Vox clamantis in deserto
Another precious quarter hour
"The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February, at least we notice that the days are getting longer. Minute by minute they lengthen out. It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change. It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, as you watch it day by day, until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise we realize that we can stay out of doors in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour.
-- Vita Sackville-West
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-- Robert Frost
Llewellyn King: Lament of the airline coach passenger
The vice president for mollifying irate customers of one of the great airlines — there are only four left, and by the time you read this it may be down to three — has written me asking how I “enjoyed” my last flight. I wonder if this jokester even knows what that word enjoy means? Do they have access to dictionaries at Big Air? I couldn’t even get a second cup of coffee from a surly flight attendant, who only wanted to sit in the back of the plane and kvetch about the latest merger.
Definitely, asking you about the quality of your flight is in dubious taste: Have any Big Air executives ever walked back to coach, where we sit like rowers without oars in a trireme.
My missive from Big Air asks questions like, “How did you enjoy your reception at the check-in?” It said I should evaluate my level of experience from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.”
How can you relate in those terms to a machine called a “kiosk”? As it so happens, my kiosk had serious socialization problems. It’s the seventh kiosk from the left at Washington Dulles International Airport, and it’s determined to prove its recalcitrance from the get-go. It rejected my credit card; it didn’t know my frequent flier number; it told me I wasn’t flying anywhere, as I didn’t exist because it couldn’t “get my record.”
It became quite civil, though, when trying to sell me a larger seat, take a fee for my baggage, and offering to sell me more frequent flier miles. What for? Does Kiosk No. 7 know they have 304 blackout days a year?
Having secured my ticket, I moved on to security — where some TSA worker any day now may be nabbed by a casting director for the archetypal role of a terrorist – which took a grim view of me. I stood bereft of shoes, belt, wallet and all identification so that I could put my hands in the air in a glass contraption. Another incipient movie bad guy examined the screen. Not good enough. I got wanded. Of course, if someone had made off with my plastic tray of possessions while this is going on, I’d have become stateless: undocumented, illegal.
Then I found that I was in Zone 4 for boarding. I’m always in Zone 4, no matter when I book my flight. I suppose I was pre-selected for Zone 4 on account of some library book I never returned. This means there wouldn’t be any room for my suitcase in the overhead compartment, and it’d be taken from me as though I’d been apprehended doing something I shouldn’t.
At least I’ve been saved sitting in a seat too small for its designed purpose for 20 minutes more than necessary. The seat that was too small for me, too small for smaller people, and very much too small for the enormous man who sat next to me.
Did you know they’ve got new seats now without a place to put your book or magazine? They have slim backs to reduce comfort and so more seats can be jammed in.
Then there was the toilet. You must use the one at the back because the people in first class – actually they’re not people, they’re corporate lawyers, a subset of homo sapiens — cannot be expected to share their spacious commode with the likes of coach travelers, who have a social disease: less money.
Here’s a tip you’ll appreciate if you’re a man: Decide which bodily function you plan to execute because there’s no room to turn around. No. 1, walk straight in; No. 2, back in. Women always have to back in.
The pilot came on. He sounded as though his last job was playing a trail boss on radio. You know, that special kind of speech that Easterners think Westerners actually speak: all about “critters” and “dudes,” and how we’re going to “canter over to LA.”
It was going to be five bleak hours of discomfort.
But the good news is passengers won’t have to endure seats much longer. Coming to an airline near you: standing room only and meat hooks for safety belts.
Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is a longtime publisher, columnist and international business consultant.
See Gotham horror movie: TrumptheMovie.com
The old Trump and the new Trump are the same Trump. Here's an entertaining and yet alarming look at the old Trump, or rather the young Trump, in full amoral and narcissistic action as he bestrode Gotham becoming famous for many bad reasons.
See: trumpthemovie.com
Robert Burns: 'Winter: A Dirge'
''Winter Light'' (oil on canvas), by Susan Charles, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.
“The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,”
The joyless winter day
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!
Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here firm I rest; they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want—O do Thou grant
This one request of mine!—
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign.
James P. Freeman: Charlie Baker restores good government to Mass.
“The Baker-Polito Administration Year in Review – 2016,” released nearly a year after Massachusetts Gov. Charles (but almost always called Charlie) Baker assumed the corner office is, in many respects, a blistering indictment of Deval Patrick’s eight years as governor.
