On Friday, the second estimate of Q2 GDP will be released. In the advance release, the BEA reported real GDP increased at a 2.4% annualized rate in Q2. However subsequent economic releases for construction spending, inventory and trade all suggest downward revisions in the second release. The consensus is for a downward revision to 1.3% real annualized growth.
And next week, the ISM manufacturing index will be released – and this will probably continue to decline based on the regional manufacturing reports (I’m tracking all the regional reports right now because I expect a slowdown in manufacturing).
And next Friday, the August employment report will be released. I expect another weak report – and I expect the unemployment rate to start ticking up.
BTW, if you don’t glance at Calculated Risk from time to time, you’re missing out on one of the best economic blogs on the web, particularly with regards to analysis of interesting and often ignored economic indicators.
One thing that CR points out that is worth mentioning:
Note: I still think the economy will avoid a technical double-dip recession, but the odds are uncomfortably high – and it will probably feel like a recession to millions of Americans. It will be especially discouraging – if I’m correct – when the unemployment rate starts increasing again, and when reported house prices start falling again.
To the average American, GDP growth of 0.5% will feel a whole lot like GDP contraction of 0.5%. The fact that the category for one is still weak growth and the other is recession won’t matter to Americans still out of work or trying to make ends meet. Whether the economy is “growing” or “shrinking” may mean a great deal to policymakers, but it won’t mean squat to the people who are suffering the most, particularly long-term unemployed.
Kevin Drum has an amazing chart of the day in response to news that Americans still seem to believe that houses will magically increase their value over time, so that all you have to do is buy a home, and if you sell it at ANY point in the future, you will turn a profit. Of course, this is false. You would think that the housing bubble and subsequent market crash would have taught that to a few people, but perhaps not. So check it out; housing prices don’t generally change much when you account for inflation:
Drum goes on to suggest a few reasons for the misconception. The NYT reports how:
“In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities — Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee — once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade.”
Take the two charts in this post together and you can see the problem. If people actually think this will happen, then I don’t blame them for taking huge loans to buy houses they can’t afford. Now, my opinion on this matter is obviously biased. I am young, unmarried, without children, likely to move multiple times over the next decade as I take new jobs, and currently am employed an in area where almost every home is old and on a small lot and yet still, according to Zillow, fetch average prices of $700,000. Which is, you might guess, more than just a little out of my price range. But still, when you take all those factors together, it’s difficult for me to imagine buying a house for any reason.
With all the noise over the Cordoba House, I read with sad resignation this letter sent to David Kurtz at TalkingPointsMemo . The Republicans run the symbolic issues every time, because they know they’ll lose on substance. So they use whatever symbolic wedge issues they can find — Swift Boats, gay marriage, elitism, “family values,” etc. — to win.
The key paragraph for me, though, came at the end:
I appreciate what you are doing in terms of bearing witness to conservative anti-Muslim bigotry, but really, we need to drag the political conversation back to the important issues. The real problems our county faces are too important to once again have ourselves get dragged down into a six month long fight on some manufactured non-issue that Frank Luntz thinks polls well.
I agree wholeheartedly. With about 3 months left until the election, it’s worth considering what’s at stake in this election. Sometimes, we need a reminder of exactly what a Republican Congress might mean.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the Republicans are going to run right over the Democrats, and the fragile economy is looking worse, which means more fodder for Republicans and more dissatisfaction with Democrats. It’s a tough break, but that’s just how it goes.
But I would point out that the Republicans will make the economy much worse, particularly if a double-dip recession occurs. Consider the words of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the “moderate, reasonable” Republican on new legislation in Congress, such as the health care reform bill:
“The best thing we can do is calm down,” he told ABC’s “This Week,” adding, “I sat down with a business this week — I’ll give you an example — and they’re looking at the healthcare bill, and they’re trying to decide, should they keep people under 30 hours? Smaller businesses are saying, should we stay under 25?”
OK, first of all, this is clear malarkey. Business was fine right after the passage of the health care reform bill, and banks are pulling in good profit numbers after the passage of the financial reform bill. It’s hard to argue that the reform bills “caused” “economic uncertainty.”
If Republicans win big in the fall, any chance for real stimulus in the event of a double-dip recession will be impossible. Republicans will spend their energy blocking all legislation that Democrats try to pass, and the logjam in the Senate will grow even worse. Even mild stimulus will likely meet with vociferous opposition, and we’ll have even worse political gridlock, preventing any and all action to deal with the deepening economic crisis.
With a Republican Congress, there would have been no stimulus package, no Cash for Clunkers, no auto industry rescue, no financial reform after the collapse of the banks, no attempt to rein in health care costs, no bailout for the states to keep hundreds of thousands of workers employed, no unemployment benefits for those out of work and still searching. Millions more Americans would be out of work, with nowhere to find work and no income. And that’s the future Republicans promise if they get into office.
