…because he is Robert effing Solow and I am not,
and Solow’s review is terrific.
__P.S.__: Via Cosma Shalizi, I should have noted. I think he got it from Brad DeLong, which he (Cosma) also bookmarked.
Category: Books
I was just minding my own, Googling for an image of the cover of [book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century] for inclusion in an eventual review, when I happened upon the [newspaper: Wall Street Journal] getting it horribly, horribly wrong, and I was awoken from my dogmatic slumbers. I guess I’ll be writing that review now, then.
I really cannot emphasize this enough: there is nothing in that [newspaper: Journal] piece that gets Piketty even half right. That the piece contains the phrase “this book is less a work of economic analysis than a bizarre ideological screed” is proof on its own that the author wasn’t even reading the same book that the rest of the literate Anglophone world was.
The best thing you can do to combat the [newspaper: Journal] piece is to go read Piketty himself. Really, you need to do that. If people aren’t still citing Piketty himself in 30 years, they will be citing works that would not have existed without him; it’s really that good.
If you don’t read Piketty, what you need to know is the single mathematical statement that dominates the whole book: the rate of return on invested capital historically exceeds the rate of growth of the economy. If that continues over a long enough time scale, the weight of the past (in the form of inherited fortune) comes to dominate the present (in the form of new growth, entrepreneurship, etc.). Over long time scales, the rate of return on capital has exceeded the economy’s rate of growth; the only times when capital’s share of national wealth has dropped have been times of global-scale war. War made necessary the systems of income taxation that we have today; war destroyed capital, in the form of land and factories. In normal eras, inheritance comes to be viewed as the only way to “make it”: entering “the professions” (law, medicine) and working hard is not going to get you into the 1%. In short: under ordinary circumstances, everyone knows that the only way to become part of the aristocracy is to marry an heiress. That’s why the works of Austen and Balzac play such a central role in Piketty’s book: they illustrate what everyone knew in their guts in the 18th and 19th centuries, even when they didn’t necessarily have economic data to back it up.
And we’re heading back to that world: the basic depressing thrust of [book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century] is that we’ll almost inevitably end up in the land of “marry an heiress” whenever the rate of return on capital exceeds the economy’s rate of growth, which it almost always does.
You can choose to respond to this, or not. Piketty has his doubts that a society in which the wealthiest 1% own 90-plus percent of the assets is politically stable. As an economist with some humility, and with a great many critical things to say about his discipline, he is at pains — again and again and again — to observe that the problems of whether and how to respond to growing inequality are not merely technocratic problems of optimal tax policy to be solved by convex maximization; they must be solved by democratic polities in command of all the facts. And every generation encounters different variations of the governance problem, which require constant democratic engagement to handle them. One problem our generation faces is the increasing mobility of capital, which makes taxation by a single nation-state feel increasingly toothless. Even measuring the problem we’re trying to solve, Piketty observes, is getting harder: the wealthy seem to be hiding an astonishingly large quantity of money in offshore tax havens.
To sum up, then: inequality may be a problem; if it’s a problem, it cannot be solved by infinitely wise economists, but must instead be solved at the ballot box; if it’s going to be solved at the ballot box, the electorate must know the extent of the problem it’s solving; and increasingly, multinational capital flows make it hard for the electorate to know the extent of the problem it’s solving.
One of Piketty’s solutions is a modest tax on assets, in large part just to get some record of how large inequalities are. This would require some international coordination, of course; money hiding in Swiss banks needs to be exposed to the sunlight. As Piketty archly notes, it’s no more utopian to expect this to happen than it is to expect European nations to come together and agree on a common currency in the absence of a common government, yet somehow they’ve managed to do that.
