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February 3, 2012–Americans, the saying goes, don’t like to talk about class — but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.

One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its “Living Room Scale,” which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader’s Digest, framed diplomas, or “any work of art depicting cowboys” (sorry, pardners) is not.

Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.

Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.

Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven’t. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. “This growing isolation” of the elites, he writes, “has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power.”

While he declines to rate the rug in your living room, Murray does include a quiz to determine your upper-class street cred: “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” It’s rather entertaining, delving into your NASCAR knowledge, hard-knocks childhood stories, and more, but I actually think it could be shortened into one question: Do you become horrified when you enter a Wal-Mart, not just because of an alarming selection of T-shirts with dramatic white wolves howling in a lightning storm airbrushed on them (also a staple at truck stops), but because of America’s raging obesity problem? Done, done, and done. (If you have never entered a Wal-Mart, well then, we’re also done.)
And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious “nonjudgmentalism.” Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama’s infamous “clinging to guns and religion” comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about “low-sloping foreheads” in “the middle places” of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.

“Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture,” Murray writes. “If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret.” Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter — and to understand why they do.

Coming Apart is a must-read for many reasons, but its main value comes from its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism. In a book ostensibly about class, Murray spends much of his time exploring the things that really matter in life, fighting against the presumption that we’re here to merely pass our days as pleasantly as possible.

“If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life — achieve happiness,” Murray writes, “the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith.” The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are “the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.” This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It’s a cost that many in the new upper class don’t experience or understand.

Unfortunately, in today’s political landscape, the idea that government “help” can sap human virtue is a radical concept. “Those in the new upper class who don’t care about politics don’t mind the drift toward the European model,” Murray points out, “because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience — much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.”

Even the American political right, often caricatured as welfare-bashers, can fall into this trap: Republican front-runner and much-maligned rich guy Mitt Romney recently stepped in it by declaring he wasn’t worried about the very poor, because, well, “we have a very ample safety net.” Ah, then! Nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine!
Murray ends his book with a bit of optimism, confident that “the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated.” A more accurate understanding of human nature, he argues, would lead to an understanding of the importance of traditional values and virtues — for everyone, not just the new upper class — and a restoration of the American experiment.

I hope he’s right, but I’m a bit skeptical. In the pages of Coming Apart, we often find Murray bending over backward to explain obvious points, either to avoid offending his more sensitive readers (or to make sure no one thinks he’s a racist). But certain facts — say, that some people are smarter than other people, or that smart people who marry each other tend to have smart children — tend to infuriate a certain sector of the population, polite explanation or no.

In another instance, Murray points out that children clearly do the best with two married, biological parents, but also acknowledges that “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.”

Some of this stems from good intentions: People don’t want to make struggling single moms or divorced parents feel worse than they already do. Much of this comes, as do many of the building blocks of hyper-progressive politics, from plain old wishful thinking. And some of it stems from a subtle hostility toward the idea of universal virtues existing at all.

“Discussing solutions is secondary to this book, just as understanding causes is secondary,” Murray writes. “The important thing is to look unblinkingly at the problem.” That task alone, it seems, is more than a big enough challenge for today.

August 16, 2011 – Are Christians a bunch of delusional, sanctimonious lame-os? Penn Jillette — atheist, “Penn & Teller” Vegas showman, and author of the new book, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales — certainly seems to think so. And he is not alone.

Forget Dawkins, Hitchens, and other highbrow atheists. Just search for the word “Christian” at The Onion, a satire newspaper, and you’ll find the following headlines: “Recently Born-Again Christian Finally Has Social Life”; “Religious Cousin Ruins Family’s Christmas”; “Apartment Full of Jesus Stuff Brings Date to a Screeching Halt”; and my personal favorite, “Christian Rockers Deny Kicking Ass.”

Even Christians get in on the act. Stuff Christians Like, a Jesus-soaked parody of the cult website Stuff White People Like, features an long insiders’ list, including “#29: Not dancing,” “#30: The end of the Harry Potter series,” “#54: Halloween hating,” and “#134: Witnessing to people that don’t believe in the Bible using the Bible.”

Which brings us back to Penn Jillette and his new book. To be fair, Jillette is an equal-opportunity religion basher — and don’t even get him started on agnostics. (Very short version: They’re cowards.) Christians like me, you’ll be pleased to know, are not the only peabrains/dangerous weirdos on the planet. But we do share a special place of dubious honor. According to God, No!, it was the cover-to-cover reading of our holy book that turned a young Jillette to the dark (or, as some prominent atheists would prefer, the “bright”) side.

Jillette’s main problems with the man upstairs can be difficult to quote, given his fondness for F-bombs and earthy references to his favorite body part. On one page he blasts the “arrogance” of those who claim to have knowledge of a higher power. On the next, he rather confidently declares “No! There is no fricking God!” (He said something other than “fricking,” but I’m making this PG-13, repressed and Christian-y.)

