Brooks and Nocera

Mr. Bruni is off today.  Bobo, in “The Vigorous Virtues,” says Margaret Thatcher was a pioneering figure for the qualities of public leadership we most admire today.  What’s this “we” shit, sparky?  There were those of us who were never really fans of Attila the Hen…  Mr. Nocera has a question in “The Military Prep School Scam:”  The military academies wouldn’t lower their standards to enroll top athletes. Would they?  Here’s Bobo:

The 1990 Tory coup against Margaret Thatcher was the most intense political event I’ve covered. The Conservative politicians who were trying to remove her from party leadership and the prime minister’s office knew they were toppling a person who was their political and moral superior. They knew she had earned the right to face the country in an election one last time, rather than be deposed by the supposed lieutenants in her own party. They sensed there would be some Shakespearean retribution for the act of disloyalty they were engaged in. They went around rubbing their hands like Lady Macbeth trying to expunge the sin even as they were committing it.

But Thatcher had exhausted the country. She had run through all the potential ministers on her side, and blocked the ambitions of many others. Her colleagues thought she was too anti-Europe. Her poll numbers were sinking. And so they felt compelled to act. After a series of fervid meetings and maneuvers while she was away, the members of her own party brought her down.

She came back from Paris betrayed and red around the eyes. But she still had to lead a Question Time in the House of Commons, speaking for a government she no longer headed.

It was a triumph. She dominated the hall, crushed the hecklers and rose magnificently above her own misery. “I’m enjoying this,” she exulted at one point. “I’m enjoying this!” The men who destroyed her leapt to their feet and roared. “You can wipe the floor with those people!” one of her remaining supporters shouted.

Thatcher went down in full cry: “When good has to be upheld, when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms!”

A little while later I literally bumped into her at a conference. I asked her what was running through her mind as she entered the House of Commons for that triumphant session. I’ve rarely received an answer so disappointing. She told me she was thinking of the thank-you notes she would have to write that evening, and other mundane details of the day.

The people who make history are usually not the same people who are able to reflect and be introspective about it. As her former aide Matthew Parris once wrote, “I don’t actually believe she had hidden depths.”

Margaret Thatcher was a world historical figure for the obvious reasons. Before Thatcher, history seemed to be moving in the direction of Swedish social democracy. After Thatcher, it wasn’t. But her most pervasive influence was on the level of values.

She was formed by her disgust with 1970s Britain. She witnessed a moral shift in those years, away from people who were competitive and toward people who were cooperative, away from the ambitious and toward those who were self-nurturing and self-exploring, away from the culture of rectitude and toward the culture of narcissism. Especially in the prestigious reaches of society, people were often uninterested in technology and disdainful of commerce.

In the political sphere this translated into an aversion to conflict, a desperate desire for consensus, which often translated into policy drift and a gradual surrender to entrenched interests. Thatcher saw this as a loss of national potency. She saw it as a loss of will, a settling for mediocrity, a betrayal of Britain’s great history and an acceptance of decline.

The daughter of a small grocer, she led a fervent bourgeois Risorgimento. She was the voice of the ambitious middle class. She lionized the self-made striver. Loving tidiness, she checked to see if the space above the picture frames was properly dusted.

She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

If her predecessors stood for consensus and the endless negotiation of interests over beer and sandwiches, Thatcher stood for steadfast conviction on behalf of the national good. An admirer of the free market, her companion goal was to restore the authority of the state, and she was willing to centralize power to do it.

At a time when others were sliding toward moral relativism, Thatcher stood for individual responsibility, moral self-confidence and often, it has to be admitted, self-righteous certitude.

Put aside her personal failings, she was a militant optimist for a country slipping unconsciously toward defeatism. Beyond her policy decisions, she was part of a values shift.

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced and ratified her policy shifts. Millions more have been influenced by her idea of what makes an admirable individual.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

Is there any institution of higher learning that isn’t gaming the system to gain athletic advantage? I’ve come to believe the answer is no.

Harvard? Last year, before announcing that the university had uncovered widespread cheating, a Harvard administrator sent an e-mail to the university’s resident deans, saying that potentially culpable athletes might withdraw from school temporarily. That way, the cheating scandal wouldn’t cost them eligibility.

On the other side of the country, the University of California, Davis, had long kept athletics in perspective — until 2007, when it inexplicably joined the big boys in Division I. Vowing not to cut any “minor” sports, it did just that as athletic expenses soared. Promising not to lower standards, it abandoned that vow, too. After the U.C. Davis faculty athletic representative refused to support the application of “a talented basketball player with a questionable academic background,” she was removed from that position, according to a report by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. The basketball player was admitted.

Which brings us to today’s subject: the military academies. Incredibly, even the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy and West Point, charged with training the next generation of military leaders, systematically abandon their standards and admissions processes when a good athlete is within reach. Their highly questionable enrollment practices make one wonder whether the academies care as much about their mission these days as they do about winning football games.

There are two ways the military academies sneak in athletes who fail to meet their admissions standards. First, they all operate prep schools whose original purpose — preparing promising enlisted personnel for the rigors of an academy education — is long outdated.

Instead, the prep schools, which cost taxpayers around $25 million or so per year, are used for other purposes, including “redshirting” athletes — that is, stockpiling them for a year — when their high school records would prevent them from being admitted directly from high school. For instance, of the 300 students in the 2011 class of the Naval Academy Prep School, 110 are recruited athletes — typical for the other service academies. Oh, and they get paid a monthly stipend — which would seem to be a rather blatant violation of N.C.A.A. rules.

When I talked to academy officials, they pooh-poohed the idea that the prep school was a place to sneak athletes in through the back door. Because athletics are so important, said a public affairs officer, “we consider every midshipman to be an athlete.”

But the statistics tell a different story. Nearly 80 percent of the 52-member Navy lacrosse team came through the Naval Academy Prep School; for returning football lettermen, the percentage is around two-thirds.

Meanwhile, West Point recently built a new $107 million campus for its prep school. An aerial shot of the new campus on the Military Academy Prep School Web site highlights its dominant feature: acres of lush athletic fields.

The second scam involves the nonprofit foundations that exist to give financial support to the service academies. Among other things, the foundations offer scholarships to athletes to go to certain prep schools that stress certain sports — with the proviso, of course, that they then attend whichever service academy the boosters are supporting. (In 2010, when a Naval Academy athlete who had gotten in via the foundation route tried to withdraw, saying “this isn’t the place for me,” the foundation demanded the return of his prep school “scholarship” money.)

Although Ed Wallace, a retired Navy captain who runs the Naval Academy foundation’s “athletic and scholarship programs,” denied that it directed athletes to certain schools — or that it singled out recruited athletes for financial support — a document outlining this contractual obligation is on the Naval Academy Foundation’s Web site. Or rather, it was. It was removed in 2012, when the N.C.A.A. began an investigation into the practices of the prep schools and the foundations. (Despite some pretty obvious violations of its rules, the N.C.A.A. dropped the investigation last year.)

Of course, these practices are troubling for reasons that go far beyond the N.C.A.A. Is it really appropriate for our military academies to favor recruited athletes over more qualified candidates? Surely there’s a lot more at stake when the academies lower their admissions standards than when, say, Auburn does.

There is also the sequester. The Navy right now is in the process of canceling deployments, grounding airplanes and deferring ship maintenance. The civilian faculty members at the Naval Academy have been told that they will have to take a 14-day furlough sometime before the end of the semester. But I don’t see anyone suggesting cutting back on the prep school or the athletic teams.

Of course not. After all, Navy is joining the Big East in 2015.

Bread and circuses, Joe, bread and circuses.  Except, of course, this time around we’re not even getting the bread, just the circuses…

Brooks and Krugman

It would seem that both Bobo and The Moustache of Wisdom are huge fans of online universities.  Which ought to be enough to make all the rest of us more than a little leery…  In “The Practical University” Bobo says that the promise of online education lies in taking care of the technical knowledge so that universities can focus on transmitting practical knowledge.  Not critical thinking skills, just “practical knowledge…”  Prof. Krugman, in “The Urge to Purge,” says the push to see depression as a necessary and somehow desirable punishment for past sins is as strong as ever.  Here’s Bobo:

The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?

Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?

My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of knowledge you need to understand a task — the statistical knowledge you need to understand what market researchers do, the biological knowledge you need to grasp the basics of what nurses do.

Technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook. It is formulas telling you roughly what is to be done. It is reducible to rules and directions. It’s the sort of knowledge that can be captured in lectures and bullet points and memorized by rote.

Right now, online and hybrid offerings seem to be as good as standard lectures at transmitting this kind of knowledge, and, in the years ahead, they are bound to get better — more imaginatively curated, more interactive and with better assessments.

The problem is that as online education becomes more pervasive, universities can no longer primarily be in the business of transmitting technical knowledge. Online offerings from distant, star professors will just be too efficient. As Ben Nelson of Minerva University points out, a school cannot charge students $40,000 and then turn around and offer them online courses that they can get free or nearly free. That business model simply does not work. There will be no such thing as a MOOC university.

Nelson believes that universities will end up effectively telling students: “Take the following online courses over the summer or over a certain period, and then, when you’re done, you will come to campus and that’s when our job will begin.” If Nelson is right, then universities in the future will spend much less time transmitting technical knowledge and much more time transmitting practical knowledge.

Practical knowledge is not about what you do, but how you do it. It is the wisdom a great chef possesses that cannot be found in recipe books. Practical knowledge is not the sort of knowledge that can be taught and memorized; it can only be imparted and absorbed. It is not reducible to rules; it only exists in practice.

Now I could give you a theory about how universities can transmit this sort of practical moral wisdom, but let’s save that. Let’s focus on practical wisdom in the modern workplace.

Think about Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Put aside the debate about the challenges facing women in society. Focus on the tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.

These skills are practical knowledge. Anybody who works in a modern office knows that they are surprisingly rare. But students can learn these skills at a university, through student activities, through the living examples of their professors and also in seminars.

Nelson’s venture, Minerva, uses technology to double down on seminars. Minerva is a well-financed, audacious effort to use technological advances to create an elite university at a much lower cost. I don’t know if Minerva will work or not, but Nelson is surely right to focus on the marriage of technology and seminars.

The problem with the current seminars is that it’s really hard to know what anybody gets out of them. The conversations might be lively, but they flow by so fast you feel as if you’re missing important points and exchanges.

The goal should be to use technology to take a free-form seminar and turn it into a deliberate seminar (I’m borrowing Anders Ericsson’s definition of deliberate practice). Seminars could be recorded with video-cameras, and exchanges could be reviewed and analyzed to pick apart how a disagreement was handled and how a debate was conducted. Episodes in one seminar could be replayed for another. Students could be assessed, and their seminar skills could be tracked over time.

So far, most of the talk about online education has been on technology and lectures, but the important challenge is technology and seminars. So far, the discussion is mostly about technical knowledge, but the future of the universities is in practical knowledge.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. … It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.”

