Humean anthropology and indolence: 3

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is, as its very title shows, something different than a mere history. History and natural history differ in their object: in the former, the object is the chronicle of human action, and in the later, of the development of living forms in nature. By shifting religion to the realm of nature, Hume was following through on the logic of a division that he articulates in the very first paragraph between reason and human nature. Already this division speaks to a certain incoherence in the pretence that man is, ontologically, on an equal level with ‘nature’. In other words, an incoherence of ontological scope. This incoherence haunts social science like a Cartesian demon, casting doubt on all attempts to ground a social science on the opposition between culture and nature, while at the same time making it impossible to simply combine the two without destroying the very meaning and savor of both categories. In the twentieth century, Levy-Strauss made of that opposition one of the founding social structures, the study of which is the object of anthropology, at least insofar as the society studied lacks a system of writing. I mention Levy-Strauss to signal a certain textual destiny that can assigned to Hume’s natural history. Although the essay is not shaped by the protocols of what we would call anthropology – it evidences no fieldwork whatsoever – it is, on the other hand, an argument about a certain product of human nature, religion, that is almost – Hume is very clear about the ‘almost’ – universal. And in as much as it appears in most societies, Hume feels that we can understand it as a system of beliefs by asking what qualities of human nature are expressed in it.

However, in posing the question in this way, we already suppose that it is not a product of human reason. Reason, here, will be regarded not as an expression of human nature, but as a mechanism that transcends human nature. Reason is a machinery that allows for a two-fold operation, beginning firstly with citation – breaking a certain phenomenon out of its context or situation – and secondly with analysis, breaking it down according to the rules of either deduction or induction. Hume thinks that the operation of reason, abstraction, contemplation, etc. is so little a product of human nature that most humans do it badly, if they do it at all. In a sense, Hume’s whole essay is at the polar opposite of one of Wittgenstein’s comments about Frazer’s Golden Bough (which is itself very much a descendent of Hume’s Natural History of Religion):

“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.


But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.

When he explains to us that the King must be killed in his blood, because after the ideas of the savages, otherwise his soul will not be fresh, one can only say: where this practice and this idea go together, the practice does not spring from the idea, but they are both simply there. “

Hume, on the other hand, thinks it will never be plausible that religion – in his survey of it – comes from anything but stupidity. The “ignorant”, the “vulgar”, and the “ignorant vulgar” play a very strong role in Hume’s account, and help us understand another of the determinations of his initial separation of human nature and reason: it is from the standpoint of reason, which deduces the truth about God, that the historian can understand the history of religion, which unfolds as a series of misperceptions of God. Importantly, for Hume, as for Frazer, God is a phenomenon of belief, molded in the form of the God that is worshipped in the Christian church. When Hume finds, not unnaturally, that this concept of God cannot really be imposed on many of the religious phenomena he finds in the past, he attributes this to a primitive intellectual equipment.

It is in explaining that primitive intellectual equipment that we come upon a certain unarticulated primal supposition in Hume, concerning primitive man. Hume, while never fully spelling this out in his essay, evidently assumes Hobbes. He assumes, that is, that the primitive state was one of man against man, or perpetual and complete war. It is characteristic of that state that people are harried – they have no time for contemplation. The temporal/material condition for reasoning – indolence – is lacking. And this original lack impedes the habit of inquiry; for inquiry, like all human phenomena in Hume, is eventually founded in habit and habit’s social cousin, custom.

“Adam rising at once in Paradise, and in the full perfection of his his faculties, would naturally, as represented by Milton, be astonished at the glorious appearances of nature, the heavens, the air, the earth, his own organs and members ; and would be led to ask, whence this wonderful scene arose: but a barbarous, necessitous animal (such as a man is on the first origin of society), pressed by such numerous wants and passions, has no leisure to admire the regular face of nature, or make inquiries concerning the cause of those objects to which, from his infancy, he has been gradually accustomed. On the contrary, the more regular and uniform, that is, the more perfect nature appears, the more is he familiarized to it, and the less inclined to scrutinize and examine it. A monstrous birth excites his curiosity, and is deemed a prodigy. It alarms him from its novelty,and immediately sets him a-trembling, and sacrificing, and praying. But an animal, complete in all its limbs and organs, is to him an ordinary spectacle, and produces no religions opinion or affection. Ask him
whence that animal arose? hewill tell you, from the copulation of its parents. And these, whence? From the copulation of theirs. A few removes satisfy his curiosity, and set the objects at such a distance, that he entirely loses sight of them. Imagine not that he will so much as start the question, whence the first animal,much less whence the whole system or united fabric of the universe arose.”

