Suicidal Boredom

The reason we pay attention to Beck is that he both comforts and flatters his audience; he makes them feel good, and good about themselves. And by “them” I mean the two groups that obsess over Beck the most: tea partiers and liberals. Tea partiers are driven by the belief that the America that elected Barack Obama isn’t their America, and Beck comforts them by telling them they’re right: that the America they love, the America they now feel so distant from, the America of faith and the Founders and some sort of idyllic Leave It to Beaver past, is still there, waiting to be awakened from Obama’s evil spell. And he flatters them by saying that the coastal elites are too stupid or too lazy to figure out what’s really going on; only his loyal viewers are perceptive enough to see the truth and, ultimately, to save the nation. In other words, Beck makes the tea partiers feel, as Hofstadter put it, as if they are “the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph,” which is better than feeling disenfranchised, marginalized, and looked down upon.

For liberals, Beck serves a similar purpose. In an era of massive problems and extreme change—the Great Recession, the health-care overhaul, etc.—liberals can avoid the difficult question of whether Obama is leading America in the right direction by simply telling themselves that the only alternative would be someone like Glenn Beck: hyperbolic, demagogic, irrational, and slightly unhinged—just like all conservatives. This is comforting. And by choosing to argue against Beck’s patently absurd insinuations instead of, say, the legitimate policy proposals of someone like Rep. Paul Ryan—the progressive fact-checking site Media Matters posts about 15 anti-Beck items a day—liberals can flatter themselves into believing they’re smarter and better informed than anyone who happens to disagree with them.

110 notes 

The deeper policy correction that’s now needed in Washington and financial centers around the world simply can’t take place without a rethinking of the underlying economic theory. Much as Washington is still captured by Wall Street, the economics profession remains captured by the false idea of rationality—the “religious belief” (as Stiglitz calls it) that science can fully explain human economic behavior. This thinking underlies much of the short-sighted thinking in Washington, the persistence-by-default of the old view that letting market forces rip is invariably the best policy choice, at least when compared to government intervention.

So enduring is this idea that, even in the face of the most serious market failure since the Great Depression, policymakers in Washington are still behaving in scared deference to the old rational-market models. Even with the evidence of massive fraud and manipulation in the mortgage and credit industry before them, Congress is intent on blocking or defanging the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency and providing the scamsters of the derivatives industry with new loopholes. When it comes to health care, a great deal of economics work has shown that the free market, dominated by for-profit insurance companies, simply doesn’t work well: people who most want insurance are also the people who are likely to become ill or who are already ill; and for-profit companies, knowing this, work equally hard to eliminate these customers or to minimize the care they can get (a concept called “adverse selection”). Despite that, the first thing to be dropped from the debate in President Obama’s recent legislative triumph was the “public option,” the idea of a government-run insurance alternative. Never mind that it was probably the only measure that could really bring the insurance companies under control.

10 notes 

Net neutrality isn’t a fair fight. It’s an abstract issue concerning whether Internet service providers can treat different kinds of data in different ways, and to understand it, people mainly look to see who’s on which side of the battle. That turns out to be, in the pro camp, innovative Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, who have playful logos and give you stuff for free, versus scary cable megaliths like Comcast, a.k.a. the guys who gouge you monthly and schedule installation appointments for eight-hour windows. It’s the wide open future of the Internet versus roadblocks and toll-taking. There may not be a clearer good-guys/bad-guys fight in all of technologydom. There’s a third player, too, a kind of white knight—the Federal Communications Commission’s baby-faced new chairman, Julius Genachowski. A college and law-school chum of President Obama’s, Genachowski has made net neutrality one of his signature issues, viewing it as a part of the bedrock on which America’s Webby future will rest. In his mind, to be for net neutrality is to be on the side of history. When the history of the Internet does get written, a few decades hence, it will recall that today in Washington, the bad guys won.

65 notes 

40 years ago you could open the hood of your car and see and touch just about every component in there. And you had to, because many of those components required frequent maintenance. To properly own a car required, to some degree, that you understood how a car worked. Today, you open the hood of your car and you see a big sealed block and a basin for the windshield washer fluid. You can buy a new car, drive it for years, and never once open the hood yourself.

That’s the iPad.

21 notes