Contradictory? Absolutely. Many of the objections in God, No!, in fact, are addressed in Tim Keller’s excellent book, The Reason for God, which illustrates the many leaps of faith that unbelievers must take. “Skeptics believe that any exclusive claims to a superior knowledge of spiritual reality cannot be true,” Keller writes — but this, ironically, is “also an ‘exclusive’ claim about the nature of spiritual reality.”

Similarly, Keller writes, atheists who try “to follow John Rawls and find universally accessible, ‘neutral and objective’ arguments” for a moral society will inevitably fail. In God, No!, Jillette does just that, offering “human intelligence, creativity and love” as the highest ideals.

But where do these, and other “suggestions” in the book, come from? In the end, Keller notes, people affirm “the equality and dignity of human individuals simply because [they] believe it is true and right. [They] take as an article of faith that people are more valuable than rocks or trees — though [they] can’t prove that scientifically. [Their] public policy proposals are ultimately based on a religious stance.”

There are many other worthwhile books that tackle the issues raised in God, No! The Language of God, for instance, offers objective, scientific pointers towards the existence of a higher power, and The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism offers a sociological view of religion’s beneficial effects. I would also recommend the more folksy Heaven is for Real, about near-death experiences, but I have the feeling Mr. Jillette would only douse that one with kerosene, flame it with a blowtorch, and shoot it from a giant cannon into a toilet filled with crucifixes. Because that is how he rolls.

Which brings us to Vegas. Having only been there once, on a bachelorette party, I have not yet seen Penn & Teller’s live show. I have, however, seen “Thunder From Down Under: Australia’s Hottest Hunks,” which is pretty much what it sounds like: a bunch of really tan, really muscled, really enthusiastic half-naked fire chiefs and Captain Jack Sparrows bouncing around an audience of crazed women from Columbus, Ohio. It is terrifying.

God, No! is sort of the “Thunder From Down Under” of books: metaphorically, a sweaty, ponytailed, scantily clad Hot Cop could jump on your table at any time. Readers, you will learn more about Jillette’s sex life than you ever, ever wanted to know. Gay bathhouse action in the 80′s? Check. Porn star Ron Jeremy waxing poetic in a hot tub? Check. And while I gagged during the book’s scuba diving sex scene, styled as a Penthouse letter, I also admit to laughing out loud when Jillette gets his you-know-what stuck in his ex-girlfriend’s roommate’s hair dryer.

The book, while gross, is often funny. Jillette puts the “fun” in atheist fundamentalism. He also puts the “fun” in regular old dysfunction. But the striking thing about God, No! — and aggressive, evangelical atheism in general — is that there is so little joy to be found.

“Believing there is no God,” Jillette once told National Public Radio, “gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have…Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.”

This is good news, I suppose, for those who win the genetic lottery, have great jobs, aren’t living in a famine-stricken war zone, and have healthy and loving family and friends. This is bad news, of course, when life goes wrong…and it often does.

The Christian concept of joy is not something that we “get” or acquire, and it’s fundamentally different from happiness, which is ephemeral and fleeting. In his autobiographical book Surprised By Joy, former atheist C.S. Lewis describes joy as the human longing for — and almost a memory of — something higher. “Its visitations were rather the moment of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature,” he wrote. Joy, he added, “makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.”

After Jillette’s mother died, as he describes in his book, “It was a time for sadness and memory, and it was also a time for pure, raw, empty hate at the pain of life.” The pre-conversion C.S. Lewis had a similar feeling: “My argument against God,” he wrote in Mere Christianity, “was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.”

But then there’s more. “But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?” Lewis continued. “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” Eventually, Lewis saw his argument against God buckle and he turned out to be one of the leading Christian thinkers of the 20th century.

So what does the future have in store for Penn Jillette? “We don’t have any friends who are Christards or into any kind of faith based hooey,” he writes. But, then again, he also claims to have a soft spot for the “bugnutty freaky whack jobs” who try to convert him. So who knows? God, nearly everyone agrees, works in mysterious ways.

May 19, 2011–

Joe Kernen, host of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” believes the latter is true — and he’s not growing any liberals at his house, thank you very much. His new book, “Your Teacher Said WHAT?!,” chronicles Kernen’s efforts to defend his fifth-grade daughter and co-author, Blake, “from the liberal assault on capitalism.”

Ah, Blake. Poor, innocent Blake. I have to admit I felt kind of bad for her at certain points of the book, given that as a reader, I was subjected to the same lectures that she undoubtedly received ad nauseum over the past two years. (Sorry, Joe — your intentions are good, I know. My husband regularly lectures our children on deep philosophical questions, and they’re still in Pampers. Thus far, they show no sign of favoring progressive ideas like state-subsidized cowboy poetry, but you never know — to a 2-year old, that idea might sound pretty compelling.)

And, as a matter of fact, that’s one of Kernen’s main arguments: Progressives, he writes, “retain a child’s view of the world. Like ten-year-olds, they retain a belief in obvious heroes and villains, in perfection as a place where things don’t change (especially as the result of human action), and in happy endings.” Progressives also tend to make Kernen’s head explode. “Progressivism,” he writes, “is a durable bit of craziness.” (Ouch, right? “So,” he admits, “is parenting.”)