As you might expect, it’s the modest asset tax that gets the [newspaper: Journal] author’s panties in a bunch. Wealthy people don’t want to pay more money, and the cossacks have always worked for the czar; so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the [newspaper: Journal] would be upset. And it may well be a safe bet that most people aren’t going to read a 600-page work on the economics of inequality, so maybe the [newspaper: Journal] will win by default. You, my intelligent reader, won’t allow that to happen, will you? The [newspaper: Journal] has been blinded by tears of rage, to the point of actual illiteracy. On the one side I might quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” On the other, more hopeful side, I’ll quote Jefferson: “let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Let’s approach the [newspaper: Wall Street Journal] as Jefferson would have, if for no other reason than that I think that’s what Piketty would want us to do.
The final thing to say about Piketty’s masterpiece is that its very durability derives from the fact that it is exactly the opposite of the “screed” that the [newspaper: Wall Street Journal] has manufactured out of whole cloth. Whenever possible, Piketty maps out all branches on the road ahead, and makes clear that the choice of path is not up to him; it’s up to democracies. He’s fair to a shocking and refreshing degree. As soon as the ideologues at the [newspaper: Journal] are done hyperventilating, perhaps they’ll be able to see that [book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century] is an astoundingly fair book, with ammunition aplenty for all sides in the debate. Indeed, much of what Piketty is saying is that democracies require knowledge for their effective functioning — not because that knowledge arms one side or the other, but because everyone on all sides needs it. Our perspective on inequality is a moral judgment that should be based on the soundest of reasons, and those reasons should be based on facts. Piketty doesn’t supply the judgment, but he does supply the facts.
P.S.: There’s really so much more to say about the book. For one thing, Piketty makes the point that you really need to distinguish between labor income and capital income in any analysis of inequality, so that naïve measures like the Gini coefficient hide more than they illuminate. And when you pick apart the numbers in this way, you find that the U.S. distribution of labor income — labor, not capital — is more unequal than at probably any other time or any other place in recorded history, because the wealthiest people are largely a new class of “supermanagers” rather than the basketball players or world-famous musicians that we might imagine. You really need to be in the top 0.1% or 0.01% before you find people largely living more off of capital assets than they are off of their labor.
Rather than explore all of the reasons why you should read this book, and all of the things that you’d learn, I’d just strongly recommend that you read it yourself. It’s seriously worth your time — again, because Piketty’s role is to inform democratic debate.
P.P.S.: Having now made up my own mind about Piketty, I can go and read the reviews I’ve been waiting to read, like Krugman’s.
P.P.P.S.: The title of the post, by the way, is a hat tip to Mary McCarthy.
I will only say here of the Piketty book that practically almost absolutely everybody is talking about: it really is that good. I’m most of the way through it, hopefully to finish today. It’s just … hard to call it anything short of a landmark. It consolidates everything you’ve read or thought about inequality into a single work, complete with analytical support for nearly everything (though oddly lacking citations in nearly all of its footnotes).
This is just a downpayment on a review. You really want to read the book, though.
I hardly want to tell you anything about this book. Mostly I just want to tell you to go read it right away. Eleanor Catton, who has won a Booker Prize for [book: The Luminaries] at 28 years old and has thereby left half the world with their jaws agape, has pulled off a magic trick with this book.
It’s really hard for me to describe it as anything other than a magic trick. While reading it, I for some reason couldn’t help but contrast it with the magic involved in some amazing piece of machinery. I don’t really understand what’s happening in my iPhone, yet somehow that’s expected: it presents as a single smooth piece of glass, with all the magic carefully hidden away. [book: The Luminaries], like all novels, shows you all its workings. Yet Catton’s novel feels more magical than any machine.
Catton plays with time, periodically jumping back years and months to explain how we got here. She plays with storytelling: characters tell stories that involve other characters, and the other characters inside the stories tell stories of their own. She plays with narration: our narrator is possibly omniscient, and it’s really hard to tell which era he or she is in: the narrator could exist in the 19th century like the rest of the novel, or could be telling us the whole story from a century on. For that matter, the narrator might be an incorporeal essence rather than a human.
