Bill James defends the jockocracy

Noted baseball stats expert Bill James has an interesting piece at Slate in which he suggests that the sports world does a much better job of identifying and promoting talent than, well, pretty much every other segment of society. "The average city the size of Topeka produces a major league player every 10 or 15 years. If we did the same things for young writers, every city would produce a Shakespeare or a Dickens or at least a Graham Greene every 10 or 15 years," he writes. (And am I the only one who thinks he sounds like Malcolm Gladwell in this piece?) But I think he gets weirdly defensive at the end.

Because the sporting world was always ahead of the rest of the world in breaking racial barri­ers, black kids came to perceive sports as being the pathway out of poverty. For this we are now harshly and routinely criticized—as if it was our fault that the rest of society hasn't kept up. Some jackass Ph.D ex-athlete pops up on my TV two or three times a year claiming that a young black kid has a better chance of being hit by lightning than of becoming a millionaire athlete. This is nonsense as well as being a rational hash.

Look, it's not our fault that the rest of the world hasn't kept up. It's not our fault that there are still barriers to black kids becoming doctors and lawyers and airline pilots. Black kids regard the athletic world as a pathway out of poverty because it is. The sporting world should be praised and honored for that. Instead, we are more often criticized because the pathway is so narrow.

I think James misreads the criticism, and the object of it. Yes, it's not uncommon to hear laments that young black men (and young men generally) see sports as their best ticket to the good life. But the criticism isn't really heaped on the shoulders of the sports world. It's aimed at society in general, which has invested so much time, energy, and money in the sports world, which is why you often hear comparisons between (say) Jimmy Rollins' paycheck and that of a South Philadelphia schoolteacher. The idea is usually that we should be heaping more honors and money on the teacher. And that's kind of the point that James is making. So why is he being so defensive?

Fatimah Ali leaves the Daily News

I'm not a particular fan of Fatimah Ali; I thought her column last week advocating school prayer was several different kinds of wrongheaded. Yet I'm somewhat troubled this morning to learn that she's being forced out at the Daily News:

Several months ago, I began ponder the possibility that I might not be at the Daily News forever. I saw small signals that indicated how far apart I might be from the paper's edgy new perspective.

SO IT CAME as no surprise when I was told last week that today's column would be my last. But I remain a committed communicator, as well as a believer that God's time is always best.

Because I'm not really a fan of Ali, I suppose it's possible that Larry Platt is merely clearing away some of the more stale elements of the Daily News as he continues to remake the paper. But given his track record in the first months, it's also possible that he's dispensing with a lesser-known voice in order to import another celebrity columnist. I hope that's not the case, but I'm still suspicious that the Daily News is transitioning from "gritty" to "flashy." Ugh.

The New York Times stops blaming the rape victim; Jonah Goldberg might want to take notice

The New York Times has revisited the story of the 11-year-old Texas girl who was allegedly raped by more than a dozen men. It doesn't acknowledge the story is an act of penance for its earlier victim-blaming piece on the same topic, although editor Bill Keller said as much in an aside in his Sunday column.

It turns out that the girl wasn't victimized one time, but repeatedly over a period of months.

The arrests have raised fundamental questions about how a girl might have been repeatedly abused by many men and boys in a tightly knit community without any adult intervening, or even seeming to register that something was amiss, until sexually explicit videos of the victim began circulating in local schools.

“It wasn’t that anyone was asleep,” said the Rev. Travis Hulett Jr., the pastor of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, which anchors the Precinct 20 neighborhood where most of the defendants live. “You can be awake and see things and still not do anything.”

A tight-knit community in which 19 men felt they had the right to rape an 11-year-old girl, and only gradually did it dawn of folks that something wrong was going on here.

I couldn't help but think of this piece when I read Jonah Goldberg's column in today's Los Angeles Times, about how feminism has finished its work in the United States, and how what it really needs to do is pack up and start helping women overseas.

Islamist extremism and oppression of women go hand in hand. And while the correlation between poverty and terrorism is often overstated, the correlation between prosperity and women's liberation is profound. Female education is tightly linked with GDP growth, lower birthrates and even higher agricultural yields.

It's also tightly linked with human freedom and decency, which is why no Islamic "spring" is possible without a feminist revolution.

There is something to this. Recent events in the Arab world have brought us fresh examples that one of the tools of oppression is to rape and sexually humiliate women who challenge authority. Americans—and American feminists—should push back, hard, against those cultures.

