Stiglitz on the top one percent

In a Vanity Fair article, economist Joseph Stiglitz writes of the enormous, and growing, inequality between what the top 1% of Americans earn (and are worth) versus the other 99%. He proceeds to cite the reasons this yawning chasm is detrimental not just to the nation as a whole, but also to those extraordinarily wealthy people themselves.

The article is bound to stir up accusations of class warfare among those who feel the rich are the only remaining group it is permissible to demonize, but this statistic is hard to wave away:

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.

(Thanks to The Browser for the link.)

Halliburton fracking info, week 20

Sometime in the last two weeks, Halliburton added a third state to its fracking fluids disclosure page: North Dakota joins Pennsylvania and (South) Texas. The three North Dakota formulations are:

• North Dakota Bakken Hybrid Formulation 1
• North Dakota Bakken Hybrid Formulation 2
• North Dakota Bakken Hybrid Formulation 3

As with the other formulations, Halliburton's pages list "additives," proprietary blends that play specific roles in the fracking process, and "components," the raw ingredients that make up the additives. Again, too, Halliburton is at pains to point out common and innocuous uses for each component.

A prefatory explanation to the formulations explains a little about why the region is being explored.

The Upper Devonian-lower Mississippian-age Bakken Formation, a relatively thin stratigraphic unit that covers a large portion (>200,000 mi2) of the Williston Basin, contains the largest oil accumulation in the contiguous 48 states. The Bakken Formation which is found only in the subsurface of the Williston Basin, ranges in depth from11,000 ft at the center of the Williston basin to just over 3,000 ft along its northern limit. The Williston Basin is located in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and North Dakota in the United States and Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.

Discovered in 1951, the Bakken has seen aggressive growth in development activity in recent years with the successful application of advanced horizontal drilling, fracturing, and completions technologies.

The Wikipedia entry on the Bakken Formation has more details, including the history of how estimates of the recoverable amount of oil have changed just in the past five years. Presumably, the provable reserves of natural gas in the area are commensurately large.

Yes, I'm conflicted

Last entry:

Our failure [to produce new genius writers] is due to not valuing them. We don't value them because we don't value great writing. And we don't value great writing because we don't value intellectualism in any form.
...
[James] has put his finger on a very serious shortcoming about our culture.

The entry before that:

The 'net-addled might not be as intellectually rigorous or as deeply thoughtful as earlier generations. It doesn't matter. If it's a problem, future generations will make those characteristics a priority (again).

Not quite a direct contradiction, but close. Maybe the moon changed phases last night.

I can hold mutually incompatible opinions more or less simultaneously. Well, at least that should help me pass a Turing test.

Why we mint athletes instead of writers

In an excerpt from his book Solid Fool's Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom, sports writer Bill James advances a familiar argument in a refreshingly blunt way. To the question, "Why are we so good at developing athletes and so lousy at developing writers?" James says the answer is, we work a lot harder at the former than the latter.

First, we give them [potential athletes] the opportunity to compete at a young age.

Second, we recognize and identify ability at a young age.

Third, we celebrate athletes' success constantly. We show up at their games and cheer. We give them trophies. When they get to be teenagers, if they're still good, we put their names in the newspaper once in a while.

Fourth, we pay them for potential, rather than simply paying them once they get to be among the best in the world.

James has been taken to task, justifiably, for a badly conceived comparison between London at the time of Shakespeare (and Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Francis Bacon) and Topeka, Kansas, a comparison James intended to be the key statistical underpinning for his argument. The comparison is wrong and helps his argument not a bit. However, the criticisms I've read don't argue that his central premise is flawed. We do put a lot more effort into identifying and nurturing athletes than writers, or more broadly, intellectuals.

More pugnaciously, James also says that sports get a bad rap for misdirecting racial aspirations, and he's tired of the calumny.

People in the sporting world in 1950 were just as racist as people in other parts of society—but people in the sporting world got over it a hell of a lot faster, because we cared more about winning than we did about discriminating. Because the sporting world was always ahead of the rest of the world in breaking racial barriers, black kids came to perceive sports as being the pathway out of poverty. For this we are now harshly and routinely criticized—as if it was our fault that the rest of society hasn't kept up.

I have no idea if he's right. It seems a bit facile as arguments go. However, it's good food for thought, no?

On the other hand ...

Some jackass Ph.D ex-athlete pops up on my TV two or three times a year claiming that a young black kid has a better chance of being hit by lightning than of becoming a millionaire athlete. This is nonsense as well as being a rational hash.

In the absence of actual statistics in support of his assertion, I'll call foul on James. I don't think it's nonsense at all: I think it's a realistic appraisal of the odds. (James seems to have trouble putting statistics into proper context: that failure is the crux of the flaw in his Topeka-vs.-London argument, too. I find that failure a bit ironic in a sports writer, considering that stats rule sports analysis.)