This is interestingly wrong. It was even known to be wrong in Hume’s time: there was, by 1750, two centuries of material gathered and published by Europeans that showed, contrary to Hume, a deep fascination with how the whole system of the fabric of the universe arose, and even how animals arose. Hume was probably aware of Lafitau, if not the numerous Spanish works on the belief systems of the Indios. And of course since Hume’s time we are more and more aware that, whatever else interested Paleolithic humans, they were absolutely fascinated and even obsessed by an animal complete in its limbs and organs. But Hume’s Hobbesianism disallows at least one reading of the evidence. And, interestingly, sets the stage for one of Hume’s most ingenious suppositions, which will prove to have a long life in the 19th and 20th centuries.

comment on the NYT Stephen Roach piece at Room for Debate

Stephen Roach, the well named financial analyst, was asked about the crisis in savings in Japan and the United States in the NYT’s Room for Debate the other day. His response was essentially to knock the American middle class for living beyond its means (which used to be the bright side – remember the Ownership society? Remember ‘its your money’? Ah, the Bushisms of yesteryear). Anyway, I wrote a comment which, for some reason, the NYT chose not to publish, although I can’t see that it violated any policy of theirs. So, in the interest of keeping this comment around so that I can use it later, rather than flushing it into the cybervoid, here’s a link to Roach’s article and here’s my comment.

"Nice to see Roach talk his book - let's shove more money into Wall Street via IRAs and 401Ks. - Or, lets strip them of their tax deductibility and set up government retirement and education accounts which would be tax free and offer a modest but guaranteed return of 3 percent annually, as suggested by Teresa Ghilarducci. As Jim Mosquera in ‘Escaping Oz’ puts it: “At the last major stock market bottom in 1982, American households were not that interested in owning stocks. The growth of the stock industry was aided by the creation of IRA accounts (1974) and 401(k) plans (1980). IRA accounts came during the stock market bottom of 1974 and 401k plans arrived just before the major stock market bottom of 1982. Stock ownership comprised barely 12 percent of all household financial assets in 1982, where not 2/3 of investors have half their financial assets in mutual funds. Stocks litter IRA and 401k accounts, the most precious of saving vehicles. Fifty-four percent (54%) of households own stock mutual funds and 37% own individual stocks in their IRA accounts.” In 1982, retirement was much more secure than it is now. Our experiment with stock ownership has failed. It is time to admit it, and to shrink the funds Wall Street has to play with. This will re-set Wall Street so that it becomes of use, rather than what it is now - a wasteful casino that allocates capital with maximum inefficiency - and would actually help finance the operation of the government without tax increases for the 99 percent - although of course we need to hike the 1 percent tax rate to Eisenhower levels."

Hume and Rousseau on indolence: 2

Han Joachim Voth, in his essay, Time Use in Eighteenth century London: some evidence from Old Bailey (1997) cleverly figured out a way to quantify over time use in 18th century Britain by using the accounts of witnesses at trials. The question of whether and how much time discipline intensified among urban laborers (and agricultural workers) has been much disputed, as the Marxist claim that was backed up in the E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class has been tugged at here and statistically stiffed there. Voth concluded that the evidence points not to longer working days, but instead, to longer working weeks. The sixteenth and seventeenth century holidays were being cut down. St. Monday was assassinated. Another study of the decline of Saint Monday (the day that workers would sometimes take off to have a day of drinking and music) in 18th and 19th century Birmingham found that the Saint was not martyred all at once, but bit by bit.

The evidence, then, points to an increase in the working time of the laboring class in Britain in the 18th century. And yet, at the same time, one discovers a new sense of leisure among the ‘middling men’ – the bourgeoisie – both in the later start in life by bourgeois children, who were educated for much longer than laborer’s children, and in soft work and hard leisure – a certain non-differentiation of the two spheres. Gambling could be leisure, but for many it really did pay the bills. And the question of intellectual labor was still not wholly defined at this time. Research could be a hobby from, say, preaching.

