President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has provoked concern from abortion rights advocates, who say they have seen no evidence that she supports upholding Roe vs. Wade.

In 2002, Sotomayor rejected a challenge to President George W. Bush’s so-called Mexico City policy, which required foreign groups receiving U.S. funds to pledge that they would not support or promote abortion.

Two years ago — in a case of concern to women’s groups — she joined an appeals court ruling that upheld a school district’s policy requiring teachers to notify a parent if they saw that a girl was pregnant. The court said that the teachers had no legal basis for objecting to the policy.

Personally, I highly doubt that Sotomayor would be anything but a reliable vote in favor of Roe v. Wade. The cases in question here involved matters that were fairly open and shut, legally, so I don’t think they tell us much about her views one way or the other (at most one could glean from the decisions that she is not so rabidly pro-abortion as to rule against any pro-life policy regardless of the law or the circumstances). And while the White House claims it never discussed the issue of Roe with her prior to nomination, I don’t believe that for a second. The irony of having the fifth vote to overturn Roe come from an Obama-appointed justice is so great as to make me really want to give the idea credence, but the reality is that she will almost certainly end up as part of the Court’s pro-Roe block.

UPDATE: Looks like the abortion rights crowd has another reason to be worried. According to this article, the Catholic League’s Bill Donahue is says he will “quietly root” for Sotomayor to be confirmed (the article also quotes Vox Nova alum Steve Dillard).

To see where Belloc’s chain of reasoning went wrong, we need to look closer at his account of how exactly the condition of legally compelled labor was supposed to reassert itself. As noted previously, Belloc considered the two main devices that would lead to the re-enslavement of the masses to be 1) unemployment insurance, and 2) the minimum wage.

What was so bad about unemployment and the minimum wage? In a word: unemployment. According to Belloc, the institution of unemployment insurance would remove the incentive for people to work, leading to the necessity of their being legally compelled to do so:

The state says to the serf: “I saw to it that you should have so much when you are unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to your getting more when you are unemployed than when you are employed. I further find that in many cases, though you get more when you are employed, yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man to work, or to make him take any particular trouble to get work. I must see to this.”

The minimum wage, Belloc thought, likewise would lead to unemployment, though here the cause would be not an unwillingness of potential employees to work but rather an unwillingness on the part of employers to hire them:

It would be impossible, without a general ruin, to compel capital to lose upon the man who is not worth even the minimum wage . . . To support the man gratuitously because he cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of the commonwealth is working for its guaranteed wages, is to put a premium upon incapacity and sloth. The man must be made to work. He must be taught, if possible, to produce those economic values, which are regarded as the minimum of sufficiency. He must be kept at that work even if he cannot produce the minimum, lest his presence as a free laborer should imperil the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and introduce at the same time a continuous element of instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for forced labor.

Belloc then goes on to describe the “labor colony” where such people would be taken.

Belloc wasn’t wrong in thinking the things like unemployment insurance lead to unemployment. To quote Lawrence Summers (the head of Obama’s National Economic Council): “To fully understand unemployment, we must consider the causes of recorded long-term unemployment. Empirical evidence shows that two causes are welfare payments and unemployment insurance.” The claim that the minimum wage causes unemployment is more controversial. However, most economists still believe that increasing the minimum wage leads to disemployment, and presumably almost everyone would believe this given a large enough increase.

But while unemployment insurance and the minimum wage may lead to more unemployment, the state has managed to keep the overall disemployment effect of these programs relatively low. In the case of unemployment insurance, this is achieved by making benefits only a fraction of one’s earlier employment, and by limiting the time during which a person may receive payments. In the case of the minimum wage, this is achieved by keeping the minimum wage level low enough that it doesn’t apply to most workers (in the U.S., for example, only about 5% of workers make the minimum wage).

