The Challenge of Avoiding Junk Food

Don't like McDonalds? But they're hard to avoid- each dot of light on that map above represents a branch. The answer says Weather Sealed is to move to South Dakota:

.... McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

Say what you will, Anglo American capitalism has always been great at providing choice, I'm sure you'll agree...

Via

Seven Deadly Sins: Their Distribution in the US

Yes, I've got John B's range of problems plus a few more, but once my family sorts itself out I'll start blogging properly again. Meanwhile check out Angie Androit on Sociological Images:

Some geographers at Kansas State University recently did an analysis of the spacial distribution of EVIL in the United States. Which part of the country is most afflicted by sloth? Lust? Greed? Envy? Wrath? Gluttony? Pride?

That’s right, folks – these geographers have operationalized sin, quantified it, then measured and mapped it. Pride is the aggregate distribution of all other sins, since it is supposedly the root of all evil (though one could also make a good case for apathy). Here’s how the sins are measured (and here’s a good view of the maps):

• Greed: Average incomes versus total inhabitants below the poverty line
• Envy: Total number of thefts (robbery, burglary, larceny, and stolen cars)
• Wrath: Total number of violent crimes (murder, assault and rape) per capita
• Lust: Sexually transmitted diseases per capita
• Gluttony: Number of fast-foot restaurants per capita
• Sloth: Expenditures on arts, entertainment and recreation versus rate of employment
• Pride: An aggregate of the six other sins

There are clearer maps over at Flowing Data.

Buffettism

You might as well bookmark this link now. Because you're going to need it sooner or later. Just for this quote from Warren Buffett:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Via

.01 % of Yankees Are Doodle-Dandy

It's been fun, hasn't it ? This sense of national unity in outrage at the attack of the vile foreigner on our treasured NHS. Like 1940 all over again. Very 'cockney-sing-songs-in-the-tube-stations-we-can-take-it-Mr.Hitler-Blitz-spirit-ish' I'd say. We've even managed to get that nice Daniel Hannan to agree to play the part of Lord Haw-Haw. (B& T suggests his success in this role should be lauded to the skies by New Labour).

But as I've just come back from spending a holiday with a group including a - really very nice - American I thought I ought to put in a word for one thing they definitely do well: inequality. The Huffington Post is reporting a new paper which says inequality levels in the States have reached levels beyond those of the Great Depression. In 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.(see chart)

"...while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth."

All joking aside, this is why Obama's otherwise pitifully limited health reforms matter so much and why they're arousing so much anger over there. Yup, it's class. One side has got so used to taking everything that they can't quite deal with the idea that they might have to share a little in order to keep most of what they've got, the way their own All-American predecessors used to.

Socialised Medicine: May Contain A Worse Threat Than MRSA....

Slugger led me to a long, long debate on American Healthcare Reform over at Reddit. My favourite comment is about 1000 down, from a Canadian coming to terms with the US system now he's living south of the border:

If you're American and have grown up used to the idea of a private health-care system, try picturing this: Imagine going to a new country and finding out that to call the police was for-profit, and you had a variety of options for licensed police services. If you paid for a good plan, you'd get sub-5-minute response times, you'd get detectives assigned if your car was stolen, and you'd have a cop patrolling your neighborhood on a somewhat regular basis. If you were on a budget, you'd only get a 10-minute response time, and no detectives assigned for major threats or patrols

Well, yes, most of you might think. But as another poster warned, there can be hidden dangers to thinking this way:

But aren't you glad that the government didn't tell you what doctor you had to go see? Like they don't do in any socialized medicare country that I know of? Haven't you considered the various imaginary problems that socialized medicine could cause? You know even talking about it could turn you communist like every other western nation. I'm a Canadian and I've seen people come out of hospitals drop to the ground and suddenly become communists, happens all the time.

Update: Sean at The Soul Of Man under Capitalism has a brilliant Fox TV clip where they seriously discuss the idea that socialised medicine encourages jihadist doctors...

The San Andreas Default?

The State of California is paying people with IOUs, because it is broke. Well, perhaps not broke (Willem Buiter points out its debt levels are comparatively trivial) but stuck with a broken political system. Like a lot of US States it lives under a formal constitutional requirement of having to balance the budget. But since its' political representatives can neither agree the formal definition of a balanced budget nor, especially, agree a budget which requires a 2/3rds majority in each of their two State houses, it is paying people with what Buiter calls 'funny money'.

