Gender-Reveal Parties

It must mean something, but I had not heard about them until I read it on The New Yorker site.

I discovered gender-reveal parties while reading a column George Packer posted online.

As it happened, Packer heard it from human beings. But, not in any ordinary circumstances. Packer heard it in “a rundown inner-city café full of ex-felons who were having a very hard time finding jobs.” Me, I discovered it online.
I will mention in passing that neither Packer nor I have a clue why these parties are called by the term that is commonly used to introduce someone who has undergone an extreme makeover.

For those who are even further behind the times than I, at gender-reveal parties expectant parents or their friends and relatives throw a party to announce their new baby’s gender.

But they are not just announcing it to their assembled guests. They are discovering it themselves at the same time.

The party resembles a baby shower, but it opens the doors to men.  Thus, it deprives women of a traditionally important female-bonding ceremony.

To be more precise and to answer the questions you are now asking yourself, the lab technician who first discovers the baby’s gender via ultrasound is sworn to secrecy. He/she/it sequesters the information in a sealed envelope. It is only opened at the moment of the reveal.

When the expectant parents and their closest friends and family discover their baby’s gender they are transforming an intimate moment into a vulgar ceremony where everyone gets to join in the fun.

When you turn your private experiences into public spectacles, you are, I hate to say it, being vulgar.

Apparently, the couple then posts the whole scene on the web so that everyone else can watch their private reactions to the discovery of their new baby’s sex.

Packer’s analysis of the phenomenon is exceptionally brilliant, so allow me to review some of what he says. Beginning with this:

These parties seem to marry the oversharing of Facebook and Instagram with the contrived ceremonies that modern people in search of meaning impose on normal life events: food journaling, birthday parties for grownups, workout diaries, birth-experience planning.
Confucius said that living in human society involved participation in ceremony and ritual. To my knowledge he did not have very much to say about "contrived" ceremonies and rituals.

Confucius knew that true rituals and ceremonies were about affirming one’s membership in community. Packer notes that contrived ceremonies are about anything but community. They highlight the individual self.

In his words:

In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made possible by science and oblige others to join in, with the result—as in so many invented rituals of our day—that the focus turns from where it ought to be (in this case, the baby) to the self. At a bris or christening, the emotional emphasis falls on the arrival of a new life in the embrace of family and community. At a gender-reveal party, the camera is on the expectant father tearing up at the sight of pink cake.

Packer doesn’t use the term anomie, but he sees these contrived ceremonies as an effort to overcome it.

Having learned to dispense with traditional rituals and ceremonies, to say nothing of customs and mores, we moderns find ourselves lost and adrift, detached from our cultural moorings, trying to find a way home.

Packer explains:

That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair?

In a world where we pride ourselves in our belief in science and where the more sophisticated among us reject all religious practices, we have shredded the social fabric and the cultural traditions that would ground our human identity.

Packer sees that the anomie produced by the modern world has elicited a strong counter-reaction or backlash. People who should know better are embracing some of the strangest and more extreme forms of social cohesion… even extremist ideologies… because being alone and detached and disconnected is intolerable.

In Packer’s words:

If, like millions of Americans, you’re secular and the traditions of a church or temple have no hold on you, or if you’re assimilated and ethnic identity has faded away, then what is there to sustain you on the lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world? Science might not be enough, which is why so many educated people have turned against it and adopted hostile theories about childhood vaccination. This is the same disenchantment that has produced religious revivalism through much of the world. The same emptiness that afflicts modern life leads doctors in Cairo and Karachi to vote for doctrinaire Islamists, stay-at-home moms in suburban Colorado and rural Minnesota to dig in as evangelicals, Web designers in Silicon Valley and Park Slope to make a cult of yoga while rejecting pasteurized milk, and Americans everywhere to throw parties with cupcakes filled with pink or blue custard.
Many of the commenters on The New Yorker site have found Packer to be overly cynical. I do not. They feel that he has no right to mock an event that they consider to be wholesome fun, fraught with meaning.

