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Are Wall Street Profits Fundamentally Based on Consumer Laziness?

by LoreenDavidson Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brad DeLong:

It used to be that we collectively paid Wall Street 1% per year of asset value–which was then some 3 years’ worth of GDP–to manage our investment and payments systems. Now we pay it more like 2% per year of asset value, which is now some 4 years’ worth of GDP.

He is responding to a post by Noah Smith that, when I click on it, turns out to be a response to me. My question was simple: finance is a very competitive industry, so how has it stayed so astronomically profitable for so long? Smith suggests that part of the answer is lending to households, but another part is asset management fees:

Asset-management fees are middleman costs that all kinds of players in the finance industry charge to move money around….The amount of wealth in the U.S. economy has soared since 1980 — just think of the rises in the housing and stock markets over that time — meaning that the middlemen in the finance industry have been taking their percentage fees out of a much larger pool of assets.

….But why have profits from these middleman fees stayed so high? Why haven’t asset-management charges gone down amid competition? In a recent post, I suggested one answer: people might just be ignoring them. Percentage fees sound tiny — 1 percent or 2 percent a year. But because that slice is taken off every year, it adds up to truly astronomical amounts. So if people are just ignoring what middlemen skim off the top, because each fee seems small, investors could be handing significant fractions of the country’s GDP to the financial sector out of sheer carelessness. That would certainly keep profits high; if many investors pay no attention to what they’re being charged, more competition can’t push down those fees.

So a combination of rising asset values and unchanging management fees can explain a large part of both finance’s growth and its continued profitability.

James Kwak has more here, basically suggesting that lots of people pay high fees for actively-managed funds deliberately. They figure that the higher price means better performance, just as a higher price usually means better performance in most areas of the consumer economy.

If Smith and Kwak are right, it means the enormous profitability of the financial system is based primarily on products sold to consumers (mutual funds, home loans), not to services offered to the rich or to the rest of the industry. Is this true? To find out, someone would have to break out industry profitability by product line (so to speak) and figure out where most of the money is coming from. Has anyone ever done that?

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Are Wall Street Profits Fundamentally Based on Consumer Laziness?

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Are Liberals Too Smug? Nah, We’re Too Condescending.

by TajMcCullough Posted on April 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are liberals too smug? Sure. That’s what Emmett Rensin says at Vox, anyway. Unfortunately, his essay runs to a Voxtastic 7,000 words, so there probably aren’t too many people willing to read it all the way through. These days, I’m tempted to say that the real problem with liberalism is that we’ve forgotten how to make a good, crisp point in a couple thousand words. We’ve fallen victim to the idea that longer essays signal greater importance. Maybe I’ll write a 2000-word piece about that someday.

But anyway—smugness. Are liberals too smug? I’d say so, except I’m not sure smug is really the right word. Here is Rensin explaining it:

By the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition? Why did they abandon us?

….The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable…. The trouble is that stupid hicks don’t know what’s good for them. They’re getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that’ve made them so wrong. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re voting against their own self-interest.

….It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy….The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:

….NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.

….Liberals aren’t just better informed. They’re smarter.

….They’ve got better grammar. They know more words.

….Liberals are better able to process new information; they’re less biased like that. They’ve got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They’ve got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.

Etc.

Fair enough. But what would you call that? There’s some smugness in there, sure, but I’d call it plain old condescension. We’re convinced that conservatives, especially working class conservatives, are just dumb. Smug suggests only a supreme confidence that we’re right—but conservative elites also believe they’re right, and they believe it as much as we do. The difference is that, generally speaking, they’re less condescending about it.

(Except for libertarians. Damn, but those guys are condescending.)

In any case, to boil things down a bit, Rensin accuses liberals of several faults:

Making fun of all those working-class rubes who vote for Republicans.
Spending too much time citing research studies and insisting that simple facts back up everything we believe.
Adopting a pose of knowing things that are faintly arcane. “The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing….Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.”
Abandoning the working class because we just can’t stand their dull, troglodyte social views.

I agree with some of this. I’ve long since gotten tired of the endless reposting of John Oliver’s “amazing,” “perfect,” “mic drop” destruction of whatever topic he takes on this week. I’m exasperated that the authors of papers showing that liberals are better than conservatives seem unable to write them in value-neutral ways that acknowledge the value of conservative ways of thinking. I don’t like the endless mockery of flyover country rubes. We should punch up, not down.

