So from everything I have read, Joe The Plumber would not, in fact, be fiscally penalized by an Obama administration. He does not actually, as he has conceded, make $250,000 a year. The plumbing business he supposedly wants to buy almost certainly does not net $250,000 a year. And in any case, his purchase of that business appears to be a pure hypothetical. If anything, it is likely that voting for Obama would be in Joe’s economic self interest: Joe himself admits that unless Obama is lying about his plans, “I would be receiving his tax cuts.”
This raises some questions. For starters, what is Joe’s problem? Is he stupid? Is he a Republican plant? Is he motivated by some other issue that has nothing to do with this?
Well, anything is possible. But I think Joe may be acting in the interest not of himself, but of a theoretical future self. When Joe told Obama “I’m being taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” he was, objectively speaking, wrong. He is not being taxed more and more, because he is not fulfilling the American dream.
He is dreaming the American dream. And as it happens, there’s no charge for that. But while Joe would not be penalized by Obama’s proposed tax hikes, his theoretical future self — Dream Joe, let’s call him — would.
Or might be, if Dream Joe comes true. Of course Actual Joe is a true American, and believes that Dream Joe will inevitably merge with Actual Joe; it’s only a matter of time. So that was Dream Joe talking to Obama.
Anyway, the absurd Joe spectacle has me thinking about a bit from a recent George Packer New Yorker camapaign article. The article had Packer traveling around economically beaten-down areas talking politics, and the relevant passage deals with Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas, and that book’s thesis: Working-class people vote against their economic self-interest for cultural reasons that have been seized on and amplified by conservative politicians.
I’ll put the whole passage after the jump, but basically Packer summarizes research by some sociologists which suggested that working-class voters who used to see the Democratic party as a protector of their economic security started drifting away in the 1970s, not because of cultural issues, but precisely because in their judgment the Democratic party had lost the ability to protect that economic security — or their “material well-being,” as the study’s authors put it. After all, unions were dying out, jobs were going overseas, and these workers were increasingly on their own.
“Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement,” Packer writes. (The cultural factors Frank cites kicked in later, according to this argument. See the whole passage for more.)
To this I’d just add one more layer, which will bring us back to the likes of Joe. The anti-government, low-tax rhetoric that Packer refers to — and that was perfected by Ronald Reagan, who managed to win the role of governing the citizenry in large part by arguing that government is the biggest problem citizens have — worked because it spoke to aspiration.
It was populist rhetoric, but it did turn not turn on class warfare. Indeed it did away with the idea that the Joe the Plumbers of the world resent the rich, and was rather premised on the insight that Joe the Plumber and his ilk want to be the rich. And in point of fact believes he ought to be rich, deserves to be rich. Taken to its extreme, this form of populist rhetoric is premised on class envy: Joe is as good as any of those fat-cat swells! What’s keeping him from being rich? The government! Outta the way, government!
Joe the Plumber identifies with that, even though, in real life, his “wealth” will not be “spread around” by an Obama government, or any government. Yet he is not interested in the best interest of Actual Joe; he is interested in the best interests of Dream Joe.
And he’s not alone. Which is why the McCain campaign has been attempting the neat rhetorical trick of suggesting that a tax increase for the top-earning 2% of Americans is actually a blow to the Joes of the world. Maybe I’ll say more about that tomorrow.
Extract from New Yorker article after the jump if you’re interested. Read more
Mr. Nocera’s column today contains this passing assertion:
I contend that this financial crisis is going to cause an entire generation to become debt-averse, as our parents were after the Depression.
Possibly so. Here’s a bunch more debt/credit thinking:
Here, Virginia Postrel makes the case that “the expansion of consumer credit is one of the great economic achievements of the past century.”
Here, Michael Mandel of BusinessWeek and Johs Worsoe of Union Bank tell Marketplace that in recent years growth was too credit-driven and behavior change is necessary.
