I missed the memo about the new criteria for hypocrisy, so I’d like a little clarification here. Are Catholics now required to vote solely on the basis of Catholic issues, and union workers solely on the basis of union issues, and billionaires solely on the basis of billionaire issues? Or is it only gays who are forbidden to prioritize, say, foreign affairs and tax policy? And what’s to become of the multifaceted? If you’re a gay Jewish small business owner, to which brand of parochialism are you now in thrall? Please advise.

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I realize that some will criticize the NAACP for over-reacting here, or for mis-reacting. But cut them a break. You don’t see them doing anything truly loonytunes, like, say, commanding the amorphous Tea Party movement to “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.” Right?

A hat tip to our frequent commenter Ken B. for pointing me to the video.

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Last year, I almost bought a Lexus RX450 SUV. There were a lot of great features to this car, including a USB port for plugging in your iPod so you can control it directly from the dashboard. I know, I know, there are probably a lot of other cars offering this feature now, but I’d never seen it before and I loved it. At least, that is, until I tried it. Because it turns out that if you want to play a particular song through this interface—say the 1100th song in alphabetical order on your iPod—the only way to do it is to page through about 110 screens, each displaying 10 song titles. Moreover, each time you hit the button to move to the next screen, the top song on that screen starts to play. So before you can listen to, say, Fred Small’s If I Were a Moose, you’ve got to sit through about 110 snippets of non-moose-related material. (There is no way to reorganize in any order other than alphabetical.) For this reason—and this reason alone—I didn’t buy the car.

But what’s really on my mind is the new $800 million Jet Blue Terminal at John F. Kennedy airport, unveiled a bit over a year ago with much fanfare regarding its fine dining, high-class retail outlets, comfortable lounges, and terminals that allow you to order food brought directly to your boarding gate. All of which is true, and all of which is thoroughly overshadowed by the seemingly random flashing lights and screeching sirens that blare for several minutes at a time until you’d happily pour boiling oil in your nostrils if it were the price of escape. During one two-hour layover last week, this happened at least four times; during another it happened only once—but the retailers I talked to, who are there every day, told me that the first experience was pretty typical. (Plus, once is more than enough—especially if your traveling companion, like mine, happens to be susceptible to day-long migraines that are triggered by flashing lights and screeching sirens.)

Mind you, these sirens and lights serve absolutely no purpose. Everyone in the terminal ignores them (except for covering their eyes and ears). And even if you wanted to respond to them, you couldn’t, because there are no posted instructions about what you’re supposed to do when an alarm goes off. Their only effect is to make the terminal so very unpleasant that I will never connect through it again as long as there is any viable alternative.

So—huge project, done 99% right, but the 1% that’s wrong drives your customers away. Do you have a name for this phenomenon and/or other examples to share?

PS—I know, from email and from comments on other posts, that a lot of you want to hear about my religion debate with Dinesh D’Souza. I’m thinking that rather than summarize it from memory, I should first review the video (since I might be a shade less brilliant on the video than in memory). Give me a couple of days!

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So why the singular focus on teachers? The answer, of course, is that unlike plumbers or cab drivers or pharmaceutical workers or computer programmers, teachers, through their unions, were major contributors to the Obama campaign.

All victorious politicians engage in the unsavory practice of diverting spoils to their most vigorous supporters at everyone else’s expense. In this, the current administration may be no more blameworthy than any other. But I’m pretty sure that sending out the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to defend these political payoffs marks a new sort of low. Traditionally, the Council is composed of first-rate academics whose job is to give good counsel and remain above the political fray. Shame on the President for debasing that noble mission, and shame on Christy Romer for going along with it.

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I have never tried to count the times I have read a newspaper article explaining that students are bored with math that has no visible practical application, and follows with an example of a teacher, or club, that rectifies the situation in some novel and engaging way.

In the present case a class has built a sculpture that resembles a graph of a modulated wave motion. Of all the practical, real-world
applications of mathematics! It is as practical as a snowman.

Why doesn’t anyone ask for real-world applications of table tennis? What a bore any game must be, that has no real-world application! Why do kids stand for it? Ping-pong again? Ugh.

But I can think of something: Let’s all make a model of a ping-pong ball in the school yard, seventy feet high, blocking all the entrances and thus preventing all us students from entering the (ugh) school. Then we can take our fishing poles and torn straw hats out from under our beds and, with the hats on our heads and fishing poles over our shoulders, all traipse together down the dusty road to Norman Rockwell’s house.

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“It’s now crystal clear what the Tea Party stands for” says Frank Rich midway through a column that makes it crystal clear what Frank Rich stands for, and it isn’t pretty.

Whatever you may think about the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a whole, it indisputably narrows property rights by allowing politicians to dictate the policies of private businesses. Not only is it perfectly reasonable to find that at least a little disturbing, it’s perfectly unreasonable not to find it a little disturbing—even if your ultimate judgment is that it’s a necessary means to a desirable end. Even avid supporters of the Patriot Act ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about privacy, even avid supporters of capital punishment ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about false convictions, and even avid supporters of the Civil Rights Act ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about property rights.

