Competition

Balancing collaboration and competition for a healthy society.

The ongoing discussions about race and caste in America are plumbing the depths of who we want to be as a society, and of the human psychology of hierarchy and competition. As Darwin taught, competition is inherent to life. Winners don't just feel good, they live to fight another day and reproduce another generation. Competition is naturally at the core of human psychology and development as well. We only learn to know our selves against a backdrop of challenges overcome, and people to compare ourselves with. We celebrate the winners in art, music, politics, sports, business. Excellence only exists in comparison.

America was conceived from the first as a winners versus losers project. White Europeans, already sailing all parts of the known world in search of treasure and plunder in competition with each other and the other great Asian cultures, found a virgin land. At least virgin in that it hardly offered any competition, with peoples who were summarily exterminated or enslaved. That this domination was transferred to Africa as a convenient source of losers to be utterly dominated, and ultimately branded as an inferior caste in perpetuity, is at once spiritually shameful and also a natural consequence of the competive drive that inheres in all people.

Idealists then came up with a competing dream of socialism and communism, which was to be a sweeping antidote to all these racial, economic, and social injustices. But competition inexorably reared its ugly head, moving the field of play from its traditional moorings to the political and existential levels, even to the very nature of reality and truth, as seen in the Stalinist systems, and the numerous appalling dictatorial systems that copied it. There was no getting around the need to prove that some are more equal than others.

However we run our formal systems of government and economics, we live in countless competitive settings- socially, economically, sexually, in families and outside. No one loves unconditionally, or serves without reward. So the genius of civilization has been to tame and channel competitive structures and impulses to positive ends. Fairly rewarding work, or setting a standard of one sexual partner in marriage, are examples of rough attempts to forge stable, just, and positive social outcomes out of competitive instincts that if given freer license would destroy us. 

Slavery was a system that, while mostly stable and marginally productive, was also profoundly unjust. One tribe simply declared itself dominant, and used every insidious tool of indoctrination, oppression, and violence to maintain that position. Over time, the original source of the competitive superiority, (whether that was just or not), became irrelevant, and the disparity became as unearned by the oppressors as it was undeserved by the oppressed. It served in no way to expose the natural talents of either in a fair environment of self-expression and actualization through competitive effort. 

So over the history of our country, we have fitfully been waking up to this injustice and expression of erstwhile competitive success, and fighting over how to forge a new social contract. That is perhaps the main reason our political system is so bitterly divided right now. "Freedom" rings from the mouths of both sides. But for one it is typically the freedom to continue enforcing their inherited inequities and privileges. For the other, it is the quest to escape exactly those inequities, which have reified, (as they have similarly in India's caste system, over centuries), into a vast network of debilities, social dysfunctions, ingrained or instinctive attitudes, artistic modes and motifs, economic and geographic patterns.

The new social contract is obviously modeled on modern meritocracy, where all are educated as far as possible, all participate freely in the many markets that pervade our lives, from mating to consuming to job-finding and politics, and all benefit in proportion to their contributions as regulated by those markets. Historical inequities would have little influence in this world, while individual talent and character count for all. This assumes that such a meritocracy is a fair ideal, which many dispute, as the fate of the losers remains uncertain, and in our current version, unbelievably harsh.

But there is no ridding ourselves of competition, however blessed we are with countervailing instincts of empathy and cooperation. It is a rock of human nature, and of our personal development. The best we can do is to regulate it to be fair and moderate. That is, expressing the competitive success of the individual, not her forebears or tribe. And allowing enough benefits to winning to provide motivation towards excellence and success, without destroying the portion of society that necessarily will be losers in various markets. This is the perennial conflict (and competition) between right and left, Republican vs Democrat.

• What happens when the poor are concentrated on one place- East Lake Meadows.
• How long Taiwan?
• Fond memories of the Trumpers.
• What will become of our empire?
• Ten days of quarantine is plenty. Even eight would be OK.
• FOX- another reason to cut the cable cord.

Success is an Elixir

We are besotted by success. For very obvious evolutionary reasons, but with problematic consequences.

Why is the James Bond franchise so compelling? It got more cartoonish over the years, but the old Sean Connery embodied a heady archetype of the completely successful hero. A man as skilled in vetting wines as in flying planes, as debonair with the ladies as he was in fighting hand-to-hand, all while outwitting the most malevolent and brilliant criminal minds. Handsome, witty, and brutally effective in all he turned his hand to, there was little complexity, just relentless perfection, other than an inexplicable penchant for getting himself into dramatic situations, from which he then suavely extricated himself.