“Your Teacher Said WHAT?!” offers a laundry list of basic explanations for various progressive ills, most of which are, sadly, accurate: Our culture unfairly demonizes capitalism and business. Public employee unions have run amok. Government regulations come with unintended, sometimes destructive, consequences. The tax code is laughable. Both nature and hungry animals can be mean.

Other points, like Kernen’s breezy confidence in plentiful oil (and our ability to transition off of it) or his bashing of high-end/grass-fed/organic food (have you read a hamburger label lately? There’s meat from 11 countries in there), are more debatable. Those hoping for lurid tales of state-funded public school indoctrination, meanwhile, will be disappointed. (There are, however, some fairly entertaining dissections of anti-capitalist themes in children’s movies — in the movie “WALL-E,” Kernen points out, “Earth has been destroyed not by fire or by ice but by “Everyday Low Prices.”)

All quibbling aside, Kernen deserves credit for taking an active role in his children’s education and for seeking to help other parents do the same. Throughout his book, he challenges destructive anti-market assumptions passed on by our culture every day, and he’s often amusing while doing it.

Economic literacy is not a sexy topic, but it’s exceptionally important. Many economists, including Friedrich Hayek, author of “The Road to Serfdom,” have seen a strong link between state-controlled economies and the path to totalitarianism. On a less dramatic level, economic liberty — and the future generation’s embrace or dismissal of it — will significantly impact their standard of living, health care, and personal freedom. And on a global historical scale, as Kernen notes, many progressive ideas, when institutionalized, can lead to starvation, famine, or worse.

The facts tend to fall on the side of free markets. So why are there so many intelligent progressives out there? (And there are plenty. Though he takes a few shots at Harvard and Princeton, even Kernen won’t argue their resident liberals are dummies.) And what if, despite his daily dispensation of free market economics, Joe Kernen loses the war? What if his daughter Blake grows up to be — cue the Hollywood horror-movie screams — a liberal?

And, more importantly, what would inspire her to make that choice? The positions of progressives leave Kernen flummoxed: “It’s hard, if not impossible,” he writes, “to tell whether the positions taken by the New York Times are so consistently wrong out of ignorance, denial, or a deliberate attempt to gloss over problems that get in the way of the newspaper’s Progressive agenda (this is actually a problem with most Progressives). ”

Life, with its shades of gray, often frustrates the empiricist — and political persuasions are often about far more than facts. Kernen cites a psychological theory that divides people into two groups: ” ‘Internals’ believe that they are in control of their own lives, while ‘externals’ see themselves as subject to outside forces they can’t control.” Not shockingly, “externals” tend to be progressives — and cultural attitudes can influence and encourage this belief.

Smart people (and not just progressives, by the way) cling to dodgy ideas for all sorts of reasons. Some may give them a sense of identity. Some, like “humans bad, trees good” environmentalism, have an almost religious appeal. Some are powered by persuasive marketing.

And some ideas are so appealing on the surface that people, quite simply, just want them to be true. Facts alone won’t change their mind.

But offering a competing and positive vision might. It’s something that even a 10-year-old, thankfully, can understand.

March 23, 2011

“You listen to me,” Walsh whispers, his eyes wild. “I need this, okay? My wife, my job, my kids. Every day is exactly the same. I go golfing on Sundays….and I hate golf. Don’t blackball me, Mitch. Please.”

Such, some would argue, is the plight of the modern man. Trapped in a hyper-feminized world, men have no outlet for their much-maligned testosterone; no place to hang their proverbial deer head. Rather, they face a daily gauntlet of gender sensitivity seminars, mandatory bicycle helmets, and awful Sarah Jessica Parker movies.

In “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys,” Kay Hymowitz explores the rise of the “child-man,” a slovenly creature who spends his twenties (and, in some cases, his thirties and forties) in the grip of a prolonged adolescence. Hymowitz coins this new life phase “preadulthood,” and while it applies to both sexes, “it doesn’t tend to bring out the best in men.”

Today’s child-man, as “Manning Up” describes him, is a guy’s guy, albeit one who has a vacant sense of responsibility, few visible manners, and, when faced with a world that has turned traditional gender roles upside down, throws up his hands-and reaches for the Xbox and a beer.

His female contemporaries, Hymowitz writes, are “alpha girls.” Long told they can have it all (the brilliant job, the perfect family, the shiny hair and manicured hands to boot), alpha girls are honing their resumes and preparing to take over the world. They may not dominate corporate boardrooms yet, as “Manning Up” admits, but they’re starting to outearn their male counterparts in cities across the country.

