Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
A new analysis by Peter Ganong, Pascal Noel and Joseph Vavra, economists at the University of Chicago,1 uses government data from 2019 to estimate that 68 percent of unemployed workers who can receive benefits are eligible for payments that are greater than their lost earnings. They also found that the estimated median replacement rate — the share of a worker’s original weekly salary that is being replaced by unemployment benefits — is 134 percent, or more than one-third above their original wage.
Of course you don’t have to be bringing home 100 percent of your former income for there to be an incentive to stay unemployed.
For example, if you had a job that you really hated, you would almost certainly jump at the chance to stay home every day and still make 90 percent of what you formerly earned.
So yes, those that had very high paying jobs will be motivated to get back to work, but everyone else will be highly tempted to ride the gravy train for as long as it lasts.
And the less you made when you were actually working, the more intense that temptation will be.
Just consider what restaurant and hotel workers must be thinking about now. According to CNBC, the average unemployed worker in that industry is now eligible to collect “182% of their previous wages”…
The average worker in this industry, which employs 14 million people, makes $13.45 an hour — the lowest compared with other industries.
These workers would benefit most under the unemployment system when compared to others — collecting 182% of their previous wages, according to a CNBC analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Labor Department data.
Do you think that those workers are going to be eager to get back to their former jobs?
I don’t think so.
Of course the truth is that many of their jobs are never coming back. According to the Atlantic, “hundreds of thousands of companies” have already collapsed during this economic downturn…
Small-business activity has plunged nationwide by nearly 50 percent. Hundreds of thousands of companies have already failed. Big retailers such as J.Crew and Neiman Marcus have filed for bankruptcy, while others, including Macy’s, are teetering. By some measures, scarcely one-third of Americans say they are working. Next month’s jobs report will likely show that, for the first time since World War II, a majority of Americans aren’t officially employed.
So the cold, hard reality of the matter is that there simply is not going to be enough jobs for everyone in the United States for the foreseeable future.
And moving forward, a lot more businesses are going to be failing.
Just recently, Facebook conducted a survey of “86,000 small and medium-sized business owners”, and the results of that survey were quite startling…
About a third of small businesses forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic say they won’t be able to reopen due to an inability to pay bills or rent, a Facebook survery has found.
More than half of the business owners surveyed by Facebook have also said they don’t expect to be able to rehire the same amount of workers that they employed prior to the pandemic.
More specifically, the survey discovered that just 45 percent of all small and medium-sized business owners plan to rehire the same number of employees that they previously had.
So that means that millions upon millions of jobs are gone for good.
And of course the environment of fear that COVID-19 has created is going to paralyze new hiring for a long time to come. If you are an existing business and you are concerned that you may not be able to keep the employees that you already have, that is going to make you extremely hesitant to add anyone new.
The bottom line is that it is going to be exceedingly difficult to find jobs in the months ahead, and the long-term outlook for the newly unemployed is not good at all.
For the moment, those newly unemployed workers are being taken care of by the federal government, but the $600 bonuses are set to expire in July.
If we get to July and those benefits are not extended, we could have a massive national temper tantrum on our hands.
Of course there are many in Congress that are quite eager to extend those benefits, but that would also mean borrowing and spending billions upon billions more dollars that we do not have.
And what happens when an even bigger crisis than COVID-19 comes along? We are just experiencing the early winds of “the perfect storm” that I portrayed in “The Beginning Of The End”, and most Americans are completely and utterly unprepared for what is coming.
So let’s not be mad at those that have lost their jobs just because they are getting a windfall for a few months. Instead, let us hold our national leaders accountable for getting us into this mess in the first place.
For decades, our national leaders have been leading us down a road that leads to national oblivion, and now it appears that we are rapidly approaching the end of that road.
About the Author: I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep. My name is Michael Snyder and I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing those books you help to support my work. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but due to government regulations I need those that republish my articles to include this “About the Author” section with each article. In order to comply with those government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of the websites where my work is republished. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with all many people as we possibly can.
The post 68% Of Unemployed Workers In The U.S. “Are Eligible For Payments That Are Greater Than Their Lost Earnings” appeared first on The Economic Collapse.
Guest Post by Paul Joseph Watson
A scientific study in Austria has found that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that has led to a pandemic, was likely created in a lab, barring some “remarkable coincidence” that led to the virus naturally evolving to be optimised to attack human cells.
The study was led by Nikolai Petrovsky, a vaccine researcher at Flinders University. The scientists in his team discovered that the coronavirus is optimized for penetration into human cells, rather than animal cells, which means that the theory that it emerged from an animal market and jumped to humans naturally is unlikely.
