Category: reason

“The University of York Apologises for Saying ‘Negro’ in Lecture on Civil Rights Hero’s Book Called the Philadelphia Negro”

From the Daily Mail article (Julie Henry):

Lecturers were forced to apologise after students attending a class on race complained about quotations from renowned black writers which included the word ‘negro’.

Undergraduates at the University of York said they had been left ‘distressed’ after an academic read out passages which included the word from works by [W.E.B.] Du Bois, an African-American sociologist and civil rights activist, and Frantz Fanon, a French psychiatrist and anti-colonialist – both black academics….

[English Department head Helen] Smith wrote a letter of apology saying that while the term was part of a quotation and was not used ‘offensively’, she recognised that reading it out had caused ‘considerable distress’.

‘I am extremely sorry that this happened, and I have written to all staff in the department to make it clear that they should not pronounce racial slurs as part of their teaching and that if those words appear in texts or on PowerPoint slides, they should be prefaced with an appropriate content warning,’ she wrote.

A follow-up e-mail to lecturers “asked them to refrain from saying the word, written throughout the email as ‘n*gro’.”

 

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Louisiana Alligator Farmers and Malibu Fashion Retailers Team Up

The American aesthetic is tied to cowboy boots. That means not just boots made of tanned cowhide, but also those made from the skin of the American alligator. For more than a century, Americans have obsessed over alligator for everything from fashion accessories to the animal’s meat. We love alligators so much we nearly hunted them to extinction, landing the animal on the endangered species list from 1967 to 1987. 

But starting in the 1980s, Americans figured out how to balance our love of all things gator with the species’ own welfare. Louisiana led the way by getting private landowners, alligator hunters and farmers, and conservationists all on the same page. The result is a market for alligator byproducts that doesn’t threaten alligators’ existence. 

In California, however, the alligator trade ends on January 1. A new state ban on the sale and import of alligator and crocodile products will make it a misdemeanor to sell gator products. The law is part of a slew of new animal-related bans in California set to be enacted in coming years. New regulations will also prohibit pet stores from selling dogs or cats that aren’t rescued from shelters or adoption centers, as well as ban fur sales and foie gras, a traditional French delicacy that’s developed by over-feeding ducks and geese to enlarge their livers. 

For the domestic alligator industry, which spans across the nation’s southeastern sector, from North Carolina to Texas’ Rio Grande River, California’s ban could jeopardize an industry that actually protects alligators, advocates say. The Golden State makes up roughly 30 percent of the world’s alligator skin market, with Beverly Hills its epicenter. Louisiana, meanwhile, is the nation’s leading producer of alligator products. California’s ban will hurt the fashionistas on Rodeo Drive and conservationist farmers in the bayou, as well as other state’s alligator industries. 

Louisiana officials say California’s ban is unconstitutional. In fact, California banned the sale of alligator skins and meats in 1970, but has opted to repeatedly renew an exemption, says Cole Garrett, an attorney for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The exemption was most recently renewed in 2014. This year, despite comments from industry officials, it wasn’t. 

Proponents of the ban, including the Defenders of Wildlife, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity, applauded California lawmakers’ decision. They argue the ban will help discourage illegal poaching and trade. 

But Louisiana and other gator-centric businesses are fighting back. Earlier this month, the businesses that “represent every step in the chain of commerce for alligator” filed a lawsuit opposing the ban in the Eastern District of California. “Indeed, irreparable harms are already taking effect in anticipation of the impending trade ban, including canceled orders, lost business transactions and sales, and halted or dramatically curtailed production,” the complaint says. “Other imminent irreparable harms include liquidated inventories, ‘fire sales’ of products, job eliminations, cancellations of entire business lines, dissolutions of businesses, and potential relocation of several California plaintiffs outside the state.”

Within days of the industry lawsuit, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed a separate lawsuit challenging California’s ban in the same federal court. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF), the agency that oversees the state’s $80 million per-year alligator industry. The lawsuit notes that the alligator trade has received support from conservationists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species experts. “California has nevertheless attempted to destroy the market for American alligator products notwithstanding the fact that no such alligators live in California,” the lawsuit says. 

“When one states decides to take their ball and go home, that has implications throughout the nation,” Garrett says. “While the other state’s rights argument is one, that is why we do have a federal government and there are some regulations that kind of keep things within reason and on an even playing field.” 

The LWDF has been integral in recovery of the American alligator species, Louisiana officials argue. Despite the fact that 1 million wild alligators and 6 million farmed gators have been slaughtered since the 1970s—for meat, skins, teeth—Louisiana’s alligator population is actually booming as it currently stands, and has been for decades. According to the state, the past two nest counts have produced the highest alligator tallies in decades. In the wild, there are roughly 2 million animals today, says Amity Bass, a biologist at the LDWF. On farms, there are about 900,000 animals. “We went from, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, having animals in the thousands, and now having them in the millions—they’re doing quite well,” Bass says. 

Animal rights advocates admit the species’ population has rebounded in recent years. “However, other crocodilian species, which include alligators, caimans, crocodiles and gharials, have not been as lucky,” writes Elly Pepper, a wildlife advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a blog post for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Continuing to allow for a legal trade in crocodilian parts, even if limited, will put another nail in the coffin for these species by exacerbating the parallel illegal trade in these products.” The species’ likeness in the appearance of their hide and other products makes it almost impossible to tell them apart, she notes. 

