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Letters: An Attack on Syria? The Tension Rises

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 31 Agustus 2013 | 13.26

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Re "Obama Set for Limited Strike on Syria as British Vote No" (front page, Aug. 30): It is troubling that we are again considering bombing another far-off country, and possibly without support from the international community.

The use of chemical weapons is unacceptable, but establishing that Syrian forces used them is not alone sufficient to justify unilateral intervention.

The lessons of our recent military adventures in the Middle East and Central Asia dictate that before we start bombing we should have a game plan, that we must know what good we can reasonably expect to accomplish, and that we should have a clear exit strategy.

It does not appear that any of this is in place. Have we not learned the limits of our power? Let us not further destabilize this troubled region.

BRUCE A. BURNS
Spencertown, N.Y., Aug. 30, 2013

To the Editor:

So Prime Minister David Cameron cannot wage war without the consent of the British people as represented by Parliament. I guess this is what a democracy looks like.

BRIAN DEIMLING
Brooklyn, Aug. 30, 2013

To the Editor:

Secretary of State John Kerry has made the case for retaliation against Syria. The die is cast. Forget further efforts at negotiation, a Security Council resolution or a political solution: they will never happen.

I believe that President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons and that we have the proof. No more wringing of hands. This is not like the invasion of Iraq on false premises. Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Syria has used them, and it sends a clear signal that it would do so again.

We should attack Syria with full force in the air and decapitate its command and control and its leadership in palaces, airfields, and weapon sites and logistical support. Syria is a threat to our national safety. Congress must get on board. France supports us. Let's do it now.

LAURENCE C. DAY
Ladue, Mo., Aug. 30, 2013

To the Editor:

The fact that President Obama is prepared to carry out a go-it-alone strike on Syria is not a good thing.

It will further inflame the negative feelings toward America in the Middle East with little likelihood of achieving any benefits that might be gained.

We have already compromised our moral position in that part of the world, jeopardizing the opportunity to help achieve peace and stability.

I hope that Congress will exercise its constitutional obligations with respect to our country's involvement in another Middle East war.

JOHN A. VITERITTI
Southold, N.Y., Aug. 30, 2013

To the Editor:

Re "Reinforce a Norm in Syria," by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Aug. 29):

In urging President Obama to take "a tougher approach" toward Syria, Mr. Kristof tells of a Syrian grandmother who lost her husband, her son and her daughter-in-law to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and he asks, "What do we tell her?" It is a painful question, but surely the answer should not be to launch a missile attack that will kill yet more people and add to the turmoil in the region.

Ideally, what we should tell that grandmother is that the United States is working through the United Nations to achieve an immediate cease-fire in Syria, to be followed by an intensive diplomatic effort to work out a permanent and peaceful solution to the conflict so that the killing will stop once and for all.

Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should have told us by now that dropping more bombs on a Muslim country will do nothing but perpetuate violence and increase hatred of America.

RACHELLE MARSHALL
Mill Valley, Calif., Aug. 29, 2013

To the Editor:

In Rwanda, an estimated 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days. In Syria, more than 100,000 have been killed in two years. The slaughter in both cases has been horrific, but the two situations are not comparable. One involved failure to intervene in a clearly defined genocide where United States military action could have been decisive.

In Syria, you have a complex civil war, where both sides have a significant number of bad actors and where even a full-scale invasion might not achieve the desired result. And people who engage in symbolic gestures involving guns often end up shooting themselves in the foot. The trouble with red lines is that they can easily become a green light for ill-considered military action.

SUSAN ALTMAN
Washington, Aug. 29, 2013


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Letter: A Tribute to Seamus Heaney

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To the Editor:

Re "Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74" (nytimes.com, Aug. 30):

Seamus Heaney saw his beloved homeland torn by war and cruel political hatreds throughout the 20th century, and was the heir to a culture long bound in Catholic tradition.

Though Mr. Heaney's trajectory took him far from his Catholic origins, he never fully resisted Catholicism's gravitational pull, never denied its energy.

Mr. Heaney was world-weary and wise, tinctured with an existential sadness, though he managed a strong underlying optimism. With Seamus Heaney, like Irish beer, the sharpness and the bitterness are undeniable, but it is the refreshment that soothes and lingers.

GEORGE KOVAC
Miami, Aug. 30, 2013


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Letters: Navigating the Worlds of Science and Faith

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To the Editor:

Adam Frank, in "Welcome to the Age of Denial" (Op-Ed, Aug. 22), seems bitter that no one is listening to him and his fellow astrophysicists. After all, they have found the truth.

Let me remind Dr. Frank that the theory of relativity is still a theory, as is the Big Bang theory. As a physician in private practice for almost 25 years, I have made it a point to have an open discourse with my patients when they question medical or scientific fact. Too often I have seen outcomes defy those facts.

Let those of us who may have been educated in the ivory towers of academia abandon the notion that we belong to a society that holds knowledge of the universal truths of humankind and the cosmos. They should be used as guidelines rather than as intransigent blocks to creative approaches and thought.

The universal truth that I live by is the understanding that the challenges of everyday life have a way of creating individual realities that, to scientists, may fly in the face of logic and fact; however, they are logical and factual to those who experience and live with them.

CHARLES F. GLASSMAN
Pomona, N.Y., Aug. 22, 2013

The writer is an internist.

To the Editor:

That we have fallen into an age of denial is a symptom of the longstanding battle of faith versus reason; faith's passion usually wins over reason's sobriety. We scientists can be our own worst enemies by failing to communicate our passion for discovery, a fire that burns as bright as a creationist's zeal. Carl Sagan knew that; now it's our turn to drag us out of this unfortunate state of affairs.

JEFFREY H. TONEY
Union, N.J., Aug. 22, 2013

The writer, a former pharmaceutical researcher, is provost and vice president for academic affairs at Kean University.

To the Editor:

Adam Frank correctly laments some Americans' disdain of scientific fact. But he less correctly lumps creationists together for scorn and praises scientists without qualification. He quite ignores the middle, where I live.

Our love for science and keen belief in God are both firm and reasonable. We are annoyed by the assumption that hard-wired science will learn about everything that can be known. We are amused by scientific exuberance like that of Carl Sagan, who stated as a scientific fact that the physical universe is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be. So at least for us in the middle, add scientific hubris to the list of forces that have eroded confidence in science.

(Rev.)

JOSEPH A. TETLOW
St. Louis, Aug. 22, 2013

The writer, a Jesuit priest, is writer in residence at Jesuit Hall, Saint Louis University.

To the Editor:

Anti-science complaints are most often aimed at the creationism espoused by religious conservatives, but there's rarely a word about the left's dubious opposition to engineering marvels like nuclear energy, environmentally friendly oil drilling, and solutions to climate change that involve technology instead of changes to personal behavior.

As someone who studied physics as an undergraduate and graduate student, I believe that we hear little about anti-science behavior on the left because the prejudices and outcomes it embraces are more popular than those of the right wing. Their anti-science charges are built on ideologically convenient, cherry-picked examples like those of Adam Frank.

MICHAEL LONG
Burke, Va., Aug. 22, 2013


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Letter: Make Rights of Women a Top Diplomatic Priority

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Re "A Question of How Women's Issues Will Fare, in Washington and Overseas" (news article, Aug. 23):

As an organization dedicated to protecting the rights and dignity of the world's most marginalized people, American Jewish World Service supports Ambassador Catherine M. Russell's efforts to make women's issues a top priority of Secretary of State John Kerry. Women and girls make up 70 percent of the global poor, an alarming statistic compounded by their vulnerability to violence.

Ambassador Russell played a critical role in writing the International Violence Against Women Act and is well placed to prod Congress to pass this critical legislation. She can help ensure that fighting violence against women internationally is not only given importance but also codified as a diplomatic priority in future administrations.

Advancing peace, security and democracy internationally requires putting women and girls at the center of foreign policy. We urge Congress and Secretary Kerry to make sure that the rights of women and girls around the world remain a centerpiece of American diplomacy.

RUTH MESSINGER
Pres., American Jewish World Service
New York, Aug. 23, 2013


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Op-Ed Columnist: War-Weariness

America may have lost its stomach for military intervention.

The Obama administration has made its case that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons against his own people and that a "limited" military response is in order to demonstrate that international norms will — and must — be enforced.

President Obama said during a news conference on Friday, "It's important for us to recognize that when over a thousand people are killed, including hundreds of innocent children, through the use of a weapon that 98 or 99 percent of humanity says should not be used even in war, and there is no action, then we're sending a signal."

The president is attempting to assure the American people that any action in Syria will not involve American boots on the ground and will not be a sinkhole like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that is a hard case to make.

