Results tagged “rhetoric” from Eccentric Eclectica

Another of my favorite economic-moral connections is choice. I recently talked with a friend about health care and choice and was treated to the full-on Republican explanation that as long as people have choices they will do fine. Choice becomes the most important value and making bad choices becomes the fault of the individual. The organizations and social structures that force a particular choice are glossed over or completely ignored. It all fits into the Randian argument of the economic overman.

Lawrence Glickman wrote an article about the defeat of consumer protection in the 1960s and 1970s at Baseline Scenario. He argues that the main conservative argument during the 1960s and 1970s was against government bureaucrats controlling the choices of consumers. Conservatives marched out the standard slippery slope arguments about how the creation of one agency to protect consumers would lead to catastrophe for all businesses. Government could never solve a problem because they were always captured by special interests. Glickman calls this the triumph of conservative populism.

I’m particularly interested in the next rhetorical move that Glickman describes.

The flip-side of bureaucratic arrogance and over-reach, according to the critics of the consumer movement, was the assumption of incompetence on the part of ordinary consumers. The very call for an agency on behalf of consumers was an expression of the bureaucrats’ lack of faith in the abilities of their countrymen and women.  Ronald Reagan, the ex-Governor of California, criticized the consumerists–whom he compared to Orwell’s “Big Brother,” in several op-ed pieces and radio commentaries in 1975–for “promoting the notion that people are too dumb to buy a box of corn flakes without being cheated.”  Reagan concluded that “professional consumerists are, in reality, elitists who think they know better than you do what’s good for you.”  A group of Senators who opposed the CPA also rejected the view, which they claimed was implicit in CPA legislation, “that all consumers are mental midgets who must look to Washington to find out how to manage their personal lives from some bureaucratic consumer `representative’ who will have neither the time nor the knowledge to shop for and cook a decent supper.”  According to the advertising executive, Arthur Fatt, the consumer movement sees “the typical consumer as a moron.” The celebration of the intelligence of ordinary Americans became a component of conservative anti-elitism and an element of its populism.  If consumer advocates were snobs condescending toward those they claimed to protect, it was easy to dismiss their proposal as tainted since, as the business journalist Mary Bennett Peterson wrote, “those the Movement is designed to protect can actually wind up as its victims.”

In time such dismissals of liberal proposals became rote but in the 1970s this was a new line of criticism, one that successfully consolidated conservative ideology.  As the CPA bill languished after its final defeat in 1978, conservative groups correctly foresaw the opportunity for what Jeffrey H. Joseph, of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called a political and legislative “bonanza.”  And indeed the terms of that victory foreshadow the rhetorical (and electoral) victories of Reaganism and the concomitant delegitimation of liberalism.  The Wall Street Journal did not exaggerate when it noted that the CPA bill was “killed by words” and those words continued to resonate long after the once-popular federal consumer protection idea  faded from public memory.

The rhetoric ties into the “rugged individualist” cliches that have been a mainstay of American culture. I think promoting choice is valuable, but the consumerist view of choice described by the opponents of regulation is a stunted view of choice. In this view the only real choices made by people are choices made on the market.

The current health care debate plays out the same argument. There are some conservatives who argue that giving money to individuals so they can buy their own insurance will automagically reduce the cost of health care because consumer’s will be able to search for the best bargains on drugs, hospitals, doctors, and insurance. But the virtue of consumer choice is being oversold. The problem is that different people will need different amounts of health care during their lifetimes. Is there any just reason for a poor person to get less care than a rich person?

James Kwak at Baseline Scenario finishes the argument

People start out in different economic circumstances, and they suffer different fates in their lives. Without redistribution in some form, the ones who are poor and get sick will simply not be able to afford health care. Cashing out their employer health benefits and giving them “choice” won’t change that – especially if they don’t have employer health benefits to begin with. Yes, insurance can play a redistributive role on its own, but it only works if poor people can afford to buy insurance that will cover them against serious illness. And once they have that insurance, then the price signals so beloved of conservatives won’t function anymore. The problem is really very simple: for price signals to work, you have to be willing to let consumers run out of money, since no one can predict his future health care needs. And then they die.

So what really frustrates me about this whole “consumer choice” fraud is the premise it begins with. It starts out by framing health care as a problem of consumer incentives – health care is too cheap. This is a factually accurate framing that leads you to a dead end (unless you think people who underestimate their future sickness should die).

