More Dangerous Government-Backed "Consensus" Science: Salt

A regular theme here is how the government -- supposedly consisting of all-perfect experts who can use their expertise to run the people's lives -- regularly falls for scientific nonsense promoted by the loudest and most-insistent self-promoters (always living entirely on the government nickel).  See, e.g., climate, the "low-fat" diet, etc.  Of course, in every case the scientific nonsense translates into lots more power for some power-obsessed government bureaucracy.  

A particularly egregious example of the phenomenon is the campaign against dietary salt.  Back in 2013 I wrote two posts on this subject, the first (in May) titled "Junk Statistics And The Government's Campaign For More Power," and the second (in July) "The Endless Supply Of Fake Scares And Statistical Scams."  The particular thing that inspired those posts was that the Institute of Medicine -- which had long supported government initiatives to regulate salt in the diet -- had just come out with a report analyzing the literature on dietary salt, and had concluded that there was little evidence of harm at levels consumed by most Americans, and some substantial evidence that reducing salt much below these levels could well be harmful to many people.  The May 2013 post quoted from a New York Times article of that month reporting on the brand-new IOM study, title "No Benefits Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet."  Excerpt:

In a report that undercuts years of public health warnings, a prestigious group convened by the government says there is no good reason based on health outcomes for many Americans to drive their sodium consumption down to the very low levels recommended in national dietary guidelines. . . .  “As you go below the 2,300 mark, there is an absence of data in terms of benefit and there begin to be suggestions in subgroup populations about potential harms,” said Dr. Brian L. Strom, chairman of the committee and a professor of public health at the University of Pennsylvania. He explained that the possible harms included increased rates of heart attacks and an increased risk of death.    

And it hasn't gotten any better since then for the anti-salt campaign.  For example, the Washington Post wonkblog reported in April 2015 on the latest, in a post titled "Is the American diet too salty?  Scientists challenge the long-standing government warning."   

[U]nknown to many shoppers urged to buy foods that are “low sodium” and “low salt,” this longstanding warning has come under assault by scientists who say that typical American salt consumption is without risk. . . .  [A]ccording to studies published in recent years by pillars of the medical community, the low levels of salt recommended by the government might actually be dangerous.  “There is no longer any valid basis for the current salt guidelines,” said Andrew Mente, a professor at McMaster University in Ontario and one of the researchers involved in a major study published last year by the New England Journal of Medicine. “So why are we still scaring people about salt?”

So, Mr. Menton, your side appears to have won this one, so why are you still complaining?  The reason is that adverse data seems to have completely lost its ability to deter bureaucracies bent on increasing their power.  We're now three years into the era when everybody who follows the issue knows that salt in the diet at levels you find tasty is not harmful, and yet just this week we have two pieces of news on bureaucracies not only continuing, but ramping up the anti-salt jihad.  

First, the FDA.  Just this week the FDA has come out with a new thing called its "Draft Guidance" for "Voluntary Sodium Reduction Goals."   Do you like that "voluntary" part?  Good luck to a Kraft or a Goya if they try to say they decline to participate.  So why is the FDA doing this at this time? Here's their justification:

According to the 2010 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report, “Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake in the United States” (Ref. 5), multiple public health efforts have attempted to reduce sodium intake over the past 40 years. However, these efforts, which mainly included education initiatives, have not been successful. The IOM noted this and concluded that without an overall reduction of the level of sodium in the food supply, consumers will not be able to reach intakes recommended by the Dietary Guidelines. 

Yes, it's based on a 2010 IOM report.  But what about the 2013 IOM report that found that the dietary sodium levels recommended by the Dietary Guidelines were borderline dangerous?  They somehow spin it as supporting their position, and completely ignore all the recent adverse research and data out there.  From a June 1 New York Times article reporting on the FDA initiative:  

David A. McCarron, a research associate in the Department of Nutrition at the University of California, Davis, said a number of studies had shown risks of too little salt.  “Going below 3,000 is dangerous — that’s what the data has shown,” said Professor McCarron, who has consulted for the food industry.

By the way, the government's guideline for salt is 2300 mg per day.  And by God we're going to make the food companies get us there, no matter how many people we kill along the way!

Also in the news, on May 26 a panel of the New York State Appellate Division, First Department (the district that covers Manhattan and the Bronx) has upheld the denial of a preliminary injunction sought by the National Restaurant Association against the New York City Department of Health to prevent it from enforcing new rules requiring that the amount of salt in each dish be specified on the menu.  You say that it's impossible even to know how much salt the cook may have shaken from his salt shaker onto your steak?  Too bad!  Hey, if the FDA can put through a bunch of anti-salt regulations, then so can we!