In Belloc’s defense, he seems to have been thought that society was tending towards a state in which the vast majority of the population was living at the level of bare subsistence (he says that “it is the essence of slavery that subsistence or little more than subsistence should be guaranteed to the slave” and opines that “[i]n the perfect capitalist state there would be no food available for the nonowner save when he was actually engaged in production.”) If a man’s wages when employed were at the level of bare subsistence, the clearly one could not make his unemployment benefits much lower than his previous wages. Similarly, if the minimum wage applied to 95% percent of society (Belloc’s estimate of the proportion of the population at the time of his writing who made up the proletariat) then the disemployment effects caused by such laws could be severe.

This, however, raises a further question. Namely, how did we get from a society where virtually everyone was living at the level of bare subsistence to the current state of affairs in which virtually no one is (the question of whether people are doing “well enough” is of course distinct from the question of whether they are living at subsistence at the level of 1912). There are two main stories in answer to this question, a political story, and a markets story.

The political story is that people banded together and passed legislation ensuring adequate pay, safe working conditions, a social safety net, etc., and that these laws helped the mass of society to rise from poverty to what the authors of the Port Huron statement called “at least modest comfort.” The markets story, by contrast, says that the rise was due to increased productivity, free competition among employers, and so forth. The two stories are, of course, not incompatible. One might think that part of the rise in living standards over the past hundred years has been due to markets and part has been due to political activism. However, one might equally well reject either the political story or the markets story, thinking either that the laws in question were counter-productive but were outweighed by the advances due to the market, or that the free market leads to destitution, but that this tendency was stayed by legislative advances.

I provided an outline of this theory in a previous post and so won’t go into it again. In terms of the political story, all I will say is that the evidence in favor of a pure political story is somewhat lacking. Singapore, for example, has no minimum wage, no unemployment insurance, no real independent labor unions, and only the thinnest of social safety nets. Yet in the span of forty years it went from being one of the poorest countries on earth to being one of the richest. Examples like Singapore suggest that the political story is, at best, a secondary explanation for the West’s current prosperity.

This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth: That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment o compulsory labor legally enforceable upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do.

Most everything appearing in the book is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to supporting this prediction.

Mr. Belloc’s argument for his prediction, in brief, is as follows. English society (and by inference other industrialized Protestant countries) at the time of the books writing are defined by Mr. Belloc as being capitalist. That is to say, it is a society where nearly everyone is politically and economically free as regards the law, but where the means of production (defined as ownership in land, capital goods, and savings) is concentrated in the hands of a few. This, Mr. Belloc argues, is necessarily unstable, as it tends towards the monopolization of the capitalists (i.e. those who own the means of production) and the emiseration of the proletariat (i.e. those who don’t). This emiseration gives rise to reform movements who seek to lessen the plight of the proletariat. While these movements will tend to be socialist in ideology, both the power of entrenched capitalist interests and the popular moral sentiment against outright confiscation of people’s property by the State will make actually implementing a socialist program infeasible. As a second-best alternative, therefore, reformers will end up regulating the employer/employee relationship, placing restrictions on the ability of employers and employees to freely contract for labor, establishing duties of the employer to the employee and visa versa. According to Mr. Belloc’s view, the ultimate effect of these regulations will be the reestablishment of legal slavery, and those who lack property will be compelled to work for those who do. In such things as worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage, Mr. Belloc sees the beginnings of this system already developing.

Mr. Belloc is quite explicit that it is the reemergence of actual, literal slavery, and not slavery in some figurative or metaphorical sense, that he is predicting. He refers dozens of times to the fact that work will be compelled by the positive law according to one’s status as a nonowner, and explicitly disclaims the label servile or slave for work undertaken for any other purpose:

That society is not servile in which men are intelligently constrained to labor . . . indirectly from fear of destitution, or directly from love of gain, or from the common sense which teaches them that by their labor they may increase their well-being.