Hymowitz argues that the rise of the knowledge economy (which rewards brains, emotional IQ, and creativity over brawn) has contributed to the success of women in the workplace. Together with the rise of feminism and the birth control pill, it has also upended traditional “life scripts.” Today’s upwardly mobile, college-educated preadolescents hop from job to job, city to city, placing career above all else-including marriage and family. “Manning Up” relates the following:

Amy and Leon Kass, professors at University of Chicago, used to ask their students, “What is the most important decision you will make in your life?” The answer was almost always “My career” or “What grad school to go to.” When one student answered, “The mother of my children,” he was greeted with hilarity from his classmates.

The preadulthood phenomenon is unprecedented in human history, and, according to Hymowitz, it also means trouble. Today’s men, she argues, see no good reason to grow up. In days of yore, they knew they were expected to provide for a family; today, single parenthood is accepted and one-night stands are celebrated. The culture at large doesn’t expect much from men; neither, it turns out, do women. When it comes down to it, why not slack on the couch?

But alpha girls, it seems, can get an even worse deal: “What all of this adds up to for women,” Hymowitz writes, “is a gap between the cultural ideals behind preadulthood-equality, freedom, personal achievement, sexual self-expression-and biology’s pitiless clock.” Women, in other words, can wake up at 39 realizing they forgot to have a family, while men their age are either a) taken, b) single for a reason, or c) busy scouting out 27-year-olds.

“Manning Up” is a fun, thoughtful read, and an interesting one-Hymowitz weaves a history of gender roles, the post-industrial economy, and evolving pop culture into her often witty take on the battle of the sexes. The book concludes with a few broad assertions. First, biology, like it or not, isn’t fair. Second, if you expect nothing of men, they’ll likely deliver nothing, particularly in the realm of parenthood. Third, both men and women need to rethink our aggressively individualist culture in order to have meaningful lives together.

All true. But what, one is forced to ask, do we do about it? Hymowitz hints at it in her book, perhaps too polite to blaringly point it out. But a close read of “Manning Up” delivers two sizable implications, lurking under the surface like toothy barracudas: First, that women share a large amount of culpability in this whole mess. Second, the child-man, like it or not, is in part a product of women’s behavior. To cure the child-man, women will have to change.

“Men may be jerks,” my husband likes to occasionally declare, “but women are insane.” I hate to admit it, but he’s right-and anyone who has spent two years living in a sorority house filled with alpha girls (I’m raising my hand) can attest that this is true.

Women are likely going nuts for a number of reasons. For instance, it’s quite tiring and stressful, not to mention impossible, to try to have the brilliant job, the perfect family, shiny hair and manicured hands. Some women say they want total “equality” but still want guys to pick up the check. But perhaps another reason women are losing it is that they’re repeatedly told that they’re no different than men-and many believe it, particularly in the realm of sex.

This, of course, is clearly not true. Not in the realm of biology, as “Manning Up” reminds us; not in the realm of emotional health-a new book, “Premarital Sex in America,” details the heightened correlation between female promiscuity and depression; and not even in terms of interpersonal communication. The irony is that many of the “empowered” true believers, certain we’re all androgynous frat boys now, often end up catering to the child-man’s every whim.

None of this excuses bad behavior from men, as Hymowitz points out. But the fact is that women who are sick of child-men will have little luck trying to change the knowledge economy. They’re certainly happy that birth control and feminism are here to stay. The one thing they can change, however, is their own behavior, their standards, and their expectations.

At the end of Old School, Walsh, the desperate office worker, ends up pledging the fraternity. Will Ferrell’s character ends up as a permanent fixture in the frat house-after his divorce, of course. But Vince Vaughan’s character, even after being tempted by a college girl, stays true to his wife. Luke Wilson’s character Mitch wins the object of his affection, a divorced mom who has a little girl of her own.

Men might be from Mars and women from Venus, but there’s a good chance they still want the same things. Over 80 percent of high school seniors, Hymowitz reports, want to marry someday, and over 70 percent of college freshmen say raising a family is “essential” or “very important.” Even the Old School characters are batting .500. With a little bit of soul-searching, I’d say we have some hope.

Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but one thing is certain: She had no use for common niceties. A grimly precocious, friendless Rand declared her atheism at age 13. “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s secular sermon-as-novel, boils with revulsion toward the “looters” and “moochers” who consume public funds. Rand scornfully excommunicated followers who disagreed with her, and in 1964 she told Playboy that those who place friends and family first in life are “immoral” and “emotional parasites.”

Shoddy manners aside, 52 years after the release of “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand seems to be roaring back. Sales are surging—Brian Doherty, author of “Radicals for Capitalism” (2007), recently calculated that in one week in late August, “Atlas” sold “67 percent more copies than it did the same week a year before, and 114 percent more than that same week in 2007.” Two buzzed-about Rand biographies hit the shelves this fall, and an “Atlas” cable miniseries is reportedly in the works. Designer Ralph Lauren recently listed Rand as one of his favorite novelists, and CNBC host Rick Santelli, whose on-air antibailout rant inspired hundreds of “tea party” protests across the nation, admitted the same. “I know this may not sound very humanitarian,” he said, “but at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rand-er.”