Among all the government crusades and jihads, the anti-salt campaign has to be about the most pointless.  Your body tells you when you need more salt, and if you're not getting enough from your industrial salad dressing and canned soup, it's likely that you will suddenly find yourself with a craving for potato chips or a ham.  But meanwhile a bunch of bureaucrats get to feel really self-important about flexing their power.  The result will show up in your cost of food, but you'll never be able to attach any specific amount as the incremental cost imposed by the regulators.  Meanwhile the amount of your dietary salt intake will remain the same. 

Which Candidate Would "Bring Fascism To America"?

In an op-ed a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post, a guy named Robert Kagan (of Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations) opined on the subject of Donald Trump that "This is how fascism comes to America."   The op-ed inspired considerable commentary, including this piece by Peter Baker in the New York Times -- supposedly a news article rather than an opinion column -- titled "Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism." 

Calling someone a "fascist" -- and thereby analogizing that person to Hitler and Mussolini and invoking the memory of their crimes -- is of course the easiest and cheapest and most overused way for a political commentator to try to demonize and de-legitimize a politician he does not like.  But that does not necessarily mean that every commentator who applies the "fascist" label to a candidate is wrong.  And lord knows that I have plenty of my own differences with Trump (e.g., here and here).  But the question for today is, is there something about Trump that is particularly or uniquely "fascist"; and, if so, is there really good reason to believe that Trump is likely to take America down a road toward "fascism" any more so than, say, an Obama, or a Clinton, or a Sanders?

One of the problems with trying to tag someone as a "fascist" is that fascism never was known for any kind of coherent policy program.  As perhaps the most important example, Hitler demonized and vilified Stalin and the Soviet Union, while at the same time adopting the label of "socialist" for his own movement and engaging in massive industry nationalizations and government control of the economy.  Yes, it didn't make any sense; but at the same time there's little doubt that Hitler himself thought that his policies were highly intelligent and coherent -- even brilliant.

Kagan thinks that the very meaninglessness of trying to attach the "fascist" label to any particular set of policies is what gives him the license to declare Trump a fascist.  It's not that any particular policy of Trump is the same as one of Hitler or Mussolini; it's that all three men are known for policy prescriptions that are incoherent and contradictory! :

[T]he entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology.  It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy.  Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. . . .  [W]hat Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. . . .  His [policy utterances are] incoherent and contradictory. . . . 

So is every politician whose policy utterances are "incoherent and contradictory" and "change daily" a "fascist"?  (Trump may be a somewhat extreme case, but can anyone name a single politician not guilty of those charges to at least some degree?)  Apparently recognizing that mere "incoherence" would be an overbroad definition, Kagan then adds a couple of other things that he asserts are defining characteristics of the "fascist" category -- the first being a "play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger"; and the other one that "[it's] about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation."  Surely with that definition we have isolated Trump as the perfect and only reincarnation of Hitler and Mussolini.

But wait -- Is there anything about this definition that does not also perfectly fit Barack Obama?  A "play on feelings of resentment, disdain . . . fear, hatred and anger"?  What about Obama's railings against the "millionaires and billionaires," and the "top 1%," and "income inequality" being the "defining challenge of our time"?  The messianic cult of "the strongman, the leader"?  Who can forget Obama's acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention?:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment [i.e., my nomination] when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. . . .   

And "incoherent" policy prescriptions?  Dare I mention proposing Obamacare as a way to decrease the cost of healthcare; proposing Dodd-Frank as a way to decrease (or eliminate) risk in the financial sector; taking over the energy sector of the economy and closing down the coal industry for no possible effect on world climate (let alone on the "rise of the oceans")?  I could go on about this for a long time.  Obviously, Obama deeply believes in government as the solution to all human problems.  In my view that is the very definition of incoherence.

Yes, we have had eight years of everything Kagan describes, in spades.  I tried a few Google searches to see if I could find the place where Kagan had labeled Obama as a "fascist," but somehow I can't find it.

