nateoman's posterous

Further Thoughts on the Omnivore's Dilemma

So I finally finished reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  It was a good book.  I enjoyed it.  I learned a lot.  It made me think.  I think that it is very confused at places.  For this post I have two thoughts.  First, Pollan's grasp of economics is shaky to non-existence.  He seems to think in vaguely Marxist terms (although without the idea of class; more on this below).  Hence, rather than thinking of economic arrangements in terms of the micro incentives that drive them, he tends to think in terms of social structures.  Hence, we are treated to a lot of at times gaseous talk about industrialized corporate capitalism and commodification, as though the optimal capital structure and firm size were always bigger and as though it was impossible to compete on any metric other than price.  I love the way in which his discussion of Polyface Farms, a radical locovore farm in Virginia -- full disclosure: we've purchased chickens and beef from them; very tastey! -- as an alternative to modern economic structures includes an extensive discussion of the the way that such radical farmers are benefiting from nascent specialization in their markets.  Really!  Ya think?!?

While he is less radical than many of the voices that he features in the book, I do think that Pollan generally under-estimates the massive value in terms of consumer surplus that accrues as a result of competition in the market for food.  That said, I think that he makes some very trenchant points about the way in which government subsidies have massively distorted food markets.  In the end, while I am considerably less apocalyptic about capitalism (oh, how I hate that word!) than Pollan, I agree with much of his critique of processed food.  It is nasty, tasteless, often poisonous stuff.  I am a huge fan of eating real food, that is food that one can easily identify as having previously been a plant or animal.

Now, having attacked Pollan for not being neo-classical enough in his account of economics let me switch gears and accuse him of not being sufficiently Marxist or at least Marxist-ish.  Class is almost wholly absent from Pollan's book or from the food movements that he describes.  Let me give two examples.  The first is his discussion of hunting, which I found a bit precious.  To his credit, Pollan is a carnivore and a hunter.  He avoids the the Bambi narrative of anti-hunting.  That said, in all of his exhaustive discussion of his cultural and ethical unease about hunting, I was genuinely surprised that the issue of class never came up.  Pollan is a journalist living in Berkeley, California.  We may assume that he is well-educated, affluent, urban, and secular.  In other words, he inhabits a blue world.  Hunting, however, is very much a Red-state kind of activity.  I was expecting at least some discussion of the fact that one source of unease about hunting among Berkeley-residing journalists might have something to do with the way in which it transgresses the cultural and class divide between the Bay Area and -- say -- south eastern Idaho.  To be sure, one might tell this story in which the cultural space of the Bay Area was simply a place-holder or a signal for the underlying ethical difficulties that Pollan describes.  I can't help but thinking, however, that often the expression of the ethical difficulties is mainly a cultural signaling device, a way of expressing a particular kind of class and cultural solidarity.

The second place where Pollan is inattentive to class is in the blithe way in which he calls for more expensive food.  There may well be good environmental arguments for more expensive food.  Heaven knows that given the level of government subsidies in agriculture, there are exceedingly good economic arguments for more expensive food.  That said, however, the basic reality is that food is one of those forms of consumption that it is fairly difficult for human beings to substitute away from.  Accordingly, everyone has a certain fix cost of food: without a certain caloric intake each day we will die.  What this means is that increases in the cost of food will be steeply regressive.  It is one think for Pollan to blithely tell his fellow denizens of the affluent and well-educated meritocracy that they ought to shell out more money for locally grown vegetables and chickens that lived a happy life before they were slaughtered.  Delivering the same message farther down the socio-economic ladder, however, means that a proportionately larger share of household income goes for food.  Likewise, it is one thing for the affluent to pooh-pooh the economic benefits of shaving a few dollars off of the grocery bill.  It is another think to say the same thing to the poor.  (Incidentally, this broader issue plays out in many a romantic and neo-romantic critique of industrialization and modern capitalism.  It was one thing for Blake to inveigh against the dark Satanic mills.  After all, was such social disruption really worth a few pennies off of a yard of cloth?  The calculation might look very different, however, to a poor person is now able to afford warm clothing for the first time.)  Of course, many of the poor are not at all well-served by the processed food industry, as virtually any study of obesity and socio-economic status will reveal.  This, however, has less to do with cheap food per se, than with the pathology of distribution networks in many poor areas.  South-East Washington DC or the seedier areas of Richmond are largely bereft of grocery stores, but abound with convenience stores.  This, however, is a function of crime -- especially shoplifting -- rates not the evils of cheap food.  Some recognition of these complexities would be nice.  Otherwise, one is left with the strong impression that Pollan believes that our food chains should be reorganized mainly to accomodate ideologically conscious dinner parties. 