The Servile State, then, is centered around a prediction, the reemergence of legal slavery in the form of legally compelled labor on the part of the majority of the population based on their status as nonowners of property. Nearly one hundred years after the publication of Mr. Belloc’s book, such a reemergence has failed to materialize. Nor, frankly, does the emergence of a servile state in Mr. Belloc’s sense appear to be on the horizon. If anything, the amount of legally compelled labor today is less than at the time he was writing (in the United States, for example, even the Armed Forces is made up of volunteers).

In the mid-nineteenth century, followers of the charismatic preacher William Miller believed that the second coming of Christ was due to occur on October 22, 1844. When this prediction failed to pan out, many were disillusioned. Some however, preferred to reinterpret the prophecy in a way that made it comport with subsequent events. Similarly, when various predictions made by Karl Marx didn’t pan out, a whole cottage industry grew up attempting to show that Marx hadn’t actually been wrong, but only that he had been misunderstood. No doubt there is a temptation among Mr. Belloc’s fans today to do something similar, and to allegorize his claims about the reemergence of slavery in order to keep them from being falsified. This, however, would not be in keeping with the spirit of The Servile State. Mr. Belloc takes great pains in the book to stress that he is to be taken literally, and if he were alive today, one hopes that he would be candid enough to admit that the central thesis of the book has been proved wrong.

But I don’t really want to argue about the credit card bill. Rather, I wanted to note an odd premise that both the pro and anti credit bill folks seem to be relying on in making their respective cases.

Let’s start with the pros. Here’s Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post:

The credit card industry, in recent years, has developed something of a tiered model. Good customers are treated extremely well. There are rewards programs, favorable terms, and high limits. But those who don’t prove as assiduous about their bills, or slip up amidst their payments, fall into a second tier that’s as punishing and deceptive as the first tier is serene and straightforward. Hidden fees, unexpected rate increases, universal default, and all the rest. The result is that low income credit card holders effectively subsidize high income credit card holders.

For the case against the bill, we have to turn to that notoriously right-wing rag, the New York Times:

Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

“It will be a different business,” said Edward L. Yingling, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, which has been lobbying Congress for more lenient legislation on behalf of the nation’s biggest banks. “Those that manage their credit well will in some degree subsidize those that have credit problems.”

As Bryan Caplan notes, the argument made by the credit industry folks doesn’t make much economic sense: “When you make lending to high-risk people less attractive, the result is not worse terms for low-risk people who have been profitable all along. The result is that high-risk people get less credit. They used to be able to get credit despite their credit-unworthiness by paying extra; if the law forbids this, why lend to them?”

Caplan is right, but by the same logic Klein’s claim that high risk borrowers are subsidizing low risk ones seems rather dubious. If people who always paid their credit cards on time were a drain on credit card companies’ profits, you would expect them to try to deny credit to such people, or at least offer it to them on less favorable terms. You certainly wouldn’t expect those companies to go out of their way to attract these very customers by offering them “rewards programs, favorable terms, and high limits.” The idea that if everyone who paid their credit cards on time were denied credit those who didn’t pay on time would get more favorable terms doesn’t make much more sense than saying car insurance companies would benefit if they only insured people who got in accidents, because then they could increase people’s rates.

The idea that lenders benefit when people don’t pay them back on time is one that is attractive to a lot of people (see here for a related discussion). Partially this may rest on an implicit zero sum fallacy; paying late is clearly not to the benefit of the borrower, so people assume that it must be to the benefit of the lender. Mainly, though, I think it’s an example of the seen and unseen. The benefits that credit card companies get from having people use their cards wisely (e.g. intercharge fees) tend to be invisible to consumers, whereas the money they pay in late fees and interest is highly salient.

Which side of the Arab-Israeli conflict does the US support? Obviously, both are “special interests,” and an easy way to tell whose pull is stronger is to see whose side USG favors.

There’s a wrong way to answer this question and a right way. The wrong way is to start by asking: what should US foreign policy in the Middle East be?

Having answered this question, we can define the answer as the “center,” and then compare what USG’s policies are to what they should be. Ie, if USG’s policies are more pro-Israeli than the center, the pole is tilted to the right, and the Israel lobby must be stronger. If USG’s policies are more pro-Arab than the center, the pole is tilted to the left, etc, etc.

