Thursday, June 22, 2017

Rodrik: Doing (and Teaching) Economics [Video] [feedly]

The wise and modest Dani Rodrik....his remarks start at 7 min into tape -- there is some background noise. 

Rodrik: Doing (and Teaching) Economics [Video]
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/06/rodrik-doing-and-teaching-economics-video.html

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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Fear of Hygge and Working-Class Social Capital [feedly]

Fear of Hygge and Working-Class Social Capital
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/fear-of-hygge-and-working-class-social-capital/

One of the contenders for the Oxford Dictionaries' "word of the year" in 2016 is the Danish word hygge (pronounced hoo-guh).  As defined by Oxford, it denotes "a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment and well-being." According to The New Yorker, hygge has "made inroads with an international audience" because it is often seen as the source of Denmark's ranking as among the happiest places on earth in international surveys.

I sought to find out about hygge because various references to it seemed similar to my sense of key aspects of American working-class culture – namely, the priority given to the pleasures of simply "hanging out" with friends and family or, more broadly, what Barbara Jensen decades ago called a working-class preference for belonging vs. becoming.  Based on the handful of articles I read, I wouldn't push this analogy between Danish national culture and American working-class culture too far.  But the anxiety hygge seems to generate among middle-class professionals for whom striving to achieve is the very core of life seems to confirm the stark opposition between working-class and middle-class cultures that Jensen laid out in Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America.

Hygge is wonderfully difficult to define, at least for the American and British writers I read.  It is strongly associated with certain physical objects like fireplaces, cocoa, old shirts, and candles.  But it is primarily an attitude of appreciating what some writers call "the small things of life," not just a hot cup of cocoa by a fire in winter, but the "comfortable conviviality" of "relaxation with close friends or family."  Some call it "the art of creating intimacy" or "coziness of the soul."

The panicked reaction to such an attitude is typified by The Atlantic headline: "The Danish Don't Have the Secret to Happiness: Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark."  The writer, Michael Booth, would not be happy in Denmark because it is too orderly and boring there – no street food or graffiti, no homeless people panhandling, and insufficient numbers of visible poor people to add spice and variety to urban wandering.  (In fact, 5% of Danes are poor, including nearly 3% of children, not nearly as spicy as our double-digit rates, with 20% of American children growing up in poverty.)  Booth is cagily over-the-top with this complaint, but all the writers endorse the satiric anti-individualist "Laws of Jante" as accurately describing Danish social norms.   Most of the laws counsel an egalitarian ethic similar to the one I heard growing up in a working-class family a while back: "Never think you are better than anybody else or that anybody else is better than you."  Similarly, they counsel not to expect too much of yourself and to have generally modest expectations of life, while appreciating and making the best of what you have, above all, your family and friends.  Most Anglo-American writers find this stifling, a recipe for mediocrity, self-satisfaction, and complacency.  Life for them is a "journey," always striving for self-improvement.

The Laws of Jante were articulated by a Danish rebel against the hygge culture, and many Danes dispute their sardonic exaggeration of Danish conformity.  A more positive version of hygge is articulated by Danish philosopher/psychologist Svend Brinkmann in Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze.  Without ever mentioning hygge, Brinkmann argues against individualist self-absorption and for a Stoic sense of character based on one's obligations to others, advocating that "we forego our desperate preoccupation with the internal and self-development, and instead learn to connect in more appropriate and meaningful ways to the pre-existing relationships in our lives."

Danish hygge in this version is not so much about coziness and relaxation as it is about centering one's life around and giving priority to "pre-existing relationships," what Jensen called working-class belonging in contrast to middle-class striving to become something bigger and better than you are so far.  Jensen sees Robert Putnam's distinction between a bonding social capital and a bridging social capital as a class-cultural difference.  Bonding is "the kind of social capital that is at the heart of working-class communities – deep, loyal, we-are-part-of-one-another bonding."  Middle-class bridging social capital, with its skill at networking, is "less personal" and more superficial, but "it can unite many people across wide differences," and it "invites individuals into new communities and experiences."

