Are People Who Drive In Los Angeles Living Things?

I was driving north over the Sepulveda Pass on Sepulveda Boulevard last Wednesday afternoon when I was struck by a bizarre thought: are most Angelenos really living things?

A typical high school biology textbook will generally define a living organism as able to reproduce, grow and develop, maintain homeostasis, and respond to stimulus.

As I rounded another corner, a portable traffic control message board entered my field of vision. “LEFT LANE CLOSED AHEAD,” it shouted in blocky orange letters.

Up to this particular point, my sojourn had gone mostly unimpeded. Opting to take surface streets instead of the freeway, I had managed to avoid stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper traffic hell for the time being.

Driving through Los Angeles without having a foot hovering over the brake pedal feels liberating, and almost transgressive, so it was disheartening when I found myself slowing for a line of cars stopped at the sign’s aforementioned choke point.

As I mashed my brake pedal in anticipation of a full stop of my own, I wondered, why don’t more drivers anticipate the need to move over to the right lane? If they did, we could all avoid this foolishness and be on our way.

Then again, I thought, I’m being unfair to my fellow Los Angeles drivers. People disregard pertinent signs, weave through traffic, and have brushes with death on the roads everyday all over the country; this was--oh shit, that guy’s coming up on my rear end awfully fast. I hope he sto--

And then it hit me. (And fortunately it wasn’t the car behind me.) Most Angeleno drivers don’t respond to stimuli. Ergo, could most Angeleno drivers be considered living things according to the definition presented in my freshman biology class? Certainly not!

This logical leap, however, has frightening implications. My freshman biology class (and Bill Nye the Science Guy, for that matter) taught me that if something is not living it can either be nonliving, inanimate and never living, in other words, or dead, once living, but no longer.

Stay with me, because here’s where it gets good: viruses are small, nonliving collections of genetic material that infect host cells in order to reproduce. Zombies are dead human beings that have been reanimated and are roaming the earth once again. Today’s most cutting edge zombieology tells us that zombification takes place through infection by a highly contagious virus.

> > LA drivers are viruses? Zombies? Stop mixing your metaphors, Piper!

* * *

Without further ado, we are pleased to announce The Piper’s Army’s first public service campaign!

Don’t drive like a zombie, Los Angeles!

Things I Learned From Watching Moneyball

The following is a list of things I was reminded of about the 2002 Oakland Athletics by Aaron Sorkin’s film adaptation of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball:

Mike Magnante was a TERRIBLE pitcher.

That is all.

The Piper moves to Los Angeles, AND, the Piper looks for a job

It appears that an apology is in order.

To my (two) regular readers: I am deeply sorry there haven’t been more posts lately. Getting settled in a new city can be disorienting; I’m starting to get my bearings though. Thanks for staying with me!

* * *

Los Angeles is a pretty remarkable place. This city holds perhaps the greatest assortment of ethnic diversity in the world. And yet, for all its diversity, LA has a perplexing degree of segregation, particularly along ethnic and class lines. (I’m not naive; this geographical and social separation exists all around the country. It seems more pervasive here, though. Perhaps that’s a function of the number of first-generation immigrants in the Southland.)  It feels as though segregation has stifled the possibility of cultural mixing and understanding here.

But, as I’ve said before, it’s hard to much care about the problems of the world or your city when you’re driving down a traffic-free, tree-lined boulevard on a sunny Southern California afternoon.

(Although, let’s be honest: traffic-free? Laughable.)

* * *

Attempting to finding a job in a city with an unemployment rate over 13 percent is fraught with failure. As commentators on the major networks often mention, there are four job-seekers for every job opening in the U.S., a figure which is assuredly higher in a city like Los Angeles.

As a result, e-mails go unanswered, cover letters and resumes go unread, and discouragement rises. Even though the unemployment level for college graduates is significantly lower than it is for those who have completed less education, the prospects for first-time job seekers are pretty grim.

* * *

I intend to redouble my blogging efforts in the coming days and weeks. Hopefully I’ll have an original thought once in a while to share with you, my faithful readers, and the rest of the world!

Chapter three, in which the Piper takes a terrible analogy to a logical extension

Amidst this year’s fake debt/deficit crisis, political actors of many stripes compared the federal government’s budget to the budget of the average American family. (Because, of course, in order for the average American to understand complicated political and economic issues, said issues must be dumbed down and be made relatable.)