Here, Robert Reich argues the problem hasn’t been people living beyond their means via debt, it’s been stagnant wages forcing them to take on too much debt just to keep up. (Via Marginal Utility.)
Here, Virginia Prescott of public radio show Word of Mouth interviews the maker of a film called I.O.U.S.A, which argues “America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.”
UPDATE: One more note of interest on an NPR page, here: “Since 1970, consumption in the U.S. as a percentage of GDP has been at or above 64 percent. These levels are substantially higher than the rates for Germany and Japan.” That’s not a stat I knew.
Over the weekend the NYT reminded us what a poor job the school system does in educating young people about personal-finance basics.
Today the NYT tells us that someone is stepping up to teach Americans how to be thrifty: Retailers.
The Stop & Shop grocery chain is offering “affordable food summits” where consumers are taught how to lower their grocery bills. Home Depot offers classes on how to cut energy bills. And Wal-Mart Stores hired a “family financial expert” who has used online chats to teach several thousand shoppers how to save money for college, whittle away debt and sell a house.
Great. If this works out, maybe they can add geography and math classes. No Consumer Left Behind!
Back in February I had a short post pondering what a bad economy meant for the “green” movement. (Funny, February seems like it was a giddy boom period compared to today, eh?) Two more recent views on that question:
A Marketplace report is largely pessimistic: “Financial Crisis Is Not Eco-Friendly.”
A piece on The Big Money, by Eric Pooley, offers a more optimistic view: “Save the Economy, Save the Planet.”
Well, after last week’s posts here on optimism, and pessimism, and optimism vs. pessimism — it’s looking pretty grim out there! As I type, the Dow has fallen 600 points below the 10,000 mark. Other lousy economic news abounds, and the presidential race is disintegrating into bitterness and tomfoolery.
The NYT’s story on how consumers are faring is not exactly shocking: “Full of Doubts, U.S. Shoppers Cut Spending.” Looks like consumer spending for the third quarter will be down 3 percent, per projections, “the first quarterly decline in nearly two decades.”
“The last few days have devastated the American consumer,” said Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates, a consultancy, who said he worried that the constant drumbeat of negative news about the economy was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. “They all feel poor.”
No surprise, then, that the post here last week that got the most response was the pessimism one, which also happened to ask: “Is Main Street a bunch of spoiled overspending babies?” More specifically, I brought up some comments from a Sunday chat show in which some observers contended that one of the issues America is going to have to work through is that many Americans have been living well beyond their means for years, and in denial about it.
The comments were mixed, to say the least. However, I wanted to follow up in a general way to make a broad point that’s not aimed at any of those comments specifically. Read more
Back in the 1990s I worked as an editor at various personal finance and business publications, and one of the very smartest people I ever crossed paths with was Jason Zweig. So I was very interested in his WSJ column today, not least because of this point countering those who might think we’re headed toward another Great Depression:
When you spend time studying the Crash of 1929 and the depression that followed, what stands out the most is the dearth of doomsayers. Even Roger Babson, the economist known to posterity as “the man who called the crash,” did no such thing; he forecast only a 15% to 20% drop, not the apocalypse that actually occurred. Depressions start not when lots of people are worried about them, as we have today, but when no one is worried about them, as in 1929.
Interesting! Also this:
Furthermore, U.S. nonfinancial companies have just under $1 trillion in cash on their books. Even though Wall Street is dead, innovation is not: In the months to come, clever new financial go-betweens will spring up and find a way to get that cash flowing again. It’s hard to see how a depression could get under way when so much capital is waiting in the wings.
As a counterpoint to the anonymous J, mentioned yesterday, there was an unbelievably gloomy roundtable on This Week Sunday, most interesting to me because in addition to the usual beatdowns to government and Wall Street, the participants went after Main Street consumers.
Here’s a link to the video, but I’ll give you the highlights, or lowlights (with selected bolding to underscore the most interesting stuff). The first 10 minutes or so is boilerplate hemming and hawing about the bailout and craven politicians and all that. Then about halfway through, Washington Post writer Steven Pearlstein said: Read more
WSJ’s Weath Report blog notes:
[AIG’s ex-honcho] Hank Greenberg’s shares once were valued at more than $700 million.
