Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Alterman on Murray

Eric Alterman excerpts his analysis of Chalres Murray’s Losing Ground from What Liberal Media?. The first book showed the same emprical rigor that he would display in The Bell Curve:

Unfortunately, Murray’s assertions were based on a series of internal contradictions, specious arguments and outright phony claims unsupported by his data. For instance, his assertion that that the hope for welfare payments was the main source of illegitimacy among black teenagers posited no evidence for this claim, and failed to explain why the rate of illegitimacy rose for everyone—and not just welfare recipients–after 1972, while the constant-dollar value of those welfare benefits declined by twenty percent. While continually insisting on the impotence of the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, Murray never once explained the development of the Black middle class during this period. Moreover, why blame the welfare policies of the late sixties and early seventies on for the decline in participation of Black males in the labor market when the decline actually dates back to the late fifties? It turned out that Murray’s calculations relied on the highly disputed figures of an obscure economist named Timothy Smedding. Using more traditional and widely-accepted measurements, Christopher Jencks calculated that contrary to Murray’s central claims, the percentage of the population defined as poor in 1980 was only half the size it was in 1965, and one third the size it was in 1950.

Much of Murray’s argument was taken up by a “thought-experiment” based on a fictional couple he named Harold and Phyllis who lived in Pennsylvania, who made what Murray argued was an entirely rational economic decision for the woman to remain unmarried [AS2] after having a child in order to collect welfare benefits. But Murray screwed up his math. While Pennsylvania was indeed atypically generous to welfare recipients in 1980, the couple’s income would still have been over thirty percent higher if Harold had worked at a minimum wage job rather than Phyllis collecting welfare as the sole means of support for the family.

I’ve always found the idea that people’s sexual relationships are primarily governed by marginal changes in monetary incentives one of the most self-paradoic ideas to emerge from rational choice theory…

Louisiana 2005

It’s times like this that call from the greatest song by one of the greatest albums in American popular music:

What has happened down here is the winds have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tyrin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, “Little fat man isn’t it a shame what the river has done
To this poor crackers land.”

Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Hopefully the damage will not be as severe as expected, but what a horrible tragedy.

…I see Kieran beat me to it.

Travesty

This is the song The Big Trunk stole from Bob Dylan. Hilzoy’s stealin’ it back.

Bell Curve Apologists

Atrios is doing great work on the subject, but let me add a quick point about Murray to my earlier post. First, Sullivan’s remarkable claim that putting the New Republic‘s weight behind Murray and Herrnstein’s racist pseudo-science was one of his “proudest moments” in journalism contains the same sophomoric distortion of the “classical liberal” tradition he claims to represent as David Adesnik’s defense of teaching ID. It might be relevant if someone was talking about suppressing publication of The Bell Curve, but that wasn’t the issue. Again, the liberal commitment to free speech is not a commitment to the idea that all ideas are of equal worth. Sullivan, as editor of the New Republic, is a gatekeeper; the issue is whether a shoddy scientific argument that African Americans are genetically inferior should be treated as credible, and given the imprimatur of what was once a respected liberal magazine. To follow Sullivan’s logic, he wouldn’t be permitted to publish an article criticizing William Bennett’s crackpot claims about the life expectancy of gay people without also giving Bennett a cover story in order to promote them. In other words, it’s a self-evidently ridiculous argument. Promoting Murray’s (grossly illberal) arguments has nothing to do with promoting “debate” or adding to the “marketplace of ideas.” Sullivan gave Murray a soapbox to propagate his reprehensible ideas because he agreed with them, and despite their having been utterly discredited he still does. Trying to hide this behind a commitment to “classical liberalism” is a sick joke.

And in this, he follows Murray’s lead. To expand a bit on Digby’s argument, Murray throughout his career has managed to synthesize the worst elements of American right-wing thought, advancing an (often contradictory) combination of obsessive racial and gender essentialism with an alleged commitment to social-Darwinist rugged individualism, and he switches between the two in order to advance the most reactionary political outcome. As Louis Menand pointed out in a terrific essay reprinted in American Studies, what gives away the show is that Murray sees a liberal individualist utopia in…the United States prior to 1960. Yes, the half-apartheid United States of Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Emmett Till is, in Murray’s mind, when American society was truly an individualist meritocracy. Randall Kennedy explained this very well in the New Republic symposium:

First, there are notable outcroppings of disingenuousness in the Murray-Herrnstein essay, the most blatant of which is its claim that “our limited objective is to warn readers who come to the discussion [black-white differences in I.Q.] with firmly held opinions on either side.” Surely the authors and their backers are seeking to do more than this. One of the things they are seeking to do is to keep alive the long-standing claim that, on average, whites are intellectually superior to blacks not only in terms of educational attainment but in terms of cognitive capacity.