Well, what about Hillary and Bernie?  Can they avoid Kagan's "fascist" label?  Let's try each of Kagan's tests:

• A "play on feelings of resentment, disdain . . . fear, hatred and anger."  Isn't this the defining characteristic of both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns?  Yes, they name different number one enemies.  For Bernie, the focus is economic resentment by the middle classes against "Wall Street," "the top 1%" and "the millionaires and billionaires."  Hillary's focus is more on stoking racial resentments among African Americans and gender resentments among women.  It's a distinction without a difference.  Both easily meet Kagan's test.
• "Incoherent" policy prescriptions.  Hey, Bernie openly avows that he is a socialist!  And Hillary?  She sees government as the solution to every human problem -- isn't that the same thing?  Indeed, asked by Chris Matthews back in January what is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist, Hillary was famously stumped and could not give an answer.  As just one of hundreds of examples of Hillary policies that make no sense, if a minimum wage at all is a good idea, why is Hillary's $12 better than Bernie's $15?  Why not $1000?  Help us out here Hillary!  Anyway, clearly both meet Kagan's test.
• "[it's] about the strongman, the leader."  I'll admit that neither Clinton nor Sanders has the charisma of an Obama, or a Hitler, or a Mussolini, or for that matter, even of a Trump.  (I for one don't find Trump particularly charismatic, but that's a discussion for another time.)  On the other hand, if you are buying into the idea that government is the solution to all human problems, let alone into the idea of socialism -- which is what Hillary and Bernie are asking -- then aren't you inherently buying into the idea of this leader as the most important influence in your life?  In other words, Hillary and Bernie may not be very good at selling themselves as the potential "duce" or "fuhrer", but that role is still what they are asking you to accept.  I say that they both meet Kagan's test.

For myself, I don't find the "fascist" category particularly helpful in thinking about whom to vote for.  Let's face it -- all the candidates are imperfect.  I don't even hope for an election in which that won't be true.  All the candidates are running precisely because they want to be able to exercise big power for what they see as the good; and I see the concentration of too much power in one place as the biggest problem and the antithesis of the good.  But it's possible for a candidate to envision spheres of life that are better left to the private sector, or even the states, rather than to an all-knowing, perfect federal government.  If either Bernie or Hillary has ever harbored such a thought, I've never seen or heard about it.  Both of them see the federal government as an unalloyed force for fairness, justice, goodness, and the solution to every human problem (with enough taxing, spending, and regulations).  Trump?  Yes, he has an overblown sense of his own ability to fix everything by doing the right "deals."  But at the same time, he has expressed at least some reservations about the all-perfectness of the federal government.  See for example his energy policy speech here.  Excerpt:

We will get the bureaucracy out of the way of innovation, so we can pursue all forms of energy. This includes renewable energies and the technologies of the future. It includes nuclear, wind and solar energy – but not to the exclusion of other energy. The government should not pick winners and losers. Instead, it should remove obstacles to exploration. Any market has ups and downs, but lifting these draconian barriers will ensure that we are no longer at the mercy of global markets.

It may not be much, but it is a difference -- and, in the direction away from fascism, fairly defined.

UPDATE, June 3:  Apparently there was some serious violence outside a Trump rally last night in San Jose, California (by the way, it's the 10th largest U.S. city by population, in case you didn't know).  Ann Althouse has a roundup of links here, and it's all over Drudge here.  As far as appears from any of the articles I can find, including "mainstream" sites linked at Drudge (e.g., ABC News, NBC News), all of the violence came from the anti-Trump side, identified largely as Mexicans (many carrying Mexican flags) and Sanders supporters.  I'm not standing up for all of Trump's rhetoric, but as far as I know in this country, rhetoric of any sort is completely fair game, no matter how obnoxious, insulting, demeaning, disgusting, or whatever.  Violence is another story.  So who are the brownshirts here?  Meanwhile, according to every source I can find, the San Jose police stood by and did nothing to stop the violence.  Buzzfeed has this quote from San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (a Clinton supporter):  “At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign."  Really?  This guy supposedly went to Harvard Law School!  

The New York Times reports on the events in a tiny article in a corner on page A13, title "Clash Erupts At an Event For Trump."  I love that "clash erupts" bit -- hey, it wasn't any actual people that did this, it was just that a clash "erupted"!  Anyway, you can't accuse them of not reporting on the event, but it is rather effectively buried.  In the article, the perpetrators of the violence are identified only as "protesters."  Three instance of violence are specified, each of them committed by a "protester" against one or more Trump supporters.  