Their comments suggest that they have bought into many of the types of contrived ceremonies that Packer ridicules, and take serious umbrage at the harsh light that he casts on them.

One might say—I would—that Packer is asserting the value of traditional ceremonies and rituals and telling us to think twice before replacing them with contrived ceremonies and rituals.

With all due respect for commenter sensitivity, Packer is correct. Not all ceremonies deserve the same respect. Making public a moment that has always been shared privately by a couple and their physician or midwife is a bad idea.

For my part I would add one ironic note. At a time when the nation is awash in gender-bending silliness, it is worth noting that gender-reveal ceremonies do assert the supreme importance of gender.

If these reveals need a saving grace, I recommend their effort to counteract the mindless trend toward gender neutering.

Illiberal Liberals

By now it’s an established fact: when it comes to politics Democrats are more ignorant than Republicans.

It doesn’t end there.

The Daily Caller reports:

Yet another new survey shows that Republican supporters know more about politics and political history than Democrats….

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

Considering that the Democratic Party has always prided itself on its intellectual superiority the results might come as a surprise.

Of course, there are Democrats and then there are Democrats. The Daily Caller diagnoses the Democratic Party as “bipolar.” Since bipolar involves mood swings, the word “schizoid” would have been more precise.

The Democratic Party contains a strange mix of the overeducated and the undereducated.

Even though a significant number of those who have earned advanced degrees are Democrats so are a large number of high school grads and dropouts.

When we think of liberals we most often think of the first group and ignore the second.

Liberals with advanced educations tend to be very well informed. Liberals with a high school education or less tend to be poorly informed.

When pollsters take surveys them lump both groups together, and the large number of undereducated Democrats drags down the score.

Of course, there’s advanced education and then there’s advanced education. I do not know the breakdown of these statistics by academic field but I think it fair to say that the group with advanced degrees skews toward intellectuals, especially educators, and toward people who want to help others. I am assuming that it does not include a large number of Ph.D. mathematicians or scientists.

Anyone who wants to teach must have an advanced degree. So does anyone who wants to practice psychotherapy or mental health counseling.

Over recent years there has been a great increase in the number of  mental health counselors, especially psychologists and social workers.

If we combine the teachers, the mental health workers, and the lawyers, we get a picture of the Democratic Party’s intellectual elite.

The Democratic Party elite tends to be more idealistic and more compassionate, less pragmatic and less empirical. It prefers ideas to reality; feeling to scientific fact.

Of course, the Party has enhanced its political power by buying off those who are less fortunate.

Undereducated Democratic voters tend to pay less tax and be more reliant on government programs. Thus Democratic thinkers always want to raise taxes on the rich and increase entitlement spending for the poor.

Strangely, liberal Democratic elites tend to be less liberal minded than Republicans and conservatives.

Surveys show that they are more narrow-minded, less tolerant of diverse opinions, and more prone to groupthink.

Since they demand ideological conformity they are far more likely to punish those who think differently.

The Daily Caller reports the statistics:

A March 12 Pew study showed that Democrats are far more likely than conservatives to disconnect from people who disagree with them.

“In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS [social networking sites] because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates,” said the report, tiled “Social networking sites and politics.”

The report also noted that 11 percent of liberals, but only 4 percent of conservatives, deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.

This puts a nice face on some very ugly behavior. Democrats are more likely to shun people who disagree with their dogmas. They are more willing to excommunicate those who hold opposing points of view.

Liberals might see themselves as great defenders of free debate and deliberation but they are only comfortable when surrounded by people who echo their own thoughts.

It’s a form of intellectual narcissism. Liberals are less willing than conservatives to engage with different points of view. They are more likely to enforce ideological conformity by ostracizing those who disagree with the group’s opinion.

Groups that function this way are properly described as cults. If everyone thinks the same thing, then no one is really thinking.

Or else, you might see liberals as intellectual monopolists that tyrannize their members and  fear the competition of the marketplace of ideas.

The world has seen this kind of illiberalism before. It has led to witch hunts and brainwashing. If you only judge a person according to how he thinks and feels, you have a problem. You can never really know with certainty what anyone else thinks of feels. 

