Slavery and Congressional Gridlock

There is a direct link between slavery and congressional gridlock. Looking back at the arc of American history, its original sin has shaped its curve. Embedded in the constitution and eventually splitting the country apart in a bloody war, slavery gave way to institutionalized and social and cultural racism. And racism became more exclusive to one party.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Voting Rights initiatives moved conservatives out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. Before this, as noted in the Economist article, conservatives and liberals has existed in both parties and had allowed members to find common ground more easily, reducing gridlock. This partisanship has been a major factor in increasing polarization and gridlock in Congress.

Race is still a great dividing factor in America and talking about race is difficult, especially for white people, who can become defensive very quickly when discussing white privilege or institutional racism. So how can we heal this divide, and therefore remove a host of divisive social issues from party politics?

Without certain social divisions people could once again move among parties to find common ground on individual policy issues. Support Black Lives Matter and reducing the corporate tax rate? Vote for Republicans. Want to end affirmative action but support a single-payer option for health care? Vote for Democrats. If this were the case so many regular problems tied to the actual smooth running of the nation, which is the chief victim of polarized gridlock, could and would be addressed.

The salient fact in engaging in this sort of thought experiment is to note how many divisive issues surround race and America’s attempts to reconcile with its (more) racist past. Affirmative action, our view of police and policing, welfare and tax redistribution, the war on drugs. Race has gotten in the way of making policy decisions solely on the facts, and on Utilitarian principles of governing for the greatest good for the greatest number. The practice of dividing people on a granular level, especially with the rise of big data and analysis, has the effect of dividing people even further into a Republican/Conservative camp and a Democratic/Liberal camp where policy and social and cultural views are all linked, where they do not necessarily need to be. It is a dangerous path that risks dividing people from one another where even if they share some similar, broad principles, they are utterly separated.

Common Core and Inequality

Incentives matter. And so do disincentives. Modern economics has displayed this again and again as people debate everything from social issues to race relations. Unintended consequences have ruined many a brilliant plan to benefit individuals and society as a whole. In the United States, the Obama administration has now implemented legislation that has had negative unintended consequences twice. The first is the well-intentioned Affordable Care Act, designed to ameliorate the shameful absence of health coverage for millions of Americans. While this is a sprawling, confusing law the provision I want to focus on is the one setting a full-time work week at 30 hours. The drafters of this legislation outsmarted themselves on this one. I’m sure that they figured, “We will make it so that companies can’t deny people coverage by giving them 39 hours a week and saying that they are part-time workers.” Unfortunately what occurred was that thousands of businesses merely reduced the number of hours people were working to 29 hours. This certainly created additional hardship in many low-income workers lives by forcing them to get another job and then juggling their schedules and lives, or, live with a reduced paycheck.

One of the pillars of Common Core, which has the noble purpose of combatting job loss due to globalization, is tying teacher evaluations to assessments. One immediate effect this will have is to disincentivize teachers from teaching in poor-performing and poorer districts. Teachers have little control of the conditions of the community which make schools into “dropout factories.” No matter how effective Common Core is at reforming education in schools, at least initially, there will not be immediate improvements. So, why would a teacher go through the effort of working at a school where they will be punished by the conditions prevailing in their districts. It will push more teachers to apply in better districts, depriving already poor-performing districts of the best teachers. The overall effect of this will be to exacerbate inequality as poor and minority-filled districts, which already struggle in assessment and graduation rates, will fall farther behind wealthy districts. The students will, presumably, get a worse education and will be less-prepared for gaining high-quality employment. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Thoughts on "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory"

This timely and interesting book by author John Seabrook provides an often searing look at the high-end of celebrity pop music. All of those number 1 hits you hear on the radio are manufactured by one of several giant music conglomerates, and our dear celebrity pop artists are mere afterthoughts chosen for their unseemly desire for fame meshed with their physical beauty. Though it focuses on the brilliance of the handful of producers who create the vast majority of pop hits the book is truly about the power of large corporations in modern America. The promise of the internet to free entrepreneurs from corporate structures and to cut out middle men has proven to be only half true. What we can now see is that very few break into wealth, popularity, or, more broadly, success without the aid of some large corporation or other institutions that have existed before the creation of the Internet.

The entire wealth generated by the music industry is dependent on the handful of pop hits created by a handful of producers. These producers hand off their songs to interchangeable artists who are then branded and promoted, and then their songs are promoted in a form of collusion between the giant music corporations and the handful of gigantic radio corporations. The hits themselves are an example of the engineering of consumer products to best please the reward pathways of the brain. As in fast food manufacture, where food is laced with just the right combination of salt, fat and sugar to stimulate an addictive release of dopamine, the producers have stumbled upon the right melodies and harmonies and release of tension to create a rewarding “bliss point.”

It is the same in almost every major industry: from music, pharmaceuticals, and food to television, video games and your favorite social media apps. The music is forced on us in one other way that is specific to enormous corporations: you are bludgeoned with it relentlessly until you begin to enjoy it because of the familiarity with it, another psychological quirk that has been leveraged….

The problem with all of this is the fact that the reason corporations are so successful at creating and managing consumer products while masking the naked capitalism involved is because they are the only institutions with the resources to create, market, and make profitable these products, which are sold in a fundamentally dishonest way. I don’t think anything can truly be done to change the situation but the facts leave me feeling that we live in a controlled and sanitized reality, that doesn’t actually match the world. Perhaps the great sin of scientific progress has been to make the world fundamentally inauthentic, and maybe we need to find an antidote for that for our psychological well-being.