The Republicans will play the distraction game all day, but it’s up to Democrats to change the conversation back to the issues that matter. The economy is in shaky shape, with mixed reports (increased industrial output here, decreasing home prices there, etc.) of health, but a push in the wrong direction and we could be looking at a new Long Recession.
And by the way, unless I missed it, the only mention Stendhal has made recently of his personal life is a quiet and probably unnoticed update on our “About us” page. But just so you know, in case he’s reluctant to tell, Stendhal is finishing teaching English in Chicago for now, and will embark on a new journey on the east coast this fall. (He’s going to a pretty nifty law school.) But fear not, dear reader, he will continue blogging.
And it’s becoming increasingly clear with each passing day. Today the NYT reports on how there are already two mosques close to Ground Zero. One of them is 4 blocks away and the other is 12 blocks away. They have been there for decades, and both routinely turn people away for lack of space. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if there were another nearby mosque to accommodate them?
Furthermore, all these mosques, whether they are 2, 4 or 12 blocks from Ground Zero, aren’t actually at Ground Zero. Distance does matter. Which is why it’s mostly rightwing nuts calling it the “Ground Zero Mosque” or, worse, “the mosque at Ground Zero” as though it were right there.
But wait, what if Muslims were actually practicing Islam directly on site at the “hallowed space” of the 9/11 attacks? Oh shit, they already do. Muslims have practiced their faith inside the Pentagon since 9/11. As has been noted elsewhere, this has gone on for years and has made appearances in media, but doesn’t become a “controversy” until the rightwing hate machine decides to make it their issue. And so it was initially with the Cordoba initiative. Once again, like Stendhal says, we are victim to a debate being hijacked by Braindead Megaphones. And the mainstream media goes along for the ride.
Charles Barkley joined a legion of sportswriters and former players decrying the so-called Superfriends in Miami, in particular Lebron James’s decision to go to Miami through a hilarious Cleveland-crushing hour-long ESPN special.
Much of the criticism focuses on Lebron’s unwillingness to stay with his hometown team, instead strutting around onstage and wiping Cleveland’s nose in its loss. This is fair; although I confess that I was not around for the theatrics, I imagine the spectacle was rather uncouth, considering the understood etiquette when it comes to leaving behind your longtime team.
I find, however, that much of the criticism of Lebron (and Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh) centers on his break with tradition. Magic Johnson sums up the argument:
“We didn’t think about it cause that’s not what we were about,” said Johnson, whose Michigan State squad beat Bird’s Indiana State team in the 1979 National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. “From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird.”
Yet, each of these greats — Jordan, Bird, Johnson — needed superstar role players to help them win! And these role players were easily as good as the comparative Superfriends now assembled in Miami.
In the 1990-1991 Chicago Bulls season, Michael Jordan had a league-leading 20.3 Win Shares. That’s a lot, about as many as Lebron James in his best season. Yet, he also had Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant on his team, each of whom accounted for over 10 Win Shares individually! (For comparison, the WS numbers on Lebron, Wade and Bosh are 18.5, 13.0 and 9.8, respectively.) This means that of the Bulls’ 61 wins, 2/3 of them could be accounted for in just three players. Jordan often insisted that he needed more help, and his fights with Jerry Krause led to better teams with better players. If Jordan had not gotten the necessary help and instead continued to languish in Chicago without Pippen or Grant (or Phil Jackson!), would he have been wrong to abandon Chicago for a contender elsewhere?
Furthermore, although the Heat have three excellent players, there are other teams in the NBA with similar set-ups, and these teams are unsurprisingly successful. LA has Gasol/Odom/Bryant (NOTE THE ORDER HERE); Boston has Rondo/Pierce/Garnett/Allen.
All that James (or more accurately, Wade) did in the offseason was play the role of a General Manager, personally assembling the talent to play on a team, rather than waiting for the real GM to cobble together a deal or series of deals.
To return to Johnson’s argument, then, the reason that Magic didn’t have to join Larry Bird is because he already had players of excellent talent level around him. In fact, almost all of Magic’s championship teams regularly had contributors of ~10 Win Shares apiece, be it Jabbar, Worthy, Scott, or others filling the role. Bird’s Celtics similarly had Parrish, McHale, and Co. Compare this to Lebron in Cleveland, and you see a team of mediocrity surrounding its star. To boot, Lebron would have made a pretty bad GM, insisting on acquiring an aging Shaq for a slightly less aging Ben Wallace, as well as insisting on picking up an always-overrated Antawn Jamison. No one begrudged the Bulls for picking up amazing player Dennis Rodman and adding him to their pantheon of greats for Jordan’s second run; why should we act differently for the Heat?
