Sociologists are Scared to Study Asian-Americans

From Heterodox Academy, a podcast from a Professor of Sociology was studies Asian-Americans. That’s not a great career choice for an aspiring young sociologist, since that subject is a matter of intense embarrassment to the leftists in the profession. Some excerpts.

I’ve heard of debates about why sociology is so liberal and there’s some say it’s selectivity—liberals are the people interested in going into sociology…. My perception has been that within the field of sociology, the rewards for people who don’t conform to the conventional wisdom are slim, and I’ve known good sociologists doing good research who did not get tenure because their work didn’t fit into the paradigm very well.

I’ll be frank with you—I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough for the ASR [American Sociological Review]to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to Whites. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom, the methodological standards are raised. But when you argue that there’s discrimination against Asians, the methodological standards are relaxed.

A lot of courses don’t seriously talk about Asian Americans systematically so you’re not provided with evidence or consistent data to test this paradigm for Asians. For example, Erik Olin Wright, former president of the American Sociological Association, has an intro textbook “How America Really Works.” And in the whole chapter on race there’s not a single datum on Asian Americans. And that’s “How America Works” is the name. It’s not uncommon for these data to be deleted, and they’ll talk about this or that particular instance of racism…. They’ll talk about instances of discrimination but they won’t go over systematic statistics which suggest that Asians are actually less likely to be murdered than other groups.

The reason for this is rather obvious, and is bluntly stated by a commenter:

I live in a community that is plurality Asian. I have worked alongside Asians all of my life and have many Asian friends, including my business partner. In my experience, they get married, stay married, and have children in wedlock. The ones I know are excellent parents and grandparents. Their work ethic is off the wall. Asian-Americans I know endorse “bourgeois values” more strongly than nearly every other ethnic group. Their endorsement of bourgeois values also threatens those who call those values racist.

Asian-American success is proof that the Melting Pot works. The hard left can’t stand that.

Even the “heterodox” people at Heterodox Academy shy away from bluntly saying why this is: the contrast between the success of Asians and the failure of blacks is stunning. And if we leave aside a fringe who attribute this to black racial inferiority, we have to face the ugly truth that culture matters. The culture of the inner city ghetto, with the vast majority of kids born out of wedlock, and absurdly high crime rates, condemns black people to inferior status.

Culture matters.

But the leftist hostility to “bourgeois values” goes beyond that. Bourgeois values create strong institutions (family, church, voluntary associations) that are a source of social capital and which rival the state. Leftists (the New Class) have a class interest in the expansion of state power, since the expansion of state power is the expansion of New Class power.

Thus, for the New Class, the role of “marginalized groups” in society is to fail, to articulate grievances, and to demand government benefits. To behave otherwise is to commit treason.

2011: Bernie Sanders Lauds Venezuela for Closing Income Gap

That’s right, he did so in a statement on his Senate website. The statement is still there as of this writing..

Sanders said:

These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?

Yes, incomes are likely to be equal where everybody is poor. Except, of course, for the elite socialists whose incomes may not be huge, but who have privileged access to the scarce goods and services that ordinary citizens don’t.

That’s the dirty little secret of the socialists. They expect to be among those who get the good doctors under a single payer system of socialized medicine. They expect to get the desirable flats when government assigns people housing. They expect to have the connections and political clout to get the better consumer goods and services. While enjoying all of this, they expect to bask in the righteous feeling that social justice has been achieved.

Get More Income by Soaking the Rich?

At the moment, Obama and the Democrats seem to be hanging tough on demanding that tax rates on high earners be increased.

This in spite of the fact that the president’s own commission (Simpson/Bowles) recommended reducing top tax rates, and gaining revenue by closing loopholes.

But the notion that higher rates will produce more revenue is just grossly simplistic. Some evidence comes from the United Kingdom.

Almost two-thirds of the country’s million-pound earners disappeared from Britain after the introduction of the 50p top rate of tax, figures have disclosed.

In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million to HM Revenue and Customs.

This number fell to just 6,000 after Gordon Brown introduced the new 50p top rate of income tax shortly before the last general election.

The figures have been seized upon by the Conservatives to claim that increasing the highest rate of tax actually led to a loss in revenues for the Government.

It is believed that rich Britons moved abroad or took steps to avoid paying the new levy by reducing their taxable incomes.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, announced in the Budget earlier this year that the 50p top rate will be reduced to 45p from next April.

