Sunday, March 31, 2013

Play Ball!
The Splendid Splinter was my Dad's favorite.  Yaz was mine.  I enjoyed our 'heated' discussions about who was better.  Something about arguing with Dad just always felt like the right thing to do.  Fortunately, I remember these exchanges with great joy, as practice bouts where Dad was just letting me work some things out, because he has not over the years since reminded me of how many times I was wrong.  Sure, Yaz was my hero and a great player...but better than Ted Williams?  What was I thinking?


My brothers and I are hoping that Dad will join us for a couple a spring training games in Fort Myers next year.  Maybe we can also catch a Florida Gulf Coast basketball practice!

Openning Day is tomorrow at Yankee Stadium.  Jon Lester will start for the Sox and his spring ERA was less than one.  Papi is still out.  There are a few new faces.  But as the greatest Red Sox fan ever, Nanny, might have said:  'When the Sox win, we all win; when the Sox lose they stink.  Let's listen to the game on the radio with the TV sound off.'

So, my prediction this year (not that much different from last year, every year) is a Red Sox World Series title.  Lester and Buchholtz will finish one-two in the AL Cy Young Award voting.  Ellsbury will regain his five tool MVP contributions.  Middlebrooks will emerge as a feared power hitter.  The Blue Jays might win the East, with the Sox getting in as a wild card, but then it will be all Sox.


Thursday, March 28, 2013

Why 'Conventional Wisdom' has an Affluent Bias
A recent editorial from the LA Times was reprinted in the Akron Beacon Journal and is worth reading in full. It was written by Benjamin Page and Larry Bartels, both Political Scientists.  But we should not hold that against them, it is still worth reading. Really.  I interjected in red.
Over the past two years, President Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early 2011, only about 12 percent of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as the nation’s most important problem. Two to three times as many cited unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country.
Point #1:  Americans are concerned about jobs a lot more than about the national debt right now.
So why did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation’s priority had more clout than the majority that didn’t.
Point #2:  Good question, and it is important to ask better questions.  And the affluent bias built into our political system (see EE Schattschneider among others) is a very solid starting point for a great answer.
We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1 percent of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue.
Point #3:  Not a conspiracy theory.  It should be no surprise, or even a concern, that the wealthiest want to protect their own interests, as we all do.  The concern is their disproportionate (and too often hidden) capacity to re-present their private interests as if these were the top priority public interest.
If the concerns of the wealthy carry special weight in government — as an increasing body of social scientific evidence suggests — such extreme differences between their views and those of other Americans could significantly skew policy away from what a majority of the country would prefer. Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political reach of the very wealthy.
Point #4:  We risk moving toward (or already live in) a plutocracy instead of a democracy.
While we had no way to measure directly the political influence of those surveyed, they did report themselves to be highly active politically.
Two-thirds of the respondents had contributed money (averaging $4,633) in the most recent presidential election, and fully one-fifth of them “bundled” contributions from others. About half recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly half (44 percent) of those contacts concerned matters of relatively narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concerns. This kind of access to elected officials suggests an outsized influence in Washington.
Point #5:  Not a direct measure, but at the same time I cannot imagine contributing over $4,000 in a campaign, have never been approached about bundling during a round of golf, and I am fairly certain that it does not matter what issues I want to raise in my efforts to contact members of Congress.
On policy, it wasn’t just their ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement programs like Social Security and health care be cut to balance the budget. Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.
Point #6:  Again, holding a self-interested position is not a surprise other than the disproportionate capacity to influence public policy in support of that position.  Sidebar:  My reading of the challenges we face suggests that we need to do both for the long-term security of all Americans, but that we need to focus on job creation first.  Faith in austerity measure is largely a hoax.
While the wealthy favored more government spending on infrastructure, scientific research and aid to education, they leaned toward cutting nearly everything else. Even with education, they opposed things that most Americans favor, including spending to ensure that all children have access to good-quality public schools, expanding government programs to ensure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so, and investing more in worker retraining and education.
Point #7:  Even when we dig deeper, the same self-interest as public interest pattern emerges.
The wealthy opposed — while most Americans favor — instituting a system of national health insurance, raising the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and providing a “decent standard of living” for the unemployed. They were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for those who cannot find private employment.
Unlike most Americans, wealthy respondents opposed increased regulation of large corporations and raising the “cap” that exempts income above $113,700 from the FICA payroll tax. And unlike most Americans, they oppose relying heavily on corporate taxes to raise revenue and oppose taxing the rich to redistribute wealth.
Some of the differences between the political views of the wealthy and other Americans may be explained by differences in the two groups’ economic experiences and self-interest. The wealthy are likely to have better information about the costs of government programs (for which they pay a lot of taxes) than about the benefits of those programs. They don’t usually have to rely on Social Security, for example, let alone food stamps or unemployment insurance.
Another possibility is that the wealthy — who tend to be highly educated, well informed and committed to charitable giving — seek the common good as they see it, and know better than average Americans what sorts of policies would benefit us all. On the issue of federal deficits, for example, the public has come to see government debt as an increasingly important problem over the past two years, reducing the gulf between their views and those of the wealthy. Is that because the wealthy were ahead of the curve, or because their concern helped stimulate a steady drumbeat of deficit alarmism in the media and in Washington?
Our pilot study included a relatively small number of wealthy citizens, and they were all from a single metropolitan area. A larger-scale national study is needed to pin down more precisely the views of wealthy Americans about public policy. We need to understand how they formed the preferences they have, and how wealthy people from different regions, industries, and social backgrounds differ in their political views and behavior. We also need to understand more about their political clout.
Our initial results suggest the wealthy have very different ideas than other Americans on a variety of policy issues. If their influence is far greater than that of ordinary people, what does that mean for American democracy?
Page is a political science professor at Northwestern University and co-author of Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality. Bartels is a political science professor at Vanderbilt University and author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. They wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
  