Lifesite News reports that the scientists “used a version of the novel coronavirus collected in the earliest days of the outbreak and applied computer models to test its capacity to bind to certain cell receptor enzymes, called “ACE2,” that allow the virus to infect human and animal cells to varying degrees of efficacy.”
“They found that “the novel coronavirus most powerfully binds with human ACE2, and with variously lesser degrees of effectiveness with animal versions of the receptor.”
The authors believe this means that the virus “became specialized for human cell penetration by living previously in human cells, quite possibly in a laboratory.”
The Study notes that “a virus would be expected to have highest affinity for the receptor in its original host species, e.g. bat, with a lower initial binding affinity for the receptor of any new host, e.g. humans. However, in this case, the affinity of SARS-CoV-2 is higher for humans than for the putative original host species, bats, or for any potential intermediary host species.”
It continues, noting that a “possibility which still cannot be excluded is that SARSCoV-2 was created by a recombination event that occurred inadvertently or consciously in a laboratory handling coronaviruses, with the new virus then accidentally released into the local human population.”
Dr Petrovsky added in a statement that, rather than being rapidly genetically spliced and mutated, the virus shows signs of being ‘cultured’ to evolve over time.
“Our and other analyses of the genomic sequence of the virus do not reveal any artificial gene inserts that would be the hallmark of a gene jockey, genetic engineers who manipulate or even create viruses by splicing in artificial inserts into their genome.” Petrovsky said.
“These are generally easily recognisable and hence clear signatures of human intervention in the creation of a virus. The fact that these artificial inserts are not present has been interpreted by some to mean this virus is not the result of human manipulation.” he added.
“However, this logic is incorrect as there are other ways in which humans can manipulate viruses and that is caused by natural selection,” he continued, adding that “you can force [a] bat virus to adapt to infect human cells via mutations in its spike protein,” after culturing it for a few years.
“The result of these experiments, according to the doctor, would be “a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus.”
If all of this sounds familiar, it is because this is exactly what the scientists inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing with bat borne coronaviruses.
From Live Science:
The WIV lab, along with researchers in the U.S. and Switzerland, showed in 2015 the scary-good capability of bat coronaviruses to thrive in human cells. In that paper, which was published in 2015 in the journal Nature Medicine, they described how they had created a chimeric SARS-like virus out of the surface spike protein of a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats, called SHC014, and the backbone of a SARS virus that could be grown in mice. The idea was to look at the potential of coronaviruses circulating in bat populations to infect humans. In a lab dish, the chimeric coronavirus could infect and replicate in primary human airway cells; the virus also was able to infect lung cells in mice.
That study was met with some pushback from researchers who considered the risk of that kind of research to outweigh the benefits. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was one of those scientists. Wain-Hobson emphasized the fact that this chimeric virus “grows remarkably well” in human cells, adding that “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Nature News reported.
In an email to LifeSite, Dr Petrovsky said that his study suggests that “there are some highly unusual features, including optimal human adaptation, that in the absence of identification of a close to identical virus in an animal population from which COVID19 could have arisen, would point in the direction of human intervention at some point in the evolution of COVID19.”
He added that scientists have been unable to find any evidence of this coronavirus strain present in animals, which would support the natural evolution theory.
“If an animal vector and virus could be found then of course this would resolve the matter completely,” Petrovsky noted, adding “One would have thought that the Chinese would be intensively sampling all conceivable animals trying to find such a virus to exonerate their labs. If no such intense search is going on (which I don’t know one way or the other) then the inference could be that they are not looking because they already know what they might find.”
“Whilst the facts cannot be known at this time, the nature of this event and its proximity to a high-risk biosecurity facility at the epicentre of the outbreak demands a full and independent international enquiry to ascertain whether a virus of this kind of COVID-19 was being cultured in the facility and might have been accidentally released,” Petrovsky concluded.
YouTubers are being silenced if they don’t agree with the United Nations on public health. As The Verdict reports:
YouTube will ban any content containing medical advice that contradicts World Health Organisation (WHO) coronavirus recommendations, according to CEO Susan Wojcicki.
Wojcicki announced the policy on CNN on Sunday. WHO is an agency of the UN, charged with overseeing global public health. The Verdict report continues:
Wojcicki said that the Google-owned video streaming platform would be “removing information that is problematic”. She told host Brian Stelter that this would include “anything that is medically unsubstantiated”.
“So people saying ‘take vitamin C; take turmeric, we’ll cure you’, those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy,” she said. “Anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
While the decision has been welcomed by many, some have accused the streaming giant of censorship.
To be clear, for American YouTubers, this kind of censorship is not a violation of their constitutional right of free speech. The First Amendment protects citizens against government censorship, and YouTube is a private platform. Were the US government to force the private owners of YouTube to continue broadcasting certain videos against their will, that would be much more a violation of the First Amendment.