Since the announcement, the number of people declaring annual incomes of more than £1 million has risen to 10,000.

However, the number of million-pound earners is still far below the level recorded even at the height of the recession and financial crisis.

Last night, Harriet Baldwin, the Conservative MP who uncovered the latest figures, said: “Labour’s ideological tax hike led to a tax cull of millionaires.

Far from raising funds, it actually cost the UK £7 billion in lost tax revenue.

“Labour now needs to admit that their policies resulted in millionaires paying less tax and come clean about whether they would reintroduce this failed policy if they were in power.”

A less journalistic analysis of the effect of the high tax rates reaches generally the same conclusion.

• The 50 per cent additional rate of income tax was introduced on 6 April 2010. It was the first increase in the highest rate of tax in the UK for over 30 years, and was expected to yield around £2.5 billion. However, because of the uncertainty regarding how those affected would respond, and its impact on the economy, the yield estimates were highly uncertain.
• This report provides the first comprehensive ex-post assessment of the additional rate yield using a range of evidence including the 2010-11 Self Assessment returns. The analysis shows that there was a considerable behavioural response to the rate change, including a substantial amount of forestalling: around £16 billion to £18 billion of income is estimated to have been brought forward to 2009-10 to avoid the introduction of the additional rate of tax.
• The modelling suggests the underlying behavioural response was greater than estimated previously in Budget 2009 and in March Budget 2010, decreasing the pre-behavioural yield by at least 83 per cent. This result is also consistent with that contained in the Mirrlees review, and suggests the additional rate is a highly distortionary form of taxation.

Bottom line: the increase in the tax rate distorted people’s behavior, causing them to arrange to reap income when the tax rate was lower, and had a major disincentive effect, causing people do things (work less, retreat to tax shelters) that reduced the yield by 83 percent compared to a “static scoring” (one that assumes that people faced with a higher tax rate act exactly as they would if faced with a lower rate).

But the truth is, the demand for higher tax rates has nothing to do with raising revenue.

It’s an attack on the social class that can earn high incomes in markets. And it is mounted not by the poor, but by the New Class: people such as academics, journalists, political activists and government bureaucrats who prosper as government grows.

Since their orientation is not toward producing for the market, and their incomes are lower than those who are similiarly qualified and educated and do produce for the market, they resent people who earn, in markets, higher incomes than they do.

So they demonize them (“vulture capitalists”) and try to seize their income. But the point is not really to seize their income and put it to uses the New Class prefers. It is much more simply to level down a rival social class.

Liberals and Trains: The Real Reason

From George Will, who rehearses the fact that trains are massive financial sink holes, and goes on to explain the cultural and ideological dimension:

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.

Time was, the progressive cry was “Workers of the world unite!” or “Power to the people!” Now it is less resonant: “All aboard!”

Obama’s Rail Boondoggle

Washington Post: Scott Walker is Right About Rail

Actually, they don’t mention the name of the Wisconsin governor, but the message is clear. This, by the way, is not some conservative writing an Op-Ed for the Post, it’s an editorial.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S fiscal 2012 budget includes $8 billion for high-speed rail next year and $53 billion over six years. In the president’s view, the United States needs to spend big on high-speed rail so that we can catch up with Europe, Japan - and you-know-who. “China is building faster trains and newer airports,” the president warned in his State of the Union address. But of all the reasons to build high-speed rail in the United States, keeping up with the international Joneses may be one of the worst. In fact, experience abroad has repeatedly raised questions about the cost-effectiveness of high-speed rail.

China would seem to be an especially dubious role model, given the problems its high-speed rail system has been going through of late. Beijing just fired its railway minister amid corruption allegations; this is the sort of thing that can happen when a government suddenly starts throwing $100 billion at a gargantuan public works project, as China did with rail in 2008. Sleek as they may be, China’s new fast trains are too expensive for ordinary workers to ride, so they are not achieving their ostensible goal of moving passengers from the roads to the rails. Last year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences asked the government to reconsider its high-speed rail plans because of the system’s huge debts.

Of course, if the Chinese do finish their system, it is likely to require operating subsidies for many years - possibly forever. A recent World Bank report on high-speed rail systems around the world noted that ridership forecasts rarely materialize and warned that “governments contemplating the benefits of a new high-speed railway, whether procured by public or private or combined public-private project structures, should also contemplate the near-certainty of copious and continuing budget support for the debt.”

