Bobo is showing off. Bobo made me look up a word: precariat. He pretends he gives a crap in “The American Precariat” and gurgles that declining mobility may be symptomatic of a broader crisis of faith in the American dream. Nary a word about what might have caused this, of course… Mr. Cohen, in “The B.D.S. Threat,” says the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement targets the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Mr. Nocera, in “Dogged By Data Theft,” tells how bankers and retailers have left American consumers less secure. Mr. Bruni has a question in “Panic in the Locker Room!”: Let me get this, um, straight: Some N.F.L. players can withstand crushing tackles but not an openly gay teammate? It’s interesting to note that since yesterday evening most of the comments operation at the Times is down — not a comment anywhere, and no way available to leave one, at least for me when I log onto their site. The only place I found comments available was Krugman’s blog. Maybe because he’s not afraid of them… Here’s Bobo:
When foreign visitors used to describe American culture, they generally settled on different versions of one trait: energy. Whether driven by crass motivations or spiritual ones, Americans, visitors agreed, worked more frantically, moved more and switched jobs more than just about anybody else on earth.
That’s changing. In the past 60 years, for example, Americans have become steadily less mobile. In 1950, 20 percent of Americans moved in a given year. Now, it’s around 12 percent. In the 1950s and 1960s, people lived in the same house for an average of five years; now people live in the same house for an average of 8.6 years. When it comes to geographic mobility, we are now at historic lows, no more mobile than people in Denmark or Finland.
Why is this happening? A few theories offer partial explanations, but only partial ones.
It is true that we are an aging nation and older people tend to move less. But today’s young people are much less mobile than young people from earlier generations. Between the 1980s and the 2000s alone, mobility among young adults dropped by 41 percent.
It’s also true that many people are locked into homes with underwater values. But as Timothy Noah pointed out in Washington Monthly, mobility among renters is down just as sharply as mobility among homeowners.
It’s also true that labor markets are getting more homogeneous. It used to be that the jobs found in Pittsburgh were different than the ones found in Atlanta. But now they are more similar, so there is less reason to move from one city to another. But that also fails to explain the tremendous drops over decades.
No, a big factor here is a loss in self-confidence. It takes faith to move. You are putting yourself through temporary expense and hardship because you have faith that over the long run you will slingshot forward. Many highly educated people, who are still moving in high numbers, have that long-term faith. Less-educated people often do not.
One of the oddities of the mobility that does exist is that people are not moving to low-unemployment/high-income areas. Instead they are moving to lower-income areas with cheap housing. That is to say, they are less likely to endure temporary housing hardship for the sake of future opportunity. They are more likely to move to places that offer immediate comfort even if the long-term income prospects are lower.
This loss of faith is evident in other areas of life. Fertility rates, a good marker of confidence, are down. Even accounting for cyclical changes, people are less likely to voluntarily vacate a job in search of a better one. Only 46 percent of white Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, the lowest levels in the history of the General Social Survey.
Peter Beinart wrote a fascinating piece for National Journal, arguing that Americans used to have much more faith in capitalism, a classless society, America’s role in the world and organized religion than people from Europe. But now American attitudes resemble European attitudes, and when you just look at young people, American exceptionalism is basically gone.
Fifty percent of Americans over 65 believe America stands above all others as the greatest nation on earth. Only 27 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe that. As late as 2003, Americans were more likely than Italians, Brits and Germans to say the “free market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world.” By 2010, they were slightly less likely than those Europeans to embrace capitalism.
Thirty years ago, a vast majority of Americans identified as members of the middle class. But since 1988, the percentage of Americans who call themselves members of the “have-nots” has doubled. Today’s young people are more likely to believe success is a matter of luck, not effort, than earlier generations.
These pessimistic views bring to mind a concept that’s been floating around Europe: the Precariat. According to the British academic Guy Standing, the Precariat is the growing class of people living with short-term and part-time work with precarious living standards and “without a narrative of occupational development.” They live with multiple forms of insecurity and are liable to join protest movements across the political spectrum.