While YouTube’s decision is not unconstitutional, it is unwise, exhibiting far too much deference to central authority in general and to WHO especially.
The World Health Organization is far from infallible. Its handling of information throughout the coronavirus emergency has been a long string of failures. As policy analyst Ross Marchand has recounted here on FEE last week, WHO failed to raise the alarm as the coronavirus rapidly spread through China during the crucial early period of the global crisis in January of this year. Then, as Marchand wrote:
The global bureaucracy uncritically reported that Chinese authorities had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus” on January 14, just one day after acknowledging the first case outside of China (in Thailand). WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his “political commitment” and “political leadership” despite these repeated, reprehensible attempts to keep the world in the dark about the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump recently announced that the US would cease its funding of WHO over its many coronavirus-related failures.
And it is not just American conservatives who have been critical. As FEE’s Jon Miltimore wrote:
Our World in Data, an online publication based at the University of Oxford, announced on Tuesday that it had stopped relying on World Health Organization (WHO) data for its models, citing errors and other factors.
This raises an interesting question: would YouTube censor Oxford if it posted a video on the coronavirus issue with recommendations based on data that contradicts WHO’s?
As Miltimore wrote, “Recent reports suggest US intelligence agencies relied heavily on WHO in its national assessment of the COVID-19 threat.”
This is gravely concerning because bad information leads to bad policies. This is true not only for government policy (like mayors, governors, and heads of state deciding to largely shut down the economy in their jurisdiction), but for the policies of private decision-makers like doctors, business-owners, and individuals making decisions about the health and overall lives of themselves and their families.
Indeed, WHO’s misinformation early in the crisis squandered the most precious part of the world’s prep time, which likely crippled the public’s responses and may have cost many lives.
YouTube risks compounding that tragedy by now insisting that the public’s response to the coronavirus emergency conforms even more strictly with WHO’s dubious pronouncements. Wojcicki wants to protect WHO’s recommendations from contradiction. But WHO’s recommendations are necessarily informed by WHO’s information, which has proven to be extremely suspect. Sheltering untrustworthy pronouncements risks amplifying their dangerous influence.
So, it is ironic that YouTube justifies this policy in the name of protecting the public from dangerous misinformation.
It is true that many videos contradicting official pronouncements are themselves full of medical quackery and other misleading falsehoods. But, censorship is the worst way to combat them.
For one, censorship can actually boost the perceived credibility of an untruth. Believers interpret it as validation: evidence that they are onto a truth that is feared by the powers-that-be. And they use that interpretation as a powerful selling point in their underground evangelism.
Censorship also insulates falsehoods from debunking, allowing them to circulate largely uncriticized in the dark corners of public discourse.
This makes censorship especially counterproductive because it is open-air debunking that is one of the most effective ways to counter misinformation and bad ideas. As Justice Louis Brandeis expressed in a US Supreme Court opinion, the ideal remedy for bad speech, “is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Again, YouTube has a right to set the terms of service of its own website. But the general principle applies here as well: the truth has a much better fighting chance with a proliferation of competing voices than with inquisitorial efforts to circumscribe discourse within a narrow orthodoxy.
Moreover, WHO’s track record of misinformation is not exceptional among government organizations in neither its degree of error nor in its disastrous impact. Governments and the experts they employ not only get things wrong but have frequently proven to be fundamentally wrong-headed on big questions.
To take another example in the realm of public health, it is increasingly widely recognized that the high-carb, low-fat diet recommendations, as depicted by the the USDA’s “Food Pyramid,” and successfully promoted for decades to the population by the US government and the most respected authorities on dietary science and epidemiology, was basically backward. Science journalist Gary Taub tells the whole story of bad science, corrupt influence, and obtuse orthodoxy in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Again, bad information leads to bad advice which leads to bad choices. So how much illness and even death was caused by generations of Americans uncritically swallowing “official” diet advice and by Americans largely only having one choice on the “menu” of diet advice?
The more we centralize decision-making and the management of actionable information, the wider the scope of the damage caused by any single error. But if we let a thousand errors bloom along with a thousand truths, any single error will be circumscribed in its damage and more likely to be corrected through experience and counter-argument.
Champions of policies like YouTube’s like to cast the issue in simplistic terms: as a black-and-white battle between respectable experts and wild-eyed crackpots. But the issue is more complex than that.
It is just as often a matter of overweening technocrats making pronouncements on matters that are way beyond them in complexity, that involve factors that fall way outside their domain of expertise, and that drastically impact the lives of millions or even billions. For example: a few dozen epidemiologists, with limited understanding of economics and a great many other relevant disciplines, holding sway over whole economies.
It is also a matter of dissenting experts being silenced along with the actual crackpots.