That may be true, Bass says, but it’s not accurate as it relates to Louisiana’s rigorous regulation of the industry, such as the tagging system that complies with Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. When a gator is harvested, Louisiana requires the harvester to affix a state-licensed tag, as well as a CITES tag that denotes its origin. “So we know each animal that was harvested, where it came from, the metrics on it,” Bass says. “When that hide is tanned, before it is shipped, our staff expect each and every single hide and account for it. So the possibility for fraud, I would say, is barely miniscule.” 

Neither is it an issue that’s solely related to jobs, as the business groups’ lawsuit might suggest. If the ban goes into effect, Louisiana’s lawsuit notes that the state’s private “landowners will be forced to greatly reduce or cease their erosion control efforts”—which they do to protect alligator environs—”because they will be unable to economically sustain those efforts, resulting in irreparable harm to their property as well as harm to Louisiana’s sovereign environmental interests in wetland preservation.” 

Roughly 90 percent of the Louisiana land on which alligators are raised is privately owned, Bass estimates, meaning private landowners are a major focus of the state’s wildlife management efforts. “The industry has absolutely helped that,” she continues. “The funds from the income of alligators helps to provide incentives for wetland conservation and management here in coastal Louisiana. The incomes derived from [those efforts] help us to manage the species effectively, because our agency is involved in every aspect of alligators, from the egg out on the landscape up until it’s shipped out of state.” 

Louisiana state officials not only set the number of alligators that can be harvested on each citizen’s private property, they also have rules for how many eggs can be harvested off of a property—a large source of their income, Bass says—based on the habitat and acreage. An agreement is made with the farmer for a set amount of money for the farmer to collect the eggs. The farmer then takes the eggs, hatches them on his farm, and returns at least 10 percent of what hatched back onto that property. It’s a beneficial system for both species and landowner, Bass says. “What they’re putting back are animals they’ve had in captivity for a year,” she continues. “They grow larger, have a better chance of survival. So it’s really helping to boost the population. I think that’s an important part, too.” 

If you take the system away, advocates argue, you’re taking away the economic incentive of having a dangerous animal on your property. Without the incentive, the population will almost undoubtedly decline. “Economic incentives are a very powerful reason to protect species and habitats,” says Richard Thomas, a spokesperson for the group TRAFFIC, the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, in an email. He gives the analogous example of the harvesting of Toco Toucan chicks by indigenous Paraguayan communities. After CITES banned the export of the species, the economic option was no longer available for the families on the community land on which the toucan nests. Instead, the communities replaced their income source with charcoal made from trees. “Of course, charcoal can only be harvested and sold once,” Thomas says. “This was surely an unintended, but in retrospect, rather surprising consequence of the ban.” 

While this might seem, from a distance, like red state versus blue, liberal versus conservative, Bass doesn’t see it that way. “I think a lot of it is based, perhaps, off an emotional reaction,” she says. “Alligators, not only is it an economic thing here in our state, it’s also a cultural icon as well, and a lot of people making a living off alligators.” Animal rights activists, meanwhile, prefer prohibition over balancing the rights and welfare of people and critters.  

For Bass and other members of Louisiana gator’s communities, California’s new law stands to undermine a major ecological accomplishment. “I don’t know of other examples that are comparable, where not only have we recovered a species that was in danger, we’ve helped to create an industry around it. That industry helps to support conservation of the species.”

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“The University of York Apologises for Saying ‘Negro’ in Lecture on Civil Rights Hero’s Book Called the Philadelphia Negro”

From the Daily Mail article (Julie Henry):

Lecturers were forced to apologise after students attending a class on race complained about quotations from renowned black writers which included the word ‘negro’.

Undergraduates at the University of York said they had been left ‘distressed’ after an academic read out passages which included the word from works by [W.E.B.] Du Bois, an African-American sociologist and civil rights activist, and Frantz Fanon, a French psychiatrist and anti-colonialist – both black academics….

[English Department head Helen] Smith wrote a letter of apology saying that while the term was part of a quotation and was not used ‘offensively’, she recognised that reading it out had caused ‘considerable distress’.

‘I am extremely sorry that this happened, and I have written to all staff in the department to make it clear that they should not pronounce racial slurs as part of their teaching and that if those words appear in texts or on PowerPoint slides, they should be prefaced with an appropriate content warning,’ she wrote.

A follow-up e-mail to lecturers “asked them to refrain from saying the word, written throughout the email as ‘n*gro’.”

 

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Trump’s Trade War Has Hurt American Manufacturers More Than It Helped Them

President Donald Trump’s trade war has been a losing proposition for American manufacturers, which have suffered from higher prices and reduced market access.

That is exactly what many economists predicted would happen when the Trump administration slapped tariffs on steel, aluminum, and billions of dollars of Chinese imports in 2018. And it’s exactly what news reports and economic data have suggested for months, as the manufacturing sector has struggled to keep up with other, stronger sectors of the American economy.

But a new report from two economists on the Federal Reserve Board goes beyond the theoretical implications of tariffs and the anecdotal evidence that the trade war has not worked.

