Kevin Drum

Twitter, Addiction, and Changing Social Norms

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 8:48 PM PDT

I see there's some discussion of Twitter today on the blogosphere. I'm going to use it to make the most outlandish point possible. Watch as I attempt this death-defying feat.

Ahem. So Nick Beaudrot gave up Twitter for Lent. And he liked it! "After two days without Twitter, I barely missed it; by the second week, I was downright happy not to be thinking about 'staying on top' of my feed." Ezra Klein says "amen":

The problem isn’t Twitter, exactly. Twitter, like so much else, is excellent when consumed in moderation. But it’s also an unusually addictive product, and it has certain unusual properties that help it crowd out other information streams.

....[Compared to those other information streams,] Twitter elicits a more poisonous information anxiety. It moves so fast that if I’m not continuously checking in, I completely lose track of the conversation — and it’s almost impossible to figure out what happened three hours ago, much less two days ago. I can’t save Twitter for later, and thus there’s always a pressure to check Twitter now. Twitter ends up taking more of my time than I’d like it to, as there’s a constant reason to check it rather than, say, reading a magazine article.

It's not just Twitter. It's broader than that. Within the verbal, well-educated, politically conscious social group that most bloggers belong to, we've always been expected to keep up with things. The problem is that "keeping up" increasingly means being surrounded by an endless torrent of tweets, texts, blogs, and Tumblrs demanding our attention. With traditional physical forms of news consumption no longer acting as natural limits, the risk of relapse into obsession is never more than a ringtone away, with nothing but raw self discipline as our last line of defense. Modern social norms don't allow us to turn this stuff off completely, but for those of us who are vulnerable to this kind of addiction, ever advancing technology conspires to turn us into nervous wrecks if we don't.

You may or may not feel much sympathy for this problem. I don't, because I don't have any problem limiting my news consumption. I dip into Twitter whenever I feel like it, I don't bother with Tumblr, and I mark all my RSS feeds read at the end of the day whether I've actually read them or not. For lots of people, though, it's not that easy. It's a real headache.

So here's my outlandish point: if you do feel any sympathy for this problem, you should probably also feel some sympathy for conservative warnings about the breakdown of traditional social norms. In our own social group (verbal, educated, etc.), we tend to look at things like declining marriage rates and easier access to drugs as generally neutral or positive. That's because we mostly have the self discipline to regulate our own behavior even when laws and norms loosen up, and we have robust social networks to help us out if our self discipline breaks down. But that's not universally true in every social group. Many of the things that seem harmless to us—the way Twitter seems harmless to me—are real problems for people with poor educations, poor impulse control, and weak social networks.

We probably don't think about this as much as we should, and conservatives don't help by crying wolf over every single social change they happen to dislike. But it's something to think about anyway.

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Hating on the Rentier Class

—By Kevin Drum

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 2:23 PM PDT

Mike Konczal wrote a column over the weekend suggesting that an "anti-rentier" agenda had some potential to unite left and right. Reihan Salam comments:

Konczal also identifies tensions between what we might describe as the anti-rentier agenda of the right, which tends to focus on how state interventions serve the interests of incumbents and wealthy, influential individuals, and the anti-rentier agenda of the left, which is more concerned about the dangers of wealth concentration as such and the market power of firms that flourish in an open, lightly-regulated economy, due to first-mover advantages, network effects, and much else.

Is this really a serious agenda anywhere on the right? I've occasionally seen committed libertarians make the point that state interventions often serve the interests of economic incumbents, but even that's rare.¹ Outside of that, there's Tim Carney and....

Anyone else? Any actual working Republican politicians, for example? Maybe I'm missing something, but it sure seems to me that the Republican Party is pretty firmly dedicated to defending the privileges of big corporations and the rich. Has there been a tectonic shift that I'm not aware of?

¹It's even rarer to see them arguing against state intervention because it would benefit the rich too much. In fact, I'm not sure I ever remember seeing an example of this.

Why Hasn't the Mortgage Business Rebounded?

—By Kevin Drum

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 11:40 AM PDT

Nick Timiraos notes today that Federal Reserve governor Elizabeth Duke is worried about the fact that after years of being too loose, mortgage standards may now be too tight:

So why haven’t mortgage credit standards eased up even a little bit, as they have for other consumer loans such as credit cards and autos? First, home prices have fallen so sharply that lenders are worried future price declines and job losses will leave them with more defaulted mortgages.