We worship success, for understandable reasons, but sometimes a little too much. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. It is fundamental to our growth from childhood to adulthood, to demonstrate and be recognized for some kind of effectiveness- passing tests, graduating from school, becoming skilled in some art or profession, which is socially recognized as useful, maybe through the medium of money. The ancient rites of passage recognized this, by setting a key test, such as killing the bear, or withstanding some brutal austerity. Only through effectiveness in life can we justify that life to ourselves and to others. The role can take many forms- extroverts tend to focus on social power- the capability of bending others to their will, while introverts may focus more on other skills like making tools or interpreting the natural world.

The Darwinian case is clear enough- each life is a hero's quest to express one's inner gifts and capabilities, in order to succeed not only in thriving in the given environment, but in replicating, creating more successful versions of one's self which do so all over again. Women naturally fall for successful men, as James Bond so amply demonstrated, but as is seen in so many fields, from basketball to finance.

But all this creates some strong cognitive biases that have some influences that are not always positive. Junior high school is the most obvious realm where these play out. Children are getting used to the idea that life is not fair, and that they can communally form social standards and decisions about what constitutes success, which then victimize those on the losing end- what is cool, what is lame, who is a loser, etc. Popularity contests, like politics and the stock market, are notorious for following fashions that valorize what one generation may believe is success, only to have the next generation look back in horror and redefine success as something else. In these cases, success is little more than a commonly held opinion about success, which leads to the success of con men like our current president, who insists that everything he does is perfectly successful, and who inspires sufficient fear, or confidence, or suspension of disbelief, or is so ably assisted by the propaganda of his allies, that many take him seriously. Indeed, it is exactly the unaccountable support of his allies who surely know better that force others in the wider circles of the society to take seriously what no rational or decent person would believe for a second.

The status of minorities is typically a "loser" status, since by definition their beliefs and practices, and perhaps their very existence, are not popular. While this may be a mark of true Darwinian lack of success, it is far more likely to be an accident of, or an even less innocent consequence of, history. In any case, our worship of success frequently blinds us to the value of minorities and minority perspectives, and is a large reason why such enormous effort has been expended over millennia, on religious, legal, constitutional, and cultural planes, to remedy this bias and promote such things as democracy, diversity, due process, and respect for contrasting perspectives.

We are victimized in many other ways by our mania for success- by advertisers, by the gambling industry, by war mongers, among many others, who peddle easy success while causing incalculable damage. While it is hard to insulate ourselves from these social influences and judgements, which are, after all, the soul of evaluating success; as with any other cognitive bias, being in our guard is essential to avoiding cults, traps, and, ultimately, expensive failure.

• The news from Chris Hedges.
• Who produces value, where is the money going?
• History repeats itself.
• A look back, at Afghanistan.
• Life on earth is suffering.

Fixing the NCAA

How can college sports be fair to players?

March madness is now well past, but the bittersweet taste lingers, of seeing so many starry-eyed young strivers bossed around by extremely well-paid coaches and staffs, funded by enormous television contracts, paid for by our eyeballs and cable bills. It is really a plantation system.

There are proposals to pay college students, but I would like to go in a different direction. It is appropriate to pay student athletes in the coin of education, if they are really getting an education. So the first and most obvious reform has to be to award full, four-year, no-strings scholarships. Right now, scholarships are renewable, per year, or even less. This makes getting one the same as working for one boss- the coach, as the student can be fired at will for non-performance, sent packing from the school as well as the team. Are academic scholarships awarded on such a cold-blooded, mercenary basis, replicating the worst aspects of our at-will employment system? No, and nor should athletic scholarships. If the institution values the student, they should pay the full freight and allow that student the basic personal and academic freedom to do what they want with all the opportunities of higher education.

But I would add just one more thing, which is that salaries (which is to say, total pay) at all non-profit institutions (such as colleges, whether public or private), should be capped at something like ten times the minimum wage. It is truly revolting to see star college coaches feted as the second coming, building empires that overshadow the rest of their institutions, and being paid in grandiose terms, all on the backs of young athletes they so shamelessly exploit. Any non-profit is supposed to have a public purpose and an ethic of service, which is antithetical to the blowout contracts and naked greed so much on display. Will all the good coaches go to the NBA? Good riddance! May they join the Clippers.