On Nicholas Kristof And The Liberal Blind Spot

Multiple people have brought to my attention two op-eds over the past few weeks by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, one from May 28 titled "The Liberal Blind Spot," and the other from May 7 titled "A Confession Of Liberal Intolerance."  The theme of the two articles is that Kristof has somehow discovered that the in the world of academics, nearly all calling themselves "liberals" and seemingly priding themselves on their boundless tolerance, there is remarkable intolerance for conservative thought and opinion.  

In very gentle terms, Kristof points out to his progressive academic comrades that perhaps it might be a slight tactical mistake to insist on complete ideological conformity in their ranks:  

We desperately need academics like sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes untapped. . . .   We liberals should have the self-confidence to believe that our values can triumph in a fair contest in the marketplace of ideas.

The May 28 column is particular interesting in noting that thousands of liberal commenters on the earlier article had been near unanimous in agreeing that he was "dead wrong" and that conservative thought should properly be ignored if not ostracized:

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.  “You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”  

Well, good try Nick.  But I think it's hopeless.  What you fail to recognize is that modern liberalism/progressivism is essentially a religion, and under the tenets of that religion conservatives are not just people with whom our crowd respectfully disagrees; rather, conservatives are immoral and evil.  If people are immoral and evil, you don't welcome them into your institutions and encourage them to propagate their immoral and evil ideas.

If you want to understand where your comrades are coming from, I recommend that you start with the Manhattan Contrarian About page.  The specific subject there is current Manhattan political orthodoxy, but the simple principles apply equally to academic orthodoxy as well:

The central tenet of that orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending.  The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and anyone who stands in the way of those solutions is immoral.

All progressives instinctively know, just know, that the right government programs and spending can solve all significant human problems.  Poverty?  The right program (or 500 of them) will fix it!  Income inequality?  Same.  Education shortcomings?  You just need more money for smaller classes and more unionized teachers in the government schools!  Inequality and discrimination between and among races?  Big enough bureaucracies can fix that -- they can order businesses to behave, and prosecute them when they don't!  Housing in trendy cities is too expensive?  A bureaucracy can order that it be made "affordable"!  World temperatures seem to have crept up by a degree or so over the past century?  That can be fixed by a bureaucracy to put the coal industry out of business and ban "fracking"!  Transgender people feel uncomfortable in their assigned public bathrooms?  A bureaucracy can order equal bathroom access for all!  Healthcare too expensive?  Fix it with a 2000 page law, vast new bureaucracies and spending and endless new rules and mandates (Obamacare); or even better, make it free (with government spending)!  College too expensive?  Make it free (with government spending)!  Retirement income too low?  Double social security!  Market swings, bad guys, and natural disasters keep imposing downside risk on life?  The government can fix it all with thousands of pages of new bank regulations and infinite insurance for everything, from bank deposits to hurricanes to terrorism to crop loss!  Obviously, I could go on (and on, and on, and on).

There is actually an important distinction between the Manhattan and academic variants of the progressive orthodoxy adherents.  The Manhattanite is basically a working stiff.  S/he is making good money, and thinks that there is plenty of money in the world to solve all the human problems, but at the same time s/he is way too busy personally to figure out the solutions to so many things.  The easy answer is to outsource solving the problems to the government.  The government can hire a bunch of experts to get the job done -- just like I do at my job.  Meanwhile the government bureaucracies put out a steady stream of propaganda about how if they are just given a few more big new programs and big annual budget increases all the problems will magically be solved.  It takes a lot of work to look critically at the performance of all these bureaucracies and figure out how ineffective they are.  Everybody else around here thinks the government can solve these things.  Why should I buck the consensus?

The academic is in a very different position, and is far more deeply committed, both intellectually and financially, to the progressive orthodoxy, and to suppressing dissent from it.  Academics are the people who have created, designed and advocated for the government programs that are supposed to be solving these problems.  At the prestigious universities with the fancy professors, essentially everyone is living off government grants, all of which to some degree are used to subcontract to academia the solving of the vast array of human problems that the government is supposed to be solving.  Many prominent academics regularly go into and out of government.  These people (whether currently in or out of government) know that they are the very best and the very brightest, and that the helpless people have entrusted to them the great and weighty responsibility to fix the world.  Obviously the solutions devised by the best and the brightest, by these greatest and most scintillating luminaries of the intellectual world, will be the best and most perfect solutions that could possibly be devised!  How could any sane person doubt that?  And to stand in the way of our solutions is to advocate that the poor starve, that babies die, that income inequality persist, that education remain inadequate and underfunded, that dominant races and genders suppress the non-dominant races and genders, that the planet be desecrated, and so forth.  Can't every thinking person see that that is the very essence of evil?

