The Ambrosini Critique

Bowling for Columbine – Going in

There’s much controversy about this movie. Is it a documentary or Micheal Moore’s political soap box? Does Mr. Moore lie? Are his arguments persuasive?

I’m from a small town and therefore, I’m pro-gun by default. Individuals are responsible for themselves and we should trust them and allow them to protect themselves with firearms. Also, having grown up with guns, gun safety was integral to my upbringing. Arguments involving how scary guns are, won’t convince me.

Now, living in a suburb and having lived in a city, I can see the point of anti-gun arguments. How can you trust so many people to handle gun’s with care? How will Micheal get me around the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ argument?

Mostly, I’m persuaded by arguments that correlate gun ownership with the violence of the society. Is there a high correlation? Is it correlation or causation?

(Note added 7/8/07: I’ve cleaned up the formatting on the post… the conversion from blogger to wordpress wasn’t particularly clean. This post was a response to this Paul Krugman essay about Glenn Loury.)

Berkeley is one of the most dogmatic of places. When I was there as an undergraduate, the big debate was regarding affirmative action. You couldn’t be against affirmative action without being ostracized and certainly, nobody took what you said seriously or would engage you on the subject.

It is clear that American history contains moments when, simply due to the color of one’s skin, certain people were treated in awful and in some instances sub-human ways. It is also clear that these moments were responsible for building a kind of structural racism that lives on today in some or all of our institutions in one form or other. So before the civil rights movement, there were two types of racism, overt and structural. The efforts of civil rights advocates resulted in policies that in most instances have removed or drastically reduced overt racism. For example, out-right racism (of the name calling, cross-burning, lynching variety) is no longer acceptable, in any form, in the large majority of our society. The tactics that civil rights advocates used, impassioned speech of freedom and equality for all, to remove these overt racism made sense for that purpose.

The question remains of how to remove the structural racism. The answer is not obvious but it is obvious that you can’t create color blind institutions by color conscious policy. The policy would be a constant reminder of the thing its trying to erase.

At Berkeley, you couldn’t discuss that obvious deficit of policies like affirmative action. Like all dogmas, Berkeley’s stunted true discussion and for a dogma that calls itself “progressive” it eliminates the prospects of progress.

The hope of true dialog on the subject would be to yield policies that resolve the conflict; eliminate structural racism while encouraging color-blindness.

Jobless recovery aka Productivity-cushioned recession

There’s much being said of the unprecedented nature of this recovery. GDP is rising at healthy levels, but unemployment is riding high. Usually, recoveries are caused by more input being made by more workers. The current recovery is unusual because increased production is up because productivity of the folks that still have jobs is increasing, not because more people have jobs.

So this is why Arnold Kling says that the better way to describe the recovery is to not call it a recovery at all. He prefers the term “productivity-cushioned recession”.

To me, the distinction is important depending on your priorities. If you think that its important for the country to have maximum employment (basically, everyone that wants a job can get one) then you prefer Kling’s description of the current economy. If you believe a country should have maximum income, then you’ll side with the folks that are calling this a jobless recovery.

I’m not very concerned about the unemployment rate. You have to have some unemployment rate because folks in between jobs take some time to get a new job. In some sense, the rate is an indication of how long it takes to get a job after you’ve lost your previous job. The very long term view on unemployment shows us to be within historical norms. The ongoing policy challenge is to find ways to make it easier for folks to switch jobs. This means it needs to be easy to find jobs and it needs to be easy to retrain folks for new/different industries.

One way to interpret the current joblessness is to see the 90’s as a time when new industries were being created. In these new industries there was low barrier to entry for workers. Any Joe Schmo could learn to code html, quit his job and join the dot com craziness. This had the effect of reducing the average time between jobs. When we all sobered up and realized that there is more to it then slapping up some web pages, the bubble crashed and Joe couldn’t easily find a web jockey job. This had the effect of increasing the time it took to get a job (i.e. there’s no easy jobs to be taken) and thus increase the structural unemployment rate.

Confirmation bias

The greatest lesson learned is that people are locked in their own heads. This seems obvious. Everyone has their own perspective. What is less obvious is that perspective is not chosen, its innate. It’s not as if every person was born, given a set of optional world views and then consciously chooses the one that suits them. Perspective forms and grows as the person grows up, influenced by family and friends. Perspective becomes integral to who a person is; you can wholly describe a person by describing how that person sees the world. There’s no such thing as detachable, plug-n-play world views.

My writing teachers would tell me over and over again that I need to understand my audience. This point was always lost on me. To me, writing was expository in that I was laying down the facts. Facts are universal, understood by all. What I’ve come to understand is that what is fact to me may be fiction or inconsequential to another.

If I’m interested in imparting my opinion and world view on others, I would need to find a method for changing the world view of others. The brute force method of hammering out ‘facts’ would not do the job.

The challenge when working with others is to understand their perspective and to understand that their perspective is big part of who they are. If I want that other person to see the fact of something I see, I need to understand their point of view. While their point of view is integral to who they are, how can I make my point without butting up against who they are? Once I answer that question, I can frame my argument for them.

A new book wrestles with monogamy and its modern discontents

“Love might indeed get a better name if we were as attentive to the intellectual dishonesties of the public debate over its failings as we are to the emotional dishonesties of adulterers.”

Failing at Living / It’s a blackboard jungle out there: It’s bad enough when the students don’t want to learn, but when they can’t even spell dirty words correctly, can a teacher really expect them to grasp Stephen Sondheim?

Sigh…

Star Telegram | 09/01/2003 | Watering the driest thing I know

Economics, dry? No!

Someday, I’m going to read Manias, Panics, and Crashes by Charles Kindleberger. It has been said that he is a great economics writer and I’ve already Amazon’d the book (its sitting on my growing ‘to-read’ pile).