This procedure is not useful because, to answer the question, we must first judge the dispute . . .But this judgment is not relevant to the problem at hand, namely, ascertaining objectively which lobby is stronger.

So the right way is to start with an objective question: if USG’s involvement in the conflict were to cease, which side would benefit? If the answer is “the Palestinians,” USG’s involvement must logically favor Israel, and thus the Israel lobby is stronger. If the answer is “the Israelis,” vice versa. This procedure produces an answer without the need for any sort of judgment.

Looked at this way, Moldbug argues, the obvious if counter-intuitive answer to the question is that American foreign policy is objectively pro-Palestinian.

I tend to agree with Moldbug both on the procedure he uses to answer the question and on the answer that he gives. For this reason, I find claims that the U.S. needs to stop taking an uncritically pro-Israel approach to the conflict if it wants to advance peace to be somewhat baffling. Actually, it would be baffling even if you did think the U.S. approach was uncritically pro-Israel. If the Israeli and Palestinian leadership wanted an “honest broker” who would be more “even handed” in mediating the conflict there are plenty of places they could go to. That they do not do so suggests that (for whatever reason) the parties prefer pro-Israel America to any of the alternatives.

But I digress. What Moldbug views as a hypothetical to assess the bias of American policy, I see as a desirable policy in and of itself. The U.S., taking a page from Senator Aiken, should simply declare victory on the Israel/Palestinian issue and go home. That means no foreign or military aid to Israel or to the surrounding Arab nations. It means no diplomatic efforts to solve the conflict; no sanctions or security guarantees for either side.

To those on the right who urge the need to protect an ally, I would say: Israel can take care of itself. And if it can’t, if a Jewish state can only be maintained in the region with the assistance of other nations halfway around the world, then perhaps it’s time for the Jews to find somewhere else to live. If that sounds harsh, sorry, but the world’s a tough place some times. Talk about Israel’s right to exist is beside the point. No state has the right to exist. A state may defend itself, but if it can’t do so then it’s probably not long for this world.

To those on the left who want to talk about the plight of the Palestinians, I would say: Decades of diplomatic efforts have failed to bring about a resolution to the conflict. That ain’t likely to change any time soon. At about the same time Israel declared its independence, India was being split in two. As with Israel, this caused much bloodshed, and millions of people were forced from their homes. But sixty years later you don’t see a bunch of Bengali Hindus still living in refugee camps. There are plenty of people in the world who have it bad, and that no one cares about. Given that all our concern for the plight of the Palestinians has done nothing to actually improve their condition (and may have made matters worse) I see no reason to continue playing Sisyphus for peace.

* If you’ve never experienced Moldbuggery before, be forewarned that it can initially be a quite disorienting experience. Moldbug is a good stylist, but brevity is not his strong suit, and it can take a while to master his technical jargon (like our own MM, Moldbug is very down on calvinists, though he means something quite different by the term). Some of his views are also, shall we say, a little creepy.

Yet there needn’t be anything inconsistent about interpreting the Constitution in one way and the Bible in another. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, given to us for the salvation of souls; the Constitution is a legal document. What’s sauce for the goose ain’t necessarily sauce for the gander in such a context.

In any event, it’s not clear to me exactly what it would mean to have a sola scriptura view of the Constitution (which for sake of flourish I shall call the sola constitutionola view), or what is supposed to be objectionable about it. Presumably the idea is that sola constitutionola is to the Constitution what sola scriptura is to the Bible. Okay, so what’s sola scriptura? According to the Missouri Synod, sola scriptura is the belief that:

The Bible is God’s inerrant and infallible Word, in which He reveals His Law and His Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. It is the sole rule and norm for Christian doctrine.

By parity of meaning, then, sola constitutionola would be the view that the Constitution is inerrant and infallible, and that it is the sole rule and norm for legal doctrine.

