Money can buy happiness, but only if you let me have more than you

M.C. Escher, Encounter, 1898.

This thing from Politico's magazine section, endorsed by Ramesh Ponnuru:

Soaking The Rich Won't Make America Happy

It turns out money does buy happiness. But happiness isn’t everything.

By WILL WILKINSON

May 31, 2015

...(it won't make us happy, though it would make us happy, but then is that all you want anyway?) gets even more confused as you work your way into the argument.

1. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 started a

movement to make happiness, rather than wealth, the priority of public policy. “The gross national product,” Kennedy said, “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials..."

OK, so the claim is that happiness reports provide a better measure of how well government is doing its job than the GNP. Costa Rica has a better government than Azerbaijan, and Netherlands just might be doing better than the US, too. Any questions?

Settled philosophies

Via HuffingtonPost.

Warning: some of the language in this post may cause readers discomfort or even trigger feelings of helpless rage. For example, I may find myself quoting David Brooks:

Laura Kipnis is a feminist film professor at Northwestern University who wrote a provocative piece on sexual mores on campus that was published in February. She was hit with two Title IX charges on the grounds, without evidence, that her words might have a “chilling effect” on those who might need to report sexual assaults.

Indeed. What he doesn't tell us is about yesterday's report in Chronicle of Higher Education that Kipnis has been entirely exonerated, quite rightly, so that while she no doubt should never have been investigated at all, it could be worse.

Annals of derp: Jonah Goldberg on American political theory

Welcome Crooks, Liars, and the people who love them! Thanks, Tengrain.

And on air guitar... Image via Crooks&Liars.

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job.

Imma let you finish, Jonah....

Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man...

Not quite all accounts. There's a little disagreement on that score. I mean, just on a couple of issues. Not necessarily anything serious. Or anything.

...Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan.

Ah, here we go. Progressives are the real Prohibitionists, or is it the other way around?

What's to stop me from marrying my television?—Ross, I think you did.

Update: Welcome visitors from the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2015!

Joseph Guisol of Toowomba, Queensland, and his bride, Honey, a golden labrador, 2010. "It's not sexual," Guisol told the guests. Via Animal Planet.

Sometimes Monsignor Douthat is really kind of brilliant, and today is one of those times, when he takes up the challenge of turning the mouth-breather Rick-Santorum man-on-dog argument about the slippery slope of marriage equality into a sophisticated, even wearily amused piece of high-class concern trolling.

Not saying, in fact, that allowing people to marry their same-sex partners will inexorably lead to dudes getting hitched to their pooches, but that it will most likely end up with legal polygyny, and then won't you liberals be sorry?

Because he recognizes that liberals won't like the idea of legal polygyny:

The book he didn't write

Tom Sawyer curates Aunt Polly's board fence. Via.

David "I guess I wrote this book to save my own soul" Brooks appears to be developing into a kind of corporate person, theroadtocharacter.com, and he's awfully busy, so instead of writing a column today he curated one, a little exhibit of pieces from the crowd-sourced part of the website, where ordinary folks write in to share how they have gone about finding meaning or purpose in life.

So it would be kind of mean-spirited to criticize these volunteers, who seem like pretty nice and thoughtful persons (humble enough to admire Brooks a lot more than he deserves and assume his sincerity). Though it wouldn't have hurt to have an editor check the singular-plural issue of the contributor who described "an amazingly consistent phenomena". In fact Brooks has engineered himself the startling feat of using the adverb "amazingly" twice in one brief essay—it's possible, of course, that he hasn't read today's column at all.

They have a message worth attending to, that you don't have to be St. Augustine or Bayard Rustin or Frances Perkins to have a meaningful life: you might just cultivate your garden, like 85-year-old Hans Pitsch, who writes,

Cheap shots and tilted fields

Update 5/28: National Review Plagiarism Watch

Film by Vittorio de Sisti, 1973. This is not in fact funny in any relevant way, but it is funny. 

Reported at TPM:

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said earlier this year that the Chinese aren’t “terribly imaginative” and must resort to stealing the intellectual property of Americans.

Fiorina's comments were made on Jan. 24 during an interview about the Common Core with Iowa political blog, Caffeinated Thoughts, video of which was surfaced by BuzzFeed News on Tuesday.

Anglo-Saxon Platitudes

Traditional image of King John signing the Comprehensive Immigration and Inheritance Tax Reform Act of 1215. Via.

Shorter David Brooks, "Talent Loves English", May 26 2015:

Happy birthday to the Magna Carta, 800 years old next month and still having amazing effects around the world! One little-known fact about this classic document of the Anglo-Saxon tradition is that when the liberty-loving barons forced it on big-government liberal King John they were setting up the conditions that would make Britain, Canada, Australia, and other countries including the United States a magnet for immigrants in the 21st century, drawn by relatively strong economies, good universities, and open cultures. Because immigration isn't your grandfather's huddled masses any more, but a savvy middle-class population now. Thus now that Mexico is more prosperous it sends us fewer immigrants, while we get more from China and India looking for better living conditions, better educational opportunities, and better retirement opportunities such as those offered by our generous Social Security system. Hillary Clinton's daring support for a comprehensive immigration report with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is the way to go, and Republicans who stick with policies based on stereotypes from the 1980s are insane.