And then come along those pesky "conservatives" to point out that the whole enterprise is wildly expensive and doesn't work; and indeed that most aspects of the enterprise are counterproductive and make worse the problems they are supposed to be solving.  People like the Manhattan Contrarian (and, fairly speaking, many right-side bloggers and think tanks, and such "conservative" academics as continue to exist) point out things like: anti-poverty spending on progressive-designed anti-poverty programs actually makes measured poverty worse; measured income inequality is worst in the jurisdictions where government spending supposedly designed to improve income inequality is the highest; race- and gender-based mandates and set-asides only worsen and prolong racial and gender inequality and resentments; government "affordable housing" programs make housing more expensive; massive government spending on healthcare has hugely driven up the cost of healthcare without improving health outcomes; government subsidies to colleges and student loans have only made college more expensive and have burdened young people with huge amounts of debt; the deeper countries go into pervasive government and bureaucratic solutions to all problems, the poorer they become, with economic collapse in the most extreme cases (sometimes going by the name "socialism"); and, worst of all, that voluntary transactions among free human beings (sometimes going under the name "capitalism") provide far better solutions to all of these problems than do government bureaucracies and their academic allies.

So to the progressive academic, the conservative is not just immoral and evil, but even worse.  S/he is posing an existential threat to the entire enterprise.  S/he is putting the income and career of everyone around here at risk.  S/he is giving the know-nothing Congress ammunition to cut funding to a degree that could leave this place looking like Dresden after the blitz!

Because the position of the Manhattan progressive groupthinker really just stems from intellectual laziness, there is hope that that position can be subject to change through persuasion by facts and reason.  The academic?  Sorry, Nick, but I don't think so.              

New York: A Tale Of Two Neighborhoods

A fascinating subject for study is the demographics of New York neighborhoods, many of which have been transformed multiple times in the course of little more than a century by successive waves of new residents.  Perhaps the most famous example among many is the Lower East Side of Manhattan (a couple of miles east of where I live), which was first predominantly Irish and German in the late nineteenth century, then became heavily Eastern-European Jewish in the early twentieth century, then after World War II gradually became predominantly Hispanic, and most recently has been undergoing "gentrification" largely due to recent arrivals from elsewhere in the U.S.  For even more wild examples of ethnic diversity and constant change, check out the Borough of Queens.  

Is this process of neighborhood ethnic change just a natural result of independent choices of millions of individuals, or is there something sinister about it?  Two articles in yesterday's (Sunday) New York Times separately discuss the process in two different neighborhoods -- Harlem (in Manhattan) and Belmont (in the Bronx).  You won't learn much about the process of ethnic change from reading the articles, but as usual you can learn a lot about the New York Times/progressive mind set.

Harlem is the neighborhood in Manhattan immediately north of Central Park.  Although Harlem is scarred by many huge public housing projects, its remaining streets are characterized by long rows of stately townhouses, mostly built between about 1880 and 1910.  Between about 1910 and 1930 there was a huge influx of African-Americans into Harlem, some coming from the downtown parts of Manhattan, and many from the Jim Crow South.  According to a compilation of Census data at Wikipedia, by 1920 Central Harlem was 32.43% black, and by 1930 it was 70.18%.  In the mid-century Harlem became the hub of African-American culture in the U.S., and the concentration of blacks in Harlem only increased.  A 2014 article in New African magazine here asserts that by 1990 there were only 672 whites in Central Harlem (out of a population of well over 100,000).   More recently, other ethnic groups have been increasing in Harlem, and the black percentage of the population has been declining.  A famous New York Times article from 2010 took note of the development that Harlem was suddenly "No Longer Majority Black."   But that of course did not mean that it had become majority white.  Ethnic data compiled at city-data.com from the 2010 Census show approximate percentages for Harlem of 40% black, 25% Hispanic, 15% white, 5% Asian, and the remainder consisting of various mixtures and combinations.  Although the Census data are notoriously lagged, it is safe to assume that the percentages of whites, Asians and mixed races in Harlem's ethnic mix have only increased since.

