Blogs

The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias has a revealing post up today responding to an article about the blogosphere's lead role in the new progressive movement.

Beyond that, I'll admit to not having much interest in socialist thought. I will say that I'm pretty much a believer in Marx-style base/superstructure theory to an extent that most of my friends and colleagues seem to find somewhat appalling. I don't, for example, believe that William F. Buckley, Jr. exercised any substantial real causal influence on American history not through any fault of his own but simply because I don't think intellectuals really impact the course of events. This is, needless to say, not a popular opinion among writers.

I love bloggers, but ideas can be their biggest blindspot. To many of them, ideas are less important than tactics, arguments, and facts. But I think we're right in the middle of an election that shows how relevant ideas still are. Marx-style theory, powerful as it may be, cannot account for a fiercely contested election where policy differences are so irrelevant. The primary's now being fought over symbols, ideas and frameworks. And we haven't come up with a framework that holds the centrist and the progressive wings together, as the sustained divide between Clinton and Obama shows.

So as the newly-annointed leaders of the intellectual left, they could do us all a big favor by putting some effort into coming up with a framework for both the left and center-left to coexist peacefully in.

Update: Senate voted last night to pass the Children's Health Insurance improvement bill. Vote was 67-29; here's the roll call.

Turns out HHS Secretary Mike Levitt has a blog. It's pretty boring—lead post right now is "Clarifications on HHS Energy Newsletter"—but if President Bush vetoes the bipartisan compromise bill to expand health insurance for kids, it might be a good place to express your opinion.

The National Women's Law Center recently unveiled womenstake.org, a new addition to the emerging policy blogosphere. In a good post from last week, they explain the problem with preferential tax treatment for hedge fund managers and provide an update on Congressional efforts to fix it.

Top hedge fund managers, some earning over $1 billion a year, ... manage to pay tax on most of their income at just 15%.

How is this possible? Two words: capital gains.

Currently, the highest tax rate on capital gains income is 15%, while the highest tax rate on “ordinary earned income” is 35%. This 20 percentage point difference creates a lot of incentive to try to turn ordinary income from earnings into capital gain. And super-wealthy private equity managers have learned to be creative. The typical fee arrangement pays the managers an annual fee of about 2% of fund assets (taxed as ordinary income) and a 20% share of fund profits—the carried interest. The payments of income from the “carried interest” are taxed as capital gains, rather than as ordinary income—so managers pay only 15% federal income tax instead of 35% on the larger part of their compensation.

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Some members of Congress are starting to go after the private equity tax loopholes. Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI), along with Ways and Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) and House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank (D-MA), introduced a bill (HR 2834) to treat income from carried interests as compensation and tax it as ordinary income. Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) and ranking member Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced a bill (S. 1624) that would tax as corporations publicly traded partnerships that derive their income from investment advising or management services, such as the newly public Blackstone Group. Most publicly traded partnerships are already taxed as corporations.

Lots of economists, both inside and outside of academia have started blogs over the last several years, but relatively few non-economist social scientists blog. This, I think, is a bad thing. Via Matthew Nisbet's blog, here's an excerpt from a recent article in the journal Cell that explains why (it's about the biological sciences, but equally applicable to social science, since debate and discussion are presumably good things in that field also):

... blogs allow discussions of scientific issues that do not typically take place in the scientific literature. "A scientific journal is not the right vehicle for debate and discussion," says Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto and author of the popular biochemistry textbook Principles of Biochemistry. As a case in point, Moran used his blog Sandwalk ( http://sandwalk.blogspot.com) to start a debate about evolutionary developmental biology. "There's much to criticize in the field of evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo," leads off his March 30, 2007 entry. It continues "The thing that bugs me more than anything else is the attempt to create a general theory of evolution based entirely on a subset of living species: namely multicellular animals."

But how significant are these discussions if only a minority of scientists read blogs, or write them? "Blogs are important sources for opinion leaders, activists, and journalists. They help create a lot of the discourse out in the world," explains Nisbet. Indeed, many discussions that grab the attention of bloggers have ended up in the pages of The New York Times or in the news sections of science journals. "Blogs are having an impact because newsmakers read them," says Moran. "To some extent we are writing for science journalists. We are saying 'Here is something getting the wrong kind of coverage' or 'Here is something you should be paying attention to.'"

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and TPM Cafe is now doing some really impressive stuff with online video.

It's more sophisticated than the typical video blog, but still the kind of thing that most progressive policy shops should be able to do with a modest investment.

The staff of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch recently unveiled a new blog on globalization and trade that's definitely worth bookmarking. Like OMB Watch's excellent Budget Blog, Eyes on Trade is really what Robert Kuttner calls a "crog"—for carefully-researched weblog—one that provides big-picture perspective, while also keeping a close eye on the day-to-day happenings on trade policy.

In an entry from this weekend, Todd Tucker notes that free-trade booster (and former Clintonite) Alan Blinder is now having second thoughts, particularly about offshoring—here's Blinder:

I'm a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I'm being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation.

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Improvements in technology will raise living standards, just as they have since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And the availability of millions of new electronically deliverable service jobs in, say, India and China will help alleviate poverty on a mass scale. Offshoring will also reduce costs and boost productivity in the United States. So repeat after me: Globalization is good for the world. Which is where economists usually stop.