And, perhaps most fundamentally, it is a matter of weakening the individual’s ability to discern between truth and falsehood, good advice and bad, by denying them the responsibility and practice of doing so in the first place—of turning self-reliant, free men and women into irresponsible wards to be led by the nose like dumb, deferential livestock by their “expert” caretakers.
That is not where we are, but that is the direction that the rigid enforcement of centralized orthodoxies tends toward.
Let’s choose a different direction. YouTube, do better. Trust your users more. Treat them like human beings with all the capacities for learning, growth, discourse, and cooperation that are the distinctive glories of being human.
After all, that is what made you great in the first place. Your very name is derived from your original faith in the individual. YouTube (a crowd-sourced, individual-driven, pluralistic platform) is what made the boob tube (centralized, institutionalized, and homogenizing broadcast television) largely obsolete. As such, you had a starring role in the internet’s democratization of information and learning.
Don’t betray that legacy. Not now. Not when we need open platforms for the free flow of information and discourse more than ever.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. It has been republished under a Creative Commons licence.
The post YouTube bans content that contradicts WHO on Covid-19, despite its track record of misinformation appeared first on MercatorNet.
Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Academia does not really have a reputation for being riddled with violence and sudden unexplained deaths. Yet at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, two young pioneering researchers from the same obscure field of study met with mysterious ends.
Outside of academic circles, Dr. James Taylor and Dr. Bing Liu were relative unknowns. Inside of the scientific community, however, the two had achieved something like rock-star status. And now, within a period of 30 days, both young men are dead at a time when their talents are needed most.
Let’s first consider the life and work of James Taylor, who passed away on April 2 at the age of 40. Anyone hoping to learn details about the cause of death of this remarkable man will be disappointed; to date, no information has been made available to the public.
“The cause of James’ death is not yet known, and given how overwhelmed the medical profession is in Baltimore, we may never know,” stated the website of Galaxy Project, using the coronavirus as an excuse for not being able to dig deeper into the death of a colleague. “Given how quickly this overtook him it is very unlikely to have been COVID-19.”
Until any additional information is forthcoming with regards to the cause of death, it seems reasonable to ask whether Taylor was involved in any projects or activities that may have made him a potential target of foul play. A cursory look at his Twitter page indicates there were some impassioned discussions just prior to his premature passing that warrant consideration. Before jumping into those discussions, however, a few words about his professional background are necessary.
According to his obituary on the Johns Hopkins University website, Taylor was “a trailblazer in computational biology and genomics research,” who made a significant contribution as a “scientist, teacher, and colleague.”
Taylor’s breakout moment in the scientific community, however, came with the creation of Galaxy, a cloud-based system that has been described as “the first comprehensive data analysis resource in Life Sciences.” According to its website, Galaxy provides an open platform that aims to make computational biology accessible to scientists, mostly those who are involved in genomics research, a major field of study when it comes to the development of drugs and vaccines.
And it is on this particular point that Taylor became engaged in debate just days before his death. On March 19, the researcher asked a seemingly innocuous question on his Twitter page: “Can we talk about genomic data sharing for #covid19 #SARSCoV2 research?”
Can we talk about genomic data sharing for #covid19 #SARSCoV2 research?
— James Taylor (@jxtx) March 19, 2020
Judging by the feedback, the question proved to be a loaded one. Taylor’s question revealed the frustration being felt by other research groups, like NCBI and Nextstrain, which were attempting to retrieve the genomic characteristics of Covid-19 but were running into hurdles. Taylor’s colleagues, Anton Nekrutenko and Sergei Kosakovsky Pond, expressed similar concerns regarding those roadblocks one month earlier in a paper entitled, ‘No more business as usual: agile and effective responses to emerging pathogen threats require open data and open analytics.’
“The current state of much of the Wuhan pneumonia virus (COVID-19) research shows a regrettable lack of data sharing and considerable analytical obfuscation,” Nekrutenko and Kosakovsky Pond wrote. “This impedes global research cooperation, which is essential for tackling public health emergencies, and requires unimpeded access to data, analysis tools, and computational infrastructure.”
Here is proof of something that many people have long suspected about the world of academia: it is ruthless and self-serving just as much as any profit-seeking corporation. Not only are academics fiercely protective of their work, which is perfectly understandable, they are also not blind to the potential for financial gain that comes from their labors. But I digress.
This data should be on ENA or SRA without any restrictions! #FAIR https://t.co/5ige3Q27fH
— Björn Grüning (@bjoerngruening) March 26, 2020
Judging by his social media activity, it seems that James Taylor’s main beef was with GISAID, a German-based platform that stands for Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data. This private and public organization, which also partners with the governments of Singapore and the United States, has acquired much of the genome data for many diseases, including that of Covid-19, information that would be critical in the development of drugs and vaccines.