It begins a section entitled “Fixes and Reforms,” which lists as goals and objectives: “fixing a broken transportation system,” “reforming a broken Department of Children and Families,” “fixing the RMV,” “fixing a broken Health Connector,” and “fixing a broken Medical Marijuana dispensary system.” In short, the document lays out the charges of years of progressive malfeasance in Massachusetts.
In a wide ranging telephone interview, Baker sounded calm and confident about the noble work his team is diligently implementing to restore and repair a dysfunctional state government.
Asked if he would characterize one of the themes of his administration as “restoration,” Baker pondered for a moment, and responded, simply: “That is a perfectly fine word” to describe it.
Baker said the biggest disappointment of his first year was not addressing the problems at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority “earlier.” The contrasts between Patrick and Baker, in style and substance, are evident. Patrick embodied the incurable progressive urge: if you can’t fix it, expand it. Instead of simply fixing the “T” he sought its expansion, with a billion-dollar transportation “network.” Patrick was a dreamer. Baker is a reformer.
Baker’s approach is not sleight of hand or sledgehammer, rather, it is realistic assessment. When asked the biggest hurdle the Commonwealth faces, his answer is surprising: “energy.”
Despite the comfort of low natural-gas prices and the false sense of security it brings, the Commonwealth is due to lose 10,000 megawatts of power off the grid in the next four to five years. Residents already pay the second highest energy rates in the country. Unless it is addressed soon, Baker fears brownouts and blackouts are possible. He believes Canadian hydropower is the best alternative and “I hope there is a big debate in 2016” with the legislature about obtaining the approvals to move forward. Securing energy, like good government, is overly complicated today.
With regard to building a better economy, Baker eschews the grandiosity of the previous administration’s billion-dollar grab bags (see Life Sciences Initiative). His programs resemble economic, in which smaller, more manageable initiatives come into sharper focus from a distance, where a comprehensive image emerges. He seeks to “simplify” and “modernize” local and state government and reduce its complexity. He is also intent on seeing that western Massachusetts take part in Boston’s booming economy by developing what he calls “skill building.”
A few weeks ago, the governor held a private screening of the shattering HBO documentary Heroin: Cape Cod, USA. It is an antiseptic look at a group of young people who have succumb to the grip of opiate addiction and shreds the idyllic image of Patti Page’s “Old Cape Cod.” He told invited guests that while the film takes place in Massachusetts it “could be anyplace in America.” Every day four people die in the Commonwealth of opioid overdose. It would not be surprising if he looks to reforming how prescriptions for opioid pain medications are written, with such medications being drivers of unintended addictions.
Baker may in fact be the rightful heir to another quiet, serene and unassuming leader of the Commonwealth from nearly a century ago, Gov. Calvin Coolidge. They share the same sentiments and sensibilities about what government does and how it should do it, its vices and virtues.
Coolidge wrote long ago, but with particular relevance today, “There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no one independence quite so important, as living in your means.”
Given the level of massive liabilities — unfunded pensions, perennial out-of-balance budgets, public debt obligations – that approach $130 billion (or $19,493 per capita), Massachusetts has been living beyond its means for decades. These matters will surely need attention too.
The process of restoration is untidy and, in many respects, the major political battles have yet begun but are looming. One wonders if Baker will proactively flush out unpopular and even painful measures early in a first term or slowly unravel the carnival of carnage as it continues coming his way. Either way is fraught with political risks for a man enjoying 70 percent approval ratings today.
After a long lineage of progressive posturing and grisly governance, however, an exhausted and bloodied Commonwealth should continue to enthusiastically accept Baker’s brand of competence, caution and sensible government.
James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and a former Cape Cod Times columnist. This piece originated at The New Boston Post.
Paging Messrs. Durante and de Bergerac
"Nose 9'' (sugarlift acquatint and engraving), by William Kentridge, in the show "The Nose Series,'' at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, Conn., through March 19. The idea for this goes back to a satirical short story by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol written in the mid 1830s about an official in St. Petersburg whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own.
Scott Wolf/Laurie White: Efficient mass transit can boost local economy
Via ecoRI News
To have a successful mass-transit system you have to correctly answer a simple question: Does it get people where they need to go, when they need to get there, conveniently, safely and affordably?
Right now, Rhode Islanders’ answer to that question is largely “No.” Many people still can’t easily rely on mass transit to get to work, go to school, visit their doctor, go shopping or just see a friend when they’re ready to go. This results in Rhode Island not taking advantage of the economic benefits that an inviting and user-friendly mass transit system offers.
