Author Archives: Larry Franz

It’s a Global Problem — They’d Make It Worse

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I’m avoiding polls and speculation about the upcoming midterm election and don’t see political advertisements, but political news and commentary does get through. Today, Paul Krugman discussed the state of the economy and pointed out that Republican politicians don’t have a plan to address what they say is the country’s biggest problem (since the climate crisis isn’t real, women shouldn’t have equal rights and democracy is overrated):

Few things I’ve written in recent years have generated as much hate mail as a relatively low-key, somewhat nerdy newsletter I put out just before the release of data on gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2022. In that newsletter I explained why, despite a lot of misinformation in the news media, a recession is not defined as two quarters of declining G.D.P. and the first half of 2022 was unlikely to meet the actual, multidimensional criteria used by the committee that determines whether a recession has started.

The reason for the hate mail was, of course, that Republicans were eager to declare a “Biden recession” and falsely accused the administration of a double standard when it said that we were not, in fact, in a recession.

Well, Thursday’s advance G.D.P. report for the third quarter of 2022 showed why a recession call based on two quarters of somewhat bizarre data would have been all wrong. Economic growth has rebounded, back up to 2.6 percent at an annual rate — putting G.D.P. back in line with strong employment growth, which has continued throughout the year. Do you really want to say that we were in a recession from January through June but have miraculously recovered?

… Suffice it to say, we weren’t in a recession earlier this year and aren’t in a recession now, although we could find ourselves in one in the future as delayed effects of rising interest rates kick in.

Politically, however, it may not matter much, because Republicans have largely given up on the recession story. Instead, their economic attacks, in both debates and campaign ads, have been focused overwhelmingly on inflation, especially gas prices.

It therefore seems worth pointing out that the Republican Party doesn’t have a plan to fight inflation. Actually, it doesn’t have any coherent economic plan at all. But to the extent that Republicans have laid out what they will try to do if they win the midterms, their policies would make inflation worse, not better.

When pressed about how, exactly, they would reduce inflation, Republicans often fall back on some version of “Gas was only $2 a gallon when Trump left office!” So let’s talk about that comparison.

First, it’s remarkable how the right has reimagined January 2021 as a golden moment for America. At the time, about 20,000 Americans were dying from Covid every week; there were still nine million fewer jobs than there had been before the pandemic. Indeed, the still-depressed state of major economies, including that of the United States, was the main reason world oil prices were unusually low, which in turn was the main reason gas was cheap.

A better comparison would be with 2019, the year before the pandemic, when gas averaged $2.60 a gallon. Bear in mind that average wages have risen about 15 percent over the past three years, so gas would be as affordable now as it was in 2019 if its current average price were $2.99. As of Wednesday, it was $3.75. So yes, gas has become less affordable, but not by nearly as much as Republicans claim.

And despite Republican rhetoric, Biden administration policies have had little impact on gas prices, which have been driven by events affecting world markets — notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and to some extent by bottlenecks in refining, which grew worse for several weeks starting in mid-September but have eased again.

So what is the Republican plan to bring gas prices down? There isn’t one.

What about inflation more generally? You can make the case that large deficit spending early in the Biden presidency fed inflation (although it had little effect on the most politically salient prices, for energy and food, which have soared around the world).

If you’re worried about the inflationary impact of budget deficits, however, you should know that almost the only concrete economic policy idea we’re hearing from Republicans is that they want to extend the Trump tax cuts, which would 
 substantially increase the deficit.

It’s true that many Republicans adhere to an economic ideology that doesn’t see deficits caused by tax cuts as a problem, either because they believe — in the teeth of all the evidence — that tax cuts somehow pay for themselves, or because they believe that government spending, not deficits per se, is what causes problems.

But if you believe that cutting taxes without any plausible plan for offsetting spending cuts isn’t a problem even in a time of inflation, markets beg to disagree. Look at what happened to the pound and British interest rates after Liz Truss, the quickly deposed prime minister, announced an economic plan that, broadly speaking, looks a lot like what Republicans are proposing here. (There’s more to it than that, but still.)

The bottom line is that while the G.O.P.’s election strategy is all about blaming the Biden administration for inflation, the Republican Party doesn’t actually have any plan to reduce inflation. To the extent it has an economic plan at all, it would make inflation worse.

Unquote.

I’ll add that inflation is a global problem (it’s higher in Europe than in the Us) and oil companies are making tremendous profits with gas prices this high. What would a Republican Congress do to restrain oil company profiteering? The question answers itself.

A Constitution Set in Stone, or the Beating of a Dead Horse

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The historian Jill Lepore has a long article in The New Yorker entitled:

The United States’ Unamendable Constitution: How our inability to change America’s most important document is deforming our politics and government.