 

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Challenging China, Challenging OurselvesWilliam Pesek: Add dirty air to the list of Chinese exportsMarch 23,2013 11:54 PM GMTWilliam PesekBloomberg View
 Copyright 2013 Bloomberg View. All rights reservIt would be impossible to watch Congress today and not worry about the future of the great American experiment.  Can this generation do as earlier Americans have done and respond to the challenges we face as one nation, united around the idea that we can advance the general welfare by protecting individual freedom?  No sober observer could avoid the conclusion that Americans face a multitude of serious challenges, not the least of which is making government work again, finding leaders who can make democracy work again. 
 
 
The US is not alone.   China’s new leaders face at least as many, at least as daunting, challenges.  The ratio of workers to retirees is, like the US, out of whack.  Corrupt leaders—in the public and private sector—appear willing to put party (or individual gain) above nation.  Environmental degradation, resulting from unregulated growth, threatens public health, economic vitality, and international stability.  Sounds familiar.  A columnist, describing the impact of the desertification of Northeast China on Japan, put it this way:
“The sand is compliments of China’s boom. Thanks to deforestation and overgrazing, more and more of the Gobi Desert’s grit, along with industrial pollution, is being carried by prevailing winds to Japan….The geopolitics of pollution has the potential to turn toxic. If you thought Asia’s territorial disputes were a barrier to peace and cooperation, just wait until blackened skies dominate summit meetings. And they will, as nationalists in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan use pollution as a rallying point to gin up anti-China sentiment; business leaders in Hong Kong express anger about having trouble recruiting foreign talent; China lashes out at independent reports on health risks; and the world points fingers at the Communist Party as climate change accelerates.”
If the Pacific Rim economies go into a tailspin, this will almost certainly reverse our modest economic recovery, because we can no longer deny our interdependence (making cooperation more prudent than war as a default approach to foreign policy).  If China's 'wild west' model of unconstrained economic development spreads, we may see already weakened democratic institutions atrophy worldwide as the negative impacts of an unregulated free market become even more difficult to manage.
“’Asia can barely get along now, never mind when we throw air pollution into the mix,’ said Alistair Thornton, a Beijing-based economist at research company IHS Inc.  Environmental disputes already abound….disputes over water with Kazakhstan, India and the nations downstream on the Mekong River; conflicts over illegal logging with Indonesia; and the lack of corporate social responsibility by Chinese companies in Vietnam and Myanmar. Add to that China’s shipments of acrid air to Japan….
Pollution is a clear danger to the Communist Party’s legitimacy….  The U.S. Embassy in Beijing also refused to stop issuing hourly air-quality updates.
The problem is political will. Flush with $3.3 trillion of currency reserves, China has the money to succeed. Yet almost any route it takes to go green requires slower growth. China’s leaders for the next 10 years, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, are under pressure to boost today’s 7.9 percent growth rate and placate a populace seething over income inequality.”
Will our own environmental degradation and political stalemate undermine the legitimacy of elites in both parties, or of a corporate elite increasingly callous to the living conditions of ordinary Americans?  As our embassy (rightly) pushes Beijing to reform, will other nations similarly exploit tensions over the highest levels of inequality in the US since 1929?  Do our leaders lack the political will to do what is best for the nation?  These are not the usual types of questions we ask about ourselves.  But when we read about very similar challenges facing China these are the first questions that come to mind.  Are we asking the wrong questions?