All that said, it's hard not to like Pollan's curiosity, his willingness to problematize neat ideological answers (when he notices to do so), and his evident love of food.  And he is right that McDonalds is a sick abomination.  Eat some real food and go for a run.

Why I Don't Take You as Seriously as I Should

I have a confession.  I often don't take much of what my friends say all that seriously.  This tends to especially be the case when they are talking about such weighty matters as religion, politics, morality, and the fate of society.  Don't get me wrong.  My friends are, by and large, an extremely intelligent and likable lot.  They are thoughtful and well informed.  So what gives?  Why don't I take them seriously?

Well in addition to being smart and loquacious many of my friends are morally intense.  In part this is because they are sensitive souls who see the injustice of the world and wish for a better one.  However, a big reason for their intensity is that it's fun.  What makes it fun is the the emotional rush that one gets from a sense of moral outrage. I think that there is a kind of high that comes from engaging in moral conflicts that one believes are significant and that put one on the side of the angels. It's a potent cocktail and I think that it is one of the things that draws people to blog discussions, partisan political debates, and a apocalyptic religious preaching. At some level I have no problem with this as good clean fun, but it's not without its own intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual dangers. Best not to take one's self too seriously if you can avoid it.

Of course the problem is that sometimes there really are big existential issues about which I ought to be morally passionate, and I freely admit that in my attitude there is the danger of indifference in the face of evil.  It also tends to make me come off as a bit smug.  Still, you now know why I'm likely to respond to your next passionate moral stand against the evil of the world with an amused twitch at the corner of my mouth.

Why I Probably Don't Take Much of What You Say All That Seriously

I have a confession.  I often don't take much of what my friends say all that seriously.  This tends to especially be the case when they are talking about such weighty matters as religion, politics, morality, and the fate of society.  Don't get me wrong.  My friends are, by and large, an extremely intelligent and likable lot.  They are thoughtful and well informed.  So what gives?  Why don't I take them seriously?

Well in addition to being smart and loquacious many of my friends are morally intense.  In part this is because they are sensitive souls who see the injustice of the world and wish for a better one.  However, a big reason for their intensity is that it's fun.  What makes it fun is the the emotional rush that one gets from a sense of moral outrage. I think that there is a kind of high that comes from engaging in moral conflicts that one believes are significant and that put one on the side of the angels. It's a potent cocktail and I think that it is one of the things that draws people to blog discussions, partisan political debates, and a apocalyptic religious preaching. At some level I have no problem with this as good clean fun, but it's not without its own intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual dangers. Best not to take one's self too seriously if you can avoid it.

Of course the problem is that sometimes there really are big existential issues about which I ought to be morally passionate, and I freely admit that in my attitude there is the danger of indifference in the face of evil.  It also tends to make me come off as a bit smug.  Still, you now know why I'm likely to respond to your next passionate moral stand against the evil of the world with an amused twitch at the corner of my mouth.