But there's a certain "Go back to Russia!" quality to Goldberg's complaint. Yes, there are bad things happening overseas that deserve the attention of feminists. But we still live in a country where a community of men will take advantage of a young girl, and the community that surrounds them will struggle to justify their actions or blame the young girl, and where a major national newspaper will occasionally unthinkingly print those justifications without contradiction. That suggests to me there's still plenty of work for feminism to do at home, as well.

The fight over delivering cable to my iPad

I don't have Time Warner service, but this New York Times story about that company's new iPad app—it live-streams TV programming to the tablet to cable subscribers using the device in their home—is interesting. Apparently the TV networks think Time Warner is horning in on their business:

But some channel owners say that companies like Time Warner Cable should be consulting with them more closely before introducing new products. “Portability is a different business proposition,” said an executive at one of the major channel owners, suggesting that there should be a premium paid for the ability to take a TV show into bed or into the bathtub. One commercial for Time Warner Cable’s app actually shows a person watching TV on a tablet while taking a bath.

Portability is a different proposition—if true portability is involved. (By which I mean: I can take my iPad to the cafe down the street and watch CNN on it.) But that's not the Time Warner app. As the Times notes: "The iPad app only works inside the home, and only for customers who receive both television and Internet from the operator."

From a consumer standpoint, then, I don't think there's a significant difference here that should require me to, you know, pay more for cable service. Water comes into my apartment in several places, for different functions: A kitchen sink for washing dishes and providing water for cooking and drinking; the bathroom sink for hand-washing and tooth-brushing; the bathtub for body-cleaning. We also have water flowing into our washing machine.

Yet we don't get charged for the different types of ways the water gets used in our apartment: the water is delivered to us, we pay for it, and we use it as needed. Cable television isn't water, of course, but I don't know why it can't be the same way: Get the entertainment to my house and let me choose how to view it. Don't charge me extra just because I'm watching Comedy Central on my iPad instead of a television.

The Koch brothers' mighty big bootstraps

I don't have a particular dislike for the Koch brothers; perhaps that's a consequence of having grown up in Kansas and knowing people who have worked for for their company. But a lot of the ire directed their way from the left strikes me as basically a much-less-anti-Semitic version of the hysteria the right routinely whips up about George Soros. They should be paid attention, but there's a limit to the usefulness of scapegoating them.

That said, Matthew Continetti could've saved himself some time on his Weekly Standard profile of the brothers by farming the work directly to their public relations team. The shared grievance--People are criticizing us because we got involved in politics? The horror!--is laid on a little thick at times. But the part that really caught my eye was the description of how the brothers have increased the value of their company since taking it over from their father in the 1960s:

Fred was a towering personality. “My father was a man of enormous integrity, and he wanted his children to grow up to be great men, and fine, honest, decent people,” David said. Charles and David attended their father’s alma mater (MIT) and studied his chosen field. When Charles graduated, he stayed in Boston. He found a job with the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, where he worked in business development and management services. Life was good. Then in 1960 he got a call from his father: My health is failing, Fred told him. You need to come back and work for the company and succeed me. “I said, ‘God, I’m doing great here, so I’d rather stay here,’ ” Charles said. Which he did.

A year later Fred called Charles again. Return home and work for me, Fred said, or I’ll sell the company. Charles complied. “He was very strong, and Dutch, and one of his favorite sayings was, ‘You can tell the Dutch but you can’t tell them much,’ ” Charles said. He took over the company after his father’s death in 1967. In the years since Charles Koch went to work for Fred, Koch Industries has grown more than 2,600-fold. The notion that Charles and David are “inheritance babies” is nonsense.

The sense you get from this and other parts of the story is that Charles and David Koch genuinely believe themselves to be self-made men. I don't want to disparage their business acumen--the American landscape is littered with the husks of companies and industries that were once too big to fail--but it's also the case that it's a lot easier to become a billionaire if you're already a millionaire and have a degree from one of the finest universities in the world. That they don't seem to recognize this speaks badly of their ego, but it also speaks to why lots of folks on the left are suspicious of the Kochs' big-business libertarianism: the Kochs seem to truly believe that the free market rewards anybody who is willing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but they don't seem to care much about the folks who don't have bootstraps.

Later in the piece:

The imputation in February that Governor Scott Walker had brought Wisconsin to a standstill to further the interests of Koch Industries was of course ridiculous. But it also demonstrated the power of the left-wing vilification machine. As the assaults piled up Charles couldn’t help thinking of Schopenhauer’s “Art of Controversy.” The German philosopher had noted that people who can’t win an argument through reason attack their opponent’s motivation. “I thought I was cynical enough,” Charles said. “But that was pretty shocking, to see what we’re up against, or what the country’s up against: to have an element like this.”