This kind of rule would have beneficial effects in many areas. In our local area, we were once saddled with a predatory hospital chain that extracted money, gave mediocre service, and paid its executives like princes, and was, you guessed it, a non-profit. CEO-scale pay is a sign of a profit mind-set and purpose, not a non-profit mind-set. Such a rule might also light a fire under the effort to increase the minimum wage, which has few powerful natural advocates otherwise.

Indeed it is high time for a new model of work and pay, where the primary motivation of work is the work itself. Running a company, school, or non-profit organization has far more meaningful rewards than the money involved, so the idea that pay should be set exclusively by some market mechanism using the fig leaf of marginal productivity to cover essentially random factors of luck, access, career choice, negotiating prowess, and inborn talent, is both counter-productive, and morally repugnant. Sure, reward people for greater effort and effectiveness, but within a reasonable band that doesn't bankrupt our communal institutions and more importantly, doesn't turn everyone involved into avatars of greed. Human worth is a far more complicated proposition.

Lastly, what to do about the media ecosystem, which vacuums up money whether the students and coaches get paid alot or not? The NCAA, under this system, would naturally be a non-profit subject to the same salary caps as its member schools. So the money would be negotiated as usual, but would all go to the general accounts of the schools participating. Not to their athletic departments, not to their coaches. If they want to run big programs and enjoy sports, let them do so in light of their wider institutional responsibilities. The whole college sports machine needs to be toned down a little, and the focus taken from the rabid onlookers and spectacle (i.e. madness, to put it in technical terms) to the young people who should, after all, be getting an education, first and foremost.

• Would lying about atheism be moral?
• A lengthy riff on programming. Which is all bad.
• Creationists are still about, still nuts.
• Wealth must be destroyed, to save the planet.
• Iraq is falling apart. A template for Afghanistan?
• Correlation between money spent on guards and inequality.
• Financial crime is no longer reported as crime, let alone prosecuted as crime. As long as money is flowing upwards in the class hierarchy.
• This week in the WSJ: "Insider trading not only does no harm, it can have significant social and economic benefits including a more accurate pricing of stocks."
• The Fannie/Freddie replacement plan doesn't sound very good.
• Another response to Piketty- socialize wealth.
• Peter van Buren on Piketty.

Empiricism: good for tiny and unimportant things!

Baseball succumbs to the video replay.

One attitude that intrigues me in discussion with defenders of religion is their appreciation of logic and science. They are often effusive about its value and relevance to all kinds of practical and mundane things. But when it comes to the so-called "big questions" and super-important topics, well, then intuition and whatever-I-feel-in-my-gut rules the day.

It is as if the enlightenment and multiple scientific revolutions came and went, in one ear and out the other. As if humans hadn't learned they are fallible, and do not intuitively come up with all the right answers about the structure of reality, automatically, by sheer inspiration. As if they still had an imaginary friend.

This all came to mind again when I read that baseball is finally giving in to the instant replay. Spectators at home watching their Tivo'd HDTV games can see all the bad officiating in excruciating detail, and the league can no longer hide behind a best effort / intuitive model of officiating. They are forced to deal with the actual truth, which may not come from the eyes of umpires, but more reliably from the unblinking camera. Like countless areas of science, sports is (reluctantly) transformed by instruments that improve on our natural endowments, and help us see new things, or the familar in new ways, with greater accuracy.

Similar progress is afoot in law, where the reliability of eye-witness testimony has over the recent decades come to be recognized as among the worst evidence, while technological marvels like DNA identification provide a whole new level of accuracy.

So, what about religion, the exemplary province still ruled by intuition? By coincidence, Steven Pinker wrote a strong plea in TNR recently for a truce between science and the humanities, including religion, to cooperate rather than hiding in mutual ignorance, hurling meaningless language such as "scientism". His point was not only that science has had important humanistic underpinnings and effects over the last several centuries, but that those humanities most vexed by "scientism", such as postmodernist philosophy and theology, have not had a lot of accomplishment to crow about themselves. They had better learn from other fields and take what is useful, rather than take obscurantist potshots.