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won’t see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you’re much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Now, the fact is that these ranters have been wrong about everything, at every stage of the crisis, while the Keynesians have been mostly right. Remember how federal deficits were supposed to cause soaring interest rates? Never mind: After four years of such warnings, rates remain near historic lows — just as Keynesians predicted. Remember how running the printing presses was going to cause runaway inflation? Since the recession began, the Fed has more than tripled the size of its balance sheet, but inflation has averaged less than 2 percent.

But the Mellonites just keep coming. The latest example is David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, who has just published a mammoth screed titled “The Great Deformation.”

His book doesn’t have much new to say. Although Mr. Stockman’s willingness to criticize some Republicans and praise some Democrats has garnered him a reputation as an iconoclast, his analysis is pretty much standard liquidationism, with a strong goldbug streak. We’ve been doomed to disaster, he asserts, ever since F.D.R. took us off the gold standard and introduced deposit insurance. Everything since has been a series of “sprees” (his favorite word): spending sprees, consumption sprees, debt sprees, and above all money-printing sprees. If disaster was somehow avoided for 70-plus years, it was thanks to a series of lucky accidents.

So it’s more or less the usual stuff. In particular, like so many in his camp, Mr. Stockman misunderstands the meaning of rising debt. Yes, total debt in the U.S. economy, public and private combined, has risen dramatically relative to G.D.P. No, this doesn’t mean that we as a nation have been living far beyond our means, and must drastically tighten our belts. While we have run up a significant foreign debt (although not as big as many imagine), the rise in debt overwhelmingly represents Americans borrowing from other Americans, which doesn’t make the nation as a whole any poorer, and doesn’t require that we collectively spend less. In fact, the biggest problem created by all this debt is that it’s keeping the economy depressed by causing us collectively to spend too little, with debtors forced to cut back while creditors see no reason to spend more.

So what should we be doing? By all means, let’s restore the kind of effective financial regulation that, in the years before the Reagan revolution, helped deter excessive leverage. But that’s about preventing the next crisis. To deal with the crisis that’s already here, we need monetary and fiscal stimulus, to induce those who aren’t too deeply indebted to spend more while the debtors are cutting back.

But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump.

The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said, been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it.

But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less.

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

The only charitable explanation is that Bobo wrote his column yesterday and it’s a particularly ham-handed attempt at a joke.  In “Freedom Loses One” he actually says that if same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, it will be a victory for living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations.  Now he’s just fcking with us…  Mr. Nocera, in “Investor Activism Gone Wild,” says that if J.C. Penney succumbs to its financial troubles, a shareholder activist will shoulder much of the blame.  Mr. Bruni likes it “When TV Takes Its Time.”  He says the answer to too many “Housewives” and too much forensic hullabaloo? The gentle tempo and steadfast puzzles of shows like Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake.”  Yeah, Frank.  On the Sundance channel…  We’re on a fixed income and can’t afford all those premium channels like HBO and Showtime, etc., etc., etc., so I guess I’m doomed to continue watching “Hoarders.”  (I file that one under “shit that makes me feel normal.”)  Here, FSM help us, is Bobo:

I don’t think we’ve paused sufficiently to celebrate the wonderful recent defeat for the cause of personal freedom. After all, these sorts of defeats don’t happen every day.

Over the past 40 years, personal freedom has been on a nearly uninterrupted winning streak. In the 1960s, we saw a great expansion of social and lifestyle freedom. In the 1980s, we saw a great expansion of economic freedom. Since then, we’ve had everything from jeans commercials to rock anthems to political conventions celebrating freedom as the highest ideal.

People are much more at liberty these days to follow their desires, unhampered by social convention, religious and ethnic traditions and legal restraints.

The big thinkers down through the ages warned us this was going to have downsides. Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim thought that if people are left perfectly free to pursue their individual desires, they will discover their desires are unlimited and unquenchable. They’ll turn inward and become self-absorbed. Society will become atomized. You’ll end up with more loneliness and less community.

Other big thinkers believed that if people are left perfectly free to follow their desires, their baser ones will end up dominating their nobler ones. For these writers, the goal in life is not primarily to be free but to be good. Being virtuous often means thwarting your inclinations, obeying a power outside yourself. It means maintaining a balance between liberty and restraint, restricting freedom for the sake of an ordered existence. As Edmund Burke put it:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Recently, the balance between freedom and restraint has been thrown out of whack. People no longer even have a language to explain why freedom should sometimes be limited. The results are as predicted. A decaying social fabric, especially among the less fortunate. Decline in marriage. More children raised in unsteady homes. Higher debt levels as people spend to satisfy their cravings.

But last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy. They committed themselves to the idea that these self-restrictions should be reinforced by the state. They committed themselves to the idea that lifestyle choices are not just private affairs but work better when they are embedded in law.

And far from being baffled by this attempt to use state power to restrict individual choice, most Americans seem to be applauding it. Once, gay culture was erroneously associated with bathhouses and nightclubs. Now, the gay and lesbian rights movement is associated with marriage and military service. Once the movement was associated with self-sacrifice, it was bound to become popular.

Americans may no longer have a vocabulary to explain why freedom should sometimes be constricted, but they like it when they see people trying to do it. Once Americans acknowledged gay people exist, then, of course, they wanted them enmeshed in webs of obligation.

I suspect that this shift in public acceptance will be permanent, unless it turns out that marriages are more unstable when two people of the same gender are involved.

And, who knows, maybe we’ll see other spheres in life where restraints are placed on maximum personal choice. Maybe there will be sumptuary codes that will make lavish spending and C.E.O. salaries unseemly. Maybe there will be social codes so that people understand that the act of creating a child includes a lifetime commitment to give him or her an organized home. Maybe voters will restrain their appetite for their grandchildren’s money. Maybe more straight people will marry.

The proponents of same-sex marriage used the language of equality and rights in promoting their cause, because that is the language we have floating around. But, if it wins, same-sex marriage will be a victory for the good life, which is about living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations.

It’s been a while since I’ve served up a large plate of salted weasel dicks for Bobo, but this one deserves it.  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

William Ackman, the investor-activist who runs the $12 billion hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital, is like one of those guys you used to see in a certain kind of old-fashioned comedy. On one shoulder sits an angel, encouraging his better nature. On the other sits a devil, whispering temptation.

When he listens to the angel, Ackman does amazing things. He made a $25 million contribution to the Newark school system, an early and important match against the $100 million that Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, put up in September 2010. Yet unlike virtually every other actor involved in the Zuckerberg grant, who have been squabbling ever since, Ackman attached virtually no strings to his donation. He wants his money to be used to help Newark’s schoolchildren — not to push someone’s reform agenda.

Then there’s his current Herbalife crusade. After making a $1 billion bet that the stock would fall, Ackman released a lengthy report alleging that the company was running an illegal pyramid scheme. I have been sadly constrained from writing columns about the Ackman-Herbalife battle because the company had the wit to hire my fiancée’s employer, David Boies, after Ackman unveiled his attack. I was, as they say, “conflicted out.”

But I will say this: Pyramid schemes are a hidden scourge, hurting millions of people seduced by their get-rich-quick promises. Until Ackman began agitating, the federal government had largely capitulated to the “multilevel marketing” industry (as it likes to be called), even exempting it from a law passed a few years ago specifically aimed at curbing pyramid schemes. Ackman has been heroic in taking on this litigious, well-financed industry. Not since Jim Chanos went after Enron has a hedge fund manager been willing to question whether a company was actually a criminal enterprise. That takes guts.

Also, his track record as an activist has been good; you don’t get $12 billion in assets if you don’t win more than you lose.

But there is always that devil on the other shoulder. A few years ago, Ackman took a position in Target’s stock. Because of the recession, retailers such as Target were struggling. To get the stock up, Ackman began throwing out ideas that amounted to financial engineering. He then mounted an expensive proxy fight to get on the board, which thankfully, he lost. The stock has since rebounded. Target didn’t need financial engineering; it just needed a better economy.

Which brings me to his latest retail foray, J.C. Penney. Is there a single word that can sum up what has befallen J.C. Penney since Ackman took a stake in the company? Yes: disaster.

J.C. Penney had long catered to lower-middle-class families searching for sales. Its chief executive, Mike Ullman, who had been at the helm since 2004, was widely viewed as solid, if a tad unimaginative. He had led J.C. Penney to some of the most profitable years in its history. But, by the fall of 2010, hurt by the same recession that hurt Target, Penney’s stock was way down. That’s when Ackman showed up.

Being a big-time activist-investor, Ackman could hardly allow Ullman to remain at the helm. Activists have to be, you know, active. Within a year, he landed the executive everyone in retail wanted: Ron Johnson, who had built Apple’s retail business. Imagine: a Steve Jobs disciple was going to run downmarket J.C. Penney. What could possibly go wrong?

Pretty much everything. Johnson decided to eliminate the sales that had always been J.C. Penney’s trademark and move to everyday low prices. He thus alienated the core J.C. Penney customer. He kept talking about how he was going to apply the lessons he had learned at Apple to J.C. Penney, even though the companies sold completely different products to completely different customers. As the core customers departed, Johnson and J.C. Penney didn’t have the merchandise or cachet to attract a more upscale, Target-type customer. People abandoned J.C. Penney.

At the end of 2012, J.C. Penney announced that its revenues had fallen by a staggering $4.3 billion. It has laid off some 20,000 people. Walter Loeb, the former longtime retail analyst at Morgan Stanley who now blogs for Forbes.com, is predicting that its revenues will decline another 22 percent in the first quarter of 2013.

Lately, Johnson has brought back sales and devised a new strategy, revolving around “stores within stores” — selling merchandise much the way Bloomingdale’s does. One of its ministores will be devoted to Martha Stewart-designed home goods. You may have read about that. Macy’s, which says it has a contract that prevents Martha Stewart from selling housewares to other retailers, has sued. On the stand during the trial, I’m told, Johnson kept referring to his experience at Apple. Some people never learn.

The question is no longer whether Johnson will learn in time. If the quarter is as bad as Loeb is predicting, he’ll be gone soon. The question is whether Ackman has learned anything. The next time the devil whispers in his ear, let’s hope he doesn’t listen.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni, who enjoys classy TV shows:

If you haven’t caught “Top of the Lake,” a cryptic mini-series on the Sundance Channel right now, you owe yourself a peek, if only to behold and savor Holly Hunter, whose character is a mash-up of Pocahontas, the oracle at Delphi and Cousin Itt from “The Addams Family.” She’s all hair, her silvery mane accounting for easily half of her body weight and seemingly destined to sweep the ground. Perhaps when the character isn’t providing terse counsel to the damaged women around her at an odd spiritual retreat, she moonlights as a broom.

Most of the women at the retreat, built from a network of colorful cargo containers arranged like gigantic Legos on the lip of the aforementioned lake, are on the lam from destructive relationships with men. One is on the lam from a destructive relationship with a chimpanzee as well. Still they can’t help themselves. Their eyes rove to the scruffy local lads in the gorgeous patch of New Zealand where the story is set, and in the third of what will be seven episodes, a woman leaves her container to spend the night in the less Spartan digs of a lakeside drug lord. Minor spoiler alert: as she slips into his bed, he announces that he’s impotent, and the day after, as they frolic sexlessly in the woods, he stumbles across his mother’s grave, kneels in front of it and begins flagellating himself. This is a pretty good definition of a really bad date.

