 2011 Census figures place poverty among Americans aged 65 and older at 8.7%, well below the national average of 15%.

Today it is the Millennials, the youngest generation, that finds itself poor, vulnerable, and screwed by financial storms caused by another generation. Unemployment among 18-29 year olds is 11.1% and has been over 10% for 53 months. The rate for people age 16-24 is16.1%. Poverty is highest among teens and children - 27%.

Dylan Matthews, on the other hand, argues that seniors are poorer than those statistics would lead you to believe.

Are you a liberal imperialist? Liberal imperialists are like kinder, gentler neoconservatives: Like neocons, they believe it's America's responsibility to right political and humanitarian wrongs around the world, and they're comfortable with the idea of the United States deciding who will run countries such as Libya, Syria, or Afghanistan. Unlike neocons, liberal imperialists embrace and support international institutions (like the United Nations), and they are driven more by concern for human rights than they are by blind nationalism or protecting the U.S.-Israel special relationship. Still, like the neocons, liberal imperialists are eager proponents for using American hard power, even in situations where it might easily do more harm than good. The odd-bedfellow combination of their idealism with neocons' ideology has given us a lot of bad foreign policy over the past decade, especially the decisions to intervene militarily in Iraq or nation-build in Afghanistan, and today's drumbeat to do the same in Syria.

It's not that the United States should never intervene in other countries or that its military should not undertake humanitarian missions (as it did in Indonesia following the Asian tsunami and in Haiti after a damaging earthquake). It should do so, however, only when there are vital national interests at stake or when sending U.S. troops or American arms is overwhelmingly likely to make things better. In short, decisions to intervene need to clear a very high bar and survive hardheaded questioning about what the use of force will actually accomplish.

So while I often sympathize with their intentions, I'm tempted to send all liberal imperialists a sampler cross-stitched with: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." At a minimum, that warning might help them be just a bit more skeptical about the wisdom of their advice. But I'm lousy at needlepoint, so instead today I offer my "10 Warning Signs that You Are a Liberal Imperialist."

#1: You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don't speak, and that you never paid much attention to until bad things started happening there.

#2: You tend to argue that the United States is morally obligated to "do something" rather than just stay out of nasty internecine quarrels in faraway lands. In the global classroom that is our digitized current world, you believe that being a bystander -- even thousands of miles away -- is as bad as being the bully. So you hardly ever find yourself saying that "we should sit this one out."

#3: You think globally and speak, um, globally. You are quick to condemn human rights violations by other governments, but American abuses (e.g., torture, rendition, targeted assassinations, Guantánamo, etc.) and those of America's allies get a pass. You worry privately (and correctly) that aiming your critique homeward might get in the way of a future job.

#4: You are a strong proponent of international law, except when it gets in the way of Doing the Right Thing. Then you emphasize its limitations and explain why the United States doesn't need to be bound by it in this case.

#5: You belong to the respectful chorus of those who publicly praise the service of anyone in the U.S. military, but you would probably discourage your own progeny from pursuing a military career.

#6. Even if you don't know very much about military history, logistics, or modern military operations, you are still convinced that military power can achieve complex political objectives at relatively low cost.

#7: To your credit, you have powerful sympathies for anyone opposing a tyrant. Unfortunately, you tend not to ask whether rebels, exiles, and other anti-regime forces are trying to enlist your support by telling you what they think you want to hear. (Two words: Ahmed Chalabi.)

#8. You are convinced that the desire for freedom is hard-wired into human DNA and that Western-style liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Accordingly, you believe that democracy can triumph anywhere -- even in deeply divided societies that have never been democratic before -- if outsiders provide enough help.

#9. You respect the arguments of those who are skeptical about intervening, but you secretly believe that they don't really care about saving human lives.

#10. You believe that if the United States does not try to stop a humanitarian outrage, its credibility as an ally will collapse and its moral authority as a defender of human rights will be tarnished, even if there are no vital strategic interests at stake.

If you are exhibiting some or all of these warning signs, you have two choices. Option #1: You can stick to your guns (literally) and proudly own up to your interventionist proclivities. Option #2: You can admit that you've been swept along by the interventionist tide and seek help. If you choose the latter course, I recommend that you start by reading Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten's "Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization" (International Security, 2013), along with Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan and Peter Van Buren's We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.

And if that doesn't work, maybe we need some sort of 12-step program…

Apple.

I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to seize Apple’s assets until it came to a reasonable agreement on its tax bill.

A recent study reviewed the published literature and talked to climate scientists about whether human activities are driving climate change. Their results indicate a general consensus in the scientific community:

An international team of scientists analyzed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers published between 1991 and 2011 dealing with climate change and global warming. That’s right — we’re talking about 20 years of papers, many published long before Superstorm Sandy, last year’s epic Greenland melt, or Australia’s “angry summer.”