The problem is that America seems war weary.

If the administration is correct, this is a human rights tragedy. Something should be done. But must we always be the ones to do it? Does protecting America's interest mean policing the world's horrors?

When innocent lives are taken in the most reprehensible of ways, to whom do their souls cry? Whence comes their justice? Is America's moral leadership in the world carved out by the tip of its sword?

These are profound questions that go straight to the heart of how we see ourselves on a rapidly changing planet. Are we the arbiters of the world's atrocities?

It would seem that Americans are conflicted about that role, at least in this case.

An NBC News poll released Friday found that while 58 percent of Americans believe that the use of chemical weapons by any country is a "red line" requiring a significant United States response, including military action, only 42 percent believe that we should take such action in Syria and only 21 percent are convinced that such action is in our national interest. Fifty percent of Americans believe that we should take no significant military action.

To put that in context, according to data from Gallup, the highest disapproval rate for military action in the last 30 years was 45 percent for military action in Haiti in 1994 and in Kosovo and the Balkans in 1999.

Our current conflicts, no doubt, weigh heavily on Americans' minds.

The war in Afghanistan is now in its 12th year, and the Iraq war lasted nearly 9 years. In fact, only 7 of the past 30 years have seen the United States not engaged in military action in some part of the world, according to Gallup.

And most of the countries where the United States has been engaged are halfway around the world, where few Americans are likely to have been or even be familiar with.

In fact, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, only 50 percent of Americans can correctly locate Syria on a map, and an April report from Pew found that fewer than one in five Americans have followed the news about Syria very closely since May 2011.

Convincing Americans that a place they hardly know about poses a security threat may prove difficult. We all remember that the Iraq war was based on faulty intelligence trafficked by the Bush administration and regurgitated by the media. This damaged folks' faith and left them dubious.

Furthermore, the coalition we might expect to support intervention isn't intact. The British Parliament voted against launching a strike on Syria, a shocking move by one of America's staunchest allies. The United Nations Security Council did not resolve to use military force, and there is not likely to be a vote in Congress before any action is taken.

The president is out on a most precarious limb on this issue. It is an unenviable position, where the right moral move could be the wrong political one, where the to-what-end question has a lack-of-clarity answer. Would a "limited" bombing campaign be the military equivalent of slap on the wrist? How would it guarantee an end to the atrocities?

These are the moments — when the support flags and emotions flare — that try the character and constitution of a leader, particularly a leader who rose to prominence as an antiwar candidate.

The president said Friday that "a lot of people think something should be done, but nobody wants to do it." Does he want to? Or must he? And must we? Always?


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Letters: The High Turnover at Charter Schools

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 30 Agustus 2013 | 13.26

To the Editor:

Re "At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice" (front page, Aug. 27):

Thank you for shedding light on the appalling turnover rate for teachers at many charter schools. Research has shown that teacher-student relationships are absolutely crucial to student success. These relationships cannot be built in a year or two.

Working at a charter school, I saw the kids cry every year over their favorite teachers leaving. Each year, I watched the new teachers scrambling. Instability created by the constant churn of staff was devastating, especially for the most vulnerable students, who felt constantly misunderstood and undervalued.

I've taught for over a decade. I didn't begin to hit my stride until my fifth year teaching. I've never seen a teacher with less than three years of experience whom I would even call "good." Teaching is incredibly complex and multifaceted. A teacher must deeply understand the content he or she teaches, as well as possess pedagogical knowledge, classroom management techniques and relationship-building skills.

The charter school representatives in your article defend the rapid turnover of teachers. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, even says that teachers can become great in one or two years! Would we expand this idea to other professions? Do we think the best lawyers are those fresh out of law school? Should we choose a rookie physician for complex surgery, because this surgeon is more "enthusiastic" than veteran surgeons?

The "short term" teachers speak of teaching not as a profession, but as a steppingstone to a career in another field. A 24-year-old charter-school teacher is quoted saying, "I feel like our generation is always moving onto the next thing and always moving onto something bigger and better." Bigger and better than teaching children? How disrespectful of the profession and the children themselves.

CATHERINE M. IONATA
Aberdeen, N.J., Aug. 27, 2013

To the Editor:

This article highlights high turnover for teachers at charter schools like Yes Prep and KIPP. But it missed the successes that these charters are having in turning around low-performing schools.

The Recovery School District in southern Louisiana was formed in 2003 by shutting down 107 of the worst-performing schools and converting many of those to charters. This year, it reports that the district's achievement gap with the state average has been reduced by 29 percentage points over the past five years. Arthur Ashe Charter School students beat the state average by five points, while serving the highest percentage of special education students in New Orleans. Success Prep Charter students increased their score 15 points in one year, while 96 percent of their students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

These schools attract top college graduates as teachers and put them through grueling training and coaching throughout the first year. Some say it is not sustainable, but these schools are still making rapid gains after a decade.

RICK BERGDAHL
Issaquah, Wash., Aug. 27, 2013

To the Editor:

The high teacher turnover at charter schools leaves these institutions fragile and ill equipped to support their most vulnerable students. It takes far more than a year or two in the classroom to develop that elusive set of skills needed to serve our nation's neediest cohorts of students — young men of color, English language learners and so on. And I have seen some of the most well-regarded charters here in Massachusetts left reeling and in danger of closing after extensive teacher departures.

During recent years, the average experience of teachers in my school's humanities department essentially doubled, and we have correspondingly seen increased performance by students with disabilities, decreased student attrition and some of the top high school test scores in the state.

Our school's leaders haven't done anything radical; they have simply continued to make thoughtful moves year after year to support our faculty — whether trimming after-school duties, providing mentors for new teachers or offering more teacher leadership opportunities.

It is possible to achieve great results for all students without burning through our youngest teachers.

HENRY SETON
Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 27, 2013

The writer is a humanities teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge.

To the Editor:

Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, makes the claim that the "strongest schools" can develop their teachers so that "they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years." My experience (nine years of school teaching, then 25 years of running teacher preparation programs) suggests otherwise.

Teachers go through three stages in learning the craft. The first stage, the first full year of teaching, is just learning to be comfortable in a roomful of adolescents. The second stage, typically the second year, is teaching, with some success, the given curriculum. The third stage, which can begin in the third year and shouldn't end, is teaching shaped by the creativity and originality of the teacher herself.

Most of the "short-timers" in the article will never reach the third stage. No wonder so many leave after too short a time.

"O.K., I've got this," an administrator at a charter school imagines such beginners thinking about their teaching. But they don't; they can't. Ms. Kopp's idea that one or two years of teaching can be enough to become great is arrogant nonsense.

DANIEL LINDLEY
New York, Aug. 27, 2013


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Letter: Gus, the Captive Polar Bear

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To the Editor:

Gus was no ordinary neurotic New Yorker ("Farewell to Gus, Whose Issues Made Him a Star," front page, Aug. 29). He was a polar bear, genetically designed to thrive in Arctic expanses. His "issues" were a result of life in captivity.

Oxford University researchers say polar bears fare especially poorly in captive situations because they're unable to satisfy their instinct to roam. A captive polar bear's typical enclosure size is about one-millionth of its minimum home-range size.

What Gus needed much more than positive reinforcement, toys and hidden treats was tundras, open ocean and freedom of movement.

Gus can finally rest in peace, and in his memory, zoo officials and patrons should acknowledge that complex animals who are meant to roam, hunt and swim for vast distances do not belong in New York City.

HEATHER MOORE
Research Specialist
PETA Foundation
Norfolk, Va., Aug. 29, 2013


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Letter: Theology and Civil Rights

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Re "The Ideas Behind the March" (column, Aug. 27): David Brooks has done us all a favor by recalling the deep theological roots that underlay the nonviolent self-discipline of the civil rights movement and the 1963 March on Washington. Those roots were already evident in 1947, when we met Bayard Rustin and a few others who were on a "Journey of Reconciliation," which anticipated the Freedom Rides that were to come later.

The first Journey of Reconciliation was in North Carolina, where they were taken off an interstate bus, beaten by segregationists and jailed by the local authorities. Despite such treatment, Mr. Rustin never wavered from his nonviolent strategies in the cause of justice. Those strategies and spirit are again at work in North Carolina.

Hundreds of blacks and whites together, led in nonviolent action by the N.A.A.C.P., do civil disobedience at the state capitol in Raleigh every Monday.

The spirit of Bayard Rustin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others lives on in these "Moral Mondays," resisting the state's recent laws that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.

Such actions are the best way to memorialize the civil rights leaders.