If this is what sola constitutionola means, then no originalist believes in it and it is silly to suggest otherwise. No one says that the Constitution is inerrant and infallible; nor do originalists think that the Constitution is the only legal authority. They are perfectly willing to recognize other sources of law, such as state and federal law, treaties, etc.

What view, then is sola constitutionola supposed to mimic? Is it the view that the meaning of the Scriptures does not change over time? If so, then I fail to see what is objectionable even from a Catholic perspective.

Originalism is the view that the Constitution ought to be interpreted according to its original public meaning, i.e., the way the text would have been understood at the time of ratification. So far as I know, no Protestant believes something analogous about Scripture. All Christians believe, for example, that many passages in the Old Testament refer to Christ, yet pretty clearly they would not have been understood by the general public to refer to him when originally written hundreds of years before his birth.

The Constitution is a public document ratified by a large number of people and subject to much debate before hand – that it could have a secret meaning is unthinkable. The Scriptures, by contrast, are inspired by God and everyone accepts that they contain many mysteries. The same goes for the view that Scriptures are to be interpreted according to their plain meaning. I highly doubt that the Constitution has a spiritual sense.

In my last post I noted that while the real median income for all workers in up more than 30% over the last 35 years, the real median income of White men isn’t much higher than it was in the early 1970s. In describing this phenomenon, I have spoken of wages being “flat” or “stagnant.” This is the common way of speaking about the matter, but it is inaccurate. To say that wages for a given group were “flat” or “stagnant” during a given period implies that they remained largely unchanged throughout that period. But the fact that wages are more or less the same at the end of a given period as at the beginning doesn’t mean that they have remained unchanged throughout that period, anymore than a roller coaster must be flat because you start and stop at the same point.

Indeed, if we take another look at the Census Bureau’s Historical Income Tables, what we find is that wages (even for White men) have been anything but stagnant over the last 35 years. In actuality the real median income for White men fell nearly 10% between 1974 and 1982, only to rise 15% from 1982 to 2007. In addition, real median income for women increased only slightly between 1974 and 1982 and actually fell slightly for blacks during the same period. (If you are wondering why real wage growth was so bad between 1974 and 1982, you might want to check out my review of Robert Samuelson’s The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath).

This is important for two reasons. First, many people who cite the “stagnant” wages figures often attempt to lay the blame for this apparent stagnation at the feet of Ronald Reagan and his conservative heirs. Ronald Reagan, however, did not become president until 1981, and while his policies are open to criticism on a number of grounds, he did not have access to a time machine, and his actions as president can’t be blamed for what happened in the 1970s.

More importantly, if real median wages really were flat throughout the period of 1973/74 to the present, one might want to search for ways to get them growing again. If, on the other hand, real median wages have been growing since the early 1980s, and only appear flat because of real wage decline in the 1970s (due to policies since corrected), then there is less of a reason to go looking for something in current policy that has caused wages to stagnate. To say this, of course, is not to say that there is nothing in current policy that is open to criticism, or that we shouldn’t try to get real wages growing even faster than they have been (if we can). It is only to express a preference for honesty when assessing social problems.

As I noted last time, the claim that real wages have been stagnant over the last several decades is a common place among certain groups. But is it true?

A look at the Census Bureau’s Historical Income Tables shows that the median income for individuals was more than 30% higher in real terms in 2007 than in 1974 (from $20,230 to $26,625 in 2007 dollars). Of course, the fact that real median income for society as a whole is up 30% over the last 35 years doesn’t mean that real median income was up that much for all groups within American society. Breaking down data based on race and sex, what one finds is that while real median income for women roughly doubled in the period between 1974 and 2007 (from $11,687 to $20,922 in 2007 dollars) and real median income for blacks increased by nearly fifty percent (from $14,338 to $21,888 in 2007 dollars) the real median income for White and Hispanic men was virtually the same in 2007 as in 1974 (from $33,575 to $35,141 in 2007 dollars for Whites, $24,432 to $24,451 in 2007 dollars for Hispanics). No doubt if one was to focus on even more specific subcategories, one could find groups that where real median wages were doing even better or even worse than the above, but of course as a simply matter of statistics any subgroup you found doing worse would have to be more than balanced by other groups doing better (since real median wages overall are up 30+%).