Politicos from President Obama to congressional leaders to Tea Party back benchers to people who are famous for being famous have made the case that when times get tough for average Americans, families cut back their expenditures. Our leaders have made the case that when mom loses her job or when dad’s hours get cut back, and family income falls, family spending gets cut back, too.

(Except that’s not how things work for families in this country. When enough money isn’t coming in from week-to-week, American families borrow--through home equity loans, credit cards, or payday lenders. American families have mortgage and car payments to make, along with child care, groceries, clothing, and transportation. These costs are pretty static; unless a person is intent on defaulting on her mortgage, one can’t very well cut back on one’s mortgage budget from month to month. It’s the average family’s equivalent to the federal government’s mandatory spending programs. Are this country’s political leaders really so far removed from average people, or statistics about average people, not to know that?)

President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and countless others claimed that the federal government needs to behave like an American family, and “tighten its belt” by cutting government expenditures in the face of a large budget deficit. Congressional Republicans, particularly Tea Party-backed House members, have stridently opposed raising extra revenues (read: increasing taxes) in order to close the deficit and avoid further federal debt and advocate cuts only.

Now, of course, opinion makers on both the left and the right have pushed back at this absolutely inane analogy. But, what if we were, for the sake of argument, to extend the family-government analogy a little further?

First, if banks and governments around the world were willing to lend your family money for a real interest rate of around--oh say, zero percent for ten years, wouldn’t your family take the money and use it for useful things?

Second, if your family could print its own fiat money, and use it to buy real goods and services, perhaps even getting other people back to work, wouldn’t your family do that?

Third, (and this one is for the Tea Partiers), if someone offered your family more income (or if the government sought to increase revenues), say for a raise or a new job, would you really turn it down? “No, thank you, I’d prefer to cut my family’s expenditures on milk, eggs, and diapers, rather than take the extra income. Austerity is the only way for my family to grow in these tough times.”

Could it possibly be that a combination of revenue-killing regressive tax cuts, unfunded wars, and a persistent economic downturn has created the federal government’s current deficit/debt situation? No? It’s that we’re spending too much money on helping feed poor children, making sure prescription drugs are safe, and investing in future infrastructure? Oh!

What a wonderful world we’d live in if only everyone saw the logic of austerity as clearly as the Tea Partiers do!

Rick Perry's Anti-Youth Republican Party

(Taking “youth” to mean anyone younger than forty-five; if you can remember Ike, you’re safe!)

Over at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog, Neil King Jr. reports that Rick Perry (or the very wise people running his campaign) has backed away from several of the provocative claims he made in his recent book, Fed Up!, particularly that Social Security is unconstitutional.

Today, Perry’s communication director, Ray Sullivan, clarified Perry’s position, saying,

The governor wants to see the benefits for existing retirees and those close to Social Security be strongly protected. [Beyond that], he believes a full review and discussion of entitlement reforms need to be had, aimed at seeing that programs like Social Security and Medicare are fiscally responsible and actuarially sound.  (quote credit to King)

Allow me a moment to parse this statement by Governor Perry’s point man on media relations. In essence, what Mr. Sullivan’s carefully constructed answer is saying is, if we win the presidency, (1) we’re going to preserve Social Security and Medicare for older people, because they reliably vote Republican, and (2) we’re going to dismantle said programs for everyone else because they’re just too goshdarned expensive!

Shall I paraphrase Mr. Sullivan’s thinking further? I think I can boil it down to three words. Fuck young people.

Almost every entitlement reform proposal floated in recent times has called for a significant cut in Social Security benefits for people currently entering the workforce. The youngest members of today’s workforce, already hamstrung by persistent unemployment, will probably face sharp cuts in entitlement benefits to cover debts accumulated by yesterday’s wars and tax cuts.

Those of us Millennials lucky enough to have steady employment are now paying into a system which many of our elders, like Governor Perry, have no intent of preserving for us.

Given the content of Perry’s book, which labels Social Security “an illegal Ponzi scheme,” I doubt very highly that Millennials can count on the governor to reform entitlements in good faith.

* * *

Also, I have to admit, I somewhat doubt that Governor Rick "graduated with a 2.2 GPA in animal science at Texas A&M" Perry actually could have written that book.  I bet someone at ALEC ghostwrote it for him.

Go ahead, do it already!