To many, it doesn’t sound humanitarian at all. To be an “Ayn Rand-er” sounds, as the New York Times recently put it, “angry” and “vulgar.” In its review of the new Rand biographies, the New Republic bemoaned the “cacophony of rage and dread” surrounding Rand’s acolytes. Even in Rand’s heyday, many conservatives shrank from what they saw as her toxic blend of atheism, absolutism and ruthless individualism. “William F. Buckley must be spinning in his grave to hear all this chatter about Rand,” says Jennifer Burns, the author of “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right,” “because it was a goal of his to make Rand an untouchable.”

In this, apparently, Buckley failed. Despite her tendency to lose friends and alienate people, Rand’s guru-status in today’s free-market establishment, detailed in Mr. Doherty’s book, is undeniable. “People who are in influential positions at leading free-market organizations were very likely influenced by her at one point,” says Chip Mellor, head of the libertarian Institute for Justice. And, he notes, with the spike in government spending and wealth-redistribution programs, “the prescience of her writing has been brought home with a vengeance this year.”

But in an age where hope, change and warm-hearted marketing clearly resonate, is revitalizing and glorifying Rand’s acerbic “virtue of selfishness” doing the free-market movement any good? Doubts are starting to emerge. Leonard Liggio, a respected figure in libertarian circles and a guest at Rand’s post-”Atlas Shrugged” New York get-togethers, sees value in Rand but admits she wasn’t a bridge builder. “She used strong, confrontational language, forcing people to react,” he says. “And maybe that’s not the best way to educate people.” Mr. Mellor agrees: “Is Rand’s exact message the best for most audiences today? Probably not.”

Others, however, go further. “Rand has this extremist, intolerant, dogmatic antigovernment stance,” says Brink Lindsey of the libertarian Cato Institute, “and it pushes free-market supporters toward a purist, radical vision that undermines their capacity to get anything done.” The Rev. Robert Sirico, head of the free-market Acton Institute, agrees. “If you want to offend, Rand accomplishes that. But if you want to convert—well, for instance, who could imagine Rand debating a health-care bill? I wouldn’t want to take an order from her in a restaurant, let alone negotiate a political point.”

Rand’s tendency to enrage certain audiences could also be blocking a huge opportunity for proponents of small government. Cato’s Mr. Lindsey, a proponent of what he calls “bleeding-heart libertarianism,” notes that free markets are ultimately the best way to help the poor and disadvantaged. It is a familiar argument and a cogent one. Rand’s insistence on the folly of altruism, however, tends to overshadow and even invalidate this message.

For her fans, Rand’s appeal lies in her big-picture, unified, philosophical approach to man’s purpose and the meaning of life. But ultimately ideas need more than size and a potboiler plot to overtake the dominant, big-government political paradigm. Rand held some insight on the nature of markets and has sold scads of books, but when it comes to shaping today’s mainstream assumptions, she is a terrible marketer: elitist, cold and laser-focused on the supermen and superwomen of the world.

How are free markets best “sold”? A more compelling approach flips Rand’s philosophy on its head, explaining how everyone, especially society’s neediest, benefits from economic liberty. It’s a compelling story about how freedom and prosperity can change lives for the better. And Ayn Rand is of little help in telling it.

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago.

September 12, 2008

In their newest study, Broda and Romalis contend that inequality has actually grown very little over the last decade. According to their research, the perceived rise in inequality—accepted as gospel by many economists and political figures—comes down to a simple measurement error, namely, focusing only on income, rather than on the prices of goods that particular groups consume. Inflation for the richest 10 percent of U.S. households was 6 percent higher than inflation for the poorest 10 percent.

“We are underestimating the gains from trade,” Broda says. “The current statistical interpretation ignores the fact that a poor household today can access goods that, in the 1960s, they could not—microwaves, DVDs—and, more importantly, that the prices of the staples that lower-income households consume have also gone down dramatically.”

Indeed, he claims that lower-income Americans, who tend to spend more on certain goods, have made impressive strides over the past decade, thanks largely to U.S. trade with China.

The Broda-Romalis paper, “Inequality and Prices: Does China Benefit the Poor in America?,” shows that from 1994 to 2005, much of the increase in U.S. income inequality was actually offset by a decline in the price index of the goods that poorer households consume. Inflation for the richest 10 percent of U.S. households, which tend to spend more on services, was 6 percent higher than inflation for the poorest 10 percent, which tend to spend more on nondurable goods, the type of goods often imported from China and sold at Wal-Mart.

Broda and Romalis found that in the sectors where Chinese imports have increased the most (especially nondurable goods such as canned food and clothing), prices have fallen dramatically. They estimate that about one-third of the price decline for the poor is directly associated with rising imports from China. “In the sectors where there is no Chinese presence,” Broda says, “inflation has been more than 20 percent.”