The Line

Theline

I voted this morning, and I may have something to say about it later.  I'm also hoping to get to some thoughts I have had about Russell's latest offering and the malais on the left and apocalyptic enthusiasm on the right.  Who knows if that will actually happen.  I did, however, want to post briefly on this picture, which I took at the polling station this morning.  The chalk line is literally the border of free speech.  On one side of that line you have wide open debate, perhaps the strongest protections for free speech in the world.  On the other side of the line attempting to persuade someone to vote in a particular way is a crime.  As a law professor I spend a lot of time talking with students about how to draw lines.  Generally speaking the line is indistinct, difficult to locate, and as often as not arbitrary.  The joy and frustration of legal thinking is in some sense the quest to articulate coherent reasons for believing a line is one place rather than another and then justifying its location.  Walking past the line on the way to my car I thought a bit about free speech around the world.  Some places maintain an elaborate apparatus of censorship like China's Great Fire Wall.  In most places where political speech is limited, however, the issue is much murkier, like in Venezuela where media outlets hostile to the President get harassed over petty regulatory violations rather than being subject to direct censorship.  It's not just that saying the wrong thing can have negative legal consequences it is that the legal consequences arise out of a corrupt miasma of discretionary action.

It was a pretty boring ballot in Virginia's 1st Congressional district this year.  Not much there to inspire.  I did, however, find the chalk line on the sidewalk oddly moving.  Freedom and clear -- and in this case at least -- sensible rules; you could do a lot worse.

Sanity, Stewart, and Markets

I like Jon Stewart.  Of course, I don't really have a TV, so what I see of him consists mainly of clips on the internet.  But he's a funny guy and a William & Mary alum to boot.  What's not to like?  I finally got around to watching his speech from Saturday on YouTube this morning.  I was struck by his image of people of very diverse beliefs working productively together, an image he contrasted with mindless divisiveness of politics and puditry.  

What struck me was that in grasping for images of sane and reasonable cooperation, Stewart ultimately looked not to some exemplary political leader but to the marketplace.  He rightly notes that most Americans do not live their lives in the partisan hothouse of cable TV.  Rather, Americans spend a lot of time at work in the market.  Here I think that Stewart, accidentally as it were, has hit on a profound point.

The market is often portrayed as a vicious and cut-throat place, one that is at times contrasted with the redemptive power of politics which at its best is supposed to involve lofty stuff like rights, democracy, and the pubic good.  Of course in some places and at some times, there is true to both the image of wicked commerce and the image of righteous politics.  Markets, however, are also miracles of human cooperation.  Think about something as simple as the construction of a building.  This involves an enormous collective effort from a lot of people who have to trust and work with one another.  It's not surprising that people who habitually participate in the marketplace day in and day out tend to exhibit the kinds of virtues that Stewart extolled.

It's commerce that makes us virtuous in the way that Stewart describes -- hard working, honest, cooperative, productive.  It's politics that breeds the vices he deplores.

Another Example of the GOP's Self-Destructive Anti-immigrant Obsession

California is a mess.  It is the worse governed large economy (number 8 globally) in the world.  It has essentially too big problems.  The first is an utterly dysfunctional budget process.  Some ridiculous portion of the budget is non-discretionary, locked in by ballot referendum.  The other problem are over-mighty public employees unions that are perfectly willing to drive the state into bankruptcy and default (remember when the state issued IOUs to bond holders a while back?) rather than make realistic cuts in the benefits that they have voted themselves.  It's second problem is a regulatory environment from hell that is driving away businesses and with them jobs and tax revenues.  It is only the state's inherent strengths -- good universities, nice weather, established business networks, good surfing etc. --  that keep it from utterly imploding.  If Indiana were run the way that California is run, the entire state would look like Gary.

In the governor's race you have Meg Whitman, the successful CEO of eBay, facing off against Jerry Brown, the career Democratic pol son of a career Democratic pol.  I don't see how this is even a hard choice.  Does anyone think that Jerry Brown -- Jerry Brown! -- is going to take on public employees unions and California's regulatory mayhem?  Seriously?  You don't survive two life times in California Democratic politics and retain the ability to seriously piss off public employees unions.  At best Jerry will raise taxes, which will help stave off government insolvency but only at the price of making an economically distasteful place to do business even worse.  Given California's perverse constitutional system, I don't have a lot of hope for Whitman but at the very least she has not spent a life in hock to public employees unions and has a reality-based relationship to California's business environment.  Oh, and she is also spending the crap out of Jerry Brown's campaign with her own money.