ANNE L. BARSTOW
TOM F. DRIVER
Hightstown, N.J., Aug. 29, 2013

The writers are a retired history professor at the SUNY College at Old Westbury and professor emeritus at the Union Theological Seminary.


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Letter: A Challenge to Christie

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To the Editor:

Re "Less Bully, More Pulpit" (column, Aug. 28): Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is quoted by Maureen Dowd as saying, "You know, college professors basically spout out ideas that nobody ever does anything about."

Any time that Governor Christie would like to compare the actual accomplishments of his Republican Party with ours here at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I am a professor of American sign language, I'm ready.

GEOFFREY S. POOR
Rochester, Aug. 28, 2013


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Letter: Airplane Noise in Queens

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Re "A Rumble in the Sky, and Grumbles Below" ("What?" series, Aug. 26), about new airplane noise that is ruining the quality of life in Queens:

One of the reasons the problem is so bad in Queens is the lack of an airport advisory committee. Along with Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Steve Israel, I have urged the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to establish such a panel to help reduce the constant barrage of aircraft noise over the borough.

No formal forum exists for residents of the New York metropolitan area to express how they are affected by flight patterns and other airport issues. A formal committee would give elected officials, the aviation community and the Federal Aviation Administration an understanding of the concerns affecting area residents and allow all stakeholders to work together to reach solutions.

With congested skies and flight delays continuing to affect air travelers, the F.A.A. needs to move forward with efforts that enhance the efficiency and reliability of our airspace. But we cannot allow this to be done at the expense of those who reside beneath these new routes. The unbearable noise they have been forced to endure is unacceptable, and we will continue to fight it.

GRACE MENG
Bayside, Queens, Aug. 28, 2013

The writer, a Democrat, represents New York's Sixth District in the House.


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Opinionator | Private Lives: Forgetting Grandma

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 29 Agustus 2013 | 13.26

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

My grandmother has Alzheimer's disease. But in a lot of ways, she made us forget each other a long time ago.

Several years ago, I found out from my father that she lived four miles away from me in San Francisco. This was news: I'd last seen my grandmother almost 25 years before.

"Your ma-ma is turning 81," my father informed me on the phone from China, using the Cantonese name for paternal grandmother. "We'll go see her when I visit you this month."

I pictured a "??!" floating over my head in a comic book bubble. Then I asked him why he'd never told me this before. I'd been living in the Bay Area for six years.

This was a weird situation in which to find myself. I talk to my mom every week, and visit her and my extended network of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in New York as often as possible. My brother just moved to San Francisco to be closer to me. My maternal family has always been strong, steady, there: when my uncle and his wife had children, his parents and sisters pitched in. When one sister lost her husband, another sister moved in. In a family this intimate, it was impossible to lose track of anyone.

My father, on the other hand, comes from a complicated line of divorce and stepfamilies. He and my mother divorced, as did his parents and his grandparents before them. I'm the only person I know whose family history involves the triple-whammy of three successive generations of divorce. After her own divorce, my ma-ma promptly remarried a wealthy older man and had two other children, after which there were no letters and no phone calls. We had assumed it was because she was living in Hong Kong.

When I expressed astonishment at his withholding information about my grandmother's whereabouts, my father feigned ignorance, before telling me that he had probably seen her only about 30 times in his life. Total. As a young boy, after his parents broke up, he'd been shipped off to boarding school. It did not seem outrageous to him that he'd allowed me to think she lived in another country for a quarter-century.

"You know your ba has a very strange family," he went on, temporarily referring to himself in the third person. Was this supposed to make me feel better? "Ma-ma has this whole other family. But she's getting old. And don't you want to see your grandmother?"

What self-respecting woman doesn't know that her grandma lives in the same city as she does? It felt appalling, unnatural. It did not seem as important that I had seen my grandmother only twice, the last time when I was 8, or that neither she nor my father had tried to foster her bond with my brother and me. I had developed a far more significant emotional connection with the FedEx delivery woman I saw on my doorstep almost every day. But still I felt ashamed.

When I reluctantly related this discovery to my friends, they expressed awe. "You have a grandmother here?" my friend Jenny asked. Her Chinese grandmother also lived in San Francisco, but she visited her every two weeks.

"No one ever told me," I said. I knew how lame that sounded. And I felt angry at the position that my father had put me in. If I didn't go, I'd be the bad granddaughter. The thought galled and embarrassed me. And yet: wasn't it unfair to expect me to feel unreserved love for a virtual stranger?

On the day of the big visit, I made my husband come along with us. The four-mile drive from our neighborhood to the foggy Inner Sunset seemed to take forever. I was moving backward, the gap between my 30-something self and my younger self getting smaller with every block we traveled.

On the steps of her small stucco house, my grandmother was waiting, with two of my father's half sisters, one of whom I'd never met (the other I'd seen just once). They waved cheerily as we pulled up.

We started the evening at a bad Japanese restaurant, eating gummy rice and greasy tempura. My grandmother and I chatted about my writing. She teased my father about how he was looking older now — at this, he bristled comically — and his half siblings shared in the good-natured ribbing. We talked about my father's recent art show, my husband's job, and how we all hadn't seen one another in ages. My grandmother said that she had been forgetting things. But when she asked me if I remembered her, her eyes were sharp. "I last saw you when I was 58," she said with certainty, in Cantonese. "You were very little then."

Of course I remembered her. Or rather, I remembered a character sketch of her. A cool, distant relation who swept in to visit us twice in New York and didn't get along with my mother. There was suspicion on my mother's part — this woman doesn't care about my husband, when has she ever visited, what does she want now? — and it colored my consciousness. But I was 8. My memory of her was dulled by all the intervening years of absence. I didn't remember her having a big, sweet smile. Or a keen sense of humor. Or this kind of youthful vigor. In front of me now, with her neat red lipstick and dyed-black hair, she didn't look a day over 60. And she seemed like a perfectly delightful person.

We all had a good time. We drove back to her house after dinner and sat around eating chocolate, watching a basketball game and looking at pictures of my grandmother's recent trip to China. It was fun, but somehow false. The pleasantries were just that: surface exchanges that didn't have the weight of history behind them. After all, there wasn't a single photo of my father or me in that house. As my husband and I wandered through the rooms, every tabletop cluttered with other family photos, I found to my surprise that I didn't feel longing. We were strangers whose paths intersected now and again.

When we got up to go home at the end of the night, my ma-ma flashed her bright, all-encompassing grin and took my arm. "If I see you on the street and I don't know who you are," she said, looking into my eyes, "you have to remind me. All right?"

I looked back at her and wondered what I owed her. It was the moment to tell her that we should see each other more often.

I smiled, gave her one last hug, and didn't say anything. It's true that many things that night weren't quite what I expected. But it turned out that this wasn't a family reunion, and I wanted us to exit with some grace.

If she called, I told myself, I would answer. But I knew she wouldn't.

Bonnie Tsui is a writer based in San Francisco and the author, most recently, of "American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods."


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Letter: Invitation to a Dialogue: Economics as Science

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Re "What Is Economics Good For?" (Sunday Review, Aug. 25):

I disagree with Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain's characterization of science in general and economics in particular. They claim that a scientific discipline is to be judged primarily on its predictions, and on that basis, they suggest, economics doesn't qualify as a science.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting. Seismology, for example, has taught us why earthquakes occur, but doesn't tell Californians when they'll be hit by "the big one."

And through meteorology we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise.

In the same way, economic theory provides a good understanding of how financial derivatives are priced (notwithstanding Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Curtain's snarky reference to the Black-Scholes model). But that doesn't mean that we know whether the derivatives market will crash this year.

Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.

ERIC S. MASKIN
Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 26, 2013

The writer, a university professor at Harvard, is a 2007 Nobel laureate in economics.

Editors' Note: We invite readers to respond briefly for the Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and a rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com


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Letters: ‘I Have a Dream,’ Then and Now

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In "The Ideas Behind the March" (column, Aug. 27), David Brooks punctures a myth about nonviolent resistance used by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin that was on display in the historic 1963 civil rights March on Washington, at which Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Nonviolent resistance was not passive and required a great deal of practiced discipline reinforced by a mass movement. Although many dismissed it as "turning the other cheek," even cowardly, it should be seen as an expression of manhood built on the power of self-respect and self-control, behavior more difficult to engage in than aggression and violence.

Dr. King and his allies used nonviolent resistance not only in pursuit of legal equality but also to eliminate economic inequality through redistributive policies that would close the gap between rich and poor, a goal that remains unfulfilled.

STEVEN F. LAWSON
Metuchen, N.J., Aug. 27, 2013

The writer is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University.

