And Most People Live in Both at the Same Time

Or so it would seem . . . the "Two Americas," that is, the one (ones?) Edwards likes to talk about.

Income differences in the U.S. are too stark, and the government should provide jobs and training for those having a tough time, according to majorities in a national poll released Thursday.

OK, so far so good, right? And respondents on either side of $80k/yr agreed, roughly. But there's still this unshakeable meritocratic bootstrap mentality . . .

In the survey, 58 percent said large pay differences help get people to work harder. Yet 61 percent said such discrepancies are not needed for the country to prosper.

Um. Hm. Soooooo . . . it's about who's more deserving, but even lots of undeserving people will prosper when the deserving get paid lots more? I'm so confused.

Maybe more of the article will help me sort it out:

Two-thirds said the government should make sure there is a job for everyone who wants one. Small majorities said it should provide jobs for people who can't find private employment, increase federal training programs and redistribute money with high taxes on the wealthy.

Even so, nearly two-thirds said it is not the government's responsibility to ease income differences.

Hm.

It sure looks like lots of the same people believe that government should make sure there are jobs, but not do something about income gaps, like, say, progressive taxation. Er, wait, "small majorities" said that was a good idea?

And while large income gaps are not necessary, and the government ought to do something to make sure that people have jobs, still, large income gaps motivate people to work harder.

Are YOU motivated by the fact that that rich f*** at Blackstone made $4M last year?

Is this the worst designed survey in the history of surveys, or are we the most oxymoronic beings in the universe? I'm all about how people are irrational, but how do we think all these things at the same time? And when he confronted with it, what do we say?

Why don't we explode, like when matter and anti-matter meet? Why haven't we already destroyed the world with those explosions?

tags technorati : economics, justice, income gap, taxes, rich-poor gap
politics
capitalism

The Wealthy have a Great Idea: Progressive Taxation!

According to the Wall Street Journal,

A new argument is emerging among the pro-globalization crowd in the U.S., the folks who see continued globalization and trade as vital to the country's prosperity: Tax the rich more heavily to thwart an economically crippling political backlash against trade prompted by workers who see themselves -- with some justification -- as losers from globalization.

How . . . innovative. No wonder those guys make so much money. But here's the interesting part:

The sharpest articulation of this view comes not from one of the Democratic presidential campaigns, but from economist Matthew Slaughter, who recently left President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers to return to Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

Welcome aboard, d0rks.

More keen insight:

"Individuals are asking themselves, 'Is globalization good for me?' and in a growing number of cases, arriving at the conclusion that it is not," Messrs. Slaughter and Scheve write. (You can see why Mr. Slaughter waited until he had left the Bush administration to speak his mind.) [Not that Bush doesn't encourage his staff to speak their minds.]

The conventional response from fans of globalization, including the Bush administration, is rhetorical support for more aid for workers hurt by imports to salve the immediate pain and better education to equip the next generation of Americans with skills needed to command high wages in a global economy. Both are crucial. Progress on both is painfully inadequate.

But trade-adjustment assistance is traditionally targeted narrowly at workers hurt by imports. Today's angst about globalization is far more pervasive. Whatever the actual impact of offshore outsourcing today, it has millions of white-collar workers frightened. And education takes generations to pay off.

What to do? To preserve political support for the globalization dividend, spread the benefits more broadly by taxing winners more and losers less.

"It is best not to address increasingly salient concerns about inequality by interfering with trade," Mr. Summers argued at a forum sponsored by the Hamilton Project, the think tank he and others founded to provide intellectual fodder for like-minded politicians. His solution: use progressive taxation to offset some, but not all, of the increase in inequality. For starters, return tax rates for couples with incomes above $200,000 to the levels they were under President Clinton. [ . . . ]

This, obviously, would be a sea change in fiscal policy. Mr. Clinton raised taxes, especially at the top, to bring down the deficit. Mr. Bush cut taxes, especially on the top. But all this talk is likely to influence any Democrat who takes the White House in 2008. He or she will almost surely move to raise taxes on the best-off Americans -- both to raise revenue to pay the bills and to resist the three-decade-old inequality trend.