But Duke noted another more surprising cause: the Fed’s campaign to push down interest rates means lenders haven’t had to work very hard to drum up business. Together with federal efforts to ease refinancing rules, low rates have produced a surge of refinancing business. This has delivered a steady stream of high-quality, low-risk borrowers in an industry that already has shrunk significantly. Capacity-constrained lenders have “less incentive to pursue harder-to-complete or less profitable loan applications,” said Duke.

I dunno. I was chatting with a friend the other day who's trying to refinance his house. You'll have to take my word for this, but he's basically about the most reliable, creditworthy, upper middle class person you could hope to meet. Good income, reliable job, longtime bank customer, etc. etc. And yet, his bank keeps finding things to be nervous about. This should be a slam-dunk refi, but it keeps dragging out.

It's just an anecdote. But it makes me wonder if even the refi biz is quite as healthy as Duke suggests. If you have any horror stories of your own, feel free to share them in comments.

America Has Very Few Ineffective Teachers....Maybe

—By Kevin Drum

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 10:12 AM PDT

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about all the shiny new teacher evaluation systems being used around the country, and how they're basically rating nearly every teacher as effective (or, better yet, highly effective). Only about 3 or 4 percent of teachers are being rated ineffective. Dana Goldstein comments on whether ed reformers think this is a reasonable number:

I've asked a number of prominent accountability hawks that question over the past six years and the answer I've heard most frequently is "5 to 10 percent." As Matthew DiCarlo explains, that estimate is culled from the research of the ubiquitous Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, and by that standard, these evaluation systems are already half way to where they are intended to be, a reasonable outcome for something so new.

My gut feeling is that 5 percent is probably about right and 10 percent is too high. This isn't based on anything specific about teaching, just on my experience in white-collar jobs. Go to any large corporation and take a look through the annual reviews given to its white-collar workers. How many are rated at the bottom level, the one where you're in danger of being fired if you don't improve? I'd say about 5 percent. I don't have any good reason to think teachers are much different from other white-collar workers, so I'd guess that about 5 percent of them are ineffective too.

Goldstein has some interesting historical background on teacher evaluation systems that makes her skeptical that the new ones will work any better than they have in the past. But what struck me about the Times article was the way it described how various school districts came up with their numbers. There was nothing subtle about it in Florida:

One Leon County principal, Melissa Fullmore of Ruediger Elementary school in Tallahassee, said that had it been solely up to her, one or two of her teachers would have been graded “highly effective,” the top category. Three would have been marked “needs improvement,” one rung up from the bottom, and the rest would have fallen under “effective.”

But because Leon County set the test-score bar so low, when their marks came out, all but one were highly effective, and the other was categorized as effective. “I wouldn’t put stock in the numbers,” Ms. Fullmore said.

The same was true at Springwood Elementary School nearby. “We had three or four teachers that were rated as ‘needs improvement’ on the observation, but due to changes in the cut scores, they were all bumped up to effective,” Dr. Christopher Small, the principal, said.

Officials in another county, Alachua, set scores relatively high, but when only 78 percent of teachers were deemed highly effective or effective, and when they saw how lenient other districts were, they set them much lower; ultimately, 99.4 percent of teachers were rated effective or highly effective. “It’s inconsistent, it’s unfair and it’s unscientific,” the superintendent, Dan Boyd, wrote in a letter to The Gainesville Sun criticizing how the state’s new evaluations had been carried out.

So test scores, far from tightening up evaluations, actually made them looser because districts deliberately set the cut scores to insure that very few teachers would be graded as ineffective.

This is only one state, and Florida's new evaluation system is, well, new. What's more, even the 2 or 3 percent of failing teachers under this system is apparently more than under the old system, in which "roughly 100 percent of them were rated satisfactory." So it would be unwise to rush to any conclusions about this. Still, it gives you pause for thought.

Apparently Voters Don't Know Much About the People They Vote For

—By Kevin Drum

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 9:14 AM PDT

California has recently enacted two electoral reforms. In June 2010, we passed an open primary initiative that allowed the top two finishers to go on the general election, even if both are from the same party, and a few months later we passed a second initiative that created a nonpartisan commission to draw district lines in congressional races. Supporters of these initiatives hoped that they would push Californians to vote for more moderate candidates.