Senate Finance Committee members miraculously survive near-death experience, describe encounters with Truth

Ernie, via JimmyFungus.

Brilliant New York Times reporter Robert Pear has learned that some of the authors of the Affordable Care Act are still alive, so that it should be possible to ask them about the King v. Burwell theory—that health insurance subsidies should not be available in states that failed to create their own exchanges because Congress intended that a federal exchange should exist but should not work.

So he went and asked them—former senators Olympia Snowe and Jeff Bingaman, specifically, and some of the Senate Finance Committee lawyers and other staffers from way back in 2009-10. Waiting carefully, of course, until after the Supreme Court justices had made up their minds on the case, and in all probability written their opinion, because it would be so un-American if a Supreme Court decision were in danger of being influenced by some, you know, facts, as opposed to the opinions former consultant Jonathan Gruber suggested he might have held in January 2012 although he has since said he was mistaken.

And lo and behold, it turns out the authors of the Act did intend that the federal exchange working was the idea.

Not that it would necessarily have influenced what the Court thought. They don't want to know what James Madison thought about the subject matter of the Second Amendment.

Now I have to go read what Lemieux said. [Update: he didn't say the same thing. Whew!]

Me and Andrew

Can't get over these guys.

I've been thinking I ought to write something about Governor Cuomo's Education Tax Credit proposal, something he seems to have become mildly obsessed with:

He is putting his political energy into a proposal to enact a $150 million education tax credit program to benefit mostly private and religious schools – despite his veto lectures to lawmakers against such matters coming up after the budget.

“We know that it is justice,” Cuomo told a Jewish audience in Brooklyn on Sunday. He advised attendees to vote against lawmakers who do not support his tax credit plan.

The plan also has grown in size – from the $100 million effort he pushed in March but that did not get by the Democratic-led Assembly during budget negotiations. Critics call the program a back-door school voucher initiative that, in the end, will do more to help lower tax bills of wealthy donors to private school scholarships than it will to bolster the finances of the schools. (Buffalo News 5/18/15)

In the course of a crazy Twitter battle last night, I argued myself into the idea that it might be a little worse than that. Storify over the fold:

Memorial Day

Via.

Headline writer at The Guardian:

President Obama marks first Memorial Day in 14 years without major US war

I'll take that. And a particular salute from the president to the last two Americans to die in the Afghanistan combat mission, Wyatt Martin and Ramon Morris, last December.

We honor those who fell by working for peace, little as any individual among us can do, and also by recognizing that war is very old and cunning, and it's not easy to stop or even slow.

Am I my brother's (score-) keeper?

Image by Eric Draper/AP from the 2000 campaign.

J.E.B. in Politico:

Bush said that Obama “abandoned” Iraq and lamented the fall of Ramadi to Islamic State terrorists, saying that “ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president” and that Al Qaeda was decimated under his brother.

Sorry, Jebbie, but ISIS was founded, under conditions entirely created under your brother's orders, and because of your brother's stupid and probably illegal orders, in Camp Bucca in 2004. This is really a pretty well known fact.

Freedom of specie

Sean Connery and Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger (1964).

A Dissent interview with Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, run across somewhere on Twitter last night—using "neoliberalism" to mean, or entail, what I might call "economism", the rude reduction of humanity to Homo œconomicus, and of human culture to so many overlapping markets, and human history to a kind of vulgar social-Darwinism of the longue durée, the endlessly repetitive story of how some people have managed to be marginally wealthier than others, and therefore winning, before they died.

So she said something wonderfully insightful about what's really wrong with Citizens United:

The Accumulation of Spiritual Capital

Subway outfit. Claudette Colbert in Mitchell Leisen's Midnight (1939), the most recent image I can find in a quick search of pillbox hat, veil, and gloves (lace-trimmed or otherwise), via divamissz. But she clearly doesn't have a pastel dress or accessory grandchild.

See, in feudal times spirituality was essentially a cottage industry, something peasants did after a day in the fields and the evening bowl of gruel, for an hour or two while the candle-ends held out. Most people barely had enough spirituality to subsist on, but over the course of centuries, some individuals gathered together large reserves of spirituality that they were able to pass on to their children, and eventually to put to work with new technologies for making spiritual production more efficient, and before you knew it the landscape of  northern England was dotted with faith factories, mitzvah mills, a surplus of transcendence, and the modern world was born. Just kidding.