“We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” write Aaron Flaaen, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Output Section, and Justin Pierce, a principal economist with the Industrial Output Section.

In short, protectionism doesn’t work.

Flaaen and Pierce say their research provides “the first comprehensive estimates” of how the Trump administration’s tariffs have affected American manufacturers by warping global supply chains and increasing the cost of input goods—which makes American goods less competitive in the global market. While tariffs have benefited American manufacturers by reducing some foreign competition, they write, those benefits have been overwhelmed by the costs, which have resulted in a reduction in manufacturing employment.

“For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” the two economists conclude.

Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s economic data shows a sharp decline in manufacturing output and a slowdown of job growth in the manufacturing sector—both beginning in mid-2018 as the tariffs were imposed.

IP = “Industrial Production,” which measures real output of the manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities industries.

The new report is an aggregate, comprehensive look at how tariffs have whacked American manufacturers, but it tracks with what many American companies have been saying and doing for months now. Thousands of domestic businesses have sought exemptions from the Trump administration’s tariffs—effectively begging to be saved from the very policies Trump says are supposed to be helping them. The process for getting an exemption, as Reason has previously reported, is expensive, time-consuming, and lacks transparency and due process. Nevertheless, many businesses seem to have decided it is better to roll the dice on getting an exemption than to pay higher prices to import the manufacturing inputs they need.

Each time the Trump administration has sought to increase tariffs on Chinese imports, owners and executives of dozens of potentially affected businesses have made their way to Washington, D.C., to argue against the tariffs in byzantine hearings that have (mostly) been ignored by the administration and the general public.

Business owners aren’t jumping through hoops to avoid tariffs because they have a faulty understanding of their own supply chains. They have a much better understanding of the consequences of the Trump administration’s trade policies than the bureaucrats and ideologues imposing those tariffs.

The tariff-caused problems harming American manufacturers also mirror what’s happened to other supposed beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s trade policies. Tariffs on imported steel were supposed to boost domestic production, but this year has provided a steady stream of news reports about steel plants laying off workers, slowing production, and even suing the government to stop the tariffs.  Meanwhile, the White House has quietly shifted its trade strategy to focus on China instead of Trump’s promise to resurrect American steelmaking.

On the China front, Trump has tried to save face by recently striking a so-called “Phase One” trade deal that could result in tariff reductions next year and includes a promise that China will buy more American farm goods. If that means 2020 will be marked by the winding down of a destructive and unnecessary trade war, we should all be celebrating.

But one of the few benefits to come from the Trump administration’s nearly two-year-long trade war is that economists got new, empirical evidence about why tariffs don’t work—and why they fail especially in an economy that relies on global supply chains for both imports and exports.

“Our results suggest that the traditional use of trade policy as a tool for the protection and promotion of domestic manufacturing is complicated by the presence of globally interconnnected supply chains,” Flaaen and Pierce write. “While the potential for both tit-for-tat retaliation on import protection and input-output effects on the domestic economy have long been recognized by trade economists, empirical evidence documenting these channels in the context of an advanced economy has been limited.”

Trump’s trade war hasn’t done much for American manufacturers or workers. But at least it has proven, once again, that tariffs are bad policy.

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Trump’s Trade War Has Hurt American Manufacturers More Than It Helped Them

President Donald Trump’s trade war has been a losing proposition for American manufacturers, which have suffered from higher prices and reduced market access.

That is exactly what many economists predicted would happen when the Trump administration slapped tariffs on steel, aluminum, and billions of dollars of Chinese imports in 2018. And it’s exactly what news reports and economic data have suggested for months, as the manufacturing sector has struggled to keep up with other, stronger sectors of the American economy.

But a new report from two economists on the Federal Reserve Board goes beyond the theoretical implications of tariffs and the anecdotal evidence that the trade war has not worked.

“We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” write Aaron Flaaen, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Output Section, and Justin Pierce, a principal economist with the Industrial Output Section.

In short, protectionism doesn’t work.

Flaaen and Pierce say their research provides “the first comprehensive estimates” of how the Trump administration’s tariffs have affected American manufacturers by warping global supply chains and increasing the cost of input goods—which makes American goods less competitive in the global market. While tariffs have benefited American manufacturers by reducing some foreign competition, they write, those benefits have been overwhelmed by the costs, which have resulted in a reduction in manufacturing employment.

“For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” the two economists conclude.

Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s economic data shows a sharp decline in manufacturing output and a slowdown of job growth in the manufacturing sector—both beginning in mid-2018 as the tariffs were imposed.

IP = “Industrial Production,” which measures real output of the manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities industries.

The new report is an aggregate, comprehensive look at how tariffs have whacked American manufacturers, but it tracks with what many American companies have been saying and doing for months now. Thousands of domestic businesses have sought exemptions from the Trump administration’s tariffs—effectively begging to be saved from the very policies Trump says are supposed to be helping them. The process for getting an exemption, as Reason has previously reported, is expensive, time-consuming, and lacks transparency and due process. Nevertheless, many businesses seem to have decided it is better to roll the dice on getting an exemption than to pay higher prices to import the manufacturing inputs they need.

Each time the Trump administration has sought to increase tariffs on Chinese imports, owners and executives of dozens of potentially affected businesses have made their way to Washington, D.C., to argue against the tariffs in byzantine hearings that have (mostly) been ignored by the administration and the general public.