While the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) has taken steps to maximize passenger mobility with extremely limited resources, achieving and sustaining a robust transit system requires substantial investments in both infrastructure and operations. Among Northeast Corridor states, Rhode Island ranks last in annual per-capita public investment in transit, averaging just $50.53 per person, compared with the regional average of $202.45 per person, according to a 2014 study by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
It isn’t as though Rhode Island lacks the public will to upgrade its mass transit. In 2014, Rhode Island voters handily approved a $35 million first-ever transit-only bond to create a multi-modal transit hub at the Providence train station.
And Rhode Island already has many other pieces in place to succeed. Notably small, it’s the second-most urbanized state, with more than 75 percent of its residents living within a 10-minute walk of a transit stop. Still, less than 3 percent of the state's population uses transit regularly.
Having a robust and user-friendly transit system is increasingly seen by the business community as an important component to a vibrant economy. This is demonstrated in part by a sustained trend across the country of companies moving to walkable, transit-accessible locations in and around downtowns, big and small.
The Millennial generation, which will soon dominate the workforce, and about whom we hear a constant lament from businesses that young, skilled labor is leaving the state, prefer using public transit to get around. Together with aging Baby Boomers, they’re driving ridership growth around the country. There's no reason why we can’t leverage strategic investments in transit to make Rhode Island more attractive to millennials and grow our economy in ways that further revitalize our urban and town centers.
The recent “Next Stop: Making Transit Work for Rhode Island” forum in Providence demonstrated how we can achieve a transit system that generates a positive return on investment for Rhode Island’s economy and quality of place. Following a “lessons learned” presentation by officials and transit experts from Minneapolis, Denver and Hartford, Rhode Island officials engaged in a lively discussion about the challenges and opportunities for achieving a transit system that really works for more residents and businesses.
With continued leadership from the governor's office and House and Senate leaders to make public transit a priority this year, we’re confident that Rhode Island can reap the many economic and quality-of-life benefits of a more convenient and effective transit system.
Investing in a smarter transportation system is becoming easier with the recent approval of the new federal transportation act — the FAST Act — that modestly increased federal investment for roads and bridges and also for local mass transit. Also boosted were public and private incentives for transit projects that best deliver on mobility, and economic, environmental and social gains.
Still, Rhode Island must do even more to focus and leverage its limited resources to unleash the many co-benefits of improved mass transit. This includes a serious pursuit of public-private partnerships that have proven to work elsewhere, particularly for transit stations and transit-oriented development.
That simple question — “Does the public transit system take people where they need to go, when they need to go, conveniently, safely and affordably?” — may not yet yield the answer we all want. But by taking steps now to plan and invest wisely, we can get the correct response that Rhode Islanders and the state’s economy are looking for.
Scott Wolf is the executive director of Grow Smart RI, which co-leads the Coalition for Transportation Choices. Laurie White is president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce.
Hartford is another sucker stadium city
Most partially or fully publicly financed professional-sports team stadiums are scams and grand larceny against the public. But owners of these franchises know full well how moronic many politicians and some members of the general public are apt to be about these scams because they're blinded by the "glamour'' of professional sports and want so much to believe in the chimera of "economic development'' from them.
The latest example is the new stadium being built in the desperate sucker city of Hartford.
But such is the triumph of hope over experience, that officials in Providence will probably be open to another proposal by the owners of the Pawtucket Red Sox.
The stadium scams are a bit like the state lotteries -- another income transfer from the not-rich to the very rich. But at least gambling is voluntary, unlike taxpayers paying rich people for stadiums.
Shedding more light on the season
This is about the time of year that you start to notice on early-morning walks the sunlight a little brighter and earlier than only a couple of weeks ago. The toughest weeks of winter -- physically -- are the next four or five weeks but the slowly extending light -- and the sense of accelerating time -- gives one more hope than one had in November, at least for a few minutes after sunrise.
-- Robert Whitcomb
Emily Schwartz Greco: So Trump would 'take their oil'?
Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign ad pledges to “take their oil.” That’s what President (gasp) Trump would do after having “quickly cut the head off the Islamic State,” says the deep-voiced narrator.
Along with political decapitation, there are many disturbing things in the Republican front-runner’s commercials besides these three words. But stop and ponder the questions they raise.
First, the U.S. government lacks state-owned oil companies, the requisite drilling equipment, and a fleet of tankers. How would Trump “take their oil”?
He’d get around this inconvenience wrought by America’s capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with “a ring” of U.S. troops.
“You ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies?” Trump crowed in Iowa in November. “They’ll rebuild that sucker, brand new — it’ll be beautiful.”