Closer to home, but on the same point, colleges and universities need to return to a faculty leadership structure.  Rather than hiring over-paid bureaucrats from the private sector who are looking to ease into a comfortable campus retirement, return to the tradition of faculty leadership.  This would be innovative and good for both our students and higher education.  Hiring internally reduces costs, often significantly, and puts individuals in charge who actually understand where value is created on a university campus.
 

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Living, really living, with less
Graham Hill, internet entrepreneur, writes about materialism…from experience.  Did you know that the “average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people?”

 
Did you know that in a “recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Though American consumer activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined?”

Hill’s short essay is worth reading and reflecting upon.  Because he is warning us about a trap that any of us, perhaps all of us at some point, can fall into and die.  And he is not railing against materialism as one of those self-righteous posers who pretend to actually prefer tofu to steak.

“…I like material things as much as anyone. I studied product design in school. I’m into gadgets, clothing and all kinds of things. But my experiences show that after a certain point, material objects have a tendency to crowd out the emotional needs they are meant to support.”

Check out his essay.

 

Monday, March 18, 2013

CPAC on Race
Those gathering at the Conservative Political Action Committee meetings this past week organized many sessions, including one sponsored by Tea Party Patriots called “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”

You can see the chaos that ensued here.


Talking Points Memo provides an analysis that includes a formal statement from the black conservative who moderated this session.

Engaging candidly about race is difficult, as some conservatives noted in the Talking Points Memo coverage.  But difficulty does not justify refusing to engage and it certainly does not make talk about white men “being systematically disenfranchised” any less crazy.

How about a session on policies to reduce racial discrimination, defund the war on drugs, and revitalizing inner city schools...instead of a session on how verbal jujitsu (just say you are a Frederick Douglas Republican) that devolves into a defense of slavery?

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Fill in your brackets!
While the NCAA in general operates more like an organization designed to destroy college athletics...there is no denying that March Madness is some of the best basketball on the planet.

In just over two hours many thousands will be filling out their tournament brackets.  Some use color of uniform, others rely on 'statistics,' while still more deploy their own unique combination of head and heart picks each year.  If you do not already have a place to get a bracket to fill out yourself, try bleacher report.

Each year the Lyons family members compete to see whose bracket will end up closest to actual outcome.  In this way, we are like a zillion other families, office pools, and fantasy sports communities all doing the same.  This year I am torn...

Will my University of Akron Zips emerge as the cinderella of the 2013 tourny?







Or will my UMass Minutemen crush all comers? 









Or my UW Huskies? 







Or my Beijing Normal University (pretty sure they don't have a mascot) student-athletes?