By assembling the Superfriends, Miami has simply tried a shortcut to the championship, using only free agency to start from a clean slate. Unlike those who think the Superfriends will be bad for basketball, I look forward to some outstanding games next season.
Sports fans are enamored of tradition; sports players generally couldn’t care less. Thus, the real “crime” of Lebron and Co. is shrugging off tradition: the tradition of a storied franchise, of building franchises, of loyalty to a city, of sentimentality, of deference to the status quo.
With the recent flood of right-wing-talking-points-turned-”news”, from ACORN to birtherism to death panels to Shirley Sherrod to the Cordoba House, I am increasingly reminded of the George Saunders essay “The Braindead Megaphone.” You can read it in its entirety here, but I wanted to excerpt the section that talks directly about the Megaphone concept:
Imagine a party. The guests, from all walks of life, are not negligible. They’ve been around: they’ve lived, suffered, own businesses, have real areas of expertise. They’re talking about things that interest them, giving and taking subtle correction. Certain submerged concerns are coming to the surface and—surprise, pleasant surprise—being confirmed and seconded and assuaged by other people who’ve been feeling the same way.
Then a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate.
But he’s got that megaphone.
Say he starts talking about how much he loves early mornings in spring. What happens? Well, people turn to listen. It would be hard not to. It’s only polite. And soon, in their small groups, the guests may find themselves talking about early spring mornings. Or, more correctly, about the validity of Megaphone Guy’s ideas about early spring mornings. Some are agreeing with him, some disagreeing — but because he’s so loud, their conversations will begin to react to what he’s saying. As he changes topics, so do they…
His main characteristic is his dominance. He crowds the other voices out. His rhetoric becomes the central rhetoric because of its unavoidability.
Sound familiar? Because these wingnut ideas get aired out so widely, they suddenly become important talking points. News must be devoted to them! First talk radio, then Drudge, then 24-hour-news, then legitimate outfits covering “the controversy,” then a front-page story on the New York Times, then an apologetic op-ed from the ombudsman of the Washington Post for not taking the story seriously enough. Megaphone Guy is just too powerful, too impossible to resist. His dominant noise-making gives him importance, even if his comments are idiotic. We cannot help but debate them, trace their origins, refute them, and deal with the host of new responses.
I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to solve the problem of Megaphone Guy. So much of the left’s energy is expended in defending itself from untrue attacks or exposing right wing lies, but the lies continue unabated. Perhaps illustrative of this phenomenon, the current Newsweek cover features an image of the wreckage of Ground Zero with the words “War Over Ground Zero Mosque.” Sure, the two main articles actually rebut the Islamophobic intolerance of the mosque-banners, but the damage is already done. Megaphone Guy has done his job. Instead of talking about how to deal with inequality, or how to work with the Muslim world, or how to help those still affected by 9/11, we are talking about whether or not we support a house of worship.
Any ideas on how to solve the problem of Megaphone Guy?
Hipsters have been targeted as the “Dead End of Western Civilization,” which seems a bit histrionic, but underscores the general critical disdain for hipsterdom. Everyone, it seems, hates hipsters, even hipsters. Living in Wicker Park — hipster central in Chicago — I can’t tell you how many times I have heard bearded, skinny-jeaned hipsters discuss how much they hate hipsters.
But what exactly do hipsters do to deserve the hate? To me, a hipster is little more than an evolution/hybridization of many previous existing subcultures. The one that most reminds me of hipsters, however, is the dandy movement of the 19th century. Baudelaire describes dandyism, fairly accurately, as an elevation of aesthetic to a religion. Dandies in their time were decried by many outsiders as well, for their superficiality and snobbery with regards to aesthetics, as opposed to the “real issues” of the day.
To this end, I think much of the hatred of hipsters focuses on the uselessness of their existence. What exactly do hipsters produce? Hipsters are often derided for their lack of economic productivity, funded by their parents to live in overpriced apartments from Portland to Williamsburg. They live for the scene, oblivious to the problems of the world. Yet, I would caution anyone who labels a movement as purely aesthetic or narcissistic, since such movements often have far-reaching effects. Dandyism, after all, produced Benjamin Disraeli, as well as writers such as Wilde, Baudelaire, and Byron. My point here is that a movement that seems driven by superficial aesthetics only appears worthless to a society focused on economic production.
The superficiality of the hipster does differ in some sense from previous counter-cultural movements — the scruffy beatniks, the decidedly unkempt hippies — but has deeper roots in other aesthetically driven subcultures. One need only trace the term “hipster” to its origin in the Bop era of jazz, with its roots deep in musical snobbery (a taste for hot jazz, as opposed to big bands or old-timers) and fashion (zoot suits and black turtlenecks), in order to understand that hipsterdom is an attempt to find the authentic, the “cool” as opposed to the “square.” What modern hipsterdom has discovered, to its own dismay, is that trying to find the “cool” is itself inauthentic — “uncool.”