(Exxon and its competitors aren’t “great” companies. They’re destroying the planet and are dangerous for investors. But let’s stick with those three words.)
Second, much of the territory the Islamic State controls today lies in oil-poor Syria. If a businessman-turned-president is going to deal with all the hassles that making our nation’s fifth-largest corporation an official agent of foreign policy would entail, why operate there?
Further, Syria faces a crisis so severe that babies are starving and the locals are eating cats and dogs to stay alive. Taking their oil would sow more instability and create more refugees. Doesn’t Trump see how bad snatching oil from the Islamic State’s survivors right after it falls would look?
Whether it’s out of humanitarian concern or propelled by the optics, shouldn’t the immediate post-ISIS U.S. mobilization focus on delivering aid and relief rather than further impoverishing the carpet-bombed populace?
Furthermore, the diplomatic conflict now brewing between Iran and Saudi Arabia may spiral into a regional war. Shouldn’t the Pentagon get out of the way instead of forming a “ring” around invasive oil rigs?
Finally, Uncle Sam can’t take oil that doesn’t lie below federal land without stealing it. How would swiping a commodity that belongs to other people foster stability in the Middle East and dial back the threat of “radical Islamic extremism,” three other wordsTrump likes to chant?
He’s also repeatedly criticized the U.S. government for not “taking” Iraq’s oil during Washington’s occupation, which began 13 years ago amid related oily delusions.
“The bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis,” notably including their oil revenue, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrongly predicted in October 2003.
Ultimately, Washington squandered $60 billion on Iraq’s botched reconstruction. The U.S. government left the country in shambles, vulnerable to the Islamic State’s operatives, and ready to forge military ties with Iran.
Trump’s call for easy fixes and letting post-conflict oil pay the bills coincides with our country’s latest Middle Eastern milestone. The Gulf War officially began with the bombing of Baghdad on January 17, 1991. Happy 25th anniversary, everybody!
While shorter and cheaper than the second Iraq War, that misadventure set the stage for the failures that followed. It dragged on in other ways through years of harsh economic sanctions and intermittent bombing.
The conflict inflicted immeasurable misery upon the Iraqi people with relatively little inconvenience on our part. Since it ended, however, cancers and other chronic diseaseshave sickened and even killed some 200,000 Gulf War veterans.
Isn’t it time to stop pretending that Americans can quickly fix the Middle East’s problems and deluding ourselves about how the profits from taking their oil will pay the tab for our military intervention?
It sure would be nice if the GOP presidential debate moderators were to ask The Donald some of these questions.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.org, where this piece originated.
A cold beauty
"The Northern Lights'' (oil on canvas, 1926), by Sydney M. Laurence, in the show "The Art of Winter,'' at the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt., Jan. 23-May 30.
Don Pesci: GE games Conn. system and leaves
The news was leaked in advance of the formal announcement. Capitol Report, Tom Dudchik’s popular Connecticut aggregation site, announced in a bold red headline -- BOSTON GLOBE: GE MOVING TO BOSTON, BOMBSHELL: GE EXEC CALL BAKER, WALSH. And several sub stories were listed:
FLASHBACK: Looney: 'I think they doth protest too much'...FLASHBACK: Sharkey accuses GE of 'fear-mongering'...FLASHBACK: Aresimowicz tells GE suits 'take a weekend off from the yacht'...
President Pro Tem of the Connecticut state Senate Brendan Sharkey several weeks ago announced that General Electric's much publicized tax complaints were needless whining because “GE pays no taxes.” His complement in the House, Speaker Martin Looney, had added that GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, like Lady Macbeth “doth protest too much.”
Gov. Dannel Malloy claimed to have had conversations with Mr. Immelt, but he had no comment on GE’s possible move from its large campus in Fairfield. Pressed by reporters just before the newly appointed Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association was due to arrive in Washington, there to receive plaudits from fellow progressive President barrack Obama, Mr. Malloy whined, with a shrug, “GE will do what GE will do.” Upon his return home from his Washington, D.C., petting, Mr. Malloy was told that GE was moving to Boston.
Early tremors had been signaling that earth quake for months; even much dazzled Connecticut reporters were not surprised by the announcement. Mr. Malloy noted, phlegmatically, “You win some, you lose some.”
But of course – If GE pays no taxes, how could Mr. Malloy induce GE to remain in the state by slathering the company with tax abatements?
Days before the leak, it was rumored that Mr. Immelt, perhaps stung by Mr. Looney’s Lady Macbeth reference, was considering deeding the Fairfield campus to Sacred Heart University and so removing the property from Connecticut tax rolls.