It deals with topics, mainly the Constitution and the Supreme Court and the anti-democratic features thereof, that have come up here many, many times. I read the whole thing anyway. This is a lot of it:

It’s always been hard to amend the Constitution. But, in the past half century, it’s become much harder—so hard that people barely bother trying anymore. Between 1789 and 1804—fifteen years—the Constitution was amended twelve times. Between 1805 and 2022—two hundred and seventeen years—it’s been amended only fifteen times, and since 1971 only once.

The Framers did not anticipate two developments that have made the double supermajority required by Article V [2/3 of both houses of Congress and Ÿ of the states] almost impossible to achieve: the emergence of the first political parties, which happened in the seventeen-nineties, and the establishment of a stable two-party system, in place by the eighteen-twenties. As John Adams complained, in 1808, “the Principle Seems to be established on both Sides that the Nation is never to be governed by the Nation: but the whole is to be exclusively governed by a Party.” This state of affairs raised the bar for amending the Constitution. The current era of party polarization, which began in the early nineteen-seventies, has raised the bar much, much higher.

How high? Political scientists talk about the “amendment rate”—the number of amendments to any given constitution, per year. Divide twenty-seven ratified amendments by two hundred and thirty-three years and you get 0.12, the U.S. amendment rate. It is one of the lowest rates in the world…..

An unamendable constitution is not an American tradition. U.S. state constitutions are much easier to amend than the federal Constitution. The average amendment rate of a U.S. state is 1.23; Alabama’s constitution has an amendment rate of 8.07. A high amendment rate is generally not a sign of political well-being, though, since it comes at the cost of stability. Also, it can be disastrous in states where constitutions can be amended by a popular referendum: research suggests that the language of ballot initiatives is so mealy-mouthed that many voters, confused or misled, end up casting votes that go against their actual preferences….You don’t want your constitution to be too hard to amend, but you don’t want it to be too easy, either.

Making the Constitution easier to amend would itself require a constitutional amendment, which means it’s not going to happen.
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“Nothing new can be put into the Constitution except through the amendatory process,” Justice Felix Frankfurter declared, in 1956, and “nothing old can be taken out without the same process.” That’s not strictly true. The Constitution has become unamendable, but it has not become unchangeable. Its meaning can be altered by the nine people who serve on the Supreme Court [actually, by merely five of them]. They can’t rewrite it, but they can reread it.

The Framers did not design or even anticipate this method of altering the Constitution. They didn’t plan for judicial review (the power exercised by the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of legislation), and they thought they’d protected against the possibility of judicial supremacy (the inability of any other branch of government to check the Court’s power).

As with the filibuster, whether you like judicial supremacy generally depends on whether your party’s in power or out. The Court is the least democratic branch of government. But it also has the ability to protect the rights of minorities against a majority. In the nineteen-fifties, because Jim Crow laws meant that Blacks in the South could not vote, it proved impossible to end segregation through electoral politics or a constitutional amendment; instead, the N.A.A.C.P. sought to end it by bringing Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court.

Since then, the Court has implemented all sorts of constitutional changes: it has secured the rights of criminal defendants; established rights to contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage; declared corporate campaign donations to be free speech; and interpreted the Second Amendment as restricting the government’s ability to regulate firearms. Which of these you believe to be bad decisions and which good depends on your position on all manner of things. But, unlike a constitutional amendment, every decision the Court makes it can reverse, the way that, this year, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it overturned Roe v. Wade, from 1973. (You can reverse a constitutional amendment, but only with another one: that’s how Prohibition ended.)…

Reversing Roe v. Wade did not require a constitutional amendment (even though many were proposed). Instead, it required something even more extraordinary: a wholly new mode of constitutional interpretation. Roe built on a 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which protected access to contraception under a right to privacy. After Griswold, conservative critics of the Court began to devise an approach to constitutional interpretation custom-built to defeat it: the jurisprudence of originalism. Robert Bork first proposed its framework in 1971, in an essay in which he argued against Griswold. Originalism undergirds one of the most radical constitutional reversals in recent American history: the reinterpretation of the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to bear arms, as opposed to the right of the people to form militias. (Bork himself disagreed with this reinterpretation, which has been advanced by the N.R.A.) This spring, in the Bruen case, the Court reinforced its N.R.A.-informed interpretation of the Second Amendment.

