Orlok, Shylock and Blankfein

Michael Kinsley asked the question out loud: Is Criticism Of Goldman Really Anti-Semitism?

Then there is this oft-quoted passage ... in Rolling Stone: "The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society... 

Taibbi claims to have been utterly blindsided by accusations that his article was anti-Semitic...  His critics find this impossible to believe. Could such a sophisticated writer... not know about the stereotypes and ancient lies that this passage echoes...  It may be possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker without being an anti-Semite. But is it possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker and then be surprised when you're called an anti-Semite?

Kinsley's analysis, seems to me, simply correct. There are plenty of reasons to criticize Goldman having nothing to do with antisemitism. There are also plenty of memes historically entwined with antisemitism whether or not applied to Goldman.

The current cover of New York Magazine, asks the same question, perhaps less innocently.  It doctors an image of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein in a manner that seems to me plainly inspired-by/drawing-on Shylock and Count Orlok -- the most classical of all classical anti-semitic imagery.

Take a look and decide for yourself:

(from left to right: Al Pacino as Shylock, Max Shreck as Count Orlok, the first two images morphed using MorphThing, the New York Magazine stylized Blankfein, Blankfein un-doctored)

Culturalism

The standard, if intellectually lazy, political conservative position on the Civil Rights Act is, as Ross Douthat describes:

No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous intellectual consistency.

This was all that Rand Paul needed to admit...

A more full throated, conservative/libertarian defense is possible: To believe in Freedom is to believe that discrimination, by itself, without government support, cannot stand. If you and I have competing firms and you are unwilling to employ or serve a particular minority, that gives me sustainable competitive advantages -- wider access to talent and markets. In a truly free market, given those advantages, over time, my firm will crush yours. That, in practice, it does not always seem to play out this way, points to market warping Government intervention (today in the form of a failing monopolistic education bureaucracy and regulation-as-barriers-to-entry) sustaining discriminatory inequality, not to the limits of Freedom.

This argument, to me, seems politically viable as it re-frames the question from "Do you support discrimination or not?" (we all here agree not), to "Do you believe in Freedom?" It is naturally resisted by progressives for whom freedom is not found in, rather from, free and fair markets, and by politicians, for whom the sacrifice of principle is second-nature, but should be naturally embraced by, for example, conservative columnists.

That it is not, I think, reflects an increasingly unhealthy infatuation with an overly fixed view of culture. In their heart, I suspect, they believe that racial discrimination will persist even in free and fair markets, because, they believe, disadvantaged minorities posses and perpetuate an inferior culture.

The concept of "culture" is most properly politically employed to trace the limits of anyone's ability to meaningfully understand the deeply complicated webs that structure a society, and by extension, point to the dangers of hubristic government policy. But to believe in Freedom is to see in American history ample evidence of how malleable and ever-changing "culture" can be and how people, left to their own devices, lift themselves up.

The Glass Closet

Gawker weighs the evidence and concludes that Elana Kagan is lesbian. If true, it certainly is disheartening that in 2010, Ms. Kagan feels the need to cover it up in order to advance professionally.

Previously, attentively reading the President's statements on the matter, I argued that his call for empathetic judges was, in particular, a call for "someone who will discover a constitutional right to Gay Marriage". He also succeeded in meeting his goal of a choice being someone who could create majorities, if not in general, at least in this particular.

If Roe (among others) is any guide, the coming Supreme Court discovery of a constitutional right to Gay Marriage (as opposed to letting the political process play out) rather than settling the issue, will serve, above all, to harden hearts, intensify the political combat and push farther into the future the day when a nominee's sexual orientation is understood to be a non-issue.

On Immigration

The immigration debate is a frustrating illustration that American politics is now played in the red zone. Between the forty yard lines we (should) all agree that America is both a nation of immigrants and a nation governed by law.

In one red zone, any attempt to enforce any immigration law is protested as racist, even, nazi-esque. (It [should] go without saying that such rhetoric is wildly overblown: there is a meaningful distinction between the consequence of being caught w/o papers in Arizona 2010 and in Germany 1942).

In the other end, there is a shocking lack of racial sensitivity. To compare and contrast: Opponents have accused the Tea Party of racism. As far-fetched as the smear is, Tea Party activists are conscientiously working to counter it. There is precious little mirror effort -- to articulate a clear differentiation between anti-illegal-immigrant and anti-Latino -- from anti-illegal immigration activists.

This is likely, in part, due to there being a distinct racial edge to anti-illegal-immigration advocacy. One illustration is Ross Douthat's otherwise unintelligible argument that immigration policy ought counter the natural forces of geography. Another illustration is the near radio-silence maintained regarding the meaningful Asian component to illegal immigration.

