Oh Boy! This Is Fun. The Catch-22 Of Being Janet Yellen.

This new WaPo article on why Janet Yellen is probably not the president's choice for the next chair of the Federal Reserve is fantastic!  It's hilarious!  It's a perfect example of the Catch-22 that Yellen must struggle under.

Take the argument that Yellen is not a team player and what's needed for the chair of the Federal Reserve is a team player:

Yellen has a perfectly solid relationship with Bernanke, as best as I can tell, but she’s more of her own thinker within the institution. She has spent her time as vice chairwoman urging Bernanke and her other fellow policymakers to shift policy to try to do more to combat unemployment, and thinking through ways to do just that. She even had one economist who functioned for a time as something of a de facto chief of staff, Andrew Levin. And people dealing with her within the Fed have viewed her not so much as Bernanke’s emissary but as her own intellectual force within the organization.

So what does that have to do with how Obama’s advisers might view her? They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face.

Mmm.  By inference, then, Larry Summers, the apparent candidate for the chair, IS a team player.  But if you dig back in the murky archives of time, you come across comments like these:

What has all this to do with Larry Summers as a potential Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration? It depends on how much of the job involves what are usually called “people skills,” the skills that bring men and women of diverse views together in a spirit of optimism and co-operation (two words Obama has often invoked). A cabinet secretary must interact with other secretaries, with the White House staff, with the vice president, with congressional committees, with leaders of industry, with the representatives of other sovereign states and with the media.
It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues. Little that he did as president of Harvard suggests that Summers possesses these virtues.

And like these:

In the first world, you're going to read a lot of stories about how Larry Summers was a meanie who rendered the economic team dysfunctional and impeded the Obama administration's efforts to revive the economy. In the other, you're going to read a lot of stories about how the famously prickly Larry Summers managed to keep his ego in check and leverage his considerable brilliance to help the Obama administration save the American economy. 

So Janet Yellen is looking in from the outside, as the WaPo article states, while Summers is inside, manically participating in everything!  Which reminds me of the role of the outsider in all sorts of groups.

But never mind, what the situation truly needs is a person who doesn't prepare, who isn't meticulous but who just jumps in:

A second, and related, reason that Yellen’s leadership style isn’t a great mesh with the Obamaites is also one of her strengths. She is always meticulously prepared, a careful and systematic thinker who chooses her words carefully. In a Fed policy committee meeting or a gathering of international central bankers, she typically scripts herself in advance and reads those prepared comments.
She is methodical, not manic. And the prevailing style of the White House insiders advising on the decision leans a bit more toward manic. Geithner, for example, jumps from meeting to meeting, from hearing to phone call, without so much as a set of talking points to work from. The question is how Yellin’s cautious approach would work when she is dealing with the full panoply of issues that a Fed chair must grapple with.

But if Yellen was manic, unprepared and willing to jump about like a rabbit, what would her flaws be then?

That's why I see all this as a Catch-22 case for poor Janet.  She is damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, and that's because both of these arguments can be built to be whatever they need to be afterwards, once the choice already is for Larry Summers. 

Just find whatever he has and she does not,  as the thing that is needed!  Hence we come up with the argument that it's bad to be prepared and meticulous, while running the Federal Reserve!  Or that it's bad to be independent, in a position for which independence is usually a desired characteristic.

Atrios titles his post on this topic as "Bros B4 Hoes," and that's one possible take on the topic.  It's not the only possible one, because a similar outcome could be reached when one camp defends its homeboy against the homeboy of the other camp.  Still, given the general reputation of Summers, defending him against Yellen also produces a kind of Catch-22 when it comes to questions of gender.

A general note:  This post is not about which candidate actually might be better at the job.  It's about the conversations we have about them.

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What To Read Today

This post on Harriet Tubman and what happened recently about her memory.

This article on building a new racial justice movement.

The ghost rapes of Bolivia.  On sexual abuse among a Mennonite community in Bolivia.  For me the crucial point of this is that when the system of justice is based on the rule of the fathers it will not serve the victims.

