The links are, according to Mason:

1. “the near collapse of free-market capitalism,” and in particular the opportunities it presents to the young;

2. rapid demographic growth creating a “youth bulge,” where young people come to represent a growing percentage of a country’s overall population, compounding and amplifying the impact of point 1;

3. growth in educational attainment, which Mason uses to argue that the young people sans opportunity are those who played by the rules and feel their economic loss more acutely as a result. He calls them “graduates with no future”;

4. “an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means.” Technology and individualism, Mason says, allow protests to assume a networked structure than can overpower traditional hierarchies.

I’ve been skeptical of this argument since it first appeared on Mason’s blog a year ago.

The three core problems Mason identifies – youth unemployment, the youth demographic bulge, and the diminishing returns on education- are real ones. But in Mason’s account, they are depicted as three components of the same, global problem. That’s simply not accurate.

To learn exactly what’s wrong with Mason’s economic assumptions, and how a more rigorous look at the economic data undermines his argument, read the whole thing.

What we have, in other words, is a meta-debate about whether policy options are permissible, instead of a debate about whether they are sound. A debate in which what is permissible is defined narrowly, as whatever is specifically ‘foreseen’ in documents written years ago, instead of broadly, as whatever those documents do not explicitly forbid. And a debate in which it is hard to avoid the conclusion that policy options are being construed as impossible because they are politically unpalatable to the people who would have to carry them out.

More here.

Read the whole post here.

In honor of the World Series, which starts tonight*, I dug out a research paper I’ve been sitting on for a while.

The paper, ‘Productivity, Wages, and Marriage: The Case of Major League Baseball‘ looks at the wages of baseball players and identifies a 16% gap between the wages of married players and unmarried players.

Economists have been documenting the marriage premium – the income boost (anywhere from 10 to 40 percent) married men have over their unmarried counterparts – for decades. But researchers have historically gotten stuck when it comes to providing explanations for the phenomenon: Do married men perform better because their wives are doing more of the housework? Do married men perform better because women tend to marry high performers anyway? Do married men perform about the same, but employers discriminate in their favor because they come across as reliable?  Without data about productivity, it’s hard to say.

That’s what makes the baseball study distinctive: baseball is a geek’s sport, filled with statistics, and – in a post-Moneyball world – increasingly managed by the numbers. That allowed the paper’s authors, Francesca Cornaglia and Naomi E. Feldman, to control for productivity (using both Batting Average and On-Base Plus Slugging) and sorted players into groups by age (early and late career) and ability (low, medium, or high performers). They were not only able to show that there is a marriage premium, but able to test the prevailing theories about why it exists.

Go read.

Yesterday,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech to the New York Economic Club on ‘economic statecraft’ and its role in American foreign policy. It’s a two-pronged concept – first, how the United States can leverage economic policy to strengthen its diplomatic position abroad; and second, how diplomacy can strengthen the U.S. economy at home.

As Dan Drezner’s already noted, venue aside, the purpose of the speech seemed to be to signal to career diplomats and civil servants that they will need to be savvy about economics, and incorporate it into their work, if they want to get ahead in Clinton’s State Department: “We need to be a Department where more people can read both Foreign Affairs and a Bloomberg Terminal,” Clinton said. Given the link between economics and foreign policy is my main hobbyhorse, it’s gratifying to see it taken seriously at the top like this.

As for policy, the speech was a bit more mixed.

For a detailed look at the speech, read the whole post.

NB: I’m posting this from a phone, so apologies for any typos or odd formatting.

So, as a critique, from the left, of our economic malaise, Occupy Wall Street interests me. But I am frustrated by the way the critique is framed.

The protest seems to have two strains: There are some hardline activists who see corporate power as an ill in itself, and condemn capitalism as a system and the institutions – the companies, the regulators, the politicians – who make it work. And there are a bunch of recent college graduates frustrated by unemployment and mounting debt, who played by the system’s rules and find themselves not as far along as they expected to be because the system is broken. Their complaint doesn’t seem to be that the system is illegitimate and needs to be abolished, but rather that it does not work as advertised and should be fixed.

There is a tension between these two strains, and I would like to see the movement settle on one or the other. But there is a larger problem, which is that the movement makes both arguments badly, and that brings us back to the distinction between culture and economics.

The cultural left wants individual freedom from social and institutional constraints; the economic left wants to build institutions to advance communitarian interests, and protect the weak from the strong.

Both the more radical and more moderate voices of Occupy Wall Street are trying to advance ideas of the economic left – that the interests of the many have been trampled to benefit a privileged few, or that institutions aren’t serving the collective as they ought to be – but they are mired in the language of individualism.

Doug Henwood blames this gap between mission and rhetoric on Reagan, Thatcher, and neoliberalism:

“This is not about left versus right,” said the photographer, Christopher Walsh, 25, from Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s about hierarchy versus autonomy.

…

Autonomy in this context sounds like a hipster version of bourgeois individualism…Occupy Wall Street is hardly about autonomy. It’s about living out solidarity and about attracting people to a movement. They’re living a collectivity, even if they’re not articulating it that way.

I suspect the problem is that three decades of neoliberalism have destroyed any available vocabulary for solidarity. My guess is that most of the people in Zuccotti Park were born after Thatcher and Reagan took office. There’s no such thing as society, as the Lady said. But there is, and we need more of it.

And he’s right.

But solidarity, collectivity and building instruments to advance them didn’t become verboten solely because of right wing economics. The process got an assist from the cultural left’s own emphasis on personal autonomy and its mistrust of social institutions. When I hear occupiers say that adopting a more rigorous collective agenda would be an imposition on their personal freedom, and that the point of the protest is to protest, rather than to achieve any goals, I hear a bit of Ayn Rand, sure, but I also hear the obsession with individual expression that has been a feature of the left since the ’60s.

