"How politics makes us stupid": Ezra Klein's hypothesis, Chait's case study

Serendipity. On one sunny Sunday, Jonathan Chair purported to explain the controlling dynamic in U.S. politics. And Ezra Klein purported to explain the controlling dynamic in politics, period. Their hypotheses are congruent.

Klein deployed social science research from a team led by Yale law professor Dan Kahan demonstrating that all of us actively resist evidence that challenges our assumptions. In matters of passion and identity, we almost literally can't see contrary evidence. Exhibit A is an experiment in which people who had already demonstrated their ability to use math to arrive at a counterintuitive conclusion disabled that capacity when it threatened to undermine a political conviction.

In Kahan's experiment, people who had previously parsed data about the effectiveness of a skin cream were shown similarly presented data about the effectiveness of gun control. And, lo:

Obama's national narrative is a bit less triumphal these days

It's hard to wax lyrical about Obama waxing lyrical when he seems on the point of launching an attack on another country with no clear end and to advance no clear U.S. interest. 

But I did think that his speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington was a good one, better than the Twitter chatter on my feed would lead you to believe. It was familiar: the always perfecting/never perfected frame, offsetting progress made with challenges yet unmet -- but this time with an edge, an emphasis on the lack of economic progress, for the middle class generally and African Americans specifically, over the last fifty years.

I was moved by his account of the ordinary people who drove major social change, though I've heard it before. And I found his account of the political forces militating against opportunity and shared prosperity satisfyingly meaty:

Detroit's destruction began in its heyday

Thomas J. Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1997) is a great book -- and in some ways a simple one.  It provides extensive, fine-grained documentation of two or three (depending on how you count) relentless forces that destroyed Detroit.

The first was the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs that was in full flow by the early fifties, and could only have been stemmed by national industrial policies unthinkable in the United States: a rollback of Taft-Hartley's enablement of state right-to-work laws; a German-style role for labor in corporate management; legal restrictions on companies' right to lay off workers or move manufacturing operations as they saw fit.

The second was the vicious, rooted, legally codified and government-sanctioned racism that kept African Americans at the bottom of the labor totem pole, consigning them to the hardiest, dirtiest, poorest-paying and least secure factory jobs and excluding them skilled crafts, retail service and a host of other occupations.