As Jensen suggests, both kinds of social capital have value, with both strengths and limitations.  The Economist, for example, was quick to point out that hygge, with its preference for bonding, makes it harder for strangers, like immigrants, to make friends and to feel welcome in Denmark, concluding: "If cultures are obsessed with the joys of relaxing with old friends, perhaps it is because they find it stressful to make new ones."  It likewise could be said that those "obsessed" with networking among people they hardly know and have no intention of ever knowing very well may have a fear of intimacy.

Bonding and bridging are not incompatible with each other.  A person can bridge all day and then bond in the evening, as so many of us do.  But the dismissive defensiveness against hygge of Anglo-American writers indicates a cultural anxiety that fears relaxation itself as threatening the constant striving to perfect one's self and to outperform others.  Hygge, I imagine, is relaxing not because of cocoa and fireplaces, but because you are with people who know you so well that you don't have to bother with presenting yourself, with hiding what you perceive as your weaknesses and disabilities and "putting your best foot forward."  It's relaxing because you can just be yourself, warts and all, and still be accepted, still belong.  That this is seen as a threat to achievement, a dangerous siren call to complacency and self-satisfaction, suggests a professional middle-class culture that has lost confidence in itself and, as a result, is becoming more narrow, rigid, and cramped in its insistence that, in the words of Frederick Winslow Taylor, there is only one right way.

Then, too, much of the fear of hygge, as Anna Altman in The New Yorker points out, may be based on the "American" rejection of Denmark's "high taxes and socialist ideas."  Before snarkily dismissing it, Altman cites an alternative point-of-view:

"Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down: free university education, social security, universal health care, efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of vacation a year. With those necessities secured, according to [Meik] Wiking, Danes are free to become 'aware of the decoupling between wealth and well-being.'"

The American working class does not have these big things nailed down, and their preference for belonging is more likely influenced by the fact that it's cheaper and doesn't require cash or a credit card.  In addition, in a belonging culture that is better at bonding than bridging, "pre-existing relationships" are not "the small things of life" but the big ones.

Jack Metzgar


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Reading List for an Ungiven Course: The "Classical" Mediterranean Economy [feedly]

Reading List for an Ungiven Course: The "Classical" Mediterranean Economy
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/reading-list-for-an-ungiven-course-the-classical-mediterranean-economy.html

It looks to me as though I should admit (to myself at least) that I am unlikely to ever teach my course the "classical" Mediterranean economy. Thus it is time for me to move it to the Assignment Desk--things that I really wish other people work on.

Here is the skeleton of the reading list: things that I think must be on it.

They all, of course, require ancillary follow-on pieces developing, applying, and critiquing each of the principal authors' arguments. In addition, many of them are sufficiently difficult and demanding that they require a preparatory warm-up reading or two as well. All of those are absent:

And a very few scattered notes:

* * * *


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The Republican Thieves Who Stole Health Care [feedly]

The Republican Thieves Who Stole Health Care
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/the-republican-thieves-who-stole-health-care

The Republican Thieves Who Stole Health Care

Dean Baker
Truthout, June 19, 2017

See article on original site

In their desperation to provide $600 billion in tax cuts to their rich campaign contributors, the Republicans have decided to abandon all the standard rules by which Congress has governed itself. The actions might seem extraordinary, but we know how desperately the richest people in the country need tax cuts, so who can complain if the normal procedures are not being followed?

Unfortunately the debate over the "repeal and replacement" of Obamacare is being confused with a debate over health care. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate don't give a damn about health care. This is about getting $600 billion in tax cuts for the people who pay for their campaigns and will offer them jobs as high paid lobbyists when they leave office. The fact that the tax cuts are associated with health care for tens of millions of people is just a coincidence.

If anyone thought the Republicans were interested in actually putting together a health care plan that was better than Obamacare, their actions show beyond any doubt this is not the case. After the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the first version of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) would increase the number of people without insurance by 24 million, the Republican leadership rushed a vote of the revised version before CBO had time to evaluate it.

This is the sort of behavior for which there is not an adequate reservoir of ridicule. How can the Republicans think that they will have a better bill if they don't have input from CBO? Just to be clear, CBO has gotten many things wrong. There are reasons that people can reasonably object to a CBO assessment, as I have occasionally done.

But the manner in which serious people challenge CBO is by reviewing its projections and showing where they are likely to be wrong. They don't just ignore them as the Republicans appear determined to do.