In return, it is obvious that science and scientists need to be careful about what they have expertise in, and what values they and the humanities respectively bring to the table. But one important point here is that, under the cover of "hard" sciences and objectivity, science has made great strides in recognizing human cognitive limitations, both explicitly in the fields of psychology, and implicitly in the other sciences, whose whole modus operandi is built around the recognition of human weaknesses, which require constant vigilance, by open argument between competitively motivated scholars, by mathematical formulations where possible, by the discouting of authority, by careful and public documentation, and, most notoriously of all, by empirical experiment.

Have enough experiments been done to say whether prayers work? Have enough experiments been done to say whether god saves its chosen people, favors one team over another, or one nation, or one religion? Have enough experiments been done to indicate that religion has a deep psychological basis that belie its florid claims to objective truth?

Yes. We know all these things, and much more. For those viewing at home, the primary property of god is its "hidden-ness". For those rewinding and watching in depth and slow-motion, another primary property is the abundant anthropomorphic projections and wishes (and fears) attached to "Him". It is quite clear where all this comes from, and it isn't from telescopic observation.

Connected with this, we also know that we are fundamentally alone. While there may (or may not) be other intelligent beings in the universe, we know already that they won't be genetically or cognitively related to us, and will be so distant as to be fundamentally cut off from interacting with us. There is no one else to turn to.

Part of being existentially alone is having no outer standard of morals or other subjective values. We answer to no god or other being, we go to no Valhalla after death. Part of what we have learned is that for all the objective reality out there, the values and desires we have are our own, part of our subjective (and biological) makeup, in a constant dance with the wisdom (and desires) of those around us, and with those who have gone before and cultured our way through the world. This is the one place where intuitions really do rule supreme, since they make up our values by necessity ... there is nothing else to go by.

One can sense the discomfort of those yearning for something more certain to hang on to- a father totem to tell them what to think and how to feel. But, checking the instant replay, god is still dead and gone ... the movements of theology, postmodernsim, religious "discernment", and post-60's backlash are made up of people working out their own issues, groping in the dark without help from above. A key tipoff is their moralism. What is real or not is secondary to whether their communities live in a properly patriarchial moral order agreeable to them.

Incidentally, Steven Pinker discusses the fascinating issue of "explaining away", which is a common fear coming from the humanities. If we understand some interesting topic in a fully worked-out reductionistic sense, does that rob us of some aesthetic appreciation, of some of our humanity? Does music theory kill one's appreciation for Bach? Does knowing molecular biology kill one's appreciation for biology, or does instant replay destroy our appreciation for baseball? I don't think so.

What empiricism and science in general do "explain away" are ... bad explanations. There may be a certain charm in thinking that hurricanes are caused by immorality, birth defects by sins in a past life, that prophets received divine "revelations", or that god forms us in "His" image, (take note, females!), but we have to make do without such tales when we learn more about how things actually work. If you value "inspired" scriptures, mystical "forces", and folk theories about all and sundry, then yes, we lose something by this rationalistic, reductionistic, remorseless instant-replay process of enlightenement. And, frankly, good riddance.

• "Intellectually unsubtle"!, fumes Russ Douthat. Of all people.
• God still hanging around in some very small council chambers.
• Dawkins: evil, or just right?
• Why are attitudes about science shifting.. or are they?
• At least some fields (cougheconomics) could use another dose of empiricism.
• Malthus and modernity. Why does population outrun development in some countries, not others?
• Fannie and Freddie should be made entirely state run, not destroyed.
• The brotherhood's gamble.
• When will Egypt get a competent civilian government?
• Republicans... still the party sort of opposed to governing.
• On the values of leadership.
• We have to take nuclear seriously. After we get that carbon tax, of course.

I attend a religious service

Interesting rituals pervade the ritualized combat ... of baseball.

Take me out to the ball game,

Oh, take me out to the ball game! America's pastime is not only one of the most refined and elegant sports, but the home of endless rituals and symbolism. It could be viewed as the center of our civic religion, with politics a peripheral and grubby afterthought. And it is better than typical religions- a living ritual enacting the competitive spirit that truly characterizes American existence, enclosed within a lovingly maintained structure of rules, decorum, and tradition. Thankfully, my town recently acquired a ultra-minor professional baseball team, which is a joy to watch.