The American Precariat seems more hunkered down, insecure, risk averse, relying on friends and family but without faith in American possibilities. This fatalism is historically uncharacteristic of America.
No one response is going to reverse the trend, but Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute believes government should offer moving vouchers to the long-term unemployed so they can chase opportunity. If we could induce more people to Go West! (or South, East or North) in search of opportunity, maybe the old future-oriented mind-set would return.
Next up we have Mr. Cohen:
Secretary of State John Kerry caused outrage in Israel recently when he declared: “For Israel there’s an increasing delegitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it. There is talk of boycotts and other kinds of things. Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable. It’s illusionary.”
Members of the Israeli government were indignant. Israel, they declared, will not negotiate under pressure. Advice givers, stay away! But Kerry was only repeating what Israel’s own finance minister, Yair Lapid, had already said: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement is beginning to bite.
I am a strong supporter of a two-state peace. The messianic idea of Greater Israel, occupying all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, must wither. Jews, having suffered for most of their history as a minority, cannot, as a majority now in their state, keep their boots on the heads of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank any longer.
Palestinians must accept the permanence of the state of Israel within the 1967 lines with equitable land swaps. Competitive victimhood should cede to collaborative viability for the nation states of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. Narratives and revealed truth do not a future make. They perpetuate the imprisoning past.
So, in theory, B.D.S. might be a positive factor. When the largest Dutch pension fund and the largest Danish bank withdraw investments from, or cease business with, Israeli banks because of their operations in the settlements, they send a powerful signal to Israel to get out of the West Bank.
Yet these developments make me uneasy for a simple reason: I do not trust the B.D.S. movement. Its stated aim is to end the occupation, secure “full equality” for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and fight for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees. The first objective is essential to Israel’s future. The second is laudable. The third, combined with the second, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This is the hidden agenda of B.D.S., its unacceptable subterfuge: beguile, disguise and suffocate.
The anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa contained no such ambiguity. As Diana Shaw Clark, an activist on behalf of a two-state solution, wrote to me in an email, “People affiliated with divestment in South Africa had no agenda other than the liberation and enfranchisement of an oppressed majority.”
This is not the case in Israel, where the triple objective of B.D.S. would, in Clark’s words, “doom Israel as a national home for the Jews.” Mellifluous talk of democracy and rights and justice masks the B.D.S. objective that is nothing other than the end of the Jewish state for which the United Nations gave an unambiguous mandate in 1947. The movement’s anti-Zionism can easily be a cover for anti-Semitism.
It would be gratifying if Israelis and Palestinians could learn overnight to live together as equal citizens in some United States of the Holy Land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, a binational and democratic secular state that resolves their differences. But it is an illusion to think this could ever happen, the one-state pipe dream. The fault lines are too deep. A single state cannot mark its Day of Independence and Day of Catastrophe on the same date.
One state, however conceived, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state, the core of the Zionist idea. Jews must not allow this to happen. Trust your neighbor? Been there, tried that.
The so-called right of return of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven out in the 1948 war (whose descendants now number in the millions) cannot be exercised, any more than the Jews of Baghdad and Cairo have deeds to return home. There can, and should be, agreed compensation for the dispossessed, but there cannot be a reversal of history. The “right” is in fact a claim.
A Jewish national home is needed. History demonstrated that. It must now be reinvented. For that, the corrosive occupation has to end and with it the settlement industry.
B.D.S. is a wake-up call. I oppose it because I do not trust it. That does not mean, as Lapid intimated, that Israel can ignore its message.