Look, it's not our fault that the rest of the world hasn't kept up. It's not our fault that there are still barriers to black kids becoming doctors and lawyers and airline pilots. Black kids regard the athletic world as a pathway out of poverty because it is. The sporting world should be praised and honored for that. Instead, we are more often criticized because the pathway is so narrow.

I like his scrappy tone. I suspect, though, that his argument, again, is too facile.

First, I'd like to see hard numbers. Second, is the problem really racial discrimination, which is what I assume he means by "barriers"? It's not at all clear to me that low rates of racial diversity in various fields -- if the rates are low; again, I don't have numbers (James doesn't cite any, either) -- are tied to race rather than income. As I understand things, parental income tends to be a more reliable predictor of children's education and future status than race.

In spite of the weaknesses in James's argument, attributable to overreach, I think his fundamental point is sound: we pay more attention to identifying and developing athletes than we do to identifying and developing writers (or any intellectuals). Why is that? Here's his answer:

We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day—fudging just a little on the definition of the word need. We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.

The fallacy of thinking "we don't genuinely need more literary geniuses" becomes more breathtaking the longer you think about it. If Shakespeare sufficed, why did later ages produce Hardy or Dickens or Stevenson? For that matter, why did we need Shakespeare when the classic Greek tragedies sufficed for Western civilization for a couple of thousand years?

Why wouldn't we need and want more literary geniuses, for crying out loud?

Certainly Shakespeare remains important and relevant today. So did Sophocles in Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare, though, was a better fit for his audience than Sophocles was. So we should expect that someone from our own time and circumstances would connect more intimately with us than Shakespeare does. That person might join Shakespeare in the esteem of future generations.

James is wrong that our failure as a society to produce new genius writers is due to our not needing them. Our failure is due to not valuing them. We don't value them because we don't value great writing. And we don't value great writing because we don't value intellectualism in any form.

If we did, we'd be paying physicists what rookie baseball players make, we'd have multiple channels dedicated to following philosophical debates instead of golf, and our kids would grow up idolizing those who analyze viral proteins instead of NBA all-stars.

It's a pity James doesn't do a better job of supporting his own argument, because he has put his finger on a very serious shortcoming about our culture.

Fretting about the 'net

I shun celebrity gossip sites and Web videos because I decided a while back that if I'm going to kill brain cells, I'd rather do so over a well-aged bottle of amber bliss with a good friend or two. Recently, though, I realized I have another weakness that, while not killing as many brain cells, certainly isn't giving the ones I still have the kind of workout they need, and is taking up an inordinate amount of time to boot. The culprit is the melancholic essay about the 'net's detrimental effect on our social lives and/or mental health. (That's right, essays just like this one.)

Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog is dedicated to investigating the effects of the 'net on our minds; Carr has even written a book on the subject, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. (Visit the Rough Type blog for the actual link, in case he gets cash for the clicks. I haven't read it, by the way, so don't ask me if it's any good.) I read a lot of what Carr posts; I don't agree with it all, but I appreciate that somebody is reading and thinking about the subject.

That said, reading about the 'net's detrimental effects on our minds ultimately is pointless. People have anecdotal evidence to support this narrow finding or that one: the 'net is decreasing our ability to focus, unless it isn't; we're losing our capacity for deep thought, except when we aren't; etc. Few well-designed studies have been done. Nobody can say whether our 'net-addled brains work differently today than brains did a hundred years ago, much less say whether any differences are beneficial.

Moreover, there's something narcissistic about 'net-fretting. We who spend a lot of time online tend to obsess about it in ways that bemuse, if not amuse, others. We think we're hyperaware of our environment, imagining ourselves to be fish who realize they live in water. It's probably truer to say we're self-absorbed: we can't get enough about how the 'net has changed us.

So why write another navel-gazing piece? Actually, I'm hoping this won't turn out to be one. Believe it or not, this professional pessimist and part-time cynic is going (to try) to offer a non-cynical, mostly non-pessimistic take on the subject. For this surprising turn you can thank Alice Gregory, who penned (can I still use that term?) a book review last November that Carr made the focus of a recent blog entry.

Gregory's review of Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story is really an excuse, and not a bad one, for an extended reflection on how technology and circumstance have changed the way she thinks since she graduated from college. She's not happy with the changes.

In the past year, I graduated from college, got a desk job, and bought an iPhone: the three vertices of the Bermuda Triangle into which my ability to think in the ways that matter most to me has disappeared. My mental landscape is now so altered that its very appearance must be different than it was at this time last year. I imagine my brain as a newly wretched terrain, littered with gaping chasms (What’s my social security number, again?), expansive lacunae (For the thousandth time, the difference between “synecdoche” and “metonymy,” please?), and recently formed fissures (How the fuck do you spell “Gyllenhaal?”). This is your brain on technology.