Listen to the way rich people and poor people describe the same thing and you will start to understand some of the divides in this country. The financial apocalypse has brought different ways of speaking to the forefront of our media and our attention.

There are many examples of linguistic difference between rich and poor. For example consider the way we use the words “leverage” and “borrow.” Let’s go the dictionary first to read the definitions.

Borrow: to take or obtain with the promise to return the same or an equivalent: Our neighbor borrowed my lawn mower.

Leverage: the use of a small initial investment, credit, or borrowed funds to gain a very high return in relation to one’s investment, to control a much larger investment, or to reduce one’s own liability for any loss.

To find out how the word is used I looked up both using ProQuest Newstand. I limited the results to the Star Tribune newspaper over the last 30 days.

I got 9 results for leverage. Here are two examples related to money.

1. “In an interview Monday, Cooper said the demands of TARP began to conflict with the government’s own policies. For instance, the federal government was pressuring banks to use the funds as leverage to make more loans and to buy other banks. But such moves would reduce a bank’s tangible common equity, which has become a major focus of bank regulators and is considered a key measure of bank health.” — Star Tribune March 3, p. D1
2. “Investment banks “raced like lemmings over the cliff by abandoning the usual principles of sound risk management both by increasing their leverage dramatically after 2004 and abandoning diversification in pursuit of obsessive focus on high-profit securitizations.” — Star Tribune, March 17 p. D1

Notice the actors in these reports are banks, not people. Banks leverage, people don’t.

Next I looked up borrow in the same paper and same time frame. Again there were 9 results. Here are three money related examples.

1. “We help (customers) get on a plan for their financial success in order to buy (insurance and investments) through Thrivent in the future,” she said. Harvey’s top idea for employed folks without emergency savings: Open up a line of credit just in case. “It’s always easier to borrow money when you don’t need it. When you’re unemployed, there’s not a loan out there for you,” she said. — Star Tribune, March 15, pD3
2. Toby Madden, a regional economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, said the seeds of the rising default rate were sown earlier in the decade when credit eased so people could borrow more. — Star Tribune, March 8, p D1
3. Last week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty tossed another $27 million on the table in his bid to boost K-12 spending about 2 percent in 2010-11, even in the face of a steep, recession-driven revenue slide. He’s willing to gamble with the state’s credit rating and borrow against future state revenues to do it. He said he’s also willing to up his K-12 ante another 2.8 percent in 2012-13, while freezing every other item in the state budget at his recommended 2010 level. — Star Tribune, Mach 22, p OP-1

Individuals and governments borrow, not banks.

Leverage connotes power and movement. The dictionary defines leverage as “power or ability to act or to influence people, events, decisions, etc.” before it mentions money. Borrowing is a sign of weakness, a lack that needs to be filled, which creates an obligation to repay. Borrowers repay their loans. What do leveragers do?

People and governments borrow, which puts all of us at risk. Think about the national debt discussion. I haven’t heard anyone tell us that we need to leverage our wonder-working American economy in order to save our asses from disaster. Instead the fiscal scolds tell us not to “borrow from our kids.” Strange that these people didn’t seem to have any complaints about leveraging the financial power of Wall Street.

Wall Street gets the linguistic benefit while people and government get the linguistic punishment. Haven’t we heard this tune before?

Never have so few been so sure of their own rightness. That is my reaction to this morning’s meeting of the MN Futurists. I’m sorry to say this, because I like the principle of the group, but the reality today was a bunch of old white men exercising their sense of dudgeon.

The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.

My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.

A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.

In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.

Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.

The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.

Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.

When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.

The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.

The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:

• Immigration is bad because diversity causes cultural division and balkanization. See here for a refutation.
• Immigration is bad because it leads to increased consumption of natural resources. A Hmong person driving an SUV in St. Paul has a much bigger carbon footprint than a Hmong person still living in Laos.
• Immigration is bad because current federal policy is rooted in deception. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 led to a dramatic increase in immigration, especially non-white immigration, so therefore the people who wrote the law must have intended to change the cultural composition of America. I call this the conspiracy theory. Refutations to take place on your own.

The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.

All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.

I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.

Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.

There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.