Yet the most magical part of all is that, with all these magic tricks going on, Catton is a careful enough storyteller that she never leaves us behind. She knows that all the nested storytelling and playing with time could leave us confused, and paranoid that we’re missing something. So she’s careful to bring us along slowly: when she returns us to a character who exists at the intersection of three or four different stories, the story carefully reminds us of that character’s significance. And it’s not clunky at all: Catton has the characters dance with each other in such a way that they’re *naturally* going to explain to each other what’s going on. Catton’s handling of this complexity says both that she is a master of the story she’s telling, and completely understands the ear of the person she’s telling it to. This sort of deftness would be astonishing from writers of any age; from a 28-year-old, it’s practically a miracle.
You might be wondering what this book is about. I almost don’t want to tell you. How about if I just tell you about the first chapter. One of our fellows arrives in a New Zealand gold-rush town in the middle of the night, having just taken a journey by boat that unnerved him to his core. When he shows up at the inn where he’s to stay, he sits down before a fireplace in a comfortable leather chair, hoping to decompress and cast off the cares that followed him in from the sea. A talkative fellow starts chatting him up, and soon enough he realizes that all the other gentlemen in the room are listening very carefully while trying hard to seem nonchalant. All the others, in fact, seem to be occupying very prescribed spots in the room. Why are they listening? Why do they care?
The conversation between our voyager and his new intimates continues, until eventually someone says something that makes everyone else’s spines tingle. Suddenly the twelve men in the room, and the newcomer, realize that they are tied together by the ship voyage that our visitor has just taken. The rest of the room lights up. Suddenly all those who had been sitting quietly are very interested indeed in what this new fellow has to say.
Much of the book proceeds similarly. Characters end up in the same room as other characters, and start chatting amiably about the odd gossip that would consume any newcomer in a gold-rush town: everyone is out to make a fortune, and the world has been creates anew. Everyone is fresh off the boat from Scotland or England; even the prostitutes have just arrived. Yet somehow by the end of every conversation, something even more mysterious and unnerving has been revealed.
A long sequence of these dialogues could make you feel like you’re reading Murakami’s [book: Wind-Up Bird Chronicles] — an amazing read but a terrible tease. I always envision Murakami writing [book: Wind-Up Bird] during a weeks-long cocaine binge, at the end of which he checked himself into Betty Ford and wrapped up the book as quickly as he could. Alternatively, I envision him carrying on the world’s most thrilling juggling show, throwing chainsaws and jaguars and smaller versions of Haruki Murakami himself into the air, spinning them dazzlingly, and then — just when you think he can’t continue with this magical show any longer — deciding he’s bored and ending the whole show in an instant, the whole structure falling to the ground with a splat.
I was somewhat worried throughout [book: The Luminaries] that we’d have another [book: Wind-Up Bird] on our hands. I was only *somewhat* afraid, though: even from the beginning, it’s clear that Catton is completely in control of her narration, of her dialogue, and of the novel’s full architecture. Indeed, I would be astonished if she didn’t have the whole story literally mapped out on her wall, like James Joyce plotting out his characters’ motions around Dublin with the aid of a stopwatch.
It’s a masterpiece. I get chills of joy when I imagine what art this brilliant author will give to the world over her long career.
Some facts about the 2016 election:
* Probably most everyone you know has already figured out which party he or she will vote for.
* The actual person with the “(D)” or the “(R)” after his or her name doesn’t much matter. What matters is the party. Your candidate, when he or she is in office, will have to do what his or her party wants. Moreover, your candidate will probably *want* to do what his or her party wants, and it’s good that this is the case: if you vote for a Democrat, you know generally that this person will be in favor of expanding the welfare state — or will at least support welfare-state expansion more than will the candidate with the “(R)” after his or her name. The Republican candidate will praise the virtues of small businessmen, will demand that Obamacare be overturned, and will promise to cut your taxes.
* If you live in California or Massachusetts and you vote for a Republican, or if you live in Texas or Mississippi and you vote for a Democrat, your vote doesn’t matter. You may as well not vote in the general election. Your vote in the primary, though, does matter.