To the Editor:

David Brooks is right about the origins of the March on Washington in 1963 and the pivotal roles played by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, but it would have been helpful to note the influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

It was Mr. Rustin who was most responsible for promoting the Gandhian philosophy in the civil rights movement. And although the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first heard of Gandhi's ideas in 1950, it was not until Mr. Rustin became a trusted adviser that he began to realize the importance of nonviolent protest as the best strategy to end segregation.

HERB BOYD
New York, Aug. 27, 2013

The writer is an adjunct professor of black studies at City College, CUNY, and the author of "Civil Rights, Yesterday and Today."

To the Editor:

In assessing the success of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence movement, David Brooks is a tad idealistic. He doesn't mention that the concurrent black fringe movements' advocacy of violence ("by any means necessary") made Dr. King look moderate and acceptable.

Without those groups, he himself would have looked radical. Indeed, in the "Letter From Birmingham Jail," he in effect said, Either negotiate with me or fight with the radicals.

MANFRED WEIDHORN
Fair Lawn, N.J., Aug. 28, 2013


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Letter: Iran’s View of Israel

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The language in "Reading Tweets From Iran" (editorial, Aug. 26) that President Obama "must include managing the enmity that Israel and many members of Congress feel toward Iran" was disappointing. To refer to Israel's "enmity" toward Iran is an example of reverse causality, citing Israel's reaction but not the cause of it, which is Iran's dangerous fantasy of Israel's annihilation.

Time and again, Iran's leaders have called for a world without Israel, plotted terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets from Argentina to Azerbaijan, and underwritten Hezbollah and other jihadist groups. Israel's approach to Iran is driven by an understandable response to this eliminationist ideology, and its accompanying nuclear and missile programs.

There are no territorial disputes between Israel and Iran. What divides them is Iran's worldview and, simply put, Israel's unwillingness to succumb to it. The onus must be on Iran's leaders to demonstrate, and not merely in rosy 140-character tweets from a president whose power is limited, that this worldview has changed.

DAVID HARRIS
Executive Director
American Jewish Committee
New York, Aug. 26, 2013


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Opinionator: Can Republicans Paint the White House Red?

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

Tags:

Bush, Jeb, Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Elections, Senate, Presidential Election of 2016, Republican Party, Rove, Karl, United States Politics and Government

Democrats may dream of sixteen years of dominance, but on Nov. 8, 2016 it is entirely possible that Americans will elect a Republican president. It is even possible, although less likely, that Republicans will be in full control of the federal government: the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court.

A dominant theme in contemporary political commentary on the left, the right and the center is that the Republican Party faces a grave crisis of both demographics and ideology. But despite the cacophony of fault-finding, caution is in order before we declare the Republican Party down for the count.

To explore the possibility of a Republican revival in 2016, I spoke with a number of Republican strategists including Stuart Stevens, who ran the Romney campaign in 2012, Patrick Ruffini, president of Engage, a digital consulting company, and Bill McInturff, founder of Public Opinion Strategies.

Stevens is a critic of the doom-and-gloom approach. He argues that a successful 2016 Republican presidential scenario can be credibly pieced together. Here are some of the hypotheticals that might lead to victory.

One, Hillary Clinton chooses not to run or, as was the case in 2008, falls flat in the primaries and caucuses. This would leave Democrats with second-tier candidates, none of whom can inspire the overall turnout or the specific margins enjoyed by President Obama.

Two, public discontent with Obamacare grows. Young voters, a key to recent Democratic victories, bristle over the requirement to buy insurance or pay a fine. Corporate plans cut spousal coverage. Businesses replace full-time workers with part-timers, ineligible for benefits. Health insurance premiums continue to rise faster than inflation. The discontent with the Affordable Care Act on the part of the three major unions – the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite-Here – spreads throughout the labor movement. Glitches in rolling out the massive new healthcare program increase public opposition (the regulations governing the hiring of healthcare "navigators" to help consumers enroll total an estimated 13,900 words in the Federal Register). Increasing numbers of people cannot keep either their current doctor or their healthcare plan.

Three, the stock market and corporate profits rise, but employment continues to lag; more people drop out of the workforce; the job market continues to bifurcate, with work at the high and low ends, but less and less in the middle.

Four, the Republican primary electorate does not nominate Ted Cruz of Texas or Rand Paul of Kentucky and instead picks Jeb Bush or another mainstream nominee.

Ruffini puts the case for 50-50 odds in 2016 in terms of his view that Hillary Clinton is the likely nominee, noting that she carries substantial baggage. "Clinton's currently favorable political position," Ruffini wrote me,

is a function of the aftermath of the 2008 campaign, where she gained in popularity amongst Republicans as a Democratic foil to Obama, and stayed above the partisan fray as Secretary of State. In 2016, that dynamic will no longer apply.

In addition, he said,

No one wants to say that Hillary Clinton is too old to be president; she is not. But there is a demonstrable bias in recent presidential elections towards a younger candidate being able to successfully contrast stylistically against an older one. Especially if the public mood pivots back towards change in 2016, this is something Clinton will need to navigate, as it seems likely right now that the Republican candidate will personify a generational shift in the electorate. Finally, it should be remembered that we saw how Clinton performed on the campaign trail in 2008 and the results weren't good.

Ruffini's bottom line:

Clinton is a formidable candidate who can rely on historic levels of support among women and can raise hundreds of millions of dollars online even before the general election. The celebrity factor will propel her. But she won't be able to defy gravity forever.

It's relatively easy to draw up a counter-scenario in which Republican prospects in 2016 are dim. Let's say:

  • Conservative Republicans in the House and Senate force a government shutdown inflicting damage on the economy.
  • The fight for the nomination forces all Republican candidates, including those from the mainstream, to shift to the right, undermining their general election prospects;
  • Republican primary voters go over the edge and nominate Cruz or Paul.
  • Hillary Clinton runs unopposed for the nomination, raises $1 billion or more before the conventions, while Republicans battle each other with the winner broke in August 2016.

Just as importantly, the Electoral College, which throughout the years of Republican ascendancy from the late 60s into the early 90s tilted to the right, now leans to the left. This map of the United States, "The Big Blue Wall," was put together by the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies:

The Republican Party's difficulties have prompted some sympathetic analysts to call for a reversal of trickle-down economic policies. Mark Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argue that Republicans should become

visible and persistent critics of corporate welfare: the vast network of subsidies and tax breaks extended by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to wealthy and well-connected corporations.

Even Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to an administration that passed two tax cuts favoring the affluent, has caught the populist bug, arguing "there is too much corporate welfare and there are too many breaks that benefit the big guys and the people who've already got it." With no evident embarrassment, Rove told an Aspen Institute conference on the future of the Republican Party:

So we got a tax system that benefits the big guy over the little guy and we need to reform it and we got a government with way too much benefits that flow to the people who've got the money that keeps us from providing the resources necessary to the people who don't have money and also keeps us all paying too much in taxes, because they're running up too much of debt, because most of that corporate welfare if not all of it, is being paid for by borrowed money we don't have.

David Leege, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, believes Republicans have a good shot in 2016 because their disparate and often conflicting factions "will unite around an even more elemental fear — threats to the preservation of white male rule." Leege argues in an email to the Times:

2016 could look good for Reps. They are the party of fresh faces. Dems are the party of old faces. Reps have taken advantage of Citizens United and will (illegally) do as good a job of coordinating almost limitless gifts between PACs and the candidate's campaign organization, as the Dems did in 2012 with "limited" funds.

Steve Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, is even more bullish on Republican prospects:

I think they have a better than 50-50 shot at the presidency. It is very hard for a party to win the presidency three times in a row — since WWII, only the run of Reagan-Bush. There are a lot of divisions in the G.O.P., but there is no shortage of respectable candidates.

The post-World War II historical record strongly favors a Republican victory in 2016, according to David Mayhew, a political scientist at Yale. He pointed out that in five of the six "open" elections since World War II (open meaning without an incumbent candidate), the candidate representing the party holding the White House lost. In 2016, the Democratic nominee will fit that definition.

Both Mayhew and Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, contend that Republican power brokers should be able to force enough of a change in the direction of the party to be competitive. Lupia wrote in an email responding to a Times' inquiry asking him to assess the competitive strength of the parties:

Establishment Republicans have room to extend their base and their appeal. The incremental changes that we are seeing on issues such as immigration, same-sex marriage, and climate change set the stage for a person with conservative bona fides to draw support from the ideological center of the U.S. population. Slight changes in G.O.P. primary rules and more strategic use of money by establishment Republican money people will give centrists more advantages than they had in 2008 and 2012.

Along parallel lines, Mayhew wrote:

Generally speaking, out-parties adapt. They take advantage of various party-in-office erosions, they adjust to changing demographics, and they play a good game in candidate choice and issue positioning.