That’s certainly what happened in Japan, where only a single bullet-train line, between Japan and Osaka, breaks even; it’s what happened in France, where only the Paris-Lyon line is in the black. Taiwan tried a privately financed system, but it ended up losing so much money that the government had to bail it out in 2009.

When it comes to high-speed rail, Europe, Japan and Taiwan have two natural advantages over every region of the United States, with the possible exception of the Northeast Corridor - high gas taxes and high population density. If high-speed rail turned into a money pit under relatively favorable circumstances, imagine the subsidies it would require here. Every dollar spent to subsidize high-speed rail is a dollar that cannot be spent modernizing highways, expanding the freight rail system or creating private-sector jobs. The Obama administration insists we dare not lag the rest of the world in high-speed rail. Actually, this is a race everyone loses.

It’s long been obvious to us that the mania for rail can’t be explained in terms of rational policy analysis.

Some, of course, is just old-fashioned pork barrel politics.

But most of the explanation is cultural. Liberal elites -- the New Class -- see cars, highways and suburbs as representing the uppity nature of ordinary Americans. They go where they want to go. They want to live some place with green space that they own (a yard) and a free market economy allows it.

They don’t respect their “betters” -- the liberal elites. The latter, who are always convinced they know better, lack the ability to plan and control the lives of ordinary people.

Of course, Obama’s high speed rail project would not change the lives of Americans perceptibly, since so few people would ride.

But, for the New Class, striking a symbolic blow against the populist culture of this nation seems well worth billions of other people’s money.

Socialism: The Peasant Mentality

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.

In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off.

Citizens of ancient Greece and Italy soon proved more prosperous and free than either the tribal folk to the north and west, or the imperial subjects to the south and east. The success of later Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is testament to this legacy of the freedom of the individual in the widest political and economic sense.

We seem to be forgetting that lately — though Mao Zedong’s redistributive failures in China, or present-day bankrupt Greece, should warn us about what happens when government tries to enforce an equality of result rather than of opportunity.

Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, for some reason America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama’s “spread the wealth” slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama’s “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and creates more regulations, the more those who create wealth are sitting out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks and either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit largely confiscated through higher taxes.

No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few don’t get richer.

That limited-good mind-set expects that businesses will agree that they now make enough money and so have no need to pursue any more profits at the expense of others. Therefore, they will gladly still hire the unemployed and buy new equipment — as they pay higher health care or income taxes to a government that knows far better how to redistribute their income to the more needy or deserving.

This peasant approach to commerce also assumes that businesses either cannot understand administration signals or can do nothing about them. So who cares that in the Chrysler bankruptcy settlement, quite arbitrarily the government put the unions in front of the legally entitled lenders?

Health insurers should not mind that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just warned them to keep their profits down and their mouths shut — or face exclusion from health care markets.

I suppose that no corporation should worry that the government arbitrarily announced — without benefit a law or court ruling — that it wanted BP to put up $20 billion in cleanup costs for the Gulf spill.

What optimistic Americans used to call a rising tide that lifts all boats is now once again derided as trickle-down economics. In other words, a newly peasant-minded America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier.

The present economy suggests that it is surely getting its wish.

Hanson’s point is consistent with the thinking of famous political theorist Louis Hartz, who in a book called The Liberal Tradition in America (“liberal” as in free markets and free people) observed that socialism in Europe did not grow out of capitalism. It rather grew out of the feudal past of the continent. It was simply the peasant mentality applied to modern industrial society.

Of course, the lust for redistribution in the U.S. today does not come from the poor, and certainly not from the working class. It comes from the New Class — people in government, academia, the media and activist groups who use redistribution as a tool to attack a rival elite, the business class.

It is not, in other words, the project of people who value equality, but rather the project of a new elite, an elite perfectly personified by the Obama Administration.

Obama is Not Hard to Understand

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, mentions a couple of professors who have provided a laudatory analysis of Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is a pragmatist, James Kloppenberg tells the New York Times. No, he doesn’t mean Obama is practical-minded; no one thinks that anymore. In fact, Kloppenberg, a Harvard historian, disparages the “vulgar pragmatism” of Bill Clinton while praising Obama’s “philosophical pragmatism.”