All sorts of ideas are floating around for how to shake things loose. Constitutional populists [i.e. right-wingers] have rallied around a proposal to revise the Constitution by way of a provision in Article V that’s never been used, and which holds that the country, “on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments.” Nineteen state legislatures have made some version of that application; thirty-four are required. Since 2013, this effort has been headed by the Convention of States project, funded in part by the Koch brothers [But we should note that any amendment adopted by a constitutional convention would have to be approved by Ÿ of the states (38), meaning it could be defeated by 13 states]….

Americans aren’t going to amend Article V anytime soon because we’re not going to amend any part of the Constitution anytime soon. In the end, the really interesting question isn’t what would happen if the people could amend the Constitution by popular vote but what actually happened, in the first place, to cripple Article V, and give the Supreme Court superpowers.

The Constitution became effectively unamendable in the early nineteen-seventies, just when originalism began its slow, steady rise. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, which was ratified in 1971 and lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, an antiwar-movement objective, turned out to be the only amendment that constitutionalized an aim of one of the political revolutions of the sixties—the women’s movement, the civil-rights movement, the gay-rights movement, and the environmental-rights movement. People did not see that coming: they expected those movements to result in amendments.

In 1970, the civil-rights activist, constitutional theorist, and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the passage of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, barring discrimination on the basis of sex, was essential 
 to inaugurating a new and better era in the history of the nation’s constitutional democracy:

The adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment and its ratification by the several States could well usher in an unprecedented Golden Age of human relations in our national life and help our country to become an example of the practical ideal that the sole purpose of governments is to create the conditions under which the uniqueness of each individual is cherished and is encouraged to fulfill his or her highest creative potential.

That, of course, did not come to pass. No golden age ever does. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states, where most observers expected that it would secure quick ratification. But, in 1973, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Roe v. Wade. And conservatives began a decades-long campaign to advance originalism, reverse Roe, and defeat the E.R.A. by arguing … that “the E.R.A. means abortion.” Every significant amendment attempted since has failed. And, although efforts are ongoing to revive the E.R.A., so far they haven’t succeeded, either.

Polarization weakened Article V. But the Constitution really snapped when it became too brittle to guarantee equal rights to women. Liberals gave up on constitutional amendment; conservatives abandoned it in favor of advancing originalism. Still, nothing’s broken that can’t be mended. It’s a question, now, of how.

Unquote.

It’s also a question of how bad things will get if, as it seems now, nothing is done about it.

Philosophizing Naturally

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Science used to be called “philosophy”. More specifically, it was called “natural philosophy”:

From the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the common term for the study of physics (nature), a broad term that included botany, zoology, anthropology, and chemistry as well as what we now call physics. It was in the 19th century that the concept of science received its modern shape, with different scientific subjects emerging, such as astronomy, biology, and physics…. Isaac Newton’s book PhilosophiĂŠ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) reflects the use of the term natural philosophy in the 17th century [Wikipedia].

It makes some sense, therefore, that well-known physicist Sean Carroll decided to promote “natural philosophy”. This is from the transcript of one of Prof. Carroll’s podcasts:

… One of the bonuses of my new job here at Johns Hopkins is that I got to choose my own title. My title is Homewood professor, but then Homewood professor of what? … Knowing that I would both be involved in the physics department and the philosophy department, I thought it would be fun to call myself a professor of natural philosophy….

Back in the day, before we had separated out something called science and something called physics from philosophy, people like Isaac Newton or Galileo would have been considered to be philosophers. [He then mentions the full title of Newton’s Principia] …There’s a certain kind of philosophy and a certain kind of physics that really, really overlap, that are almost indistinguishable from each other, asking the biggest questions about, what is the world? What is it made of? Where did it come from? Why does it exist? Those kinds of things that really intersect with more down-to-earth physics questions like, “How does quantum mechanics work? What is fine-tuning in cosmology?” Things like that.

After reading that, I came upon an article from Quanta Magazine: “Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’”. Here’s how it starts:

The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed
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High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively charged electrons that buzz around them. College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks. But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images.

“This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine,” said Mike Williams, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”

Reading further made me want to do some philosophy:

The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form. And its forms differ drastically depending on how researchers set up their experiment. Connecting the particle’s many faces has been the work of generations. “We’re kind of just starting to understand this system in a complete way,” said Richard Milner, a nuclear physicist at MIT.

As the pursuit continues, the proton’s secrets keep tumbling out. Most recently, a monumental data analysis published in August found that the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself.

The proton “has been humbling to humans,” Williams said. “Every time you think you kind of have a handle on it, it throws you some curveballs.”