I'll hazard a guess that she's wrong to make technology the primary culprit. College requires you to spend hours, days, or even weeks on a single topic. Most jobs neither encourage nor permit that kind of singlemindedness. You're engaged with the outside world, and the outside world is wont to destroy your carefully constructed plans for organizing the day. This happens whether or not you own an iPhone.

(I can't resist observing that Gregory writes in a very fresh-out-of-school way. Flourishing her erudition alongside her earthiness shows us and future employers that she not only received a good education, but can write for the common man too.)

Certain software, though (and by "technology" Gregory really is talking about software, not hardware), does habituate us to what she calls "the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation." Where I think she errs is in assuming such stimulation is entirely pleasurable. Up to a point it is: we all like new experiences. However, eventually we grow tired of being stimulated and we need to rest. Gregory finds herself wearier and wearier, and perhaps as a consequence, finds much about social media to be a chore.

Sometimes 'net obsession goes beyond being a chore, and turns into something that sounds like a narcotic.

Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember. You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.

[Grumpy aside: it's "the Internet," capitalized. It's still a proper name, even today.]

None of the foregoing would have gotten me to comment on this review, though. What spurred me to do that was a bit of amateur prognostication of What All This Means For Our Future.

The internet’s most ruinous effect on literacy may not be the obliteration of long-format journalism or drops in hardcover sales; it may be the destruction of the belief that books can be talked and written about endlessly. There are fewer official reviews of novels lately, but there are infinitely more pithily captioned links on Facebook, reader-response posts on Tumblr, punny jokes on Twitter. How depressing, to have a book you just read and loved feel so suddenly passé, to feel—almost immediately—as though you no longer have any claim to your own ideas about it.

I don't know what to make of ominous visions like this. My inclination is to observe that in spite of books, radio, films, television, and now the Internet, people still see plays. They no longer command the same degree of attention, but they survive. I'll warrant that books, and deep discussion and appreciation thereof, will survive, too.

Anyway, I've stopped worrying about humanity's future.

If you were to transport Aldous Huxley from his heyday to right now, would he conclude that we had escaped or fulfilled the dystopian freak show of Brave New World?

If the Greek philosophers who first imagined "democracy" could see us now, would they think we had distorted human society all out of reason, and fallen from what they would consider their own state of relative grace?

Whether you answered "yes" or "no" to the foregoing, consider this:

What does it matter?

We can't and won't go back to an earlier state of society. We always look forward. The result might be something that looks similar to what came before, but it will have arisen in response to current needs and current abilities, and it will never be exactly the same as what came before.

So fretting that the 'net is changing the way we think isn't going to get us not to use the 'net. It might get us to use it less, but that's all. None of us wants to turn the clock back, even if we could.

The 'net-addled might not be as intellectually rigorous or as deeply thoughtful as earlier generations. It doesn't matter. If it's a problem, future generations will make those characteristics a priority (again). That's how our future brains will take care of themselves. That's why hand-wringing like Gregory's doesn't impress me any more.

Humanity will muddle through somehow.

That fracking dirty water

I'm sorry that ambient overload kept me from reading a New York Times piece about wastewater from fracking until now. Specifically, the article talks about how the wastewater is being sent to sewage treatment plants that aren't designed to cope either with its high level of salts or relatively high level of radioactivity.

I'm also sort of sorry that I read the article, because it makes abundantly clear that the only ones more overwhelmed by the situation than those treatment plants are federal and state regulators charged with protecting us from that hazardous wastewater.

Actually, not all state regulators are overwhelmed. The word "overwhelmed" suggests that they're attempting to cope. In the case of Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, nothing could be further from the truth.

In 2009, E.P.A. scientists studied the matter and also determined that certain Pennsylvania rivers were ineffective at sufficiently diluting the radium-laced drilling wastewater being discharged into them.

Asked about the studies, Pennsylvania regulators said they were not aware of them.

It's hard to tell if the Pennsylvania D.E.P. is complacent, or complicit.

UPDATE: I wrote about the risks of reusing the wastewater in early March. As with measuring for radioactivity in such wastewater, there are no regulations covering wastewater reuse.

"Johnson & Johnson's Quality Catastrophe," David Voreacos, Alex Nussbaum, Greg Farrell

Courtesy of Longreads, a disturbing portrait of a megacorporation gone wrong in the last decade.

The CEO claims the problems largely have been confined to one division and are being addressed. Others see a companywide culture that places profit and shareholder interests above strict quality control. The CEO's credibility would be greater (not high on an absolute scale, but still, greater) if the company didn't have a pattern of doing everything it could to keep people from finding out things -- things like how often it recalled products, and how widespread those recalls were.