Yet with all of this, they are neck and neck.  Why?  Because the conservative wing of the GOP has an insane and self-destructive obsession with immigration.  It's not just that they are working hard to systematically alienate Latinos, one of the fastest growing demographic groups in America.  They are also taking sensible candidates like Whitman and forcing them through a primary process that makes them difficult if not impossible to elect.  In Whitman's case she tacked hard to the right in the primary, pandering to the anti-immigrant crowd with a bunch of zero tolerance rhetorical nonsense.  Distasteful, destructive, and wrong but that's politics and I'd rather Whitman come ouf of the primary rather than someone even worse.  The problem of course, is that the anti-immigrant nonsense she had to spew in the primary has now handed the Democrats a perfect weapon.  It is not just that they can scare Latino voters with her statements, they also get to expose her as a heartless hypocrite. 

And so it looks like the xenophobic wing of the California GOP may well deliver the state to Jerry Brown.  What a pathetic farce.

Murder, Elephants, Metaethics, Barbarian Kings, and Other Stuff: Quick Thoughts on Some Books I've Read of Late

The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic by Robert L. O'Connell.  This is basically a history of the Second Punic War.  It's a nice narrative, although at times the writing is clunky and cliche-ridden.  For example, it concludes -- I am not making this up -- by claiming that "In the end, Hannibal had the last laugh."  The main thesis of the article is that Hannibal set it motion the forces the led to the fall of the Republic by calling into existence the charismatic military leader who commanded the loyalty of his troops the the exclusion of the state.  His exhibit A for this argument is Scipio Africanus and the loyalty that he demanded from the exiled survivors of Cannae that he led to Africa.  In the end, I don't really buy it.  It seems to me that Scipio's army was still on the whole a classically republican body of self-financed citizen soldiers and the Cannae exiles were never really a model for later Roman armies.  I would trace the fundamental shift in the relationship between army and Republic to a later period, specifically the military reforms under Gaius Marius.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the Battle Between States and Corporations by Ian Bremmer.  This is a book about the rise of state capitalism.  The core case, of course, is China but Bremmer also includes Russia and the petro-states in the Persian Gulf in this category.  By state capitalism, he means a system in which state actors encourage market capitalism but seek to control major industries for political gain.  My main problem with the book -- other than the rather banal, Economist-style middle-of-the-road consensus position it takes on macroeconomic policy -- is that I am not sure that it really makes sense to say that Dubai, Russia, and China are necessarily really examples of a single kind of economic system.  Rather, I think that they are really quite different states.  What they share is a rejection of old-style socialism and an aggressively interventionist state.  I do agree with Bremmer's conclusion, which is that ultimately the Chinese model of capitalism is not sustainable, but that in the near to medium term it isn't going any where soon. 

Persona Non Grata: A Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie.  Pure escapist fiction.  This one is a murder mystery set in the Roman Empire of Hadrian.  Our protagonist, Gaius Petronius Russo, is an army physician returned home to the family estate in southern Gaul.  There are complicated business and family problems.  There is a murder.  Who dunnit?  It was a fun book, much like Downie's first Gaius Russo novel, Medicus, which I also enjoyed.  A number of reviewers have commented on how funny and witty Downie's writing is.  I just don't see it.  

The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O'Donnell.  The basic thesis of this books is that there was no fall of the Roman Empire.  Sure, the so-called Gothic successor kingdoms to the empire were ruled by men who called themselves "Rex" rather than "Imperator," but we shouldn't make too much of this fact.  Theodoric -- the hero of the piece -- should be thought of as a Roman imperial leader and a pretty successful one at that.  In place of a vision of an empire struggling against barbarian invaders until it finally succumbs to chaos, O'Donnell insists that you just have a process of gradual evolution with far more continuity on either side of 476 AD when Romulus Augustus was forced to abdicate than is suggested by Hollywood barbarians rampaging through the streets of Rome.  Also, O'Donnell thinks that Justinian was a real putz.  I don't know if I buy O'Donnell's argument or not.  It is worth noting, however, that Saint Augustine, who actually lived through the events, thought that something cataclysmic and earth shaking did indeed happen when Rome was sacked and the Vandals invaded Africa province.