I’m mesmerized by “Top of the Lake,” which is now halfway through its run, and friends who are watching it constantly bring it up. And what we’re mainly responding to isn’t the meat of the yarn, which focuses on the effort to unravel what happened to a 12-year-old girl who is about five months pregnant. It’s the ancillary riddles and vaguely explained curiosities, like the interludes in Lego land. It’s the gentle pacing. It’s the way in which the mini-series, one of whose principal writers and directors is Jane Campion, insists on a certain opaqueness and bucks the bulk of what’s on television, even in this golden age of the medium.

“Top of the Lake” belongs to a budding genre that several critics, including Alessandra Stanley in The Times and Matt Zoller Seitz in Salon, have called Slow TV. Stanley sagely noted the parallel to Slow Food, which rebelled against the metastasis of McDonald’s outposts. Slow TV pushes back at the instant gratification and empty calories of too many elimination contests, too many reality shows, too many efficient, literal-minded forensic dramas that perhaps keep certain plot threads dangling but tie up the episode’s main mystery by the hour’s end.

The term Slow TV has multiple meanings, and has been applied to full-length chronicles of actual, incrementally unfolding events, like a ship’s voyage, and to the practice of spacing out viewings of a fictional serial’s episodes rather than watching them in a marathon session. But I think it’s best deployed in the way Stanley and then Seitz, writing about such shows as “Treme” and “Game of Thrones,” used it: to describe unrushed, atmospheric narratives.

Slow TV mines the pleasures of ambiguity, which are affirmed, as it happens, by one of the best movies I’ve recently seen, “Room 237,” a documentary in limited theatrical release and on cable TV. The title refers to a detail in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of “The Shining,” and the documentary recounts the riot of messages and meanings that obsessive fans have read into Kubrick’s lone foray into horror.

It’s a testament, hilarious at times, to the human genius for overanalysis. One “Shining” fan points to a German-made typewriter in the movie to support his theory that it’s a Holocaust parable; another cites the feathered-headdress logo on baking-powder cans in a few scenes for his belief that “The Shining” is about the massacre of American Indians. A desktop paper tray is determined to be a metaphoric erection, and so on. The abstruseness of some of “The Shining” is arguably a flaw, but “Room 237” reminds you that only an artistic work that resists tidy explanation can accommodate such enjoyable flights of interpretive fancy.

Ambiguity has never been what TV values most, “Twin Peaks” excepted. But it was central to “The Killing,” which highlighted an additional characteristic of Slow or Slowish TV, the willingness to wander off the main road and down an intriguing cul-de-sac, as “Girls” did in a discrete episode with Patrick Wilson as a guest star. Another HBO series, “Enlightened,” partly redeemed its irritations with its habits of straying, and of lingering: on a sigh, on a glare, on a soulless office building. It cared as much for mood as for plot.

The same is true of “Top of the Lake,” which preserves some enigmas, hirsute and otherwise, and surrenders others on its own timetable, making you wait and making you work. Just like life.

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo is teaching (FSM help us) at Yale.  In “The Empirical Kids” he tells us about a Yale senior who takes a stab at defining her generation, one emerging into adulthood on the heels of the 2000s.  Prof. Krugman, in “Cheating Our Children,” says the deficit scolds who insist on reducing government borrowing have done far more damage to future generations than the federal debt ever did.  Here’s Bobo:

Twelve years ago, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, called “The Organization Kid,” about the smart, hard-working, pleasant-but-cautious achievatrons who thrive in elite universities. Occasionally, somebody asks me how students have changed since then. I haven’t been perceptive enough to give a good answer.

But, this year, I’m teaching at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale, and one terrifically observant senior, Victoria Buhler, wrote a paper trying to capture how it feels to be in at least a segment of her age cohort. She’s given me permission to quote from it.

Buhler points out that the college students of 12 years ago grew up with 1990s prosperity at home, and the democratic triumph in the cold war abroad. They naturally had a tendency to believe deeply “in the American model of democratic capitalism, which created all men equal but allowed some to rise above others through competition.”

Then came Sept. 11. That was followed by the highly moralistic language of George W. Bush’s war on terror: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

But Bush’s effort to replicate the Reagan war on an evil empire lead to humiliation, not triumph. Americans, Buhler writes, “emerged from the experience both dismissive of foreign intervention as a tool of statecraft as well as wary of the moral language used to justify it.”

Then came the financial crisis, the other formative event for today’s students. The root of the crisis was in the financial world. But the pain was felt outside that world. “The capitalist system, with its promise of positive-sum gains for all, appeared brutal and unpredictable.”

Moreover, today’s students harbor the anxiety that in the race for global accomplishment, they may no longer be the best competitors. Chinese students spend 12-hour days in school, while American scores are middle of the pack.

In sum, today’s graduates enter a harsher landscape. Immediate postgrad life, Buhler writes, will probably bear a depressing resemblance to Hannah Horvath’s world on “Girls.” The hit song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis “is less a fashion statement, more a looming financial reality.”

Buhler argues that the group she calls Cynic Kids “don’t like the system — however, they are wary of other alternatives as well as dismissive of their ability to actually achieve the desired modifications. As such, the generation is very conservative in its appetite for change. Broadly speaking, Cynic Kids distrust the link between action and result.”

A Brookings Institution survey found that only 10 percent of young people agree with the statement, “America should be more globally proactive.” The Occupy movement, Buhler notes, “launched more traffic jams than legislation.” The Arab Spring seemed like a popular awakening but has not fulfilled its promise.

In what I think is an especially trenchant observation, Buhler suggests that these disillusioning events have led to a different epistemological framework. “We are deeply resistant to idealism. Rather, the Cynic Kids have embraced the policy revolution; they require hypothesis to be tested, substantiated, and then results replicated before they commit to any course of action.”

Maybe this empirical mind-set is a sign of maturity, but Buhler acknowledges that the “yearning for definitive ‘evidence’ … can retard action. … The multiplicity of options invites relativism as a response to the insurmountable complexity. Ever the policy buffs, we know we are unable to scientifically appraise different options, and so, given the information constraints, we stick with the evil we know.”

She suggests calling this state of mind the Tinder Effect, referring to the app that lets you scroll through hundreds of potential romantic partners, but that rarely leads to a real-life encounter.

Buhler’s most comprehensive disquiet is with the meritocratic system itself. It rewards an obsessive focus on individual improvement: “Time not spent investing in yourself carries an opportunity cost, rendering you at a competitive disadvantage as compared to others who maintained the priority of self.”

She wonders if the educated class is beginning to look at the less-educated class — portrayed on TV in shows like “Teen Mom 2” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” — as a distant, dysfunctional spectacle. She also wonders if the mathematization of public policy performs a gatekeeper function; only the elite can understand the formulas that govern most people’s lives.

I had many reactions to Buhler’s dazzling paper, but I’d like to highlight one: that the harsh events of the past decade may have produced not a youth revolt but a reversion to an empiricist mind-set, a tendency to think in demoralized economic phrases like “data analysis,” “opportunity costs” and “replicability,” and a tendency to dismiss other more ethical and idealistic vocabularies that seem fuzzy and, therefore, unreliable. After the hippie, the yuppie and the hipster, the cool people are now wonksters.

And, yes, I gave her an A.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

So, about that fiscal crisis — the one that would, any day now, turn us into Greece. Greece, I tell you: Never mind.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness. Suddenly, the argument has changed: It’s not about the crisis next month; it’s about the long run, about not cheating our children. The deficit, we’re told, is really a moral issue.

There’s just one problem: The new argument is as bad as the old one. Yes, we are cheating our children, but the deficit has nothing to do with it.

Before I get there, a few words about the sudden switch in arguments.

There has, of course, been no explicit announcement of a change in position. But the signs are everywhere. Pundits who spent years trying to foster a sense of panic over the deficit have begun writing pieces lamenting the likelihood that there won’t be a crisis, after all. Maybe it wasn’t that significant when President Obama declared that we don’t face any “immediate” debt crisis, but it did represent a change in tone from his previous deficit-hawk rhetoric. And it was startling, indeed, when John Boehner, the speaker of the House, said exactly the same thing a few days later.

What happened? Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.

So talk of a fiscal crisis has subsided. Yet the deficit scolds haven’t given up on their determination to bully the nation into slashing Social Security and Medicare. So they have a new line: We must bring down the deficit right away because it’s “generational warfare,” imposing a crippling burden on the next generation.

What’s wrong with this argument? For one thing, it involves a fundamental misunderstanding of what debt does to the economy.

Contrary to almost everything you read in the papers or see on TV, debt doesn’t directly make our nation poorer; it’s essentially money we owe to ourselves. Deficits would indirectly be making us poorer if they were either leading to big trade deficits, increasing our overseas borrowing, or crowding out investment, reducing future productive capacity. But they aren’t: Trade deficits are down, not up, while business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly from the slump. And the main reason businesses aren’t investing more is inadequate demand. They’re sitting on lots of cash, despite soaring profits, because there’s no reason to expand capacity when you aren’t selling enough to use the capacity you have. In fact, you can think of deficits mainly as a way to put some of that idle cash to use.

Yet there is, as I said, a lot of truth to the charge that we’re cheating our children. How? By neglecting public investment and failing to provide jobs.

You don’t have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest “report card” from the American Society of Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams, bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still makes startling and depressing reading. And right now — with vast numbers of unemployed construction workers and vast amounts of cash sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually plunged since the slump began.

Or what about investing in our young? We’re cutting back there, too, having laid off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families.

Last but not least, think of the waste of human potential caused by high unemployment among younger Americans — for example, among recent college graduates who can’t start their careers and will probably never make up the lost ground.

And why are we shortchanging the future so dramatically and inexcusably? Blame the deficit scolds, who weep crocodile tears over the supposed burden of debt on the next generation, but whose constant inveighing against the risks of government borrowing, by undercutting political support for public investment and job creation, has done far more to cheat our children than deficits ever did.

Fiscal policy is, indeed, a moral issue, and we should be ashamed of what we’re doing to the next generation’s economic prospects. But our sin involves investing too little, not borrowing too much — and the deficit scolds, for all their claims to have our children’s interests at heart, are actually the bad guys in this story.

Well, Paul, the scolds are primarily Republicans and all they seem to care about is keeping a child in the womb for 9 months.  After the baby is born all interest ceases, and they look at it and think FYIGM.

Brooks and Bruni

I wonder if Bobo has a Lifetime Membership in the NRA.  In “The Killing Chain” he scolds us that our present debate around violence fixates on guns at the unhelpful expense of nonmaterial factors and more prudent policy considerations.  Right, Bobo.  You want more attention given to policing and social services.  What are among the first things slashed in Republican “don’t tax me” budgets?  Mr. Bruni takes a look at “Rand Paul’s Loopy Ascent” and says at risk to a party that must muffle its cuckoo’s nest, the junior senator from Kentucky spreads his wings.  Here’s Bobo:

Let’s say you were writing a novel about a homicide. You’d want to describe the killer’s neighborhood and family background. You’d want to describe his school, his culture and his gang.