Liberals are hypersensitive to the least deviation from political correctness because they are almost paranoid about finding out that someone who had presented himself as liberal was really just telling what they wanted to hear. 

Having an advanced degree does not necessarily make you smarter or more knowledgeable than those who do not. If you have been brought up surrounded only by people who think as you think you will have much more difficulty defending your position against those who disagree.

If the group thinks that an idea is bad when Republicans propose it but good when Democrats propose it, it is encouraging rank hypocrisy.

A March Washington Post poll showed that Democrats were more willing to change their views about a subject to make their team look good. For example, in 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said the GOP-controlled White House could lower gas prices, but that number fell by more than half to 33 percent in 2012 once a Democrat was in the White House.

In contrast, the opinions of GOP supporters were more consistent. Their collective opinion shifted by only a third, according to the data. In 2006, 47 percent in believed the White House could influence gas prices. By 2012, that number had risen to 65 percent up 17 points compared to the Democrats’ 40 point shift.

This suggests that liberals are the more unprincipled group. Knowing that groupthink is strictly enforced, they hew to the party line, mindlessly.

This explains how liberals could denounce Bush administration policies about Gitmo, for example, while embracing the same policies once Obama took office.

Obviously, shunning people who hold different political opinions is morally repulsive. Liberal democracy cannot function without granting respect to differing opinions. Extra-constitutional efforts to shut down the free exchange of opinions should be abhorrent.

It would seem that liberal elites who shun and ostracize people on the basis of political opinion are judgmental. They would beg to disagree.

Normally, we ought to judge people by “the content of their character.” We judge them by the way that they conduct their lives and the way they behave toward us and toward others.

Character involves public behavior. Liberal groupthink aims at private thoughts.

When a group decides that it will judge others, not on the basis of their character, but on their willingness to adhere strictly to dogma, then it is also giving them a free pass to behave as they please.

It is a powerful recruiting tool for liberals, one that has a special appeal to young people. If you allow progressives to control your mind and your vote, they will happily return the favor by offering you a free pass on bad behavior.

When Clarence Thomas was accused of having made sexually suggestive remarks to Anita Hill, liberals excoriated him for having committed a horrific crime. But, when Bill Clinton was accused of sexual harassment and rape, liberals were happy to blame it on the “vast right wing conspiracy.”

When liberals claim to love individual liberty they seem to mean the freedom to do as you please when you please with whom you please.

Beyond all of that, liberals tend to be more narrow-minded, even emotionally obtuse. They consider themselves to be paragons of human empathy but they are are incapable of grasping the potential validity of any position that differs from their own.

According to a recent study by University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt, conservatives are fully capable of grasping the importance of values that liberals hold dear: values like care and compassion and fairness.

Unfortunately, they are so severely blinded by their ideology that they cannot understand why conservatives value loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Failing to respect the point of view of those who disagree with them is endemic to contemporary liberalism.

A Lost Generation?

They came out in droves to vote for Barack Obama.

Young people, especially the college-educated, fulfilled the wishes of their teachers and voted for the candidate who most fully embodied the values they had learned in school.

They didn’t know it at the time, but they were following a Pied Piper… over a cliff. They are fast becoming a lost generation.

Of course, the situation was just as dire in 2009. Many people, myself included, wrote about it at the time.

Now, more than three years into the Obama administration the situation has not gotten any better. It seems to have gotten worse. Sadly, what we were saying three years ago still feels true.

Yesterday, the Huffington Post reported that around one half of recent college graduates is either unemployed or underemployed... and has been for quite some time now.

As is well known, the longer you stay out of the workforce or work below your qualifications the more dismal your future chances for career success.

It comes as no surprise that humanities graduates lead the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, while science, technology and engineering graduates have done best in the job market.

Also, many of these young people have accumulated a considerable amount of student loan, debt that will remain with them for decades to come.

Put it all together and you have the makings of a lost generation.

Knowing how we got here might help us to solve the problem, but not necessarily. Unfortunately, the problem is complex.