Over at the Monkey Cage, a team of researchers reports on a study suggesting that the open primary law failed to accomplish this. Their methodology strikes me as a bit iffy, so I'd take it with a grain of salt, but I was interested in what their data said about why the open primary system seemingly failed to change things:

While voters are generally quite moderate and were willing to cast crossover votes (roughly 12% of our participants who voted for a major party candidate did so), they largely failed to discern ideological differences between extreme and moderate candidates of the same party, particularly if they were challengers.

....Of particular interest in the second graph—which includes only Republican candidates—are the respondent placements for District 24. Abel Maldonado is a well-known moderate politician in California....His potential constituents rated him at roughly 5.25 on the 7-point scale. However, they gave almost the same rating to his fellow GOP challenger Chris Mitchum, a little-known actor and Tea Party candidate.

Again, I'd take this with a grain of salt. It's one study, the sample sizes are fairly small, and it's early days for open primaries. Still, I'd like to see further research specifically on the question of how accurately voters assess candidates. Certainly it's my sense that plenty of primary campaigns are brutal affairs in which it's crystal clear who the more extreme candidates are. But maybe that's true only in the high-profile races that tend to get national coverage. In others, maybe voters really don't have much of an idea of who's the centrist and who's out on the fringe. I'd certainly be curious to see this studied further.

How the Demise of Antitrust Enforcement Affects Your Eyesight

—By Kevin Drum

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 7:41 AM PDT

The New York Times features a short video today about Warby Parker, the online eyeglass company that "wants to do everything themselves, from designing to manufacturing to selling the product." I didn't learn much about Warby Parker from this piece, but I question the Times' claim that they truly "want" to do all that stuff. More likely, they simply have no choice because the United States government no longer bothers enforcing antitrust law. Luxottica's stranglehold on the design, manufacture, and retail sales of eyewear is so strong that any wannabe competitor has no real choice except to do everything themselves. This is why a simple pair of replacement lenses now costs 300 bucks at LensCrafters, even though the technology existed to sell them for a hundred bucks two decades ago.

Anyway, good for Warby Parker, and I hope they manage to build a retail presence someday too. But their attempt to make an entrepreneurial buck is a lot harder than it ought to be. It's just one small example of the demise of antitrust enforcement over the past few decades, which is itself a small example of the way that the rich have not just rigged the rules of the capitalist game for their own benefit, but convinced everyone it's for their own good. We are all victims of economic Stockholm Syndrome these days.

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The Gay Marriage Debate Probably Hasn't Affected Straight Marriage Much

—By Kevin Drum

| Sun Mar. 31, 2013 4:09 PM PDT

Ross Douthat on the coming liberal victory over gay marriage:

Whether people think they’re on the side of God or of History, magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.

That's true! Also true of practically every other disagreement, big or small, among human beings. The exceptions are rare enough that they usually become famous.

In any case, what Douthat wants lefties to magnanimously acknowledge is the possibility that the growing acceptance of gay marriage, even if it's a net positive, might have contributed to things like the decline in traditional marriage rates and the rise in out-of-wedlock births. He concedes, of course, that those are long-term trends and the Great Recession has made them worse:

But there is also a certain willed naïveté to the idea that the advance of gay marriage is unrelated to any other marital trend. For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side [...] pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation.

Two comments. First, I think this is ironic. My sense of the debate is that the procreation argument was introduced by opponents of same-sex marriage, not supporters. Those advocating SSM just wanted gays and lesbians to be able to marry each other. It was opponents, after realizing that Old Testament jeremiads weren't cutting it any more, who began claiming that SSM should remain banned because gays couldn't have children. This turned out to be both a tactical and strategic disaster, partly because the argument was so transparently silly (what about old people? what about women who had hysterectomies? etc.) and partly because it suggested that SSM opponents didn't have any better arguments to offer. But disaster or not, they're the ones responsible for making this into a cornerstone of the anti-SSM debates in the aughts. Without that, I doubt that most ordinary people would ever have connected gay marriage to procreation within straight marriages in the first place. If this really has had an impact on traditional marriage, the anti-SSM forces have mostly themselves to blame.

But they probably shouldn't blame themselves very much, because I don't think the demographic details back up Douthat's case. Take a look at the demographic groups where marriage has declined: very famously, it's been among poor and working class women, and especially among poor and working class black women. I'll concede that I might be off base here, but I think Douthat is assuming that recondite arguments over procreation and gay marriage, which are common in his highly-educated social group, are also common in the groups where marriage has declined. I doubt that very much. What's more, support for gay marriage is lowest in precisely the groups that have abandoned traditional marriage in the largest numbers. If the procreation argument were really affecting marriage rates, you'd expect to see the biggest impact in the groups where this argument is most commonly advanced, and in the groups that most strongly support gay marriage. Instead we've seen the opposite.