No taxes, eh?
The GE move -- along with major Connecticut insurance company consolidations with other major out-of-state companies, the sale of Sikorsky, the out-migration of some United Technology operations, the out-migration of the state’s most promising entrepreneurial talent to other states, Connecticut’s seemingly endless budget deficits and rescissions, and the drip, drip, drip of Connecticut’s prospectivetax revenue to other low tax, low regulatory states – long ago should have convinced Connecticut’s progressive governor and progressives within the Democrat dominated General Assembly that progressivism itself contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The progressive president pro tem of the state Senate admitted as much when he was asked by Dennis House of WFSB’s Face the State whether recurring deficits would be a permanent feature of Connecticut’s budget making. Connecticut’s economy is volatile, Mr. Looney answered “but one other trend that we do have to recognize is that, while unemployment in our state is down and actual employment is up, we are to some extent victimized by the progressivity of our own tax structure. Because of an array of credits and deductions that we have, most people earning under $40,000 a year or so wind up not having income tax liability.
A lot of the jobs that have been created are in the service economy. So, while we are seeing an increase in employment, we are not seeing an increase in tax revenues. But I think that’s why both the governor and the General Assembly are committed to advance the interest of high tech businesses and others that will, in fact, pay high wages, so that people will then be able to support the state.”
The volatility in Connecticut’s economy may be traced to the inability on the part of Mr. Looney’s Democratic cohort in the General Assembly to make meaningful cuts in spending, a hard political road to travel. The easy road is to boost revenue through tax increases and then sooth preferred impacted companies by awarding credits and deductions, a process that shifts the tax load from large to small businesses. Companies play the game, reap temporary benefits and then move on to less punishing quarters elsewhere. GE will not be the last in-state company to game the political system before shaking the dust of Connecticut from its feet.
Fortunately for Connecticut, progressivism is a self-limiting disease. At some point short of bankruptcy, thoughtful governments begin to regulate government rather than the governed. We can only imagine what Connecticut might look like if it had as governor a chief-executive intent on regulating governmental greed and a modest General Assembly pledged to return the state to normalcy.
Don Pesci is a political writer based in Vernon, Conn.
Chris Powell: Not worth it to chase addicts
Three East Hartford, Conn., police officers were lucky to survive their interrupting aheroin addict's injecting himself in a car in a hotel parking lot last week.
Speeding off, the addict, Kevin McNeilly, ran his car into them, prompting an officer to fire hisgun at the addict, hitting the addict's car and a parked car. After a chase inwhich the addict drove with only three tires, chewed up lawns, and crashed intothe gate of an apartment complex, he was apprehended four miles away.
The incident raises several serious questions. The first is the question with all criminal drug law: Was the police actionworth the trouble and particularly the risk to the lives of the officers and thedrivers and pedestrians near the chase?
Why should lives of the bravest public servants and innocent civilians bejeopardized only to prevent some poor soul from jeopardizing his own life?
It would have been far better if the police had let the addict shoot up and thenblocked him from driving away while calling an ambulance for him. It might havebeen better even to have left him alone entirely. For as developments in hiscase were to suggest the next day, drug criminalization is futile.
The second question is about Connecticut's criminal-justice system itself. Striving to create what he calls a "second-chance society," Gov. Dannel Malloy hasbecome Connecticut's first governor to get serious about criminal recidivism, the cycle of crime, imprisonment, release, return to crime, and moreimprisonment, a cycle that traps two-thirds or more of the state's criminaloffenders, most of them fatherless and neglected young men produced by thewelfare system. This cycle ruins lives and causes huge public expense.
The governor's initiatives, which have included reducing criminal penalties forsimple drug possession, are crucial insofar as they mean reducing the law'smanufacture of offenders and rehabilitating offenders, ensuring that upon their release from prison they are educated and physically and mentally healthy enoughfor decent work and have access to housing and health care.
But as many other sensational crimes in Connecticut do, last week's incident inEast Hartford showed that the state long has been something far beyond a"second-chance society."
For at his arraignment in Manchester Superior Court on the day after theincident, the addict not only confessed to buying heroin but was confirmed tohave a record of 32 criminal convictions dating to 1981, including convictionsfor burglary, robbery and larceny, and to be serving probation from aconviction in New Jersey for selling untaxed cigarettes. Most of these offensesseem connected to his drug problem.