Second, Murray and Herrnstein create straw men. They write, for instance, that “many people have a fuzzy impression that if cognitive ability has been depressed by a disadvantaged environment, it is easily remedied.” Who says this? The people to whom Murray and Herrnstein refer do not typically claim the baleful consequences of a disadvantaged environment can be easily repaired. To the contrary, they usually acknowledge the tremendous difficulty of countering the bad effects of poor living conditions. That is why they plead for more funding to transform the disadvantaged environments that generate problems that are hard to undo.

Third, Murray and Herrnstein display a nostalgia for good old days that never existed. “We argue,” they write, “that the best and indeed the only answer to the problem of group differences is an energetic and uncompromising recommitment to individualism. To judge someone except on his or her own merits was historically thought to be un-American, and we urge that it become so again.” Although I am sympathetic to one of the impulses behind this comment — an impulse prompted by the cages of racial and gender differences being created by some ideologues of “diversity” — the reference to a lost golden age of meritocracy is laughable. American history has been characterized by invidious racial oppression far more than it has been characterized by race-neutral equal opportunity.

Fourth, I hope that African Americans and others will eschew Murray and Herrnstein’s invitation to indulge in what they describe as “wise ethnocentrism.” The suggestion appears to me to be merely another marketing device, a way to make more palatable the Murray-Herrnstein claim that blacks, on average, are inferior intellectually to whites. Being part of a group that is collectively inferior in intellectual capacity is not so bad, the authors appear to contend, so long as the group recognizes its own accomplishments. Indeed, the authors later maintain with a gush of apparent enthusiasm that “it is possible to look ahead to a world in which the glorious hodgepodge of inequalities of ethnic groups genetic and environmental, permanent and temporary, can be not only accepted but celebrated.” This ridiculous appeal to non-judgmental relativism is one part reactionary racialism and one part 1990s political correctness — a strange brew indeed. Furthermore, apart from the matter of motive, the substance of the advice is dubious. We have enough ethnocentrisms in our nation without adding a new variety or creating a fresh justification for those already in existence.

As Brad DeLong explains, even in his less “controversial” mode Murray is a sloppy, second-rate thinker, whose non-trivial empirical claims have a distinct tendency to be false. The core of The Bell Curve is something much worse than that. Sullivan’s decision to promote this book was, an is, an indefensible disgrace.

In Critique of Nepotism

Jonah Goldberg:

The panel consisted of Mitchell Muncy, the head of Spence Publishing, Marji Ross the head of Regnery, Daniel Flynn of Accuracy in Academia and my editor Adam Bellow of Random House (who helped bring to the public The Bell Curve and The Closing of the American Mind among scores of others).

So, in other words, the premise of Bellow’s book is refuted.

But the more remarkable thing is that Goldberg–in the context of a post engaging in chest-beating about how “conservatives take ideas very seriously”!–is still touting the white-supremacist junk science of The Bell Curve. The National Review just hasn’t come very far since its days of Jim Crow apologism, has it? Coming next week: Jonah Goldberg explains how cutting-edge skull measurement science justifies the Bush tax cuts.

Jeffrey Rosen and Chuck Lane explain the sources of the ideas that Goldberg finds so fascinating:

Murray and Herrnstein’s discussion of white-Asian i.q. differences is drawn largely from data cited in a 1991 article by Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster that appeared in Roger Pearson’s neo-eugenicist journal Mankind Quarterly. (In a 1966 article Pearson argued that “if a nation with a more advanced, more specialized or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide.”) Lynn and Hans Wilhelm Jurgens, a German anthropologist who has advocated the internment sterilization of hereditary “anti-socials,” served as associate editors of Mankind Quarterly.

[...]

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein also introduce readers to the work of J. Phillipe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist. Rushton has argued that Asians are more intelligent than Caucasians, have larger brains for their body size, smaller penises, lower sex drive, are less fertile, work harder and are more readily socialized; and Caucasians have the same relationship to blacks. In his most recent book, Race, Evolution and Behavior, Rushton acknowledges the assistance of Herrnstein; and Murray and Herrnstein return the compliment, devoting two pages of their book to a defense of Rushton. Among the views that Herrnstein and Murray suggest Rushton has supported with “increasingly detailed and convincing empirical reports” is the theory that, in their words, “the average Mongoloid is toward one end of the continuum of reproductive strategies–the few offspring, high survival and high parental investment end–the average Negroid is shifted toward the other end, and the average Caucasoid is in the middle.”