Israel can only be a state of laws again when the lawless enterprise beyond the Green Line ends. West of that line, Israel is a democracy affording greater minority rights than other regional states (Omar Barghouti, a B.D.S. leader, has a master’s degree from Tel Aviv University). But that is not enough. All citizens should enjoy equality in the Jews’ national home, a state where civil marriage becomes possible, state and synagogue are divorced, and Israelis are permitted to identify themselves as Israelis if they so wish, rather than as Jews or Arabs or Druze — that is as undifferentiated citizens.
Next up is Mr. Nocera:
“What is stopping us from moving to this kind of technology?” asked a perplexed Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota. It was last Tuesday, and the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Klobuchar sits, was holding a hearing about the recent breaches of Target and Neiman Marcus in which the data from tens of millions of credit and debit cards were stolen.
The technology Klobuchar had in mind is known as chip-and-PIN. The chip refers to a computer chip embedded in a credit or debit card that encrypts data and authenticates the card. The PIN refers to a personal identification number the customer has to use, which, in effect, authenticates the user.
It is no big secret that, from a security standpoint, a chip-and-PIN system is far superior to the magnetic stripe that is the backbone of the credit and debit card systems in the United States. Criminal gangs in Eastern Europe have learned how to penetrate many computer systems of American retailers and “skim” credit card data at the moment a transaction takes place. That kind of theft would be virtually impossible with a chip-and-PIN system.
Nor is it news that much of the rest of the world long ago adopted chip-and-PIN technology; according to MasterCard, 79 percent of terminals in Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean are “chip-enabled,” a figure that rises to 95 percent in parts of Europe. But, inexplicably, this clearly superior technology has not yet penetrated the United States.
Or maybe it’s not so inexplicable. The main stumbling block, it would appear, is that retailers and bankers have spent way too much time blaming each other for the growing data theft problem — and not nearly enough time worrying about the people whose data have been stolen. Namely, us.
“Why did the U.S. stick with the mag stripe?” said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report. It may not have been best for consumers, but it was “cheap and efficient” for the banks and retailers. What’s more, banks and retailers had a certain amount of fraud built into their business models. Thus, while a hacked card brought big headaches to the customer, it was just another cost of doing business for the other entities involved in the transaction.
Even as Europe and Canada were moving to a chip-and-PIN system, the American banks held back. Fraud at the point of sale dropped dramatically in countries with chip-and-PIN. Still the U.S. held back. Every time there was a push to adopt chip-and-PIN, both retailers and bankers would do the math and come to the same conclusion: It wasn’t worth the trouble.
And when a company did try to adopt it? That’s what Target tried to do around 2003 — only to discover that it was largely a waste of money if nobody else went along. In Europe and elsewhere governments had pushed companies to adopt chip-and-PIN. In the U.S., the banks and retailers needed to be able to work together — spending billions both to manufacture new cards and install new terminals that could read the cards.
There are two things that are likely to change the equation. The first is the Target breach, which, one expert told me, could involve as many as one in every 10 cards in circulation in the United States. Many of the cards are debit cards, which means if the card is used by a crook to make a purchase, it comes directly out of the customer’s bank account. (Target has vowed to indemnify any customer who has losses as a result of the breach.) The Target breach has shown the reputational hit a company can take when its system is breached. It also has had business consequences: the last two weeks of the Christmas season were lousy ones for Target — and the publicity from the breach is considered a prime culprit.
Second, though, Visa and MasterCard have both set forth timetables that attempt to institute the adoption of embedded-chips technology by the fall of 2015. Although the timetables are not mandatory, they would essentially shift the liability for card losses on to whichever side — the bank or the retailer — has the least secure technology. Although there were various calls for delaying the implementation yet again, those calls stopped once the Target breach took place.
Which is not to say that the banks and the retailers are now seeing eye to eye. When I spoke to a bank lobbyist last week, he told me that the real problem was “a weakness in the internal computer system of large companies that sophisticated criminals have learned to exploit.” The retailers, meanwhile, retort that the banks have continually come up with ideas short of chip-and-PIN, none of which ever worked for long before the bad guys figured how to breach them.