You’d want to describe how he got into crime, his prior arrests, his prison time, his drug use and his relationship with his probation officer. You’d want to describe how he got the murder weapon, what sort of police presence there was the night of the killing and what incited the murder.

In other words you’d want to describe a long killing chain, a complex series of links leading up to the ultimate homicide.

Over the last 25 years, American authorities have tried to interrupt that killing chain at almost every link except one. In a hodgepodge but organic manner, there have been vast changes in proactive policing, mentoring programs, gang eradication programs, incarceration rates, cultural attitudes and so on. The only step in the killing chain that we haven’t really touched is gun acquisition. Federal gun control laws have become more permissive over the last several years.

This de facto approach — influencing the whole killing chain except gun acquisition — has nonetheless contributed to a phenomenal decline in violence. Murder rates over all have fallen by about 50 percent, back to levels not seen since the Kennedy administration. There are thousands of people alive today because homicide rates dropped so precipitously.

Now we are in the middle of another debate about violence. If we lived in a purely rational society, this debate would have started with a series of questions: What explains the tremendous drop in violence? How can we build on recent efforts to bring the murder rate even lower? These general questions would have led to a series of more specific questions about police procedures, probably the most direct way to prevent shootings.

For example, as Heather Mac Donald of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, points out, 75 percent of the shootings in Boston over the past 30 years have occurred in 4.5 percent of its area, while 88.5 percent of the city’s street segments had not had a single shooting. So how can we focus police resources on those few areas that host most of the killing?

Or as Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas points out, in New York police chiefs and precinct leaders are held accountable for changes in the murder rate in their areas. New York has seen an 80 percent drop in the homicide rate. Why aren’t police officials held similarly accountable in many other cities?

But those questions are rarely asked. Instead, the national debate has focused on just one link in the killing chain, the acquisition of the gun.

Now I understand why the gun has taken center stage. The gun is the shocking fact at the moment of the murder. Also, many Americans are material determinists. In any moral question or frightening conflict, there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the human element and like to fixate on the material factor.

But the sad fact is that gun acquisition is probably the link on the killing chain least amenable to influence. We live in a country that already has something like 250 million guns floating around. It’s hard retroactively to get a grip on them.

Past efforts to control guns have not dramatically reduced violence. The Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Act of 1993 and the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 all failed to reduce homicides significantly. The Brady law, for example, led to a drop in suicides for those age 55 and older, but a 2000 study commissioned by the American Medical Association found that it did not lead to a reduction in the overall murder rate.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did an analysis of 51 studies of a series of gun control regulations. It could not find evidence to prove the effectiveness of gun control laws. A 2012 study conducted at Arizona State University and the University of Cincinnati found that waiting periods and background checks had little statistical effect on gun crimes.

Other studies have found more significant effects, but nothing like the impact we’ve seen from changing police procedures and other efforts up and down the killing chain.

If we could start the violence debate over, I’d begin with universal background checks. Acknowledge that on their own, these checks won’t accomplish much. (Drug dealers from Baltimore are not driving to West Virginia gun shows to acquire weaponry.) But use those checks as the first step in a series of policies to reinforce gun trafficking laws and reassert police control over the zones of concentrated violence.

We have a successful history of reducing violence by spreading efforts across the killing chain. We have a disappointing history of trying to reduce violence with a gun-obsessed approach. Let’s focus on what works.

Until we you decide to slash taxes and cut services…  Here’s Mr. Bruni:

When you’ve got loons the likes of Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin fluttering about, I suppose it’s easy not to seem like such a wacko bird yourself.

Is that why Rand Paul is flying high right now? Or is it because he followed his 13-hour filibuster — that knee-defeating, bladder-defying moment in the Senate sun — by showing a few of his less florid feathers? Either way, he has managed, with remarkable speed, to migrate to the foreground of Republican politics. You could almost lose sight of what an albatross he really is.

Today he’s singing the moderate song of immigration reform, and that dirge about drones, which had a valid bass note despite its alarmist melody, struck chords across the political spectrum.

But Paul’s greatest hits include a denunciation of Medicare as socialism, a recommendation of stopping foreign aid to a few key allies, and the insistent introduction of Patriot Act amendments so loopy that one of them netted all of 10 votes from the 95 senators present while another garnered a whopping total of 4.

As Jennifer Steinhauer noted in The Times right after he peddled those clunkers, he had seemingly relocated to Washington “less to make laws than points.”

Now he’s making headlines and waves, and not as a Tea Party curiosity but as a Republican Party lodestar, someone discussed seriously as a possible force in the 2016 presidential primaries. He was tapped just last week to be the featured speaker at the approaching Lincoln Day Dinner in Iowa. There’s an important caucus in that state, you’ll recall.

Paul personifies the G.O.P.’s curse right now. Although it needs to re-establish its bearings in the mainstream, many of the Republicans making the biggest splashes are rowing in from strange tributaries, and the establishment can’t seem to stop the tide.

Seasoned hands with cooler heads tend not to generate nearly as much excitement. All Jeb Bush generated with the publicity tour for his immigration book was outright befuddlement.

The tail wags the dog. Rather than Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, humbly taking cues from John Cornyn, the senior senator, Cornyn labors to match the supercilious upstart scowl for scowl, and even followed Cruz’s intemperate lead to cast one of only three Senate votes against John Kerry’s confirmation as secretary of state.

And Mitch McConnell, who is not only Kentucky’s senior senator but also the Senate minority leader, seems to worry more about Paul, the state’s junior senator, than vice versa.

Back when Paul began his 2010 Senate campaign as an insurgent ophthalmologist (how many times does a journalist get to write that phrase?), McConnell supported the other, more established candidate in the Republican primary. Then Paul triumphed, the Tea Party proved its muscle and McConnell, eyeing his own 2014 re-election bid, had to worry about being undone by the very romance with naysaying outsiders that lofted Paul to victory.

McConnell’s campaign manager this time around? The same one Paul used. His new public posture toward Paul? Indulgent, sometimes even adulatory. He joined Paul for a portion of that marathon filibuster, egging him on.

McConnell doesn’t fear a potential Democratic run by Ashley Judd. He fears being “primaried” — the menacing verb that was popularized by the 2010 and 2012 elections, signifying the threat that a state’s restive Republican voters will pick a Richard Mourdock over a Richard Lugar. That’s Cornyn’s dread, too. He’s also up in 2014.

And so someone like Paul (who, by the way, voted for Kerry’s confirmation) sets the tone. I also wonder if he’s modulating his own, as some long-term strategy moseys into his thinking.

Yes, his recent questioning of jail time for marijuana arrests isn’t a certain winner, but it’s not a surefire loser, either. And his immigration speech last week, which called for a path to citizenship without quite calling it that, suggested a fresh calibration and sensitivity.

But his past brims with statements and stands that make him an unhelpful mascot for his party. He’d be a skunk in a presidential primary and a quixotic, doomed nominee.

He has railed erroneously about the Clean Water Act’s effect on his toilets, indelicately quibbled with aspects of the Civil Rights and Americans With Disabilities Acts, and carped about the “nanny state” in relation to seat-belt laws. Yes, seat-belt laws.

His distaste for government is so deep you wonder how he can bear to work there. He’s like a vegan who has chosen to sup at a steakhouse, though I guess that’s the point. Now that he has access to the kitchen, he can filibuster the filet, stall the sirloin with nuisance amendments, and leave diners with only a side of spinach, and maybe an iceberg wedge.

It’s a crazy salad he’s serving, no matter how it’s currently dressed.

Charles Pierce at Esquire has posited the “Paul Rule,” which he says applies equally to Rand and his daddy Ron.  He says the first 5 minutes of what they say can make sense, but at 5:01 the crazy starts…

Brooks and Krugman

In “Forecasting Fox” Bobo breathlessly tells us how one man unveils a strategy for better forecasting.  Not weather forecasting.  He’s all about political forecasting…  Prof. Krugman, in “Treasure Island Trauma,” says from the way things are going with Cyprus, you’d think the financial crisis didn’t teach our leaders anything.  Here’s Bobo:

In 2006, Philip E. Tetlock published a landmark book called “Expert Political Judgment.” While his findings obviously don’t apply to me, Tetlock demonstrated that pundits and experts are terrible at making predictions.

But Tetlock is also interested in how people can get better at making forecasts. His subsequent work helped prompt people at one of the government’s most creative agencies, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to hold a forecasting tournament to see if competition could spur better predictions.

In the fall of 2011, the agency asked a series of short-term questions about foreign affairs, such as whether certain countries will leave the euro, whether North Korea will re-enter arms talks, or whether Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would switch jobs. They hired a consulting firm to run an experimental control group against which the competitors could be benchmarked.

Five teams entered the tournament, from places like M.I.T., Michigan and Maryland. Tetlock and his wife, the decision scientist Barbara Mellers, helped form a Penn/Berkeley team, which bested the competition and surpassed the benchmarks by 60 percent in Year 1.

How did they make such accurate predictions? In the first place, they identified better forecasters. It turns out you can give people tests that usefully measure how open-minded they are.

For example, if you spent $1.10 on a baseball glove and a ball, and the glove cost $1 more than the ball, how much did the ball cost? Most people want to say that the glove cost $1 and the ball 10 cents. But some people doubt their original answer and realize the ball actually costs 5 cents.

Tetlock and company gathered 3,000 participants. Some got put into teams with training, some got put into teams without. Some worked alone. Some worked in prediction markets. Some did probabilistic thinking and some did more narrative thinking. The teams with training that engaged in probabilistic thinking performed best. The training involved learning some of the lessons included in Daniel Kahneman’s great work, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” For example, they were taught to alternate between taking the inside view and the outside view.

Suppose you’re asked to predict whether the government of Egypt will fall. You can try to learn everything you can about Egypt. That’s the inside view. Or you can ask about the category. Of all Middle Eastern authoritarian governments, what percentage fall in a given year? That outside view is essential.

Most important, participants were taught to turn hunches into probabilities. Then they had online discussions with members of their team adjusting the probabilities, as often as every day. People in the discussions wanted to avoid the embarrassment of being proved wrong.

In these discussions, hedgehogs disappeared and foxes prospered. That is, having grand theories about, say, the nature of modern China was not useful. Being able to look at a narrow question from many vantage points and quickly readjust the probabilities was tremendously useful. The Penn/Berkeley team also came up with an algorithm to weigh the best performers. Let’s say the top three forecasters all believe that the chances that Italy will stay in the euro zone are 0.7 (with 1 being a certainty it will and 0 being a certainty it won’t). If those three forecasters arrive at their judgments using different information and analysis, then the algorithm synthesizes their combined judgment into a 0.9. It makes the collective judgment more extreme.

This algorithm has been extremely good at predicting results. Tetlock has tried to use his own intuition to beat the algorithm but hasn’t succeeded.

