why Hillary Clinton appears untrustworthy

Leave a reply

Philippe Boulet-Gercourt has a long article in the French magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur) entitled “The Ten Sins of Hillary.” He quotes me saying, “I see her as someone very sensitive to what is possible and what is not, you watch her thinking in real-time, seeking the right answer that takes all the constraints into account. … Her answers can be complex because she attempts to answer honestly. [She’s] a political junkie and, in a way, it is a mark of sincerity!” (I was interviewed in English, my words were translated into French, and here I translate back.)

I am open to objections to what I said. First, it could be that the center-left in the US imposes these constraints on itself unnecessarily, to its detriment. For instance, if you’re a “serious” politician, you never say that we should float bonds to pay for infrastructure. That is what economists would recommend, but you don’t say it because it’s supposed to be politically impossible to advocate borrowing and spending. By censoring yourself, you narrow the range of what actually is possible, and you come across as pervasively dishonest because it’s clear that you’re for things that you won’t defend. Arguably, HRC is Exhibit One of that phenomenon. Second, one could assemble a list of specific prevarications or evasions from her long career. Third, maybe people don’t trust her because of her gender.

But I still think that genuine efforts to be realistic can look dishonest, especially in contrast to passionate statements that pay no heed to constraints. In January 2003, I posted on this blog about my day’s work with a class of kids who were conducting an oral history project on the desegregation of Prince George’s County (MD) schools. They were all students of color, and they were exploring (with me) how their school had been de jure white until Brown v Board of Education, was then integrated for a time, and is now diverse but minus a substantial white population.

One interviewee [had been] the first African American student at the school. (He was still the only one when he graduated three years later). He said: “Initially I was actually hoping that it wouldn’t work. My parents had said that if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. … Instead of violence, there were three years of hostility.” His main motivation was to be “part of something bigger,” the Civil Rights Movement. He later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing—and easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness.

He wouldn’t say much about how he personally felt about integrating the school. Our next speaker was a current member of the County Council, a white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer and who spoke very passionately about his commitment to integration. I was mildly suspicious of him; the kids loved him. Our reactions were different, probably not because of age or other demographics characteristic but just because assessments of character are subjective. But I do think it’s possible that I was right to trust the speaker who was guarded and private more than the guy who said exactly what his audience wanted to hear. The question is whether HRC faces the same problem.

social capital makes the labor market more fluid

Leave a reply

In 2012, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Chaeyoon Lim, and I published research for the National Conference on Citizenship showing a strong link between the civic engagement of cities and states and their economic performance after the great recession of 2007-9. Ours was a correlational study with lots of controls, and that method neither proves causality nor provides explanations for the correlations. We did hypothesize a whole set of explanations for why civic health would be good for economic health, and (specifically) employment.

Yesterday, the New York Times’ Patricia Cohen reported on a new Bookings study by Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, Riccardo Trezzi, and Abigail Wozniak. The authors find that employment fluidity has declined. That would be OK if it meant that people were landing stable jobs that they like, but it appears that instead, many people are stuck in jobs that are not satisfactory yet don’t leave them, in part because opportunities are too scarce. Cohen writes:

One of the more intriguing findings was the role of declining social trust and what is known as social capital — the web of family, friends and professional contacts. For example, the proportion of people who agree with the statement, “Most people can be trusted,” has been shrinking for more than three decades. Researchers found that states with larger declines in social trust also had larger declines in labor market fluidity. The lack of trust may increase the cost of job-hunting and make both employees and employers more risk-averse.

Ms. Wozniak added that the benefits of LinkedIn and Facebook friends may not replace the personal connections that still remain the best way to find a job.

By the way, my Tufts colleague Laura Gee published a piece in The Conversation yesterday in which she noted that more than half of jobs are found through social ties, and that on Facebook, it is mostly people’s stronger and closer connections that land them jobs.