What is important is that leisure and labor carry strong class colorations. As Joan-Lluís Marfany puts it in “The invention of labour in Early Modern Europe”:

…take the question of boredom, the history of which [Peter Burke] invites us to write. This is not, as it may seem, strictly an upper- class problem, but here too there is one important distinction to be made. The leisured classes get bored because they are idle; their problem, as Burke, quoting Henry Fielding, points out, is how to kill time. For the workers, the source of boredom is work. They too devise ways of passing the time, only in their case it is working time that needs to be passed. In conservative, idealizing literature, peasants are portrayed as people who like to keep always busy, to the extent that even in the long winter evenings when they get together to while away the time by telling stories, singing songs and playing games, they still manage to combine these activities with some useful task, such as, for instance in northern Catalonia, peeling or shelling corn cobs, or sifting Yet we might just as well look at it from the opposite angle. The cobs had to be peeled and shelled; the seeds had to be sifted; the stamens to be carefully plucked for saffron; the wool or the flax had to be spun: all tedious, repetitive tasks. Doing the work together to the accompaniment of stories, songs or games was a way of alleviating the mind-numbing boredom of the chores.”

These are quick glimpses of a deep and complex historical event, but they pose a question: how could Hume have gotten it so wrong? That is, how could he, and other European intellectuals of the time, have thought that they were living in the golden age of leisure?

Hume and Rousseau on indolence: a backwards glance 1

Indolence and leisure have long been outlier themes in philosophy and the social sciences. And yet, as I hope to show, they are connected by every family tie to the grander themes of reason, progress and culture, as these were articulated among the Enlightenment intellectuals of the eighteenth century.

Let’s start this inquiry with a conference held in 1966 when Marshall Sahlins surveyed the ethnographic evidence concerning the use of time by hunter gatherers, such as the !Kung and Australian aborigines, and used it as evidence for what he called the “original affluence”. Sahlins wrote: “A fair case can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other condition of society (1968 – quoted by Winterhalder (1993). Windterhalder’s essay, which advocates a neo-classical framework to explain the “original affluence” thesis instead of Sahlins’ own Zen economics, introduces the problematic with a clever comparison to the myth of the busy bee:

“More than ninety years ago entomologist Professor C.F. Hodge marked individ- ual honey bees to study their activities. He observed that between sunrise and sunset no bee worked more than three and one-half hours (see Hubbell 1988: 78). Compare this observation with the commonly held belief captured in the phrase, 'busy as a bee'. In popular wisdom the honeybee stands for bustling productive effort, its labours those of nearly ceaseless toil. Only the beaver equals its reputation as an icon of industriousness.1 But Hodge is right. Bees spend a lot of time doing nothing or wandering through the hive appearing to do nothing in particular. Only intermittently do they work hard (Seeley 1989). Beavers too are active foragers only a small percentage of the time (Belovsky 1984).”

The bee, the leisurely hunter, and sleep will all figure in one way or another in a backward glance at Hume and Rousseau’s conjectural histories of original man. Neither Hume or Rousseau are ‘typical’ Enlightenment figures, but their different philosophical anthropologies did influence two different lines of thought in the Occident.
…

Hume’s essays on economics and social theory were written, according to James Buchan, under Hume’s strategic impulse to introduce himself a second time into the world of the learned, or at least the Edinburgh part of that world, after his first foray, A Treatise of Human Nature, fell stillborn from the press – at least in Hume’s own, retrospective account. Hume wrote the essays while living in his mother’s house, Ninewells, outside of the village of Chirnside. Although Hume’s afterlife has been more lively in metaphysics, his essays certainly gave him a fair place in the prehistory of economics and political theory.

One essay in the second volume, On refinement in the arts, takes up the defense of luxury. The Enlightenment inversion of the values of Christendom made a special case of luxury. Denounced by the Church as a vice, and subject to various taxes, luxury was not only praised by Mandeville and the French libertine school, but praised, specifically, for its social utility. Mandeville’s argument (made in The Fable of the Bees, for that insect's folkloric properties can be made to serve enlightened ends) that private vices can be public virtues, gave a radical foundation to the separation of the secular and the sacred: if we grant, as the New Philosophers held, that government exists to promote the happiness of the people, than giving the sacred secular tools to pursue private vice snuffs out the public benefit – the commerce – deriving from them.