In the second year of the tournament, Tetlock and collaborators skimmed off the top 2 percent of forecasters across experimental conditions, identifying 60 top performers and randomly assigning them into five teams of 12 each. These “super forecasters” also delivered a far-above-average performance in Year 2. Apparently, forecasting skill cannot only be taught, it can be replicated.

Tetlock is now recruiting for Year 3. (You can match wits against the world by visiting www.goodjudgmentproject.com.) He believes that this kind of process may help depolarize politics. If you take Republicans and Democrats and ask them to make a series of narrow predictions, they’ll have to put aside their grand notions and think clearly about the imminently falsifiable.

If I were President Obama or John Kerry, I’d want the Penn/Berkeley predictions on my desk. The intelligence communities may hate it. High-status old vets have nothing to gain and much to lose by having their analysis measured against a bunch of outsiders. But this sort of work could probably help policy makers better anticipate what’s around the corner. It might induce them to think more probabilistically. It might make them better foxes.

Please to be remembering that Bobo is lavishly remunerated for producing this.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

A couple of years ago, the journalist Nicholas Shaxson published a fascinating, chilling book titled “Treasure Islands,” which explained how international tax havens — which are also, as the author pointed out, “secrecy jurisdictions” where many rules don’t apply — undermine economies around the world. Not only do they bleed revenues from cash-strapped governments and enable corruption; they distort the flow of capital, helping to feed ever-bigger financial crises.

One question Mr. Shaxson didn’t get into much, however, is what happens when a secrecy jurisdiction itself goes bust. That’s the story of Cyprus right now. And whatever the outcome for Cyprus itself (hint: it’s not likely to be happy), the Cyprus mess shows just how unreformed the world banking system remains, almost five years after the global financial crisis began.

So, about Cyprus: You might wonder why anyone cares about a tiny nation with an economy not much bigger than that of metropolitan Scranton, Pa. Cyprus is, however, a member of the euro zone, so events there could trigger contagion (for example, bank runs) in larger nations. And there’s something else: While the Cypriot economy may be tiny, it’s a surprisingly large financial player, with a banking sector four or five times as big as you might expect given the size of its economy.

Why are Cypriot banks so big? Because the country is a tax haven where corporations and wealthy foreigners stash their money. Officially, 37 percent of the deposits in Cypriot banks come from nonresidents; the true number, once you take into account wealthy expatriates and people who are only nominally resident in Cyprus, is surely much higher. Basically, Cyprus is a place where people, especially but not only Russians, hide their wealth from both the taxmen and the regulators. Whatever gloss you put on it, it’s basically about money-laundering.

And the truth is that much of the wealth never moved at all; it just became invisible. On paper, for example, Cyprus became a huge investor in Russia — much bigger than Germany, whose economy is hundreds of times larger. In reality, of course, this was just “roundtripping” by Russians using the island as a tax shelter.

Unfortunately for the Cypriots, enough real money came in to finance some seriously bad investments, as their banks bought Greek debt and lent into a vast real estate bubble. Sooner or later, things were bound to go wrong. And now they have.

Now what? There are some strong similarities between Cyprus now and Iceland (a similar-size economy) a few years back. Like Cyprus now, Iceland had a huge banking sector, swollen by foreign deposits, that was simply too big to bail out. Iceland’s response was essentially to let its banks go bust, wiping out those foreign investors, while protecting domestic depositors — and the results weren’t too bad. Indeed, Iceland, with a far lower unemployment rate than most of Europe, has weathered the crisis surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, Cyprus’s response to its crisis has been a hopeless muddle. In part, this reflects the fact that it no longer has its own currency, which makes it dependent on decision makers in Brussels and Berlin — decision makers who haven’t been willing to let banks openly fail.

But it also reflects Cyprus’s own reluctance to accept the end of its money-laundering business; its leaders are still trying to limit losses to foreign depositors in the vain hope that business as usual can resume, and they were so anxious to protect the big money that they tried to limit foreigners’ losses by expropriating small domestic depositors. As it turned out, however, ordinary Cypriots were outraged, the plan was rejected, and, at this point, nobody knows what will happen.

My guess is that, in the end, Cyprus will adopt something like the Icelandic solution, but unless it ends up being forced off the euro in the next few days — a real possibility — it may first waste a lot of time and money on half-measures, trying to avoid facing up to reality while running up huge debts to wealthier nations. We’ll see.

But step back for a minute and consider the incredible fact that tax havens like Cyprus, the Cayman Islands, and many more are still operating pretty much the same way that they did before the global financial crisis. Everyone has seen the damage that runaway bankers can inflict, yet much of the world’s financial business is still routed through jurisdictions that let bankers sidestep even the mild regulations we’ve put in place. Everyone is crying about budget deficits, yet corporations and the wealthy are still freely using tax havens to avoid paying taxes like the little people.

So don’t cry for Cyprus; cry for all of us, living in a world whose leaders seem determined not to learn from disaster.

Brooks and Nocera

Mr. Bruni is off today.  Bobo has decided to tell us all about “The Progressive Shift.”  He gurgles that liberalism in the United States seems to have moved to believing that government is the first and final engine of all progress.  It’s typical…  He says “many” progressives (none are cited, of course) believe something so, therefore, his conclusion is that all progressives must believe it.  And, of course, he offers no ideas of either his own or his party’s…  Mr. Nocera, in “The Senate’s Muckraker,” says Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has done more than anyone to expose the financial industry the past few years.  Here’s Bobo:

There is a statue outside the Department of Labor of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man. This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses.

Today, liberalism seems to have changed. Today, many progressives seem to believe that government is the horse, the source of growth, job creation and prosperity. Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.

For an example of this new worldview, look at the budget produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus last week. These Democrats try to boost economic growth with a gigantic $2.1 trillion increase in government spending — including a $450 billion public works initiative, a similar-size infrastructure program and $179 billion so states, too, can hire more government workers.

Now, of course, liberals have always believed in Keynesian countercyclical deficit spending. But that was borrowing to brake against a downturn when certain conditions prevail: when the economy is shrinking; when debt levels are low; when there are plenty of shovel-ready projects waiting to be enacted; when there is a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.

Today, House progressives are calling for a huge increase in government taxing and spending when none of those conditions apply. Today, progressives are calling on government to be the growth engine in all circumstances. In this phase of the recovery, just as the economy is finally beginning to take off, these Democrats want to take an astounding $4.2 trillion out of the private sector and put it into government where they believe it can be used more efficiently.

How do the House Democrats want to get this money? The top tax rate would shoot up to 49 percent. There’d be new taxes on investment, inheritance, corporate income, financial transactions, banking activity and on and on.

Now, of course, there have been times, like, say, the Eisenhower administration, when top tax rates were very high. But the total tax burden was lower since so few people paid the top rate and there were so many ways to avoid it. Government was smaller.

Today, especially after the recent tax increases, the total tax burden is already at historic highs. If you combine federal, state, sales and other taxes, rich people in places like California and New York are seeing the government take 60 cents or more out of their last dollar earned.

Democrats would make that weighty tax burden much, much heavier. In fact, the entire Democratic governing vision, from President Obama on down, is based on the notion that we can have a growing welfare state and pay for it by taxing the top 2 percent.

The first problem, of course, is that there aren’t enough rich people to cover even the current spending plans. As an analysis by the group Third Way demonstrated, even if we threw every semiplausible tax increase at the rich, the national debt would still double over the next three decades.

The second problem is that if you set the tax burden at astronomical levels you really do begin to change behavior and wind up with a very different country. You don’t have to be a rabid supply-sider to believe that when you start taking away 80 percent or 90 percent of somebody’s top marginal earnings, you are going to get some pretty screwy effects.

Higher taxes will produce long-term changes in social norms, behavior and growth. Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, found that, in the 1950s when their taxes were low, Europeans worked more hours per capita than Americans. Then their taxes went up, reducing the incentives to work and increasing the incentives to relax. Over the next decades, Europe saw a nearly 30 percent decline in work hours.

The rich tend to be more sensitive to tax-rate changes because they’ve got advisers who are paid to be. Martin Feldstein, an economics professor at Harvard, looked into tax changes in the 1980s and concluded that raising rates causes people to shift compensations to untaxed fringe benefits and otherwise suppresses their economic activity. A study last year by the economists Michael Keane and Richard Rogerson found that tax rates can have a surprisingly large influence on how much people invest in education, how likely they are to create businesses and which professions they go into.

The progressive budget in the House seems to have been written by people hermetically sealed in the house of government. They work in government. They represent public-sector workers. They seem to have had little contact with private-sector job creators and no idea about what factors might play in their thinking. It’s a reminder that while Republicans may embarrass on a daily basis, many progressives have lost touch with what actually produces growth and prosperity.

Well, I guess if your party produces people like the one who actually said at CPAC that the slaves should have been grateful to ol’ massa for feeding and housing them it could be said to embarrass.  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

I’ll miss Carl Levin when he leaves the Senate after the next election — and you will, too.

At 78, Levin has represented Michigan in the United States Senate for 34 years. He has certainly earned the right to retire on his own terms. But as a longtime Democratic member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — and as its chairman since 2007 — Levin has done more than anyone to expose the scams, the conflicts, the wrongdoing and the sheer idiocy of the financial industry from the run-up to the financial crisis to the present day. Every time Levin’s subcommittee holds a hearing, it should shame Attorney General Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Jr.

The subcommittee’s most recent exposé took place on Friday, when it held a hearing to explore the infamous “London Whale” trades that cost JPMorgan Chase $6 billion last year. Months earlier, the Senate Banking Committee, whose members lean on the big banks for major campaign contributions, held its own inquiry into the disastrous trades. There, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, was treated more like a visiting dignitary than a committee witness. Senator Charles Schumer of New York, unctuously describing Dimon as “a financial expert,” asked him to gauge the “danger of this kind of thing happening at other institutions not as well-capitalized as JPMorgan.” Pathetic.

Levin and John McCain, the permanent subcommittee’s ranking minority member, didn’t even bother to invite Dimon. “We wanted to speak to the people who had the most information,” Levin told me. Thus, the subcommittee’s witnesses included Ina Drew, who led the division that oversaw the London traders, and Douglas Braunstein, who was the bank’s chief financial officer. The combination of Levin’s tough questions and a 300-page report by the subcommittee’s investigators was brutal. The bank, and Dimon, took a major reputational hit.

For instance, Levin established that JPMorgan knew more about the mounting losses than it let on during the now-notorious conference call in April 2012, when Dimon described the trades as “a tempest in a teapot.” The report included examples of the utter contempt for which the bank held its regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The O.C.C., meanwhile, never understood the risks involved. Indeed, under Levin’s relentless questioning, bank witnesses essentially conceded that their explanation for the losses — that the London trades were part of a hedge that had gone wrong — was not a particularly truthful statement. What the trades were supposed to be hedging was never adequately explained.

(“Our executives said what they believed to be true based on the facts they had at the time,” said a JPMorgan spokesman in a statement. “In retrospect, the information they had was wrong, and they apologized for this.”)