 
Silence for our health
Perhaps it has always felt this way.  But it feels to me like today, we live our lives as if extra-strength was the minimum dosage.  Our everday pace feels like the manic race to finish a term paper at the last minute, except we are always in the last minute.  There is no reprieve.  Other than sleep, which itself seems negatively impacted, we are always rushing in a million directions at once, pretending that this is productive, that it will only last until the next punctuation mark.  But we just keep ratcheting up the noise.  An interesting commentary in today's Beacon suggests we have stumbled into an emotional, physical and spiritual diet that lacks essential nutrients, most noticably missing regular, relaxing, reflections in silence.

The commentary quotes outgoing Pope Benedict, whose approach to living has never struck me as particularly Christian, but he gets it right here, highlighting the spiritual, social and political reasons to seek out silence in our daily lives...

In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible.”

One of my objectives as teacher is to help us all each learn to think, to value a life of the mind because it will enrich our lives and careers and help us more productively address the conflicts and challenges we face together.  Teachers attempt to do this by finding engaging readings that challenge us to re-think and think more deeply in writing and in conversation.  Today, I encourage us to rediscover an age-old ingredient of a life well-lived that is at some risk in the internet era: silence and silent reflection. Meditation, prayer, singing, poetry, Tai Ji, yoga, reading for fun, and many other activities are each valuable ways to improve our capacity to understand and transform the conflicts in our lives, and this is the case, in part, because each puts a premium on cultivating a daily habit of silence and silent reflection.  Learning to listen, step one, learn to be silent.

'Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, puts it this way: “Thinking is always out of order, interrupts all ordinary activities and is interrupted by them.” Yet we need to do it. Socrates, she reminds us, didn’t always have the answers, and wasn’t always interested in dialogue. Again and again, Arendt says, we see him going off alone to think.'


Saturday, March 16, 2013

If I love my own son...
Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman has come out in favor of same-sex marriage.  Part of me wants to hold onto the disgust I have felt in response to his very recent willingness to join the chorus of the hateful, but I am also moved by how important it is that we all break out of our bubbles and interact with people who are unlike us, who see the world differently, who hold competing views…because as we see here, this experience at the face2face and human level changes us…often for the better. Thanks Senator Portman for this statement that was reported in the Beacon today.  Seems pretty straightforward.

‘U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, voicing support for same-sex marriage Friday with a personal note that his son is gay, joins a bipartisan movement toward a recognition of rights that many Americans are embracing.
“I have come to believe that if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love and care for each other in good times and in bad, the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to get married,” the Republican wrote in a commentary published in the Columbus Dispatch.
Portman, 57, joins some within his own party, notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, in speaking to an issue from the heart — Cheney has a daughter who is gay.’

Friday, March 15, 2013

Pope Francis
Lives simply.  A good sign.
Has an ambiguous relationship to right-wing death squads.  Not a good sign.
May redirect church attention from the bedroom to the poor.  A good sign.

EJ Dionne sounds cautiously optimistic about the new Pope and, as if often the case, I agree with him.
‘In the end, it is Pope Francis’ standing as a Latin American and as an advocate of the poor that may well define him.
His connection to Argentina is not without ambiguity. He has come under criticism for not speaking up strongly against the brutal Argentine junta that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. Yet he is unlike some past leaders in the Latin Church who allied themselves with privilege.
He gave up the archbishop’s mansion in favor of a small apartment, and used public transit. He’s worked in his nation’s slums and asked his priests to do the same. He has outlined the shortcomings of unregulated capitalism, and of the International Monetary Fund.
For many Catholics, a great deal of hope rests on the new pontiff’s choice of the name Francis, the saint who disdained formal authority, devoted himself to a simple life, cared passionately about the marginalized, and saw actions as counting far more than proclamations.
It is said that St. Francis once declared, “Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words.” For a pope, it’s a challenging approach.’


Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Spring Training
Off to Fort Myers, FL to meet my brothers and watch a couple of Red Sox spring training games this weekend.  Perfect in every way.


This Yaz poster was in my room growing up!  Go Sox! 