In a follow-up tweet, Taylor complained that GISAID “has much more data…but onerous restrictions on data use and sharing, in particular does not allow sharing any sequence data.” This was followed by the comment that GISAID’s restrictions on using its data are “a real impediment to rapid, collaborative data analysis including our efforts to make transparent, reusable and reproducible analysis pipelines for outbreak analysis.”
At the same time Taylor was chastising GISAID for supposedly not sharing its sequence data on Covid-19, GISAID was boasting on its website about its transparency. So where is the truth? Judging by the comments on James Taylor’s Twitter feed, it would seem GISAID was not completely forthcoming with its data.
Dave O’Connor, for example, a virologist at the University of Washington (Madison), remarked on Taylor’s Twitter thread, “I doubt if many people, if any, people who contributed data to GISAID did so with the intention of it being siloed.”
Dr. Melissa A. Wilson, a prominent evolutionary and computational biologist from Arizona State University, also expressed dismay at the failure to share critical genome data that could assist in helping researchers discover a cure for Covid-19.
In her tweet, dated March 23, Wilson directed a question to Taylor, asking: “Where are we storing data so it is accessible?”
US needs this kind of effort. ASU + other institutions have tests, but:
— Melissa A. Wilson (@sexchrlab) March 23, 2020
1. Who is sequencing #COVID19? (@baym?)
2. Where are we storing data so it is accessible? (@jxtx?)
Can collect answers here: https://t.co/P7eAAMNyFd
Will happily amplify other efforts. https://t.co/lfdhACLVw9
At this point the reader may be asking, ‘Ok, so what. What significance is there to a group of researchers having trouble getting access to the genome structure of the coronavirus?’ The problem is that it could mean the difference between being able to develop a vaccine for the disease and not.
Here it should be mentioned that on October 18, 2019, Johns Hopkins University, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted Event 201, a high-level exercise that imagined how the public and private sector would coordinate in the event of a pandemic. The event so closely mirrored the outbreak of Covid-19 just two months later that Johns Hopkins released a statement denying that it had made a “prediction” about the pandemic.
Moreover, on the question of producing vaccines to fight against Covid-19, Johns Hopkins appears to be an ardent supporter.
“I would imagine we are going to get a massive vaccination program going in place,” revealed Andrew Pekosz, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Professor, in an interview with Bloomberg. “The vaccines that are currently in the lead…are ones that are going to be given by injection.
“It looks like vaccines are going to be the game changer here…”
The question that must be asked is whether James Taylor was somehow working at cross-purposes to other organizations that are, for example, in the race to develop a vaccine against Covid-19. Or, alternatively, did the 40-year-old renowned researcher die a natural death at the very moment the quest for a vaccine against the coronavirus had become the central focus for researchers, pharmaceutical companies and his very alma mater?
On May 2, Liu, a 37-year-old assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (UPSM), was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds at his townhouse in an upscale suburban neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Another victim, identified as Hao Gu, was found dead in his car near Liu’s home with what police say was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Just four days after the double murder, Ross Township Police said they believe the apparent murder-suicide was the result of a “lengthy dispute regarding an intimate partner.”
“We have found zero evidence that this tragic event has anything to do with employment at the University of Pittsburgh, any work being conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and the current health crisis affecting the United States and the world,” said Detective Sgt. Brian Kohlhepp.
What makes this case particularly compelling is that, according to a homage page on the UPSM website, “Bing was on the verge of making very significant findings toward understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie SARS-CoV-2 infection and the cellular basis of the following complications.”
The other remarkable detail is how closely aligned Bing Liu and James Taylor’s academic resumes were. Both academics were involved in the obscure field of computational systems biology, as well as machine-learning techniques to better predict the behavior of biological species.
The lives of the two academics crossed paths due to their mutual affiliation with the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, also located in Pittsburgh. There, Liu worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of computer science, while Taylor delivered seminars there on his Galaxy program. If by chance Taylor was unfamiliar with Liu’s prolific body of academic work that would probably have changed after Liu’s purportedly breakthrough research on the Covid-19 was released. That magical moment was not to be, of course, due to Liu’s premature and very tragic death.
With regards to the purported murder-suicide, the details are sketchy. First, the mainstream media is portraying the murder as the result of a “lengthy dispute regarding an intimate partner.” Yet local media reported that Liu and his wife had no children and mostly kept to themselves. Of course that doesn’t mean that the two men were not competing for the affections of some other woman. However, with the married Liu on the verge of making a major breakthrough on the coronavirus front, it would seem that he would have very little time for any ‘extracurricular activities.’