The Second Person Standpoint by Stephen Darwell.  I am not actually finished with this one yet, so I've no final thoughts.  This book is all the rage among private law theorists these days, although I suspect that in the end Darwell will be less useful than they suppose.  This is a book on moral theory, in particular metaethics.  What Darwell wants to do is understand the foundations of moral accountability and obligation.  If I understand the argument correctly, he believes that such foundations must be sought in the particular authority that agents have to address and hold one another accountable.  If I understand him correctly, the gist of his argument is that moral obligation is derivative of the ability of victims or others with second-personal authority rather than vice versa.  Hence, if you are stepping on my foot and this is wrong it is because I have a particular authority to demand that you stope stepping on my foot rather than because your stepping on my foot violates some more abstract principle that I can invoke against you.  The private law theorists like this book because it focuses attention on relational wrongs and the authority of victims to demand and hold wrongdoer's accountable.  This, of course, sounds much like the structure of a civil law suit.  My problem is that as I understand Darwell, he is not simply elucidating some peculiar form of second-person morality.  Rather he is arguing that ALL morality is based on some sort of second-person standpoint.  Yet the attraction of Darwell for private law theorists lies precisely in their hope of finding some peculiar or unique sort of moral argument that underlies the peculiar and unique practice of civil liability.  But I think that Darwell would say that criminal law or constitutional law -- the the extent they are also grounded in moral claims -- are also second-personal.  Anyway, I have to finish the book to figure out what I think.

The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse by Steven Smith.  Smith's basic argument is that public debate in contemporary society sucks.  Contra folks like Ronald Dworkin, however, he doesn't see this as resulting from the abandonment of the noble Enlightenment tradition of secular reason.  Rather, he sees the problem as arising from a form of public discourse that adheres too closely to the Rawlsian strictures of public reason.  Once we exclude everyone's deepest convictions from public debate, of course the debate will be shallow, intellectually dishonest, and unsatisfying.  Duh.  Or so says Smith.  I think that there is a lot to what he says, but I have two points I'd make in response.  First, I think that democracy itself is a problem here.  It is not just that we are engaging in some sort of liberal epistemological abstemiousness.  Rather, it is that appealing to a mass audience, as public discourse in a democracy must, necessarily makes us stupid because collectively we tend to be dumber than we are individually.  Or so says my inner aristocrat.  Second, even if Smith is right he has absolutely nothing to say about solutions other than that sometimes perhaps we should try talking in a different way, although not always.  It's difficult and perhaps this is the best we can do.  It's a very mushy feeling ending.

The Astronomer: A Novel of Suspense by Lawrence Goldstone.  More escapist fiction.  This one is set in France during the Protestant Reformation.  The hero is a disillusioned theology student who becomes an agent for the Inquisition who turns against his handlers when he uncovers a plot to murder Copernicus.  I didn't think that the novel was all that great.  The pacing was uneven, and while the author went out of his way to fill the action with historical detail I just couldn't take his protagonist seriously as a sixteenth-century character.  His motivation and internal dialogue made him sound like a liberal unitarian astrophysicist.  He is skeptical, vaguely theist but uninterested in ideas of sin and redemption, and a firm partisan of the scientific method as it would be formulated at the end of the nineteenth-century.  Thumbs down on this one.

Thoughts on the Deseret News, Immigration, and a Mormon Voice

Consider this editorial in the Deseret News.  (I mean it.  Follow the link, read the article, and come back.)  Intellectually there is quite a bit going on in these paragraphs.  First, it is addressing the immigration debate arguing in effect that the rule of law is undermined by both widespread flouting of the laws and attempts to relentlessly enforce laws that are unfair.  Both points are well taken in my opinion and in my mind they point toward a policy of better enforcement of considerably more liberal immigration laws, something I would certainly support.  The interesting stuff, however, comes in the way that the editorial uses nineteenth-century Mormon experience.