Murray and Herrnstein go out of their way to say that “Rushton’s work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot.” In fact, Rushton was censured by the University of Western Ontario for paying 150 participants at a local mall– one-third were black, one-third white and one-third Asian–to answer such questions as: “How far can you ejaculate?” and “How large is your penis?” Interviewed in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Rushton summarizes his research agenda: “Even if you take things like athletic ability or sexuality– not to reinforce stereotypes–but it’s a trade-off: more brain or more penis. You can’t have everything.” And in a 1986 article in Politics and Life Sciences, Rushton suggested that Nazi Germany’s military prowess was connected to the purity of its gene pool, and warned that egalitarian ideas endangered “North European civilization.”

Anticipating Murray’s celebration of “clannish self-esteem,” Rushton devotes an entire chapter of his book to a genetic explanation for ethnocentrism: “According to genetic similarity theory, people can be expected to favor their own group over others.” And Rushton speculates that ” favoritism for one’s own ethnic group may have arisen as an extension of enhancing family and social cohesiveness.” The Bell Curve, too, flirts with the notion that enthnocentrism is hereditary.

Murray’s racialist notion of American blacks and whites as culturally and genetically distinct “clans” seems especially implausible in an era when the healthy growth of ethnic intermarriage promises to undermine the concept of coherent racial classification entirely. It’s not surprising to discover, after scratching the surface of Murray’s footnotes, the shabbiness of the tradition on which he has staked his reputation.

[The New Republic, October 31 1994, p.13.]

To state the obvious, being fascinated with ideas like this does nobody any credit.

Zevon

Erik writes to ask what somebody who owns Excitable Boy but is interested in branching out a bit should purchase, and if that’s not a topic for this blog, what is?

To start with, there are two pretty well-selected Rhino best-ofs, the two-CD I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead and the single-CD Genius. The 2-CD one is, I think, more than worth the extra 6 bucks if you’ve heard enough to think you’ll like him, but they’re both pretty exceptional. [The older best-of is also pretty good; it has the advatange of including two first-rate songs ("Mohammed's Radio" and "Ain't That Pretty At All") whose studio versions are inexplicably absent from the newer ones, but has the disadvantages of stopping earlier and omitting the punchline of "Lawyers, Guns and Money."] If you opt for the single, your next buy should probably be the R.E.M-backed Sentimental Hygiene (which is very well-represented on the double. Ditto with the terrific Mr. Bad Example (which would also be a good starting point if you find it cheap.) Also, although it’s fans-only I kinda like the outtakes from the R.E.M. sessions, which were released as Hindu Love Gods. From there, I would check out one or two of his post-1991 albums, all of which are very strong. My order of preference would be Mutineer (lo-fi, slow-paced; probably not ideal for newbies); My Ride’s Here (starts weakly but peaks highest of the 4, also the hardest-rocking), Life’ll Kill Ya (tuneful, consistent, accessible, lacks a truly killer track), The Wind (most popular; I don’t think it’s quite as good as its three predecessors, but context matters, and beautiful at its best.) The debut is also a very good album but you don’t need it if you get the double.

One problem with this, of course, is that I’m a big fan, so it’s hard for me to advise a more neutral party. (I play even the proggish Transverse City quite a bit.) There’s not a lot of criticism online, alas, so I guess that’s what comment sections are for. Robert Christgau‘s evaluations are reasonable; obviously, I would peg them a notch or two higher. (Unfortunately, the utility of his most important insight–that The Envoy is one of his very best–is mitigated by the fact that it’s out of print.) I also play the uneven live-acoustic Learning to Flinch a fair bit, but it’s not a good starting point. The bottom line is that he never made a bad record and he never made a flawless record, so if you like what you’ve heard you can pick up anything that sounds good to you without too much risk.

C’est moi!

Despite popular demand, Lawyers, Guns and Money is proud to offer pictorial representation of yours truly. Photo by Shakespeare’s Sister.

(Context here. Matt uncomfortably notes that my argument is regrettably similar to one made by Norman Mailer here.)