* The press coverage will be filled every day with lots of irrelevant personal details. If you thought the coverage of the Malaysian Airlines flight was absurd, you get to look forward to two years of nonsense, starting in earnest once the midterm elections are over in November. The twenty-four-hour news cycle isn’t going to fill itself.
* If the economy is doing well in the year before the election, you should expect that the Democrats will do well; if it’s not, you should expect Republicans to do well. This isn’t deterministic, of course, but it’s a strong relationship.
* Whatever party you’re part of will be right and good and logical and rational; whatever the party on the other side is will be wrong and evil and illogical and irrational. I say this for all values of “you” including “me”. I wish this weren’t so, but it is.
* Your party might well put forward a candidate who excites you into believing that This Time Is Different — that you’ll get the liberal or conservative stalwart you’ve always wanted, that the welfare state will expand to protect everyone or will be gutted and freedom returned to the people. In reality the government you’ll get is the government you had. There are many veto points in American government. And as our society gains institutions like a system of political parties or a military-industrial complex or a private health-insurance industry, those institutions make it harder and harder to change anything fundamentally (go read Skowronek on this point).
Consider all of these just rules of thumb, not truths handed down on tablets. But I think they’re all safe bets. I’m particularly sad about the tribalist aspects: despite my best efforts, we’ll probably end up thinking that the guy who disagrees with us about the Affordable Care Act is not only a bad candidate whom we can’t support, but is in fact the Antichrist, whose one and only hope in life is to take women into back alleys and perform coathanger abortions on them. Because that’s what They all want, right? To take away women’s hard-won freedoms. That is, when They’re not also trying to return black people to the back of the bus and keep poor people down.
Maybe few of us think this explicitly (though I’ve met a fair number of my fellow liberals who do); most of us do implicitly. How many of us believed that a Romney administration would be not only a bad one, but would in fact be a nightmare from which the country would never wake? If we didn’t explicitly believe this, then why did the election seem so fraught?
So maybe that’s another bullet point to add to my 2016 predictions:
* This election will be Very Important Indeed; maybe The Most Important Ever. This election will be a watershed: on the one side, a bright future for America; on the other, bleakness and a return to the dark ages.
I don’t entirely mean to make light of it. Elections matter. The re-election of Barack Obama in 2012 meant that the Affordable Care Act came into being; had Romney been elected, there’s a chance that it would have been overturned. If nothing else, President Romney would likely have done all he could to slow its implementation. Speaking only for myself, the Affordable Care Act alone justified re-electing President Obama. And inasmuch as I could only trust a Democrat to implement the ACA, I would have voted for anyone with a “(D)” after his name. And inasmuch as I live in Massachusetts, it doesn’t matter whom I voted for in the general. And to the extent that economic fundamentals determine who wins, my vote matters even less. Elections matter, but it’s good to have some perspective on where your vote fits in the grand scheme of things.
I’m just not at all looking forward to the entirely predictable course of the next 2.5 years. The last time around, I swore that I wouldn’t read the news in the year leading up to the election. Maybe I’ll be able to keep to that promise this time, and double down on reading books about things that matter.
Oh, whom am I kidding? I’ll do the same stupid things this time around that I always do.
Why are urban school systems so bad? It’s the segregation, stupid. Wealthy white people left the city, or put their kids in private schools, leaving only poor black children in inner-city schools. Merge city and suburban school districts like Raleigh did, says Gerald Grant, and — after a lot of hard work — you’ll see a million flowers bloom. Education for the wealthier, whiter kids will not get worse, while education for the poorer kids will get better. More specifically, the poor kids will learn the middle-class habits of the wealthier kids around them — habits that they wouldn’t necessarily learn at home; they’ll learn the bourgeois virtues; they’ll learn the “soft skills” whose importance James Heckman has so prominently endorsed. Meanwhile the white schools will gain from diversity — from having multiple diverse points of view when making any decision.