“In the ’60s, all the talk was about trying to win the war against poverty,” he adds. “The bottom line with our study is that we may have won the war against poverty without even noticing it. Here we have Congress debating why the poor in America haven’t been able to grasp the great economic growth we’ve seen in the last 30 years. ‘It’s been only concentrated in the top 1 percent,’ they say. And, absolutely, that segment has grown a lot. But that doesn’t mean that the poor haven’t been able to access part of that progress.”

Broda’s argument on inequality goes against the grain, and as such, it’s gaining attention. “As improbable as it may seem,” their University of Chicago colleague (and Freakonomics author) Steven Levitt wrote recently in The New York Times, “I believe them.”

Born in Argentina, Broda came to the United States in 1998 to get his master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stayed at MIT to receive his doctorate.

“In Argentina, everybody’s an economist,” he says. “Grocers, taxi drivers, everybody. The reason is that, if you don’t know economics, you are essentially at the risk of losing all of your money. Argentina, you know, has a history of very volatile economic situations. You think about any extreme example of economic phenomena—inflation, default, volatility—and Argentina is up there as an example.”

Witnessing a series of hapless economic policies in his home country led Broda to consider economics as a career. So did horse racing. “I’ve been going to horse races since I can remember—since I was five, six years old. Horse racing really got me thinking about numbers, because horse racing has so much to do with statistics, the odds. Of course, I think the really enticing part of horse racing, when I was really small, had to do with the horses themselves. As I grew up, though, I became more boring, and focused more on the numbers,” says Broda, who is married and has two toddlers.

At MIT, Broda worked with Rudi Dornbusch, a professor who was highly influential in the field of international economics. Dornbusch was also known for his ability to explain complicated problems simply.

‘We may have won the war against poverty without even noticing it.

“He guided me to thinking that there was a role for an empirical guy within this profession to look at even the simple things, but much more carefully than before,” Broda says. Since then, Broda has focused on using micro data to explain “big picture” macro questions—everything from the Japanese retirement system to why strawberries are now available in cooler climates during winter. “I don’t do complicated things,” he says. “I prefer simple. Many systematic biases are extremely simple. When you think about it, there are a lot of simple things out there that are not understood, so why get complicated?”

Simple shifts in analysis, he notes, can make a huge difference when it comes to your view of the world. “Let’s face it: it’s hard for people that have a job, a life, and are specializing in a particular industry to go through and analyze the data. I teach MBA students, and most of them come with the conventional wisdom very engrained in their mind. This is often a structure put into place by a very clean, knowledgeable reading of the press, by the way. These are very smart people, but some of these things we talk about—trade, globalization, China—they are not perfectly intuitive.” He laughs. “They’re intuitive, of course, after somebody tells you. Before, it’s not obvious. A lot of things in statistics are like that.”

So are many aspects of politics. And while much of Broda’s work is inherently political, he tries to avoid being partisan. “I hope I didn’t convey any political stance,” he says, leaning forward, “because this is not about that. It’s about making the right assumptions and using common sense. It’s about finding the right answer.”

Though he argues that economic analysis can “make the debate more mature,” Broda doesn’t expect much statistical soul-searching in an election year. “I’d be surprised if many politicians take a step back and talk about these issues in anything but the conventional way. A few of the issues I discuss, as you know, are not terribly popular. But that’s what’s good about my role in academia, in a way—I don’t care whether they are popular or not.”

Academia’s role in the United States also fascinates Broda. “Professors, academics are very engaged, for instance, in the press, and that’s not the role that academia plays in other countries. Academia is much more isolated there. Here, I am challenged and pushed to make what I’m doing useful.”

He pauses. “And here, of course, I come back to the beginning. It’s the testing that’s enticing to me. I don’t think that academia always has to be useful. There are people who have to be thinking about the clouds, because eventually, something might come out of that that may reshape conventional wisdom. But that’s not what motivates me.”

Addressing big-picture questions with smaller data, however, does. One project underway is an analysis of the impact of the 2008 federal tax rebate checks. Broda acknowledges that “these are certainly tough times” for the global economy, but he remains upbeat about the future.

“I am by all means an optimist,” he says. “There may be some ups and downs, but we are living in a world of prosperity. The last 20 years have been amazing in terms of the way we’ve changed our well-being.”

He gestures out the window at the Chicago cityscape. “Okay, we’re not seeing flying cars. But I can talk to my family in Argentina, seeing each other through the phone—and it’s free.”

Published in The American, a journal of the American Enterprise Institute.  Full article at american.com

June 27, 2008

Ever persistent, Danny sidles up to the judge. “I planned to go to law school after I graduated,” Danny sighs. “But it looks like my folks won’t have enough money to put me through college.”

“Well,” the judge huffs, marching ahead, “the world needs ditch diggers, too!”

Fast forward to 2008, where, in much of America’s cultural imagination, the Grand Old Party might as well be the party of Judge Smails. Media forecasts predict a bloodbath at the November polls; Democrats gleefully point to Republican “elitism” and favoritism towards “corporations” and “the rich.” Many luminaries in the right-wing cognoscenti, meanwhile, remain convinced that if the party’s problems stem from anything, it’s from a lack of ideological purity and libertarian zeal.