Unhealthy Discourse

When reading Eugene Volokh’s latest recycling of the major points of anti-gay discourse, it’s important to connect this with what he argued previously:

“But most people are not nearly this cautious, and the reality thus remains that, given the vastly disproportionate prevalence of HIV among gays in America today, the greater risk from anal sex, a practice that for understandable reasons many male homosexuals do not want to forego, and the notorious difficulty with getting people to actually practice safe practices–whether aimed at preventing disease or conception–the fact remains that experimenting with male homosexuality is dangerous activity.) Given this danger, I’d prefer that men with bisexual orientations who can be happy with women not experiment with men…”

The goal here, evidently, is to justify the legal discoruagement of gay sexual practices. Obviously, Volokh gives away the show by using the language of “conversion”, which suggests 1)something systematic and 2)that one’s underlying desires are being actively changed (it generally does not refer to persuading a small number of bisexual men to have sex with men.) And note that, as with any fundie conservative, the solution to the spread of STDs is never rational sex ed., which actually works, but unrealistic attempts to change behavior, which don’t. But, anyway, does anybody think (leaving aside the extremely dubious data on which Volokh uncritically relies) that health is the issue here? Does Volokh ever write screeds about how it’s OK to legally discourage people from marrying smokers because of the health risks to them and any future children? (And, as always, his alleged “libertarianism” fades into the ether when confronted with Republican dogma; the idea that human beings can balance out their own risks and pleasures is notably absent from Volokh’s arguments here.)

On the latter point, yesterday Arthur Silber brought up Volokh’s past endorsement of torture, which is instructive with respect to the last point. You probably remember his celebration and strong endorsement of the Iranian government’s practice of torturing prisoners to death. What you may not remember is what he wrote about torture previously, when the subject was the Yoo memos:

The whole topic is sad and horrible, whatever the right answer is… It’’s not a rational reaction; it’s a visceral one. I’’m not proud of my squeamishness, but there it is. I know that just because something is sickening doesn’’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Sometimes people need to do disgusting things to avoid greater harms…But if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.

So, in other words, when the discussion of torture could result in being contrary to the policies of the Bush administration, torture is too gross to be discussed even hypothetically. But once the the partisan conflict vanishes, when he discusses torture you can all but see his erection as he’s typing. And I’m sure it’s the same thing with his dissemination of conservative homophobic tropes: as soon as gay-bashing is no longer one of the strongest glues holding the Republican coalition together, Volokh will move on to some other form of crackpotery. Volokh is as standard-issue a Republican hack as they come, and there should be nothing surprising about this latest series of posts.

Speaking of Republican hacks, shorter Tailgunner Glenn: “I agree with Pat Robertson about assassinating democratically elected leaders I don’t like, but he was dumb to say it.”

…oddly, when it comes to, say, fast food (as opposed to realtionships at the core of your life), Volokh becomes much more libertarian about the balance between liberty and health risks. How strange. Where is the 5-part series about McDonald’s trying to “convert” healthy eaters?

…ogged mounts a defense of Volokh; I try to explain in more detail why Volokh’s position is objectionable in comments.

Babies Come Out Of What Now?

I admit that the anecdotes in this story could make a marginally palatable throwaway NYT style n’ health column. But the angle would have to be more along the lines of “boy, narcissism and passive-aggressive sensitivity sure is an annoying combination” or “So you’ve married a man with a Jake LaMotta-sized virgin/whore complex.” Ye gods. In other news, GOP manwhore Armstrong Williams has applied the NYT’s fascinating scientific findings about the pizza delivery industry.

Speaking of wankers and sexuality, memo to self: restore long-ago pledge to start ignoring Eugene Volokh.

"Let us not assassinate something called "the left" further, Warblogger. You have done enough."

Tailgunner Glenn:

Michael Barone writes that it’s all the bad news that’s fit to print. He also asks: “How much coverage would the press have given a World War II-era Cindy Sheehan who camped outside Hyde Park or Warm Springs demanding to meet with President Roosevelt?”
But back then, the press wanted us to win….
[...]

The press views the war as a political story, not a matter of patriotism. That’s what’s different about today’s coverage, and it’s a disgrace.

The disgrace, of course, is that a professor of law believes that during times of war the press should function simply as a propaganda wing of the current administration. (And, of course, lest there be any doubt that he simply conflates “patriotism” with “agreeing with Glenn Reynolds”, he’s still engaging in classic McCarthyite smears despite their being thoroughly debunked.) It’s not clear why the framers wanted to protect freedom of the press if their uncovering any facts that are inconvenient to the foreign policy of the current administration is “unpatriotic”. But of course, his passive-aggressive “The First Amendment is just dandy as long as nobody uses it to say things I disagree with” routine is nothing new. Equally silly is his belief that one can a “win” a war whose objective is implanting an entirely new system of government on a devastated country with little civil society if you just want to badly enough and nobody reports the bad news.