Business owners aren’t jumping through hoops to avoid tariffs because they have a faulty understanding of their own supply chains. They have a much better understanding of the consequences of the Trump administration’s trade policies than the bureaucrats and ideologues imposing those tariffs.

The tariff-caused problems harming American manufacturers also mirror what’s happened to other supposed beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s trade policies. Tariffs on imported steel were supposed to boost domestic production, but this year has provided a steady stream of news reports about steel plants laying off workers, slowing production, and even suing the government to stop the tariffs.  Meanwhile, the White House has quietly shifted its trade strategy to focus on China instead of Trump’s promise to resurrect American steelmaking.

On the China front, Trump has tried to save face by recently striking a so-called “Phase One” trade deal that could result in tariff reductions next year and includes a promise that China will buy more American farm goods. If that means 2020 will be marked by the winding down of a destructive and unnecessary trade war, we should all be celebrating.

But one of the few benefits to come from the Trump administration’s nearly two-year-long trade war is that economists got new, empirical evidence about why tariffs don’t work—and why they fail especially in an economy that relies on global supply chains for both imports and exports.

“Our results suggest that the traditional use of trade policy as a tool for the protection and promotion of domestic manufacturing is complicated by the presence of globally interconnnected supply chains,” Flaaen and Pierce write. “While the potential for both tit-for-tat retaliation on import protection and input-output effects on the domestic economy have long been recognized by trade economists, empirical evidence documenting these channels in the context of an advanced economy has been limited.”

Trump’s trade war hasn’t done much for American manufacturers or workers. But at least it has proven, once again, that tariffs are bad policy.

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Bloomberg’s Promise of a New ‘War on Poverty’ Echoes Past Government Failures

During his first inaugural address in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared a no-holds-barred federal “war on poverty” that promised not only to improve poor people’s economic conditions—but to address the fundamental causes of their despair. “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty,” he said, “but to cure it, above all, to prevent it.”

LBJ promised to help poor Americans become self-sufficient, but mostly touted an array of familiar-sounding proposals—hiking the minimum wage, investing more money in public schools, building public-housing projects and creating new or expanded income-support programs. His economic-development ideas promised to uplift African-Americans in urban slums, Native Americans on reservations and whites in Appalachia.

It sounded so high-minded, yet what Johnson later termed “The Great Society” left a trail of destruction that rivaled his other initiative—the Vietnam War. Poverty rates are lower today than in 1964, but that’s “despite” the government’s war on it. America now suffers from rates of dependency and family breakdown that are partially the result of Johnson’s not-so-great ideas. Despite these “investments” and social programs, poverty—especially in California—is as intractable as ever.

Why the short remembrance of the Johnson administration? Apparently, most Democratic presidential candidates—and one in particular—seem to have missed the lessons of the past 56 years. In his presidential campaign’s recent tour in California, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said “my job will be to move all Americans ahead, and that includes committing our country to new and innovative ways to combat poverty. There has to be a war on poverty.”

One of the weird things about getting older is listening to people revive old discredited slogans that make me shudder when I hear them. Republicans push an “America First” agenda now, which brings back echoes of the 1940s-era pro-fascist movement. California Democrats talk about fighting “economic crimes,” which has a strange Soviet-like ring to it. And now a 2020 presidential candidate talks about a “war on poverty” without any sense of the past.

I’m all for “innovative ways to fight poverty,” but most of Bloomberg’s ideas—hiking the minimum wage, dumping billions of dollars in public-housing programs and the like—are retrograde, not innovative. I like his plan to ease zoning restrictions, which will help boost development in urban areas, but beyond that it’s more of the same-old failed policies of dumping government money on the problem. He hasn’t learned a thing.

In fact, Bloomberg made his remarks in Stockton, where poverty rates top 20 percent. The city’s young and idealistic mayor, Michael Tubbs, had endorsed Bloomberg earlier in the day. Tubbs’ best-known idea is called Universal Basic Income, whereby the city provides $500 a month to a few dozen families with no strings attached. The pilot project is privately funded, but supporters see Stockton’s plan as an experiment that could be replicated elsewhere using public funds.

That epitomizes the old “war on poverty” approach, which is based on the idea that the only reason many people are poor is that they don’t have any money. Give them money or housing or whatnot and, viola, problem solved. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. “While the state of neediness we call poverty does involve a lack of material resources, it also involves a mass of psychological and moral problems, including weak motivation, lack of trust in others, ignorance, irresponsibility, self-destructiveness, short-sightedness, alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity and violence,” explained a still-timely 1999 piece by the free-market Foundation for Economic Education.

In my first newspaper job, I covered a plan by the city’s officials to build scattered-site housing—a major initiative during Bill Clinton’s administration—and rent them on the cheap to poor people. Plopping subsidized suburban-style houses in the middle of settled working-class neighborhoods often undermined the surrounding city blocks for a pretty obvious reason.

You can give a poor person a middle-class house, but that doesn’t automatically give them the social skills to turn them into bona fide members of the middle class. A 2016 article in the liberal publication Vox looked at Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Bloomberg’s own city and found that despite all the money and good intentions, the situation now is almost indistinguishable from what it was when the Great Society concentrated its efforts there.

