Social

It’s apparently “beat up the economists week and no one thought to tell me in advance. Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies posts about Greg Mankiw’s recent NY Times editorial and suggests that the reason economists are so patronizing is bitterness over being stuck in a low paying academic job whose sole purpose is to justify the inequities in a capitalist system. In Scientific American, we have Rober Nadeau’s editorial on the problems with the views of economists. Nadeau notes that economics is a social science that tried to pattern itself after physics. Unfortunately, a) it used 19th century physics and never updated itself as the physics changed; and b) economists never realized that they can’t treat people as elemental particles. Nadeau goes on to note some of the basic assumptions made in economics that don’t stand up. ...

As mentioned last month, the North Carolina Utilities Commission has banned the expansion of Progress Energy’s Balanced Billing Plan and Duke Power’s Fixed Payment Plan. These are the plans that charge you roughly 11% in order to have a guaranteed power bill. Unfortunately, it’s not a full ban, it’s just a prohibition against enrolling any new participants. The reason for the ban? [drum roll please] The plans encourage participants to increase their power consumption.

Last week I was having lunch with a colleague (of sorts) and we were on the topic of the economy, outsourcing of jobs, etc. I mentioned that we were living in, what I’ve taken to calling, a crappy low-rent future *. He pointed out, and I agree, that this is largely because corporations have broken the social contract. It turns out he had been reading Robert Reich’s “Super Capitalism while I had been reading “The Global Class War. In their own ways, each of these books tells the story of how corporations from the end of the WWII with the New Deal until the late 1970s were bound by something of a social contract. Corporations recognized that their customer base was their employee base and that while you might not want to pay your employees, not doing so would spiral out of control so that your own customers couldn’t afford your products. Corporations began to slip the social contract in the late 70s with the Regan Revolution. The trend continued in the 80s and 90s as companies began to achieve transnational status: i.e., their customer base and their employee base were no longer the same. NAFTA and the follow-up “free trade agreements accelerated this trend by allowing companies to shift labor and production to the places where it was cheapest without actually requiring labor or environmental standards that would level the playing field. ...

Gee, nobody could have predicted this I suppose: The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday. Admittedly, Mueller goes on to say that the reports were prior to new policies being put into place, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better. It’s things like this that have always made me very nervous about partnerships between law enforcement and industry. I’ll try to post something about InfraGard one of these days. It’s a little scary in its own right.

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue: Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens. Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC) Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists. The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for. Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country. I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed. ...

Interesting. Shortly after posting about power companies, I received a comment from Progress Energy correcting me about the plans. It seems [pure speculation here] that Progress has some sort of “blog response team up in Maryland or northern Virginia. Anyway, I misnamed the program that I had been offered, as the comment says, it was indeed the “Balanced Bill payment plan where you wind up spending some 11% more over the course of the year for the privilege of knowing that your bill will be 1/12th of a fixed amount. There is (apparently) a different equal payment plan which is comparable to what we had with Duke Power. However, it’s not the money maker that the Balanced Bill program is and so it is not heavily advertised. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find details of the plan online. The closest I can get is here, which seems to be lacking in specifics. ...

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past two years of power consumption, they compute your monthly bill and that’s what you’ll pay all year long. They’ll recompute a new amount 12 months later. We had something like that with Duke Power in Durham. They computed your recent average. You paid that for 11 months and then settled up on the 12th month, paying less or more depending on actual use. ...

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up! “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it. “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t do anything about it. “What, we can? Well it’ll destroy our economy. “You mean it won’t? Well, you must be French. ...

Okay, slight confession time. I’m something of a closet political junkie. Not so much the “who’s up, who’s down campaigning politics, but the questions of policy, who supports what, what makes sense kind of thing. If I were involved in politics directly, I suppose that would make me a wonk, not a hack. Anyway, K and I were having a discussion last week about the presidential primaries. K’s position was that if Huckabee wins the GOP primaries, we’re all in serious danger because the man holds positions that are bad for women, minorities, basically everyone that’s not a middle class white heterosexual male. I, on the other hand, maintained the position that a Huckabee win in the primaries would be hysterical. 🙂 ...

I missed on Sunday, but under the theory of better late than never… Donald Kerr is the principal deputy director of national intelligence, so presumably he speaks with some authority regarding the government’s view of privacy. In a recent Associated Press article he made several remarks which I find exceedingly scary, misleading or both. First up: Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information. ...