Is the Green New Deal Sustainable?

It seems like an odd question. The Green New Deal is a proposal to invest in clean energy to provide economic stimulus and good jobs, and the shift to clean energy is obviously needed to make the economy sustainable.

But I would say that the underlying assumption that the government should stimulate the economy to provide jobs is not sustainable. It has been the basic assumption of American politics since the end of World War II, but it is obviously not sustainable to stimulate the economy and promote economic growth forever.

As I have said many times, progressives ignore the underlying question of why we need economic growth to provide jobs.

New technology makes workers produce more, doing away with jobs. During the twentieth century, the amount that a worker produces in an hour increased roughly tenfold--which means that, in 2000, we would have had about 90% unemployment if we produced as much per capita as we did in 1900.

After World War II, we adopted the policy of dealing with this techological unemployment by stimulating the economy, so people would consume more and more and would keep up with the economy's capacity to produce more and more. But this is not sustainable.

Instead, we should be creating jobs by shortening work hours. If people could choose their work hours based on how much money they want to earn and spend, they we could match the amount the amount the economy produces to the amount that people want to consume - rejecting the unsustainable policy that we must make consumption keep up with productivity to avoid unemployment.

Lyndon Johnson and Progressivism

Recent opinion pieces have said that progressives may end up liking Biden as president, because they also had doubts about Lyndon Johnson at first but he turned out to be one of the two most progressive presidents in history (along with Franklin Roosevelt).

This claim shows that today's progressives have not learned from the successes and failures of 1960s progressivism.

One of the great successes was Medicare. For the first time, everyone more than 65 years old could afford health care.

One of the great failures was public housing. Federal funding let cities demolish existing neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance and replace them with public housing.  Yet studies showed that the public housing had higher crime rates than older neighborhoods nearby with the same demographics, and things were so bad that hundreds of housing projects were later demolished under the HOPE VI program.

Progressives should have learned that:

• The Federal government is good at making transfer payments, taxing the wealthy and distributing income or vouchers to the poor. In addition to Medicare, examples of successful federal anti-poverty programs are Social Security and Food Stamps (now called SNAP food benefits). What these programs have in common is that they give income or vouchers that people can spend more-or-less as they choose. 

• The Federal government is not good at micromanaging the lives of the poor. Centralized programs are likely to use the sort of impersonal, mass-production methods that are so obvious in the design of mid-century housing projects. And when centralized programs make mistakes, they make them on a vast scale; decentralization has the advantage of letting us try many different methods, so we can imitate the successful ones and abandon the unsuccessful ones without very widespread damage. 

Yet progressive have not learned this second lesson. They seem to be able to think about only one thing at a time - that they want to help the poor - and can't think at the same time about what sort of program to help the poor is most likely to be successful. Most self-styled progressives have not even learned the most obvious lesson of the 1960s and still want housing projects for low-income people. 

To give the most striking example, almost all progressives support universal preschool. But what if the federal government makes an error in designing this universal program, as they made an error in designing mid-century housing projects? The housing projects were built for decades before this error became apparent to everyone, and the universal preschool would continue for decades before any errors that it makes become apparent when the children grow up.

The housing projects blighted low-income urban neighborhoods physically. Errors in designing universal preschool could do much worse damage: they could blight an entire generation of Americans psychologically.

The obvious alternative it to give an allowance to all parents of pre-school children that they could use to pay for preschool or to supplement their income so they could stay at home and care for their own children, at least part-time. This is the sort of transfer payment that has been successful in helping the poor, rather than the sort of micromanaged system that has been a failure. But I don't hear any progressives advocating it. They all want a centralized, top-down system of universal preschools.

Bernie Sanders: Electability and Policy

Many say that they like Bernie Sanders' policies, but they are not voting for him in primaries because they think he is not electable.

I think he is not electable - and I also think he would be a bad president both because of his policies and because of his rigid, dogmatic character.

Sanders is the only major Democratic candidate during this primary season who has said he is against putting a price on carbon emissions. Instead, he proposes spending trillions of federal dollars on a a top-down remake of much of our economy.

A price on carbon emissions is the lowest-cost method of controlling global warming. Some of Sanders' proposals seem very expensive and wasteful. For example, he wants to spend over $500 billion creating a national smart grid. Twenty years ago, a smart grid seemed like a good idea, despite the cost, because it was the best way to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind power: the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere, and if solar or wind power are not available in one place, a smart grid would bring them there from somewhere else.  But today, the cost of battery storage is so low and declining so rapidly, that it seems that local generation with battery storage is more cost effective than shuttling electricity back and forth across the country.