The issues at play in presidential campaigns are often different from those in House and Senate races. Control of the Senate could turn out to be a bigger hurdle for the Republican Party than winning the White House. Republicans have a decent chance of taking control next year, but even if they do, the party will have a tough time retaining control in 2016.

The view among non-partisan election experts on the 2014 Senate races is generally similar. Charlie Cook described the odds as

a little less than 50-50 for G.O.P. takeover. Don't know if you have seen our Senate math worksheet. Republicans have a very narrow but not uphill path to a majority. They have to almost run the table, but the states aren't tough ones.

Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of The Rothenberg Political Report, told me that he expects Republicans to pick up from 3 to 6 seats. "As you know, the Rs need to net 6 seats to take the Senate. So we characterize the Senate as 'in play'."

Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia, wrote in an emailed response to a Times inquiry:

I look at it this way. Heavy odds that Republicans will pick up seats, net, in 2014. Right now, it looks like +3 or +4. They need +6 to gain control. So Democrats are early slight favorites to retain control of the Senate. All the Republicans need, though, is a medium-sized wave to take 6. They already probably have WV, SD, and MT — currently all D seats with vacating incumbents. It's 50-50 in AR for Sen. Mark Pryor (D) vs. Rep. Tom Cotton (R). Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Mark Begich (D-AK) are slight favorites to hold their seats — but a medium wave could unseat them. That's potentially +6 for the G.O.P.

Cook, Rothenberg and Sabato are looking at the 2014 senate contests. In 2016, however, the advantage in Senate elections will shift back to the Democrats. Of the 34 Senators up for election, 24 are Republicans, included those holding seats in highly competitive states like New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The only 2016 Democratic seats in toss-up states are in Nevada and Colorado.

The ingredient missing so far in this discussion of the future of the Republican Party is the American business community. The Republican Party has been the political home of corporate America for generations.

At the moment, the Tea Party faction has become a major problem for business interests on at least three fronts. First, by blocking immigration reform, a top priority of the business lobby. Second, by calling for rejection of legislation raising the debt ceiling, the Tea Party promotes economic uncertainty, and uncertainty is itself anathema to commercial interests. Third, the radicalism of the Tea Party threatens the viability of the Republican Party, the political arm of business.

The future of the Republican Party will in large part be determined by the outcome of the internal struggle between the Tea Party faction and the pro-business establishment wing. Over the long haul, this is not a fight between equals. Prospects favor a revived pro-business, anti-regulatory Republican Party that purposefully narrowcasts — that is, carefully restricts to a select audience — its focus on divisive social and cultural issues, just as the Democratic Party, which had lost three presidential elections in a row, lowered its liberal profile in the 1990s. The compelling mandate for a national political party in the United States is not to serve as ideological advocate, but to win.


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Letters: Paying for College: Obama’s Proposal

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 27 Agustus 2013 | 13.26

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Re "Obama's Plan Aims to Lower Cost of College" (front page, Aug. 22):

President Obama's proposal for linking federal aid to a ranking system typifies the approach of so-called educational reformers. From the perspective of someone who has taught at a large state university that enrolls a large number of students of modest means, the proposal fails to come to grips with the roots of the problem.

My students, many of whom are first-generation college students, face stagnant levels of financial aid and declining state funding, forcing many of them to work full time and/or take fewer courses to make ends meet. This leads to delayed graduations and periods out of school.

But instead of admitting that lack of funding has produced this state of affairs, reformers seek to vilify universities. After 20 years of stagnant wages, cuts in benefits and declining faculty numbers, there is nothing left to cut.

In a final twist, the president suggested consulting university administrators for cost-cutting measures. As my colleagues in the academy will no doubt confirm, the one growth sector in universities has been in the number and salaries of administrators — along with the expensive vanity projects that administrators embrace, like recreational facilities and athletics.

Finally, unless a rating system accounts for the considerable differences in student backgrounds and resources available to them, it will simply mirror the vast inequalities within higher education. Thousands of my students have gone on to successful careers in a variety of fields despite the challenges they faced. It would be unfortunate if future students are punished to satisfy some ill-formed notion of accountability.

KARL ITTMANN
Houston, Aug. 23, 2013

To the Editor:

On my morning commute, I gaze at the college ads that blanket the subway's walls: beaming faces of graduates who have landed their dream jobs. President Obama's proposal for college ratings would enable consumers to see the hard facts behind these smiling faces: tuition costs, graduation rates, job placements.

These numbers might have given me pause before I paid the $56,000 yearly bill at my daughter's liberal arts college. Many in her graduating class are still struggling to find meaningful paying work of any kind.

As a teacher, I believe fervently that the benefits of an education go beyond that of job placement. But shamefully overpriced tuition costs and the precarious nature of the current job market force one to reconsider. With Mr. Obama's plan, students and parents would get a far more realistic sense of what might await them after four years of crippling expenses.

CATHY BERNARD
New York, Aug. 23, 2013

The writer is an associate professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology.

To the Editor:

President Obama should be applauded for his proposal to tie federal aid to universities' cost-cutting efforts and to students' graduation rates and future salaries. But his formula leaves out the most important outcome of all: student learning.

Most universities — including my own — have not made any sustained, comprehensive effort to measure the skills or knowledge that our students obtain at college. And until someone forces our hand, we won't.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Aug. 23, 2013

The writer is a professor of education and history at New York University.

To the Editor:

In response to President Obama's plan to rate colleges based on how much money their graduates earn rather than on how much they contribute to society, I can't help but ask: What would Socrates say?

A good liberal arts education could help one answer that question.

JOHN KUSIAK
Arlington, Mass., Aug. 26, 2013


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Letter: Religious Laws and Public Places

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The recent divide between some of New York's Hasidic population and city government crystallizes the issues in the larger national conversation about religious freedom and discrimination in public accommodations ("Out of Enclaves, a Pressure to Accommodate Traditions," news article, Aug. 22).

The fundamental right to religious liberty lies at the heart of our constitutional democracy and helps define us as a nation. But the essential freedom to practice and express our faith, or to have no faith at all, does not include a right to impose those beliefs on others. Nor does it confer a right to enlist the machinery of government to enforce religious restrictions in public services.

Deeply held religious beliefs cannot trump the basic notion that government facilities, like city buses, should be open to all on an equal basis. Sincere, heartfelt moral convictions, like those invoked recently by businesses to justify limitations on employee health benefits or refusals to serve same-sex couples (a practice rejected by the New Mexico Supreme Court on Thursday), cannot be used to undermine our longstanding commitment to fairness in employment and the marketplace.

DANIEL MACH
Director, Program on Freedom
of Religion and Belief, A.C.L.U.
Washington, Aug. 23, 2013


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Letters: Tobacco, Trade Agreements and Public Health

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Re "Why Is Obama Caving on Tobacco?," by Michael R. Bloomberg (Op-Ed, Aug. 23):

I must first note the mayor's enormous influence on tobacco control. Under his leadership, New York City has become a peerless leader in efforts to end the preventable damage and death caused by tobacco use.

The Obama administration has a long history of tackling the tobacco epidemic, including the landmark Tobacco Control Act, expanded cessation coverage and new investments in community-based prevention.

The United States government's proposal on tobacco in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations represents a step forward for public health in the international trade community. It would provide health authorities a new opportunity to voice their views, and critically, it recognizes that tobacco is a product like no other with an unparalleled effect on human health because it is addictive, always harmful to health, and the single most preventable cause of death worldwide.

BILL CORR
Deputy Secretary, Dept.
of Health
and Human Services
Washington, Aug. 24, 2013

To the Editor:

I applaud the contributions in tobacco control by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and President Obama. The mayor's efforts have improved air quality and curbed youth smoking, and Obamacare intelligently factors individual responsibility into insurance premiums for smokers.

Together, the president's 2009 increase in the cigarette tax and the mayor's leadership have resulted in cigarette prices in New York City that are among the highest in the country.

I appreciate Mayor Bloomberg's disappointment regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and also understand the difficult realities to reach consensus in the trade agreement.

Controlling the global epidemic of tobacco use is an international responsibility that other world leaders must also champion. It is my hope that the leadership of the mayor and the president can be unified to resolve remaining domestic tobacco concerns first: banning menthol in cigarettes, regulating electronic cigarettes and achieving the full use of graphic warning labels to end tobacco's deadly toll in America.

JOHN MAA
Oakland, Calif., Aug. 24, 2013

The writer, a surgeon, is chairman of the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program at the University of California.

