IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS!

IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010

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This morning, as I do every morning about 5 a.m., I go to the curb, pick up my newspaper and read it as I eat my breakfast.

I read the sports page first because I wake up slowly. I love baseball and am a fan of the Chicago Cubs and the Tampa Bay Rays. The Cubs have folded but the Rays are holding steady in first place with the Yankees. My knowledge of baseball is cursory compared to my good friend, the late Robert Collins, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of every team and all their statistics.

Then I rush to the op-ed page of the St. Petersburg Times, which often stimulates my mind for the rest of the day, leading to some kind of missive.

This is the political season. We’ve just completed the primaries, where we have seen candidates acting like six graders. So, it is nice to have a respite from this nonsense and newspapers can provide it.

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Two of my favorite columnists were featured today, David Brooks and George Will. I’m comfortable with Brooks because we seem to have conceptual resonance. I like Will because he (like me) is something of a statistical freak.

Today David Brooks writes about how the United States differs in its approach to the current recession with Germany and Great Britain. He frequently makes reference to the cultural aspects of the situation, which I like, and is less an ideologue than Will, which is where I live as well.

Moreover, from Monday through Friday on PBS television I watch news from Berlin, Germany and London, England. This invites me into these countries to see how they deal with their economic and political challenges. It also gives me a different perspective to the daily world news. CNN to me is like Chinese torture.

I also read Foreign Affairs, New York Review, London Review, Time, Smithsonian, and occasionally, an article on the Internet that is recommended by a reader, and, of course, topical books by such writers as Thomas Friedman and Thomas Sowell. This dates me, but it also indicates the anchors of my perspective.

THE GERMAN WAY – DAVID BROOKS

David Brooks indicates that Germany’s stimulus package was 1.5 percent of GDP whereas the United States’ was 6 percent of GDP. Paul Krugman, whom I often agree with, but not on this point, thought the stimulus should have been bigger. He references the Great Depression and how FDR got us out of that mess with his aggressive economic stimulation. Historians now differ with Krugman’s assessment finding WWII had more to do with our economic emergence.

Brooks chooses to see the differing approach of Germany and the United States a matter of culture and values.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government have not had a walk in the park, but have stayed the course. Germany appears not only to becoming out of recession, but to be doing so with some momentum.

The German economy is more vibrant than it has been for years growing at 9 percent at the moment, mainly from exports. This has reduced unemployment and improved and stimulated spending. “The United States tried big,” Brooks writes, “but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.”

This is where culture comes in.

Germany, Brooks says, got back to its fundamentals; the US did not. Germany’s fundamentals revolve around basic research and worker training. They have also reduced cultural rigidity, which has not been easy, and taken strong measures to balance the budget.

The fundamentals of the United States are more of the swashbuckler as exemplified by Silicon Valley innovation, over-the-top speculation, and letting the fundamentals take care of themselves.

The US is a culture comfortable without boundaries, short-term thinking, and the fantasy of the American dream of every family being homeowners. The cover story in the current issue of Time (“Rethinking Homeownership," September 6, 2010) throws a monkey wrench into that myth.

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Before the bust of 2008, as we now know, tens of thousands of Americans were not only buying homes they couldn’t afford, they were often buying homes when they had no income, the idea being that they could always make money selling the house as the value was bound to go up. Not!

Prime Minister David Cameron, who like President Obama, inherited a can of worms, is showing amazing form by returning to fundamentals as Great Britain, too, is doing much better than the United States, although it has committed some of the same excesses including a huge stimulus package.

Brooks writes:

“Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions. German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well, ushering in painful but necessary reforms. America has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling.”

He sees two classes emerging: one exposes weakness in fundamentals, shatters Orthodoxies, and forms new coalitions such have been the case in Germany and Great Britain; the other is gridlock in political division, finger pointing, denying fundamental shortcomings, while aggressively fixing things for the next month, next quarter with myopic short range thinking. Brooks sees the United States in the latter category.

Incidentally, William L. Livingston IV in “Design for Prevention” (2010) exposes institutional weakness and puts meat on the bones beyond mere observation.

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OUR TRAGIC NUMBERS AND THEIR HUMAN TOLL – GEORGE WILL

George Will opens his column by alerting the reader to the fact that 10,000 baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare every day while the unemployment hovers around 10 percent.

He then quotes figures from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is nonpolitical. It sees a $10 trillion deficit between expected revenue and outlays over the next fifty years. This can all change, of course, and remedies may materialize, but it is still frightening.

Will then focuses on one specific group in America, the African American, a group he claims has been below the radar during the Obama Administration. He quotes Nathan Glazer, a sociologist, writing in the “American Interest”:

(1) By the early 2000s, more than one-third of all young black noncollege men were incarcerated;

(2) More than 60 percent of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s end in prison;

(3) For every 100 bachelor’s degrees conferred on black men, 200 were conferred on black women;

(4) Inner cities have become havens for the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and the unemployable;

(5) High out-of-wedlock birthrates exacerbate the social and economic problems of adolescent males without male parenting;

(6) This translates into disorderly neighborhoods and disorderly schools;

(7) Some young blacks see hitting the books like black males “acting white”;

(8) Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents;

(9) 24 percent of white eighth graders watch four or more hours of television a day whereas 59 percent of their black peers do (upscale children waste their time on some electronic contraption);

(10) By the age of 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in working-class family, and about 35 million more words than the average child in a welfare family with a mother who is most likely a high school dropout.

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The disappointing fact, according to Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, writing about the achievement gap, is that the gap was closing between blacks and whites in the 1970s and 1980s. They write, “Progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination.”

Barton and Coley conclude five factors have contributed to this loss of progress:

(1) The number of days students are absent from school;

(2) The number of hours students spend watching television;

(3) The number of pages read for homework;

(4) The quality and quantity of reading material;

(5) The presence of two parents in the home.

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George Will admits public policy is not the answer. The answer is the same as that advocated by David Brooks. The strength of the culture and the resonance of the values of that culture with the concomitant demands on it produce the desired returns. In our rush into the future, we have left our soul behind, which is the idea of America.

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A LITTLE COMIC RELIEF

St. Petersburg Times reporter Danny Valentine mused what could have been done with the $50 million Rick Scott spent to win the Republican nomination for Governor of Florida and the $20 million Bill McCollum spent in a losing campaign:

(1) School lunches for 87,448 school children could be paid for 356 days;

(2) Family memberships for ten years at the YMCA could be paid for 6,776 families;

(3) Four year degree programs at the University of Florida could be paid for 3,486 individual students;

(4) The city and county could hire 188 firefighters and pay their salaries for ten years.

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Not mentioned was Jeff Greene spent $25 million of his own money in an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Florida to Kendrick Meek’s $6 million. The Fisher Paradigm predicts Meeks will win the senate seat. Stay tuned.

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