Just as important, if we passed legislation putting a price on emissions, with the price increased steadily over the years, the policy would last long enough to control global warming, since it is difficult to pass new legislation that would change it. But budget allocations are made each year, and if there were one Republican president before we reach net-zero emissions, he would derail Sanders' plan.

Sanders really does think like a socialist. He believes in top-down command-and-control economics rather than in the market.

In the 1960s, when Sanders came of age, many believed that socialism could out-perform capitalism. But the world became disillusioned with socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as it became clear that it led to economic stagnation: socialism collapsed in Russia and eastern Europe; China kept talking about socialism but added a large private sector that is responsible for its economy's dynamism; India and other countries with moderate forms of socialism privatized their state-owned industries. It takes extraordinary ideological rigidity to live through this and still believe in top-down socialist economics, like Sanders.

This rigidity would prevent Sandeers from being effective as a president, since he is incapable of the compromises that are needed to get anything done. Elizabeth Warren campaigned for Medicare for All but also said that in the first couple of years, she would focus on smaller policy changes to extend health insurance to more people, since Medicare for All is not feasible immediately. Bernie Sanders has not said anything like this, and he seems to be incapable of thinking like this. As a result, he would fritter away all of his political capital as president demanding Medicare for All, which Congress will not pass, rather than working on smaller measures that Congress would pass.

Sanders and his young supporters remind me of a saying from the old days when socialist still seemed economically viable: If you are not a socialist at age twenty, you do not have a heart, but if you are still a socialist at age forty, you do not have any common sense.

But that saying applies much more strongly to Sanders. He lived through the world-wide collapse of socialism without learning anything from it, which requires an almost unbelievable absence of common sense. 

Michael Kimmelman versus Trump

Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would require classical or traditional styles for almost all federal buildings, and New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman rushed to the opposite extreme and produced the worst architecture criticism to appear in the Times since his predecessor Nicolai Ouroussoff left.

He used Thomas Phifer's United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City as an example of one of his favorite federal civic buildings, which this regulation would not allow. It is the building to the left in this picture, and it is obviously a forbidding, sterile monolith. Architects loved it, but ordinary people hated it and named it the "Borg Cube" after a villainous alien race in Star Trek that used cubical space ships.

Kimmelman's article uses a picture that looks at this building head-on, so it looks like a free-standing minimalist sculpture in the middle of its grassy grounds.

Here, we use a picture showing the face it turns to the street, to make it obvious how completely it ignores its urban context. Across the street, there is a older building with stores and restaurants facing the sidewalk, creating an attractive place for pedestrians. But the courthouse has a blank wall facing the sidewalk, then a lawn, and then set back behind the lawn, the forbidding blank wall of the courthouse building, creating a miserable place for pedestrians.

Anyone who admires this building either doesn't care about or doesn't know anything about placemaking.

The building is a typical example of the most obvious fault of modernist architecture: it tries to create a sculptural object in space rather than creating a good place for people to be.

The architects who admire it have a post-romantic view of the architect as an artist whose only obligation is to his own creative genius, rather than thinking of architects as professionals who have an obligation to create good places for their clients. It is as if a lawyer speaking in court only cared about his own flowery rhetoric and did not care about his client.

Trump's new guidelines would replace guidelines adopted in 1962, the heyday of mid-century modernism, which say that design should, "flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa." This is just another way of stating the modernist ideal of the architect as an artist with obligations to his own creative genius rather than to his clients.

I don't think the government should require a specific style, but it should adopt architectural guidelines that require buildings to break up their massing, to have human-scale fenestration, and to relate to their urban context, so we don't get more forbidding monoliths that turn their backs to the street like this Salt Lake City Courthouse. These guidelines would be something like form-based codes, so they would replace the mid-twentieth-century ideal of the architect as an artist creating sculptural objects with a twenty-first century ideal of the architect as a professional who should create human-scale places for the community.

Things might be different  if Trump had considered an executive order that required the style that he really likes best - the glitzy modernism of Trump tower. Then the critics might rush to the opposite extreme and call for a humanistic architecture rather than sterile glass monoliths.

See Kimmelman's article here 

Mnuchin Should Study Economics

At Davos, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed Greta Thunberg by saying,

"Is she the chief economist, or who is she? I'm confused. It's a joke. After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us."

If Mnuchin really cared about the economics of global warming, he would talk about the special IPCC study of 2018 which showed that the present value of the damages avoided by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is at least four times as great as the cost.

But Mnuchin has shown over and over again that he cares more about ideology than about economics.