And where my alleged apostasy starts.

For these same forces don't look so benign from the viewpoint of an American computer programmer or accountant. They've done what they were told to do: They went to college and prepared for well-paid careers with bountiful employment opportunities. But now their bosses are eyeing legions of well-qualified, English-speaking programmers and accountants in India, for example, who will happily work for a fraction of what Americans earn. Such prospective competition puts a damper on wage increases. And if the jobs do move offshore, displaced American workers may lose not only their jobs but also their pensions and health insurance. These people can be forgiven if they have doubts about the virtues of globalization.

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In terms of policy, Blinder hasn't changed his tune that much: he says "trade protection won't work" and then shifts to arguing that "we need to rethink our education system" and improve the quality of the social safety net for displaced workers. But I think Blinder's shift in emphasis (from the benefits to the costs of trade) is an important one, even though as Tucker correctly notes it seems driven primarily by concern about the impact of offshoring on highly skilled workers.

In a Columbia Journalism Review article, Robert Kuttner comes up with a great name—crogs for Carefully-Researched Weblogs—for what I've referred to rather clunkily as the emerging policy blogosphere:

Ezra [Klein] ... particularly relies on expert sites that are not exactly blogs and not exactly journalism; rather they are a very important category often left out by old media critics who divide the world into amateur bloggers versus trained reporters. Many such sites are operated by academics or think-tank researchers who have developed a taste for a popular audience, mixing blog-style comment on breaking news with original analysis, and serious research.

This category of Web site doesn’t have a name, and it trivializes them to call them blogs. Let’s call them crogs, for Carefully-Researched Weblogs. For policy wonks like Ezra and me, some of the most interesting crogs are Dean Baker’s site on how the press covers economics; the crog on Middle East affairs by the University of Michigan professor Juan Cole; and a superb crog on health policy carried on Daily Kos and written by a physician and researcher calling himself Dr. Steve B (he has a sensitive position and won’t publish his real name). There are thousands of similarly high-quality crogs on just about every public issue, of great value to both journalists and ordinary readers. The sites are rich in hyperlinks, too, so a reader can move sideways into more detailed reports and primary sources.

The rest of the piece—about whether newspapers will survive in a digital era—is good too. Here's the conclusion:

As Generation Y grows up, and Generation Z finds the idea of getting news on paper even quainter, more people like Ezra (and his children) will become their own editor-aggregators. But if the dailies do their jobs, the next generation will still read newspapers—online.

My reporting suggests that many big dailies have turned the corner, though only barely and just in time, that newspapers have started down a financially and journalistically viable path of becoming hybrids, without losing the professional culture that makes them uniquely valuable.

Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling.

Mike Doyle, like Inclusion's Margy Waller, goes carless in a big city. (Although I think Margy at least knows how to drive.) Mike's blog, Chicago Carless, is not only a source of essential Chicago food info, he also keeps up labor policy issues, like the Employee Free Choice Act.

With little help from me (I tend to read the Daily Progress Report in lieu of the blog), ThinkProgress.org, the blog of the Center for American Progress, is movin' on up:

We promised you we would challenge and overtake popular right-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin, and we did. ThinkProgress.org is now one of the most influential voices in the blogosphere, ranked by Technorati.com as #13 out of 55 million blogs. (Malkin is now #14.)

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The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org have big plans for 2007. We are expanding our staff to offer you even more signature progressive analyses of all the day’s news. We’re launching a ThinkProgress Fellows Program to enhance our work with the contributions of bloggers from across the country.

And we’re investing in cutting-edge technology for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org – featuring more video and introducing interactive commenting – to strengthen our community and turn up the volume of progressive voices.

The most recent issue of the Boston Review has an excellent piece by Henry Farrell, a professor here in DC at GW, and a blogger at the academic blog Crooked Timber, on the implications of the blogosphere for policy and political debate. The excerpt below sums up some of his key points:

What [progressive bloggers] are is an example of how the Internet can foster new ways of conducting argument and building social cooperation among diverse groups and individuals. In other words, they are the harbinger of structural changes in the relationship between technology and politics. Contrary to the predictions of social scientists like Robert Putnam, the Internet is making people more likely to be politically and socially engaged, not less. As Yochai Benkler has argued, information technology has made it radically easier and cheaper to engage in certain kinds of cooperation.

A tip of the hat to ACORN and the AFL-CIO for 7 Days @ Minimum Wage, a video blog in support of minimum wage ballot initiatives that starts on Monday.

Starting October 23, 7 Days @ Minimum Wage will run a new documentary-style interview each day about what it’s really like to earn on or near the minimum wage in America today.

Every day is like a new chapter in a book, with a story that brings the viewer deep inside the workers’ worlds, hosted by celebrated actor and comedienne Roseanne Barr.

Stay tuned for our first video from a Colorado couple, who struggles to pay for the day-to-day necessities on a minimum wage paycheck.

ACORN and AFL-CIO chose this time, as we approach November 7, Election Day 2006, because minimum wage increases are on ballots in six states across the country: Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio. Voters will have the option to choose to raise the wage from $5.15 and hour to $6.85 an hour.