Ball games have a long history in the Americas as sacred events. Bats were even used in some prehistoric cases. In our modern game, the leading actor (i.e. the pitcher) stands on a central mound, reminiscent, if only in a small way, of the religious mounds of pre-Columbian America. This lonely figure faces the most trying test, from which he (or she!) will emerge either a hero, or defeated by Lilliputians sent up to hit against him. Surrounding him is a perfect square, the number four being highly significant in many cultures and mythologies, not to mention in nature generally. The opposing players seek to circumambulate the square, a common religious action, and while typically mark of respect, in this case it is an act of power over rival priests. It is a passion play of sorts, though the outcome is open rather than closed.

Take me out with the crowd;

We begin with communal singing- the national anthem, hands over hearts. Then it is on to chanting, clapping, stomping, waving, dancing, all in a re-ligio... sense of communal connectedness. An invisible being announces the service, keeping everyone onboard with a narration of key events and rituals. In between the enactment of the heroic contest in the main drama, spectators and miscellaneous notables come on to the field to take cameo turns, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, running races and other contests, winning boons, honoring aged or fallen heros. Altar boys, er bat boys, run out one of the priestly tools- the pitcher's rosin bag, and serve the heros unstintingly through the game. The seventh inning stretch brings on the classic baseball song in chorus.

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,

Then it is on to communal eating of characteristic tribal foods. The heart of Americana- hot dogs, corn dogs, peanuts, chili, ice cream. I guess nachos count as well- the mingling of native corn with the newcomer's dairy. Healthy? No. Spiritually nourishing? You bet. While no one makes claims of transubstantiation for these foods, they make and evoke memories of unusual strength.

I don't care if I never get back.

The admission gate marks a sacred threshold, entrance to the outer precincts of the progressively more sacred central field, square, and mound. Time is suspended, as baseball does not run on a clock, but finishes whenever the ritual drama has run its course by its own arcane rules. Nor does the accumulating score lead relentlessly to the final fate. It ain't over till it's over, to use the classic maxim, as pitching breakdowns can lead to dramatic changes late in the game.

Let me root, root, root for the home team,

While in many sports, each team has its partisan section cheering it on, (soccer hooliganism comes to mind), in baseball it is more customary for all the spectators to root for the home team only, at least in the sort of minor league game portrayed here. While this may be impolite to the visiting team, it creates a civically unified atmosphere.

The Greeks made athletic festivals central to their culture, as have many others. It was a form of divination, showing whom the gods favored, and whom not. Sport was one way to express and strengthen the civic cult, as well as to transcend it, in the setting of pan-Hellenic games, even though they didn't quite get around to replacing war with sport.

If they don't win, it's a shame.

These days, the rules- i.e. moral concepts of fairness and popular legitimacy- matter far more than theories of divine favor. As a civic religion, it imbues a fundamentally secular activity with many of the narratives and spiritual archetypes embedded in human nature.

The rules of baseball are just a little more sacred and tradition-bound than those of other sports. Thus the steroid scandal hit baseball particularly shamefully, though far, far more damaging derelictions happened elsewhere in the culture, as our leaders (one of whom had helped run a baseball team, oddly enough) started a gratuitous war, showered money on the well-to-do, and raped the poor, greedy, & unsophisticated with predatory loans, making way for the current economic crisis. Baseball itself became ever more besotted with corporate advertising, corporate stadiums, and a fixation on money generally. Rituals like baseball are inescapably connected with the trends afoot elsewhere in the culture. Demons can not be exorcised by ritual alone, but only by taking the lessons of the ritual- fairness, integrity, diligence, persistence, respect- into our wider lives.

For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,

The high priest and the low priest are having a stylized game of catch, with the all-white sacred ball. (I'm not going to get into Freudian theories about the bats, balls, gloves, etc.!). Does the batting team of priests from the competing civitas have the power to interrupt this golden line? If not, the pitcher has achieved a perfect game. If the batters do get hits, can the fielding team prevent the ball from touching the mundane earth? If not, can the fielders at least prevent the ball from escaping the sacred precincts, inner and outer?

Which team has greater occult powers, exhibited through their skill and luck? The trip around the square marks the stations of this passion play, with home the ultimate goal, just as it was for Dorothy. An umpire, of yet another priestly class, maintains the balls, discarding those sullied by contact with the earth. He also lovingly sweeps home plate back to its pristine condition and validates the golden line drawn between pitcher and catcher.

At the old ball game.

Who gets to play the hero? This is far more than a question of skill. The players represent their civic tribes, and represent the archetypal hero with occult powers. This is why breaking the color line in baseball was far more significant than it was in other sports, as baseball was and remains more civically identified and more archetypally powerful than sports like basketball and football.