Belmont is the neighborhood smack in the middle of the Bronx, which has long been known as a center of Italian-American culture.  Its main drag, Arthur Avenue, continues to be lined with old-fashioned Italian restaurants and Italian specialty food shops.  Several Catholic churches continue to say mass in Italian.  But like most every other New York neighborhood, Belmont has undergone substantial ethnic change over time.  The New York Times article from yesterday discussed below gives the following ethnic data for the Belmont neighborhood from Census's 2009-13 American Community Survey: 58.2% Hispanic; 20.9% white non-Hispanic; 17.9% African-American; and 1.8% Asian.  Although you wouldn't necessarily guess it walking around Belmont today, the Italians are a relatively small minority of the population.

So how does a good New York progressive react to these trends?  In the paper's Review section (the section that contains opinion articles and editorials) the lead article is titled "The End Of Black Harlem," by Michael Henry Adams.  Adams surveys the ongoing ethnic change in Harlem, as well as accompanying physical changes to the neighborhood (e.g., new stores, new trees being planted) and sees some kind of sinister plot.  Summary:

To us, our Harlem is being remade, upgraded and transformed, just for them, for wealthier white people. 

Adams quotes a guy named Horace Carter as to a supposed "plan" to "take back" Harlem:

As Horace Carter, the founder of the Emanuel Pieterson Historical Society, insisted to me, “I tell you, they have a plan. Harlem is too well placed. The white man is ready to take it back.”    

There's no clue in the article as to who may have hatched this "plan."  Adams accuses the newcomers to Harlem of being "insolent" and "insulting," and as evidence provides a second-hand quote via an unnamed "real estate speculator," who says that his unnamed source accused blacks of being "freeloaders" for continuing to remain as low-rent tenants in non-eviction condo conversions.  According to Adams, Mayor de Blasio's programs for affordable housing are essentially useless, and the net effect of government efforts on Harlem is to "deny us our heritage":

They have no idea how insulting they are being, denying us our heritage and our stake in Harlem’s future. And, far from government intervention to keep us in our homes, houses of worship and schools, to protect buildings emblematic of black history, we see policies like destructive zoning, with false “trickle down” affordability, changes that incentivize yet more gentrification, sure to transfigure our Harlem forever.   

Whew!  That's quite an outpouring of anger!  Let's compare that to the Times's treatment of the ethnic change in Belmont, where in very much the reverse process, taking place over roughly the same time period, a white ethnic group (Italians) has been substantially replaced by Hispanics and blacks.  Note that as per the most recent Census data cited above, the percent of blacks in Belmont (17.9%) actually exceeds the percent of whites in Harlem (about 15%) (although both of these numbers may have shifted by a few percent since they were compiled). 

The article on Belmont, "Home to Immigrants and Students," appears in the Real Estate Section.  Here the new ethnic diversity appears as an unalloyed positive.  The Times quotes Catholic priest Father Jonathan Morris on how he "upholds" Italian heritage while also welcoming newcomers:

Father Morris . . . feels a duty to uphold the neighborhood’s rich Italian heritage, which dates to the early 20th century, when the area attracted families of Italian laborers who helped build the nearby Bronx Zoo and New York Botanical Garden.  ”It’s an immigrant church still today,” said Father Morris, who says Mass weekly in English, Spanish and Italian. “We’re trying to welcome the new immigrants while honoring the church’s Italian history.”  The priest . . . sees “a spirit of survival and entrepreneurship” in the neighborhood, pointing to a number of Mexican delis and restaurants that have opened. Father Morris said those owners could find inspiration in the successes of the longstanding shops that make up Belmont’s Little Italy.

Somehow the Italians seem to be doing just fine "upholding" their heritage, even as their presence in the neighborhood has shrunk far below the presence of blacks in Harlem.

Anyway, Mr. Adams is very representative of the New York Times mindset, but something tells me he is far from representative of all opinion in Harlem.  In particular, there are many, many blacks in Harlem who own those stately old homes, the values of which have now multiplied by a factor of ten and more over the past couple of decades.  Suddenly, they are multi-millionaires (although only to the extent that their ability to sell to the highest bidder is preserved).  Are we to believe that this is a bad thing?  Meanwhile, a larger number of blacks in Harlem threw in their lot with the government programs of public housing and rent regulation.  The Harlem renaissance and the great increase in housing values have passed these people by.  They have good cause to be resentful; but should they be resentful of the newcomers who are helping to drive up values, or of the government programs that have trapped them in dependency and prevented them from participating in the success of their neighbors?         

Venezuela: Has The Word "Socialism" Been Banned From American Mainstream Press?