Grant heartbreakingly contrasts Raleigh’s experience with that of the town where Grant has worked for decades, namely Syracuse. A combination of factors led Syracuse to be almost perfectly segregated, with predictably disastrous consequences. By no means was this segregation accidental, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect people’s individual, uncoordinated, uncoerced choices: 20th-century redlining discouraged banks from funding black homeownership; probably well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous policies from the War On Poverty confined black people to large urban high-rises, rather than spreading them out throughout white neighborhoods. Segregation stopped being officially supported in the 1960s, but it has continued in official and devastating ways up to the present day.
Here Grant asks a very important question: does it matter, as far as enforcing the laws goes, whether segregation was the intent or whether it was just the result? The answer seems pretty clear to me: even if the laws weren’t explicitly intended to segregate, they need to be overturned if segregation was the more or less predictable outcome. The present alignment of the Supreme Court means that we’re not likely to see laws overturned when they [foreign: de facto] segregate their communities. And the country moving en masse to a Raleigh-style union of urban and suburban school districts, while a noble goal that we should aim toward strategically, is probably some ways off. So Grant proposes some pragmatic, achievable, short-term fixes, among them something very much like Boston’s METCO: a purely voluntary program to bus kids from poor urban schools to wealthy suburban schools. [1] I can’t think of any sensible argument against Grant’s position, particularly when it’s purely voluntary.
This dovetails with some of now-senator Elizabeth Warren’s ideas in her 2003 book [book: The Two-Income Trap]. One of the most fundamental forces driving middle-class life to be so unaffordable for so many Americans, says Warren, is that the good schools and the expensive places to live are synonymous: you can only send your kids to a good public school in a town if you live in that town. The inevitable outcome, in places like the Brookline suburb of Boston, is that housing prices are through the roof, and middle-income people are forced to live where the schools aren’t as good. Let’s sunder the link between good schools and good places to live, says Warren; people who live in Roxbury should be able to send their kids to school in Brookline or Weston. (Apologies for the local dialect in this paragraph. I imagine that Warren, who lives a short walk from me in Cambridge, had much the same example in her mind as she wrote her book.) A good life for your kids won’t only be available to the wealthiest parents. I wonder whether Warren would stand by these ideas now that she’s Senator Warren.
Slavery and Jim Crow are baked as deeply into American society as they could be; they infect politics, culture, and economics. Blacks didn’t have the effective right to vote until a century after Emancipation; we shouldn’t expect that America’s original sin has magically stopped corrupting us after two centuries of official and semi-official racism. Moreover, we shouldn’t treat ending Jim Crow as something that will help only black people; white people also benefit from frequent contact with those who are different from them. No one wants to force anyone to do anything they don’t want to do; the challenge is just to open up the same opportunities to rich as to poor, and to black as to white. Gerald Grant reminds us equal opportunity can and should start with the schools.
[1] – Apparently there’s a book on this topic called [book: The Other Boston Busing Story] which immediately goes to the top of the list. You should also read about the main Boston busing story — the one that people think of when they think “Boston busing”. You should, in particular, read J. Anthony Lukas’s [book: Common Ground], which remains one of the few books that I believe every American ought to read. Other books in that category include [book: The Making of the Atomic Bomb] (among the few best works of nonfiction I’ve ever read, and without doubt the best work of science writing), and Robert Caro’s [book: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York].
You should remember that most U.S. economic statistics are based on people living in a household, and that more and more people are not attached to households because they’re imprisoned. As a result, statistics which purport to show a decrease in the income gap between black people and white people are usually far too optimistic. If we add prisoners back to the data, we add a group of people who are largely poor, largely high-school dropouts, and largely black. Prisons have become a black hole into which we toss our problems. Even that wouldn’t be so terrible, if the imprisoned population hadn’t nearly quadrupled between 1980 and 2012. The magnitude of the mismeasurement therefore grows over time. Our social problems therefore remain beyond the reach of official statistics. Official statistics are, over time, increasingly mismeasuring the lives of marginalized populations and overstating the gains that we’ve made as a society over the last half-century. If the statistics were more accurate, and were more careful about including the imprisoned population, we would have to face up to our failure as a society.