Paul Solman summarises the impasse:

"California is desperate. Like so many of us, it lived beyond its means, or taxed below its spending, or both. Three classes are now resisting the reckoning: those who "spent" the money and owe the shortfall (taxpayers); those on whom the money was spent (employees, vendors, other recipients of state funds); and those who loaned the state money (bondholders). Understandably, no class wants to take the hit, or take the hit first. For political reasons at least, the Obama administration is reluctant to come to the rescue...."

Buiter reckons the only way out is direct rule from Washington, though the comment on his blog suggests he has a bit of a tin ear for American constitutional niceties and, ahem, 'States Rights' to coin an unfortunate phrase. (Which doesn't mean he can't still be right on this point). He says,

"When the banks stop accepting the IOUs except possibly at massive discounts, which will happen soon unless an early resolution of the budgetary stalemate is achieved, the state of California will close down for business. Municipalities and counties dependent on state funds will follow suit. Before long the teachers won’t teach, the fire fighters won’t fight fires, the police won’t maintain law and order and neither garbage nor taxes will get collected. It will be a grand Hobbesian experiment."

Hence his expectation of federal intervention.

But the really interesting question, at least for a saddo like me, is whether these IOUs constitute money. Mark Thoma discusses this point, and the comments on his post educate this Brit on one of the less well known passages of the US Constitution,

"Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution:

Powers prohibited of States

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit*; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility." (my emphasis)

So, on one reading, there's no need to wait for Willem Buiter's 'grand Hobbesian experiment': California has already declared Independence and it's time for Obama to send in the troops and restore the Union.

When Capital Gives A Business Away

There's a really interesting post over at orgtheory on the situation at Chrysler in the States by Sean Stafford. The firm is all but bankrupt - and part of the bailout deal leaves the United Auto Workers Union as the majority shareholder. Surely a step towards the kind of worker co-op based strategy so forcefully advocated by the likes of Boffy?

But Stafford warns that this is not unalloyed good news, and could actually leave the Union with a huge retiree health bill if the firm does tank completely. In other words, they could be stuck with a 'pig in a poke'- the capitalists, having basically decided the North American auto industry is on its uppers, have passed an unproductive asset to the workforce. (I paraphrase and crudify). He goes further:

"...worker voice today comes in multiple forms and many of these rely less on the blunt instruments of countervailing power than on the relatively softer instruments of building alliances, framing issues, participating on multiple levels (workplace, community, identity groups, local and national governments, the media, international)."

Well, perhaps, yes, sort of. But 'worker voice' must also be developed in actually deciding what can be produced to meet social need. So I'd really like to know if the lefty engineers and technologists of this world are heading Detroit-wards to help the UAW develop their very own 'Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Plan' on a huge scale to convert the production lines from gas guzzlers to a mixture of ecologically sound vehicles and alternative products.

Because, otherwise, I think the UAW may regret this deal.

The VP Who Was A Lover, Not A Fighter

From Anti-Dismal comes this exciting news:

"During the conflict in Vietnam, married men with dependents could obtain a deferment from the draft. In 1965, following President Johnson’s Executive Order 11241 and a subsequent Selective Service System announcement, the particulars of this policy changed substantially in a way which provided strong incentives for childless American couples to conceive a first-born child. This study examines the effects of the intervention on the decision to start a family. In my empirical analysis, I use data from the Vital Statistics for the period 1963–1968 and employ a difference-in-differences methodology. The estimated magnitude of the effect is substantial."

Interestingly, Dick Cheney's first daughter, Elizabeth, was born 9 months and 2 days after the Selective Service System announced that childless married men were to be drafted.

Via S&M

Green Socialist Thinking: As All-American As......

A poster called Sandwich Man on Econospeak reveals Benjamin Franklin to be an unexpected devotee of the green and simple life. Yeah, that Benjamin Franklin - him on the $100 dollar bill. Apparently, our Ben was no fan of the injunction to 'accumulate, accumulate':

"It has been computed by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labour would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life: want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.

What occasions then so much want and misery? It is the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the necessaries nor conveniences of life, who, with those who do nothing, consume necessaries raised by the laborious...

Look round the world, and see the millions employed in doing nothing, or in something that amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences of life are in question. What is the bulk of commerce, for which we fight and destroy each other but the toil of millions for superfluities, to the great hazard and loss of many lives by the constant dangers of the sea?...

A question may be asked; Could all these people now employed in raising, making, or carrying superfluities, be subsisted by raising necessaries? I think they might....

It is, however, some comfort to reflect that, upon the whole, the quantity of industry and prudence among mankind exceeds the quantity of idleness and folly....