The JPMorgan hearing was only the latest in the subcommittee’s muckraking efforts. Previous hearings — on the mortgage shenanigans at Washington Mutual, the egregious conflicts of the credit-rating agencies, and Goldman Sachs’s efforts to dump its toxic assets on unsuspecting clients — were every bit as illuminating, and as devastating. They often exposed behavior that was at least potentionally criminal.

But when I asked Levin about the purpose of the hearings, he did not mention criminal prosecutions, perhaps just as well given our supine Justice Department. “All of our hearings are held with some legislative purpose in mind,” he said. For instance, the Goldman hearing led the authors of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to include language intended to prevent investment banks from hiding that they were on the opposite side of trades being pushed on their clients.

One goal of Friday’s hearing, Levin told me, was to “stiffen the spine of regulators. Rule-makers are struggling with what to allow in terms of hedging under the Volcker Rule,” he said. (The Volcker Rule is intended to prevent banks from trading for their own accounts.) “This should help them.”

Of course, the O.C.C. has bigger problems than that — as the hearing implicitly underscored. It is a classic captured regulator. As American Banker pointed out recently, the Promontory Financial Group, a prominent banking consulting firm founded by Eugene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency, recently hired the O.C.C.’s general counsel, Julie Williams. And where did the O.C.C. find its new general counsel, Amy Friend? From the Promontory Financial Group!

But I digress.

Toward the end of my interview with Levin, he let slip a tantalizing tidbit. Sometime in the next few months, the permanent subcommittee plans to call the Internal Revenue Service to task for allowing the political super PACs to be classified as tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s. “Tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s are not supposed to be engaged in politics,” he said. “It is against the law to do so.” Then he added, with a certain undeniable relish, “We’re going to go after them.”

Oh, boy!

I’ll believe that when I see it…

Brooks and Krugman

Apparently Bobo is also an early church historian.  Who knew?  In “How Movements Recover” he has decided to tell us all about how Augustine’s handling of a church in crisis provides a counterintuitive model for how to revive a troubled movement.  Well, maybe he isn’t the historian.  Maybe he consulted with The Putz…  In “After the Flimflam” Prof. Krugman says from the reaction to Paul Ryan’s latest cruel joke of a budget proposal, it seems as if Washington is finally getting serious about fiscal policy.  From his lips to God’s ear.  Here’s Bobo:

The Catholic Church in North Africa was in crisis at the beginning of the fourth century. The Roman emperor Diocletian had persecuted the Christians, and many bishops and priests had collaborated with the regime. Priests had turned over Christian believers to the pagan magistrates. Bishops had surrendered Holy Scriptures to be burned in the public square. An air of corruption and lewdness hung over the church.

Two rival reform movements arose to restore the integrity of Catholicism. Those in the first movement, the Donatists, believed the church needed to purify itself and return to its core identity.

The mission of the church, in the Donatist view, was to provide a holy alternative to a unclean world. The Donatists wanted to purge the traitors from the priesthood.

After they pruned their membership, the Donatists wanted to close ranks to create a community of committed believers. They would separate themselves from impurity, re-establish their core principles and defend them against the hostile forces.

The Donatists believed that, in those hard times, the first job was to defend Christian law so it wouldn’t be diluted by compromise. With this defensive posture, the Donatists would at least build a sturdy ark for all those who wanted to be Christian.

This Donatist tendency — to close ranks and return defensively to first principles — can be seen today whenever a movement faces a crisis. Modern-day Donatists emerge after every Republican defeat: conservatives who think the main task is to purge and purify. There are modern-day Donatists in humanities departments, who pull in as they lose relevance on campus.

You can see them in the waning union movement: people who double down on history and their self-conscious traditions. You can see them in the current Roman Catholic Church, which feels besieged in a hostile world. You can identify the modern-day Donatists because they feel history is flowing away from them, and when they gossip it’s always about intra-community rivalries that nobody outside their world could possibly care about.

In the fourth century, another revival movement arose, embraced by Augustine, who was Bishop of Hippo. The problem with the Donatists, Augustine argued, is that they are too static. They try to seal off an ark to ride out the storm, but they end up sealing themselves in. They cut themselves off from new circumstances and growth.

Augustine, as his magisterial biographer Peter Brown puts it, “was deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race.” He reacted against any effort to divide people between those within the church and those permanently outside.

He wanted the church to go on offense and swallow the world. This would involve swallowing impurities as well as purities. It would mean putting to use those who are imperfect. This was the price to be paid if you wanted an active church coexisting with sinners, disciplining and rebuking them.

In this view, the church would be attractive because it was hungering and thirsting for fulfillment. Far from being a stable ark, the church would be a dynamic, ever-changing network, propelled onto the streets by its own tensions. Augustine had this deep, volatile personality. His ideal church was firmly rooted in doctrine, but yearning for discovery.

This second tendency is also found in movements that are in crisis, but it is rare because it requires a lack of defensiveness, and a confidence that your identity is secure even amid crisis.

Like most of the world, I don’t know much about Pope Francis, but it’s hard not to be impressed by someone who says he prefers a church that suffers “accidents on the streets” to a church that is sick because it self-referentially closes in on itself.

It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who stands by traditional Catholic teaching, but then goes out and visits Jeronimo Podesta, a former bishop who had married in defiance of the church and who was dying poor and forgotten. It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who ferociously rebukes those priests who refuse to baptize the children of single mothers.

It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who seems to feel a compulsive need to be riding the buses, who refuses to live in the official residences, who sends his priests out to the frontiers and who once said he would die if locked away in the Vatican.

I’ll leave it to Catholics to decide if Francis is good for the church. The subject here is how do you revive a movement in crisis. The natural instinct is to turn Donatist, to build an ark and defend what’s precious. The counterintuitive but more successful strategy is to follow Augustine, to exploit a moment of weakness by making yourself even more vulnerable, by striking outward into complexity, swallowing the pure and impure, counterattacking crisis with an evangelical assault.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

It has been a big week for budget documents. In fact, members of Congress have presented not one but two full-fledged, serious proposals for spending and taxes over the next decade.

Before I get to that, however, let me talk briefly about the third proposal presented this week — the one that isn’t serious, that’s essentially a cruel joke.

Way back in 2010, when everybody in Washington seemed determined to anoint Representative Paul Ryan as the ultimate Serious, Honest Conservative, I pronounced him a flimflam man. Even then, his proposals were obviously fraudulent: huge cuts in aid to the poor, but even bigger tax cuts for the rich, with all the assertions of fiscal responsibility resting on claims that he would raise trillions of dollars by closing tax loopholes (which he refused to specify) and cutting discretionary spending (in ways he refused to specify).

Since then, his budgets have gotten even flimflammier. For example, at this point, Mr. Ryan is claiming that he can slash the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, yet somehow raise 19.1 percent of G.D.P. in revenues — a number we haven’t come close to seeing since the dot-com bubble burst a dozen years ago.

The good news is that Mr. Ryan’s thoroughly unconvincing policy-wonk act seems, finally, to have worn out its welcome. In 2011, his budget was initially treated with worshipful respect, which faded only slightly as critics pointed out the document’s many absurdities. This time around, quite a few pundits and reporters have greeted his release with the derision it deserves.

And, with that, let’s turn to the serious proposals.

Unless you’re a very careful news reader, you’ve probably heard about only one of these proposals, the one released by Senate Democrats. And let’s be clear: By comparison with the Ryan plan, and for that matter with a lot of what passes for wisdom in our nation’s capital, this is a very reasonable plan indeed.

As many observers have pointed out, the Senate Democratic plan is conservative with a small “c”: It avoids any drastic policy changes. In particular, it steers away from draconian austerity, which is simply not needed given ultralow U.S. borrowing costs and relatively benign medium-term fiscal projections.

True, the Senate plan calls for further deficit reduction, through a mix of modest tax increases and spending cuts. (Incidentally, the tax increases still fall well short of those called for in the Bowles-Simpson plan, which Washington, for some reason, treats as something close to holy scripture.) But it avoids large short-run spending cuts, which would hobble our recovery at a time when unemployment is still disastrously high, and it even includes a modest amount of stimulus spending.

So we could definitely do worse than the Senate Democratic plan, and we probably will. It is, however, an extremely cautious proposal, one that doesn’t follow through on its own analysis. After all, if sharp spending cuts are a bad thing in a depressed economy — which they are — then the plan really should be calling for substantial though temporary spending increases. It doesn’t.

But there’s a plan that does: the proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, titled “Back to Work,” which calls for substantial new spending now, temporarily widening the deficit, offset by major deficit reduction later in the next decade, largely though not entirely through higher taxes on the wealthy, corporations and pollution.

I’ve seen some people describe the caucus proposal as a “Ryan plan of the left,” but that’s unfair. There are no Ryan-style magic asterisks, trillion-dollar savings that are assumed to come from unspecified sources; this is an honest proposal. And “Back to Work” rests on solid macroeconomic analysis, not the fantasy “expansionary austerity” economics — the claim that slashing spending in a depressed economy somehow promotes job growth rather than deepening the depression — that Mr. Ryan continues to espouse despite the doctrine’s total failure in Europe.

No, the only thing the progressive caucus and Mr. Ryan share is audacity. And it’s refreshing to see someone break with the usual Washington notion that political “courage” means proposing that we hurt the poor while sparing the rich. No doubt the caucus plan is too audacious to have any chance of becoming law; but the same can be said of the Ryan plan.

So where is this all going? Realistically, we aren’t likely to get a Grand Bargain any time soon. Nonetheless, my sense is that there is some real movement here, and it’s in a direction conservatives won’t like.

As I said, Mr. Ryan’s efforts are finally starting to get the derision they deserve, while progressives seem, at long last, to be finding their voice. Little by little, Washington’s fog of fiscal flimflam seems to be lifting.

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

In “The Axis of Ennui” Bobo tells us that effective energy innovation is not happening where you think it is, Dear Reader.  He also makes it clear that it’s a tremendous burden to create two columns a week.  Maybe he should just give it up, a consummation devoutly to be wished…  In “Politics by Intimidation” Mr. Nocera says in Oregon, extremists fight gun laws with harassment. It’s the post-Newtown world.  Mr. Bruni looks at “The Conclave’s Fixed Ways” and says the process for choosing the next pope is a recipe and metaphor for the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s aloofness.  Here’s Bobo:

Because I have to generate two columns a week for you, Dear Reader, I spend some time hunting for new ideas on the conference circuit. When you are on that circuit, you are perpetually under the illusion that you are hearing from the exciting, fresh people who are about to change history.

You’re hearing from, say, the brilliant technology entrepreneur Shai Agassi, who is starting a paradigm-shifting electric car company. You’re hearing from some wizard with a new solar-panel technology, or some new social-networking entrepreneur.

My main impression over the past five years is that the conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations have turned out to be marginal to history while the people who are too boring and unfashionable to get invited to the conferences in the first place have actually changed the world under our noses.