In their new book, “Grand New Party,” Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two young editors at The Atlantic, have a different prescription for the GOP. Forget Barry Goldwater, they seem to suggest–it’s Danny Noonan you’re after. America’s working class is the ultimate swing vote, they write, and it has yet to find a home. The GOP may have squandered opportunities in the past, but it can win working-class hearts with a politics that is oriented around the interests of the “Sam’s Club” demographic, that aims to “make government work better, not pare it to the bone,” and ultimately will “lead working-class America out its post-seventies struggles.”

“Grand New Party” argues that Republicans yearning for a purer ideological platform–rhapsodizing about Reagan’s mythic “unbending libertarian purity” and lamenting Bush’s big-government tendencies–are barking up the wrong tree. Limited government is a painfully hard sell, it turns out, even among the GOP faithful. As a 2005 Pew poll revealed, only 11 percent of registered voters are in the “leave us alone” camp. Other, larger GOP-supporting groups (“social conservatives” and “pro-government conservatives,” for instance) tend to want more government involvement, not less, particularly regarding economic issues. Over the past forty years, the authors write, “this problem–that the working class wants, and needs, more from public policy than simply to be left alone–has prevented the Republican party from consolidating an enduring majority.”

Class is a slippery issue in America, making certain definitions difficult. For their part, Douthat and Salam define the working class as “non-college-educated voters who make up roughly half of the American electorate…whose parents and grandparents once formed the heart of the Roosevelt coalition.” This group has played a pivotal role in every election since 1968, and, according to the book, is currently wracked with crisis: a crisis of growing inequality, social insecurity, and “anxiety over health care, pensions, and income volatility.” Republicans are dreadfully out of touch with this insecurity, the authors argue, as well as its main political implication: “rising sympathy for the political left, with its promise of equality-through-redistribution.”

These days, the word “crisis” tends to get bandied about more than it should, and Douthat and Salam admit that America’s working class has enjoyed “persistent prosperity” and numerous benefits from the changing economy (in the form of cheaper goods, improved health care, larger homes, and increased leisure time). At the same time, however, the authors express serious concern over growing social and economic stratification, in which “the country’s mass upper class becomes increasingly segregated from the rest of the population” while the working class grows isolated from the culture of inherited success. The problem, which the authors admit, is that this sorting may be the natural, “logical endpoint” of a meritocracy, not the result of some grand conspiracy. “Grand New Party” is less likely to admit, however, that there may not be much the government can do to stop the forces behind such a major cultural and societal shift.

The same challenge faces what the authors describe as the heart of the problems facing the Sam’s Club demographic: not globalization or the rise of the information economy, but the dramatic decline of the working class family. Social issues, the authors argue, are “at the root of working-class insecurity,” and working-class travails have “as much to do with culture as with economics.” The sexual revolution, they write, wreaked havoc on the working class, leading to skyrocketing divorce, illegitimacy, and single-parent homes. “For the working-class American, who inhabits a more precarious world than the rich or the upper-middle class, family stability is a prerequisite for financial stability, and so working-class voters are less likely to benefit from greater sexual freedom and more likely to suffer from its side effects.” These cultural side effects, according to the Brookings Institution, “may be responsible for over 30 percent of the growth in income inequality between 1979 and 1996.”

How, then, can the GOP address the issues facing America’s working class? A conservatism that wins, Douthat and Salam argue, promises “to fix the welfare state, rather than abolish it; to reform the Great Society, but leave the New Deal more or less intact.” The successful parts of the New Deal, they write, were the ones that tied social and familial reconstruction to economic aid. In that light, marriage and children should be rewarded with tax credits; welfare work requirements should be enforced; vocational training should grow. Some of the book’s policies are intriguing, and others are vague. In many cases, they are a prescription for pragmatism (recommending school choice, but in a slightly watered-down form; or calling for “an environmentalism that is both pro-growth and pro-jobs.”)

“Grand New Party” gets some important things right, but it also misses one of the greatest challenges to modern political reform: the over-the-top scare tactics frequently used by the ideological left. Whether it comes to school choice, Social Security reform (which “Grand New Party” gives up on, suggesting a payroll-tax-the-rich option instead), or other policies that could dramatically increase the opportunities of the working class, left-wing politicians reliably unleash a firestorm of horror stories, leaving the GOP in the dust. As the authors suggest, fire-breathing rhetoric about slashing government likely won’t help the Republicans. But a compelling narrative about the benefits of freedom and opportunity–a narrative that doesn’t buckle just for political expediency, or, for that matter, in the face of daunting opposition–well, that just might.

June 25, 2008

Decades later, we’ve supposedly made progress in the gender wars.  Feminism has flourished, many say, leading to a more enlightened, open, and liberated time.  In her new book, “Save the Males,” syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker argues that this is, quite simply, a bunch of bunk.  We’re more confused that ever when it comes to gender, she writes—and males, not females, often bear the brunt of the assault.

