Against the Stream

TED, Taxes, and Income Inequality

 

There has been an interesting back and forth over the past few days about Nick Hanauer's recent TED talk about the idea of "job creation." Apparently TED had decided not to run the segment, and Hanauer cried "censorship," after which TED decided to go ahead and relase it. You can see the piece above.

The key element of his talk is the following passage, from an editorial he wrote on the topic:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.”

What he says here shouldn't be controversial. It's black letter economic principle: "job creation" come about ultimately through consumer spending, in other words, it's stimulated by demand, so giving ordinary consumers more money to spend has a greater stimulative effect than giving rich people more money to spend, because the rich are probably already spending near the top of their capacity. Giving Nick Hanauer a 10% tax cut won't stimulate the economy nearly as effectively as giving someone with realtively little money one, since Nick Hanauer has almost everything he might need, whereas an ordinary middle class American will take that money and immediately spend it on goods and services that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to purchase. Again, really not controversial.

It's become controversial because of the ideological capture of the idea of "job creator" to mean "enormously wealthy." The idea is that the wealthy create jobs through their investments, which to be fair, is true to a point. But the stimulative effect on the economy of low taxes for the rich is far less potent than benefits for the poor and middle class would be. In fact, because the low taxes on the rich have necessitated deep cuts in programs to the poor and middle classes, as well as cuts in education and infrastructure around the country, the low taxes on the wealthy have actually had a counter-stimulative effect. They've actually made the economy worse, or at least, haven't helped it get better.

I'm glad to see Hanauer and a few other members of the hyperwealthy in the United States beginning to push back against this ideology, precisely because, as Hanauer notes, as a matter of social policy, it's not only good for the poor and middle classes, but it is also ultimatley better for the wealthy to live in a well-managed, just, relatively equal society with a well-maintained infrastructure and a sound educational system.

Video Games and Morality: My "Different Drummers" Interview

Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministry has a show called "Different Drummers" that they post on their Youtube Channel. A few weeks ago they invited me in for an interview. Here it is:

 

It was a fun and interesting experience, though I admit it was a bit disconcerting to talk about these issues while the young man being interviewed with me was blowing away bad guys on the screen right behind me!

Felicia Day Is Cool

Taking a break from theo-blogging to dip into nerd blogging. Hope you don't mind.

Moral Combat

My cover article is in the current issue of the Christian century. Here is a link to the site for those of you who are interested in checking it out.

iPhone blogging

Just a note to tell the world I've got my new iPhone working.

That is all

Mac Notebooks Through the Ages

The sad truth is that it was my desire for a Macintosh Powerbook that resulted in my long odyssey away from Macintosh through the desert of  PC/Windows. My first computer was a Mac, but as I was beginning graduate work, I decided that I needed a laptop computer, and I really wanted a powerbook like this one.

Unfortunately, at that time, Powerbooks were incredibly expensive, both compared to desktop Macs and compared to PC laptops, so, against my better judgement, I bought an IBM Notebook. It took me a very long time to migrate back to Macs.

I'm reminded of this because there's a really cool article over at Apple Gazette on the evolution of Mac notebooks. Cool as I thought that first generation model was, I have to admit that they've gotten a lot cooler over the years.

This is what I get for gloating

Well, after chortling to a friend the other day about the Dell recall, and how that would never happen to Apple, it turns out I have to eat my words:

Ten days after Dell's record-setting notebook battery recall, Apple Computer Inc. told its customers Thursday to return 1.8 million batteries that could cause their Mac laptops to overheat and catch fire.

Both recalls involve lithium-ion batteries made by a Sony Corp. subsidiary in Japan, where the manufacturing process introduced metal particles into battery cells. Makers of battery cells strive to minimize or eliminate the presence of such particles, which can cause computers to short circuit, or, in extreme situations, catch fire.

In its recall announcement, Apple said it has received nine reports of lithium-ion battery packs overheating, including two cases in which users suffered minor burns and some involving minor property damage. The Apple recall only applies to older notebooks — not the just-released MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Serves me right, I guess.

Computer Nostalgia

From today's New York Times -- a mediatation on computers and writing:

I gave up in the spring of 2002. Eighteen years of Microsoft operating systems was enough. I had been through every version of DOS and nearly every version of Windows up to that point. If I knew as much about my tractor as I did about the fine points those systems, I would be able to rebuild its hydraulics from scratch. It made no difference. As Windows grew more and more complicated (or kludgier and kludgier) - and as Microsoft tried to make it seem simpler and friendlier to novices - it also got uglier and uglier. So it seemed to me. I moved my last Windows desktop to the basement, where I hope the mold is eating its hard-drive. I bought an iBook and have lived happily ever after.

It was just the right time. The iBook came with OS X 10.1. That's what I use. I never glanced at OS 9. I wanted nothing to do with the past - even Apple's past. I now no longer have to worry about crashes or screen freezes, regular occurrences in my Microsoft days. This has nothing to do with writing, I know, but it has everything to do with allowing me to keep my composure. The real reason for switching platforms, though, was to recover some of the pleasure of using a computer, which had almost vanished for me. The stability of my 12" iBook (and its successors, a 12" PowerBook and a 20" iMac) was important and so was ease of use and a sense of inventiveness. But what has won me over is the esthetics of the Apple cosmos. It's a fine-grained universe with smooth, clean edges. The world within the screen appears to recognize, and obey, the laws of gravity. Solids appear solid, not pixilated and porous. My Apple seemed surprisingly willing to leave me alone to do my work. It never nagged me. It never panicked. It had made a clean break with the past and it let me do so too.

I still write in Microsoft Word, I know. I'm happy with Word X for Mac, which hasn't been updated in a couple of years, and I will not upgrade to Office 2004. Even the name makes me nervous. Every now and then I hit just the wrong combination of keys, and the Office Assistant pops up. I loathe the Office Assistant - even the Mac version, which is far less annoying than the Windows one. Animated assistance is the last thing I want. It's as useless as a grammar checker. I suspect that after 21 years I've nearly come to the end of the Word road. I suppose I'll miss it when I find the right replacement. And yet I haven't missed Windows - or MS-DOS - yet. I don't think I ever will.

This, too, has nothing to do with writing. And yet everything has something to do with writing. That's the nature of the job.

This all describes my own state of mind when I switched from Windows to Mac Os X this past summer. It finally got to the point where I simply couldn't stand the clunkiness of the MS operating system any longer, and it became an impediment, rather than an aid, to my work.

He's got some good stuff on the nature of writing itself. It makes me feel pretty good about my own difficulties in "getting it done" when it comes to writing. But the difference is that journalists have the threat of the deadline hanging over their heads constantly. For academics, the deadlines are there, but they're often not so deadly, and so fiddling around instead of getting things done can be a real danger for a scholarly writer. Still if Verlyn Klinkenborg can do it, I'm sure I can too.