Based on the Census data, then, one would have to conclude that the last 35 years have been a time of great progress if you were black or were a woman, but were not so great for White males. Indeed, one might be tempted to conclude that it is precisely because blacks and women have seen such progress over the last 35 years that the real median income of White men has remained flat. That is, until the late 1960s both blacks and women were subject to a significant amount of discrimination in the job market, both legally and socially. This discrimination meant that the wages of both blacks and women were significantly lower than what they should have been given their productivity. Since the late 1960s, however, this sort of discrimination has waned considerably (though it obviously hasn’t gone away completely), with the result that the real wages of blacks and women have risen to more closely reflect their true value to employers. The flip side of this, however, is that White males now face more competition from blacks and women, which serves to suppress the growth in their own wages.

Whether one views this trend as a good thing or not will, of course, depend on your values. A White supremacist, for example, would view the above trends with horror. Likewise, someone who tended to frown on women working outside the home might be inclined to focus on the lower growth in real wages for men, and discount the vast improvements for women as being relatively unimportant. I suspect, though, that most people would view flat wages for White men as being an acceptable price to pay for the increases in the incomes of blacks and women over the last 35 years, and so to the extent that the two trends are related, would be inclined to view the overall trend as being positive.

As it happens, I don’t think that the above is anywhere near the whole story when it comes to the issue of wage stagnation. That is, I think that the lot even of White men has improved a lot more than what simply looking at the Census numbers might lead you to believe, and in future posts I hope to explain some of my reasons for thinking this. Nevertheless, even if the above numbers were the whole story, the relatively flat wages of White males would be worth it, in my view, as the price of progress achieved over the last 35 years by historically discriminated against groups.

One final note. You might wonder: what about Hispanics? Clearly they weren’t the beneficiaries of discriminatory policies against minorities, so why should their wages be flat? My guess is that this is just a matter of statistical illusion. If you compare the median age of the children of the Octomom today versus a year ago, you will find that it has dropped considerably. But that obviously doesn’t mean that any of her children are younger today than they were a year ago. If you add a bunch of people at the bottom of an income distribution, it is going to exert a downward pressure on median income even if the income of each individual keeps improving. Given the large increase in Hispanic immigration over the last 35 years (most of whom are below the median in terms of income) it’s not surprising that real median income for the group would not have improved that much.

Next in Series: Where to Begin

The premise of the show was, as I said, somewhat odd. But equally odd is that, according to plenty of pundits and commentators across the political spectrum, Tyler may actually have lucked out in being sent back in time. The reason for this, according to these commentators, is that once you account for inflation the material condition (or at least the wages) of the typical American are no better, and may in fact be considerably worse, than in the early in 1970s. The following snippet from a recent Bob Herbert column in the New York Times is typical:

As hard as it may be to believe, the peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973, when the average income per taxpayer, adjusted for inflation, was $33,000. That was nearly $4,000 higher . . . than in 2005.

Men have done particularly poorly. Men who are now in their 30s — the prime age for raising families — earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age.

While the claim that the wages of the typical American have stagnated is most often found on the left, the idea is hardly confined to such quarters. Many libertarians have also been pushing the claim (though whereas those on the left tend to blame Reagan and “neoliberalism” for the supposed stagnation, among libertarians government is the natural culprit). I know that several of my co-bloggers have also made some version of the claim at one point or another.