And now? At the $2.21 price of this morning … Mr. Greenberg’s shares were valued at about $28 million.
Of course, for most people, $28 million would be enough to get by. But to Mr. Greenberg, the shares are now “virtually worthless,” as he said Tuesday on the “Charlie Rose Show.” (At the time he said his total personal holdings of AIG were valued at about $100 million).
[Note: Yes, yes, I realized that in real life he couldn’t actually convert all that stock to cash, particularly given the specific circumstances of AIG. Have a sense of humor, okay? And trust me, this guy lives better than you do, and that’s not going to change.]
On the off chance that anybody is wondering why I haven’t added to my Mad Men Musings series — I wrote about almost every episode of the series in its first season, and not once in its second — it’s mostly because the new season, to me, hasn’t really presented a lot of very interesting material related to commercial persuasion, past v. present. That material has faded into the background of plots I find less interesting (will Don’s wife figure out he’s cheating etc. etc.).
There’s one sort-of-kind-of exception to that, though. This is the subplot involving the hiring of “young” creatives, whose basic value to the agency is their hard-wired understanding of youth culture. There’s clearly a parallel to that going on in the commercial persuasion business today. Aside from experiments like the one the NYT wrote about yesterday (“pop up agency” of twentysomethings created within traditional agency), young people are frequently spoken of by marketers as though they are either members of a different species or, possibly, have arrived here from another planet. The idea is that unless you’re one of “them” you can never never really “get” what makes “them” tick. It’s a bit goofy. Not unlike the professional young people hired by the 1962 ad agency depicted on Mad Men. But there are, I think, some interesting differences. Read more
Some time back PSFK linked to this essay, The Participatory Decepticon, which I’ve only now gotten around to reading. Basically, Jamais Cascio muses on the possibilities that arise from not just ubiquitous video technology — but also increasingly ubiquitous video-manipulation technology: “The crafting of political videos documenting candidate insults and errors that never happened.”
There are more than enough audio recordings out there of most major political candidates to allow political pranksters/”dirty tricksters” to make that candidate say just about anything; the cameraphone and flash video media offer insufficient clarity to be able to see if a candidate’s mouth is truly saying the words he or she seems to be saying.
Imagine a faked “Macaca Moment,” for instance.
“Such a deception wouldn’t stand for very long,” Cascio writes, “but would almost certainly last long enough set off a wave of furious blog posts and mainstream media attention.”
This reminded me of an NYT op-ed piece not so long ago titled “Your Brain Lies to You,” on the subject of “source amnesia,” and why it is that 10 percent of Americans somehow still believe that Barack Obama is Muslim. “Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer,” the authors write, “people often later remember it as true.”
A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.
Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.
In other words, if it does turn out that someone manages to get a phony video “out there,” debunking it might be more problematic that we’d assume.
And while I generally take a dim view of predictions, when I think about this one, it’s hard to imagine that it won’t happen before too long.
A weird irony of the New Interactive World or whatever is that nobody reads the letters to the editor anymore. Except me! Check out this: Reacting to the David Brooks column I mentioned recently and cast as an example of the media/message problem, a guy who was actually in an iPhone ad wrote to the NYT and said in part:
During the filming, I spoke with the director of the ad, Errol Morris, for 30 minutes about the iPhone’s effect on human interaction and the philosophical implications of its technology on modern culture. We discussed what the iPhone revealed about mankind’s narcissistic tendencies and the vital importance of human connection in today’s world of electronic communication.
Needless to say, none of this made it into the commercial. In addition to recommending you read this guy’s letter, I ask you: Isn’t it weird that Errol Morris makes ads at all?
If you’ve somehow managed to miss the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom about “Obama as brand,” Ad Age has a recap, without a hint that anybody might question it — but with a new twist.