Additional points from the Brookings report itself (pp. 36-8): social capital is related to better economic performance, and the causal arrow seems to point from better social capital to “long-run growth at the country level.” Social capital helps job searches because people find jobs through networks, and networks reduce the cost of filling jobs. Social capital has declined in the US. At the state level, greater declines in social capital are associated–weakly–with declines in job fluidity.

three ages

Leave a reply

1.

The sidewalk is significant.
Its ridges hamper wheels,
Its cracks harbor meadows
And little things with wills.
It is safe–the street, maleficent.
It is hard–it doles out blows.

2.

The sidewalk barely registers:
Eyes on faces, signs, and lights.
Can you say what bore your shoefalls
As you strode down streets and flights?
Thoughts on larger characters,
You miss the fragile kid who falls.

3.

When that child belongs to you, though,
Down you’ll stoop to scoop her up.
For you again it matters that
A stick is in a cup.
Significant is the crust of snow
And sun stripes on the cat.

the #1 goal of civics: making kids interested

Leave a reply

Washington (DC): I am on a civics road trip: the First Annual Civics Literacy Conference in Massachusetts, an advisory board meeting for iCivics inside the Supreme Court building, and then a meeting with executive branch people.

The public discourse about civic education often takes the form: “Why don’t people (meaning adults) know basic facts about politics? Why do 10% of college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court? We should teach schoolkids these facts!”

But almost all students study and face some kind of tests on facts like the number of US Senators. The problem is, adults don’t remember what they learned as kids.

That is because adults are not obligated to retain or update their civic knowledge. You spend 13 years of school learning to read and write. Then, if you have a job that involves written words, you must constantly update your literacy skills. You spend a few dozen hours in school learning about politics, and then you’re a citizen—but that role comes with no rewards or penalties. Nothing bad happens to you if you forget what you learned. Yes, politics affects us all. It is interested in you even if you aren’t interested in it. But just because it affects us all, each of us can let others take care of it.

Some of us do update and even dramatically expand what we learned as kids about civics. The reason is: we’re interested. Something made us feel that politics was intriguing, important, dramatic, and rewarding for us as individuals. I conclude that the main purpose of civic education in k-12 schools is to increase the proportion of young people who reach that conclusion.

Walter de la Mare, Fare Well

2 Replies

Derek Walcott says that he always “cherished” the poem “Fare Well” by Walter de la Mare “because of its melody and its plaintiveness.” I think Walcott proceeds to recite it from memory rather than read it, because his spoken rendition differs in very minor respects from the printed versions that I have found online (“or” instead of “nor”, “dost” instead of “wouldst”). Walcott’s recommendation is enough for me, so I offer de la Mare’s text below:

Fare Well

When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
Perishing be?

Oh, when this my dust surrenders
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,
May these loved and loving faces
Please other men!
May the rusting harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller’s Joy entwine,
And as happy children gather
Posies once mine.

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.

It’s quite straightforward, but I’ll add a few notes.

  • The “melody” that Walcott admires could be parsed as six rhyming couplets (AA, BB, CC) with 15 syllables before each rhyming word, arranged in in a pattern of trochee, trochee, trochee, spondee [line break], trochee, trochee, anapest [line break], trochee, spondee. It could be easily set to music.
  • De la Mare introduces some surprises. You would think that once you’re dead and buried, what you’ll miss is light. The narrator says instead that you will no longer see “shades of darkness,” which is true enough. A.E. Hausman Housman read the poem in a version with a misprint: “rustling” instead of “rusting harvest hedgerow.” Housman knew right away that the original must have read “rusting,” because the sound of wind in leaves is a cliché and unrelated to the poem’s theme, whereas “rusting” evokes autumnal colors and an imminent fall.
  •  “Wonder” is “the proof of” the narrator. Does “proof” mean a test that the narrator faced, or evidence that the narrator lived?
  • I take it the “thou” addressed in the third stanza is a reader after the narrator has died. We are to appreciate the beauty of the world as if it were about to pass and remember that those who have passed appreciated it before us.