There are two things here that don’t sound right. First, what is a “haze of probabilities”? Physicists (and philosophers) disagree about what exists when we refer to a quantum entity. Is there something relatively substantial underlying it that we can’t (yet) identify? Or is there nothing there except “probabilities” that become real or substantial when we do a measurement (or when some other quantum entity interferes)? Speaking philosophically, it makes no sense that probabilities exist in some sort of “haze”. A probability is a possibility. How could a possibility exist without anything to separate it from other possibilities? Why would a possibility be in one place (say, Switzerland) as opposed to another (perhaps Johns Hopkins)? Most physicists would reply that I just don’t understand the quantum world. Unfortunately, according to physicist Richard Feynman’s well-known remark, neither do they:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take [this] lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

But, Prof. Feynman, going down blind alleys from which nobody has escaped is something philosophers do! That’s what they do most of the time! In this case, however, instead of going down the alley, we might suggest that “exists as” be replaced by “appears to be” or perhaps “manifests itself as”: the proton manifests itself as a haze of probabilities.

This brings me to the second thing that doesn’t sound right. The Quanta article says “the proton contains traces of particles … heavier than the proton itself”. The author meant “more massive than” rather than “heavier than”, but putting that aside, how can something’s contents be more massive than the thing itself?

The original study published in Nature says it this way:

Both light and heavy quarks, whose mass is respectively smaller or bigger than the mass of the proton, are revealed inside the proton in high-energy collisions.

It would be clearer to say that when measured, the proton has a certain mass, but when heavy quarks are measured outside the proton, their mass is greater than the proton’s. That’s certainly puzzling, and obviously justifies further investigation, but it’s not as contradictory as saying the proton’s contents are more massive than the proton.

The Supreme Court Judged by a Judge

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Jed Rakoff is a Senior United States District Judge. In a book review for the New York Review of Books, he summarizes the history of the Supreme Court from the 19th century to the 21st:  

Over the course of American history, the US Supreme Court has usually been the most conservative of the three branches of government, often to a reactionary extreme. Indeed, an objective observer might well conclude that it has frequently encouraged our nation’s darkest tendencies.

In the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, the Court not only rigidly enforced slave laws but also declared that even free African Americans were not US citizens (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857). It reduced Native Americans from sovereign nations to wards of the state (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831), which was free to remove them from their treaty-prescribed lands and send them on the deadly Trail of Tears to bleak reservations hundreds of miles west. In the decades following the Civil War, it undermined Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Cases of 1883), legitimized Jim Crow (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896), denied women the right to vote (Minor v. Happersett, 1875), and treated union activities as illegal conspiracies (Loewe v. Lawlor, 1908).

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Court went to great lengths to hold progressive legislation unconstitutional (for example, in Lochner v. New York, 1905), especially laws that sought to protect women and children from exploitation (Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 1923). And when, in response to pressure from (and ultimately appointments by) President Franklin Roosevelt, the Court somewhat relaxed its disapproval of federal social welfare legislation, it continued in many cases to show a callous disregard for the rights of individuals and minorities, as demonstrated by such decisions as its cavalier approval of the internment of loyal American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II (Korematsu v. United States, 1944).

There was a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s when the Court sought to recognize its past mistakes and move forward, and while the advent of the Warren Court in 1953 was something of a fluke (no one remotely expected that Earl Warren and William Brennan—both nominated by a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower—would develop into the great champions of liberty they became), in its relatively short duration it demonstrated how the Court could, if it wished, be a leader in the enhancement of civil rights and the protection of minorities. But beginning in the 1970s, the Court gradually resumed its traditional conservative stance, for example by limiting the Warren Court’s efforts to combat police misconduct (City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 1983). And now, thanks to [the last president’s three] appointments, the current majority has reduced some of the Court’s most progressive past decisions to ashes….

Judge Rakoff then gets to the book he’s reviewing: Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment. (I’m skipping most of the long review.) Rakoff argues that Justice Frankfurter, a progressive appointed by one of our most progressive presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, was too restrained in his rulings:

Liberals were initially thrilled by Frankfurter’s elevation. But they quickly learned that his conception of a “liberal” Court was rather different from theirs. The conflict was even more noticeable within the confines of the Court, where Frankfurter’s belief that progress best lay in limiting its review of state and federal legislation so as to let the democratic political process hold sway repeatedly clashed with the view of its newest member, William O. Douglas, that the Court’s responsibility was to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of minorities and individuals…..

One of the many virtues of [Democratic Justice] is the wealth of detailed evidence he provides for each of his assertions. His own assessment of Frankfurter’s virtues and faults is that he was prescient in seeing how the supposed lack of restraint of Warren Court jurisprudence could come back to haunt American liberals once the Court returned to its more traditional conservative stance. My view, however, is that Frankfurter got so carried away with his philosophy of restraint that he failed to recognize basic principles of checks and balances inherent in our constitutional design, and in particular the natural purpose of the Court to protect individuals and minorities against excesses in which elected officials and legislators too often engage.