California has the nation’s highest poverty rates, according to the Census Bureau’s cost-of-living-adjusted measure, even though it offers the most generous income-support programs and the most aggressive minimum-wage and anti-poverty laws. Johnson was right about one thing, though, when he said in his address that “lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom.”

Instead of offering failed multitrillion-dollar ideas from the past, Bloomberg and others need to focus on boosting public-school competition and reducing regulations that impede job growth in struggling cities such as Stockton. That’s the kind of “war on poverty” that’s worth fighting.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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Bloomberg’s Promise of a New ‘War on Poverty’ Echoes Past Government Failures

During his first inaugural address in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared a no-holds-barred federal “war on poverty” that promised not only to improve poor people’s economic conditions—but to address the fundamental causes of their despair. “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty,” he said, “but to cure it, above all, to prevent it.”

LBJ promised to help poor Americans become self-sufficient, but mostly touted an array of familiar-sounding proposals—hiking the minimum wage, investing more money in public schools, building public-housing projects and creating new or expanded income-support programs. His economic-development ideas promised to uplift African-Americans in urban slums, Native Americans on reservations and whites in Appalachia.

It sounded so high-minded, yet what Johnson later termed “The Great Society” left a trail of destruction that rivaled his other initiative—the Vietnam War. Poverty rates are lower today than in 1964, but that’s “despite” the government’s war on it. America now suffers from rates of dependency and family breakdown that are partially the result of Johnson’s not-so-great ideas. Despite these “investments” and social programs, poverty—especially in California—is as intractable as ever.

Why the short remembrance of the Johnson administration? Apparently, most Democratic presidential candidates—and one in particular—seem to have missed the lessons of the past 56 years. In his presidential campaign’s recent tour in California, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said “my job will be to move all Americans ahead, and that includes committing our country to new and innovative ways to combat poverty. There has to be a war on poverty.”

One of the weird things about getting older is listening to people revive old discredited slogans that make me shudder when I hear them. Republicans push an “America First” agenda now, which brings back echoes of the 1940s-era pro-fascist movement. California Democrats talk about fighting “economic crimes,” which has a strange Soviet-like ring to it. And now a 2020 presidential candidate talks about a “war on poverty” without any sense of the past.

I’m all for “innovative ways to fight poverty,” but most of Bloomberg’s ideas—hiking the minimum wage, dumping billions of dollars in public-housing programs and the like—are retrograde, not innovative. I like his plan to ease zoning restrictions, which will help boost development in urban areas, but beyond that it’s more of the same-old failed policies of dumping government money on the problem. He hasn’t learned a thing.

In fact, Bloomberg made his remarks in Stockton, where poverty rates top 20 percent. The city’s young and idealistic mayor, Michael Tubbs, had endorsed Bloomberg earlier in the day. Tubbs’ best-known idea is called Universal Basic Income, whereby the city provides $500 a month to a few dozen families with no strings attached. The pilot project is privately funded, but supporters see Stockton’s plan as an experiment that could be replicated elsewhere using public funds.

That epitomizes the old “war on poverty” approach, which is based on the idea that the only reason many people are poor is that they don’t have any money. Give them money or housing or whatnot and, viola, problem solved. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. “While the state of neediness we call poverty does involve a lack of material resources, it also involves a mass of psychological and moral problems, including weak motivation, lack of trust in others, ignorance, irresponsibility, self-destructiveness, short-sightedness, alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity and violence,” explained a still-timely 1999 piece by the free-market Foundation for Economic Education.

In my first newspaper job, I covered a plan by the city’s officials to build scattered-site housing—a major initiative during Bill Clinton’s administration—and rent them on the cheap to poor people. Plopping subsidized suburban-style houses in the middle of settled working-class neighborhoods often undermined the surrounding city blocks for a pretty obvious reason.

You can give a poor person a middle-class house, but that doesn’t automatically give them the social skills to turn them into bona fide members of the middle class. A 2016 article in the liberal publication Vox looked at Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Bloomberg’s own city and found that despite all the money and good intentions, the situation now is almost indistinguishable from what it was when the Great Society concentrated its efforts there.

California has the nation’s highest poverty rates, according to the Census Bureau’s cost-of-living-adjusted measure, even though it offers the most generous income-support programs and the most aggressive minimum-wage and anti-poverty laws. Johnson was right about one thing, though, when he said in his address that “lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom.”

Instead of offering failed multitrillion-dollar ideas from the past, Bloomberg and others need to focus on boosting public-school competition and reducing regulations that impede job growth in struggling cities such as Stockton. That’s the kind of “war on poverty” that’s worth fighting.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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Review: Little Women

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the latest mounting of Louisa May Alcott’s revered novel (published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869), and it pulses with fresh energy and the excitement of a top-tier cast. Gerwig, nominated for Oscars as both writer and director for her breakthrough movie, the incomparable Lady Bird (2017), here settles fully into her status as an exceptional American filmmaker.

Alcott’s story has rousingly addressed generations of girls and women, but it’s not just a chick flick, especially in this iteration. Its animating theme is freedom—the natural right, not always honored in this irritating world, to pursue what may seem the unlikeliest of dreams in defiance of convention and societal condescension.