Of course, another professor climes in with an equally laudatory comment:

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

Taranto is unimpressed that professors like Obama.

One assumes that Andrew Hartman is a serious scholar, although one doesn’t know for sure because one has never heard of him. Barack Obama, by contrast, is a scholarly dilettante, a professional politician who has moonlighted as a university instructor.

Yet Hartman’s remark about Obama’s “academic background” is revealing. Professors imagine Obama is one of them because he shares their attitudes: their politically correct opinions, their condescending view of ordinary Americans, their belief in their own authority as an intellectual elite. He is the ideal product of the homogeneous world of contemporary academia. In his importance, they see a reflection of their self-importance.

Kloppenberg’s thesis reminds us of another elaborate attempt at explaining Obama: Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” D’Souza, like Kloppenberg, imputes to Obama a coherent philosophy, in D’Souza’s case “anticolonialism.” It is a needlessly elaborate explanation for an unremarkable set of facts.

Occam’s razor suggests that Obama is a mere conformist — someone who absorbed every left-wing platitude he encountered in college and never seems to have seriously questioned any of them. Kloppenberg characterizes Obama as a skeptic, not a true believer. We’re not sure he has an active enough mind to be either one.

Obama: Giving Liberal Ideas a Try-Out For the First Time in Decades

From Matt Welch at Reason.com:

In just about every speech at their 2008 convention, Democrats promised voters that a change in the White House would, in Barack Obama’s formulation, restore “our moral standing” in the world. Replace the unilateralist cowboy at the top with a humbler multilateralist, and the path would finally be cleared to fix vexing international issues such as curbing carbon emissions and dealing with the mullahs in Iran. Like many of the party faithful’s long-nurtured beliefs, this hope has disintegrated on contact with reality.

“America is losing the free world,” said a January headline in the Financial Times. While that statement is exaggerated, the sentiment behind it has been gaining traction around the globe, especially in the wake of the climate conference debacle in Copenhagen. It’s not just that the less confrontational American president has been unable to deliver results. He can’t even get his phone calls returned.

“On the last day of the [Copenhagen] talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India—but failed each time,” Gideon Rachman wrote in the Financial Times piece. “The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport. So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India.”

It was easy for many Democrats to believe, during the nightmare years of “freedom fries,” that George W. Bush alone was to blame for the diplomatic prickliness between, say, Washington and Paris. But the basic conditions for American foreign policy have more to do with America’s outsized position in the world than with any particular politicians. Bill Clinton tangled constantly with the French, and now a visibly irritated President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone within a year from vying for Obama’s attentions to taking (in the words of a competing politician) an openly “anti-Obama position.”

Obama’s approach was supposed to produce a more cooperative Tehran and Moscow, fewer terrorists in the Muslim world, and vast new initiatives to fight global poverty. Instead, Iran has murdered dissenters while speeding up its nuclear program, Russia hasn’t discernibly budged even after the U.S. abandoned its missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, a Muslim suicide bomber was stopped at the last minute from blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas, and global gatherings have produced even less concrete action than usual.

These developments illustrate a phenomenon that has been playing out across a variety of public policy areas: Progressive Democrats, after being outfoxed by Ronald Reagan, triangulated to the policy margins by Bill Clinton, then routed under the first six years of George W. Bush, are having many of the nostrums they championed during the wilderness years tested in the real world for the first time in decades. The initial results of this long-delayed peer review have been a shock to the progressive system.

The Copenhagen crackup was a dream killer in more ways than one. Not only did the breakdown give the lie to the notion that a cranky Texas oilman was the single greatest impediment to international cooperation and enlightened environmental policy; it laid waste to the argument that yoking the developing world to a “do as we say, not as we did” policy of energy consumption will somehow prove to be an economic and environmental “win-win.” If that’s true, the leaders of India and China—the latter of which has been serially praised for its green-energy initiatives by the likes of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—certainly don’t believe it. No amount of international do-goodism is going to prevent countries from acting in what they perceive to be their own self-interest.