Friday, March 1, 2013

Science and Democracy: Uneasy Bedfellows
Glen Garvin of the Miami Herald wrote a very interesting column this week.  It is precisely the kind of analysis I like to write, but calling out the left instead of the right.  So, I like that.  In fact, I have often searched for just this type of analysis. So, I like it and at the same time, I don’t. 
I can feel myself too eager to reject his arguments with all the lame, half-ass, arm-chair, dismissive responses we hear from the right in the face of scientific claims about climate change or rape, evolution or…part of me wants to say ‘you name it,’ but Garvin’s column challenges this notion.
Garvin catalogues cases where “the Luddite shock troops of progressivism like Greenpeace” cynically advance political positions that are contrary to the best available data (a favorite phrase of mine when I am excoriating the right for homologous failures).
His list includes opposition from the left to genetically modified foods, blocking ‘golden rice,’ which is modified to contain vitamin A, from saving half-a-million children from going blind each year, and half of these die.  Just like I do, he chooses to use a figure that is lower than figures cited in other research, to ensure his claims are solid.
The benefits of golden rice, according to Garvin, have not prevented Greenpeace (and others on the left) from “fighting a scorched-earth war to stop golden rice.”  Up to this point I am intrigued.  I have done some reading on genetically modified foods.  Not a lot. 
I understand that the science is new: exciting possibilities, unknown risks.  Some scientists are concerned not enough testing has been done, but their voices are muted. The US government and corporate sector have been leaders worldwide in advancing these products, opposing efforts to label foods for fear that consumers will not purchase them (out of ignorance or intelligence remains the question).
So, at this point I am ready to turn on the dismissive engines.  Then I read:
“What role does science play in the left-wing opposition to golden rice and other genetically modified crops? None. Study after study has shown no detectable deleterious effects on human health from genetically altered foods. And two studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition have shown that golden rice is an even better vehicle for delivery of vitamin A than spinach, the wonder vegetable.
Every time some lone Republican nut from Hooterville makes a jackass statement about rape or evolution, it’s immediately ascribed as a doctrinal belief of the entire GOP and conservatives in general. But liberal resistance to science is far more organized, far more destructive and far less covered in the media.”
Now I am seriously interested in what Garvin has to say, because I could have written this first paragraph about climate change or…you name it?  And the second paragraph makes me think: damn, I do that.  Isn’t it accurate, since these Hooterville commentaries advertise the same message contained in forced ultrasound legislation, legislation redefining rape, and more…which are all statements from the GOP elite, right?  And can the left ever be accurately described as organized? 
Garvin continues his list of leftist anti-intellectualism to include concerns about a connection between autism and vaccinations, quoting President Obama as sharing this concern, and concerns about nuclear power plants, where he includes a similarly shocking (to me) reference to data challenging what I take to be common sense about the carnage associated with the Chernobyl disaster.
“Actual [Chernobyl] death toll, according the U.N.’s scientific committee on nuclear radiation: less than 100. Actual birth defects: zero….  There may be good reasons for opposing nuclear power — mainly, that the industry is a bloated corporate welfare tick that cannot survive without massive government subsidy — but science isn’t one of them, which is why a 2009 Pew Research Center survey showed 70 percent of scientists support it.”
This is where my first instinct is to do what I would not due to a Paul Krugman piece…wonder what a UN scientific committee on nuclear radiation might be, without capitalization?  Sound suspicious.  Of course, what that means as I think it is, sounds unfamiliar; does not reinforce what I already think to be true.  At this point I decide to blog, rather than spend time pouring over www.factcheck.com or www.politifact.org to sort it all out. 
Of course, it is possible that Garvin has his science wrong, just as it is possible that I have my science wrong.  It is even more important, however, to recognize that neither of us has our own science, and at the same time, even scientific truths remain provisional, because like all human products, these emerge from, and live within, communities of experts and change over time.
So, rather than try to find the ‘one right answer’ (which usually just happens to coincide with what I already thought), I want to thank Garvin for a column well written.  It made me think and rethink, and for that, thanks.  But if anyone does have the scientific data to blow him out of the water, call me.