By the time that Hume came to write the essays in 1741, Mandeville’s wicked creed had diffused itself into the circles of the advanced thinkers. Myself, I want to look at Hume’s essay not so much for the defense of luxury as for his characterization of the human happiness that is the essence of public virtue, because it is subtended by what one might call a speculative anthropology – a conjectural history – that is more abundantly expressed in the Natural History of Religion. Against one of the powerful but under-recognized themes of that anthropology – the theme of indolence – I’d like to pit Rousseau’s anthropological conjecture in the Discourse on Inequality.

Here, then, is Hume’s analysis of human happiness:

“Human happiness, according to the most received notions, seems to consist in three ingredients; action,
pleasure, and indolence : And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according
to the particular disposition of the person ; yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting, without destroying,
in some measure, the relish of the whole composition. Indolence or repose, indeed, seems not of itself to contribute much to our enjoyment; but, like sleep, is requisite as an indulgence, to the weakness of human nature, which cannot support an uninterrupted course of business or pleasure. That quick march of the spirits, which takes a man from himself, and chiefly gives satisfaction, does in the end exhaust the mind, and requires some intervals of repose, which, though agreeable for a moment, yet, if prolonged, beget a languor and lethargy, that destroy all enjoyment.”

One should note that, though the structural place of this remark in his essay is directed towards building a case for further sociological observation, in fact, the natural history of the ‘quick march of the spirit’, and the exhaustion attendent upon it that requires leisure and play, has already, in Hume’s Treatise, been given a certain metaphysical, or perhaps I should say, anti-metaphysical, value in a passage highlighted by Buchan:

“But what have I here said, that reflections very refined and metaphysical have little or no influence upon us? This opinion I can scarce forbear retracting, and condemning from my present feeling and experience. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens that, since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
Play and amusement are ‘cures’ to the tangle of reasoning that has made Hume a monster to himself and – projectively – to others. Hume’s fall into monstrosity is imagined as a sort of foundering on an island –that is, it is a fall away from sociability,into what one might call primitive state of being, a Robinson Crusoe-like solitude. I will come back to that image later.
However, if in the Treatise the relaxation of the mind is a sort of film director’s cut that ends the curious metaphysical narrative, in the Natural History of Religion, relaxation – what I will call indolence – assumes a very different historical shape.

Another lizard-like Smeeding: making poverty disappear in our plutocratic era

When you are dealing with a fire, the experts involved are firefighters. When you are dealing with scuba diving, the experts are scuba divers.

But a funny thing happened to expertise on the way to D.C. The experts on poverty are – upper class. Thus, it is no big shock that under the plutocracy beloved by Obamacrats and Republicans, we are getting a new survey of poverty that, well, tweaks it. And, abracadabra, makes it disappear! Via the New York Times report on poverty spindled and mutilated through the hands of experts, we get things like this:

“One explanation can be found in programs the official count ignores: food stamps and tax credits. Combined the two programs delivered $221 billion across the country last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than doubling since 2006.
In Charlotte, Angelique Melton was among the beneficiaries. A divorced mother of two, Ms. Melton, 42, had worked her way up to a $39,000 a year position at a construction management firm. But as building halted in 2009, Ms. Melton lost her job.
Struggling to pay the rent and keep the family adequately fed, she took the only job she could find: a part-time position at Wal-Mart that paid less than half her former salary. With an annual income of about $7,500 — well below the poverty line of $17,400 for a family of three — Ms. Melton was officially poor.
Unofficially she was not.
After trying to stretch her shrunken income, Ms. Melton signed up for $3,600 a year in food stamps and received $1,800 in nutritional supplements from the Women, Infants and Children program. And her small salary qualified her for large tax credits, which arrive in the form of an annual check — in her case for about $4,000.
Along with housing aid, those subsidies gave her an annual income of nearly $18,800 — no one’s idea of rich, but by the new count not poor.”