The reason that illegal immigration from Asia, drives less opposition than that from Mexico is less simple racism as much as Asian immigrants do not raise the specter of Reconquista -- a fear that, perhaps, could be more sensitively treated by some Mexican-Americans, but that will inevitably be inflamed by the assertion that Americans are wrong to regulate entry into their country.

To the degree that opposition to unfettered Mexican immigration is driven by a desire to maintain a certain vision of this country, conservatives would do well to remember that illegal Mexican immigrants are often cultural conservatives -- hard working, G-d fearing, and, by definition believers in limited government. If anti-immigration conservatives, ultimately, want to live in the US, not Mexico, they would do well to remember that the same is true, by definition, of immigrants.

Parents and Paternalism

According to the Times report, charter schools have not worked quite as designed:

Some advocates concede that the intellectual premise behind school choice — that in a free market for education, parents will remove students from bad schools in favor of good ones — has not proved true.

For example:

Even though the school did worse on the Ohio math and English exams than the average Cleveland public school, families did not flee Arts and Social Sciences Academy. On the contrary, enrollment has doubled in each of the past two years. It is a phenomenon often seen in academically failing charter schools when parents perceive them as having better discipline than district schools.

To some, this argues that "you need government accreditation to drive quality."

As switching schools is taxing on children, caring parents cannot be expected to do so for marginal improvement (eg: from one bad school to a slightly less bad school). On the other hand, it would be surprising if there really was data indicating that, presented the option between failing and succeeding schools, parents would not choose the latter for their children.

The case for Government paternalism, in the article, insinuates just that. While it finds these "almost all poor minority" parents generally unwilling to return children in floundering charter schools to public schools, they increasingly flee, the article implies, better public schools for charter schools. Parents like this cannot be trusted to make educational decisions for their children without oversight.

In truth, the evidence presented by the article is very questionable. For example, if the average Cleveland public school does better on exams than Arts and Social Sciences Academy, there are certainly still plenty of well below average public schools to drive A&S Academy's increasing enrollment.

More fundamentally, the evidence that parents are making improper decisions rests entirely on standardized tests. But, as educators are quick to remind us when applied to public schools -- standardized tests are flawed, if better than nothing, measures. In this case, there is a reasonable alternative measure: The judgement of parents, who have a deep abiding concern, and 360 view of the product, certainly embeds significant information standardized tests cannot capture.

Accusations of racism are too cheaply thrown around by all sides, but one cannot help but wonder if the views+choices of demographically different parents would be so casually disregarded.

Educating Educators

The Times reports "Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed".

...one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

The Stanford conclusions, to me, betray a deep lack of understanding on two related fronts:

For one, quality of education is not sensibly understood -- as the Stanford researchers appear to -- as simply linear. The space, I would think, is more clearly a sort of s-curve: Children are either empowered and propelled by their education, or they are held back -- failed -- by it. We have a crisis because too many American children are in the latter category, the proper measure of success is, ultimately, whether or not charter schools are failing fewer students than traditional public schools.

Secondly, all but the most radical free market fundamentalist acknowledges that Government directed bureaucracies are generally better than free markets at meeting clear, static targets. Free markets naturally create volatility and waste along with innovation and adaptability. If there were easy or obvious answers to our educational crisis, there would be less momentum for free market solutions.

The true value of charter schools is as laboratories in which a variety of educational approaches can be tried, evaluated and the best ones propagated. For example: charter schools have finally (at least for the moment) mainstreamed the notion that educators fail children when they make excuses:

...Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school... and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”

Synthetics

One emerging consensus is that congress ban "synthetic" derivatives. As Senator Levin explains it:

As far as I'm concerned, we ought to eliminate the damn synthetics. To me, they don't serve any real purpose at all. They're just betting on something where they don't have a stake, they're not hedging legitimate risk. With other things, there's a limit. There's a finite amount of corn and wheat and mortgages. But these synthetics have no finite limit. So you literally have a gambling hall and the bets are unlimited. I'd get rid of them, and there will be an effort to get rid of them, and I will vote for it

While appealing, this argument is not true in full. Synthetic derivatives served some real purpose as real firms created demand for them. Even if they only served to encourage speculators, in doing so, they may well have served to decrease costs of hedgers of "legitimate risk". On the other hand, its easy to imagine that at some degree of abstraction, the synthetic derivatives do more harm than good and it, therefore, makes sense to have rules which, at least loosely, tie derivative trading to productive economic activity.

It must be said in all this that the idea that if the government doesn't understand the economic value of some activity, that value does not exist, is characteristic of command-, not free-, economies. In more free economies, private economic activity is not proscribed on the basis of perceived social value, rather it is regulated to the degree it threatens others. Trading in synthetic derivatives was only made threatening by the risk it posed to too big to fail/too big to manage firms. If Congress is, in fact, doing away with too big to fail, our traditional economic conceptions would argue for leaving synthetics alone.