One reflection more, and I will end this long rambling letter... Our eyes, though exceeding useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which could not much impair our finances. But the eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses, nor fine furniture."(letter to Benjamin Vaughn, dated July 1784)

American Auto Bailout

Should Obama even be doing this, never mind the conditions, given global warming? But what about the workers? This is the problem of forging a Red-Green alliance in miniature.

My answer? Wot this bloke says.

Luxembourg? What's That About Then?

The UK's holdings of US Treasury paper goes down $27bn in a year - surely a sign we've needed to pull out some savings to cover financial gaps since the crisis began?

& Luxembourg's holdings go up by $28bn. What's that about?

Ah, could it be that's what it is about. Luxembourg was a tax haven and the 'hot money' has fled to the alleged safety of the dollar?

From the Guardian today.

Wall St Versus Silicon Valley: The Choice Obama Will Struggle To Avoid

Fascinating article in the latest NLR from Mike Davis, of City of Quartz fame. The bulk of it is a detailed account of the electoral geography and demographics of Obama's victory, which tells us the precise detail of what I suspect most of us vaguely knew: he won the suburbs, he won the young and, crucially, he won the Hispanic vote which is changing the nation.

Towards the end of the article, however, he turns to the economic sociology of Obama's victory. The American labor movement, despite having, in John Edwards, 'a almost chemically pure' candidate who spoke in authentic social democratic tones, lost their way and remained ineffectual and divided: Obama can ignore them seems the implication.

But Obama does represent sociological change nonetheless: his is the 'Silicon Presidency'. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was at his side during the campaign and inside the transition team. The executives and employees of Cisco, Apple, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Ebay overwhelming supported him rather than McCain, including financially.

" A fundamental power-shift seems to be taking place in the business infrastructure of Washington, with ‘New Economy’ corporations rapidly gaining clout through Obama and the Democrats while Old Economy leviathans like General Motors grapple with destitution and welfare, and energy giants temporarily hide in caves.

..... Schmidt and his wired peers, together with the ever-more-powerful congressional delegation from California, become the principal stakeholders in Obama’s promise to launch an Apollo programme for renewable energy and new technology."

Why this alignment?

"Pessimists worry that the Valley is locked into the first stages of the Detroit product-cycle syndrome: the heroic age of Henry Ford followed by tailfins and corporate sclerosis. (Thus Web 2.0 has been criticized as mere product development rather than technological innovation.) The Obama Presidency, from this perspective, can ride to the rescue with Kennedy-scale commitments to basic science as well as stable subsidies to markets like renewable energy, smart utilities and universal broadband that are otherwise whipsawed by volatile energy prices or abdicated by corporations."

The tech industries, implies Davies, are seen as the last 'capitalists with clean hands', given the crisis.

"...the future of every corporation or sector depends upon wise investments to ‘control the state’..... But of all the new Democratic investors, only the tech industries, with their captive universities and vast internet fandoms, still retain enough public legitimacy (domestic and international).... and internal self-confidence hypothetically to act as a constructive hegemonic bloc rather than as a mob of desperate lobbyists."

Yet Obama has called back from the intellectual grave the centrist economists of the Clinton era to serve in his administration. They will struggle, vainly according to Davies, to restore the status quo ante where the financial system generated 40% of all corporate profit in the US. But waiting in the wings is a different fraction of big capital, with a radically different agenda. The contradictions between these two approaches - Davis speculates a weakened dollar may become 'the dog collar' on any Green New Deal - may yet lead to 'protracted stagnation, not timely tech-led recovery'.

How to Tell People They Sound Racist

From here, but I found it here

Changing of the Guard ?

David Harvey, doyen of Marxist theorists of neo-liberalism, offers the view that Keynesian reflation can't work in the States:

"One of the three legs of a Keynesian solution, greater empowerment of labor, rising wages and redistribution towards the lower classes is politically impossible in the United States at this point in time. The very charge that some such program amounts to “socialism” sends shivers of terror through the political establishment. Labor is not strong enough (after thirty years of being battered by political forces) and no broad social movement is in sight that will force redistributions towards the working classes."

But, he says, it can work in China - there are lots of infrastructure projects to be funded, implicit political control of the banks and the political space to allow for some redistribution. Which means there will be less Chinese money to invest in the American economy...

The Clintonite pro-liberalisation Keynesians disagree, violently.

So we have a laboratory test of different economic theories before us. Unfortunately, it feels as though we're the test rats in the laboratory

H/T Econospeak

The Relentlessly Innovative Spirit of Free Enterprise (pt 452):Malia & Sasha Dolls

Michelle is not happy. Or so says a Chicago website. & I don't blame her at all. This is invasive, crass exploitation.

