May God Have Mercy on You, Sowell

Commenting on an article by Thomas Sowell I called him a liar.  I have been challenged to back up that claim, and will do so here.  The entire article from which I will quote may be found here: http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/09/17/minimum-wage-madness-n1701840/page/full

First let us agree on a definition of lying.  A handy online dictionary offers several options, but “something intended or serving to convey a false impression,” or to “convey a false impression” are the ones we need.  As an example, if I ask if you stole my wallet, and you tell me: “I didn’t steal your wallet this morning,” the fact that it might be literally true (because you stole it last night) does not make it true; it is a lie.

Secondly, standards differ.  The person who posted the article did so in good faith.  He is not an economist, indeed, he knows next to nothing about economics.  He has no training and no aptitude for critical reading or analytical thinking.  Perforce he posts nothing original, yet even if he attempted to do so we may cut him quite a bit of slack.  By contrast, Thomas Sowell earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard, his Master’s from Columbia, and a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Chicago.  He has taught at Cornell and UCLA, and is affiliated with a think tank at Stanford. Because of these credentials he must be held to a much higher standard.  If he conveys a false impression it is not due to sloppy writing or simply not knowing better, it is deliberate.  When he does it, he is lying.

Sowell’s article contains a number of deceptions, but I need discuss only one to make my case.

However, there was a time when there was no federal minimum wage law in the United States. The last time was during the Coolidge administration, when the annual unemployment rate got as low as 1.8 percent.

A bit later we have this:

Minorities, like young people, can also be priced out of jobs. In the United States, the last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate -- 1930 -- was also the last year when there was no federal minimum wage law. Inflation in the 1940s raised the pay of even unskilled workers above the minimum wage set in 1938. Economically, it was the same as if there were no minimum wage law by the late 1940s.

That last paragraph is chock full of confusing factoids, but we will focus on the parts relevant to the first quote.  Summarizing we learn that: 1) The “last time” there was no federal minimum wage was “during the Coolidge administration;” 2) When the annual rate was “as a low as 1.8%;” 3) The “last year with no federal minimum wage” was 1930. 

The impression Sowell wishes to convey is that we had low unemployment; that a minimum wage was instituted; and that unemployment soared.

First, that annual rate of 1.8% is either simply wrong or yet another deliberate attempt to deceive.  Here is a chart showing unemployment since 1890:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Unemployment_1890-2008.gif

There is a dip in the middle of Coolidge’s second term (circa 1926) where unemployment seems to be around 4%, much higher than 1.8%. Overall, unemployment was reasonably low, especially when compared with the recession preceding Coolidge’s term, and more so with what followed, but hardly exceptional. Eyeballing the chart we see terrible unemployment in the 1890’s, well before any minimum wage laws, and horrendous numbers during the Great Depression, with the lowest rates occurring during the Second World War, and low ones during the First World War, and Korean War.  (I was born in June, 1953, the last really good month, so perhaps I caused unemployment to spike. ;-))

The year 1930 is well into Hoover’s term, so Coolidge’s was not the last administration with no federal minimum wage.  We could be charitable if that were all Sowell was up to, and say that he meant to write “last full administration,” since even academics may grow sloppy when cranking out a quick piece for the OpEd pages.  But even that year, chosen apparently because it was the “last year the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate” (I will let someone else fact check that), was not the year a federal unemployment law was instituted.

The original impetus came from Massachusetts, back in 1912 (where, coincidentally, Calvin Coolidge was serving in the state senate before becoming governor in 1914), and a number of states had passed minimum wage laws by 1920.  But these were shot down. As was the first federal attempt, in 1933, after Hoover left office, which makes the Hoover administration the last one with no minimum wage.  The first law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, but in 1938 a law that stuck was finally passed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States

To see what Sowell was up to take a look again at the unemployment chart.  In 1930 as the economy sank, unemployment hit 8.7%.  That number would be damaging enough for Sowell and his attempt to link unemployment and the minimum wage, but the law was actually passed in 1933, the worst year in US history, when it approached 25%, and may have been as high as 80% in some cities, such as Toledo, Ohio.  If Sowell used 1933, or even 1938, US unemployment would have been less in every year since! No wonder he fudged the data.  

I am not arguing here about whether or not minimum wage laws have a causal relationship with unemployment, and certainly am not claiming that anyone who makes such a claim is a liar.  Economists are split on this issue, with slightly more arguing that it does, than that it does not.  But other economists manage the trick without deliberately misleading their readers.  Sowell is a liar, and should never be trusted.

Next To Normal

One night at the kitchen table my girlfriend’s father punched her mother in the face; two sudden hard blows that drew bright red blood.