For more on the impact of justice systems, in Malawi.

Does lead in gasoline affect violent crime rates?  It's a hypothesis worth studying in more detail.

Head Start programs as the proverbial sacrifice of sequestration-mandated cuts.

And a story about a woman inventor.

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What Did You Read On The Beach?

Or what are you planning to read if you haven't had your vacation yet?  Perhaps I should ask some of you what you would read if you ever had time off for it.  Sigh.

This is supposed to be a jolly and light-footed post.  That could describe most of my summer reading, except that it doesn't.  For instance, I read the Detective Novel With The Most Miserable Atmosphere Evah, which is Henning Manckell's  The Troubled Man.  If your most fervent desire in life is to get terminally depressed over looming  old age (and it will loom for all of us lucky enough), have a nice long wallow in that book.

While still on the Nordic gloomy side, Camilla Läckberg's The Stonecutter is a little less depressive.  It's also a good mystery.

I also re-read Martial's Epigrams.  It's hard to tell if his thinking was advanced for 80 C.E. or so.  That was an era when Romans had slaves and had the right to treat them as they wished.  Women's rights were severely limited and social class differences were huge.

But there are aspects of his writings which sound utterly modern to me.  That's not the case with the somewhat later New Testament, for instance.  I'm not sure what that might mean if anything.

At places Martial's more obscene epigrams sound like lot of the stuff on today's  Internet, by the way.

I also read a few history books, including a book about women during Renaissance and stuff about World War II.

The hotchpotch aspect of this list is because I didn't choose these books or buy them but read whatever happened to be available wherever I happened to be at some particular need-to-read time.

The stilted writing is because I seem to have aimed at the proverbial what-I-did-during-my-summer-vacation children's essay.

So.

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Crushed By the Costs of Daycare. And Who Is To Pay Them?

The title of a post on the New York Times Opinionator blog.  It's a good post, pointing out the great difficulty of finding and affording good-quality daycare.  It even talks about how this is a greater problem for poorer families.

But as Joan Walsh points out on the twitter, the story screws up by viewing daycare costs as something that one must deduct from the mother's salary in two-parent households.

Well, it's not really the story which screws that one up, it's us, the society, when we view the dilemma as having two solutions which are 1)  a stay-at-home-mother or 2) daycare.  Because these are the only visible options, the costs of daycare obviously should be compared to the mother's potential salary.

That makes some narrow logical sense if the mother earns less than the father.  But in at least one of the cases in the post the father earns less.  Yet even there the focus is on the mother:

Child care is a towering expense for parents like Carla Bellamy, a professor of anthropology at Baruch College in Manhattan who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia, earns $74,000 a year and lives with her husband and their two children, a newborn and a 4-year-old. Her husband is a composer and the executive director of a music organization. Only 9 percent of women in the work force make $75,000 or more, so Professor Bellamy is relatively privileged.
But even with a combined household income of $110,000, she and her husband struggle to afford day care. (It was a story I heard echoed when I spoke with other female professors, who sometimes took sick days even when they were healthy so they could stay home and not have to pay for baby sitters.) “Our entire disposable income goes to child care,” Professor Bellamy, 41, says. “It’s not a tragic story, but is tiring and tiresome. I have a career, I work really hard, and yet I get no break.”

Note that Mr. Bellamy's husband seems to earn about half of what she does, based on these figures.

And no, I'm not suggesting that Mr. Bellamy should clearly become a stay-at-home-father or anything of the sort, just pointing out that as long as we see daycare as one of the many so-called women's problems the solutions are going to be sought in that same narrow field.

Incidentally, even in the case where the lower-earning spouse is considering staying at home as the option to daycare, its costs should not just be deducted from her or his hypothetical paycheck when the financial consequences are judged.

This is because the decision to take time off from the labor force will have further financial repercussions.  The partner who takes the time off will earn less later and will end up with a smaller retirement income.  Thus, even in such narrow calculations the costs of daycare should be assessed within those lifetime consequences.

