The Bad Child

I don't recall when I first heard this; it was sometime in the past few years. An economist made the observation that, in the United States, children had gone from an economic necessity to a luxury good, in the sense that modern children for most American families cost much more than they will every return, economically speaking.

I was listening to a series of interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates by some editors of The Atlantic, and at one point, he made a point that I'd also come to; injustice (in this particular case, White Supremacy) tends to exist when it is in the interests if the broader society for it to exist. In other words, injustice exists because it brings advantages.

And in this, you can understand a means of combating injustice that is analogous to the reduction in family sizes.

When injustice effective represents a direct increase in the standards of living across a society (and not just for the people who behave unjustly) you can imagine that it would be quite widespread, in much the same way that in places where children are effectively a form of working farm animal, large families tend to be the norm. As the relative price of injustice goes up, it will eventually become a luxury good, and people will cut back. Family sizes have dropped in part because the greater "investment" that people are expected to make in their children has raised their price, but social changes in gender roles have also raised the opportunity costs of childbearing (something that many people understand to be a form of discrimination against women), and this has also resulted in fewer children being born - there are more economically advantageous uses for the time and resources. (And it is in this sense that children become a luxury good. They're no longer broadly useful as either semi-autonomous home or farm equipment or as a buffer against old age and infirmity.) And one can understand that in a lot of ways discrimination is a modern-day status marker. Prejudices aside, the willingness to write off large swaths of the overall population means missing out on the things that those people could bring. This means that injustice tends to be the province of people who can afford it, rather than the broad populace at large.

But at the same time, it gives us a reason to understand that most forms of injustice will always be with us, no matter what. After all, people who decide to have (or to risk having) children when they cannot afford the expense of it are fairly thick on the ground. Not to say that "everyone does it," but it's common enough that stories are easy to find. And so even once both the direct and opportunity costs of injustice are high, there will still be people to whom it is important enough that they'll indulge themselves when they can.

Like many analogies, this one is imperfect. But I think that it's useful as a way of organizing thoughts around what my need to happen going forward, if things are to change.

Starting Line

Um... Frank? We're supposed to be going that way...

They Said, They Said

“This is a spiritual battle we’re fighting,” they say.
“As Christians, we believe in second chances,” they say.
There’s Biblical precedent, they say—just look at Mary and Joseph!
'You Need to Think About It Like a War'

[Mark Ford,] The head of the county Republican Party called the election “a spiritual battle we’re fighting.”
“Even if the allegations are true, as Christians we believe in second chances,” said Pat Hartline, who lives in neighboring Cherokee County and was also in attendance.
‘This is a Spiritual Battle We’re Fighting’

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus,” Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler told The Washington Examiner.
Alabama state official defends Roy Moore, citing Joseph and Mary: ‘They became parents of Jesus’

"They" is typically taken to be a plural. It when you have some combination of hes, shes and/or its. It is sometimes used a singular, generally in referring to someone where the person's gender is unknown or unimportant - "it" usually being reserved for inanimate objects at at least non-human ones. You might get away with calling a dog "it." Calling a person "it" will typically get one into trouble.

The problem that often arises with "they" is that it's a convenient weasel word. The sort of thing that's used to say something, when a certain amount of ambiguity is desired, even when ambiguity isn't called for. In 'You Need to Think About It Like a War,' McKay Coppins opens with the idea that the "God-fearing supporters" of Roy Moore have thrown their commitment to personal morality out of the window, with things that "they" say in Mr. Moore's defense. But he links to the sources of what "they" say, and in each case "they" turns out be a single, specific, individual.

Of course, this is secondary to the point. Mr. Coppins is right about the fact that the "Christian right" has decided that someone who shares their politics is a better fit as their representative than someone who doesn't, and maintaining a standard of personal moral purity isn't worth losing a valuable legislative seat. But that's not a very good reason to imply that individual voices are a chorus. because it's unnecessary. Attributing each speaker's words to the individual who said them would have still backed up Mr. Coppins' point that in the service of putting someone whose politics matched their own into the United States Senate, Roy Moore's supporters are willing to look the other way at his behavior. He simply would have had to speak of those individuals, rather than generalizing their words.

The whole article uses "conservative values voters" and "they" interchangeably, dealing in broad generalizations, when really the only people who count are the ones who actively decide to vote for someone they would otherwise find to be reprehensible. And in a nation where turning out to vote isn't a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, an active minority can carry the day. It's a safe bet that whomever wins the Alabama Senate race, they're going to carry the day with a minority of registered voters. It's possible that Mr. Moore could win with a minority of conservative values voters making it to the polls. After all, he doesn't need all them to show up - only a statistically significant number more than the number of people who are motivated enough to vote for Doug Jones. Whether that constitutes a majority, I have no idea. But it's entirely possible that there are still large numbers of conservative values voters who have no intention of backing Roy Moore. It's just that the group of them, in total, votes rarely enough that politically, they don't exist. And so the media pays no attention to them, either.