The only thing missing from these arguments is the consumer.
And now we get to Mr. Bruni:
A news flash for every straight man out there: You’ve been naked in front of a gay man.
In fact you’ve been naked, over the course of your life, in front of many gay men, at least if you have more than a few years on you. And here you are — uninjured, uncorrupted, intact. The earth still spins. The sun rises and sets.
Maybe it was in gym class, long ago. Maybe at the health club more recently. Or maybe when you played sports at the high school level, the college level, later on. Whether we gay guys are one in 10 or one in 25, it’s a matter of chance: At some point, one of us was within eyeshot when you stripped down.
And you know what? He probably wasn’t checking you out. He certainly wasn’t beaming special gay-conversion gamma rays at you. That’s why you weren’t aware of his presence and didn’t immediately go out and buy a more expensive moisturizer and a disc of Judy Garland’s greatest hits. His purpose mirrored yours. He was changing clothes and showering. It’s a locker room, for heaven’s sake. Not last call at the Rawhide.
On Sunday evening, in a story in The Times by John Branch and on ESPN, a college football star named Michael Sam came out. Because Sam is almost certain to be drafted, he could soon be the first openly gay active player in the National Football League — in any of the four major professional sports in the United States.
Most reactions from the sports world were hugely positive, even inspirational.
Some were not.
“It’d chemically imbalance an N.F.L. locker room,” an N.F.L. personnel assistant, speaking anonymously, said to Sports Illustrated. I think steroids, Adderall and painkillers have already done a pretty thorough job of that, and on the evidence of his comment, they’ve addled minds in the process.
Sports Illustrated quoted an unnamed assistant coach who also brought up the fabled sanctum of Tinactin and testosterone. “There’s nothing more sensitive than the heartbeat of the locker room,” he said. “If you knowingly bring someone in there with that sexual orientation, how are the other guys going to deal with it?”
To his question, a few of my own: When did the locker room become such a delicate ecosystem? Is it inhabited by athletes or orchids? And how is it that gladiators who don’t flinch when a 300-pound mountain of flesh in shoulder pads comes roaring toward them start to quiver at the thought of a homosexual under a nearby nozzle? They may be physical giants, but at least a few of them are psychological pipsqueaks.
And they’re surprisingly blunt and Paleolithic. When NFL Network’s Andrea Kremer recently brought up the possibility of an openly gay player with Jonathan Vilma, a New Orleans Saints linebacker, he said: “Imagine if he’s the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me.”
“How am I supposed to respond?” Vilma added.
Well, a squeal would be unmanly, Mace might not be enough and N.F.L. players tend to use their firearms away from the stadium, so I’d advise him to do what countless females of our species have done with leering males through history. Step away. Move on. Dare I say woman up?
Or Vilma could use a line suggested by the sports journalist Cyd Zeigler on the website Outsports.com: “I’m so telling your boyfriend you stole a peek.”
The anxiety about the locker room makes no sense in terms of the kind of chaotic setting it often is, with all sorts of people rushing through, including reporters of both sexes. It’s a workplace, really, and more bedlam than boudoir.
The anxiety depends on stereotypes of gay men as creatures of preternatural libido. (Thanks, but I lunge faster for pasta than for porn.)
And it’s illogical. “Every player knows that they are playing or have played with gay guys,” John Amaechi, a former pro basketball player who came out after his retirement, told me. It’s just that those gay guys didn’t or haven’t identified themselves. Why would doing so make them a greater threat? Wouldn’t an openly gay athlete have a special investment in proving that there’s zero to worry about?
Michael Sam proved as much at the University of Missouri, where teammates learned of his sexual orientation before their most recent season. They finished 12-2, and are publicly praising him so far. Nothing about trembling or cowering in the showers.
The person who raises that fear, Amaechi said, “is a bigot finally falling over the cliff and grasping for any straw that might keep their purchase. When every rational argument is gone, you go with that.”