To the Editor:

Concerning the position of American business and agriculture with regard to public health, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and trade agreements in general:

We support efforts to improve public health, but we oppose inserting provisions in trade agreements in the name of public health that are unnecessary and unjustified and could open the door to measures by our trading partners that threaten American exports and jobs.

For half a century, administrations have maintained that in trade agreements the United States remains free to safeguard the national and public interest, including public health. To change their carefully crafted language in ways that could cause harm would be a mistake.

When science and evidence support a nondiscriminatory regulatory action, it already has a safe harbor in our trade agreements and under sovereign United States law. To imply otherwise is to create problems where none exist.

CALMAN J. COHEN
President, Emergency
Committee for American Trade
Washington, Aug. 23, 2013


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Letter: Gay Rights and the Met

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In "Petition Wants Met's Gala Dedicated to Gay Rights" (Arts pages, Aug. 20), Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera's general manager, asserts that those who demand that the opening event for the Met's season be dedicated to supporting gay rights in Russia are "barking up the wrong tree."

Draconian antigay laws are being passed in Russia this summer. The Metropolitan Opera has a history of benefit performances for disaster victims and commemorating world events with powerful artistic gestures. What better way for the Met to make a statement about its support of gay human rights than at a night featuring the work of Tchaikovsky, whose life was destroyed out of shame and despair as a closeted gay man?

Would the Met's statement of unequivocal support for human rights in Russia solve the problem of virulent antigay hatred? No, of course not, but the Met can make a uniquely glorious sound, adding to the growing chorus of those who stand firmly against such hatred.

As a lesbian, as the senior rabbi of New York City's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer synagogue, Beit Simchat Torah, and as a loyal subscriber to the Met, I cannot accept that silence is justified in the name of art remaining above politics.

Words matter. Music matters.

SHARON KLEINBAUM
New York, Aug. 20, 2013


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Taking Note: Ted Cruz Plays Two Truths and a Lie

In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday, Senator Ted Cruz spoke frankly, and also not so frankly, on the movement to shut down the federal government unless healthcare reform is defunded.

Mr. Cruz admitted that "now is the single best time to stop Obamacare" because "if it doesn't happen now, it's never going to happen." As Alex Seitz-Wald wrote in The Washington Post today, it will be much more difficult to alter or uproot the health care law after October 1, when the exchanges go online.

Mr. Cruz also acknowledged that he does "not have the votes right now" to force a shutdown. At least 41 Senators need to play along, and, so far, only 13 have signaled their commitment to the cause.

But the senator would only go so far in accepting reality. He refused to concede that even if he could send a bill to President Obama's desk that cut off funding for health care — the president would never sign it.

CROWLEY:  The president is never going to sign a bill that defunds Obamacare.

CRUZ:  You know, you may be convinced to that.

CROWLEY:  You're not convinced to that?

CRUZ:  I am not at all.

Although the president's negotiation record isn't sterling, it's implausible that he would allow Mr. Cruz et al. to undo his signature domestic accomplishment—something even staunch opponents of the law have recognized. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina called the shutdown plan the "dumbest idea" he'd ever heard, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said that "defunding Obamacare, with President Obama in the White House and Harry Reid in the Senate" is "next to impossible."

To be fair to Mr. Cruz, he's in a tough spot. If he were to admit that Mr. Obama would never back down, he'd also have to admit that the whole "defund or shutdown" movement is nothing but a reckless gambit for publicity.


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Op-Ed Contributor: We’re All Still Hostages to the Big Banks

Written By Unknown on Senin, 26 Agustus 2013 | 13.26

STANFORD, Calif. — NEARLY five years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers touched off a global financial crisis, we are no safer. Huge, complex and opaque banks continue to take enormous risks that endanger the economy. From Washington to Berlin, banking lobbyists have blocked essential reforms at every turn. Their efforts at obfuscation and influence-buying are no surprise. What's shameful is how easily our leaders have caved in, and how quickly the lessons of the crisis have been forgotten.

We will never have a safe and healthy global financial system until banks are forced to rely much more on money from their owners and shareholders to finance their loans and investments. Forget all the jargon, and just focus on this simple rule.

Mindful, perhaps, of the coming five-year anniversary, regulators have recently taken some actions along these lines. In June, a committee of global banking regulators based in Basel, Switzerland, proposed changes to how banks calculate their leverage ratios, a measure of how much borrowed money they can use to conduct their business.

Last month, federal regulators proposed going somewhat beyond the internationally agreed minimum known as Basel III, which is being phased in. Last Monday, President Obama scolded regulators for dragging their feet on implementing Dodd-Frank, the gargantuan 2010 law that was supposed to prevent another crisis but in fact punted on most of the tough decisions.

Don't let the flurry of activity confuse you. The regulations being proposed offer little to celebrate.

From Wall Street to the City of London comes the same wailing: requiring banks to rely less on borrowing will hurt their ability to lend to companies and individuals. These bankers falsely imply that capital (unborrowed money) is idle cash set aside in a vault. In fact, they want to keep placing new bets at the poker table — while putting taxpayers at risk.

When we deposit money in a bank, we are making a loan. JPMorgan Chase, America's largest bank, had $2.4 trillion in assets as of June 30, and debts of $2.2 trillion: $1.2 trillion in deposits and $1 trillion in other debt (owed to money market funds, other banks, bondholders and the like). It was notable for surviving the crisis, but no bank that is so heavily indebted can be considered truly safe.

The six largest American banks — the others are Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — collectively owe about $8.7 trillion. Only a fraction of this is used to make loans. JPMorgan Chase used some excess deposits to trade complex derivatives in London — losing more than $6 billion last year in a notoriously bad bet.

Risk, taken properly, is essential for innovation and growth. But outside of banking, healthy corporations rarely carry debts totaling more than 70 percent of their assets. Many thriving corporations borrow very little.

Banks, by contrast, routinely have liabilities in excess of 90 percent of their assets. JPMorgan Chase's $2.2 trillion in debt represented some 91 percent of its $2.4 trillion in assets. (Under accounting conventions used in Europe, the figure would be around 94 percent.)

Basel III would permit banks to borrow up to 97 percent of their assets. The proposed regulations in the United States — which Wall Street is fighting — would still allow even the largest bank holding companies to borrow up to 95 percent (though how to measure bank assets is often a matter of debate).

If equity (the bank's own money) is only 5 percent of assets, even a tiny loss of 2 percent of its assets could prompt, in essence, a run on the bank. Creditors may refuse to renew their loans, causing the bank to stop lending or to sell assets in a hurry. If too many banks are distressed at once, a systemic crisis results.

Prudent banks would not lend to borrowers like themselves unless the risks were borne by someone else. But insured depositors, and creditors who expect to be paid by authorities if not by the bank, agree to lend to banks at attractive terms, allowing them to enjoy the upside of risks while others — you, the taxpayer — share the downside.

Implicit guarantees of government support perversely encouraged banks to borrow, take risk and become "too big to fail." Recent scandals — JPMorgan's $6 billion London trading loss, an HSBC money laundering scandal that resulted in a $1.9 billion settlement, and inappropriate sales of credit-card protection insurance that resulted, on Thursday, in a $2 billion settlement by British banks — suggest that the largest banks are also too big to manage, control and regulate.

NOTHING suggests that banks couldn't do what they do if they financed, for example, 30 percent of their assets with equity (unborrowed funds) — a level considered perfectly normal, or even low, for healthy corporations. Yet this simple idea is considered radical, even heretical, in the hermetic bubble of banking.

Bankers and regulators want us to believe that the banks' high levels of borrowing are acceptable because banks are good at managing their risks and regulators know how to measure them. The failures of both were manifest in 2008, and yet regulators have ignored the lessons.

If banks could absorb much more of their losses, regulators would need to worry less about risk measurements, because banks would have better incentives to manage their risks and make appropriate investment decisions. That's why raising equity requirements substantially is the single best step for making banking safer and healthier.

The transition to a better system could be managed quickly. Companies commonly rely on their profits to grow and invest, without needing to borrow. Banks should do the same.

Banks can also sell more shares to become stronger. If a bank cannot persuade investors to buy its shares at any price because its assets are too opaque, unsteady or overvalued, it fails a basic "stress test," suggesting it may be too weak without subsidies.

Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has acknowledged that the "too big to fail" problem has not been solved, but the Fed counterproductively allows most large banks to make payouts to their shareholders, repeating some of the Fed's most obvious mistakes in the run-up to the crisis. Its stress tests fail to consider the collateral damage of banks' distress. They are a charade.

Dodd-Frank was supposed to spell the end to all bailouts. It gave the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation "resolution authority" to seize and "wind down" banks, a kind of orderly liquidation — no more panics. Don't count on it. The F.D.I.C. does not have authority in the scores of nations where global banks operate, and even the mere possibility that banks would go into this untested "resolution authority" would be disruptive to the markets.