Shai Agassi’s company, Better Place, for example, has generated glowing magazine profiles, but it has managed to lose more than $500 million while selling astoundingly few cars. He stepped down as the chief executive, and his replacement lasted only a few months. It turns out that the things that are sexy to politicians and paradigm-shifting to conference audiences are not necessarily attractive to consumers.

Meanwhile, the anonymous drudges at American farming corporations are exporting $135 billion worth of products every year and transforming the American Midwest. The unfashionable executive at petrochemical companies have been uprooting plants from places like Chile, relocating them to places like Louisiana, transforming economic prospects in the Southeast. Most important of all, the boring old oil and gas engineers have transformed the global balance of power.

By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.

All of this was accomplished by people who exist largely beyond the reach of the lavalier-mike circuit.

Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.

Vanity Fair still ranks the tech and media moguls and calls it The New Establishment, but, as Kotkin notes, the big winners in the current economy are the “Material Boys” — the people who grow grain, drill for fuel and lay pipeline. The growing parts of the world, meanwhile, are often the commodity belts, resource-rich places with good rule of law like Canada, Norway and Australia.

Daniel Yergin, an energy guru, noted in Congressional testimony last month that the revolution in oil and gas extraction has led to 1.7 million new jobs in the United States alone, a number that could rise to three million by 2020. The shale revolution added $62 billion to federal revenues in 2012. At the same time, carbon-dioxide emissions are down 13 percent since 2007, as gas is used instead of coal to generate electricity.

Most of us have grown up in a world in which we assumed that energy was scarce, or even running out. We could now be entering a world of relatively cheap energy abundance.

Most of us have grown up in a world in which oil states in the Middle East could throw their weight around because of their grip on the economy’s life source. But the power of petro-states is on the wane. Yergin argues that the oil sanctions against Iran may not have been sustainable if not for the new alternate sources of supply.

We’ve grown accustomed to despotic regimes in Russia and Venezuela that live off oil and gas wealth. But those regimes are facing hard times, too. Gazprom is already offering roughly 10 percent discounts on existing contracts. The Nigerians and Venezuelans may find it hard to compete. People in China and elsewhere are wondering if the fracking revolution means that the 21st century will be another North American century, just like the last one.

What are the names of the people who are leading this shift? Who is the Steve Jobs of shale? Magazine covers don’t provide the answers. Whoever they are, they don’t seem hungry for celebrity or good with the splashy project launch. They are strong economically, but they are culturally off the map.

This revolution will not be plenaried.

Bobo ought to be forcibly moved to a place where they’re fracking so he can live with poisoned water.  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Three days before the December massacre in Newtown, Conn., a 22-year-old gunman named Jacob Tyler Roberts opened fire at the Clackamas Town Center, a suburban shopping mall in Portland, Ore. He killed two people before killing himself, though it could have been much worse. His stolen semiautomatic AR-15 rifle jammed early in his shooting spree.

Ginny Burdick, 65, a veteran state legislator, is probably the fiercest gun control advocate in the Oregon State Senate. In recent years, however, as the chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Revenue Committee, she had focused most of her attention on tax policy and budgetary issues. Then came the horrors of Clackamas and Newtown.

“I said to my fellow legislators, ‘Sorry folks, I have to put this back on the front burner,’ ” she told me the other day. She had already sponsored a bill to limit magazines to 10 rounds or less. She immediately sponsored several other bills, including one requiring background checks for private gun sales. (Thanks largely to Burdick, Oregon was one of the few states that had already closed the “gun-show loophole.”) Another would make it illegal for people with concealed carry licenses to take their guns into an Oregon school.

“We were in the middle of a special session on a very important tax bill,” she said. “I was right on the middle of it. I said, ‘We’re going back to guns.’ ”

Although there is widespread gun ownership in Oregon, Burdick has consistently been re-elected because most of the state’s gun owners — like many gun owners across the country — are in favor of sensible gun regulation. But most of Burdick’s initiatives over the years have been thwarted by the National Rifle Association, which strikes fear in Oregon legislators, just as it does lawmakers across the country.

Which is also why Burdick felt so strongly that Clackamas and Newtown, horrible though they were, offered a unique opportunity. Many gun extremists, however, realized the same thing. They fought back. In mid-January, two men began walking around a Portland neighborhood with assault weapons strapped to their backs. Even as schools in the area were locking down, the men insisted that they were “educating the public” about their Second Amendment rights. A month later, at a pro-gun rally at the State Capitol, a number of gun owners openly wielded their weapons — even bringing them into the building.

Burdick began receiving, as she puts it, “the usual threatening e-mails” — as did a fellow gun control advocate in the Legislature, Mitch Greenlick. He told The Oregonian that the e-mail he received from gun extremists was often abusive, obscene and anti-Semitic. He predicted that gun legislation would go nowhere because legislators were too frightened to act. “Politics by intimidation,” he called it.

And then there was Burdick. She was scheduled to hold a town-hall meeting on March 4. But at an earlier town hall held by several other legislators, gun advocates badgered them with angry questions. One of the questioners admitted he was carrying a concealed weapon. Fearing that someone might show up with a gun at her town hall, Burdick decided to postpone it. Not wanting to inflame the situation, she said she had a scheduling conflict.

On the evening of March 4, two men sat in a car across from her home and videotaped her. They showed her driving into her garage and taking out her garbage. Having “proved” that Burdick did not have a scheduling conflict, they then put together a short video of Burdick at home. Jeff Reynolds, the chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party, who also claims to be a citizen journalist, posted the video on a Web site he runs.

When I spoke to Reynolds, he conceded that the videographer was a friend but refused to divulge his name. He said the video had nothing to do with the gun issue. “She lied,” he told me. “She is accountable to we the people.”

He added, “This was no different than what Mike Wallace used to do at ‘60 Minutes.’ There was no intimidation.” Sure.

These days, Democrats control both houses of the Oregon Legislature as well as the governor’s office. Moderate Republicans running against incumbent Democrats are being beaten in legislative races. The Republicans even lack a credible candidate to take on the current governor, John Kitzhaber, in 2014.

The extremist tactics of people like Jeff Reynolds and his videographer friend are clearly part of the reason why — they’ve helped delegitimize the Oregon Republican Party. But the tactics have other consequences, too. The gun bills filed in the Oregon Legislature — by Burdick, Greenlick and others — are by no means assured of passage.

“Other legislators look at what happened to me, and they say to themselves, ‘Do I really want to get involved in this?’ ” Burdick said. “My argument is that this is our job. But it is tempting to look the other way.”

Thus is the gun battle fought in the post-Newtown world.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

And now the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church retreat into the Sistine Chapel, hordes of journalists flitting breathlessly around St. Peter’s Square, one question above many others hanging in the air. Will the next pope chart a course of truly significant change for the church, which could certainly use some changing?

The answer is in the very nature and composition of the conclave. No.

Much of what has eroded the church’s authority and must be addressed is its addiction to secrecy, its rejection of transparency. This dictated its botched, disastrous response to the child sexual abuse crisis. It’s the root of the problem with the Vatican bank. It’s also why public attention to the final chapter of Pope Benedict XVI’s reign was dominated by talk of leaks and liaisons and wiretaps and dossiers. When an organization shrouds itself in mystery, it’s invariably treated as a cradle of intrigue.

And yet here its self-appointed leaders are, walling themselves off in order to make the most important decision about the church’s governance in complete isolation and privacy. They will keep only their own counsel. They will speak to the outside world in smoke signals.

There’s no scriptural mandate for this. It doesn’t date back to the origins of the church. It evolved in part from the longest conclave ever, in the 13th century, when the church’s leaders were locked away by people tensely awaiting a decision and trying to hurry it along.

But the leaders now cloister themselves of their own accord, and force anyone who may come in contact with them during the conclave — nurses, say, or security officers — to swear not to reveal anything they’ve witnessed, under threat of excommunication. You’d be hard pressed to construct a better metaphor for the cardinals’ limited interest in human (as opposed to divine) accountability, or for their distance from the people in the pews, relegated time and again to roles as onlookers and dutiful subjects.

The 115 electors, who are also the candidates, are much more alike than different. They’re all men, of course, and they were all elevated to their positions by one of the last two popes, who often rewarded leaders with theological orientations mirroring their own. This is a recipe for continuity, not upheaval.

Their average age is 72, and they’re a geographic mismatch with the global distribution of Catholics. Fewer than one in 20 Catholics reside in Italy, while nearly one in four electors are Italian. Europe accounts for about 24 percent of the world’s Catholic population but more than 50 percent of the cardinals with a vote in this conclave.

All of which is to say that the church is no democracy. To a large extent, it shouldn’t be. Its lodestar isn’t what’s of greatest liking to its citizens, so to speak, but what’s of greatest fidelity to God.

And for the cardinals at its helm, the whole notion of new directions contradicts what they see as their stewardship of eternal, unalterable truths. They look at change with deep suspicion. They deem it undesirable for the most part.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, asserted almost as much in a recent homily in Rome, saying that “the very nature of the papacy is to hand on faithfully what God told us of Jesus, what Jesus told his apostles, and what his apostles hand on to us — tradition, with a capital T.”

That’s an understandable perspective. Clinging to its ways, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has outlasted other ruling classes. Despite ample turmoil, despite all the scandals, much of the world turns its gaze toward Rome this week.

But what Dolan and his peers disregard is how many facets of the tradition they stubbornly protect reflect their and their predecessors’ subjective, utterly human interpretation of how God speaks and what God wants. There are ways the church could bend without simply caving to public opinion or losing its soul. And the right degree of adaptability could substantially bolster the institutional church’s moral authority rather than compromise it.

This was implicit in an interview that one of the cardinals from the last conclave, Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, gave right before his death last year. He reportedly complained that the church was two centuries behind the times. “Our rites,” he added, “are pompous.”

They are at the least predictable. And while it may be impossible to guess whether the next pope will come from Europe or Latin America or even Africa, it’s almost certain that he will abide and maintain the church’s opaqueness, preserve the current requirements of the priesthood, stay the course.

And many hopeful, hurting Catholics will be left where they were under Benedict: with a faith whose essence warms them, but whose formal administration leaves them cold.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

Oh, gawd, he’s SO tiresome…  This time Bobo is fizzing about kosher food…  In “The Orthodox Surge” he breathlessly tells us that a thriving Jewish counterculture prompts reflections on collective commitments in the modern age.  It’s as though he had no idea that there were such things as kosher grocery stores, and he talks about his tour guide to Brooklyn…  The boy needs to get out more, or at least take his head out of his butt and look around once in a while.  (Dairy-free cheese puffs?  Really???)  Mr. Cohen, in “Evil Banker Syndrome,” says the essential difference between the U.S. and Europe endures. It is over risk and reward.  In “The Market Speaks” Prof. Krugman says yes, the Dow Jones industrial average has been setting new records this week, but the message from the markets is actually not a happy one.  Here’s Bobo:

In Midwood, Brooklyn, there’s a luxury kosher grocery store called Pomegranate serving the modern Orthodox and Hasidic communities. It looks like a really nice Whole Foods. There’s a wide selection of kosher cheeses from Italy and France, wasabi herring, gluten-free ritual foods and nicely toned wood flooring.