One reason is that baseball has very little physical contact. The ball is the central mediator- between players and between teams. Even tag-outs are made through the glove, with the ball couched within, or at its most direct, with the ball directly held in the hand outstretched. Even in the extremis of the bean ball, the ball still mediates, showing its dark power. However, the bean ball is a serious breach of decorum, both violating the golden line and bespeaking a loss of control/power by the pitching team- a descent from civilized rules (i.e. sacred ritual) into barbarity.

It is hard to leave- to break the spell of the sacred service, space, actors, and drama. But it wouldn't be sacred if there weren't mundane life to provide a backdrop.

• Another author investigates the diamond way.
• Basketball is an OK game too: American ballet, to baseball's mystical drama.
• Character in the financial elites, or lack thereof. Do they really have to be psychopathic?
• "Worst states for business" are the best states for people.
• Is corruption becoming unstoppable? Does money have to ruin all public functions?
• Tom Coburn- standing up to the terrorists, a little.
• Law of the sea.. further unworthiness of the Republican party.
• This is the soul, which we can not remove.
• Krugman on global scorching/burning/warming ...
• Economics quote of the week, by Bill Mitchell, speaking of stagnation in the US, as well as the nature of intergenerational responsibilities.. are they real or are they financial?:

"The pro-cyclical government cutbacks have introduced a vicious circle of income loss, saving loss, wealth destruction, continuing real estate crisis, loss of state and local revenue, further cutbacks according to the application of their inappropriate fiscal rules (balanced budget amendments). 

The pro-cyclical nature of state and local government employment is one of the principle reasons the US recession has endured and will ensure the long-term damage to that nation’s vitality and ability to provide high quality services to its people. 

The reasoning in the public debate about the future consequences of government budget deficits is wrong-headed. The capacity of the US to provide for an ageing society amidst the long-term decline in its industry doesn’t depend on cutting in to public spending now – which is patently causing law and order to deteriorate, the standard of public education and health to slip. 

Exactly the opposite response is required. Schools need to be revitalised. Communities need to be sure the streets are safe so that businesses will have an incentive to invest. People need to be mentally and physically well."

• Economics bonus graph of the week: Krugman on middle class stagnation:

Occupy Parquet!

A modest proposal for the NBA players locked out from the hardwood plantation.

As a casual basketball fan, I've been intrigued by the NBA lockout and contract negotiations. It shouldn't be a surprise that I side with the workers- the players, who have dissolved their union in order to attack the legality of the owner's lockout.

The players have been making 57% of the league's gross income. The owners claim that they have been losing money with this structure, and want more of the gross for themselves.

The players have certainly been doing their part, as the dramatic playoff and finals series last year showed. How have the owners been doing? Well, they say they have lost money. Which means that they aren't very good at math. They complain that free agency and lack of hard caps force them to over-pay / over-bid for players, as if someone had been holding guns to their heads. If the owners can't mount their infrastructure, marketing, dance troupes, and other activities with $1.6 billion, they should consider getting into other lines of business.

And when was the NBA supposed to be profitable enterprise anyhow? The whole point of having owners is that they are already rich and can give a little back to their communities (and massage their egos) by sponsoring contests of athletic skill that get endless free publicity and to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless schlumps that we are.

Perhaps the NBA has too many teams, and owners in smaller markets appear to struggle to keep their operations solvent. But the owners need to face up to this problem by revenue-sharing and philanthropy, not by taking it out of the player's hides. They are already a monopoly ... they should act like it.

Compared to the players, how much value do the owners add? Very, very little, in my estimation. The teams would be just as, or more, socially useful being publically owned or employee-owned. The current plutocratic ownership concept is a social construct that mirrors capitalist/philathropic relations elsewhere in the society, for very little reason or benefit, especially if the teams become profit centers rather than vanity centers. The fact that the owners can't properly manage a business monopoly and entrenched cultural institution hardly reflects well on them.

What I would recommend is that the players, now that they have disbanded from being part of the NBA structure, meet the lockout with a walkout. They should set up their own league and displace the NBA entirely. They should, in short, occupy the parquet themselves, as an employee-owned league. At first, they will be restricted to smaller venues and limited media, but I think in the age of twitter and youtube, they would gain the necessary buzz with ease, and become self-sustaining. The old franchises, like the ailing Warriors franchise that recently sold for a half-billion dollars, would consequently lose all value. If they gutted it out, the players would eventually be able to take over the old venues, including the classic Celtics parquet.