As it happens, I think Rensin could have constructed a much better case with 7,000 words to work with. His essay didn’t feel very well researched or persuasive to me, even though I agree with much of it. Still, the pushback has mostly been of the “Republicans are smug too!” variety:

But this isn’t smugness. It’s outrage, or hypocrisy, or standard issue partisanship. And as plenty of people have pointed out, outrage sells on the right, but for some reason, not on the left. We prefer mockery. So they get Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, while we get Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart.

You can find a good example in conservative criticism of political correctness on college campuses: trigger warnings, safe spaces, shouting down speakers, etc. They’re infuriated by this. They think college kids are cosseted by their administrations; can’t stand to be disagreed with; and have no respect for the First Amendment. But they’re not usually smug or condescending about it. Most of the time they’re scornful and outraged.

Generally speaking, elite conservatives think liberals are ignorant of basic truths: Econ 101; the work-sapping impact of welfare dependence; the value of traditional culture; the obvious dangers of the world that surrounds us. For working-class conservatives it’s worse: they’re just baffled by it all. They’re made to feel guilty about everything that’s any fun: college football for exploiting kids; pro football for maiming its players; SUVs for destroying the climate; living in the suburbs for being implicitly racist. If they try to argue, they’re accused of mansplaining or straightsplaining or whitesplaining. If they put a wrong word out of place, they’re slut shaming or fat shaming. Who the hell talks like that? They think it’s just crazy. Why do they have to put up with all this condescending gibberish from twenty-something liberals? What’s wrong with the values they grew up with?

So liberals and conservatives have different styles. No surprise there. The question is, do these styles work? Here, I think the answer is the same on both sides: they work on their own side, but not on the other. Outrage doesn’t persuade liberals and mockery doesn’t persuade conservatives. If you’re writing something for your own side, as I am here, most of the time, there’s no harm done. The problem is that mass media—and the internet in particular—makes it very hard to tailor our messages. Conservative outrage and liberal snark are heard by everyone, including the persuadable centrist types that we might actually want to persuade. In the end, I think this is probably Rensin’s real point. The first law of marketing, after all, is to know your audience. Handily, that’s also the first law of journalism.

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Are Liberals Too Smug? Nah, We’re Too Condescending.

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Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong

by LaureneT40 Posted on April 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CDC reports that the suicide rate was up again in 2014, and the Washington Post immediately offers some possible reasons. I’ve added numbers for easy reference:

(1) Last decade’s severe recession, (2) more drug addiction, (3) “gray divorce,” (4) increased social isolation, and even (5) the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide, according to a variety of people who study the issue.

But (6) economic distress — and dashed hopes generally — may underpin some of the increase, particularly for middle-aged white people. The data showed a 1 percent annual increase in suicide between 1999 and 2006 but a 2 percent yearly hike after that, as the economy deteriorated, unemployment skyrocketed and millions lost their homes.

David French comments:

There’s much more to say about this, but millions of our fellow citizens — friends and neighbors — are experiencing existential crises that are far beyond the ability of politics to solve. With civil society faltering, families fracturing, and millions of Americans “bowling alone,” the human toll will only continue to rise. God forgive our nation for believing we could build a culture without you.

Let’s slow down a bit. The causes of suicide are complex, and correlations are hard to prove. Still, there are a couple of things we can say. First, there should at least be a correlation if you’re claiming causation, and second, the purported cause had better come first. You can’t blame increased suicide on things that didn’t happen until years later.

With that in mind, let’s look at recent suicide rates for men. Not only does this help us control for gender, but it’s also a less noisy set of data since men commit suicide at nearly 4x the rate of women. It turns out that suicide rates barely budged between 1999-2005, so I’m going to look only at 2005-14. The chart is on the right, with suicide rates divided into three 3-year buckets. Here are some things we can say based on this and other data in the CDC report:

The Great Recession (and economic distress more generally) doesn’t really fit the facts. The suicide rate went up the most from 2005-2008, before the Great Recession. It went up the least from 2011-14. But if prolonged economic distress was at fault, you’d expect just the opposite: no effect before the recession and the greatest effect after it had been grinding away for a couple of years with no relief in sight.
Drug addiction is more plausible—but only modestly. According to HHS, marijuana use is up since 2005, but that’s an unlikely cause of suicide. Cocaine, hallucinogen, and illicit prescription drug use is down. Heroin use and heroin dependence are up. Overdose deaths among heroin and prescription opioid users are also up—but they’ve been rising since 2002 and it’s unclear how many of these deaths are suicides anyway. More generally, overall drug addiction rates have waxed and waned over the past five decades, and it’s difficult to tease out a correlation between addiction and suicide rates over the long term.
“Gray divorce” has been a thing since the 80s, well before the suicide rate started rising. It hit the mainstream in early 2007 with the publication of Calling It Quits, also before the suicide rate started rising. What’s more, suicide rates have been flat among the elderly since 1999. It’s other age groups that have seen an increase. This is unlikely to be more than a minuscule cause at most.
Increased social isolation could be a cause, but the 2006 paper that kicked off this discussion suggested only that Americans had become more isolated between 1985 and 2004. This corresponds to a period when suicide was declining or flat. What’s more, a 2009 Pew study that replicated the 2006 research found a substantially smaller—possibly zero—effect.
Internet and social media could also be a cause, though I don’t really see what the mechanism is supposed to be. And that 2009 Pew study found that internet and cell phone users were less isolated than others.

We also know that suicide is up only among whites and Native Americans, but not among Hispanics or African-Americans. So any theory about the rise of suicide needs to at least engage with what might cause this. Are whites more economically distressed than blacks? That seems distinctly unlikely. Do they have higher drug addiction rates? Higher social isolation? More family fracturing? Maybe, but I’d like to see the evidence. And what about overall life satisfaction rates? They seem to have been quite stable over the past few decades. This doesn’t suggest that growing existential angst is the cause.

My point here is not really that the increase in suicide rates can’t possibly be due to any of these things. A deeper dive might implicate any of them. What’s more, a lot of these possible causes affect a lot of people. But although suicide has seen a large percentage increase since 2005, in absolute terms it’s only gone up by about 1000 per year. That’s a small number, which makes it really hard to tease out from large-scale effects. A mere 1 percent change in the Gallup life satisfaction index, for example, represents a couple of million people, so it’s unlikely to give us much insight into relatively tiny changes in the suicide rate.

So what is my point? Just this: writers need to be careful not to casually project their own sentiments or guesses onto a topic like this. Sure, the Great Recession might be the cause of more suicides. Maybe existential crises and fracturing families are the cause. Opioid abuse could be a factor. But just because these all seem plausible doesn’t mean they’re true. Likewise, just because you personally don’t like the direction of American culture doesn’t mean they’re true either—no matter how true they seem. None of them should be tossed out casually.

For my money, we flatly don’t know what’s causing the increase in suicides over the past decade. Based on the size of the numbers and the evidence at hand, if you put a gun to my head I’d probably guess opioid abuse was the biggest cause. But I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone else knows either.

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Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong

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First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

by DorisVAWvf Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ah, Twitter. Here’s something I got last night after writing a post about Hillary Clinton’s fondness for military intervention:

My Bernie cesspool! Regular readers were amused, since I’ve written dozens of posts supportive of Hillary. But no one should get a free pass. If Hillary Clinton is too fond of military intervention for my taste, then it’s best to say so. That’s especially true during a primary campaign, when it might actually make a difference.

MoJo’s head honchos agree, and they make their case in “Why We’re Tough On The Candidates You Like: The Case For Offending Some Of The People, All Of The Time”:

Mother Jones is a reader-supported nonprofit, and that means we rely on donations and magazine subscriptions for 70 percent of our annual budget. It also means that by April 30, we need to raise $175,000 from readers like you to stay on track.

So the easiest thing to do, in some ways, would be taking it easy on our election coverage so as not to upset any of you while we’re asking for your support—we know Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeal to a lot of our readers. But taking it easy on anything is not in our DNA; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite of what (we think) you want us to do.

….Two years ago, when few were talking about Clinton’s links to the fossil fuel industry, we did a major investigative feature on her support for fracking as secretary of state; now her links to the fossil fuel industry are a big issue. Last summer, we ran the first in-depth piece on Sanders’ political evolution (and put an illustration of him on Mount Rushmore on the cover of our magazine); it took months for other major outlets to take him seriously. Since then, we’ve both covered the breaking news in the race and dug deeper on the strong points and weak points of both candidates—because that’s the job you want us to do.