Moreover, it is easy to pay lip service to a particular judicial philosophy in order to achieve any desired result. For example, the Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruling Roe v. Wade, can be interpreted by its supporters as an exercise in Frankfurter-like restraint that leaves the issue of abortion to state legislatures, while its opponents can view it as the Court’s refusal to exercise its inherent responsibility to protect individual rights.

What may not be gainsaid, however, is that the Court has now returned to its historically conservative tendencies with a vengeance that can only be called reactionary. And if you put aside arguments over judicial philosophy and look at the practical results, it is worse than that.

In the last few days of its most recent term, the Court released a series of decisions that, whatever their purported rationales, made the world a more dangerous place: more dangerous for poor people of color, who can no longer effectively seek redress for certain forms of police misconduct; more dangerous for women, who in many states must now resort to backroom abortions and face imprisonment for doing so; and more dangerous for Americans generally, who can no longer hope to meaningfully curb the increase in gun violence now plaguing our nation and whose government will find it ever more difficult to alleviate the climate change that imperils our planet. It is hard to believe that Felix Frankfurter would have been comfortable with such results.

To Believe Or Not To Believe, That Is a Question

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Philosophers sometimes wonder what the purpose of philosophy is. Given what philosophers do, they probably wonder about the purpose of their role more than, say, dentists or tightrope walkers wonder about the purpose of theirs.

The British philosopher, Bryan Magee, was also “a broadcaster, politician and author”. He was “best known for bringing philosophy to a popular audience” through a series of television interviews (available, of course, on YouTube). In 1997, Magee published Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper. It’s his intellectual autobiography. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but in the first few chapters, Magee argues that academic philosophy in the UK and US went seriously off track after World War 2 when, first at Oxford University, philosophers became too focused on language. He argues that language is a tool for understanding the world and our place in it, but that the philosophy of language shouldn’t be any more central to philosophy than the philosophy of science, politics or art. Magee believed philosophers should spend their time trying to answer the Big Questions, the kind that keep some people awake at night, like how to live a good life, if we have free will and whether to believe in God.

Coincidentally, somebody posted a link to a recent article that deals with one of those very big questions. It concerns the 17th century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who argued it’s a good idea to believe in God, because if we do, we’ll be eternally rewarded in Heaven, and if we don’t, well, we haven’t given up anything of real importance and, what matters much more,  we’ll avoid suffering in Hell forever and ever. His argument is somewhat misleadingly known as “Pascal’s Wager”. Saul Smilansky of the University of Haifa argues that Pascal got it wrong:

Pascal famously argued that practical reasoning should lead people to try and form within themselves a commitment to religious practice and obedience, based upon a belief in God…

The argument roughly goes like this: if God is all powerful and all knowing, and he will reward the righteous with heaven and condemn sinners to eternity in hell, it would be irrational to risk upsetting him. Rationally, one ought to ‘wager on God’. If God does not exist, one’s losses (such as in missing out on the joys of sin, or wasting time on religious ritual) will be relatively meagre, and in any case finite; while eternal torment in an insufferable hell is an infinite risk, which it would be radically foolish to take. There are philosophical difficulties in Pascal’s argument, such as on which God to wager, or the thought that God is unlikely to be pleased by those who follow his commandments as a pragmatic gamble. … But these need not concern us here.

…  I argue that there is a huge puzzle here, about the radical dissonance between the beliefs and practices of many of the purportedly religious; so that we should be highly sceptical of the prevalence, strength, and value of religious life and belief in God.

There are, I will argue, good reasons to doubt, concerning many (clearly not all or even most) purported religious believers, whether they are indeed believers, or at least whether their beliefs are strong; and religion seems to greatly increase the risks of deception, duplicity, and hypocrisy, as well as self-deception and inauthenticity. In these ways, many religious people end up being much worse than otherwise similar, seriously morally offending, secular people. By turning towards a religious form of life, one will therefore be adding great morality-related risks; it is playing with fire. Arguably, if there is a God who deeply cares about individual moral behaviour, he would punish religious moral transgressors more than the secular ones. And so, pace [contrary to the opinion of] Pascal, prima facie it seems better to wager on the secular life.

Those are the opening paragraphs of Smilansky’s article, which is free online. His argument made me wonder. Are there many people who loudly proclaim their religiosity, yet don’t act the way you’d expect followers of Jesus to act? Are they at risk of offending the God they claim to worship? That’s a really tough question.

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