Good news, everyone! Being a sociopath is not immoral!

This editorial by Harry G. Frankfurt, writing for Bloomberg View, caught my attention. Especially the following paragraph:

Exaggerating the moral importance of economic equality is harmful, in other words, because it is alienating. It separates a person from his own individual reality, and leads him to focus his attention upon desires and needs that are not most authentically his own.

In other words, if you "exaggerate" the moral importance of of economic equality, you run the risk of veering away from sociopathy. So, beware! More basically, the whole editorial seems to be arguing against the strawman argument that people concerned with economic inequality on moral grounds want equality of outcomes. That is not a widely held position by people who argue about the importance of economic inequality.

Community Power Segments 01 - 05 now available here!

Community Power #5 has now aired, and I'm putting the first five segments up so you can listen to them here. As I finish the remaining segments I'll add them. The theme music is the "Apple Pickers' Reel", performed by Larry Hanks, from the Folkways Records' 1972 release Berkeley Farms: Oldtime and Country Style Music of Berkeley.

• Community Power 01 - Will Yandik, Farmers and Families for Livingston, Hudson Valley Smart Energy Coalition, and Deputy Supervisor of the Town of Livingston. Also, co-producer of this series.
• Community Power 02 - Erin Tobin, Director of Preservation at Preservation League of New York State
• Community Power 03 - Joe Gatti, Livingston Town Historian, and Will Yandik
• Community Power 04 - Pam Kline, founder of Farmers and Families for Livingston.
• Community Power 05 - Hayley Carlock, Director of Environmental Advocacy for Scenic Hudson, and Daniel P. Duthie, a lawyer representing four towns and three organizations before the Public Service Commission.

Community Power Segment #5 airing this week on WGXC 90.7 FM

This week on Community Power, I talk with Hayley Carlock, Director of Environmental Advocacy for Scenic Hudson and Daniel Duthie, a lawyer representing several towns in the Transmission Line project process. We discuss the current state of affairs in the process of approving bids for Transmission Line expansion in the Hudson Valley and the NY State Public Service Commission's technical conference: what the technical conference is for, what happened and what remains to be done. We also discuss prospects moving forward of preventing the project from happening. The interview will air in segments beginning on Wednesday, at 6:15pm on WGXC 90.7 FM and streaming online at wgxc.org. Don't miss it!

Panel in Athens NY, 8/15/2015

I'll be participating in a panel discussion with three artists and two environmental educators. It should be a pretty wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between art and advocacy, the impact of changes in our ecology on our economy, etc. Come on by if you're in the area.


Shifting Ecologies II - Panel Discussion
Aug 15, 2015: 5pm - 7pm
Athens Cultural Center
24 Second Street
Athens, NY 12015
(518) 945-2136
The panel will present and discuss the interplay between art and science on the subject of environmental change, and will conclude with a group manifestation by the river with multidisciplinary artist and activist Carrie Dashow.

Publlic Service Commission AC Transmission Cases Technical Conference, part I

The Public Service Commission has posted video of the webstream from the first part of the technical conference on the various transmission line proposals that are part of the governor's energy superhighway. I'll be talking to Hayley Carlock of Scenic Hudson and Dan Duthie of Strategic Power in the next installment of Community Power which will air on August 19th. LInks to the videos (or webstream if you catch the last one as it's happening) are below.

• Day 1, July 20, 2015.
• Day 2, July 21, 2015.
• Day 3, July 31, 2015.

No, actually #BlackLivesMatter doesn't mean #WhiteLivesDon't

Jeb(!) Bush is certainly not the only one who doesn't get (or at least dare not be seen to get in public) the point of #BlackLivesMatter. If it confuses you or gives you awkward feels, try this analogy on for size (linked to in the WaPo blog post by Dave Weigel, but originally posted on Reddit):

Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don't get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that's a wonderful sentiment -- indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad's smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn't solve the problem that you still haven't gotten any!
The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad's response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

 Got it? Good. (h/t Anne Laurie at Ballon Juice)

Bernie's not like a rolling stone

Jesse Myerson, in his article in Rolling Stone, "Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?", mentions some interesting policies Sanders ought to be running on, including the Employer of Last Resort (ELR), linking to two policy notes by my fellow Levy Economics Institute scholar Pavlina Tcherneva. Myerson ironically points out that Sanders hired Stephanie Kelton, another Levy associate, to be chief economist for the Democratic staff of the Senate Budget Committee. Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which supports the idea of the government as employer of last resort. The basic idea behind ELR is that the government would guarantee a job to anyone who can't find one in the labor market. The alphabet-soup programs of the New Deal era were a step in this direction. This is not a popular idea with the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers because it gives workers a decent fallback if they (the private employers) don't offer decent working conditions and pay. Workers might get a little uppity if that were the case. Profits might fall slightly (if you ignore the increased income flowing into workers' pockets that they would tend to spend on the things that those employers make). Anyway, I second that motion: Bernie add this to your platform!