Anyone with 32 convictions and a drug problem extending over 34 years is plainlyincorrigible and surely has committed many more crimes than he has beenapprehended for. But Connecticut has no "three strikes" or even "10 strikes" lawand the state's prosecutors and courts ignore incorrigibility for anything shortof murder.
So the guy who ran into the East Hartford officers, like so many other criminals-- some of them addicts, many of them not, many of them murderers, like themurderers of the Petit family in Cheshire, in 2007, and a man with 27 convictionswho was charged in November with a murder in Middlebury -- are allowed to liveessentially as make-work projects for police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, probation officers, and social workers, being sent to prison for lifeonly after they get around to killing someone.
That's why the third question arising from last week's incident in East Hartfordis: As Connecticut properly strives to create a "second-chance society," will itever do anything about the damage caused by the 32nd-chance society it long has been?
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Not wild compared to now
"Down the Rabbit Hole'' (encaustic/mixed media on paper), by CONNIE BIGONY, in the shoe "Fauvistically Speaking,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Feb. 3-28. Fauvism is the style of Les Fauves ("wild beasts''), the early 20th Century artists who were disturbed by what they saw as the complacency of the Impressionists.
David Warsh: A lyrical look at the rise and fall of U.S. economic growth
SAN FRANCISCO
It was just two years ago that Thomas Piketty directed economists’ attention to rapidly rising degrees of inequality with his weighty tome Capital in the Twenty First Century (Harvard, 2014). We know too much to return to the single-minded preoccupation with distribution exemplified by 19th Century pioneers such as Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx. A series of industrial revolutions has seen to that.
The growth of knowledge has made room on the planet for the lives of billions of persons, and dramatically raised longevity and living standards among them around the world. But what if the rate of improvement has slowed? The first installment in the dystopian film saga The Hunger Games rolled out four years ago.
Piketty is right, of course, that institutions and policies are central to whatever happens next, and that we require a much clearer picture of the distribution of income and wealth to guide social decision-making in the future. That was one of the reasons the Swedes awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics last autumn to Angus Deaton, of Princeton University. As Deaton noted in his prize lecture, “In a world in which you work entirely in averages, if you look at the macro economy, things like inequality and poverty are simply not legible.” Without the details of individual choices, they disappear. “Even if you are only interested in the aggregate economy, distribution clearly matters for aggregate economic activity, and certainly for any serious analysis of well-being.”
Hence the depictions of Deaton working with a microscope, devising comparisons of, for instance, what it means to subsist on dollar a day. It’s a matter of “honest scorekeeping,” he says, among competing measures designed to improve individual well-being.
Some of them work and some don’t. Piketty’s empirical work, with Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California at Berkeley, and Sir Anthony Atkinson, of Nuffield College, Oxford, on the concentration of wealth in 19th- and 20th Century societies has set a high standard. Nicholas Bloom, of Stanford University, made headlines at a session of the meetings of the American Economic Association here with a new study, Firming Up Inequality, extending the analysis to industrial organization. Individuals’ inequality with their coworkers has changed little over the past three decades, he and his co-authors found; it is inequality among firms that is increasing. Workers with good corporate jobs therefore experience little growing inequality.
But as Philippe Aghion, a former Harvard professor who last year bested Piketty in competition for an appointment to a permanent professorship at the College de France, pointed out in a talk at the meetings, it is by no means clear that the potential for growth has been exhausted. Pro-growth policies remain important; they must take account of several different yardsticks of inequality, not just concentrations at the top, but measures of social mobility as well. Innovation is indisputably a source of top income inequality, Aghion said, but it differs from others sources: for example, consider the difference between Steve Jobs, who helped create smart phone, and Carlos Slim, who gained control of the cellular market through political influence, first in Mexico, and then in 18 other countries. Aghion and several coauthors spelled out the argument for fostering innovative growth last summer in an article for Vox EU.
For that reason, it seems to me that the most important development at the meetings was the appearance of another big book, in many ways the perfect complement to Piketty’s treatise. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, 2016), by Robert J. Gordon, of Northwestern University, also arrived with a intimidating thud: Rise and Fall weighs in at 762 pages, vs. 685 pages for Capital in the Twenty-first Century. (My enthusiasm for his research program played a minor role in his expanding an article into the book.)