A few days ago in a post titled "The Deep Mystery Of Why Venezuela Is Failing," I made fun of the New York Times and Time Magazine for publishing long articles about why Venezuela is failing without so much as mentioning its adoption of socialism.  But as I've read more on this subject in the last week, I've realized that this is not just a couple of isolated instances of cluelessness.  This really is "the one whose name must not be spoken."  My conclusion is that there is an official list of talking points, and "socialism" has been banned from the list.  Am I wrong?

The Times followed up its article from May 15 with another long one yesterday titled "How Venezuela Fell Into Crisis, and What Could Happen Next."   OK, this time they explicitly say that they are going to tell us the "how" of what got Venezuela into this mess.  And the official answer is, falling oil prices, too much borrowing, and a drought.  Socialism?  We've never heard of it!  Don't believe me?  Here are their words:

How could this happen in a country that has the largest reserves of oil in the world?

The price of oil, Venezuela’s only significant export, has plummeted, which means revenue could fall by 40 percent this year. The government’s huge borrowing, partly a legacy of the years when oil prices were far higher, has helped bring the crisis to a head because Venezuela now has far less money to repay its foreign debt, forcing Mr. Maduro to slash imports in order to avoid default.  On top of that are the consequences of a drought, which has shriveled the country’s hydropower generation, a critical source of electricity.

Let's try another left wing news site.  How about the Huffington Post?  They have a post titled "Why Venezuela Is on the Verge of Actual Collapse" from May 20.  Five reasons are given:

1. Murder—lots of murder; 2. Low oil prices—not always a good thing; 3. Plummeting economy; 4. Scarcity of essential goods; 5. Widespread corruption

I particularly like reasons 3 and 4.  The economy is collapsing because the economy is collapsing!  Why hadn't we figured that out on our own?

Try CNN.  They took a crack at this back in January, in "5 reasons why Venezuela's economy is in a 'meltdown.'"    It won't take you long to guess most of the five, because remember, they come from an official list of talking points:

1. Oil crash hurts Venezuela the most; 2. A currency worth less than a penny; 3. New power struggle dooms 2016; 4. Default in 2016 is 'difficult to avoid'; 5. Food crisis.

Probably you are wondering what Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman has to say about Venezuela.  Well, you'll just have to keep wondering, because Krugman doesn't choose to write about Venezuela.  Same goes for the other bombastic voices of left-wing "economics."  Ezra Klein?  Silence.  Matthew Yglesias?  Silence.

Bernie Sanders?  He got cornered on the subject of Venezuela a few days ago at an interview on Univision.  Here's the transcript on the subject:

LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: I am sure that you know about this topic: various leftist governments, especially the populists, are in serious trouble in Latin America. The socialist model in Venezuela has the country near collapse. Argentina, also Brazil, how do you explain that failure?

BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: You are asking me questions…

LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: I am sure you’re interested in that.

BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: I am very interested, but right now I’m running for President of the United States.

LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: So you don’t have an opinion about the crisis in Venezuela?

BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: Of course I have an opinion, but as I said, I’m focused on my campaign.

So can you really blame all these twenty-somethings for knowing nothing about socialism and its failures?  Won't anybody level with them?

Does Anyone In The United States Live On Less Than $2.00 Per Day?

The current issue (with a date of June 9) of the New York Review of Books has a review by Christopher Jencks of a book by Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer that came out last year, titled "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America."  The review is generally respectful, if somewhat skeptical; indeed Jencks's general acceptance of the book's findings is indicated by the title of the review, which is "Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer."  Several readers have asked me to comment.

When "$2.00 a Day" came out last year, it got the usual fawning reviews from the usual suspects.  For example, consider this from the review in the New York Times by William Julius Wilson:

This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.   

You won't be surprised to hear that I have a different take.  This book is completely preposterous.  

Edin and Schaefer purport to have discovered -- through careful analysis of Census data -- that there is a greatly increasing number of people in "extreme poverty" in the United States.  For their definition of "extreme poverty," they say they take a definition from the World Bank, which uses a figure of $1.90 per day per person; and then they round it up to the $2.00 in the title of the book.  The methodology of the book consists of two parts.  Schaefer, whose expertise is in government statistics, analyzes the Census data from the survey known as SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation) to get aggregate numbers of people who report income of less than $2.00 per day.  This work yields figures of as much as 4 - 5% as the percent of the population of the United States "living" at this level of dire poverty, a figure which, according to the Schaefer's statistical data, nearly doubled between 1996 and 2011.  Then Edin, whose thing is "talking to low income Americans," goes out and interviews a number of people with stories of serious personal hardship.  And thus the book.