Ground zero, she argues, is the classroom. “Boys learn early that they belong to the ‘bad’ sex,” Parker writes, “and their female counterparts to the ‘good.’” In schools across America, she reports, boys are stifled, feminized, and drugged; curriculum content is gender-equitable to a near-absurd degree (“We’ve created a new generation of Americans who may be more sensitive, but they don’t know much about history,” she writes); and years of “dueling girl and boy crises” have morphed into a we’re-all-the-same dogma, ultimately translating into Brave New World-style games of tag where “nobody is ever out.”

Beyond the schoolyard, Parker writes, “males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills.” In films, music, and television, “men are variously portrayed as dolts, bullies, brutes, deadbeats, rapists, sexual predators, and wife beaters.” Fictional females are often do-it-all superwomen, either embodying the “sacred feminine” of the DaVinci Code or rolling their eyes at the pot-bellied, “According to Jim” buffoons they’ve had the misfortune to marry or date. Real-life women, meanwhile, are busy feminizing their men, dragging them to “The Vagina Monologues”, pushing them into breastfeeding classes, and sharing way, way too much information. “Here on Planet Lamaze,” Parker wryly writes, “everybody’s a gynecologist.”

Sound silly? It is, and in certain sections, “Save the Males” will make you laugh out loud. But, as Parker argues, these things are also symbolic–and, when it comes to trends like the dramatic devaluation of fatherhood in the U.S., they’re also deadly serious. “Historians aren’t sure of the precise date,” Parker writes, “but sometime around 1970 everyone in the United States drank acid-laced Kool-Aid, tie-dyed their brains, and decided that fathers were no longer necessary.” The statistics here are scary, but not unfamiliar: America “leads the Western world in mother-only families”; 30 to 40 percent of American children “sleep in a home where their father does not”; and between 1999 and 2003, the number of babies born to unmarried mothers between the ages of thirty and forty-four increased by nearly 17 percent.

The results have been well documented, Parker argues, and they’re not pretty. “Growing up without a father is the most reliable predictor of poverty,” she writes, as well as “drug abuse, truancy, delinquency, and sexual promiscuity.” Regardless, single motherhood by choice is surging in popularity. When it comes to divorce, child custody, and family law, Parker argues, “pure and simple, the deck is stacked against men”–reducing them, in many cases, to “sperm and a wallet.”

“Save the Males” ties some of this dysfunction to our hypersexed, pornified culture–a culture that, Parker argues, is largely fueled by the fairer sex. “For those of you who skipped their women’s studies classes,” Parker writes, “first-wave feminism got women the vote; second-wave got them employed and divorced; third-wave is busy making them porn stars.” Sex, our culture declares, means nothing, and shame is an anachronism. Strip aerobics and pole-dancing classes have invaded even the snootiest gyms, and on college campuses, one-night-stands have taken the place of dating, provoking a “dirty dance of mutual contempt” between our youngest men and women.

It’s destructive for young men, Parker writes, to live in a society that’s “marinating in pornography.” It’s also confusing, she argues, to live in a world where the full range of female Halloween costumes seems to be a) slutty nurse; b) slutty housecat; or c) slutty one-eyed pirate. Fair enough. But at a certain point, one is tempted to find one of the “perpetual adolescent” “child-men” we’ve “created”, unplug his Wii, and tell him to toughen up. And while “Save the Males” is full of valuable points, it struggles a bit when it comes to the question of who really gets hurt by the post-sexual revolution culture–because it’s often women, not men.

Even famed feminist Germaine Greer, as Parker notes, admitted that the sexual revolution was a lie. “Permissiveness happened,” Greer said, “and that’s no better than repressiveness, because women are still being manipulated by men.” Parker’s main disagreement with Greer is that “women, if they are manipulated by men, are having their share of the fun without taking any of the responsibility.” Anyone who has spent a lot of time with young women, however, can tell you that the “fun” quickly turns into anguish. “Really, when you look at it, hookup culture is gravy for guys,” Laura Sessions Stepp, the author of “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both,” recently told the New York Times. “So how much are we winning?”

“It’s not fashionable to question women’s decisions,” Parker notes. In fact, these days, it’s not fashionable to judge anything at all, which may be one of the roots of our problems. This will likely mean that “Save the Males”–which, despite occasional stumbles, is a smart, funny, and engaging read–will make some people cranky. “This book was harder to write than I had expected,” Parker concludes, “for reasons that are probably apparent by now: Everything in it could be restated as an argument for saving females.”

Obviously, “Save the Males” begs to differ. And regardless of who you think is worse off (or, if you’re like me, and you’re just tired of victimhood altogether) the book is right on when it comes to our culture’s increasing gender confusion. And Parker is also right that America’s females don’t need to be saved…at least not from oppressive, evil men. Judging from many of the problems outlined in the book, if women need to be saved from anyone, they need to be saved from themselves. In the meantime, it’s fair to say that everyone–yes, everyone–loses.