Not that Gordon’s book is heavy-going. It’s just the opposite. A poet of the Sears, Roebuck catalog for his chapter in a 1980 National Bureau of Economic Research volume, The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, Gordon went on to co-edit a landmark NBER volume, The Economics of New Goods, in 1996. (The book included an essay by William Nordhaus, of Yale University, on the historic costs of lighting a room at night that is as close to a decisive experiment as is to be found in all of economics.) The inspiration for the present book, Gordon writes, dates from a chance encounter in a bed-and-breakfast with Otto Bettmann’s 1974 book, The Good Old Days –They Were Terrible. Bettmann, a German émigré, founded the Bettmann Archive of historically interesting photographs, in 1936. Gordon has boiled down the story to analytic narrative.
He divides the 15 core chapters into two periods, 1870-1940 and 1940-2015, speedup in one era and slowdown in another, hence “one big surge,” the sobriquet by which Gordon’s thesis has been known since it first appeared as a journal article, in 2000. The great inventions of the past could happen only once, he argued then. Wondrous as they are, he says, microprocessors and the packet-switching of the Internet do nor rival the invention of electricity, the internal-combustion engine, or flight. (Many young economists are unconvinced by this last claim.)
Thus chapters in the first period include “The Starting Point: Life and Work in 1870”; “What They Ate and Wore and Where They Bought It”: “The American Home: from Dark and Isolated to Bright and Networked”; ”Motors Overtake Horses and Rail: Inventions and Incremental Improvements”; “From Telegraph to Talkies: Information, Communication, and Entertainment”; “Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Illness and Early Death”; “Working Conditions on the Job and at Home”; “Taking and Mitigating Risks: Consumer Credit, Insurance, and the Government.” (I would have mentioned fewer titles except they convey so clearly the argument of the book.)
Chapters after 1940 include “Fast Food, Synthetic Fibers and Split-level Subdivisions: the Slowing Transformations of Food, Clothing and Housing”; “See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above”; Entertainment and Communications from Milton Berle to the iPhone”; “Computers and the Internet from the Mainframe to Facebook”; “Antibiotics, CT Scans, and the Evolution of Health and Medicine”; and “Work, Youth and Retirement at Home and on the Job.”
In the business end of the book, Gordon trades his role as historian for that of macroeconomist and growth accountant. He reprises his three key papers, including “Inequality and the Other Headwinds: Long-run American Economic Growth Slows to a Crawl,” the essay that gradually grew into the book.
What are these impediments to growth? The first is rapidly growing inequality itself, which Piketty, Saez, and others have documented. With incomes of the bottom 90 percent of the population growing much more slowly than the top ten percent, there simply won’t be enough spending to fuel the growth of median income at more than barely half its historic rate. Rising costs of education and its declining quality constitute a second headwind; demographic factors, chiefly the retirement of Baby Boomers, are a third; bourgeoning government debt is a fourth. Lesser frictions include globalization, global warming, and industrial pollution.
Through a relentless process of adding-up and subtraction, Gordon concludes that, for decades, “the future growth of real median income per person will be barely positive and far below the rate enjoyed by generations of Americans dating back to the 19th Century.” He adds a brief postscript describing measures that might boost productivity and accelerate somewhat the rate of future growth: a more equitable and efficient tax system; a better education system; less incarceration; drug legalization; more immigration; a federal fiscal reckoning that today seems quite out of reach.
Recently Gordon has been bogged down in debates with techno-optimists, the MIT duo of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee; and Gordon’s Northwestern colleague, Joel Mokyr, a distinguished historian of technology. “Nobody debates the headwinds. Instead they debate technical progress,” Gordon laments.
The meetings, at least, provoked a spirited discussion among a panel of distinguished economic historians: Gregory Clark, of the University of California at Davis; Nicholas Crafts, of the University of Warwick; Benjamin Friedman, of Harvard University;and Noam Yuchtman, of the University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business, a proxy for James Robinson, of the University of Chicago, who was unable to attend.
The real debate is with the assumptions embedded in various congressionally-mandated forecasts of future growth. What’s the difference between the official 2.2 percent growth in the Budget Data Projections of the Congressional Budget Office and Gordon’s estimate of 0.5 percent? The difference between halcyon days and sustained turmoil. For the present, at least, growth accounting dominates the center ring of policy economics. The taboo on facing up to its implications hangs over the presidential primaries.
Richard Thaler, of the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, gave the presidential address; president-elect Robert Shiller, of Yale University, organized the meetings. Jeremy Campbell, of Harvard University, gave the Ely Lecture, “Restoring Rational Choice: the Challenge of Consumer Finance.” Bengt Holmström, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave the Joint AEA/AFA Luncheon Address, “Why Are Money Markets Different?”, with Patrick Bolton, of Columbia University Graduate School of Business presiding. Some 13,300 members of more than 50 Allied Social Science Associations registered for the meetings, a record.
