Recent comments by Marc Freed

• Nationalism, Madness, and Terrorism

  This is an interesting hypothesis. It seems to imply that madness has reached epidemic proportions in the Islamic world and lesser degrees among strict adherents of the other Abrahamic religions. If that is so, what is the remedy?
  
  In her recent book The Silk Road, Professor Valerie Hansen reports that the Tang Dynasty banned religion in 845, wiping out early Christianity in China. (Buddhism was banned too but survived.) Apparently religion and nationalism have been in conflict for more than 500 years.

• Avoiding a New American Recession

  The Republican mantra that "the top 2% of earners ... now pay more than 45% of total federal personal-income taxes" is really a canard unless presented in context. First, what percent of income do these earners receive? Second, what percent of private assets in the country do they own? And on the other end of the scale, what percent of income do lower earners pay to the government in combined payroll, medicare and income taxes?
  
  A large part of this problem is the different perceptions that different groups of people have about payroll and medicare taxes. The greater one's income, the more likely it is that payroll and medicare taxes seem like insurance payments for benefits one may collect later in life. For lower earners who spend a very high percentage of their incomes, these same payments feel no different than income taxes. That may not be accurate, but it may well be the way they see it, and that would explain differences in the way they hear these arguments and respond to them with their votes.
  
  Since Medicare is the real issue in this entire discussion, we ought to be discussing the real rate at which we would have to tax people to make it self-sustaining. Since this is already a separate tax, it would take the focus off income tax rates and put it where it belongs. Then perhaps both sides could find some common ground on the costs we are willing to incur and the benefits we want to have delivered.

• America’s Third-World Politics

  While walking to vote yesterday it occurred to me that New York, which has 21 elected represetatives in Dc, has over 200 professional athletes (not counting the football players who play in New Jersey). So at a very simplisitic level, I am about 10x more likely to have a random encounter with New York Yankee than I am to meet any of my state's members of Congress. While I would much rather meet any Yankee than any member of Congress, this did not strike me as a particularly healthy measure of democracy.
  
  Perhaps, to the list of long-term remedies for our political malaise we ought to add the idea of increasing the number of our Congressional representatives by a factor of 3 or 4. Increasing the size of our Congressional delegations to reduce the number of people each one represents would enable more people to beome engaged in the political process. More importantly, it would make it less attractive for wealthy activists to donate vast sums to congressional candidates whose votes mattered only 1/3 or 1/4 as much as they do now.
  
  Only a live experiment would tell us if such a change would raise the level of our political discourse, but other democracies with lower ratios of voters to elected officials do not seem to suffer as many non-sensical arguments as we do.

• Hard Truths About Global Growth

  Our current problem with employment resembles that created by the mechanization of agriculture a century ago. The migration of agricultural workers to towns and cities with industrial jobs cured that, but the solution took a generation or more. Most of the rural poor simply became urban poor. Only their children, in most cases, experienced a meaningful improvement in living standards.
  
  Today the mechanization of industrial jobs requires us to once again find meaningful work for people trained to work in that environment. A vast increase in the breadth and quality of service sector jobs accompanied by commensurate changes in compensation for such work may solve this problem; but as in the previous transition, it may not occur at a rate that permits workers in transition to maintain the living standards they desire or expect.
  
  Managing that transtion is the job of policy makers. For that to occur, we need to find some who understand that first.