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Lettuce Prey

A fun religious post for you all!  I once considered Lettuce Prey as my Internet handle but decided against it.  Here it can stand for one of the many interesting religious transformations which exist when it comes to the beliefs some hold.

Take pastor Steven  L Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.  The principles of his church are listed on the church website and include:

We believe that the King James Bible is the word of God without error. 

We believe that life begins at conception (fertilization) and reject all forms of abortion including surgical abortion, "morning-after" pills, IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), birth control pills, and all other processes that end life after conception.

We believe that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty.
We oppose worldliness, modernism, formalism, and liberalism.

Sounds like a fun place.  I love the first of the rules, about the King James Bible being God's word without error, given that it is a translation (of other translations, probably).   The church also believes that God punishes homosexuality with a death penalty and that birth control pills are abortifacients and so on.

But none of that is why I write about our nice pastor Anderson.  The reason for that has to do with his advice on how to bring up daughters in his creed,  to keep them virginal until marriage.  The solution is to lock them up, pretty much.  Or, as Anderson states, after telling his congregation that he will teach his sons to avoid fornication:

I say I’ll teach that unto my sons and you say, well, aren’t you gonna teach that to your daughters? 

I’m gonna tell you this: It’s not gonna be humanly possible for anyone to commit fornication with my daughters. [Laughter] And you know what? You’re laughing but I’m not kidding… You say, what about when they go get a job? Well, they’re not going to get a job. Why would my daughters go get a job? What do they need a job for? You know what, I’m gonna pay for them, I’m gonna pay their bills. And you know what? When I’m done paying for them, their husband’s gonna pay for them. 

And I hope that he doesn’t fail in his responsibility to provide and send them off to work or something, but you know what, at that point, it’s none of my business. At that point, it’s not my responsibility. But you know what? When I pass off my daughters unto their husband, I’m gonna be able to guarantee that they’re a virgin because I’m gonna make it to where it’s not even humanly possible. Because I’m not gonna have them out gallivanting around town. I’m not gonna have them going off to work, and going out with all these people…

The bolding is in the original.

But the really thrilling sentence is the one which begins the third paragraph in that quote:

And I hope that he doesn’t fail in his responsibility to provide and send them off to work or something, but you know what, at that point, it’s none of my business.

It's a perfect circle.  First daddy decided about his daughters and then the hubby decides about his wife.  Reminds me of some other extreme types of right-wing religions. 

First daddy will decide how the daughters are brought up (dependent, perhaps without marketable skills) and then hubby will decide how the wife lives (perhaps he makes her go out to work, should he choose to do so). And considering that having just one breadwinner can be very difficult in the US, pastor Anderson's views are also more likely to place his daughters in tougher financial circumstances.

The justification for all this is in pastor Anderson's choices about how to interpret the Bible.  The King James version is God's word without error, but pastor Anderson's views also matter.  Because the Bible doesn't actually say that women should be housewives, but Anderson decides that it does:

And you say, well why the double standard? Um, ’cause everything in the Bible’s a double standard?! ‘Cause I’m not a feminist?! ‘Cause men and women are different? ‘Cause my sons are gonna be taught to be independent. My daughters are gonna be taught not to be independent. [Fake crying noises] My sons are gonna be taught to go out and work hard and make a living! My daughters are gonna be taught to be a homemaker, okay? You don’t like that? Well, whatever, that’s what the Bible teaches…

Bolds are in the original.

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A Different Angle to the Role of Newspaper Comments on the Net

Than in my previous post, both because I put that one out while quite ill and because this article is interesting.  It doesn't change my basic opinions on the issue (which is that moderating is a necessity, for tone and hatred), but it adds an important nuance to it.  Here's what Tim Dunlop writes at Comment Is Free, after condemning abusive comments and e-mails in general:

To put it plainly, I have nothing but contempt for those who engage in this sort of behaviour, and am happy to see them pursued and exposed. But I am also a fan of online discussion more generally, whether it be on social media, on blogs, or in the comments section under stories in the mainstream media. 