The snack section is impressive. There’s a long aisle bursting with little bags of chips and pretzels, suitable for putting into school lunch boxes. That’s important because Orthodox Jews spend a lot of time packing school lunches.

Nationwide, only 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 are married. But an astounding 71 percent of Orthodox Jews are married at that age. And they are having four and five kids per couple. In the New York City area, for example, the Orthodox make up 32 percent of Jews over all. But the Orthodox make up 61 percent of Jewish children. Because the Orthodox are so fertile, in a few years, they will be the dominant group in New York Jewry.

Another really impressive thing about the store is not found in one section but is pervasive throughout. That’s the specialty products designed around this or that aspect of Jewish law. There are the dairy-free cheese puffs in case you want to have some cheese puffs with a meat dish. There are the precut disposable tablecloths so you don’t have to use scissors on the Sabbath. There are the specially designed sponges, which don’t retain water, so you don’t have to do the work of squeezing out water on Shabbat.

Pomegranate looks like any island of upscale consumerism, but deep down it is based on a countercultural understanding of how life should work.

Those of us in secular America live in a culture that takes the supremacy of individual autonomy as a given. Life is a journey. You choose your own path. You can live in the city or the suburbs, be a Wiccan or a biker.

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.

The laws, in this view, make for a decent society. They give structure to everyday life. They infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance. They build community. They regulate desires. They moderate religious zeal, making religion an everyday practical reality.

The laws are gradually internalized through a system of lifelong study, argument and practice. The external laws may seem, at first, like an imposition, but then they become welcome and finally seem like a person’s natural way of being.

Meir Soloveichik, my tour guide during this trip through Brooklyn, borrows a musical metaphor from the Catholic theologian George Weigel. At first piano practice seems like drudgery, like self-limitation, but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs. Life is less a journey than it is mastering a discipline or craft.

Much of the delight in life comes from arguing about the law and different interpretations of God’s command. Soloveichik laughingly describes his debates over which blessing to say over Crispix cereal, which is part corn, but also part rice. Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth who is on a tour through New York, notes that Jews are constitutional lawyers: “The Torah is an anthology of argument with a shared vocabulary of common restraint.”

But there are still obligations that precede choice. For example, a young person in mainstream America can choose to marry or not. In Orthodox society, young adults have an obligation to marry and perpetuate the covenant and it is a source of deep sadness when they cannot.

“Marriage is about love, but it is not first and foremost about love,” Soloveichik says. “First and foremost, marriage is about continuity and transmission.”

The modern Orthodox are rooted in that deeper sense of collective purpose. They are like the grocery store Pomegranate, superficially a comfortable part of mainstream American culture, but built upon a moral code that is deeply countercultural.

This sort of life involves a fascinating series of judgment calls about what aspects of secularism can safely be included in a covenantal life. For example, Soloveichik’s wife, Layaliza, was admitted into Harvard, but she went to a religious college, Yeshiva, instead. Then she went to a secular professional school, Yale Law, and now works as an assistant U.S. attorney.

All of us navigate certain tensions, between community and mobility, autonomy and moral order. Mainstream Americans have gravitated toward one set of solutions. The families stuffing their groceries into their Honda Odyssey minivans in the Pomegranate parking lot represent a challenging counterculture. Mostly, I notice how incredibly self-confident they are. Once dismissed as relics, they now feel that they are the future.

Next up is Mr. Cohen:

I was talking the other day to a U.S. banker who works in the City for a British bank. He was complaining about a decision-making process that was cumbersome by American standards. But his main issue was a feeling that bankers in Europe are seen as the enemy — overpaid profiteers. It was a relief to get to New York, he said, where the economic mood was more upbeat and post-meltdown fury fading.

The banker’s words came back to me on my return this week to Europe from the United States. The headlines were all about bankers’ bonuses and executive pay curbs. European Union finance ministers have approved, over British objections, the capping of bankers’ bonuses at twice their salary — and a bonus that big will require the approval of two-thirds of shareholders. The normal cap will be a 1:1 ratio of bonus-to-salary.

The Swiss — no less — have approved in a referendum a series of executive pay curbs, including banning golden hellos and goodbyes and giving shareholders a binding say on executive pay.

When the Swiss get riled over the rich and their money, some big shift is afoot. Europe is doubling down on solidarity.

I understand the anger. A 200 percent bonus should be sufficient for anyone. The recklessness of executives at too-big-to-fail banks in the run-up to the 2008 meltdown cost just about everyone — except themselves. Huge bonuses tend to encourage the taking of short-term risks. The masters of the universe have had their moment: the 1,701 people applying for 8 low-paid jobs as “baristas” in a new Costa Coffee branch in Nottingham should not have to read about multimillion-dollar golden handshakes.

All true — but beware the feel-good retribution that returns to haunt you. City jobs will disappear (Boris Johnson, the conservative mayor of London, called the measures “moronic”). Fixed salaries may rise to offset the loss; they are harder to claw back.

At a more fundamental level, John Authers has argued persuasively in the Financial Times that the real problem is not bonuses but corporate governance. As he writes: “Limit the leverage that banks can use, and require them to hold more capital, and bonuses will be less variable. Tell them that they cannot trade with depositors’ funds, or split the biggest banks, and compensation will be less variable.” What is needed is a “a banking system that can sensibly allocate savers’ capital to productive investment opportunities. The compensation issue, to the extent that there is one, is dealt with in the process.”

But when Europe sees an opportunity to control or regulate free markets it still has a hard time resisting. These measures are good politics for European politicians. They would not fly in the United States, for all the anti-Wall Street anger engendered by the Great Recession.

The essential difference between the United States and Europe endures. It is over risk and reward. The American experience begins with risk, that of immigrants who went there in the first place. The European experience ends with solidarity, the insurance policy an old and war-scarred Continent has taken out against the worst. America yearns to be free, Europe to be free of want: politicians must pitch their appeals accordingly. These are core characteristics, written into the respective DNAs on each side of the Atlantic.

Where America enshrines the individual, Europe ennobles the collective. As to which approach is preferable, that seems to me a matter of personal choice. Capitalist churn can be cruel. On the other hand social democratic solidarity can be stultifying. It may be easier to get ahead in America. It is certainly far better to be left behind in Europe. Which is more important to you?

We may dream of Eumerica, some transcontinental fusion where the can-do attitude is American and the healthcare French. But in the end a choice must be made: Do you want your capitalism raw or remedied?

Some say this is a time of transAtlantic convergence. When President Obama calls for a trans-Atlantic free-trade agreement in his State of the Union address and all the talk in Washington is of avoiding war and saving money, it may indeed seem that this is a time of U.S.-European coming together and that the days of inhabiting Mars and Venus (in Robert Kagan’s phrase) are over.

I do not believe it. Mark Leonard had an interesting Reuters column the other day called “The Europeanization of America,” which noted the points of apparent convergence and quoted Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense, saying (with caveats): “We don’t want to be the world’s policemen.”

It is true that the U.S. wars without victory in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped the fires of Mars. America’s new God is the Drone. There is a touch of Europe’s Venus in the U.S. pivot away from Bush-era bellicosity.

The rise of the rest has left Europe and the United States with shared anxieties over insolvency. The convergence, such as it is, has about it something of a desire to dilute misery by sharing it.

But Americans will still take the bonus and run while Europeans strive worthily to redistribute it.

And now finally here’s Prof. Krugman:

Four years ago, as a newly elected president began his efforts to rescue the economy and strengthen the social safety net, conservative economic pundits — people who claimed to understand markets and know how to satisfy them — warned of imminent financial disaster. Stocks, they declared, would plunge, while interest rates would soar.

Even a casual trawl through the headlines of the time turns up one dire pronouncement after another. “Obama’s radicalism is killing the Dow,” warned an op-ed article by Michael Boskin, an economic adviser to both Presidents Bush. “The disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers return,” declared The Wall Street Journal, warning that the “bond vigilantes” would soon push Treasury yields to destructive heights.

Sure enough, this week the Dow Jones industrial average has been hitting all-time highs, while the current yield on 10-year U.S. government bonds is roughly half what it was when The Journal published that screed.

O.K., everyone makes a bad prediction now and then. But these predictions have special significance, and not just because the people who made them have had such a remarkable track record of error these past several years.

No, the important point about these particular bad predictions is that they came from people who constantly invoke the potential wrath of the markets as a reason we must follow their policy advice. Don’t try to cover America’s uninsured, they told us; if you do, you will undermine business confidence and the stock market will tank. Don’t try to reform Wall Street, or even criticize its abuses; you’ll hurt the plutocrats’ feelings, and that will lead to plunging markets. Don’t try to fight unemployment with higher government spending; if you do, interest rates will skyrocket.

And, of course, do slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid right away, or the markets will punish you for your presumption.

By the way, I’m not just talking about the hard right; a fair number of self-proclaimed centrists play the same game. For example, two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson warned us to expect an attack of the bond vigilantes within, um, two years unless we adopted, you guessed it, Simpson-Bowles.

So what the bad predictions tell us is that we are, in effect, dealing with priests who demand human sacrifices to appease their angry gods — but who actually have no insight whatsoever into what those gods actually want, and are simply projecting their own preferences onto the alleged mind of the market.

What, then, are the markets actually telling us?

I wish I could say that it’s all good news, but it isn’t. Those low interest rates are the sign of an economy that is nowhere near to a full recovery from the financial crisis of 2008, while the high level of stock prices shouldn’t be cause for celebration; it is, in large part, a reflection of the growing disconnect between productivity and wages.

The interest-rate story is fairly simple. As some of us have been trying to explain for four years and more, the financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble created a situation in which almost all of the economy’s major players are simultaneously trying to pay down debt by spending less than their income. Since my spending is your income and your spending is my income, this means a deeply depressed economy. It also means low interest rates, because another way to look at our situation is, to put it loosely, that right now everyone wants to save and nobody wants to invest. So we’re awash in desired savings with no place to go, and those excess savings are driving down borrowing costs.

Under these conditions, of course, the government should ignore its short-run deficit and ramp up spending to support the economy. Unfortunately, policy makers have been intimidated by those false priests, who have convinced them that they must pursue austerity or face the wrath of the invisible market gods.

Meanwhile, about the stock market: Stocks are high, in part, because bond yields are so low, and investors have to put their money somewhere. It’s also true, however, that while the economy remains deeply depressed, corporate profits have staged a strong recovery. And that’s a bad thing! Not only are workers failing to share in the fruits of their own rising productivity, hundreds of billions of dollars are piling up in the treasuries of corporations that, facing weak consumer demand, see no reason to put those dollars to work.

So the message from the markets is by no means a happy one. What the markets are clearly saying, however, is that the fears and prejudices that have dominated Washington discussion for years are entirely misguided. And they’re also telling us that the people who have been feeding those fears and peddling those prejudices don’t have a clue about how the economy actually works.

Me?  I live in terror that we’ll have another Republican president and my retirement savings will evaporate.  Under C+ Augustus I lost a year’s salary in one memorable month…