Obama and the Democrats have been peddling a similar win-win line about the creation of up to 5 million “green jobs” in America, through a combination of cap-and-trade carbon permits, home weatherization, clean coal, higher gas mileage standards, environmental regulation, and various renewable-energy mandates. The “green jobs” political juggernaut has been credited to Van Jones, who was obliged to resign as Obama’s “Green Czar” last summer after reports surfaced that he’d signed a petition supporting an investigation of Bush’s involvement in 9/11. What’s interesting about Jones’ beautiful-sounding concept is that even its chief supporters admit there’s no evidence the theory is true. Which is hardly surprising, since most of Obama’s proposed environmental policies involve making energy more expensive while using more tax dollars to subsidize expensive clean energy sources. As The New Yorker put it in a long, flattering profile of Jones in January 2009, “the mechanics of creating green jobs—or even what jobs should qualify for the title—have yet to be worked out.”

The debate over these phantom jobs, against a backdrop of double-digit unemployment, will likely suck up the political oxygen in Washington after the protracted health care debate finally wheezes to a close. But Americans already have found empty pots at the end of other Democratic rainbows.

The $789 billion stimulus package of February 2009, thanks to a theoretical “multiplier” that would convert federal dollars into more than their worth in job creation, was supposed to (according to administration economists) “create or save” 3.5 million jobs and prevent unemployment from reaching as high as 9 percent by the end of 2010. Instead, joblessness shot through the 10 percent barrier before the end of 2009, and the government’s own tracking of the jobs allegedly created or saved has become a laughingstock with its double counting and imaginary ZIP codes.

What about the lobbying scourge that Democrats (like all good opposition parties) opposed so vociferously in 2008? Progressive theory holds that regulation of K Street, as opposed to a cutback in overall regulation, is the key to “change the culture of corruption” in Washington, as candidate Obama repeatedly promised to do. How’d that work out in practice? In December Politico reported that “Washington’s influence industry is on track to shatter last year’s record $3.3 billion spent to lobby Congress and the rest of the federal government—and that’s with a down economy and about 1,500 fewer registered lobbyists in town.”

In the truer-believing regions of the progressive political world, the broad agenda of carbon price hikes, centralized health care, greater regulation, increased taxes, and government-mandated diversity in boardrooms are not just sound and moral policy. They are inherently popular, if only the usual obstacles to justice and reform can be neutralized or removed.

Of course, liberal Democrats are intent on “neutralizing” and “removing” such “obstacles” by shutting up talk radio with the Fairness Doctrine, demonizing the Tea Party movement, and bullying potential opposition (health insurance companies, drug companies) into compliance.

Such fantasies can serve as a salve when you live on the margins of the policy debate. And as long as you remain on the sidelines, the underlying proposals tend to go largely unchallenged. But now that progressive economic thought has its first real foothold in Washington since the 1970s, many long-marginalized ideas are being dusted off for real-world testing, from taxing stock transactions to “getting people out of their cars.” If we’re lucky, those debates will take place before the ideas are cemented into law. Better yet, maybe the growing unpopularity of central planning will dissuade the enthusiasts from inflicting their experiments on the rest of us in the first place.

The problem, of course, is that the liberal-left New Class lives to inflict its experiments on the rest of us. The power, influence, prestige and incomes of the group are tied up in using politics. So they won’t tire of that.

They will always be a threat to a free society, and they will always need to be fought off. Happily, the most immediately threatening of their power grabs -- the attempt to seize control of the health care system -- has been defeated.

Globalization Helps the Poor

From Alvaro Vargas Llosa, and account of a conference he attended where leftists derided free trade.

MONTERREY, Mexico—Is global capitalism making the poor even poorer, or is it in fact rescuing millions of people out of their misery?

I recently had the chance to participate in a series of debates here about this issue organized by Foreign Policy magazine and Letras Libres, a Mexican cultural publication. Nothing I heard at that meeting changed my conviction that the glass is half-full despite the doomsayers who predict horrific calamities.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, poverty has been significantly reduced throughout the world. Two hundred years ago, the average income per person worldwide was the equivalent of less than $2 a day; the figure is $17 today. This fact is relevant to the current discussion on globalization because, even though the information technology revolution, biotechnology, the emergence of new world players and outsourcing may give us the impression that we are in the midst of something entirely new, we are simply witnessing a new phase in the process of innovation that is the market economy—and this began a few hundred years ago.

The fact that 20 percent of the world’s population is extremely poor should not make us forget that millions of lives have improved dramatically in the last three decades. Illiteracy has dropped from 44 percent to 18 percent, and only three countries out of a total of 102 included in the U.N.’s Human Development Index have seen their socioeconomic conditions deteriorate. China’s economy used to represent one-26th of the average economy of the countries that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; today it represents one-sixth.