Frank Rich, who equates Rand Paul’s expression of those concerns with nostalgia for the Confederacy, thereby makes himself as scurrilous as those who equate reservations about the Patriot Act with being “on the side of the terrorists”. The “gotcha” game is bad enough when a single thoughtless remark becomes the pretext for dismissing an entire movement. Here the pretext is a single thoughtful remark.

If we are to discredit everyone who is capable of subtler thought than Frank Rich, then there is no hope for the level of public discourse.

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Last week in Boston, a water main broke, rendering tap water undrinkable (unless it was boiled). This inspired the journalism majors at Boston station WHDH to produce some highly emotional footage about two tragic side effects—side effects which, as far as it was possible to tell based on everything they teach in journalism school, were entirely unrelated.

First, we had the report on price gouging, featuring a woman weeping—-weeping!—-because her son had been charged $1 a bottle instead of the recent sale price of $3.99 for a case of 24. Then, we had the entirely separate report on frustrated consumers who had visited five stores and/or waited in long lines to buy bottled water. Apparently nobody at WHDH thought to ask how much longer those lines might have been if prices hadn’t risen.

Nor, apparently, have the folks at WHDH ever learned that the whole point of prices is that they adjust quickly to changes in market conditions, and that that’s a good thing. Even the convenience store owner who is a pure altruist and refuses to profit from a crisis would be well advised to raise the price of water and donate the proceeds to charity, rather than allowing all of the available water to be snatched up by whoever happens to arrive first or elbow everyone else out of the way.

In case you think I’m leaving something out, here’s the video footage from the two separate reports—one on prices and one on quantities. (Gee, if only there were some way to relate price to quantity! Maybe somebody could invent a graph with two axes….).
With a hat tip to my former student Noah Bennett:

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If rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier over the last fifty years, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?

Wait a minute, now. Self-reported happiness has been flat for fifty years despite rising incomes. Self-reported happiness has also been flat for fifty years despite dramatic increases in leisure and environmental quality. (Since 1965, the average American has gained about six hours a week of leisure—the equivalent of seven vacation weeks a year.) So why aren’t Bok and Kolbert asking why we bother to come home from the office, take vacations, and clean our air and water?

Either you take this happiness stuff seriously or you don’t. If you do, you can’t just pick and choose the policy implications you happen to like. If these numbers mean we have nothing to gain from earning more, then they also mean we have nothing to gain from working less.

As for me, I don’t have to worry about the policy implications because unlike Kolbert, I don’t think self-reported happiness tells us anything at all about actual happiness. If a pollster asks me “Are you happy?”, the question I’m going to answer is “Are you happier than your friends seem to be?”. Regardless of the ambient level of happiness, about half of us will always answer “No”.

A colleague of mine observes that the average American man is about 2 inches taller than a hundred years ago. But you’d never learn that from a survey that asks people “Are you tall?”. That’s because a 5′9″ man would probably have answered “yes” a hundred years ago and “no” today. And likewise, people might be far happier today than a hundred years ago, but you’d never learn that from a survey that asks “Are you happy?”

It’s downright dangerous to give credence to this sort of nonsense. It leads people like Kolbert to observe that Nigerians, with a per capita income of fourteen hundred dollars, rate themselves as happy as the Japanese, with twenty five times the per capita income. Kolbert, channeling public policy professor Carol Graham, entertains several possible explanations (maybe Nigerians have “happy DNA”; maybe the Japanese strive harder because they are malcontents; maybe people learn to adjust to living on a few dollars a day), but never manages to stumble on the most obvious explanation of all—maybe poor Nigerians say they’re happy because they’ve never seen how happy it’s possible to be. And maybe raising their incomes could help with that.

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Probably Moyna’s only half right. Tom Harkin doesn’t loathe her; he just doesn’t give a damn about her. Ditto for the union goons and the American business owners who tout their made-in-America, untouched-by-Third-World-hands product lines. Those people (by and large) aren’t hateful; they’re just mercenary and callous. It’s their customers–the ones who would cheerfully pay extra for the privilege of supporting a $30-an-hour middle class American instead of a struggling $1-an-hour Bangladeshi—who are motivated by something like hate.

If hate is too strong a word, then let’s just call it bigotry, which is, after all, what it is. Not all favoritism is bigotry; it is natural and unobjectionable to care more about family than your friends, more about your friends than your neighbors, and more about your neighbors than a stranger in the next town. Unfortunately, it is perhaps equally natural to care more about strangers who happen to speak your language and share your skin color than strangers who look and sound a little, well, strange. So bigotry is natural. All the more reason to resist it.

If bigotry isn’t the culprit, what is? Misguided concern for Moyna? Maybe so, though it’s hard for me to imagine concern quite that misguided. As Moyna could tell you, poverty sucks. As any historian could tell you, no society has every pulled itself out of poverty without putting its children to work. Back in the early 19th century, when Americans were as poor as Bangladeshis are now, we were sending out children to work at about the same rate as the Bangladeshis are today. Having had the good fortune to get rich first, Americans can afford to give Bangladeshis a helping hand, and there are plenty of good ways for us to do that. Denying Third Worlders the very opportunities our ancestors embraced, whether through fullfledged boycotts or by insisting on health and safety standards they can’t afford to meet, is not one of those ways.

A hat tip to my favorite ninth grader, who learned about Moyna in school, and cared.

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