Institutional hypocrisy, my name for the linking of two people who share a characteristic and calling them out for not sharing enough groupthink, is a pointless exercise. Conservative Christians don't have to think about personal purity and political office any more than two people from Rhode Island or any two Latinas have to. Generalizations in support of it don't do anything useful, either.

Untaxing

Today's "Daily Dispatch" from The Economist makes the following point about Congressional Republicans' efforts at tax reform: "The tax bill passed by the Senate on Saturday morning makes a mockery of Republican claims to want to balance budgets. The only objective seems to have been to cut taxes."

With all due respect to The Economist: Well, duh.

No form of government is perfect, and one of the imperfections of a representative government is that there is always the temptation for voters to elect people who will promise benefits at the expense of people who cannot (or do not) vote. Back in the day, the enfranchised class could vote for representatives who would deliver benefits that women, or the Black population of the country would have to pay for. But near-universal enfranchisement has changed that. And so the the current group that's been elected to shoulder the burden of today's benefits are tomorrow's adults, who are now either too young to vote or politically disengaged.

Part of what drives this is that despite the fact that Republicans are primarily focused on lowering taxes, public peity demands that they make some sort of noises about "fiscal responsibility." It's another case of the public effectively asking elected officials to lie to them, because partisan support for spending through the tax code rarely erodes simply because it will increase the size of public debt.

It's a popular trope on "the Right" (to the degree that such a large group of people are unified in any one specific issue) that Democrats often "buy" votes by promising the (undeserving, by many Conservative standards) urban and suburban poor "free stuff," and in doing so, freeing them from having to work for a living. It's a popular trope, in large part because it grows neatly out of a particular conservative worldview that tends to break the world down into Makers and Takers (which are more moralistic than economic distinctions, the way they are typically deployed).

Cutting tax rates, and "letting people keep more of their hard-earned money," is often floated as a way of restoring a measure of fairness to the world, depriving the lazy and unindustrious Takers of the fruits of the hardworking Makers' incomes. But all in all, direct cash welfare via transfer payments is a fairly small amount of the overall federal budget. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are, by themselves, about half of all government spending at this point, even when the net interest on the current debt is included. And these are programs that are popular all across the political spectrum. Reducing government revenues is not going to make these programs go away or immediately reduce their benefits. And in this, the Republican drive to reduce taxes, given the dubious chances that they will spark enough growth to fully offset their costs, is effectively, well, buying votes by giving their constituents "free stuff." It's just that the "stuff" comes in the form of retirement income and medical care.

While Senator Mitch McConnel can say that for the Republican tax plan to pay for itself only requires a boost of 0.4% to current growth rates, that's not as simple an issue as he makes it sound. While 0.4% is a very small amount, what that means in practice is boosting the current growth rate from around 3.17% to 3.47%. That's a jump of a little over 12.5%; or adding an extra dollar of economic growth for every 8 dollars of current growth. Not impossible, but a non-trivial feat.

I find it interesting that there doesn't seem to be a push to recreate the conditions that lead to the technology and internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Were it up to me, I'd be diligently attempting to understand how to create a sustainable version of that. And one doesn't have to sustain it forever. Just doing so long enough to allow for a substantial dent in public debt would be more than worthwhile. Had that rapid economic expansion been the direct result of lowering taxes, one would think that the Republicans would be shouting it from the rooftops, so that doesn't seem to be the Republican intent. The cynic in me has a suspicion as to why there isn't a move to spark another technological revolution, but since my cynical impulses are also uncharitable, I'll keep them to myself.

In the end, I hope that the Republican tax plans do drive enough economic growth to be revenue-neutral in the end. I doubt it will happen, if for no other reason than there will be heavy political pressure to not allow the individual tax rate reductions to sunset, but I have no desire to cheer the downfall of my own interests, regardless of whether I believe that they're honestly being looked after. But I do suspect that economic growth wasn't really the intent. It's well and good for the Republicans to cast doubt on each and every analysis that says that the growth won't make up for the shortfalls, but part of me thinks that it's simply to avoid admitting that they're buying votes, and since they won't be paying the price, the unit cost doesn't matter.

Simon Says

Alright, if you make another mistake, there is a very severe possibility you are both going to get shot, do you understand?

Eventually, according to Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Shaver made one too many mistakes, and a Mesa, Arizona police officer shot him to death.

This is the part that kills me:

At approximately sixteen minutes and forty seconds on the recording Sgt. Langley shouted at Shaver, “If you do that again, we are shooting you. Do you understand?”