Um. Am I misreading this, or did a WSJ writer just recommend Clinton's taxation policies? And imply that the current situation is a result of Bush's tax cuts? Are the wealthy finally recognizing that it is in their interest not to be total fuckers?

technorati tags: Globalization Lawrence Summers Economic Justice Progressive Taxation

The Atheist Imagination/Imaginary

[Originally extended February 19, 2006 at the old BrainMortgage offices.]

Rereading Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* for my ethics seminar, I came across a pithy articulation of the nature of cultural change:

What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument for cultural change.(7)

Now, we could take this and apply it to any number of ways liberals and leftists consistently employ vocabularies of disdain and denigration with respect to conservatives, particularly the lower class they so often see themselves as fighting for. But I want to think more specifically about religious belief and its place in the world, theism being one of those things about which many leftists and liberals are particularly disdainful, even vitriolic. They can no more understand religionists' belief in God or rejection of evolution than they can comprehend lower-class conservatives voting for W.

The problem with atheism is not that it's wrong as a religious position, but rather that it suffers from a two-fold failure of imagination. First, there seems to be (and I admit I am generalizing) a tendency among atheists to understand science as "disproving" the existence of a creator God, particularly as that God is represented in the Bible. Unfortunately, this simply reinforces religionist understandings of science by participating in a reading of creation narratives as history or science (which they are not). Evolution only "refutes" the creation account in the Bible if we think they are telling us the same story; of course, that is also the only context in which the Biblical creation account might be understood to "refute" evolution. Better to jettison the literalist/historico-scientific hermeneutic altogether and argue what is much more plausible and more compelling, namely that Biblical creation narratives try to tell us something about how meaning arises in the world, rather than making factual claims (whether we see them as true or false) about the history of the cosmos.

The second failure of imagination within atheism is that atheists haven't found ways of talking about living in the world that are more compelling (more useful to people, more aesthetically pleasing, etc.) than religious ways of talking about living in the world. Should we be surprised, then, that religious people don't adopt an atheist vocabulary? Maybe part of the problem is the naturalist bent of so many atheists: however creative they might be in their scientific or philosophical work (and many of them are . . . although many are surely not), they see atheism precisely as a logical problem instead of as a language game, and religious belief as simply the result of ignorance or misunderstanding, rather than as a failure of atheism to bring anything useful to the table.

The problem arises, it seems to me, when atheists (or theists) are absolutists about the veracity of their language game as opposed to any other, instead of seeing that language game as a means toward the end of a better world. Such people are perhaps more in service of "the Truth" than of justice or equity or even happiness, which seem secondary considerations at best. Maybe that is a good definition of religion?

Of course, this also shows us how the atheist who takes atheism as programmatic actually agrees with the theist/religionist who takes his or her religion programmatically. Both argue that the Truth is out there; they also agree on the kind of truth it is. They disagree only on the means of attaining it. When it comes to a just world, both will say that the (only) foundation for a better, more just, happier world is the Truth, which is only available to us from the perspective of my religious position. Only when we admit that no/my God rules the cosmos will it be possible for humanity to achieve its highest state.

Personally, I don't see the need to impose a vocabulary of atheism before or as part of promoting a vocabulary of justice. To see a discourse of justice as possibly only within a discourse of theism or, conversely, within a discourse of atheism, is to construct a language game that narrows rather than expands the idea of justice, which seems precisely contradictory to the vocabulary of justice itself.

That said, many if not most theists need to adopt more coherent religious vocabularies; specifically, they need to stop talking religion like it's science.



*Love that serial comma.

tags technorati : Rorty, Religion, Philosophy, Atheism, Science

Rorty on the Holy

Richard Rorty, arguably the greatest of all American philosophers, has died of pancreatic cancer . . . which also killed Jacques Derrida (and, coincidentally, my father; huh). I suppose I ought to write something substantive about Rorty's philosophical project or his impact on my own thinking, but anyone who reads what I post here about science, religion, and ethics will already have seen it. And others are doing a fine job of posting such personal witness. Habermas has this to say, concluding thus:

Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."