The movie’s grandest dreamer is Jo March (Saoirse Ronan), who is determined to become a writer, a goal we see her working toward in New York as the movie opens. Before long we realize that Gerwig has boldly separated the novel’s timeline into two periods, set seven years apart, so we’re also frequently observing Jo in her younger days at the March family home in Concord, Massachusetts (where Alcott was largely raised), in a house that’s a monument to cozy 19th Century clutter. (The picture is beautifully made, with carefully detailed production design by Coen brothers associate Jess Gonchor; gorgeous cinematography, conjuring a long-ago New England of stately clapboard houses and long snow-blanketed fields, by Yorick Le Saux; and richly draped and textured costumes by Jacqueline Durran.)

Jo’s sisters represent differing avenues of female aspiration. The eldest, Meg (Emma Watson), is a beauty who’s tired of having no money and wants to marry. Jo’s younger sibling, Beth (Eliza Scanlen, of Sharp Objects) is musically inclined, but sickly. And the baby of the family, the pugnacious Amy (Florence Pugh), is set on becoming a world-class painter. (“I want to be great, or nothing,” she announces.) Doing her best to encourage the girls is their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), who’s struggling to raise them in the absence of their father (Bob Odenkirk), currently away serving as a pastor with Union forces in the Civil War.

All of the girls are intrigued, to one extent or another, by Theodore “Laurie” Lawrence (Timothée Chalamet), an attractively tousled rich boy who lives nearby in a mansion owned by his kindly grandfather (Chris Cooper). Laurie is drawn to Jo, but her dreams are too big to include him. Also circling the action is a wealthy relative, Aunt March (Meryl Streep), who’s planning to take Amy along on a grand tour of Europe to broaden her cultural horizon, and an impoverished immigrant—a German academic named Friedrich (French film star Louis Garrel) —whose relationship with Jo gets off to an awkward start after she gives him some of her stories to read. “I don’t like them,” he tells her. “I think they are not good.” (Ronan, once again peerless here, displays only the subtlest flicker of hurt before striking back with, “You’ll always be a critic and never an author.”)

Alcott’s story is deceptively simple, and its dialogue still resonates today. Jo is generally irked by women’s constricted situation in the society of her time, and she marvels at her hardworking mother’s equable demeanor. “You’re never angry,” she observes. “I’m angry nearly every day of my life,” Marmee quietly replies.

Jo doesn’t think she will ever marry (“I love my liberty”) and she’s usually adamant about it. “I’m sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for,” she tells Marmee, as a wave of feeling suddenly rises. “But I’m so lonely.”

And when Meg expresses her romantic plans with a young local man, Jo tells her, in one of Alcott’s most glorious lines, “You will be bored with him in two years—and we will be interesting forever.”

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Review: Little Women

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the latest mounting of Louisa May Alcott’s revered novel (published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869), and it pulses with fresh energy and the excitement of a top-tier cast. Gerwig, nominated for Oscars as both writer and director for her breakthrough movie, the incomparable Lady Bird (2017), here settles fully into her status as an exceptional American filmmaker.

Alcott’s story has rousingly addressed generations of girls and women, but it’s not just a chick flick, especially in this iteration. Its animating theme is freedom—the natural right, not always honored in this irritating world, to pursue what may seem the unlikeliest of dreams in defiance of convention and societal condescension.

The movie’s grandest dreamer is Jo March (Saoirse Ronan), who is determined to become a writer, a goal we see her working toward in New York as the movie opens. Before long we realize that Gerwig has boldly separated the novel’s timeline into two periods, set seven years apart, so we’re also frequently observing Jo in her younger days at the March family home in Concord, Massachusetts (where Alcott was largely raised), in a house that’s a monument to cozy 19th Century clutter. (The picture is beautifully made, with carefully detailed production design by Coen brothers associate Jess Gonchor; gorgeous cinematography, conjuring a long-ago New England of stately clapboard houses and long snow-blanketed fields, by Yorick Le Saux; and richly draped and textured costumes by Jacqueline Durran.)

Jo’s sisters represent differing avenues of female aspiration. The eldest, Meg (Emma Watson), is a beauty who’s tired of having no money and wants to marry. Jo’s younger sibling, Beth (Eliza Scanlen, of Sharp Objects) is musically inclined, but sickly. And the baby of the family, the pugnacious Amy (Florence Pugh), is set on becoming a world-class painter. (“I want to be great, or nothing,” she announces.) Doing her best to encourage the girls is their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), who’s struggling to raise them in the absence of their father (Bob Odenkirk), currently away serving as a pastor with Union forces in the Civil War.

All of the girls are intrigued, to one extent or another, by Theodore “Laurie” Lawrence (Timothée Chalamet), an attractively tousled rich boy who lives nearby in a mansion owned by his kindly grandfather (Chris Cooper). Laurie is drawn to Jo, but her dreams are too big to include him. Also circling the action is a wealthy relative, Aunt March (Meryl Streep), who’s planning to take Amy along on a grand tour of Europe to broaden her cultural horizon, and an impoverished immigrant—a German academic named Friedrich (French film star Louis Garrel) —whose relationship with Jo gets off to an awkward start after she gives him some of her stories to read. “I don’t like them,” he tells her. “I think they are not good.” (Ronan, once again peerless here, displays only the subtlest flicker of hurt before striking back with, “You’ll always be a critic and never an author.”)