The state of financial reform is grim in most other nations. Europe is in a particularly dire situation. Many of its banks have not recovered from the crisis. But if other countries foolishly allow their banks to be reckless, it does not follow that we must do the same.

Some warn that tight regulation would push activities into the "shadow banking system" of money market funds and other short-term lending vehicles. But past failures to make sure that banks could not hide risks using various tricks in opaque markets is hardly reason to give up on essential new regulations. We must face the challenge of drawing up appropriate rules and enforcing them, or pay dearly for failing to do so. The first rule is to make banks rely much more on equity, and much less on borrowing.

Anat R. Admati, a professor of finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is the author, with Martin Hellwig, of "The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It."


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Op-Ed Columnist: Adrift on the Nile

IN May 2011, when the promise of the Arab Spring was still fresh and exhilarating, President Obama went to the State Department to proclaim an important reorientation of American policy in the Middle East. For decades America had defined its interests in utilitarian terms: regional stability, countering terrorism and nuclear proliferation (and, in the cold war years, Soviet influence), defending Israel's security, assuring the free flow of oil and other commerce. That often meant alliances of convenience with brutal authoritarians.

"But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore," the president said. The uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya had affirmed "that we have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals. The status quo is not sustainable." Without renouncing our commitment to those old interests, the president embraced a supplementary set of "core principles": supporting universal rights, encouraging political and economic reforms, opposing violence and oppression.

"Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest," he insisted. "Today I want to make it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal."

In the excruciating test that Egypt has become, the president has largely failed to live up to his own eloquently articulated standard. In the two years since his speech — and most shamefully in the eight weeks since the army's coup — America has seemed not just cautious (caution is good) but timid and indecisive, reactive and shortsighted, stranded between our professed commitment to change and our fear of chaos. One of the administration's most acute critics, Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, goes so far as to suggest that United States policy is, whether by design or inertia, coming full circle: back to a pre-Arab Spring, Islamophobic, order-at-all-costs policy that puts us in the cynical company of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Is it any wonder that the generals in Egypt feel they can get away with murder — or, for that matter, that Syria's Assad thinks he can call our bluff and poison his people with impunity?

It has become the conventional wisdom in Washington that the United States has no "leverage" in Egypt. That is at best an excuse for not trying very hard, at worst a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, "leverage" does not mean that supplying a few F-16 fighter planes buys you the compliance of a foreign army. (Witness Pakistan.) And, of course, Egypt's fate is, and must be, in Egyptian hands. But we have serious strategic interests in a democratic Egypt, as the president himself asserted with such fervor, and we have influence. We should have used our influence earlier. We can and should use it now.

During the last great democratic opening, when the Soviet Union lost its grip, the states that were newly liberated did not transform themselves unaided from Communist vassals into model democracies. The United States and Western Europe offered infusions of money, expertise and, just as important, a new status: the prospect, if the novice democracies met certain tests, of membership in the great clubs of civilized nations, NATO and the European Union. It took years, and not all of the former Soviet republics have made the transition, but we helped midwife some thriving new democracies.

I get that this is different. Egypt is not Poland, Europe's economy is not as robust as it was then, and Americans have lost their appetite for overseas engagement. There is no Middle East equivalent of NATO or the E.U. And there is a gloomy sense that Egypt may already be in a kind of death spiral.

But with a little leadership the U.S. could have mobilized a united Western front, embraced the standards Obama laid out in 2011, and offered Egypt's factions incentives to stay on a path toward political reconciliation and economic growth. There was a halfhearted effort led by France in 2011 to create a sort of collective support system for Arab Spring democracy; the so-called Deauville Partnership never got much beyond the stage of rhetoric. I'm told a more ambitious proposal for a concerted Arab Spring initiative was debated within the Obama administration in 2012 but was rejected because it might have been a distraction from President Obama's all-about-the-middle-class re-election campaign.

It is late for Egypt, but maybe not too late. The president could still join forces with European allies, some of which seem more willing than we are to stand up to the generals. Europe has pledged $6.7 billion to Egypt, and the U.S. gives about $1.5 billion, most of it military. Imagine if the West suspended all that aid and deposited it into a kind of trust fund, to be disbursed to help Egypt's recovery if it kept on a course away from violent repression and intolerance and toward inclusion and the rule of law.


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Editorial: Reading Tweets From Iran

Social media are an unorthodox, but useful, way to start to get a sense of Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani. In a flurry of English-language posts on Twitter since his election in June, Mr. Rouhani has given reason to hope that he is serious about resolving disputes with the United States and other major powers, most urgently about Iran's nuclear program.

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"We don't want further tension. Both nations need 2 think more abt future & try 2 sit down & find solutions to past issues & rectify things," he, or somebody writing in his name, said on June 17. On the nuclear program, he commented: "Our program is transparent, but we can take more steps to make it clear to world that our nuclear program is within intl regulations."

This seemingly reasonable outlook — refreshing after the ugly, confrontational approach of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — has been reinforced by other recent moves. The most significant is Mr. Rouhani's appointment of Mohammad Javad Zarif as foreign minister. In addition to being educated in the United States and serving many years as Iran's ambassador at the United Nations, Mr. Zarif has been at the center of several rounds of secret negotiations over the years to try to overcome decades of enmity between the two countries.

Mr. Zarif is also being considered to lead a new round of nuclear negotiations with the major powers, replacing the conservative Saeed Jalili, who made things worse when he was in that job. At his first news conference, President Rouhani parried questions about possible direct talks with Washington — which will be essential at some point for any deal to be concluded — but said he was ready to "seriously engage and interact with other parties."

It would be naïve to assume that the path to ending Iran's isolation is now clear. Hostilities between America and Iran have hardened since the 1979 Islamic revolution. For some time after the covert nuclear program was discovered in 2002, Iranian officials shrewdly played a weak hand to divide the international community and avoid sanctions. It seems likely that Mr. Rouhani, with his benign demeanor, seductive tone and more "moderate" message, will be more focused, serious and skillful in negotiations than Mr. Ahmadinejad, but still unyielding in Iran's core demand to retain significant nuclear capability.

Even so, there are strong forces propelling both sides toward a deal.

Harsh sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe and the United Nations since 2009 have devastated Iran's economy, which Mr. Rouhani is desperate to revive. Although there is no evidence that Iran has produced a nuclear weapon, its program has steadily advanced, prompting both President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to warn of possible military action. At a time when the Middle East and South Asia are in turmoil, there are also many regional issues that could benefit from American-Iranian cooperation, including Afghanistan and Syria.

President Rouhani is sending strong signals that he will dispatch a pragmatic, experienced team to the table when negotiations resume, possibly next month. That's when we should begin to see answers to key questions: How much time and creative thinking are he and President Obama willing to invest in a negotiated solution, the only rational outcome? How much political risk are they willing to take, which for Mr. Obama must include managing the enmity that Israel and many members of Congress feel toward Iran?

And finally: Do the two sides have the courage to resolve a conflict that has been decades in the making?


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Editorial: Federal Courts in Crisis

Observers of the federal court system cannot recall the last time such a thing has happened, if it ever has. Chief judges in 86 of the 94 Federal District Courts around the country — more than half of them Republican appointees — have now joined to sound an alarm about the grave damage to the nation's justice system caused by years of flat financing followed by Washington's lunatic across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration. Their urgent plea to stop starving federal courts of adequate resources to fulfill the judiciary's constitutional responsibilities deserves a response from Congress.

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In a letter sent earlier this month to leaders of the House and the Senate and the Judiciary and Appropriations committees in both chambers, the judges described themselves as "the boots on the ground in our nation's federal trial courts." They offered a detailed, firsthand view of the judiciary's "unprecedented financial crisis" and its "devastating impact on court operations nationwide."

The judiciary's current staffing level, the letter said, is the lowest it has been since 1999 despite a significant increase in the workload. Congress's $350 million reduction in the federal judiciary's budget for fiscal 2013 has slowed the processing of civil and bankruptcy cases and forced many courts to stop conducting criminal trials on all or some Fridays.

The cuts have also "put public safety at risk" by reducing the number of probation and pretrial services officers available to supervise defendants awaiting trial and people released into the community after serving time in prison for serious crimes. The judges expressed particular concern about the crippling reductions in the funds available for drug, mental health and sex-offender treatment programs and for drug testing and electronic and GPS monitoring of offenders.