Neil “Millenials” Howe pops up to reiterate the assertion (noted here, and met with skepticism my Murketing readers) that he made in a recent Brandweek interview: Gen Y digs a big brand. And Obama is a big brand:
According to Mr. Howe, Gen Xers required niche marketing: “If too many people liked something, it wasn’t cool.” But mass brand experiences, from the iPod to Harry Potter, appeal strongly to millennials, who have been shown to be a more communal, pro-social generation than their predecessors.
While critics see Mr. Obama’s penchant for mass gatherings as arrogant, Mr. Howe finds it perfect for millennials: “They’re more civically connected, and they find strength in numbers.”
I’ve said to a number of people in casual conversation that crowds will now line up for an iPhone the way people used to line up for the midnight release of some noteworthy musician’s new CD. David Brooks gets at something related to this in a column recently (I linked to it already last week, in the linkpile rotation at right) in which he argued that “over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.”
He talks about 1400 to 1965 as a long reign of a hierarchical version of good taste; this was followed by 40 years when “status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores.” And now?
On or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.
On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.
Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it….
Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel.
Whatever you make of the specifics, I think that from a broad perspective he’s onto something here, a kind of medium/message problem: There’s a lot of celebration of various media that will bring us interesting new messages that the old setup squelched. There’s a lot less evidence that the messages we get now are really that much better (as opposed to different).
You might disagree, but for the moment I don’t want to get bogged down in that specific argument.
Rather what I want to say is that I’m thinking (hoping?) that what Brooks is talking about isn’t a tectonic shift, but a phase. I think we’re having a little trouble sometimes figuring out the relationship between technology and culture — which shapes which, and how. But at some point the focus will shift from “imagine the potential” to “here is the new cultural expression that has emerged that is exciting on its own, because of its message, not because of the medium.”
Meanwhile, I poked around that American Scene blog Brooks mentioned, and it’s pretty interesting. I think maybe two of the posts he’s referencing are this one and this one. Worth reading for yet another point of view.
As we know, not everybody sees Obama as the antichrist. So here’s a more prObama bit of news following up on the subject of the candidate as muse (per April 13, 2008 Consumed):
The Obey blog announces Manifest Hope:
It’s a new Obama art contest for 2D and 3D art, from painting to photography to sculpture. The winners will be shown at the Manifest Hope Gallery online and in Denver during the Democratic convention alongside works from dozens of established and influential artists.
And, via this meditation in The Stranger on the Obama-as-muse phenomenon, I am now aware of a blog dedicated to the subject: The Obama Art Report. Worth a look.
Not sure if there’s any scripture linking the rapture to art, design, and stylish product, but if so — oh, never mind.
This Wall Street Journal article sums up the “controversy” over a McCain Web ad (on YouTube, here) that some say suggests Obama is not just aloof and full of himself and naive … he’s the antichrist! A highlight is expert commentary from Left Behind * co-author Tim LaHaye:
[He] said in an interview that he recognized allusions to his work in the ad but comparisons between Sen. Obama and the antichrist are incorrect.
“The antichrist isn’t going to be an American, so it can’t possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania.”
The story also notes that “suggestions that Sen. Obama is the antichrist have been circulating for months in Bible-study meetings” in some towns, and also that the ad’s imagery is suggestive in ways that will be obvious to anyone versed in what an expert calls “apocalyptic popular culture.”
I’m hoping that this draws a Paris Hilton-style response video from the actual antichrist.
UPDATE: Here is barackobamaantichrist.blogspot.com. “Hello. You have stumbled upon this site by searching ‘Barack Obama Antichrist’ which was in the back of your mind, you were curious if anyone else had thought about it, so you gave it a google. Welcome. You are not alone, explore the site.” Be sure to view the poll results. [Thx to extra-special adviser E for that.]
[If you’re not a big apocalyptic pop culture follower, Left Behind was discussed in the November 13, 2005 Consumed.]
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