Check it out and join the comments on the Facebook post if you’re so inclined. And if you want to support this kind of journalism, both in the magazine and here on the blog, help us out by pitching in a few bucks today for our spring fundraiser. You can give by credit card or PayPal.

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First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

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Friday Cat Blogging – 22 April 2016

by Antoinette3030 Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Our cats enjoy dark, cozy spots, so a few days ago I thought I’d buy them an enclosed pod to see how they liked it. Have I gone a little pod crazy? Perhaps. But it’s a cheap and harmless hobby.

Anyway, the only one I could find locally was a sort of cat yurt, so I shelled out $14.99 and took it home. It was…problematic. But the problem, it turned out, wasn’t the yurt concept per se, it was the pillow inside, which was so thick and soft that the cats rolled around on it like drunken sailors. As you can see in photo #1, Hopper solved that problem by burrowing under the pillow and using it as a door.

That worked well, but it caught the eye of her brother, who promptly stepped on the yurt and then decided to camp out on it. He eventually got bored with that, and when it was all over I removed the pillow entirely and moved the yurt. At first, everyone happily had their own pod. The Hilbert decided he wanted to try out the yurt, and as you can see, he eventually got his way.

But he’s a little too big for it, so it’s mostly a Hopper yurt. I’ve now customized it further by putting their old red blanket inside. We’ll see how that works out.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 22 April 2016

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Silicon Valley Not Really Feeling the Bern

by FrancescaMackino Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Based on donor data, Brian Fung says that Bernie Sanders has a lot of fans in the dotcom biz:

This wouldn’t be worth mentioning except for the fact that Sanders appears to have a broad-based appeal among Silicon Valley workers compared with his rivals. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sanders’s campaign committee seems to be by far the biggest recipient of donations from employees of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Intel.

….This sets up a few possibilities. It’s conceivable, for instance, that Clinton’s support among tech companies is actually higher than what we can observe from her list….Another possibility is that tech-industry folks are donating to Clinton but in amounts too small to break into the lists we’re looking at….What we can say is that Sanders appears to have much more support than Clinton across a wider range of tech companies, even if the amount of that financial support is relatively small.

Nah. Google employees are split nearly evenly between Bernie and Hillary, and employees of the other four companies probably are too. We just can’t see them because their totals fall below the top 20 in Hillary’s donor list. But why guess about this? All we have to do is look at the overall industry numbers. Here they are:

Compared to overall fundraising, this represents a bigger tilt toward Hillary than average. And despite the size of this sector, it represents a dismal 0.43 percent of Hillary’s total campaign donations and 0.36 percent of Bernie’s. So we can draw the following conclusions:

Hillary has broader support in the internet sector than Bernie.
Hillary gets a bigger percentage of her donations from the internet sector.
Silicon Valley is full of cheapskates who don’t care much about politics.

So there you have it.

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Silicon Valley Not Really Feeling the Bern

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Donald Trump Is Right: The GOP Primary System Is Rigged

by SheritaClune Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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I hate to agree with Donald Trump about anything, but he’s got a point: the Republican primary process is really unfair. Just look at New York: Kasich and Cruz won 40 percent of the vote but only 4 percent of the delegates. It’s an outrage.

And it’s been that way all along. In the early contests, Trump’s opponents won 68 percent of the vote but only 38 percent of the delegates. On Super Tuesday they won 66 percent of the vote but only 57 percent of the delegates. In early March they eked out a fair result: 63 percent of the vote and 66 percent of the delegates. But on Super Tuesday II it was back to business as usual: they crushed Trump with 60 percent of the vote but won only 38 percent of the delegates.

I’m glad Trump is helping shine a media spotlight on this gross inequity—and he deserves special credit since he’s the one benefiting from it. It’s a pretty selfless act. Maybe someone will finally start paying attention to the way the Republican establishment is so obviously in the bag for Trump.

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Donald Trump Is Right: The GOP Primary System Is Rigged

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Harriet Tubman Will Replace Jackson on $20 Bill

by WesleyCrb9 Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Who says Broadway musicals are a dying art form?