The letter correctly highlights the negative effect of this year's $50 million cut to the network of high-quality federal defender offices across the country. Many experienced lawyers representing indigent defendants have been laid off, and the salaries of the remaining defenders have been effectively reduced by a requirement that they take up to 20 unpaid furlough days. "We are deeply concerned that the cuts in federal defender offices will severely undermine and weaken a program that has taken years to build," the judges wrote.

With no end to Washington's partisan budget standoff in sight, the executive committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, which sets policy for the federal judiciary, recently took emergency steps to try to minimize further cuts to the federal defender program in the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1, temporarily reducing the hourly rates for private court-appointed lawyers by $15 an hour and deferring some of the payments for their work to fiscal 2015.

These moves were necessary. But they will make it harder to recruit able private lawyers to do indigent criminal defense work.

The nation's independent federal court system, though hardly perfect, is central to American democracy and the rule of law. Its current crisis was created by Washington politicians, and Washington politicians hold the power to solve it. The letter from the judges asks that Congress approve the $496 million increase in funding for the judiciary recently approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee even if a continuing budget resolution is enacted this fall keeping government spending at its current level.

That would be the reasonable thing to do, even though reason is in short supply in today's Washington.


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Editorial: Mixed Signals on Employee Health Insurance

It is hard to know whether to rejoice or lament two striking if somewhat conflicting messages last week about the costs of employer-sponsored health insurance.

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An authoritative survey found that premiums for family and individual coverage at work — including both the company's and the worker's share — have gone up only moderately for the second year in a row, suggesting that health care inflation may finally be abating and that whatever costs the president's health reforms may add will be readily absorbed.

On the other hand, United Parcel Service told its white-collar workers that in an effort to reduce its health care costs, it will no longer cover some 15,000 spouses who can obtain coverage through their own employers. The company said its move was prompted primarily by projected increases in the amount it would have to pay for employees' medical care and secondarily by various costs associated with the health care reform law.

The annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust covered more than 2,000 small and large employers. It found that the average premium for employer-sponsored health insurance, typically paid mostly by employers and partly by workers, rose only 4 percent for family plans between 2012 and 2013, the same percentage increase as between 2011 and 2012. The premiums for individual policies rose 5 percent for individual workers, up from 3 percent the previous year.

Those are well below the large premium increases seen more than a decade ago. Unfortunately, they are also well above average wage growth. And on top of premium increases, many workers must cope with rising deductibles and co-payments.

Meanwhile, U.P.S. is joining a small but growing number of companies that decline to cover working spouses who can obtain coverage at their own workplace. The costs and complications of two separate policies may vary from family to family. In some cases, the plans may have different networks of doctors and offer different benefits. U.P.S. says that eliminating a spouse from a family plan could reduce the premium paid by many of its employees by enough to cover some or all of the premium the spouse will have to pay for a separate policy at another company.

Although U.P.S. is taking other steps, such as a tobacco cessation program, to improve employee health and reduce medical spending, the spousal policy will simply shift the insurance burden from U.P.S. to the other company.


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Opinionator | The Great Divide: How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 25 Agustus 2013 | 13.25

In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.

This job drought has spurred pundits to wonder whether a profound employment sickness has overtaken us. And from there, it's only a short leap to ask whether that illness isn't productivity itself. Have we mechanized and computerized ourselves into obsolescence?

Are we in danger of losing the "race against the machine," as the M.I.T. scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in a recent book? Are we becoming enslaved to our "robot overlords," as the journalist Kevin Drum warned in Mother Jones? Do "smart machines" threaten us with "long-term misery," as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year? Have we reached "the end of labor," as Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?

Of course, anxiety, and even hysteria, about the adverse effects of technological change on employment have a venerable history. In the early 19th century a group of English textile artisans calling themselves the Luddites staged a machine-trashing rebellion. Their brashness earned them a place (rarely positive) in the lexicon, but they had legitimate reasons for concern.

Economists have historically rejected what we call the "lump of labor" fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false. In 1900, for example, 41 percent of the United States work force was in agriculture. By 2000, that share had fallen to 2 percent, after the Green Revolution transformed crop yields. But the employment-to-population ratio rose over the 20th century as women moved from home to market, and the unemployment rate fluctuated cyclically, with no long-term increase.

Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that's where the gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor. In 1900, no one could foresee that a century later, health care, finance, information technology, consumer electronics, hospitality, leisure and entertainment would employ far more workers than agriculture. Of course, as societies grow more prosperous, citizens often choose to work shorter days, take longer vacations and retire earlier — but that too is progress.

So if technological advances don't threaten employment, does that mean workers have nothing to fear from "smart machines"? Actually, no — and here's where the Luddites had a point. Although many 19th-century Britons benefited from the introduction of newer and better automated looms — unskilled laborers were hired as loom operators, and a growing middle class could now afford mass-produced fabrics — it's unlikely that skilled textile workers benefited on the whole.

Fast-forward to the present. The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor. These rapid advances — which confront us daily as we check in at airports, order books online, pay bills on our banks' Web sites or consult our smartphones for driving directions — have reawakened fears that workers will be displaced by machinery. Will this time be different?

A starting point for discussion is the observation that although computers are ubiquitous, they cannot do everything. A computer's ability to accomplish a task quickly and cheaply depends upon a human programmer's ability to write procedures or rules that direct the machine to take the correct steps at each contingency. Computers excel at "routine" tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs like bookkeeping, clerical work and repetitive production and quality-assurance jobs.

Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it has boosted demand for workers who perform "nonroutine" tasks that complement the automated activities. Those tasks happen to lie on opposite ends of the occupational skill distribution.

At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity. These tasks are characteristic of professional, managerial, technical and creative occupations, like law, medicine, science, engineering, advertising and design. People in these jobs typically have high levels of education and analytical capability, and they benefit from computers that facilitate the transmission, organization and processing of information.

On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction. Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers. But they are straightforward for humans, requiring primarily innate abilities like dexterity, sightedness and language recognition, as well as modest training. These workers can't be replaced by robots, but their skills are not scarce, so they usually make low wages.

Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined. Surprisingly, overall employment rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization. Rather, as employment in routine jobs has ebbed, employment has risen both in high-wage managerial, professional and technical occupations and in low-wage, in-person service occupations.

So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging. Workers without college education therefore concentrate in manual task-intensive jobs — like food services, cleaning and security — which are numerous but offer low wages, precarious job security and few prospects for upward mobility. This bifurcation of job opportunities has contributed to the historic rise in income inequality.

HOW can we help workers ride the wave of technological change rather than be swamped by it? One common recommendation is that citizens should invest more in their education. Spurred by growing demand for workers performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable price tag, higher education has perhaps never been a better investment. But it is far from a comprehensive solution to our labor market problems. Not all high school graduates — let alone displaced mid- and late-career workers — are academically or temperamentally prepared to pursue a four-year college degree. Only 40 percent of Americans enroll in a four-year college after graduating from high school, and more than 30 percent of those who enroll do not complete the degree within eight years.

The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take advantage of human flexibility. To take one prominent example, medical paraprofessional jobs — radiology technician, phlebotomist, nurse technician — are a rapidly growing category of relatively well-paid, middle-skill occupations. While these paraprofessions do not typically require a four-year college degree, they do demand some postsecondary vocational training.

These middle-skill jobs will persist, and potentially grow, because they involve tasks that cannot readily be unbundled without a substantial drop in quality. Consider, for example, the frustration of calling a software firm for technical support, only to discover that the technician knows nothing more than the standard answers shown on his or her computer screen — that is, the technician is a mouthpiece reading from a script, not a problem-solver. This is not generally a productive form of work organization because it fails to harness the complementarities between technical and interpersonal skills. Simply put, the quality of a service within any occupation will improve when a worker combines routine (technical) and nonroutine (flexible) tasks.

Following this logic, we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will combine routine technical tasks with abstract and manual tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction, adaptability and problem-solving. Along with medical paraprofessionals, this category includes numerous jobs for people in the skilled trades and repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service representatives; and even clerical workers who are required to do more than type and file. Indeed, even as formerly middle-skill occupations are being "deskilled," or stripped of their routine technical tasks (brokering stocks, for example), other formerly high-end occupations are becoming accessible to workers with less esoteric technical mastery (for example, the work of the nurse practitioner, who increasingly diagnoses illness and prescribes drugs in lieu of a physician). Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational skills the "new artisans."

The outlook for workers who haven't finished college is uncertain, but not devoid of hope. There will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of the past. Rather, we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the "new artisans": licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches and guides. These workers will adeptly combine technical skills with interpersonal interaction, flexibility and adaptability to offer services that are uniquely human.


David H. Autor is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David Dorn is an assistant professor of economics at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid.


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