About two-thirds of the authors of those studies refrained from stating in their abstracts whether human activity was responsible for climate change. But in those papers where a position on the claim was staked out, 97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are, indeed, cooking the planet.

The scientists involved with the new study also asked the authors of the peer-reviewed papers for their personal reflections on the causes of global warming. A little more than one-third expressed no opinion. Of those who did share a view, 97.2 percent endorsed the consensus that humans are to blame. Out of the 1,189 authors who responded to the survey, just 39 rejected the idea that humans are causing global warming.

But the main reason many Americans still refuse to believe it is religious fundamentalism. That is immune to science and reason. But it is the bedrock belief of one of our political parties.

Myron Levin has just an outstanding report on how the power saw industry fights against implementing already existing technology that would reduce finger injuries from table saws to zero. In short, an Oregon inventor came up with a table saw design that would stop immediately on contact with anything but wood. If you touch a running saw, it leaves you with the equivalent of a paper cut. He figured the saw industry would adopt it immediately. He was wrong. Instead, the saw industry has spent the last decade fighting tooth and nail against it because they fear that if anyone adopts it, their liability will go up and lawsuits will follow.

To reiterate, corporations put profits before people’s hands and lives and there is no hyperbole in that statement at all.

This is a story that won’t get lasting attention because of the small number of dead workers, but following the death of 1127 garment workers in Bangladesh, we have another factory collapse in the apparel industry. The roof collapsed in a Cambodian shoe factory, killing 2 workers and injuring at least 9 others. The factory makes shoes for the Japanese company Asics.

Once again, these workplace disasters are a completely acceptable cost of doing business in the apparel industry. Asics could employ these workers directly in its own Cambodian factory. But it is more profitable to shirk the responsibility and instead pretend like it has no fault in the death of these workers. As the linked article notes, Cambodia, like Bangladesh, has workplace safety laws and building standard codes, but they are completely unenforced. The lack of any bite to the regulation is precisely why companies like Asics, Wal-Mart, and Gap outsource factory work there, separating the point of production from the point of consumption by as large a gap as possible. This is why I believe that Asics corporate leads should be held criminally responsible for the deaths under Japanese law, just as if the factory had collapsed in Japan.

There is a legitimate reason to examine 501 (c) 4 groups: they are officially just social welfare groups, arguing for better tomorrow tomorrow or whatever. They’re not supposed to spend money on campaigns for presidential candidates. Obviously, this should be done on a strictly nonpartisan basis, and the Cincinnati office (which seems to have been relieved of its duties recently) was way out of line in focusing mainly on the right and Tea Party groups. I’m with Rand Paul in wanting heads to roll once the full facts are available.

But notice nonetheless the bigger picture. 2012 was a year in which the airwaves were flooded by ads paid for by these nebulous groups seeking tax exemption. The right swamped the left with these groups. From ProPublica this morning, in a story which reveals allegedly illegal leaking of some of the data from Cincinnati:

One of the applications the IRS released to ProPublica was from Crossroads GPS, the largest social-welfare nonprofit involved in the 2012 election. The group, started in part by GOP consultant Karl Rove, promised the IRS that any effort to influence elections would be “limited.” The group spent more than $70 million from anonymous donors in 2012.

So the biggest social welfare nonprofit was clearly in violation of the law. And because of the IRS’s stupid behavior, that very relevant fact is obscured.

The Universal Basic Income hit the Washington Post again this weekend, courtesy of Mike Konczal. He focuses on left objections to the UBI proposal, ranging from its effect on gender equality to its relationship with the existing welfare state to its interaction with the struggle for workplace democracy. In the end, he emphasizes the benefits of the UBI, and insists that while we’re unlikely to see basic income in the United States anytime soon, it’s still worth “taking a moment to think Utopian.”

Matt Bruenig objects to Konczal’s characterization of the basic income as “utopian,” on the grounds that it is not something that “proposes to dramatically overhaul society into an entirely unprecedented structure that will usher in a nearly perfect world.” It is only utopian in the very weak sense that it is not currently on the political agenda as something that is likely to be enacted.

It’s certainly true that basic income is hardly utopian in its etymological sense of meaning “nowhere.” A recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique describes an experiment with UBI in an Indian village. The experiment is run by a trade union called the Self Employed Women’s Association, and it found that with just an extra $3.65 per month, “people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business.” This is consistent with the results found in basic income experiments in Namibia and in 1970s Canada.