Ah, the new count! The new count in inflation in the 90s – by the magic of hedonics! – broke the back of inflation by counting it otherwise. The new count of the unemployed – by ignoring the long term unemployed and not counting pesky populations like the millions in prison and such – gives us a great employment rate we can wave at the social democratic countries and say, ha! And now the ‘new count” in poverty means that three people living on $18,000 per year are not poor!
The heartening stories, here, should stop the socialist stampede dead in its tracks. On the one hand, we ask people –productive, caring people – like Goldman Sachs CEOs and hedgefund traders to pay millions – millions of dollars! In taxes on their billions of dollars. They can barely come up with the incentive to work, many of them. And on the other hand, we have the so called poor rolling in the dough. Look at another of the newly minted middle class in the NYT article:

“Such is the case for John William Springs, 69, a retired city worker in Charlotte who gets nearly $12,000 a year in Social Security and disability checks. That leaves him about $1,300 above the poverty threshold for a single adult his age — officially not poor. Then again, Mr. Springs had a heart attack last summer and struggles with lung disease. Factor in the $2,500 a year that he estimates he spends on medicine, and Mr. Springs crosses the statistical line into poverty.
An upbeat survivor of a lifetime of need, Mr. Springs fills his prescriptions in partial amounts and argues the poverty counters got him right the first time.
“I ain’t poor,” he said. “I eat. I got a roof over my head.”

Now, let’s turn to the experts! I won't waste time over the Heritage empty suit who is quoted in order to even out NYT's quota of "rightwing pointyheads" and please the publisher. Lets' turn to the supposedly non-partisan experts. Let's turn to the man bearing the brilliantly Dickensian name of Timothy Smeeding - his parents missed a real opportunity by not naming him Uriah Heep Smeeding - who is an economist in Wisconsin . This Smeeding did a ‘study’ of poverty that is cited with an appropriate hush in the NYT article:
“Virtually every effort to take a fuller view — counting more income and more expenses — shows poverty rising more slowly in the recession than the official data suggests. That is true of localized studies in New York City and Wisconsin and at least four different national data sets that the Census Bureau publishes. While the official national measure shows a rise of 9.8 million people, the fuller census measures show a range from 4.5 million to 4.8 million.
“That’s a big difference,” said Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin who oversaw the study in that state. “It’s about time we started counting the programs we use to fight poverty.”

So who is this Smeeding? More importantly, on the basis that the deep diving scuba diver is our expert, how far has Smeeding dived into poverty?

Well, Timothy Smeeding is not doing badly. He collects two salaries at the University of Wisconsin, according to the salary database, one for being a prof, one for being the head of an institute studying poverty. And he thus receives a grand total of $244,444 dollars a year from Wisconsin. But lets also include his other compensations, shall we? Since apparently in the whole new world of counting compensation, if you get a deduction on your mortgage, that becomes part of your real compensation, and if you get a tax credit, that, too, goes into your income. How fun! If you get medical insurance from the Wisconsin employee system, that, too, becomes part of your compensation. If we are upping the ante on who is poor in America, it is funny that we aren’t pushing the 244,444 dollar type into another tax bracket – say, the marginal rate above 250,000 dollars. I’m sure Timothy Smeeding, then, would concede he was rich. Too bad he hasn’t been asked how a rich man like him has become an expert on poverty.
Hegel compared Kant’s critique of philosophy to trying to learn to swim on dry ground. Smeeding seems to have succeeded amply in this field, since he seemingly knows just how a woman with two children is going to survive with 18,000 dollars per year – in her total compensation package, including inkind support – without being poor. I have to congratulate him on a job well done.
In other words, we have, here, another lizard-like predator, another intellectual gangsta, who is going to make Mr. Springs' life, and Ms. Melton’s, that much harder.
One hopes that Smeeding will someday have an opportunity to fully experience Mr. Spring's life. To become an expert in deed as well as an expert on a plus +250,000 on poverty. One really really does.

Uncle Sam's 600 billion dollar gift to the wealthy

Liberals (and here I will be generous and even include the center right krewe at the New Republic) have a weakness for the idea that income distributes wealth downwards. In this takedown of the conservative claim that income inequality hasn’t increased in the past thirty years, Matt O’brien writes:

“Pethokoukis [the AEI economist} thinks that a more thorough accounting for taxes and benefits like healthcare or pensions yield a different picture of inequality. And that is somewhat true. After-tax inequality is certainly smaller than pre-tax inequality. But it is not as true as it used to be. The CBO recently confirmed that federal taxes and transfers are less redistributive now than they were in 1979. The same is true for benefits.”