If globalization is so good, why is it that leftist activists -- including the “social justice” crowd around Marquette -- don’t like it?

The reason is simple. It’s the market helping the poor. It’s global business, and not government bureaucrats, nor political activists nor multinational organizations that are creating the benefits.

Thus the process is going on without the transfer of a massive amount of power to the people with whom the “social justice” crowd identifies.

And truth be told -- although they would never admit it, even to themselves -- those folks would rather that poor remain poor than for the poor to prosper in a way that doesn’t increase their power.

Bottled Water Now Politically Incorrect

From Slate, an observation about how snobby, trendy people are realizing that a key artifact of their lifestyle is . . . well, not politically acceptable.

In March, the San Francisco Chronicle spotted a hot new food trend in the Bay Area. Instead of offering diners a choice of still or sparkling bottled water with their (inevitably) locally grown delectables, trendoid restaurants such as Incanto, Poggio, and Nopa now offer glorified tap water. Sustainable-dining pioneer Chez Panisse has also joined the crowd, tossing Santa Lucia overboard for filtered municipal water, carbonated on-site. The reason: It takes a lot of energy to create a bottle of water and ship it from Europe to California. And so of-the-moment bistros can boost their enviro cred by giving away tap water instead of selling promiscuously marked-up bottled water. “Our whole goal of sustainability means using as little energy as we have to,” Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager of Chez Panisse, told the Chronicle. “Shipping bottles of water from Italy doesn’t make sense.”

Chez Panisse’s decision to swap Perrier for public water highlights how quickly the culture surrounding food, drink, and the environment has shifted. Not long ago, bottled water represented the height of urban sophistication. Today, bottled water is just another cog in the carbon-spewing, globe-warming industrial machine. There is a growing conflict between those who want to drink clean, pure water and those who want to breathe clean, pure air.

Until relatively recently, bottled water was a snobbish luxury good—Perrier, Evian, and San Pellegrino, fey-sounding foreign brands, seemed absurd. Thanks to our superior infrastructure—New York City’s delicious tap water is actually believed to be a competitive advantage for the city’s bagel and pizza makers—it is perfectly safe to drink the water in the United States. Given the price—for long periods of time, a gallon of bottled water cost more than a gallon of gas—it seemed silly to pay up for this plentiful commodity. And it seemed pretentious to believe that our overburdened palates should be forced to develop a preference for what is generally presumed to be a tasteless substance. The presence of water sommeliers at the Ritz-Carlton in New York and at Alain Ducasse’s New York restaurant (now closed, soon to reopen) was more novelty than a necessity.

But like other high-end comestibles—sushi, good coffee—bottled water has become democratized. According to data from the International Bottled Water Association, bottled water in 2003 became the second-largest American beverage category. As soda sales stagnated, bottled water sales took off. Total U.S. consumption rose nearly 60 percent between 2001 and 2006. Last year, industry revenues were an estimated $11 billion. Per-capita consumption has risen almost 50 percent from 2001, to 27.6 gallons in 2006. Globally, the United States is the largest consumer of bottled water, although on a per-capita basis, we were only 10th in 2005. (That year, Italians consumed almost twice as much bottled water per capita as Americans.)

Bottled water’s swift transformation from glass-encased luxury good to déclassé, plastic-wrapped menace was entirely predictable. Over the past century, we’ve seen numerous examples of products that, so long as they were available only to a select few, were viewed by those elites as brilliant, life-improving developments: the automobile, coal-generated electricity, air conditioning. But once companies figured out how to make them available to the masses, the elites suddenly condemned them as dangerous and socially destructive.

So long as only a few people were drinking Evian, Perrier, and San Pellegrino, bottled water wasn’t perceived as a societal ill. Now that everybody is toting bottles of Poland Spring, Aquafina, and Dasani, it’s a big problem.

The yuppie lifestyle not only stakes a claim to cultural superiority, it also (we can’t help noticing) asserts the right to govern the country politically.

Thus the elitists moan and complain when people they consider their cultural inferiors — Southerners, conservative Christians, blue collar workers, people who live in Texas — get uppity and elect a President or Congress of whom the elitists disapprove. How dare people who drink tap water (or Miller Beer or iced tea) think they can govern the nation!

But the game is entirely transparent, and ordinary Americans aren’t impressed.