I’ll be the first to admit it, sometimes I can be a bit of an elitist.  I read the elite hipster press and scholarly journals, I like fancy cheeses, and I look down my nose at people who like to go four-wheelin’ and huntin’ on the weekend.  And yet, I’d like to think of myself as a man of the people.

So, you can’t blame me that my daily ritual includes a stop on the Yahoo! front page to see what the hoi polloi are reading about.  (I’m not alone apparently; according to data compiled by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Yahoo! News is the most visited online news provider.)

One of this morning’s top headlines, pulled from Yahoo! News’ blogger corps, “Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands,” stuck out to me.  Libertarians, and ideologues of all stripes, have been complaining for years that if only they had their own country to run, they’d do it their way.  Their ideal libertarian homeland would be free of taxation and regulation, and ruled by the guiding hand of the market.  Some libertarian groups have even floated the idea of moving collectively to one state, taking over state government, and implementing libertarian policies.

I say, go for it!  But, really, shit or get off the pot. People have been threatening to do this for years; it's time to ante up or go home.

I mean, there are other billionaires out there who sympathize with your cause.  Why doesn’t an enterprising libertarian round up some capital from his co-ideologues, both rich and super-rich, and buy a country?  Let’s say, Kyrgyzstan.

The Kyrgyz Libertarian Confederation, that has a good ring to it, right?  They could establish a libertarian homeland for the world’s free market devotees and end their suffering once and for all.

What’s that, you say?  Libertarians don’t want to go to Kyrgyzstan?  They quietly reap the benefits from a system with an interventionist federal government and a mixed economy?  They would rather complain from their comfortable, entrenched positions in our current system than start something new?

Probably.

And why do I want to see this happen so bad?  Surely, I must want reason to triumph over ideology?  Well, for one, I want to see what a mess they make.  Sometimes I just enjoy observing a spectacle.  And two, it would make for some really exciting social science research.  (That is if they don’t ban social science research in Kyrgyzstan.  On the other hand, libertarians LOVE numbers, just look at the Cato Institute.)

That way, when the Kyrgyz Libertarian Confederation finally gets off the ground, I can read about it in the latest editions of my favorite elitist academic journals.

People are people everywhere

Last Monday, the S&P (Standard and Poor’s!) 500, a broad market index of America’s largest companies, fell 6.7 percent.  The Los Angeles Times reported that $1 trillion dollars of equity value was wiped out on that day alone; other news outlets reported this sell off as a “flight to security”.

Also last week, England was in the throes of civil unrest in the aftermath of the police shooting of Mark Duggan.  Maruading bands of youth destroyed property, disrupted business, and instilled a sense of panic and fear in society.   

It was fairly evident, even at the time, that those fomenting unrest were not really up in arms about Duggan’s death.

One might look at these events as being disparate; if one was being charitable, one might say that perhaps stock market volatility and civil unrest are loosely related.

But, if you look closely, you’ll find that Wall Street traders and rioting hooligans have so much in common.  Both groups are reactionary (in the loosest sense of the term), looking to maximize their plunder before anyone stops them, and engaging in a herd mentality, while relying on the latest technology to coordinate their actions. In the end, the actions of both groups are transitory; no major changes will be made as a result.

The only major difference is that one groups activity is quasi-legal.  Traders and looters have both destroyed significant quantities of assets, although the traders in orders of magnitudes more.  A stock market crash, while viewed by some as the bloodless machinations of an efficient market, represents just as much or more human suffering, as measure by economic utility, as have the rioting youths in cities across the United Kingdom.

To sum up, marauding bands of equities traders have destroyed property, disrupted business, and instilled a sense of panic and fear in society.

* * *

It was suggested to me by a friend that, “it’s a bit of an insult to the hooligans to be compared to Wall Street traders.”

* * *

How ironic(?) is it that on the first trading day after Standard and Poor’s downgraded U.S. government debt more money flooded into the U.S. Treasury bond market?  Flight to safety!

Add credit rating agencies (particularly S&P) to the list of things in this world doomed to a slow, painful slide into irrelevance.

* * *\

Just to add insult to injury, the S&P 500 has recovered almost all of its pre-August 8th value.  This should solidify the notion that traders last Monday were just out to smash windows and take what they could.