In any case, it remains unclear how the two men knew each other, while a possible motive for the murder also remains a mystery, the Post-Gazette reported. Neighbors did not report hearing any gunshots at the time of the killings.
Finally, there are problems with the choice of murder weapon, in this case a firearm. Since both Liu and his alleged killer were not U.S. citizens, this opens up the question as to how Hao Gu was able to acquire a firearm. It is illegal – although certainly not impossible – for non-citizens to purchase firearms in the United States.
* * *
So what we are left with, at a time when the world is desperately searching for a way to combat Covid-19, is the legacy of two trailblazing researchers who were both working towards ways of better understanding the disease. Although we may never know the true story behind each man’s untimely death, the likelihood of two renowned researchers – with almost identical professional backgrounds – dying a month apart at a time when both were making headway against the pandemic must certainly rank far less than the chances of someone actually succumbing to Covid-19. The deaths of Bing Liu and James Taylor deserve far greater scrutiny by the mainstream media.
The late senator, statesman, sociologist, and New Yorker Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously observed that, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Moynihan balanced one truth with another, in part to show that neither side enjoyed a monopoly on wisdom. Had he offered these competing visions of politics and culture without describing one as “conservative” and the other as “liberal,” however, it would have admitted the possibility that one was more accurate than the other. And whether or not that is in fact the case matters—not merely for philosophical reasons but for political and social reasons, too.
In 1970, American political scientist Edward Banfield had explored this apparently innocuous question in a monograph entitled The Unheavenly City: The Nature and the Future of Our Urban Crisis. The book proved to be so divisive that a slightly revised version appeared just four years later entitled The Unheavenly City Revisited (the edition reviewed here), in which Banfield sought to address the complaints of his critics. Nevertheless, Banfield’s work drew great praise as well as opprobrium, and it has arguably dated better than the preferred theories of its critics. In 2008, Edward Glaeser, an urban affairs expert and professor of economics at Harvard, described it as “one of the most contentious, interesting, and insightful books ever written on urban policy.” On the 50th anniversary of its first edition, it deserves a reconsideration.
Banfield was a former New Dealer who had worked on anti-poverty projects for the Department of Agriculture during the 1930s and as an adviser to Republican presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1958, he wrote The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, in which he examined the family-centric culture of an impoverished town in Southern Italy. Banfield subsequently became a renowned dissident scholar at Harvard, where he developed a reputation as a brilliant thinker and sharp critic of liberal shibboleths. The principle source of controversy provoked by The Unheavenly City, he wrote in …Revisited, “is that my main points are deeply subversive of opinions and beliefs to which many highly intelligent and well-informed people are wedded, and without which the world would perhaps be unendurable for them.”
Written at the height of New York’s decline under the mayoralty of liberal reformer and Republican-cum-Democrat John Lindsay, the book’s preface warned that what followed would be provocative: “This book will probably strike many readers as the work of an ill-tempered and mean-spirited fellow,” Banfield explained, “but facts are facts, however, unpleasant, and they have to be faced unblinkingly by anyone who really wants to improve matters in the cities.” He then set forth an indictment of the New Deal/Great Society social services superstructure and a counterintuitive case that conditions had greatly improved in American cities despite the narrative that then prevailed of “urban crisis.”
Nomenclature, Banfield argued, is important, as is perspective and awareness of limitations. The problems comprising urban crisis—congestion, sprawl, commuting, suburban flight, and the decline of commercial activity—were really about “comfort, convenience, amenity, and business advantage, all of which are important.” But, he went on, “they do not affect either the essential welfare of individuals or what may be called the good health of society.” What is injurious to individual wellbeing and societal health is “crime, poverty, ignorance, and racial (and other) injustices.” These pathologies, though mitigated (some more than others), persist because, as a practical matter, there are no solutions to them—certainly none that a constitutional republic would countenance. In this view, Banfield found himself in the company of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, the Federalists, and Friedrich Hayek. All these thinkers shared what Banfield’s former student Thomas Sowell would later call the “constrained vision” of human affairs, that “sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings.”
Edward C Banfield (1916–1999) Pic: Foundation for Constitutional Government
Banfield’s great public service was the examination of these limitations in the cultural context of the American class system. Traditionally (and presently), social class is defined by similarities in position, status, education, income, habits, and tastes. American sociologist Dennis Gilbert observed that those who concluded that “there is as much art as science in the study of social stratification” were “probably right” because “broader statements about the class system run up against inherent inconsistencies of social reality.” Characteristically, Banfield took an entirely different approach to the topic. To analyze “social problems from a policy standpoint,” he wrote, “the most promising principle seems to be that of psychological orientation toward the future.” As political scientist James Q. Wilson later explained in the introduction to Banfield’s book Political Influence: “The longer a person’s time-horizon, the greater his willingness to defer present pleasures for future benefits, the more convinced he is that his own behavior will determine what the future will bring, and so the higher his (or her) class position.”