Meanwhile, there have long been critics on the Left who criticize basic income proposals precisely for their perceived lack of utopianism. As Konczal notes, Barbara Bergmann argues that it is more important to secure broader access to specific goods like child care, health care, and education: “The fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met.” In a New Left Review essay, Göran Therborn strikes a similar tone, referring to the basic income as a “curious utopia of resignation” arising in response to welfare state retrenchment and diminished prospects for working class control over the workplace or the means of production.

From the perspective of the basic income’s leftist advocates, however, there is another way in which it can be considered a deeply utopian project. Fredric Jameson discusses two different meanings of utopia in his study of utopian politics and science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future. The first is utopia as a fully-elaborated program for the future society, which is close to Bruenig’s sense of the proposal to dramatically overhaul society. But the second is the utopian impulse, which appears across much broader domains of everyday life and politics, including even “piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reforms.” Such impulses may not themselves be the program for a utopian society, but they can point in the direction of future programmatic realizations.

The French writer André Gorz was a longtime proponent of the basic income, and is also responsible for a well-known theorization of its utopian transformative potential. In one of his early works, Strategy for Labor, he attempted to do away with the tired Left debate over “reform or revolution” and replace it with a new distinction:

Is it possible from within—that is to say, without having previously destroyed capitalism—to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the system? This is the old question of “reform or revolution.” This was (or is) a paramount question when the movement had (or has) the choice between a struggle for reforms and armed insurrection. Such is no longer the case in Western Europe; here there is no longer an alternative. The question here revolves around the possibility of “revolutionary reforms,” that is to say, of reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society. Is this possible?

Gorz goes on to distinguish “reformist reforms,” which subordinate themselves to the need to preserve the functioning of the existing system, from the radical alternative:

A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. And finally, it bases the possibility of attaining its objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes. These changes can be sudden, just as they can be gradual. But in any case they assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints. They assume structural reforms.

One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemically viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform. Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure. One of my favorite gestures in this direction is Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs’ 1986 essay, “A Capitalist Road to Communism.”

The essay begins from the proposition that Marxism’s ultimate end is not socialism, but rather a communist society that abolishes not merely exploitation (the unjust distribution of the social product relative to work performed) but also alienation: “productive activities need no longer be prompted by external rewards.”

They then go on to sketch out a scenario in which a reform instituted under capitalism leads to communism without the intermediary stage of socialist construction. This thought experiment revolves around the achievement of an unconditional, universal basic income. Suppose, they say, “that it is possible to provide everyone with a universal grant sufficient to cover his or her ‘fundamental needs’ without this involving the economy in a downward spiral. How does the economy evolve once such a universal grant is introduced?”

Their answer is that the basic income would “twist” the capitalist drive to increase productivity, such that:

Entitlement to a substantial universal grant will simultaneously push up the wage rate for unattractive, unrewarding work (which no one is now forced to accept in order to survive) and bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work (because fundamental needs are covered anyway, people can now accept a high-quality job paid far below the guaranteed income level). Consequently, the capitalist logic of profit will, much more than previously, foster technical innovation and organizational change that improve the quality of work and thereby reduce the drudgery required per unit of product.

If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. Meanwhile, the wage for desirable work eventually falls to zero, because people are both willing to do it for free, and able to do so due to the existence of a basic income to supply their essential needs. As Gorz puts it in a later work, the Critique of Economic Reason, certain activities “may be partially repatriated into the sphere of autonomous activities and reduce the demand for these things to be provided by external services, whether public or commercial.”

The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced costlessly and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary co-operative activity, rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than a crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, this becomes the path to utopia.

Consider, for example, a basic income that was linked to the size of Gross Domestic Product. We are used to a capitalist world in which the increase in material prosperity corresponds to a rise in GDP, the measured value of economic activity in money. But as wage labor comes to be replaced either by automation or voluntary activity, GDP would begin to fall, and the basic income with it. This would not lead to lowered standards of living, because the falling GDP here also denotes a decline in the cost of living. Just like the socialist state in certain versions of traditional Marxism, the basic income withers away. As van der Veen and van Parijs put it, “capitalist societies will smoothly move toward full communism.”

The capitalist road to communism is truly a utopia. Not only in the colloquial sense of a total transformation of a society, but also in its overly simplified and rationalistic picture of social evolution. As Jameson notes, utopias are defined as much by their closures and exclusions as their positive programs, as much by what they cannot say as what they can. A utopia often says more about the present in which it was written than it does about the future it depicts.