Alcott’s story is deceptively simple, and its dialogue still resonates today. Jo is generally irked by women’s constricted situation in the society of her time, and she marvels at her hardworking mother’s equable demeanor. “You’re never angry,” she observes. “I’m angry nearly every day of my life,” Marmee quietly replies.

Jo doesn’t think she will ever marry (“I love my liberty”) and she’s usually adamant about it. “I’m sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for,” she tells Marmee, as a wave of feeling suddenly rises. “But I’m so lonely.”

And when Meg expresses her romantic plans with a young local man, Jo tells her, in one of Alcott’s most glorious lines, “You will be bored with him in two years—and we will be interesting forever.”

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The Uncanny Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft

Edmund Wilson, then one of America’s top literary critics, took to the pages of The New Yorker in 1945 to denounce a dead horror writer named H.P. Lovecraft. “The only real horror in most of these fictions,” Wilson sniffed, “is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” Wilson was outraged at the thought that Lovecraft, who had died, broke, in 1937, might enjoy posthumous success thanks to the recent publication of his collected writings. These stories, Wilson declared, “were hack-work contributed to such publications as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, where, in my opinion, they ought to have been left.”

Wilson was a big deal in his day, the sort of critic whose reviews could help make or break an author’s career. But he was simply no match for Lovecraft, who would enjoy the last laugh from beyond the grave. Today, Wilson is largely forgotten and Lovecraft is practically everywhere, his DNA spread far and wide throughout American popular culture.

Perhaps you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s most enduring creation, the towering, tentacle-faced elder god Cthulhu, who lies slumbering deep in his oceanic tomb, waiting for the day when “the stars are right” so that he may rise again and wreak havoc on humanity. The modern cult of Cthulhu is a capitalist success story of epic proportions. Retailers now offer Cthulhu-themed shirts, hats, socks, costumes, toys, coffee mugs, Pez dispensers, board games, video games, role-playing games, novels, short stories, comic books, coloring books, and much else besides. The heavy metal band Metallica has written two songs in Cthulhu’s honor. The Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro has found all sorts of clever ways to reference Cthulhu in his films. A popular “Cthulhu for President” bumper sticker asks, “Why vote for the lesser evil?”

Another Lovecraft signature is the obsessive researcher whose fixation on weird science unleashes an interdimensional evil that threatens to wipe out the planet. Sound familiar? In the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, shadowy government research involving children with psychic abilities rips open a portal between Hawkins, Indiana, and “the Upside Down,” a spooky parallel dimension that just happens to be crawling with Lovecraftian creatures. Yes, the mad scientist trope has been around at least since Frankenstein, but the vast, eldritch terrors of the Upside Down are pure Lovecraft. So too is the tentacled monster known as “the mind flayer” who stalks our intrepid young heroes.

Academics can’t seem to get enough of Lovecraft either. A database search will turn up hundreds of scholarly articles discussing the author and his work, in such serious-minded publications as American Studies, Math Horizons, Cultural Geographies, and the Journal of Folklore Research. In the words of Alan Moore, author of the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen and V for Vendetta, Lovecraft has enjoyed “a posthumous trajectory from pulp to academia that is perhaps unique in modern letters.”

Not everybody is a fan. In 2014, the writer Daniel José Older launched a campaign to have Lovecraft’s likeness removed from the World Fantasy Award, a prestigious genre prize that had taken the form of a Lovecraft statue since its inception in 1975. While Lovecraft “did leave a lasting mark on speculative fiction, he was also an avowed racist,” Older argued. “Many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinions….It’s time to stop co-signing his bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past.” The World Fantasy Convention ultimately agreed, dropping the statue in 2015.

Lovecraft really was an avowed racist. His stories, essays, and correspondence are filled with all sorts of ugly statements about blacks, Jews, and immigrants. He particularly hated New York City, where he briefly lived, complaining in a 1924 letter of its “Asiatic hell’s huddle of the world’s cowed, broken, inartistic, & unfit.”

Still, the horror/fantasy world was not uniformly pleased about the change. The scholar and editor S.T. Joshi, who has written numerous books about Lovecraft, returned his two World Fantasy Awards in protest. Getting rid of the Lovecraft statue, Joshi declared, “seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness.”

Seven decades after his death, Lovecraft shows no signs of going away. He has scaled the commanding heights of pop culture, influencing some of the biggest names in the game while continuing to sell tons of his own books to new generations of readers. How many authors can claim a posthumous success like that?

Haunting the Dark

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890. In 1893, his father, likely suffering from an advanced case of syphilis, was committed to the nearby Butler Hospital for the Insane. He would die there five years later. Lovecraft’s mother, who suffered from depression, would be confined to that same facility in 1919, dying within its walls two years later.

These are not the only episodes from the writer’s life that sound like plot points from a horror story. At the age of 46, Lovecraft began keeping a sort of death diary, recording his daily sufferings and terrors as he slowly expired from stomach cancer. “Pain—drowse—intense pain—rest—great pain,” he wrote in one typical entry. It was an eerie echo of his 1936 short story “The Haunter of the Dark,” in which one of the protagonists continues to write in his journal even as the dreadful monster closes in on him. “I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye….” That’s the final sentence of the story.