On one side the economy has not generated job growth at anything approximating the normal post-recession rate.

Some of this has to do with government policy. Some has to do with the migration of jobs overseas.

On the other side young people who major in the humanities are being rendered ergonomically dysfunctional.

Even if there were jobs, many of these young people would not qualify. They have acquired so many bad habits, both mental and behavioral, that very few companies would want to hire them.

By happenstance, yesterday I also came across a fascinating article by Prof. Janice Fiamengo. Writing about her experience teaching English literature in Canada, Fiamengo bemoans her students’ attitude.

In her words:

I was up against it: the attitude of entitlement rampant amongst university students and nurtured by the utopian ideology that permeates modern pedagogy, in which the imposition of rules and identification of errors are thought to limit student creativity and the fostering of a hollow self-esteem takes precedence over the building of skills on which genuine self-respect might be established. In the Humanities subjects in particular — and in English especially, the discipline I know best — such a philosophy has led to a perilous watering down of course content, with self-validation seen as more important than the mastery of specific knowledge.

Forget about whether or not these students will ever learn anything consequential about English literature. You should ask yourself how these students will develop the temperament, the attitude and the work ethic that would make them valuable employees to your company.

More likely, you read her article and start thinking about how you can outsource jobs to nations whose students have a work ethic.

Forever Texting

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never texted.

Why?

Because it feels age inappropriate.

Even if I were an avid texter, my observations would still fall largely within the domain of the anecdotal.

Like you, I am not looking forward to my anecdotage. I am doing my best to keep it at a distance.

Better to allow our reflection to be guided by the superb intelligence of MIT professor Sherry Turkle.

Turkle has fully researched the field. Last year, she wrote a book about it, called Alone Together.

Part-sociologist and part-psychologist she is exceptionally qualified to make sense out of the texting craze.

Other authors have placed more emphasis on Facebook, but I agree with Turkle that the scene of a group of people, gathered together for a meeting, each individual texting on his or her own cellular device, is more telling.

When you are surrounded by living, breathing human beings and you choose to focus on a text message, something is wrong. With you, of course, but more importantly, with our culture.

Writing in The New York Times yesterday Turkle described a younger generation that is trying to overcome feelings of disconnection by obsessively trying to connect via text message. If texting never provides the feeling of real connection, it will always be unsatisfying and will easily become manic.

Paradoxically, efforts to connect via text are causing people to feel even more disconnected, even while they believe that they are, I would say, hyper-connected.

Turkle’s thinking makes effective use of paradox. Some readers have gotten confused about it, even going so far as to suggest that paradox is self-contradictory.

It is not.

Today in America the younger generation seems especially prone to what I have been calling anomie. Having been brought up in a culture where community ties have largely frayed and where more and more people are “bowling alone” they do not know where they belong and do not know how to function within a community or even a social group.

Apparently, they do not know really how to socialize and are trying to learn by texting. Unfortunately, their mania over texting is making it more and more difficult for them to form real social connections, even real relationships with other people. As Turkle says, they are losing their ability to converse.

Why are they doing it? In part, because every member of their peer group is. If they do not feel disconnected before they get absorbed in texting they will surely feel it afterwards. If they feel disconnected before it, they will develop a false sense of connection through their constant texts.

Many young people, Turkle says, are so terrified of being alone that they will accept any form of connection, however empty it may be.

What has been lost, she explains, is human conversation, the kind that takes place when two people sit down together, face-to-face, look each other in the eye, and exchange information and feelings.

Human conversation often takes place in ritualized conditions, like family dinners or meetings. It cannot take place when each person is hiding from everyone else by texting. 

It’s almost too obvious to say it, but when you are sitting at dinner with a friend and are absorbed in a texted conversation with someone else you are being rude and inconsiderate. Bad manners make for bad relationships.

Turkle describes the scene:

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

She also quotes a 16-yer-old who says that one day he’d “like to learn how to have a conversation.”

If that does not scare you, nothing will.