Can this really be right? Is Sam Tyler better off, at least materially speaking, back in 1973 than he was in 2008? I don’t think so. To me, the claim that the typical American is no better off today than 35 years ago is initially implausible, and gets more implausible the more it is held up to scrutiny. To explain what is wrong with the claim, however, is not the work of an instant, and I recognize that the subject is a contentious one, with many different aspects. I propose, therefore, to do a series of posts on the subject, each looking at the issue from a different angle and articulating some of the reasons that I don’t think the stagnation story holds water.

I am, of course, only to keenly aware of how statistics can be used to mislead and obscure, rather than to clarify. As the sage Homer once put matters: “People can come up with statistics to prove anything; 14% of people know that.” To some extent this is unavoidable. I will, however, try to limit the chances of providing a misleading account as best I can. To that end, in what follows I will try as much as possible to use general statistics, rather than cherry picking narrow statistics that would seem to bolster my case. When you see someone trying to make the case for a general proposition using curiously precise or narrow statistics, chances are that the statistic being quoted is not representative of the larger picture, and hence is misleading.

I know that this can be contentious subject, but the response to my series of posts last year on the equally contentious subject of race gives me hope that it can be a productive endeavor.

Next in Series: The Price of Progress?

My understanding is that in Brown’s previous book, the Catholic Church was accused of murdering millions of women and of perpetrating the greatest conspiracy of all time in furtherance of its anti-women agenda. Whereas in Angels and Demons, the Church is the victim of a giant conspiracy, and is accused of having killed a few thousand people in furtherance of its anti-science agenda. So I suppose that’s progress.

A list of some of the factual errors in the book version can be found in this post by John C. Wright (the style of which is just spectacular, by the way). Can it really be that Brown said in Angels and Demons that Churchill was a “staunch Catholic”? I mean, it’s one thing to get things wrong when it comes to Catholic theology, or French geography, or theoretical physics or whatever, but surely anyone with even a basic understanding of either Churchill’s life or of British politics would realize that doesn’t scan. Does Brown not have an editor?

One other random point: In the trailer, there is a scene where Tom Hanks demands access to the Vatican’s secret archives and is rebuffed by Church officials. Of course if you go to the Vatican’s website, there is a link off the main page called “Vatican Secret Archives.” I’ve always found that a little strange. I mean, I realize that the Holy See isn’t all that tech savvy, but I mean, come on. They should at least have it where you need to move the cursor over a random part of the screen to see the link.

The CPUSA is, of course, opposed to the bailouts. But as the SSPX of communism, they are perhaps not the best guide here (don’t they realize that all that class conflict stuff went out with Vatican II?).

But while the leaders of actual Communist Countries don’t seem to care much for Marx these days, a renewed appreciation for the man does seem to be spreading in other places. Writing in the Atlantic and Foreign Policy respectively, Christopher Hitchens and Leo Panitch write that Marx was one of the first to note the periodic financial crises that beset capitalist countries. Also writing at Foreign Policy, Matt Yglesias writes that this is a silly reason to read Marx, as the idea that the business cycle is inherent in capitalism is an insight broadly shared across the theoretical spectrum. Yglesias still thinks that reading Marx is important, however, on account of his unique insight that “wealth and power have a tremendous ability to gin up self-justifying narratives.”

Probably the most helpful analysis of the question (of the one’s I’m linking to, anyway) comes from this recent lecture by Brad DeLong:

Marx the economist was among the very first to recognize that the fever-fits of financial crisis and depression that afflict modern market economies were not a passing phase or something that could easily be cured, but rather a deep disability of the system – as we are being reminded once again right now, this time with Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers in the Hot Seats. Marx pointed the spotlight in the right direction here. However, I don’t think that his theory of business cycles and financial crises holds up. Marx thought that business cycles and financial crises were evidence of the long-term unsustainability of the system. We modern neoliberal economists view it not as a fatal lymphoma but rather like malaria: Keynesianism – or monetarism, if you prefer – gives us the tools to transform the business cycle from a life-threatening economic yellow fever of the society into the occasional night sweats and fevers: that with economic policy quinine we can manage if not banish the disease.

Actually the whole DeLong lecture is probably worth your time.