These statistical problems span many different areas, which Pettit quickly touches on. Rates of poor people’s diseases such as tuberculosis are far higher among prisoners, for instance. Among the most striking observations is on the voting rate, which again is often measured relative to households, or measured by surveying those within households (ignoring prisoners altogether). Black voters were supposed to have come out in shocking numbers for President Obama in 2008. That’s probably still true, but consider how much the number changes when you consider that such a large fraction of black people (particularly black youth) is imprisoned.
Pettit’s main value in this book, I believe, is that she inserts a wedge into all your subsequent reading: you’ll now notice when statistics read that they apply to the “civilian non-institutionalized population”. Or when you read about progress in some field, maybe you’ll take a few more seconds to consider whether the numbers on which this claim is based are faulty, and whether those numbers exclude our more marginalized populations.
I can’t say that the book as a whole is worth reading. For 90% of readers, it should have been condensed to a series of blog posts or a Kindle Single. The charts and graphs are interesting, and Pettit’s data analysis is invaluable: she does the hard work of re-analyzing all measures of social progress by reincorporating prison data with household-based American Community Survey data. The legwork Pettit performs, that is, is immensely useful. And the collection of citations to others in the field is useful if you find yourself wanting to re-run her analyses. But most readers will just want to see the results, and will flip quickly past the standard academic “I will now argue; [argument]; I have just argued” structure.
This reminds me, I’m sad to say, that most books are not actually all that good as books; the blog era is teaching us this. You don’t need to read most books. Of the books that you do read, you can skim most. Novelists are better than nonfiction authors at preparing sumptuous feasts which require you to savor each word (I’m not skimming Tolstoy). I’m looking through the list of books I’ve read from 2001 or so until now, and I’m finding few nonfiction works that really need to be consumed in their entirety. Some nonfiction authors are very good indeed at putting together a full work that spins out the consequences of a few principles, requiring you to consume the whole thing to see the vast expanse of the plan; Daniel Dennett is one such author. Dennett is also rare in being an exceptional writer (or at least a writer with a good editor); you really don’t want to skip any of his words. Same with Judge Richard Posner. It’s the rare nonfiction author who covers a vast scope, whose writing is free of slack and therefore forbids skimming, and who is a master stylist. To pick a few authors out of the air: Richard Posner, Daniel Dennett, and Joan Didion fit the bill. Maybe Krugman on a good day. Oh, and I’ve heard that the new Thomas Piketty joint is epic, which is what you’d expect if you know anything about Piketty and Saez.
So don’t worry if you feel like you ought to like nonfiction more than you do. Most of it isn’t very good.
Today he says that “private-sector wages…continue to run well below pre-crisis levels”, and uses this graph to support that claim:
He’s not being quite accurate. As you can see from the y-axis, that’s year-over-year *growth* in hourly wages. Since the y-axis is everywhere above zero, we conclude that wages have always been growing. They’ve just been growing less than they were before the crisis.
…Which is Krugman’s point, I think. The main argument for increasing interest rates is to keep inflation in check. Inflation might be running amok if labor costs are skyrocketing. Labor costs are not skyrocketing; they’re under control. If interest rates need to rise now because labor costs are out of control, then they needed to rise back in 2007-2009 as well.
My buddy FRED will show you average earnings, as opposed to year-over-year change in earnings.
Honestly, this was probably just a typo on Krugman’s part. In context it’s obvious what he meant. But I would be shocked if the typo didn’t start propagating.
Richard Hofstadter wrote a very famous essay entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which mapped the contours of a certain habit in American political life — a tendency to turn mere political debates into contests between good and evil. It’s not just that your side is right and their side is wrong; it’s that their side is practically the embodiment of the Devil himself, and their side’s victory would mean the end of the United States as we know it. Hofstadter goes into a lot of rich and lovely detail about the conspiratorial style that accompanies this, including its often scholarly pretensions; an abundance of footnotes will, one supposes, bulletproof the arguments.