Banfield divided American society into the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class. The upper class individual occupies the farthest end of the future-oriented spectrum; he conducts himself and his affairs with an eye toward his heirs and family name. He is reared in a milieu that “teaches the individual that he would be cheating himself if he allowed gratification of his impulses (for example, for sex or violence) to interfere with his provision for the future.” Less future-oriented, the middle class man plans to get ahead and does what is necessary to improve his lot in life and to ensure his children achieve more than he did. Not “heavily” invested in the future, the working class individual is generally unconcerned with self-improvement. Rather, he focuses his attention on job security, his immediate family, and inculcating his children with the ethos of manual labor: “neatness and cleanliness, honesty, obedience, and respect for external authority.”
Concerned primarily with the crime, injustice, and poverty that plagued American cities at the end of the 1960s, Banfield devoted considerable time to analyzing the lower class individual “at the present-oriented end of the scale” who “lives from moment to moment”:
If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future.
Moral agency is alien to him. He takes “no interest in his work,” if he works at all. He suffers from “a feeble, attenuated sense of self.” His relationships are devoid of trust, “aggressive yet dependent.” He often does not marry, resents authority, and nurses grievance. Lower class men frequently abandon any sense of responsibility for their offspring, leaving the mother (or her mother) to head the household. And this poverty of values is inter-generationally transmitted: “once children have passed babyhood they are likely to be neglected or abused, and at best they never know what to expect.” Deprived of a stable household and responsible father, the lower class teenager will likely “join a corner gang of other such boys and to learn from the gang the ‘tough’ style of the lower-class man.” Ultimately, these deleterious influences create a person predisposed to the degeneracies of the slum: “a game, a fight, a tense confrontation with the police; feeling that something exciting is about to happen is highly congenial to people who live for the present and for whom the present is often empty.”
From this analysis, Banfield concluded that the dysfunctional elements of city life are not the fault of external forces that demand amelioration by federal or local authorities, such as misallocated economic and material resources, political disenfranchisement, or race-based discrimination. Although he acknowledged the obvious existence of racism, he found that “overemphasis on prejudice” encourages people to define all “troubles in racial terms,” which leads to “the adoption of futile and even destructive policies and to the non-adaptation of others that might do great good.” To the extent there was an American urban crisis in 1970, Banfield perceived it to be a crisis of personal responsibility.
Today, Banfield’s description of the lower class—not to be confused with poor people but, rather, poor people who behave in a particular manner—would more properly be characterized as the underclass. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal had already introduced this term in his 1963 book Challenge to Affluence, and it refers to a cohort that political and social scientist Charles Murray has studied extensively. David Green, a British think tanker who wrote the foreword to an essay Murray wrote about the British underclass, provided a succinct working definition of the present-oriented class: “Those distinguished by their undesirable behavior, including drug-taking, crime, illegitimacy, failure to hold down a job, truancy from school, and casual violence.”
Part of the controversy that engulfed the initial publication of The Unheavenly City was the charge that Banfield’s definition of the lower class was racist. In the …Revisited edition, Banfield took pains to correct ambiguities and re-emphasize that his focus was on orientation and behavior and that those intangibles respect no racial identity. In a thought experiment, Banfield asked the reader to consider what would happen if black Americans became white overnight (“New Whites”):
[I]t must be said that many New Whites would suffer indignities and humiliations not so different from those to which the Negro is now subject. The treatment that the lower class white receives is in many ways like that of the victim of racial prejudice—and a larger proportion of New Whites would be lower class. In one respect their new (class) status might be harder to bear than their former (racial) one; for the victim of race prejudice can take some comfort, however small, in the knowledge that he is being treated unjustly.
Much of what appears (especially to Negroes) as race prejudice is really class prejudice or, at any rate, class antipathy. Similarly, much of what appears (especially to whites) as “Negro” behavior is really lower class behavior. The lower class is relatively large among Negroes; it appears even larger than it is to those whites who fail to distinguish a Negro who exhibits outward signs—lack of skill, low income, slum housing, and so on—which in a white would mark him as lower class, from one whose culture is working, middle, or even upper class but whose opportunities have been limited by discrimination and whose income is low.
Writing in the late-’60s and early ’70s, Banfield focused on contemporary major cities and the underclass contingencies within them. He examined them as he found them and his analysis was unambiguously cultural, not racial. Indeed, Banfield surveyed lower class culture in a variety of ethnic groups, including 19th century Americans of English ancestry who “lived from hand to mouth, worked only when they had to, drank and fought prodigiously, felt no tie to the community, and left their women and children behind to fend for themselves or to be looked after at public expense once they have moved on.” Unassimilated Catholic immigrants from the “peasant cultures” of Europe, we learn, normalized “present-oriented” behavior, and in South Boston, in 1832, “‘to see anything like indigence or idleness,’ a visitor to New England from abroad wrote a few years later, ‘we must penetrate into the purlieus in the seaport towns, occupied by the Irish laboring population.’”