Russian roulette

Worldwide, political and economic actors are watching Congress and the President with a combination of horror and astonishment.  Everyone from the Chinese government, one of the United States government’s largest bondholders, to the average American is aghast at the spectacle unfolding in Washington.  America’s top political leaders are playing Russian roulette with America’s long-term economic viability, passing the gun back and forth.  Outside actors, even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an otherwise influential lobbying group, are sidelined; political considerations for both leaders and rank-and-file members take precedence.

And yet, financial markets and outside actors have been relatively calm, given the circumstances.  I think there are two reasons for this.  First, a reason repeated often in the left blogosphere, most financial analysts believe that a default on American debt is an unthinkable, crazy possibility.  But, just because it’s an unthinkable possibility doesn’t obviate its likelihood.  If anything, denial of the possibility brings us closer to the brink.

Second, I don’t think anyone stands to benefit economically from an American default.  In fact, if our politicians do end up shooting America in the head, economic and political actors around the world stand to gain by propping up the American corpse.  Should the American dollar lose value, the Chinese government stands to lose significant value in their currency reserves.  

In this way, America stands as a polar opposite to Greece.  While no one seems willing to bailout the Greeks, America has a number of actors standing in wait to prop us up.  Today, we’re too important to the world economy.

But, this isn’t to say that the potential for a default isn’t troubling or dangerous.  A default would help to send the American economy down an accelerated path toward international irrelevance, and would puncture the safety net which awaits us should our political leaders fail us.

Fortunately, a resolution to the debt ceiling hostage crisis seems to be in sight.  But, Speaker Boehner and the president were close to a deal last week, and that quickly fell apart.  It’s going to be a tense forty-eight hours.

(belated) Saturday music blogging: Meat Puppets, Lake of Fire (as performed live by Nirvana)

I think one of the few things I can agree on with the average Gen Xer is the awesomeness of Kurt Cobain, and grunge in general.

Also, one could make the argument that Nirvana was the Peter Frampton of their generation; recordings of their live performances are played as often or more than their studio work.

Matt Yglesias on home loan subsidies, homeownership, and minority wealth

In response to the new Pew Research Center report on the the racial wealth gap in the United States, Matt Yglesias writes:

When Fannie Mae or other government entities create special targeted programs to “help” low-income families achieve homeownership what they’re doing is extending an extra special amount of leverage to said families. This is a real subsidy, and it can provide a real benefit to the families in question, but it’s a mighty strange thing to be doing. After all, nobody ever proposes that the government create a program to subsidize poor people making leveraged investments in oil futures. Why not just take the expected cost of the program and give it to poor people? Of course, with housing it’s complicated because the government runs other programs, mostly on the tax side, to subsidize speculative leveraged investments in land when undertaken by higher income people.

I think Matt gets this wrong in a lot of ways.  First, Matt uses the Pew Center graph that shows the disparity in median net worth, in other words, wealth, between whites and blacks and Latinos.  It may be that government-backed home loans, leverage as Matt terms it, could help to flatten this inequality.  In the two decades following World War II, racially exclusionary policies prevented African Americans and Latinos from purchasing homes or obtaining federally-subsidized home loans in most areas of the country.  While homeowning whites accumulated wealth in the form of home equity, minority communities were unable to reap similar benefits.

Decades of wealth accumulation through home equity have allowed even middle-class whites to diversify their holdings to include other assets like retirement savings and investment accounts.  This has helped to make the median white family less susceptible to the effects of a collapse in housing prices than the median black or Latino family, whose net worth is concentrated most in housing equity.

Matt’s aside about handing out subsidies for poor people to make leveraged oil futures purchases is in jest, of course, but it produces a false equivalence.  While there is substantial evidence for speculatory activity in housing and land markets across history*, major structural deficiencies in the mortgage and housing markets helped to fuel the speculative bubble in housing in the early- to mid 2000s.  In other words, for most home buyers prior to the housing bubble and construction boom of the 2000s, a home purchase was NOT primarily a speculative venture.  A look at the Case-Shiller Home Price Index and a cursory examination of the reportage before and during the housing bubble bears this out as well.

Third, say what you will about the wisdom of the federal government subsidizing home loans for anyone, but increasing homeownership is something that has been advanced as a government priority on both sides of the aisle.  As long as the middle class dream includes homeownership, political actors, however enlightened they may be, will find it is harder to slash federal home loan subsidies than it is to squeeze blood from a stone.  While I agree with Matt that home loan subsidies, especially in poorly-designed programs, create perverse incentives in the housing market, I doubt we will see a change in the system until our national myth takes a different turn.