All of this feels like a very accurate description of American political life; anyone who lived through the “death panels” era will see some truth in it. And indeed, Hofstadter’s habit of getting to the core of American phenomena has often come into my life like a breath of fresh air, relieving some of the strain of the Bush administration. We were fucked, sure, but then we’d always been fucked; as Hofstadter put it elsewhere,
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When one considers American history as a whole, it is hard to think of any very long period in which it could be said that the country has been consistently well governed. And yet its political system is, on the whole, a resilient and well-seasoned one, and on the strength of its history one must assume that it can summon enough talent and good will to cope with its afflictions. To cope with them but not, I think, to master them in any thoroughly decisive or admirable fashion. The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.
So the man says true and important and in some perverse sense relaxing things about America. Yet two aspects of “The Paranoid Style” make me wonder how useful it is.
The first problem is deciding how to identify paranoid strains in everyday life. Suppose a rational, intelligent friend tells you that ObamaCare is the coming of sharia socialism. Suppose that, using one criterion or another, you identify this argument as a species of paranoia. Does that mean it’s *wrong*? One wants a criterion that will reliably distinguish cranks from the sane. Just because you’re paranoid, goes the line, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Hofstadter gives us no way to determine whether *this* paranoid fellow over here is crazy, whereas this one over here is telling the truth.
It’s probably too much to expect that Hofstadter will give us a fully fleshed out theory of psychoceramics. Maybe it’s useful just to know that the U.S. has created an indigenous form of paranoid political culture. Hofstadter is at pains to note, though, that paranoid political culture is in no way indigenous to the United States. (In fact I would have liked him to have chased down its religious roots. It hardly seems coincidental that a country founded by hardcore Christian zealots would channel the book of Revelation into its politics.)
So “The Paranoid Style” seems like little more than what it says on the tin: a style guide. Here are some fun observations about some durable aspects of our culture. Should I be happy with that? Or should I expect more from Hofstadter?
This is an interesting read for an American who mostly knows nothing about how parliamentary democracy works, who knows nothing about Stephen Harper other than that I’m supposed to hate him, and who has a starry-eyed vision of Canada. (Vancouver and Montreal are amazing. The fact that Americans aren’t moving there en masse is proof that we’ve been brainwashed.)
What outsiders — this one, anyway — want to know is whether the Canadian welfare state is basically resilient against those who want to destroy it, and whether indeed Harper wants to destroy it. (Sort of like with the UK: in a conservative’s most hopeful moments, can he even dream of killing the NHS?) I look up to the Canadian welfare state; is it all going to disappear under Harper?
I think the short answer from Wells’s book is “too soon to tell; check back later.” First, Harper has learned on a few occasions that the Canadian populace just will not tolerate sudden changes; so whatever he does, he’s going to do gradually. But the more important story is right there in Wells’s title: Harper has been in office now for eight years, and soon enough he’ll be the sixth-longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history. With luck (from Harper’s perspective), he’ll not only stay in office for a long time, but cement his legacy through successors who will carry his program forward. Gradualism, carried on over time, can achieve a lot. If we’re wondering whether Harper will upturn the welfare state, I think Wells would tell us that we’ll have to do a lot of waiting and seeing.
What Harper’s done in the meantime seems to be a variant of the Grover Norquist “starve the beast” approach: he’s slashed tax revenues and flirted with deficits, because apparently the going theory is that Canadian PMs just can’t leave a surplus alone; they feel compelled to spend it on social programs.
Then there are Harper’s moves that just seem outright slimy, like getting rid of the long-form census and generally gutting Statistics Canada. Again, this seems to be part of a pattern: if you remove the fundamental tools underlying the welfare state, including its financing and its means of measuring the populace, then there are questions you just never think of asking. If you stop measuring the same people over time, for instance, it’s harder to say that income mobility has gone down.