I found this at Rachel's, a blog by an American Sociologist who seems to have just had a couple of mixed race* kids herself. & as she gently points out - the dolls don't really look all that black, do they?

(*Or what we in the UK would call mixed race kids - forgive me if the American terminology would be different).

Obama v Blair

I defy you to find a Brit who didn't automatically superimpose memories of 1997 on the events in Washington yesterday. The superficial parallels are so obvious: a widely despised and unpopular government comes to an end, a clutch of new and apparently untainted faces come to the fore promising the end to ideologically driven policy and to focus on 'what works'. What's perhaps surprising, given these echoes, is that so few British commentators have succumbed to the temptation to cap the analogy with the obvious after-story of our massive national disillusionment with Blair...

It's true that Obama seems a more substantial individual than Blair - he appears to be an orator, not a sound-bite merchant with a gift for PR. But this alone can't explain why such an obvious analogy hasn't been pursued to its logical end.

I think that there is a political difference in their situations. New Labour's support in 1997 was very broad indeed - but it wasn't very deep at all. It had determinedly turned its face away from its core sociological constituencies and had attracted the voting preference - but not necessarily the ideological commitment - of Middle England. (I've blogged about this here). When Blair frittered away that wide support in vicious wars and technocratic 'reform' he had nothing to fall back on. New Labour seemed doomed before the economic meltdown, and may yet be so despite its best efforts at presenting 'hang onto nurse for fear of something worse' as a strategy to the electorate.

But Obama doesn't just represent new, fresh non-ideological policies to the American people the way Blair did here in 1997: the hundreds of thousands who packed Washington yesterday came to see the fulfilment of a long, long struggle for civil rights and racial emancipation. His support is deep as well as wide because it has historic and sociological roots.

Which, with all due respect to my Compass friends, is why New Labour hopes of hitching a ride on the Obama band wagon are going to be sadly misplaced. & also why I find myself in unexpected agreement with the sensible wing of the Socialist Party on how the left should relate to the new American administration.

First Day at the New Office

Well, not exactly"you have nothing to fear but fear itself" then, nor even "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country...". He sounded like an orator trying, just a little too hard, to sound focused to me.

But, hey - here's the thing: he's not George Sodding Bush so he's automatically the Greatest American President of the 21st Century. Good luck to him. He's gonna need it.

Especially since wiki has helpfully offered up his signature to the entire world. On top of every other challenge he faces, the poor bloke can never write a personal cheque again. & interesting questions may arise for future historians when they come to examine international treaties allegedly entered into by the States under his Presidency....

That Old Time Religion: Socialism 101

Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Marxian View from UVC-TV 19 on Vimeo.

I love this - it's 40 minutes long but worth the time. Rick Wolff , heir of Baran and Sweeny, explains the origins of the crisis and makes the case for bottom up socialism in simple, clear, populist language in an authentically American idiom. He's like a character from a Jimmy Stewart movie or a Studs Terkel book.

Whereas most of his British would-be equivalents either sound like they're characters from the ladybird book of Leninism or have swallowed the dictionary at the Library of the Sorbonne.

It's on google and Youtube, but I found it at Rethinking Marxism.

But would you trust the future of broadcasting to a cartoon cow?

Via
Obama has appointed Kevin Werbach, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton,as a co-chair of his Federal Communications Commission transition team. Roughly speaking, it appears that this is the American Ofcom.

Werbach is a World of Warcraft player - a level 70 Tauran Shamen no less.

Waltermonkey speaks for us all, I'm sure,

"... I feel much safer with a shaman than I would with a mage, warlock, rogue or hunter, all of which are strictly damage-oriented."

Unqualifed Offerings is positively upbeat:

"So, anyway, seeing that having a Minotaur-American alter ego is no impediment to becoming a mid-level administration official gives me some hope that politics won’t be restricted to those who never spent time on the internet. " Couldn't happen in Britain of course- we're a far more hide-bound society.

The immortal guardiansguild.com go even further:
"I’ve had a political dream for a while now that I think all of us WoW players can agree on: someday, I hope, we will have a President in the White House that plays videogames. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re closer...". Isn't that sweet? Even immortal guardians still having dreams...

There's a political moral here somewhere, I just know it. Just give me a moment to stop giggling and I'll try to find it....

I Wish I'd Written That: No.764 in a Series

What's wrong with financial markets : the dummy's guide. Also there's a particularly neat graphic in his (Michael Perelman 's) previous post, ripped from the WSJ.