Conversation is a skill. It needs to be learned, cultivated, and developed. People who do not know how to converse will not know how to conduct relationships, romantic or not. They will find it impossible to work together. They will never learn how to negotiate.

Hiding behind their screens, they may be surrounded by warm human bodies, but they are effectively alone. Turkle says that they are “alone together” and the paradox expresses the situation clearly.

When everyone gathered around the conference table is texting, the group does not coalesce.  No one will feel group solidarity or group loyalty.

People who speak primarily through text hide their faces. This means, Turkle suggests correctly, that technology allows them to mask their identities. In their texts they can pretend to be someone they are not.

If you have no face, as the Chinese would have it, you cannot commit and you cannot be trusted. 

Having no face means that you are detached, alone, isolated, and rejected. It may not feel that way, but that is the way it is.

The more people fall into the bad habit of communicating through text messages, the more they will lose the habit of conversing with others, reaching out to make a connection, identifying themselves as friends, not foes.

Turkle explains:

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

Admittedly, this is a paradox. Some people have already tripped over it, so, allow me to make clear what Turkle is telling us.

If a young person tries to overcome a feeling of disconnection by establishing a raft of false connections, he might convince himself that he is less alone, less detached, more part of the group.

And yet, his sense of connection will not be real. He may not know it but he has adopted a set of habits that befit an outcast, a pariah.

  

If his feeling of connection is hanging by the thread of an illusion, he definitely does not want to find out. The illusion of connection is better than complete disconnection.

Being alone in a room will not feel like a respite from a life full of human connections. It will open him up to the truth of his social oblivion. It will then threaten him with the unbearable anguish that attacks those who find themselves detached and disconnected from all social groups.

Getting Over Therapy

As the old saying goes, better late than never….

Four or so years ago I started a new blog called “Had Enough Therapy?” I meant the blog as a complement to my website. There I explained, in detail, the difference between introspective psychotherapy and life coaching.

Imagine my surprise and my pleasure when I saw that the New York Times had finally caught on. Or, at least, therapist Jonathan Alpert, writing in the Times this morning, has.

Alpert’s op-ed is entitled: “Is Therapy Forever? Enough Already.” To my admittedly biased mind, it sounds like a take-off on the title of this blog.

As concepts go, it isn’t quite as good, but “Had Enough Therapy?” was already taken.

I am confident that Alpert does not read this blog. If he had I’m sure he would have mentioned it. So let’s say that he has come to the same conclusion, independently.

Of course, what Alpert calls “aggressive therapy” I call coaching. Be that as it may, let’s examine his point of view:

Many patients need an aggressive therapist who prods them to face what they find uncomfortable: change. They need a therapist’s opinion, advice and structured action plans. They don’t need to talk endlessly about how they feel or about childhood memories. A recent study by the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland found that “active, engaging and extroverted therapists” helped patients more quickly in the short term than “cautious, nonintrusive therapists.”

Opinion, advice, and a structured action plan… sounds like coaching to me.

In truth it doesn’t matter so much what we call it. Alpert is right that most people do not need to spend years talking about how they feel or exploring their childhood memories. Not only is it a waste of time; it avoids the problem at hand.

Alpert is also right in his characterization of therapy. Even though the field is hopefully moving toward a cognitive-behavioral approach, still, when people think of therapy they think of getting in touch with their feelings, and rediscovering their lost past.

Alpert offers us an excellent clinical vignette:

If a patient comes to me and tells me she’s been unhappy with her boyfriend for the past year, I don’t ask, as some might, “How do you feel about that?” I already know how she feels about that. She just told me. She’s unhappy. When she asks me what I think she should do, I don’t respond with a return interrogatory, “What do you think you should do?” If she knew, she wouldn’t ask me for my thoughts.

Of course, once we raise questions about what people should do, we are dealing with issues that are properly within the domain of ethics.

Alpert continues:

Instead I ask what might be missing from her relationship and sketch out possible ways to fill in relationship gaps or, perhaps, to end it in a healthy way. Rather than dwell on the past and hash out stories from childhood, I encourage patients to find the courage to confront an adversary, take risks and embrace change. My aim is to give patients the skills needed to confront their fear of change, rather than to nod my head and ask how they feel.