He has said that tax cuts will pay for themselves by stimulating growth, though it hasn't ever happened since Ronald Reagan first made that claim. In Reagan's day, they called it "voodoo economics."  Now, it is zombie economics - a theory that should be dead but that is kept alive, despite all the evidence against it, purely because right-wingers want it to be alive. Mnuchin ignores the empirical evidence in favor of his ideology.

He has said that we don't need government regulations to control global warming because businesses can do it on their own, ignoring a fundamental principle of economics, the idea of external costs. Basic economic theory tells us that the market benefits producers and consumers, but that their transactions can impose costs on third-parties who are "external" to their transactions. In theory (though not always in practice), the best response is to impose a tax on products that reflects their external costs - called a Pigovian tax. Mnuchin ignores basic economic theory in favor of his ideology.

In reality, Mnuchin is the one who needs to study economics. He needs to review the economic theory and the evidence that he has been ignoring. Then he needs to take a look at himself and to think about how much damage he is causing to future generations.

Jason Farago Reveals Himself

New York Times art critic Jason Farago inadvertently revealed something about himself in his review of Maurizio Cattelan’s work "Comedian," which consists of a banana duct-taped to the wall and which sells for $120,000.

Farago says this work is ironic and is a satire of the contemporary art world. But he prefers it to more direct criticism of the art world, such as "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy this Shit" by the British graffiti artist Banksy. 

Why does Farrago prefer Cattelan? He compares "Comedian" to an earlier work by Cattelan, where he duct-taped his dealer to the wall, writing: 

"The banana should be seen in the context of this earlier work, which places the art market itself on the wall, drooping and pitiful. … Mr. Cattelan directs these barbs at art from inside the art world, rather than lobbing insults from some cynical distance. His entire career has been a testament to an impossible desire to create art sincerely, stunted here by money, there by his own doubts."

This is the end of the review: he doesn't go on to explain why it is better to remain in an art world that stunts you rather than leaving it and acting independently, as Banksy does.

A look at art history is enough to show us that this claim is completely implausible. For example, the Impressionists and the Vienna Succession left the mainstream academic art world that stunted them and produced fresh new art. Would they have done better to stay in the mainstream art world, paint in the academic style that they found stultifying - but include subtle ironies in these paintings showing how much they hate the academic art world as a testament to their impossible desire to create art sincerely? Obviously, this sort of hypocrisy is much more "cynical" than acting independently so you can forthrightly say what you really mean.

Farago's claim is so implausible that the only explanation is that it reflects his view of himself. His job as New York Times art critic is to produce admiring reviews of works in mainstream avant-gardist art world. But here he reveals that he really hates those works and considers them insincere and stunted by money - showing that his own work as a critic is also insincere and stunted by the money and prestige he gets from being an art critic of a major newspaper.

By saying he admires Cattelan's stunted work because Cattelan is an insider, he justifies his own choice of being an art-world insider.  

The review is at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/a-critics-defense-of-cattelan-banana-.html

Patriotic and Politically Correct Thanksgiving Myths

The old patriotic Thanksgiving myth says that the Pilgrims suffered through a hard winter, and then a Native American named Squanto acted as translator and let them make contact with his Wampanoag tribe, which taught them to plant corn. After a prosperous year, they had the first Thanksgiving, a feast with the Wampanoags, who became their miliary allies.

The new politically correct myth says that, in the years that followed, the Pilgrims deliberately wiped out the Wampanoags to take their land, just one example of Europeans wiping out Native Americans.

The facts are more complex. The Wampanoags made this military alliance because their population dropped when they caught infectious diseases that the Europeans brought to America, and their weakness led the Narragansett tribe to their west to invade their territory.  They formed a military alliance with the Europeans because they needed their help to defend themselves from being wiped out by another tribe of Native Americans!

All through human history and prehistory, groups of people have expanded their own territory by wiping out or driving away other groups of people. It goes beyond human history: populations of chimpanzees expand their territories by ambushing and killing individuals from other nearby populations, and populations of ants war with any nearby ants that are not genetically related to them.

The evolutionary reason is obvious: if a population of humans or animals increases the size of its territory, it is able to grow larger. Populations that have a genetic predisposition to take over land from weaker neighbors grow faster than those who don't, so this disposition spreads through the gene pool.

The politically correct seem to think that this tendency to expand is a trait of Europeans and not of their innocent victims, but it is actually a tendency of humans, chimpanzees, ants, and many, many other species of animals.

Rather than politically correct recriminations about the past, we need to realize that we are all have this same potential, so we can all rise above tribalism and see that our loyalty to humanity as a whole is more important than our loyalty to our own group.