David Warsh, proprietor of economicprincipals.com, is a long-time financial journalist and economic historian (and colleague many years ago of New England Diary’s overseer, Robert Whitcomb, at The Wall Street Journal.
Our well-defined winter sky
Better than TV. (Photo by Kari Amick)
WAREHAM, Mass.
The unseasonably warm weather lately means we have been spending a lot of time talking about whether it feels like winter; But there is one winter thing to complain about: it’s dark.
The sun sets early, and night settles in fast, encouraging everyone to sit tight in their homes. I journeyed into the woods after dark one night and my flashlight caught the twin glints of some creature’s eyes. It spooked me, I’ll admit.
There are other glints in the darkness: on long winter nights, the stars seem brighter than in the rest of the year. Like many things that mark the seasons, this has to do with the Earth’s orientation: in the winter, we in the Northern Hemisphere are facing away from the center of the Milky Way, out toward the galaxy’s hinterlands. In the summer, we see more stars, and all that light makes the individual stars appear dimmer. The darker skies of winter gives the stars we do see more room to shine.
One of the most easily recognizable winter constellations is Orion, easily identified by the three stars that make up Orion’s belt. I was helping fellow MassLIFT-Americorps member Tanya with an orienteering program at one of Wareham’s elementary schools when one of the boys told us he had already learned to navigate. Then he appeared to veer wildly off subject.
“You know the hero guy?” he asked.
The teachers, Tanya and I tossed out bewildered guesses, mostly of the DC or Marvel variety: Thor, Superman, Wolverine.
“No,” the boy said with a frown. “Orion.”
So he hadn’t moved off the subject of orienteering at all: Orion’s belt rises in the east and sets in the west, and can be used for navigation. And Orion was a hero guy, of sorts, or at least a mighty hunter. One version of the Orion myth holds that he was such a skilled hunter that he was hired to kill a plethora of vicious beasts; after succeeding, he vowed to kill every animal on earth. This angered the goddess Gaia, who sent a scorpion to kill Orion. The scorpion succeeded, and Orion was placed amongst the constellations — along with the scorpion, which explains why the constellations Orion and Scorpius never share the sky.
It all seems a bit peculiar, maybe. But everyone has to reckon with the long nights one way or another, and often we are inside telling or listening to stories; sharing them, whether through television or written or spoken word.
So it might not look like winter when you venture outside during the day, and I will set aside questions of climate change to encourage you to enjoy the warmth while it lasts, along our shore, in our salt marshes or cranberry bogs or forests. But some things hold steady from the Greeks through to today, so if early nightfall drives you inside, you can remember: it is winter, after all.
Kari Amick is from the Berkshires, and currently serves as MassLIFT-AmeriCorps community engagement coordinator with the Wareham Land Trust and theBuzzards Bay Coalition. She is writing a regular column for ecoRI News during her stay in southeastern New England.
Creative destruction
"Trashed - Dyslexic Love'' (oil, graphite, ink on paper), by JANET LAGE, in the 46th Annual Nor'Easter Juried Exhibition, Jan. 9-Feb. 14 at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of Art.
William Morgan: In tiny Ripley, Maine, a 'no-frills preaching box'
Main Street, Ripley, about 1910. (Courtesy of Penobscot Marine Museum)
Named for Brig. Gen. Eleazar Wheelock Ripley, a long-forgotten War of 1812 hero and later a congressman from Louisiana, this agricultural town in Somerset County has not changed much. Today's population (488) is not a lot more than it was in 1820, shortly after the town was founded. At 655, the population peaked in 1860, just before the Civil War, but was down to around 435 when this photograph was taken, around 1910.
A new Methodist church, built in 1889, joined the Union church (on the left in the photo above). Looking not unlike the ubiquitous one-room schoolhouse found throughout the rural U.S., the Ripley Methodist Church is your basic, no frills multi-denominational Protestant preaching box.
As part of its 75th anniversary, the church issued this commemorative plate, made by the Preston-Hopkinson Co., in Appomattox, Va. This little piece of northern New England history turned up in Savers' knick-knack department in Providence, for a relatively high price of almost $7.
Its owner apparently failed to note that such plates are "For Decorative Use Only," so a trip or two through the dishwasher marred the plate with some sort of ceramic pox.
The Methodist church is still active in its 127th year. But given Ripley's historic trajectory, one can imagine that this 50-year-old plate might have been the only relic of an abandoned church.
-- William Morgan
Mr. Morgan is a much-published architectural historian.