Into this picture, ladies and gentlemen, let me present two very simple concepts. One is the monopoly premium granted to corporations by that wonderful invention called intellectual property rights. The other is that equally wonderful invention called government guarantees for the financial and big business sector. It has slipped our minds, perhaps, that the Fed spread out loans totaling 16 trillion dollars at one percent and below to our high flying investors, lending a helping hand to hundreds of hedge funds, banks, and businesses. Now, to get that kind of loan normally, the charge, in the 2008-2010 period, would have been probably 4 points higher on those loans, and in many cases the price would have soared to the interest charged on Greek bonds. So, let’s see, handy calculator please: if we are talking four percentage points, 16 trillion, that’s, scribble scribble, about 600 billion dollars. Wow, nice, eh? I’d jack that up a bit, considering the collateral that was offered. So 600 billion to 800 billion was pocketed by the wealthiest in 2 years – hey, really sweet!


I suspect that there is not a fortune among the upper 1 percent that has not gained an extra million or ten from the government’s wonderful largesse in these troubled times.

So please, spare me the tales of the downward distribution of money by Uncle Sam. That is the myth.

Michael Lewis's sci fi fantasy

I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. Coming home on the train from Amboise, I finally got to his article on Californin in Vanity Fair. And that's when I had my fan crash moment. Say it ain't so, Michael!

Business Insider dubbed the article a ‘love letter’ to Arnold Schwarzenegger – and unfortunately, this is true. Lewis’s Schwarzenegger bears an odd relation to the real Schwarzenegger, who, spectators of the first decade of the Bush era will recall, was the man who rode to power against Gray Davis by promising tax cuts for business and a tres Bushian solution to California’s debt problem, which I’ve commented on before:

“And now, of course, the bills for the fun filled political vacation come due. When Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the first thing he did was Charge IT! – to a round of cheers from those scrimpin and savin’ burgermen, working all day, thinking of Jesus Christ all night. After all, why pay for the structures you need every day when – as Mr. Magician said in that beautiful Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Reagan-y Kinda Life, – the magic of the marketplace makes lower taxes bring in more revenue! We owe it to ourselves! We can’t surrender to terrorists! We can’t return to the days of tax and spend! Class warfare! As the man says:


Quelli che son dentro la merda fin qui, oh yeah
Quelli che con una bella dormita passa tutto anche il cancro, oh yeah
Quelli che, quelli che non possono crederci anche adesso che la terra e’ rotonda, oh yeah, oh yeah
Quelli che hanno paura del aeroplano, oh yeah
Quelli che non hanno mai avuto un incidente mortale, oh yeah
Quelli che non ci sentiamo
Quelli che a un certo punto della vita ci vorrebbe una arma segreta, ostia, oh yeah”

Or, in plain English, Gray Davis was dumped by voters who couldn’t stand that oatmeal-soul suit, and in his place Schwarzenegger played the part of a muscle toned Father Christmas, as outlined in a NYT article from 2005:

“The governor's budget relies on continued borrowing, using some of the proceeds of a $15 billion bond issue that Mr. Schwarzenegger won voter approval for last year. Although the bond proceeds helped to get the state through a severe fiscal crisis, the borrowing will have long-term consequences, said Fred Silva, a budget expert at the Public Policy Institute of California and a former fiscal aide in the state Legislature.
"The amount of borrowed money is going to be a budget overhang for many years," Mr. Silva said.
In years past, he said, state policy makers tried to keep the cost of debt service below 4 percent of state revenues. "Now it's going to be twice that," Mr. Silva said. "That's real money."

Hmm, a 15 billion dollar bond issue? And to think... the topic never came up in Michael Lewis’ article about our Good Gubernorator fighting the special interests to bring financial sanity to California. the topic of taxes, the taxes to, well, pay for things like increases in the cost of running the state, the taxes that Schwarzenegger ran against – these, too, never came up. The fact that Schwarzenegger was running against the Governor who wanted to actually pay for the goodies with taxes never came up.

Instead, Lewis’s idea is that the people, the grubby vulgarians whose income, over the 2000-2010 period, went down, somehow became addicted to all the good things of life and became… well, irresponsible.Not the good serfs of yore! Because the brain has a reptilian core, apparently, and can’t handle opulence. He's actually serious:

"The road out of Vallejo passes directly through the office of Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.”

Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

So it goes. It used to be, in the roaring 2000s, that it is your money - and now it turns out that it is your debt, you little rat fuck with the reptilian brain? Oh, and that debt is so tasty!

The idea that the American people went on a terrible shopping spree that ruined the economy has now been so inscribed in the reptilian core of the elite brain that it has erased, well, 2001-2008. Remember remember - but it is so hard to remember! Still, as I dimly recall, we took care of the 2001 recession because householders could be just like big companies and unlock the liquidity in their houses through a variety of new and puppy friendly loans! Of course, remembering the giant sucking sound of a tax cut happy elite going for seconds by getting that little extra helping of interest and then happily slicing, dicing and giving themselves bonuses for securitized debt – why that requires such a big memory capacity that the poor reptilian core of the brain starts to pant and gives up. Instead, it wants to see the giant ex-Governor of California in his latest action epic, Mr. Fiscal Responsibility – you know, the one in which new memory is implanted into the old brain so that a certain history didn’t happen, and a certain governor didn’t solve a certain crisis by going for the 15 billion dollar bond issue.

So alas: although Lewis’s concentration on our pension problem is half right, it is a one-eyed correctness: the pension problem was in the end a tax problem. If you don’t want to tax businesses, which is where the money traditionally is, and the wealthy for your social services, and you hire people to staff things like schools and hospitals with low salaries but high future benefits, eventually, you are so fucked. By nice people in business suits, and by Hollywood stars. …
Incidentally, for those of us old enough to remember the California election, Schwarzenneger’s anti-tax and pro-charge it policy was endorsed by ... Warren Buffett.

ps - what the hell! Might as well stretch this post out. The public pension plans that Lewis is writing about are victims of the same investment strategies by which the upper 1 percent has been looting the bottom 99 for years. This is from that now forgetten decade, the 00s - in fact, I wrote this a tremendous six years ago. Wow, that is way too long to remember anything!

I have seen the future, and it is United
Anyone interested in what Bush’s reformed Social Security would look like should look at the NYT article about United Airline’s pension fund today. It is a fun article. Here's how the movie goes: Wall Street persuades a viable pension fund to redo its safe strategy of investing for a much more groovy strategy of growth growth growth in equities. Big money is made by everybody on the Street as the pension fund shrinks, disappears, goes into a black hole. Everybody is very sorry that the beneficiaries of the fund have nothing left, but everybody also points out – the beneficiaries are scum. Mere workers. Pilots, for god’s sakes. Imagine, some stewardess somewhere is bawling cause her measely 200 thou went to some really nice Manhattan bistros. As if she deserved it. The best and the brightest, in the new Hobbesian Randian world, feast upon such little lambs.

Bush’s plan has those advantages too. By targeting middle America’s vast wealth and accelerating the burgling of it, in a record amount of time the top 10 percent income percentile can capture even more of America’s wealth. This money will be used much more efficiently. For instance, many retiring congressmen will be able to find lobbying jobs that will launch them into the higher regions of financial security when the theft is completed. Meanwhile, in a blow against the French, Americans will work harder. They will have to, as their retirement will be approximately equal, in value, to the price you can get for confetti that’s been cleaned off of streets and sidewalks after the parade is over.

The first three grafs of the article map a strategy that is almost a perfect parallel of the Bush reforms:

“HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.

So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.

Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."

Wilsman has got to be a traitor, and one hopes he will be roundly denounced on the rightwing media circuit. More voices like his would blow the perfect caper. He obviously wasn’t clued in that DJ 36,000 was just around the corner.

As even the article admits, the result of the Bush-like investment strategy proved highly satisfactory:

“While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.”

Million dollar payouts for high level failure have become America’s secret weapon for achieving true greatness. As for the employees – they merely work for a living. Piss on em, as the old Wall Street saying goes. Also, the federal government has proven that almost any problem can be solved if you have a gigantic enough credit card. Put those pensions on the card and have the Chinese buy more of our dollars, as they say in the corridors of the Treasury department.
Here’s a nice window into what Social Security is gonna look like once we get it all licked into shape:
“United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.”
I, for one, am totally psyched.
Three more irresistible grafs. Your congress at work!

"While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.

"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."