Gutting the collection of official statistics is right out of the U.S. GOP’s playbook. Wells touches on this a little bit, but perhaps not as much as I’d like. Is Canadian conservatism very similar to its American cousin? Wells is more focused on Harper the man, and on the details of Ottawa politics, so The Longer I’m Prime Minister has more to say about the politics than about these broader questions.
Wells also presupposes that I know more about Canada than I do. (It’s probably fair to assume that most Americans will not read a book about Canadian politics, so he rightly assumes that his reader will have all the necessary background.) For instance, the fight between western and eastern Canada is a large part of the book’s undercurrent. Is Canada basically a resource-extraction economy, based in Alberta, with a financial economy strapped on top? What happens when the oil runs out? In any case, Wells paints Harper’s time in office as the story of a man empowering western Canada while bringing along as many Québecois as necessary to get repeatedly reëlected.
Québec is an interesting part of the story, for me anyway. I never really knew that the Bloc Québecois was important to people outside Québec, but it repeatedly shows up in Wells’s story as the bogeyman — basically, “Don’t vote for this guy; he’s allied with those separatist terrorists over there.” There are parallels with the treatment of American socialism. The Bloc Québecois is treated (fairly or unfairly; I’m not fit to judge) as the group that wants to tear Canada apart. So various elections were cast as a battle between separatism and federalism. (The elections also lasted five weeks, I hasten to add. This too can be ours, America!)
Again, Wells knows how scared (or not) I ought to be; I do not. When m’lady and I went up to Montréal 18 months ago or so, we stayed with a charming French-Canadian man at an AirBNB, who told us that we, of course, must have heard in the United States about the recent student protests. We blushingly admitted that no, we had not, because American news says basically nothing about Canada. (If it covered Canada honestly, I swear we’d all move there.) According to our host, the government had talked about raising university fees, which had sparked the first round of protests. Apparently the protests turned up to 11 when the National Assembly of Québec passed an emergency law limiting how students could protest. Read the linked Wikipedia entries. I’ll just note one bit from there: the bill would have raised tuition “from $2,168 to $3,793 between 2012 and 2018.” I … I don’t need to explain to American readers why this news would have landed and died on page A16 or so in the <span class="newspaper"New York Times.
So is that essentially what the Harper era comes down to? A weakening of the welfare state such that university educations become slightly less affordable? (Median Canadian family income income is on the order of US$63,000, so four years’ tuition even by 2018 would be c. 25% of the median Canadian family’s annual income.) Don’t mistake me: I am deeply envious of the Canadian social-welfare state, and I’m humbled that Canadians are out on the streets fighting to keep education cheap. This was just the sort of story that Wells assumed we all knew: sure, Harper is shaking things up somewhat, empowering the west a bit at the expense of the east, but Canada will still be Canada when all is said and done.
On a personal note: m’lady and I visited some friends in Vancouver over Patriot’s Day of 2013. I was absolutely in love (with Vancouver, as well as with m’lady). Our friends were American expats who did what everyone said they’d do in 2004, namely move to Canada if Bush was reëlected. He was, and they did. They seem 100% happy with that decision. It’s right there, America! It’s a quick and astonishingly beautiful train ride north from Seattle. I don’t know why I haven’t moved there yet.
Also, I haven’t investigated this too closely, but when we got back from Montréal I looked into the Québec points system. Immigration into Canada, if I’m reading things right, is … rational? Is that even a word? Can I dream? You speak English, you get some points; you speak French, you get some points; you’re of baby-making age, you get some points; you’ve got a college education, you get some points; you have a job offer, you get some points; you can live without the support of the welfare state, you get some points. Add up the points; if the sum is high enough, you’re likely to be able to immigrate into Canada. It almost seems too good to be true.
I’m kind of in love with my ancestral home (everyone in my family named Laniel who was born up to 1946 spoke French as a first language, and for all I know I have some connection to a French postwar prime minister). I read Wells, in no small part, to decide whether I should be: my buddy Chris, I think, wanted to gently remove a little bloom from the rose. I’m not sure he succeeded. Maybe I should read a book on Rob Ford next.
Steve Reads 