This weekend Pangdemonium’s stunning production of Next To Normal opened.

Next To Normal, an award winning musical (eleven Tony nominations with three wins; Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2010), tells the story of Diane Goodman, who suffers from bipolar disorder.  While some of the particulars of the story are unique to bipolarity, the anxiety is universal. The play last night brought back memories of my friend’s family, where dysfunctions included alcoholism and battered-spouse syndrome, and memories of other families plagued by schizophrenia, drug addiction, etc.  Those shocking punches changed my reality; the rulebook for life was suddenly rewritten.  Parents didn’t hit each other out of the blue, and if they suddenly did, what was I supposed to do about it? What was she supposed to do?  What was anyone supposed to do?  Ever after there was a nagging feeling, a tension in the gut, a sense that even in calm moments, something might happen, awful and out of control.

Next To Normal gets that just right.  The outstanding cast is headed by Sally Ann Triplett, a West End veteran.  Pardon me for saying that it is a good thing they cast a Triplett, as the part of Diane is too much for just one actress.  Diane doesn’t drift into and out of reality; she lurches from one to another, turning on a dime.  She has to range from seductive, to terrified, to helpless laughter all in the course of introducing herself to a new doctor.  In one of the opening scenes she is packing the family off to work and school.  Slowly, like a truck rolling down a mountain, her happy chatter and morning bustle gain speed, until her baffled and frightened family watches her crawling around the floor slapping peanut butter on bread, an entire loaf’s worth. 

“Sweetheart?” asks her long-suffering husband Dan (Adrian Pang).  “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to get ahead, for lunch! I’m … making sandwiches … on … the floor.”

The play is not flawless.  After creating the memorable Diane, the playwright treated the other characters as afterthoughts: the suffering husband, the overachieving but neglected daughter, her stoner boyfriend – these are types not people.  Luckily, the cast is uniformly excellent, and their performances turn the characters into people we care about.  There are other bits that in lesser hands I might have found myself lashing today.  There is … No, I won’t say reveal it, as it is one of the story’s surprises, but let’s say there is a certain situation that is becoming a trope in stories about mental illness.  Aspiring playwrights take note: when you see the play, and you learn what I am referring to, this trick worked once; you will have to invent a new one.  Then there is the daughter, and drugs.  We know the first time she criticizes her boyfriend’s pot smoking that she will be abusing drugs before the night is over.  That is all too accurate; children in families like this are prone to substance abuse.  What is not accurate is her “choosing” to try the medicine in her mother’s cabinet to numb her own pain.  That is not how it happens, and it plays into an unfortunate stereotype, that all would be well if everyone involved just made “better choices.” The play otherwise makes clear that everyone is trying, everyone is making choices, but to rephrase the famous quote from Apollo 13: Success is not an option.

Playing Natalie the daughter is Julia Abueva.  It is probably unfair to single out one supporting player when all are terrific, but Julia is special. She is only seventeen, playing a character that is older. Just one year older, but it is a part that would normally be cast using an adult actress.  Consider that Linden Furnell who plays Henry, the seventeen-year old stoner boyfriend, is himself twenty-four; and that Nathan Hartono, playing seventeen-year old Gabe, won Teenage Icon eight years ago.  One year ago Julia played Wendla in Pangdemonium’s Spring Awakening, another role where casting a then sixteen-year old was a brave move amply rewarded.  This year she plays Natalie.  Her singing talents are often remarked (she will play the lead in the upcoming production of Cinderella at Resorts World Sentosa), but there are many fine singers.  It is the emotional depth she is already, at her young age, bringing to her performances, that marks her as an actress to keep an eye on.  Let us hope someone writes her the breakout role she deserves.

That is what is great, and sad, about theatre.  Once the Grande Dames “strode the boards,” that was a given.  When film and later television came along, live theatre still ruled; appearing elsewhere was slumming.  Today stage work is still honored, but as an unremunerative eccentricity.   The money is in film work, and “money makes the world go ‘round.”  One of the tragedies of that truth is that singular talents such as Julia and Sally Ann are given short shrift.  A woman of Sally’s age – and she is not old – finds few film scripts coming her way, and certainly not leads.  For Julia it will be worse if she is “discovered.”  She will be ‘rewarded” by choosing between playing Spiderman’s girlfriend (action film), Will Ferrell’s girlfriend (comedy), Richard Gere’s girlfriend (drama), or Harrison Ford’s girlfriend (all three).  Watching the waste of a fine actress forced to battle giant robots in Transformers XII is not what the Greeks meant by tragedy, but tragic it is. 

Thanks god we have live theatre, where actresses as fine as Julia and Sally Ann get to play real parts about real people, and we are lucky enough to see it.