Actually what our Brooks is concerned about today ("Building Spiritual Capital") is what to do when you're in the subway and some loud and filthy person with a bag of McNuggets on his lap is shouting at everybody who gets on the train to come and sit next to him and have a piece. There's a solution, but it only works if you're traveling in pairs:

White House Fool Report: I give up

The green card goslings I first saw a couple of weeks ago nestled around a tree trunk in Riverside Park South with their Canadian parents are now fluent swimmers.

Last night BooMan put up a post on the Trans-Pacific Partnership which articulated some things I hadn't understood about how the Senate is voting, which doesn't seem to be on any clear left-right axis but geared more to local issues, and also his informed sense, which I found really surprising and intriguing, that the administration doesn't really know how much it wants the treaty passed, if at all. I left a comment, which I'll just reproduce:

Thanks, that was very clarifying. A lot of the argument on both sides has been very propagandistic; I'm especially disappointed with Warren, who is saying things about the ISDS aspect that are really at odds with reality. The way they've been denouncing TPA as if it were the end of democracy is shameful, and I'm glad you point out that it's the only way the treaty can get written--and voted down if necessary--at all.

We have always been at war with Eastasia

Updated 5/30/2015

It's really not a secret! Map via Wikipedia.

Via NPR, the violent attack of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on US historians Pamela Crossley, Mark Elliot, James Millward, and others, for work published between 1997 and 2004 suggesting, in the trend known as the "new Qing history" that the Manchu empire of the Qing dynasty is not the same thing as China, the country it conquered in 1644 and occupied until 1912 along with other conquests such as Tibet, Mongolia, eastern Turkestan (now known as Xinjiang), and Taiwan.

Because such a view could give people the idea that Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan were not part of China before 1644 (they weren't) and that Tibetans, Uyghurs, and native Taiwanese are not eternally Chinese (they aren't), and indeed that there can be permanent Chinese communities in places (like Taiwan) that aren't China. Thus historian Li Zhiting writes (cited at the China Media Project, University of Hong Kong),

What have I learned from my mistakes?

Denial skills that will last a lifetime!

Victor Varconi and Elinor Fair in Cecil B. De Mille's The Volga Boatman (1926). Via.

David Brooks writes:

Suppose you had a chance to take a time machine trip back to Iraq in 1968? You could smother the infant Rafid Ahmed Alwan in his cradle, so that he'd never grow up to be the informant Curveball who made up the story about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs (actually trailer units for pasteurizing milk and generating hydrogen), which didn't convince the German agents who interrogated him but did convince Tony Blair, who didn't.

Without Curveball there would have been no Iraq War, right, because nobody in the United States ever imagined invading Iraq to overthrow its government until then—not until the slam dunk evidence of Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons of mass destruction assembled itself spontaneously in the corridors of Langley and Dick Cheney said to himself, "My God! Apparently this man is a threat!"

Because it's just like Hitler, really.

Maybe they meant "influenced by a blunt"

Image by duh at Thom Hartmann.

Headline at Washington Post Wonkbook:

Lindsey Graham’s comments on drones were very blunt

What the newly declared presidential candidate said:

"If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL [Islamic State], I’m not gonna call a judge," Graham said. "I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you."

How dishonest is Ross Douthat? A charitable view

Fernando Botero, Nuncio (1970). WikiArt. 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, leaps as is his wont to the defense of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops against an affront by the sociologist Robert Putnam:

“Over the last 30 years,” Harvard’s Robert Putnam told The Washington Post, “most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for ... It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.”

Worse, President Obama, speaking alongside Putnam at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University, seemed to agree with him:

Annals of Derp: Down to Slavery

Paul Moreno's very remarkable argument in The Federalist, in which he claims that

[t]he gay-rights movement has followed not the trajectory of the anti-slavery movement, but of those who supported slavery

starts off not with gay rights or support for slavery, but with polygyny among the early Latter-Day Saints and its opponents:

Annals of derp: Urban planning

Alexander Avenue in Mott Haven, South Bronx. Fort Apache was a really long time ago, before the regulation started to set in. Photo by Michael Kamber/New York Times.

Stupidest thing I heard this morning, on WNYC radio:

The quaint little homes in the charming nooks and crannies of our nation's major cities are costing us billions, according to one economic report.

The economists who did the study found that the U.S. economy would be 9.5 percent bigger, if only three of the country's most productive cities — New York City, San Francisco and San Jose — could squeeze in more people. All they'd need to do is allow developers to knock down those beautiful Brooklyn brownstones and historic Victorians in San Francisco and build taller apartments and condos like other cities allow.

The experts discussing the study on the air allowed as how nothing was likely to ameliorate this unhappy situation, seeing as how people in East New York and Mott Haven treasure the exclusivity and charm of their quaint, walkable neighborhoods so much, but it didn't occur to them to question the researchers' assumption that the aim of producing growth would justify destroying Park Slope. And it didn't occur to them to wonder whether if there might be something wrong with the methodology of a paper that advocates the urban planning strategy that gave the world Lagos and Jakarta.