Sixteen minutes and forty seconds. The shooting of Tamir Rice is often looked upon as unjustified because the police officer opened fire within seconds of arriving on the scene. This shooting seems unjustified in part because of the amount of time during which Mr. Shaver was under duress. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out how long during the overall eighteen minutes of video Mr. Shaver was trapped in the fatal game of Simon Says with the officers, but in any event, it was long enough for him to lose. And so I wonder why was the situation so drawn out, especially if officers were so concerned that Mr. Shaver may have had something dangerous concealed on his person. If every second that a person is effectively not under the complete control of the responding officers is a second in which a tragedy might unfold, keeping that number of second to a bare minimum seems like it would be a priority.

When you read the excepts of testimony in the case, it seems clear that the officers on the scene had come to the conclusion that Mr. Shaver was a criminal. He was guilty of something, even if they had no idea what, and therefore they had no responsibility to ensure a relatively positive outcome to this situation. So if the orders to do this and not do that went on forever, that wasn't their problem. Mr. Shaver had brought it upon himself by whatever unknown bad acts he'd committed.

When I've debated this sort of thing with people online, they are often at pains to say that in a situation like this, they would make sure to follow each and every one of an officer's instructions. What this case illustrates is that it's easy to say that when you don't know how long you're going to have to maintain the performance. There's an idea, perhaps born of watching too many police procedurals, that police will take complete control of a situation quickly and efficiently. Maybe a minute or three into an encounter, everything's handled, and if one complies with the three or four things they are told to do during that time, nobody is hurt and the task of working things out can begin.

But that's not the way this turned out. And despite my wonderment at how long this all appeared to take, I'm not of the opinion that officers intentionally dragged the whole scenario out for their own purposes. They were following a playbook of some or another sort, and that playbook called for a number of complicated and time-consuming moves, that, in the eyes of the officers, left no room for error.

[Mesa Officer Christopher Doane] also said he remembers Shaver crying. Still, he said, he didn't believe Shaver's tears were genuine because it appeared he was faking it in order to get some sort of advantage against the officers.

This I also find interesting. This whole episode is about a man who is unexpectedly confronted with a squad of heavily-armed police officers, and has been told on more than one occasion that if he does not do everything he is told, exactly as he is told to do it, he will be shot. But one of the officers on the scene testifies in open court to the effect, that he didn't believe the person on the business end of the weapons would be stressed out enough by this to cry. But he was shot specifically because, even though the officers outnumbered Mr. Shaver six-to-one, Officer Philip Brailsford felt threatened enough to use deadly force. When did we enter this world were stone-cold killers can pop up literally anywhere? After all, it wasn't like Mr. Shaver was wanted for a crime or anything. He'd simply been showing his pellet gun to a pair of fellow working-class people he'd met in a hotel.

While many police processes and procedures when dealing with potentially armed citizens (remember, Mr. Shaver wasn't a suspect in anything) are specifically designed to make sure that the officers have the upper hand, the officers themselves seem to be increasingly unaware of this, and of the opinion that at any moment, someone can whip out a weapon, and shoot his way to freedom against people already pointing guns at them.

But here's a simple question that I'm dying for an answer for: Why didn't the officers take the time for a visual inspection of Mr. Shaver when he came out of the hotel room? After all, a gun may be tucked into a waistband, but that doesn't make it two-dimensional; one would think that it would be possible to be reasonable sure one way or other other. Again, I presume that they has a reason. But without understanding what that reason was, it seems like an important oversight, especially in light of the fact that Mr. Shaver was shot to death because Officer Brailsford was convinced he was reaching for a hidden firearm.

One last thing: Mr. Friedersdorf makes the point that: “The case hasn’t attracted the higher degree of attention from the press, the public, or policing reform activists, partly because body-cam footage of the killing has been withheld from the media and partly because the cop and the dead man were both white, rendering the killing less controversial than one possibly animated by racism. But it warrants more attention than it has received.” But I also think that there is another aspect to this. “Brailsford is now on trial for second-degree murder.” The system working as it should, even in the aftermath of a horrendous act, rarely makes the news. Granted, it's nearly two years after Mr. Shaver was killed. I don't know how long it took for the decision to charge the officer to be made. Maybe there was an inexecusable delay. But maybe, as slowly as the wheels of justice grind, they are grinding in the way that people think the should.

I understand that I'm ignoring the main thrust of Mr. Friedersdorf's column, that shootings like that of Daniel Shaver should be publicized, because in order for the majority of Americans to be convinced that there is a problem, they have to be convinced it could happen to them. My White neighbors are more likely to write off people like Michael Brown as hardened criminals than they are people like Daniel Shaver, and so the more Daniel Shavers are brought to light, the more likely action is to be taken. I'm ignoring it because that much I know. The fact that people are the most interested in the rights of others like themselves is common knowledge, I suspect.