Senate Republicans have been willing to violate rules and norms even more blatantly than the House. The Senate has always been a body that reviewed bills carefully, with committee hearings and extensive debate before actually voting on them.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently plans to hold no hearings on the latest version of the AHCA. It seems, the plan is to keep the bill a tightly guarded secret and then drop it on the floor at the same time it is put to a vote. McConnell will use the rules on budget reconciliation to allow the bill to be approved with 50 votes, thereby avoiding the need for 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and end debate.

The contrast with the process through which the Affordable Care Act was approved is striking. This bill had dozens of hearings in both chambers. Members from both parties had the opportunity to offer amendments and many of the Republican amendments were approved and incorporated into the law. They also had had the benefit of CBO's assessment of both the core proposal and scores for the major amendments that were proposed.

That is the way legislation is supposed to go through Congress. Incredibly, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, the Republicans still complained about Democrats had "rammed" it through, even with the extensive opportunity for Republicans to have input and voice their criticisms.

But the party of Donald Trump has no shame. The mission is to give as much of the country's wealth as possible to the very rich, in as little time as possible, and they are not going to let any concerns about democratic procedures or people's health get in the way.

The big question is the role of the media in this process. To a large extent, reporters are still acting as though everything the Republicans and Donald Trump are doing is normal. This would be like the sports announcer at a basketball game continuing to give the play-by-play even after one team's coach has pulled out a baseball bat and knocked unconscious the star player for the other team and continued to wave the bat menacingly at anyone who made a move for the basket.

It's very clear to anyone with open eyes -- Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are about giving money to the rich. Nothing else matters to this crew. And apparently much of the media sees it as its job to try to pretend otherwise.


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Senate Bill’s Medicaid Cuts Would Be Even Deeper than House Cuts [feedly]

Senate Bill's Medicaid Cuts Would Be Even Deeper than House Cuts
http://www.cbpp.org/blog/senate-bills-medicaid-cuts-would-be-even-deeper-than-house-cuts

As we explained yesterday, the emerging Senate health bill would reportedly lower the annual increase in state Medicaid funding under a per capita cap to the general inflation rate starting around 2025, which is well below the House-passed bill's already inadequate growth rate. That means states would have to absorb much deeper cuts in federal Medicaid funding over the long run than under the highly damaging House bill.

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West Virginia Finally has a Budget [feedly]

West Virginia Finally has a Budget
http://www.wvpolicy.org/west-virginia-finally-has-a-budget/

After failing to come to an agreement on a plan to either completely overhaul the state's tax system, or simply raise some revenue to close the upcoming budget gap, the legislature passed a "bare bones" budget over the weekend, ending the extended special session just two weeks before a possible government shutdown.

The FY 2018 budget totals $4.653 billion, including $4.225 billion from General Revenue. That is $280.3 million less than what was proposed by the governor at the beginning of the regular session, and $124.6 million less than the governor's special session proposal.

Cuts were made throughout the budget to bring it into balance. Some of the major cuts, compared to the governor's original proposal, include:

  • Eliminating the Save Our State Fund
  • $5.3 million cut from the Department of Education, including $1 million cut from 21st Century Assessment and Professional Development and eliminating Innovation in Education and Technology Systems Specialist funding  – $4.5 million.
  • Canceling the teacher's pay raise – $19.4 million.
  • Smoothing teacher's retirement system unfunded liability payments – $44.7 million.
  • $4.5 million cut from the Division of Health, including eliminating funding for the Tobacco Education Program – $3 million.
  • $5 million cut from the Consolidated Medical Service Fund.
  • $84.2 million reduction from General Revenue funding for Medicaid.
  • $3.8 million cut from the Division of Corrections.
  • $1.5 million cut from the State Police.
  • $2.8 million cut from Community and Technical Colleges.
  • $6.2 million cut from Higher Education, which comes on top of the $10 million cut in the original FY 2018 budget proposal.
  • Funding for the Educational Broadcasting Authority, which was eliminated in the governor's original proposal, was restored, but cut by $1 million from FY 2017.

The table below lists all of the cuts made to the budget compared to the governor's original proposal.


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Links for 06-20-17 [feedly]

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