This conflict is just one small vignette in the larger economic narrative. The NBA owners clearly bought into the right-wing mindset that this would be a good time to crush unions and workers. The economic disaster that the 1% has authored has made them even more powerful over labor by way of extreme unemployment. But I'd suggest that the NBA owners ran into the buzz saw of the OWS counter-narrative, and the players have taken heart in a great deal of public support. The game is mostly mental, after all! The NBA is a uniquely worker-driven enterprise, with little rationale for capitalist ownership at all. The players may still cave, money managment perhaps not being their strong suit. But I think there is a better way, if they can hold out and boldly seize their future.

My suggestion for the new league name? HDL- Hoop Dreams League.

• Prosecutions / indictments are beginning, finally.
• I pay more taxes than GE does.
• Slate chimes in on best live albums. 
• Dean Baker on the economics profession & unemployment, part 2.
• Video of OWS and Bloomberg's army.
• Are Americans a little insular?
• "People" no longer really count. Other "people" are in charge.
• Germany on the Euro- "it's all about me".
• Economics quote of the week: Alan Minsky on the OWS meme, trickle-up economics, and related issues.

"The man who Mr. Obama asked to be his mentor when he joined the Senate was Joe Lieberman. He evidently gave Obama expert advice about how to raise funds from the financial class by delivering his liberal constituency to his Wall Street campaign contributors."
..
"Wall Street has orchestrated and lobbied for a rentier alliance whose wealth is growing at the expense of the economy at large. It is extractive, not productive."

Go, LeBron!

LeBron James knows what business he's in.

Sorry to stray from my usual dour topics, but the recent LeBron James saga has thrown some interesting light on labor in America. Commentators have been piling on about his narcissism, his breathtaking gall, his callous rending of Cleveland's heart, and the botched PR that will see him rot in hell. Or something like that.

Topping it all was the Cavalier's owner, who threw a titanic snit at losing James to Miami and apparently learning about it on TV along with the rest of us. To which I say, tough luck!

James put the NBA owners through their paces, subjecting them to the most abject groveling, before arranging a prime time extravaganza to burn his bridges to all but one. Where else have we seen a powerful and energetic black man, sometimes referred to as "the one", calling the shots? Firing generals? Showing the man who's boss? Being the man?

So let us not cry for the NBA owners, with their anti-trust exemption. Through their ministrations, the NBA has far more teams than talent. Way too many games are scheduled and as a result, injuries are rampant. The game has become relentlessly physical and combative under NBA refereeing. In Cleveland, James was expected to carry the team mostly by himself, and was unable to make it work. In desperation, they imported Shaquille O'Neal, creating a situation more comical than effective. James did the rational thing and created a better situation for himself elsewhere. All NBA teams try to nurture and milk home-town sentiments ... until they don't, trading players as though they were slaves on the auction block. It was nice to see the tables turned for a change, frankly.

The way I see it, James's primary motivation was to play with his friends and fellow stars, Wade and Bosh. And these are very honorable motives. The US army relies first and foremost on comraderie to build units that fight effectively. This seems lost on the modern NBA, where players are shuffled around on the basis of little more than management hunches, statistics, and needed positions. My local team, the Warriors, has seen season after season end up high in the draft due to terrible chemistry, starting from its top management. One player went so far as to physically choke the coach. Thankfully, both are retired now and resting peacefully. Conversely, the Boston Celtics assembled a star threesome several years ago of Paul Pierce, Ray Allan, and Kevin Garnett, which worked on the levels of both chemistry and talent, to ensuing acclaim. Few thought that Garnett should have slaved on in Minnesota to the end of his career.

In this way star players are taking control of their careers, and in turn, of the league, typically not to make more money, but to play with colleagues they like, and thence to be successful on premier teams- teams that the NBA is structured by its owners to avoid, based on its collusive drafting and salary cap rules. The owner-player tension is evident, and we shouldn't mind the ball going into the player's basket every so often through canny self-promotion and sheer talent.

Lastly, why do it on TV? Wasn't that shockingly self-aggrandizing? Well, the high ratings speak for themselves. If nine million people watch, then it is by definition not self-aggrandizing, it is entertainment, which is, after all, the business the NBA is in. To which, I say, well done, LeBron!

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