The truth is, if he had encouraged her to hash out stories from childhood he would have been telling her that her relationship does not need active management, thus, that she need do nothing about it.

He would have been telling her what far too many therapists have been telling far too many patients for far too long: that the problem is all in her mind, and that if she rearranges her mental furniture then her relationship will magically improve.

I would only add one observation here. The culture being what it is, many patients who consult with therapists bring with them an expectation that they will while away their therapy sessions exploring their feelings and rehashing their childhood memories.

Hopefully, Alpert’s column will help change patient expectations.  After all, you can give the best advice or set up the best action plan, but if your patients have been taught that anyone who gives them advice is insulting them, you are going to have your work cut out for you.

"The Progressive War On the Middle Class"

No one has done a better job of analyzing California’s decline than Professor Joel Kotkin. No one has done better at showing how the blue state model of governance has failed in California.

And yet, Kotkin admits in the Wall Street Journal today that he voted for the current governor, Jerry Brown. He adds that he is a “Truman Democrat,” meaning, I surmise, that he is now on the road to recovery.

This political season has brought us a number of phony “wars.” Today, Kotkin analyzes a real and often overlooked war, one he calls: “the progressive war on the middle class.”

It begins with what Gov. Brown and his “green cadre” call their: “’smart growth’ plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing.”

Kotkin is rightly outraged to see the rich and fortunate living very high while wanting everyone else in the state to live in substandard “workers’ housing.

As an aside, we should add that this has been tried before. The German architectural movement called the Bauhaus did design workers’ housing after the war. Tom Wolfe told the story masterfully in his book, From Bauhaus to Our House.

Wolfe explained that it did not work out very well. The experiment in aesthetic socialism ended with the destruction of many of the more famous projects. Modernist architecture brought out the worst in everyone who lived there. No one felt at home, and eventually everyone moved out.

California’s progressive war against the middle class does not stop with housing policy. It extends to an effort to green the state. Kotkin notes with regret that Jerry Brown actually believes all the “green stuff.”

Allysia Finley summarizes Kotkin’s views:

Housing is merely one front of what he calls the "progressive war on the middle class." Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost of energy and drive out manufacturing jobs without making even a dent in global carbon emissions. Then there are the renewable portfolio standards, which mandate that a third of the state's energy come from renewable sources like wind and the sun by 2020. California's electricity prices are already 50% higher than the national average.

Oh, and don't forget the $100 billion bullet train. Mr. Kotkin calls the runaway-cost train "classic California." "Where [Brown] with the state going bankrupt is even thinking about an expenditure like this is beyond comprehension. When the schools are falling apart, when the roads are falling apart, the bridges are unsafe, the state economy is in free fall. We're still doing much worse than the rest of the country, we've got this growing permanent welfare class, and high-speed rail is going to solve this?"

High speed rail makes some cultural sense; unfortunately it does not make economic sense. Apparently, Californians feel inferior to the Europeans who have networks of high speed rail. They are suffering from Europe envy.

Government policies have driven up the cost of living in California to the point where the middle class is being forced to flee.

Finley writes:

A worker in Wichita might not consider those earning $250,000 a year middle class, but "if you're a guy working for a Silicon Valley company and you're married and you're thinking about having your first kid, and your family makes 250-k a year, you can't buy a closet in the Bay Area," Mr. Kotkin says. "But for 250-k a year, you can live pretty damn well in Salt Lake City. And you might be able to send your kids to public schools and own a three-bedroom, four-bath house."

According to Mr. Kotkin, these upwardly mobile families are fleeing in droves. As a result, California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are the "entrenched incumbents" who inherited their wealth or came to California early and made their money. Then there's a shrunken middle class of public employees and, miles below, a permanent welfare class. As it stands today, about 40% of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on Medicaid.

Even high-tech is beginning to move out.