What does the hipster stand for? Irony, music, fashion, the scene. Thus, hipsterdom is less of a specific ideology, so much as it is a posture, a subculture bent on standing for the meaningless. Perhaps the hatred of hipsterdom comes from its obscurity, its refusal to permit entrance from the “square” world, and its embrace of the meaningless in a world overflowing with meaning. This lack of ideology makes the hipster hard to pin down. If a hippie stood for free love and embracing all mankind, the hipster stands for nothing and knows it.
The hipster has appropriated other subcultures and transformed them into merely so many clothes to wear (see here). A keffiyeh goes from symbol of radical Palestinian solidarity, to a fashion statement. A neighborhood goes from gritty working-class to fashionable (and fashionably overpriced), only to be abandoned for the new “hot spot.” Rather than embracing something as “authentic” or “real,” the hipster continues to focus on the “cool,” shifting from one band to the next, one trend to the next, etc., accelerated and aided by the trend-seeking Internet. Where hip-hop or country music seem obsessed with the question of authenticity — exposing fakes, giving real talk, etc. — hipsters have largely bypassed the question.
Part of what is fascinating about the hipster hegemony is actually the violent reaction of the non-hipster. A hipster may exult in his own taste, addicted to superficiality and meaninglessness, but where exactly is the affront to the mass? The hipster’s very existence is the affront; the fact that this person exists, refusing to participate in the “real world,” perturbs the dominant culture.
I don’t think we know yet exactly what the hipster aesthetic will create. Hipsterdom shifts too often in its tastes and trends to be examined for its social and political outcomes. But in the same way that beatniks provided a counterweight to the dominating culture of Cold War fear and dualism, perhaps the modern hipster will provide a sort of futile rear guard to our dominating culture of economics and globalization. A movement driven by an aesthetic may not appear productive, but is it less productive than the mass culture of infotainment that we regularly consume?
White, upper-middle-class, urban subculture movements have been around as long as there has been a white upper middle class. Hipsterdom is a variation on a theme, one that bothers us because of its embrace of its emptiness. In some ways, hipsters resemble a more literate Jersey Shore, so ensconced in its own aesthetic that it has become foreign to the culture at large.
As we look back on such subcultures — Victorian dandies, Bloomsbury bohemians, Greenwich Village beatniks, San Francisco hippies, London punk — we see the same pursuit of the meaningless, the same shifting tastes, the same snobbish reaction of mass cultures. And yet, as we look back, these groups are often the ones that produce the most interesting art, the most compelling public figures, the most enduring ideas. I’m not saying that hipsters will write the history of the future, but hipsters, by the nature of their constant shift against the “square,” serve a role as counterbalance, a murky reflection of society’s values at large.
The dominance of the Braindead Megaphone
Posted in Assholes, Media, Politics, Reality has a well-known liberal bias, tagged braindead megaphone, commentary, george saunders on August 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »
With the recent flood of right-wing-talking-points-turned-”news”, from ACORN to birtherism to death panels to Shirley Sherrod to the Cordoba House, I am increasingly reminded of the George Saunders essay “The Braindead Megaphone.” You can read it in its entirety here, but I wanted to excerpt the section that talks directly about the Megaphone concept:
Sound familiar? Because these wingnut ideas get aired out so widely, they suddenly become important talking points. News must be devoted to them! First talk radio, then Drudge, then 24-hour-news, then legitimate outfits covering “the controversy,” then a front-page story on the New York Times, then an apologetic op-ed from the ombudsman of the Washington Post for not taking the story seriously enough. Megaphone Guy is just too powerful, too impossible to resist. His dominant noise-making gives him importance, even if his comments are idiotic. We cannot help but debate them, trace their origins, refute them, and deal with the host of new responses.
The worst part is that refuting them sometimes makes the problem worse! Hearing the real facts doesn’t make people any more conducive to believing them; sometimes they get further entrenched in their own views. This dynamic of correcting mistakes only allows Megaphone Guy to use existing tensions to obscure real exploitation and injustice in our system.
I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to solve the problem of Megaphone Guy. So much of the left’s energy is expended in defending itself from untrue attacks or exposing right wing lies, but the lies continue unabated. Perhaps illustrative of this phenomenon, the current Newsweek cover features an image of the wreckage of Ground Zero with the words “War Over Ground Zero Mosque.” Sure, the two main articles actually rebut the Islamophobic intolerance of the mosque-banners, but the damage is already done. Megaphone Guy has done his job. Instead of talking about how to deal with inequality, or how to work with the Muslim world, or how to help those still affected by 9/11, we are talking about whether or not we support a house of worship.
Any ideas on how to solve the problem of Megaphone Guy?
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