The economic and social forces behind the decline in marriage are decades old: stagnant incomes for men, growing incomes for women, an incarceration explosion that's left black male communities decimated, and a feminist revolution that made single parenthood more socially acceptable. Against that backdrop, I guess I find it unlikely that a fairly esoteric debate about procreation, which took place mostly among the chattering classes, had a significant impact on the people who are actually abandoning marriage. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, though.

The Rules of the Game

—By Kevin Drum

| Sat Mar. 30, 2013 2:17 PM PDT

Here's a little something to noodle on while I'm lounging in my easy chair trying to solve this week's Saturday Stumper crossword puzzle. First, you need to click here and go read a post by Matt Yglesias. I'll wait.

You didn't read it, did you? Fine. I know you're busy, so here's the nickel summary. Matt is talking about the distribution of income in America, and he makes the point that modern capitalism is fundamentally based on a set of fairly complex rules created by humans. There's no natural, "default" distribution of income, it all depends on what rules we agree on:

It takes an awful lot of politics to get an advanced capitalist economy up and running and generating wealth....You go through the trouble of creating advanced industrial capitalism because that's a good way to create a lot of goods and services. But the creation of goods and services would be pointless unless it served the larger cause of human welfare. Collecting taxes and giving stuff to people is every bit as much a part of advancing that cause as creating the set of institutions that allows for the wealth-creation in the first place.

The specifics of how best to do this all are (to say the least) contentious and not amenable to resolution by blog-length noodling. But the intuition that there's some coherent account of what the "market distribution" would be absent public policy is mistaken. You have policy choices all the way down.

Matt's argument is a common one, and I've seen it made dozens of times in various ways. What's more, it's an argument with a lot of force. It really is true that income distribution depends on the rules of the game, and it can favor the rich or the poor depending on who sets up the rules. There are practical limits to how much you can muck with the rules and keep your economy humming along, but within these limits there's nothing inherently natural about one set of rules vs. another.

So here's the thing to noodle on. Despite having seen this argument made dozens of times, and despite its obvious force, I've never really seen it made in a way that's very persuasive at a gut level. Conservatives have done a very good job of convincing the public that rules which favor the rich really are the most natural ones, and you fiddle with them at your peril. Liberals, conversely, haven't done a very good job of convincing the public that a different, less business and wealth-centric set of rules, would be equally natural, and would benefit more people.

Why is that? It's one thing to acknowledge that changing the rules is hard because rich people have a lot of political power and don't want to see them changed. But that hardly even matters until you can make the egalitarian economic argument in a way that's convincing to the public in the first place. That's apparently very hard to do, but I'm not quite sure why. Guesses welcome in comments.

Friday Cat Blogging - 29 March 2013

—By Kevin Drum

| Fri Mar. 29, 2013 12:05 PM PDT

Marian bought a new comforter for our bed a few days ago, and it's rather thicker and more cushiony than our old one. Domino adores it. She's actually abandoned her favorite American Airlines blanket and now spends every morning plonked down in the lovely, luxurious nest of the new comforter. She is like the princess and the pea.

Next week: the return of quiltblogging!

President's Budget May Include Entitlement Cuts

—By Kevin Drum

| Fri Mar. 29, 2013 11:45 AM PDT

Damian Paletta reports that President Obama may endorse entitlement cuts when he releases his budget on April 10:

Including entitlement curbs would be notable, as Republicans often have criticized the White House for offering such steps in private negotiations but never fully embracing them as part of an official budget plan.

....The White House declined to offer details of what would appear in the budget, but top officials have said negotiations with the GOP are near an impasse. "We are in a place now where it's difficult for us to reach an agreement when you have a firm bloc of Republican senators who are refusing to compromise," White House principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said.

It's sort of interesting how little has leaked about this. In order for the interagency review to be done and printed copies of the budget to be ready on April 10, pretty much all the major decisions must have been made by now. But the only actual example of an entitlement cut that Paletta's piece mentions is adoption of chained CPI for Social Security, a policy that Obama has been committed to for quite a while. If there's more, the president's team is doing a pretty good job of keeping it quiet.

More leaks, please.

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