Finley summarizes Kotkin:

Take Salt Lake City. "Almost all of the major tech companies have moved stuff to Salt Lake City." That includes Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle.

Then there's Texas, which is on a mission to steal California's tech hegemony. Apple just announced that it's building a $304 million campus and adding 3,600 jobs in Austin. Facebook established operations there last year, and eBay plans to add 1,000 new jobs there too.

She adds:

As progressive policies drive out moderate and conservative members of the middle class, California's politics become even more left-wing. It's a classic case of natural selection, and increasingly the only ones fit to survive in California are the very rich and those who rely on government spending. In a nutshell, "the state is run for the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees."

Of course, no one is going to shed a tear for California. Its citizens are getting what they voted for. Being responsible for your own decisions is central to democratic governance.

And yet, considering how big California is and how poorly its finances are being managed, how long will it be before the nation is called on to bail it out?

When casting a vote in a national election one does well to ask which candidate is more likely to answer the call.

Mort Zuckerman Unbound

Campaign season always brings a blizzard of misleading economic statistics. Candidates and their satraps spin the numbers to tell the story that they want the electorate to buy.

Naturally, this causes many of us to seek out someone somewhere who can offer a clear and objective appraisal of what is really going on.

Since most commentators want to exercise influence over the election, it’s not an easy task.

For my part I pay special attention to recovering Obama supporters, people who supported Obama in the last election but who have since shown better judgment.

Among them, Mort Zuckerman of U. S. News and World Report. Zuckerman has offered an excellent analysis of the current employment situation. His is a dark and sobering vision. I recommend it to your attention.

He begins:

 America's great job creation machine is sputtering badly. It is now estimated that structural unemployment has risen from 5 percent before the crisis to close to 7 percent today. This means that one third of the rise in American joblessness may be impervious to the business cycle; it represents lost jobs that cannot be restored by boosting demand.

The problem now is not that people are being laid off by the millions. When an economy has reached bottom, as it did, it has already shed much of its labor, and layoffs slow. But the anemic recovery has not yielded job vacancies. Hiring today is at about 70 percent of the 2006 level. Given the increase in unemployed totals, job seekers are only about one third as likely to find work as in 2006.

Compare that to the fabled Great Depression of the 1930s. In the three years after 1933, the economy rebounded with growth rates of 11 percent, 9 percent, and 13 percent. But in 2010, months into our recovery, growth was about 3 percent, followed by 1.7 percent growth in 2011. The rate for 2012 could be about 2 percent—below the 3.4 percent throughout the postwar period.

The Great Recession continues. For some, it has become a Depression.

Next, Zuckerman explains how the uncertainties created by Obamacare have forced employers to make fewer new hires.

By now, even Barney Frank is saying that Obama’s obsession with health care reform was a mistake, so you know that the tide has turned.

In Zuckerman’s words:

Each month more Americans lose hope, permanently alienated from the workplace, their savings exhausted. The gradual expansion of the economy is too little to hope the cavalry is riding to the rescue. Real, authentic job creation will not come from Washington. It has to come out of the energy and spirits of the private sector. Two thirds of our employment is concentrated in 6 million small and medium-size businesses. We are not going to create jobs until they are in a state of mind to do so. They are not yet, and in part that's because of policy uncertainty that has depressed or confused them.

According to the Heritage Foundation, private sector hiring through June 2011 was 10 times slower following the passage of President Obama's healthcare bill compared to the prior 16 months. Economists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago estimated in the fall of 2011 that policy uncertainty has cost more than 2 million jobs since early 2010. These estimates reflect the small business community's reluctance to make new hires until employers know exactly what the law means in practice. The high level of temporary employment is a reflection of the same uncertainty. Businesses hedge their bets with short-term help.

We are living through the Obama administration’s calamitous policy failure.

Zuckerman concludes:

There is no doubt that the next presidential term will start with a rate of unemployment that is far higher than what President Obama inherited when he took office. The programs that he has put in place have failed. The U.S. economic recovery is like a person who promises much and doesn't deliver. There are not many months left for Obama to persuade the nation to measure his performance by a different mark.