Finally, I’m puzzled by Matt’s continual flogging of cash payments to low-income individuals and families over the provision in-kind benefits.  I mean, apart from the Econ 101 exam answer, that cash payments are more efficient, which seems like an unsatisfying explanation to me, what’s the deal?

(belated) Saturday music blogging: Harry McClintock, Big Rock Candy Mountain

In light of the brinkmanship being practiced by our federal elected officials in Washington, I propose changing our national anthem from "The Star-Spangled Banner," a story of military glory, to "Big Rock Candy Mountain," a song about hobo paradise.

Infrastructure Investment and America's Slow, Sad Path to Irrelevance

Investment in infrastructure at this stage seems like a no-brainer; interest rates are at historic lows (which should continue into the near-future, provided Congress passes an increase in the federal debt ceiling), construction workers are unemployed at a rate much higher than the national average, and a good deal of construction equipment lays idle.  

Pressing these resources into action in the months to come would provide continued short-term stimulus through increased employment and would provide a greater boost to the overall economy through the multiplier effect of infrastructure investment.  Mark Zandi, chief economic advisor for Senator McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and economist at Moody’s Analytics, made the calculation that government investment in infrastructure projects would produce a 60 percent return on investment and would have three to six times more stimulative effect on the GDP growth than permanent tax cuts.  

Over the long-term, federal investment in infrastructure may just help to prevent America’s long, slow decline into irrelevance on the world stage.  Irrelevance?

The United States government has always undertaken efforts to improve its infrastructure, whether actively or passively.  Road, rail, air traffic, communications, energy, and water infrastructure underlie the accumulation of fantastic sums of wealth in this country.  We, as a nation, need to sow the seeds for future prosperity in the form of infrastructure investment.  

The most forward-looking leaders in American history recognized the necessity of improvements in transportation and communication for economic growth and prosperity.  The U.S. government’s continual attention to infrastructure from the nation’s founding through the 1960s provided the foundation for the prosperity of the American Century.  In a survey of the literature on the impacts of infrastructure investments on economic growth, Francisco Rodriguez, economics professor at Wesleyan University, concludes that indeed infrastructure improvements produce robust economic returns, despite the claims of conservative economists to the contrary.

Since the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government has embarked on few new major infrastructure projects and has lapsed in its funding of infrastructure maintenance.  The reasons for this, the development of environmental impact reports, the public comment process in building projects, the complacency of American voters, and the diminution of the federal gas tax, are all topics for another post.  However, none of these factors, taken separately or all together, are formidable enough to prevent the construction of the next round of America’s great infrastructure projects.

The U.S. government, with the help of state and local governments, historically has directly or indirectly subsidized the construction of the following types of projects:

turnpikes/postal roads, canals, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, power plants, dams, bridges, roads, irrigation for farming, drinking water provision, interstate highways, airports and air traffic control systems, and the internet

Today, all Americans, regardless of class, political orientation, race, or other ascriptive category, benefit in some way, and most in a significant way, from these infrastructure improvements.  These projects helped to substantially raise our national productivity, and consequently, our standard of living.

As a friend reminded me last week, not many countries have the resources or the political will to develop such all-encompassing infrastructure.  This has largely been to the detriment of the citizens of those countries.  He noted that Ireland had only recently completed major stretches of motorway (roughly equivalent to American interstates) in the last few years; prior to today, many of Ireland’s major intercity roads were narrow and treacherous.  This served to restrain development in Ireland’s interior; Limerick and other interior cities continue to lag behind their coastal counterparts, like Galway and Dublin, in economic development.

We cannot take for granted that our infrastructure advantage over the rest of the world will last.  Indeed, American infrastructure, suffering from lack of maintenance funding, crumbles as the Chinese build tens of thousands of miles of highway, lay thousands of miles of high-speed rail, and create the foundations for, one would hope, a clean energy system.  The Chinese and other rising powers in the world will not lag behind for long and will not wait for us as our economic relevance wanes.  

President Obama’s administration keeps talking about “winning the future”; I think we need to be more concerned about America’s current slow, sad path to irrelevance.  Unless federal spending for infrastructure projects, like high-speed rail, modernization of the power grid, scaling up public transportation, and retrofitting and maintenance of our existing systems, increases markedly, we will almost certainly lose the present and forfeit the future.