In the case of the capitalist road to communism, the things left out include the political struggles that would ensue if social development threatened to evolve the capitalist class out of existence, gradually sapping their profits and their social power. This began to manifest itself even under the meager basic income in the Namibian experiment: white landlords were deeply hostile to the basic income and denied the evidence of its benefits, perhaps because they are “afraid that the poor will gain some influence and deprive the rich, white 20 percent of the population of some of their power.” Also brushed aside are the ecological limits that might make true abundance elusive. Both of these are themes I attempted to flesh out in “Four Futures.” A third issue, which I’ve discussed a bit elsewhere, is the ingrained gender norms that may be reinforced by expanding the domain of “voluntary” labor, which often amounts the imposition of unpaid work on women. But the conceptual clarity of van der Veen and van Parijs’ rendition is enlightening in its very implausibility and incompleteness, a demonstration of the utopian impulse contained in an apparently timid policy proposal.

Lunar Baboon [website | twitter]

[h/t: pleatedjeans]

Col Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut and Commander of the International Space Station, is preparing to return home to Earth. For the past six months he’s provided us all with truly awesome glimpses of our world and countless fascinating insights into what life is like in outer space, aboard the ISS. (What ever will we do without him?) But before he goes, Commander Hadfield has gifted us with a song. It gave us goosebumps and is pretty much one of the best things ever:

With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.

Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.

Diabolical. 

[original image via reddit]

David Foster Wallace’s noted 2005 Kenyon College commencement address is brought to life:

In an interview, the film’s creators explain how they skirted the copyright issues for the audio:

We had little to no budget for this project and we knew that the publishing house was going to be really skeptical of our little company’s request to utilize his work. We had faith in our vision for the video and that once it was complete they would see that this was something made with the best intentions in mind. We are in no way making any money directly from this video; it was purely a passion project. While we had high hopes for this, we could have never seen all of this attention coming. Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

John Maynard Keynes was right about the future. But he was wrong about how we'd be spending it.

"In the long run," Keynes famously wrote, "we are all dead." I rate that claim true. But it actually has little to do with Keynes's views on the subject.

Keynes was criticizing his colleagues in the economics profession who minimized the import of deep recessions -- and what governments could do to prevent and shorten them -- by promising that wounded economies, if given enough time, eventually return to health. "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again," he continued.

Keynes, however, was deeply interested in the future -- even the part that would happen after he was dead. In 1930, he wrote a slim tract titled "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." What he got wrong is interesting. What he got right is remarkable.

Consider the context. The Industrial Revolution -- and the millennia of economic stagnation that preceded it -- was a relatively fresh memory. The new economy, in which technological innovation raised living standards with remarkable regularity, was trapped in the throes of the Great Depression. And here came Keynes, promising that "the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today."

Keynes was right. From 1930 to 2011, real per capita GDP in the U.S -- that's the size of our economy after adjusting for inflation and dividing by the population -- rose sixfold. "Would any economist today, even with the bene t of training in frontier growth theory, try to make serious economic projections 100 years out?" asked UCLA economist Lee Ohanian in "Revisiting Keynes." "Very unlikely, but Keynes did, and did so remarkably well — in all honesty, much too well — given the available theory and the existing economic conditions when he was writing."

If this growth came to pass, Keynes said, humanity would have solved, or be quite near to solving, "the economic problem" that had bedeviled every single generation before us. We would have enough. Perhaps not as much as we wanted to have, or as much as we could have, but enough to survive.

This was, Keynes recognized, a reality for which we were ill-prepared. "We have been expressly evolved by nature -- with all our impulses and deepest instincts -- for the purpose of solving the economic problem," he wrote. "If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose."

The question Keynes set out to solve was how humanity would adapt to a world of abundance. "He saw two options," explains Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. "One was that we could consume ever more goods. Or we could enjoy more leisure. What worried Keynes was that when you looked at how people in the British upper classes spent their leisure, he was not overly enthralled with what he saw."

By and large, we have chosen door number one. That would have devastated Keynes, who hoped that in a post-scarcity world, "the love of money as a possession -- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -- will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

In this, Keynes was insufficiently committed to his own analysis. He hoped that solving the economic problem would return us to our true nature and that people would "once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful." But he had it right the first time. Humanity's true nature evolved around the economic problem and, with the economic problem solved, it has simply applied itself to a simulacrum of the economic problem.

In the United States, the economic problem that organizes many of our lives is not that we don't have enough. It's that we don't have quite as much as those who have more. That's an economic problem that, almost by definition, can never be solved. It's an economic problem that assures we will never lose our purpose.

It is also an economic problem most of us choose for ourselves. But not all of us. In last week's Sunday Business section, Kelly Johnson interviewed Mister Money Mustache, a young retiree who lives happily with his wife and child and devotes himself to family, leisure and, occasionally, carpentry. He considers today's middle-class life "an exploding volcano of wastefulness" and lives on $25,000 annually. His life is proof that Keynes was right about what we could do. His rarity is proof that he was wrong about what we would do.