I hope that your first thought was, is there really anyone in America who lives on less than $2.00 per day, at least as averaged over some reasonable period of time?  The idea is completely ridiculous, and frankly an insult to the hundreds of millions of people in the world who actually do live in grinding poverty at this very low level.  Edin and Schaefer just intentionally confuse two very different concepts, which are, first, having "income" of only $2.00 per day, and second, only having $2.00 or less of resources per day available on which to live.  The second is what the World Bank is talking about when it talks about serious poverty out there in the world.  The first is a statistical artifact of the particular definition of "income" that you choose to use.  As I have discussed many times on this blog, the Census Bureau, including in its SIPP surveys, defines "poverty" in terms of an arbitrary artifact of "cash income" that excludes almost all government programs and many, many other resources available to people, in order to generate ridiculously high "poverty" statistics to defraud the American people.  To be fair to Edin and Schaefer, they do realize that they can't get away without at least discussing the plethora of government benefits available to those of low income; but their basic strategy is to just dismiss things like food stamps and housing assistance as not nearly as good as cash -- and therefore fair to just not count at all in a book that is supposedly about living on "$2.00 a Day" or less.  And they don't even think about, let alone discuss, the many non-cash, non-income resources that people may be living on.

There are sensible reviews of the Edin/Schaefer book out there.  For example here's one at Forbes by Tim Worstall titled "The Number Of Americans Living On $2 A Day Or Less Is Zero."   From Worstall:

[T]he real incidence of $2 a day poverty in the US is zero. The numbers cooked up for this book look only at cash income, not any other form of aid that people might get. They are also measuring transient populations flowing through a rocky patch, not some vast underclass. And finally they are measuring income, not the thing that we really want to measure, consumption possibilities.    

And I would say that even Worstall is somewhat misdirected by the Edin/Schaefer sleight-of-hand.  The mistake is assuming that because the Census Bureau records someone as having no or next-to-no "income," that that person is "poor" at all in any meaningful sense.  There are lots of people who have no "income" for some period of months or even years but have lots of resources.  They may even be "rich" as you would normally think of the term.  Large categories include retirees living off savings (consumption of savings does not count as "income") or reverse mortgages (borrowing doesn't count as "income"); students living off scholarships, fellowships and loans (scholarships, fellowships and loans don't count as "income"); kids supported by their parents while they look for their first job (family support doesn't count as "income").  My favorite category is business owners who have a losing year -- and many, many businesses, including large ones, have a losing year sooner or later.  Hey, a big enough business could lose a million dollars in a year!  Does an income of negative one million dollars in a year represent "extreme poverty" -- even as the owners continue to live in their mansions, paid for by the earnings of prior years, and expected earnings of future years?

For a serious analysis of the data that underlies the Edin/Schaefer work, consider this from Brookings -- "How Poor Are America's Poorest: U.S. $2 A Day Poverty In A Global Context."  Brookings is not exactly part of the vast right wing conspiracy.  Their conclusion:

Based on an assessment of consumption in the fourth quarter of 2011, we obtain a much lower $2 a day poverty rate of only 0.07 percent. To verify this result, we rerun our calculation using a more selective definition of consumption with the same survey data. This yields a similar poverty rate of 0.09 percent.    

OK, it's not quite zero, but just about.  And what does the World Bank itself say?  Here's their data for the $1.90 per day benchmark.  Again, they are talking about resources to live on, not some arbitrarily-defined "cash income."  They find no extreme poverty in the U.S. by their definition.

So to Mr. Wilson, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, or others who took this ridiculous book seriously, I ask, if it is a "call to action," what is the action you are thinking of?  More of the hundreds of billions of dollars of annual government spending that, according to your own statistics, only seem to be making "extreme poverty" worse?  If not that, then what?

As to the real reason why Census's SIPP figures show increasing numbers of people with reported "income" under $2.00 per day, there could be many explanations.  For example, today's near-zero interest rates mean that many retirees earn next-to-nothing on their savings.  Perhaps more young people are staying in school longer, or living on their parents' nickel for longer.  Obviously, none of these things has anything to do with "extreme poverty."  Edin and Schaefer do not even give consideration to any such scenarios.