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday will announce plans to both keep Alexander Hamilton on the front of the $10 bill and to knock Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman, sources tell POLITICO.

….Lew’s reversal comes after he announced last summer that he was considering replacing Hamilton on the $10 bill with a woman. The plan drew swift rebukes from fans of Hamilton, who helped create the Treasury Department and the modern American financial system….Supporters of putting a woman on the $10 bill have complained that it will take too long to put a woman on the $20 bill. But people familiar with the matter said new designs for the bills should be ready by 2020. Treasury is likely to ask the Federal Reserve, which makes the final decision, to speed the process and get the bills into circulation as quickly as possible.

The movement to keep Hamilton on the $10 bill gathered strength after the Broadway musical named after the former Treasury Secretary and founding father became a runaway smash hit.

Quick! Someone create a smash hit dubstep-zydeco dance musical featuring Andrew Jackson. It’s his only hope.

I still wish Lew had chosen Frances Perkins, since I like the tradition of portraying people on currency who have served in office, but that’s just a personal thing. (Though I do admire Perkins greatly, and think she deserves more attention than she usually gets.) Still, it’s hard to argue with Tubman—or with any of dozens of other women. When you’re going from zero to one, there are a whole lot of worthy choices.

And it’s also nice to see that they can manage to put a new bill in circulation by 2020 after all. I mean, 2030? Seriously? How can it take 15 years to design a new bill and start shipping it to banks?

POSTSCRIPT: There’s a bit of irony here. The $20 bill is ubiquitous largely because that’s what ATMs have been spitting out since the late 70s. But a twenty today is worth less a ten back then. We really ought to be using $50 bills as our go-to walking-around currency these days, and that’s what ATMs should be churning out. By 2020, maybe they will be. And by 2025 cash will probably have disappeared entirely. So by the time Tubman finally makes it onto the twenty, we won’t be using them much anymore. Women just can’t catch a break.

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Harriet Tubman Will Replace Jackson on $20 Bill

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Factlet of the Day: Youth Turnout in New York Wasn’t Much Different Than in 2008

by MaureenHoffmann Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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For the record, here’s the Democratic turnout in New York in 2008 and 2016:

Total Turnout

18-29 Turnout

2008

1.82 million

273 thousand

2016

1.81 million

322 thousand

The turnout rate among all residents aged 18-29 was up from 9.8 percent to 11.5 percent. That’s a nice increase, but as I recall, Obama didn’t spend a whole lot of time in New York in 2008. When you take that into account, it’s hard to see much evidence here of a massive surge in youth interest caused by the Bernie Sanders campaign.

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Factlet of the Day: Youth Turnout in New York Wasn’t Much Different Than in 2008

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In the 21st Century, We All Want Smart, Gorgeous Mates

by GwenJosehvf Posted on April 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wonkblog points us today to a chart from Max Roser showing how men and women rated various aspects of potential mates in 1939 vs. 2009. (Since 1939 is the comparison year, it goes without saying that we’re talking about straight, cis, and most likely white folks here.) You can see the entire set of data at either of the links above, but I was interested mainly in the traits that have moved up or down significantly over that period. Here they are, in a handily color-coded pink and blue chart:

What can we tell from this? For starters, keep in mind that this is what people say they value, not what they actually value. “Similar political background,” for example, has allegedly moved up only one spot, from dead last to almost last, so it’s not in my chart. But there’s considerable evidence that a lot of people today would rather have their big toes cut off than associate with someone of the opposite party. So take all of this with a grain of salt.

Anyway, obviously chastity is out the door. No one cares anymore. Refinement is now decidedly old-fashioned, replaced by a desire for the more egalitarian virtue of sociability. And love has zoomed up to the top of the chart. (Allegedly, anyway.)

Beyond that, the two big movers are education and good looks. Apparently we all want mates who are both smart and gorgeous, which might go a long way toward explaining why marriage seems to be in decline. How many smart, gorgeous people are there in the world, after all? And if they have to be gregarious too—well, you’re just being mighty picky. Good luck.

Notably, the boring traits haven’t changed much: dependability and stability were near the top of the chart in 1939, and they’re still there now. I guess meat and potatoes are always in fashion. Or so we tell the pollsters, anyway.

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In the 21st Century, We All Want Smart, Gorgeous Mates

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