All the talk of pioneers, of course, is just a polite way of saying Mormons in public, and the point that it makes is correct: The Mormon pioneers in Utah were squatters.  There is a certain amount of tetchiness on this point in the comments at the DN site, but there isn't any serious debate about this.  Granted, after the ceding of northern Mexico to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican-American wars, Mormon immigration to Utah didn't necessarily involving illegally crossing an international boarder (although there was some of that later in the 19th century), but the settlements up and down the Mormon corridor were settled by people who did not possess legal title to the land that they occupied.  Indeed, the editorial understates this, implying that after 1869 when the territorial land office was set up in Utah everything was entirely legal.  Not so.  It actually took a decade or two to sort out legal title to all of the settled land in Utah.

The editorial also understates the way in which the Mormon pioneers status as squatters effected their attitudes toward the law.  Mormons were hostile to federal authority for much of the 19th century.  Most of this had to do with polygamy and theocracy, but it would be a mistake -- I think -- to underestimate the impact of property law on events.  Some pretty solid modern scholarship has demonstrated that the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri (as opposed to the earlier expulsion from Jackson County) was orchestrated in part by a group of local non-Mormon elites who manipulated public sentiment against the Mormons as a way of getting their property.  At the very least, these elites profited mightily by snapping up Mormon "preemption rights" thereby reaping the economic benefits of Mormon improvements.  Thus, during the Utah period Mormons were in part suspicious of federal authority because they feared -- not without cause as past experience showed -- that formal land law could be used by enemies to confiscate their de facto property.  The result was a healthy dollop of contempt by Mormons for federal legal power and even -- I believe -- a certain amount of extra-legal violence (read "law breaking") against claim jumpers, real and perceived.

There is another strand of thinking at work in the DN editorial, strand associated with the work of Peruvian political activist Hernando De Soto and the Nobel Prize winning economist Douglas North.  Both of these thinkers have looked at the way in which informal and illegal activity can be formalized and brought within the legal domain.  Hence, North has argued that the origins of the rule of law in the Anglo-American tradition can be found in the formalization of land title in medieval England.  De Soto has argued that one of the chief impediments to economic prosperity in the developing world is the way in which the poor are excluded from the formal legal system.  In effect, they must exist as squatters.

Hence, this article is implicitly doing more than simply calling for immigration reform.  It is in effect arguing that the shadowy, informal, illegal labor market inhabited by undocumented immigrants is akin to the shadowy, informal, illegal system of land holding that Mormon pioneers (and medieval lords and peasants, the inhabitants of Brazilian slums) inhabited.  Just as the formalization of property rights in land allowed for economic flourishing, the formalization of property rights in labor -- if you will -- will allow for economic flourishing.

Aside from the merits of the argument, the DN editorial raises an interesting question: Is this a "Mormon" editorial?  Yes and no.  The example of Mormon pioneers serves two functions.  First it illustrates a point.  Second -- and far more importantly -- it appeals to a Mormon audience, inviting them to associate immigrants with pioneer forbearers.  In part this is simply a rhetorical move.  But in part it represents a peculiarly Mormon challenge to the claims of national identity to primary allegiance.  The idea is that if immigrants are like Mormon pioneers they have some claim to the regard of American Mormons in the face of any objection that they are not like Americans.  It is an appeal over the head of national identity to tribal and religious identity.  On the other hand, the arguments -- especially the implicit appeal to De Soto and North -- are not themselves peculiarly Mormon.  What we get is thus a marriage of Mormon stories and imagery to a-Mormon ideas, along with a subtle subliminal appeal to Mormonism's most potentially radical political idea, namely the way in which it compromises allegiance to the nation state.

The Deseret News shouldn't really exist.  I can't think of any city in the U.S. of comparable size to Salt Lake that supports two major daily newspapers.  The DN is gambling that they can carve out a niche for themselves with -- among other things -- a stronger and more unique editorial voice, one that emanates from their "values."  In this context, I don't think that  values is simply a code word for "Mormonism" or "conservatism," although at times it is both of those things.  Rather, I think it is an attempt to find a voice that combines an engagement with public ideas with some voice and ideas rooted in a Mormon milieu.  The possibility of such a voice is the final issue lurking within this editorial. 

All in all there is quite a bit more going on here than one normally gets from the editorial page of a struggling regional daily.