But really giving away the show here is his attempt to salvage the Iraq War by bringing WWII into it. It is true, as it happens, that there was much less coverage of dissent in WWII than in, say, Vietnam. But, as Geoffrey Stone’s terrific new book points out, this is largely because there was so little dissent about WWII in the first place. WWII was a war of self-defense, fought against a profoundly evil regime that had conquered large parts of Europe; most people believed this war was worth fighting (correctly, of course), and the objectives were clear. The Iraq War, conversely, is a war of choice fought against a profoundly evil regime that posed no threat whatsoever to the United States, and the current objectives of the war and what counts as winning are a subject dispute among the war’s supporters. This, of course, is a key distinction. Cindy Sheehan merits media coverage because her opposition to the Iraq war is the majority position. This was simply not true of the genuinely fringe opposition to WWII. Reynolds’ belief that public discussion of the majority’s viewpoint should be suppressed is obscenely anti-democratic, but fortunately it is also futile.

In a sense, then, the desperation and McCarthyite rhetoric of the Reynoldses and Tarantos of the world is perfectly rational, particularly as the nature of the new Iraqi regime is becoming apparent. They can’t win an open debate on the merits of the Iraq War, and they know it very well. Their argument wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it. Increasing numbers of conservative Republicans “aren’t just anti-war, they’re on the other side.” It’s perfectly logical, and not the result of some sort of brainwashing, that a majority of the public opposes a war against a country that posed no threat to the United States in order to install an Islamic theocracy with very loose social control. (And it won’t do to say that the latter couldn’t have been predicted. It’s elementary state/society theory; fledgling states have to take advantage of civil sources of coercion, and obviously in Iraq that’s going to involve Islamist groups.) It is not clear if this outcome is a greatly better one for Iraq (and it is distinctly worse for the women of Iraq), and whatever combination of theocracy and anarchy emerges will be much worse for the security of the United States. This war wasn’t worth anything close to the lives and dollars it has sacrificed, and no amount of slanderous rhetoric is going to convince a majority of the American public otherwise.

Prelude To A Rant

Shorter Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson: Iraq is about to get a theocratic constitution with the assent of the American government, and George Bush has nothing to do with it.

Why the New Deal Needed LBJ

Shorter Michael Lind: The idea that women should make the same money as men for performing work of similar skill is nuttier than anything proposed by Stalin or Mao. And worse than that, the idea of women working and sending their children to “baby kennels” is contrary to nature. So, as a New Deal liberal, I hope we can convince the public that the gender relations that existed in the 30s were optimal.

Nathan Newman has more.

…UPDATE: Rob defends Lind in comments, but unfortunately his argument is premised on the Lind/Roberts strawman, i.e. that comparable worth means that government will set wages across the board. This is, of course, not the case. The technical data about skill levels compiled by pay equity groups was used 1)as leverage in labor negotiations, and 2)to determine whether civil rights laws have been violated. (Compliance with civil rights laws in practice does not require perfect equity, and only the most egregious violators will be sued by the government. And if Rob thinks that segregating a class of people into professions that pay much lower wages than other occupations of similar skill doesn’t constitute discrimination, I’d love to hear the argument.) Suits like the Wal-Mart suit that Nathan discusses would not result in the government setting wages for every Wal-Mart store. As Michael McCann points out in his superb study of pay equity litigation, Rights At Work:

It is important to emphasize that job evaluation techniques and statistical evaluations are almost never translated into remedial wage scales. Rather, employers and workers typically use them to structure ongoing bargaining over wage rates for specific job categories. Even where legislation or litigation mandate general guidelines for achieving equity, a process of discretionary work/management negotiation is almost always established to implement wage reform. (31; my emphasis.)

I’ll have more to say about Lind’s complaints about “plaintiff’s attorneys” later. But, of course, it is true that alleviating systematic wage discrimination is a difficult problem, both in the assessment and the application. But what supporters of wage equity understand that Lind does not is that this discrimination is simply not the result of the magic invisible hand of a perfectly functioning free market, but is the result of decisions made by corporate managers, many of whom share Lind’s convictions about the desirability of women having full-time careers. It would be nice to overcome these things without any legal action, but it’s obviously not realistic.

At any rate, for people like Roberts and Lind, the technical issues are just window dressing; it’s clear that they don’t regard wage equity as a desirable end in itself. And let’s be clear about the consequences of Lind’s preferred outcome, which is entirely dependent on parents being in stable, heterosexual marriages. Where wage segregation exists, single mothers are at a massive disadvantage. And, of course, making women economically dependent on their husbands increases domestic abuse as women are economically compelled to stay in bad marriages. Once you go beyond the strawman that Lind erects from a single, off-the-cuff quote, the odiousness of his argument is clear. (And as for Lind’s argument that pay equity is bad because it will decrease male wages, it is the precise moral equivalent of New Deal labor leaders who wanted to keep unions segregated because integrated unions might depress white wages.)