The left’s inability to understand where the Kochs were coming from puzzled Charles and David. Wasn’t it obvious that small government and free markets resulted in a better world? “Why don’t we teach in schools things that make society more prosperous, and more peaceful, and people will respect each other more? It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?” said Charles. “It’s unbelievable how they distort what your message is!” said David. The Kochs thought their aim was to increase the standard of living for everyone. The way to do this, they believed, was by applying to society the same methods that had grown their company.

To Charles, the call for bigger government was egalitarianism run amok. Liberals, he thought, fetishized equality of condition at the expense of personal liberty. “They cannot stand that some people are better off than others,” Charles said. “I think part of it fits Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: someone that’s miserable because he knows that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself. He cannot stand that. And I think they all slept through Economics 101.”

I am, of course, amused that the Kochs complain of having their motivations attacked--then two paragraphs later do the same to their opponents. It's only human, of course. The problem is that they're wrong. Granted, liberals desire a more egalitarian society than the Kochs do, but for the most part it's a matter of degree: there are precious few real socialists influencing the discourse these days (the banks would've been nationalized in 2008 otherwise) but President Obama has largely surrounded himself with free-market liberals. We're pretty much all capitalists now.

But, you know, some of us believe in a safety net. Not to pull down the people at the top, but to prevent the people at the bottom from slipping through the cracks, and perhaps even to help the people in the middle from slipping to the bottom. That can be done in conjunction with capitalism, if capitalism isn't pursued as a form of social Darwinism. And it will be easier to do so if folks like the Kochs recognize their advantages, instead of believing themselves to be self-made men.

Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times: A really bad idea

I've seen this idea surface in several places, most recently Andrew Sullivan's blog, and I'd like to nip it in the bud:

I read your item on Bob Herbert's resignation with interest, as you summarized my sentiments precisely. As way of replacement, I hope the Times considers Ta-Nehisi Coates, even though I have no idea whether he's even interested in the perch. It's not because they're both African-American; Ta-Nehisi writes about similar issues with twice the wit and grace that Herbert could muster. It would be a shame to see those issues drop off the table with Herbert's resignation, and it would represent a real promotion to one of the most talented American pundits out there.

I'm a huge fan of Coates--at this point, in fact, his career represents what I'd like to achieve with my own: He's largely self-taught; he knows what he doesn't know; he's liberal without being knee-jerk about it; and he is contemplative and graceful in addressing the issues that he does address. He doesn't tend to get caught up in the punch-counterpunch of the political blogosphere, but when he addresses an issue of the day, well, it stays addressed.

And I think the 1,000-word column format, twice a week, is precisely the wrong place for Coates. If the pressures of the format and platform didn't push him into becoming stridently ideological, the danger is that he might end up like David Brooks--following his muse into places better addressed somewhere other than the New York Times op-ed pages.

If the Times is looking for a young, non-Caucasian liberal to fill the slot, I'd recommend somebody like Adam Serwer, whose straight-ahead style seems to fit better into the major newspaper format. But let Ta-Nehisi be Ta-Nehisis.

UPDATE: I was probably wrong.

Today in inequality reading: 'The sad but true story of wages in America'

The Economic Policy Institute crunches some wage numbers in a new paper:

Recent debates about whether public- or private-sector workers earn more have obscured a larger truth: all workers have suffered from decades of stagnating wages despite large gains in productivity. The current public discussion illogically pits state and local government employees against private workers, when both groups have failed to sufficiently benefit from the economic fruits of their labors. This paper examines trends in the compensation of public (state and local government) and private-sector employees relative to the growth of productivity over the past two decades.

These data underscore that there is a bigger story than public versus private compensation and a more penetrating set of questions to ask than who has more than whom. The ability of the economy to produce more goods and services has not translated into greater compensation for either group of workers. Why has pay fared so poorly overall? Why did the richest 1% of Americans receive 56% of all the income growth between 1989 and 2007, before the recession began (compared with 16% going to the bottom 90% of households)? Why are corporate profits 22% above their pre-recession level while total corporate sector employees’ compensation (reflecting lower employment and meager pay increases) is 3% below pre-recession levels? The answers lie in an economy that is designed to work for the well off and not to produce good jobs and improved living standards.1

Essentially, economic policy has not supported good jobs over the last 30 years or so. Rather, the focus has been on policies that were thought to make consumers better off through lower prices: deregulation of industries, privatization of public services, the weakening of labor standards including the minimum wage, erosion of the social safety net, expanding globalization, and the move toward fewer and weaker unions. These policies have served to erode the bargaining power of most workers, widen wage inequality, and deplete access to good jobs. In the last 10 years even workers with a college degree have failed to see any real wage growth.