Such interactions have significantly changed the nature of the media environment, giving voice to sections of the community who have never before been able to contribute. These developments are not the democratic panacea cyber utopians sometimes pretend they are, but they are a vast improvement over the top-down media models of the past, where the audience was relegated to the role of passive consumer. We need to be careful not to let this abuse discourage us from pursuing online interactions in a way that enhances democratic participation.

Dunlop then points out that worrying about trolls can be used to squash access by those the editors don't like and that attempts to get rid of Internet anonymity are misguided:

It is very easy for those with the institutional backing of, say, a political party, a trade union or a newspaper to demand that everyone use their own name when entering online discussions, but it isn’t that simple. Without that sort of institutional support, and without the experience of involvement in public discussion, many ordinary people feel vulnerable – anonymity is the one tool they have to level the power differential.

The key terms in Dunlop's text are "enhances democratic participation."  It's not clear to me what he means by this, about trolling:

The word once had quite a specialised meaning limited to a particular sort of disruptive behaviour, but it has now become a catch-all term to describe any behaviour that some journalists and editors deem inappropriate. Their responses to what they call “trolling” often seem less about combating abuse than reasserting their role as gatekeeper, to restore to themselves the right to decide who gets to speak in public and who doesn’t. It is what US academic Susan Herbst calls “the strategic use of civility”.

I'm going to assume that he means moderating comments threads.  That might not be what Dunlop means by the gate-keeping activity.  Still, because I want to talk about moderating anyway I'll go with that:

I've surfed the net long enough to deserve Surfer Pension, and I'm pretty certain that not-moderated comment threads can, over time, lead to the very opposite of "enhanced democratic participation."   I can think of examples where people with the opposite political views set up home in the comments thread of a political publication (the Nation, a few years ago, for one case) and consequently made posting there a gantlet run for most other people.

I can also think of examples where the comments on some site have degenerated into anyone's worst nightmare, possibly through the process of some people essentially bullying all who cannot take extreme hatred or prejudice etc. away from the site.

Then there's the hate group aspect of commenting:  A call seems to go out for commentators of a particular flavor to discuss certain articles, and when those commentators use the language of hate those who belong to the hated group have a higher commenting fee to pay to participate:  They must be willing to take verbal abuse.  The way women are often treated* in the comments of a feminist article, say, is a good example of this.  And to have a higher entrance fee for some commentators may not be terribly democracy-enhancing.

Thus, while I agree that comments can have a democracy-enhancing effect, that effect will not be present when the discussion is not moderated.  The parable to that might be to remove all rules about how to carry out elections and to tell people just to run for the ballot boxes, elbow each other away, and tuck as many ballot tickets as possible in the boxes.  No other rules.  If you wish, you  can keep others from getting to the ballot boxes, too, and you can gang together to accomplish that.

Maybe that is too strong.  But my point is that anarchy is not the same as democracy.  And yes, I understand that moderating and other forms of regulation can work to stifle real democracy.   So does not moderating at all.

That's why I think moderating for hate is crucial.  And yeah, I get how difficult that could be, without stifling the argument embedded in that hate.  But if certain types of hateful comments are banned the participants might learn how to make their point in a more civil manner.   You think?


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*I get called interesting things in comments threads, by the way.  I think "a foaming c**t" is the most fun (sadly, not true, though I think having that ability would be great). 

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On What Internet Comments Might Achieve in Science Stories

As per one study:

A new obstacle to scientific literacy may be emerging, according to a paper in the journal Science by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The new study reports that not only are just 12% of Americans turning to newspaper and magazine websites for science news, but when they do they may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself.
In an experiment mentioned in the Science paper and soon to be published elsewhere in greater detail, about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.
"Disturbingly, readers' interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story," wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.
"In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself."

I haven't looked at the study itself.  But if its results hold something similar might apply to other topics than science.  For example, angry MRA comments on anything that is written on women.  Or pick your topic, pretty much, because angry comments are the flavor of the day on the many and varied Internets.

So the deeper question (assuming, once again, that the above study is OK in execution) is what the benefits of having non-moderated comments are supposed to be.

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