Lovecraft wrote for the pulps, cheaply printed magazines that specialized in the sort of sensational material—monsters, lost cities, aliens—that more respectable outlets would not deign to print. He never made any real money as a writer, though he was sometimes able to pay the bills by hiring out his services as an editor and rewrite man. The most famous of his clients was Harry Houdini, for whom Lovecraft ghostwrote the 1924 short story “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.”

Lovecraft’s first major book, The Outsider and Others, which collected some of his best stories, did not appear until two years after his death. His second book—Beyond the Wall of Sleep, another story collection—appeared four years after that. They were both published by Arkham House, an independent press founded by Lovecraft acolytes August Derleth and Donald Wandrei for the sole purpose of keeping their hero’s work in print.

It did the trick. Readers have been devouring Lovecraft’s macabre tales ever since.

What explains this extraordinary afterlife? Why do so many of us still read his stuff today? “When Lovecraft was on the money,” the writer Stephen King has argued, “his stories packed an incredible wallop. The best of them make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep.”

King ought to know, having successfully borrowed a page or two from the Lovecraftian playbook himself over the years. In It, King’s blockbuster 1986 novel about a small town terrorized by a bloodthirsty, shape-shifting clown, the big reveal at the end (spoiler alert) is that the monster is actually an ancient cosmic entity that crashed to Earth millions of years ago and has been periodically rising up to feed on human fear (and flesh) ever since. In The Mist, his 1980 novella about a small town under siege after secret government experiments unleash monsters from another dimension (hello again, Stranger Things!), King gives Cthulhu himself a sort of uncredited cameo appearance.

Lovecraft revealed the key to his own personal vision of horror in the opening sentences of his signature story, “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Pretty much any one of Lovecraft’s 70 or so tales could begin like that.

A Political Horror Show

Modern critics have sometimes struggled to make sense of Lovecraft’s worldview, particularly when it comes to where he might fall on the political spectrum. For many, the answer has been to label Lovecraft a conservative, pointing to his undeniable record as a racist, xenophobe, and Anglo-Saxon supremacist. “It’s safe to say that if Lovecraft were alive today,” The A.V. Club‘s Joshua Alston declared in 2016, “he’d have a ‘Make America Great Again’ bumper sticker on the wall of his remote cabin.”

Maybe so. But Lovecraft also hated capitalism, praised socialism, and staunchly defended President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal against “the plutocrats and their apologists,” as he once put it. “I am one for whom the spectre of ‘socialisation’ has no terror,” Lovecraft wrote in a 1933 essay. “The older I grow and the more I reflect, the more I am convinced that no industrial civilization can continue to exist except through the artificial government control and distribution of resources.” The real problem with the New Deal, Lovecraft added, was that it did not go far enough “toward the probably inevitable socialisation of large-scale industry and finance.”

Lovecraft’s combination of racism and statist economics was not exactly unusual at the time. In fact, many of the day’s leading progressive figures harbored outright racist opinions. Take Woodrow Wilson. In his 1901 book, A History of the American People, the future president voiced his disgust at the new immigrants then arriving in the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe, attacking them as “men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.” Far more to Wilson’s taste were the “sturdy stocks of the north of Europe.” Socialist leader Eugene Debs struck a similar note. “The Dago…lives more like a savage or a wild beast than the Chinese,” Debs complained, allowing him to “underbid the American working man.” Progressive hero Theodore Roosevelt argued that it was “a mistake” to give black men the right to vote via the 15th Amendment because blacks on the whole were “altogether inferior to the whites.”

Without ruling on the question of where Lovecraft might land on today’s political spectrum, it seems clear that his racist and xenophobic views were in step with much left-wing thought of his own time.

Cut from the Cosmic Horror Opus?

Lovecraft’s racism has inspired two interesting young anti-racist writers now working in the fields of horror and dark fantasy. In his captivating Lovecraft Country (Harper), Matt Ruff chronicles the adventures of a black family as it navigates the horrors—both ordinary and supernatural—of Jim Crow America in the 1950s. It’s both a welcome addition to the Lovecraftian canon and a sharp critique of it. Jordan Peele, director of the acclaimed 2017 thriller Get Out, is currently producing an HBO series based on Ruff’s novel. Meanwhile, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (Tor.com), which he dedicates to Lovecraft “with all my conflicted feelings,” takes the critique a step further—essentially rewriting one of Lovecraft’s most blatantly racist stories, “The Horror at Red Hook,” from the vantage point of a new black protagonist.

In his introduction to 2019’s The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham (Liveright), a lavishly illustrated collection edited by the cultural historian Leslie Klinger, LaValle discusses his complicated relationship with Lovecraft’s work. One option he considered was to “cut [Lovecraft] from the Cosmic Horror opus,” he acknowledges. But then he thought twice about all the great stories that would necessarily be sacrificed as a result.

So what can be done about Lovecraft and his tainted creations? “I’m not saying the fiction is so worthwhile that we just have to shrug our shoulders and live with the rest,” LaValle writes. Rather, “you can love something, love someone, and criticize them. That’s called maturity.” As far as LaValle is concerned, “Lovecraft will never be cancelled.” He’s right: The ghoulish writer has sunk his teeth far too deep into the body of American popular culture for that.

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