Banfield nevertheless anticipated that “some readers may suspect that when the author uses the words ‘lower class’ what he has in the back of his mind is ‘Negro.’” A dissident intellectual accustomed to accusation, Banfield responded matter-of-factly that there is:
…no arguing with a reader who is determined to mistake one’s meaning. All the author can do is repeat once more that there are lower-class people, as defined here, in all ethnic groups, including the Anglo-Saxon white Protestant one, and to point to the obvious fact that most Negroes are not improvident, do not live in squalor and violence, and therefore are plainly not lower class.
The “highly intelligent and well-informed” liberal academics and poverty bureaucrats, who found Banfield’s disquisition “deeply subversive” of an ideology to which they were wedded, were not especially concerned with whether or not its author was racist—the fair-minded reader will find that the text is as humane as it is honest. Banfield acknowledged without qualification the grotesque racial injustice to which black Americans had historically been subjected. His critics did resolve, however, that he had to be decisively discredited. After all, if policymakers were to accept Banfield’s assumptions about class, then many a professional social helper, petty central planner, welfare administrator, and non-profit organization would find themselves redundant. And as Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Banfield was reluctant to offer policy prescriptions. In the book’s penultimate chapter entitled “What Can Be Done?” he argued that any measures that might address the pathologies of cities are neither feasible nor acceptable because “no one knows how to change the culture of any part of the population—the lower class or the upper, whites or Negroes, pupils or teachers, policemen or criminals.” By definition, then, some proposals would entail morally and constitutionally repugnant statist activities, “such as taking infants from their parents at birth” or incarcerating people “who in the opinion of a court are extremely likely to commit violent crimes.” Other solutions are impracticable, he wrote, because the essence of the problem invalidates the response: “giving lower class persons ‘really good’ jobs is not a feasible way of inducing them to change their style of life, because that very style of life makes it impossible to give them ‘really good’ jobs.” At bottom, all one can reasonably hope for is a time-horizon treatment best characterized as “benign neglect,” where the passage of time gradually improves the underclass worldview.
Today, however, one proposal stands out as remarkably prescient, and it no doubt influenced Banfield’s student James Q. Wilson, who went on to devise the “broken windows” theory of policing with George L. Kelling. To alleviate the harassment of law-abiding people who reside in lower-income communities and to control crime generally, Banfield advised city leaders to “intensify police patrols in high-crime areas; permit the police to ‘stop and frisk’ and to make misdemeanor arrests on probable cause.” The miracle of broken windows policing needs no defense among informed citizens, but Wilson’s debt to his former teacher surely informed this praise: “Edward Banfield’s life is an example of that old saying about a prophet without honor is his own country or at least in his own times.”
Banfield’s principle insights on the link between deferment of gratification and the attainment of a “normal” life are as relevant today as they were when The Unheavenly City was first published 50 years ago. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his progressive fellow travelers in large cities have doubled down on a politics of intention against reality, where raising more taxes, expanding social programs, multicultural curricula, encumbering police, releasing recidivists, and shaming the productive is supposed to address underclass failure.
Other than a proactive and just law enforcement and prosecutorial regime to respond to crime and quality of life issues, social policy—no matter how well intended—cannot meaningfully address urban sickness where the motivations of the underclass are informed by “the existence of an outlook and style of life which is radically present-oriented and which therefore attaches no value to work, sacrifice, self-improvement, or service to family, friends, or community.” When what matters is now—right now—dispensing Mets tickets before a Rikers Island farewell, automatic recognizance release from arraignment, job training, increased wages, longer school days, domestic Marshall Plan fantasies, intersectional esteem exercises, and community policing are insufficient inducements to upright, morally dignified conduct conducive to future success.
The Unheavenly City leaves the reader in little doubt that only one of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s two “truths” is actually correct. Culture—the habits of mind, conduct, beliefs, and values—“determines the success of a society,” and that politics is far too limited an enterprise to change the deeply ingrained cultural orientation of those who comprise it. That is a lesson it is never too late to learn.
Craig Trainor is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney in New York City. His writing has appeared in National Review, City Journal, the Washington Examiner, the American Conservative, and the late Weekly Standard. You can follow him on Twitter @TrainorLaw.
Featured image: New York subway car, 1973 (US National Archives, Flickr).
The post Return to ‘The Unheavenly City’ appeared first on Quillette.