The has me thinking  of Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom, which I reviewed favorably here last year. One of the things Franzen reveals is the hollowness of the social doctrines that left-leaning individualism produces, so that its practitioners cannot rise above selfishness, even when (in the case of the protagonist, Walter Berglund, an environmentalist) they try to address societal ills.

If critics are dismissing Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of selfish, privileged whiners, that is because the protesters are speaking the language of the self instead of the language of the collective. Both left and right are to blame for that.

You can’t go home again, as the saying goes, so it is silly to get nostalgic about the old left and the old right (both of whom believed in society, in their different ways). But it is absolutely imperative to start building a new rhetoric of collectivity, if protests like Occupy Wall Street are to succeed.

As someone worried that the feminist movement is losing steam, I am thrilled to see that feminist causes can still get people, especially young people, on the streets. And while I welcome the intention to combat a culture that feeds violence against women – that is a noble feminist cause if ever there was one – I am deeply uncomfortable with the way SlutWalk has framed that cause. Attending the rally allows me to be a friendly observer, to listen and try to understand, whereas marching felt like something I should do only if I felt, truly, that SlutWalk’s message was mine.

SlutWalk began as a response to the callous comments of a Toronto cop who told women that they could avoid sexual violence by covering up. He was voicing the idea, still common in some quarters, that a woman who dresses scantily or has sex often or with many partners has ceded her sexuality to the public sphere – it is now out there for anyone to use. She’s asked for it. Implied is the notion that most women don’t like sex, and therefore that affirmative consent – of a woman asking for sex explicitly when she wants it and not being forced to participate in it when she doesn’t – is impossible.

Affirmative consent was framed quite neatly in the 1970s with the slogan, “Whatever I wear and wherever I go, ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no,’ ” Because it requires people to understand female sexuality, affirmative consent has gotten a big boost from shows like Sex and the City, which, despite its flaws, helped mainstream the idea that women like sex too, and not just the vanilla kind you see written up in Cosmo‘s advice pages. In gender studies departments, this is often referred to as ‘sex-positivity.’ And it’s great.

What distinguishes SlutWalk is a decision to affirm female sexuality by appropriating the word so often used to degrade it: slut.

It is one thing to take a word with a specific positive meaning which has been co-opted and filled with negativity and reclaim it for its original positive purpose. This is my justification, for example, for identifying publicly as a feminist, which has a positive formal definition – a person who believes and/or works towards in gender equality – despite the fact that its opponents have spent several decades filling its popular meaning with horrible stereotypes about angry sexless women who want to punish men.

But slut is a different kind of word, a word that originates as a slur. It can be appropriated, but not re-appropriated. And so its appropriation feels to me more like saying, ‘Spit on me if you like; I don’t care what you think’ rather than ‘There is nothing here for you to spit on.’ It takes a perverse pride in being the thing society hates, and maybe serves as a rebuke to the haters, but it does not directly combat or dismantle the hatred. This kind of linguistic reclamation does not feel empowering to me, and it is not part of my feminism.

SlutWalk doesn’t leave much room for someone, like myself, who wants to combat rape culture but doesn’t believe we should embrace the word ‘slut’ to do so. [More on the exclusivity of this linguistic focus here.]

SlutWalk also fails to contend with the fact that a great deal of sexual violence stems from forces other than the degradation of female sexuality. Rape happens to men too and they face a different social constraint – the pressure to appear tough – in going public about it. Most sexual violence (one study estimated 84%) happens between people who know each other, often as an extension of other domestic violence, and is about debasing the victim’s humanity, not just their sexuality. Where sexual violence happens between strangers, it is still only partly about sex – that’s why it so often goes hand in hand with murder.

Instead of addressing these complex power dynamics directly, SlutWalk – at least its New York incarnation – purports to combat all power dynamics. The fight against sexual violence, its mission statement reads, is also the fight for the rights of the disabled and against imperialism, among other things. These are causes I support. But they are not part of my feminism. They are part of my liberalism. Liberalism and feminism are not the same thing.

SlutWalk’s organizers wanted to be inclusive of the full panoply of young activists. So instead of a coherent and powerful assault on one idea, they have turned their protest into a general purpose sticking-it-to-the-man, its ideology too thinly spread to do true justice to any of its causes. [Occupy Wall Street seems to suffer from a similar problem.]

Feminism has made the mistake of tying itself to other causes before. It tried to fold itself under the umbrella of the British labor movement, but the Labour Party opposed women’s suffrage to the last, fearing that women would vote Tory. It tried to fold itself into the civil rights movement, but struggled with the internal sexism of civil rights organizations. It threw itself behind the anti-war movement, and George McGovern’s anti-war presidential campaign, only to have McGovern toss abortion rights off the party platform to secure the Democratic nomination.

These were good causes and there was nothing wrong with individual feminists getting behind them – I would have. But it was and is a mistake to conflate feminism itself with the broad umbrella of the left and all the causes liberals might support. Feminism needs to carry its own weight.

Because I want a feminism that is interested in improving women’s lives, not just providing an emotional cushion for their suffering; because I want a feminism that is simply defined and widely accessible; because I want a feminism that has its own identity, distinct from that of other ideologies; I am not a SlutWalker.

But I will still see you at the rally. Tweet me at @maharafiatal if you will be there.

Here’s a snippet of my piece:

Not a moment too soon, given a world in financial turmoil and an IMF shaken to its core by the scandal of her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned over allegations of sexual assault in May. A moderate Socialist, DSK pushed for lenient fiscal policies and stringent financial regulations and opposed austerity programs in beleaguered euro zone economies like Ireland, Portugal and Greece. Lagarde, an unabashed free marketer, takes a much flintier approach to the crisis. It’s time, she says, to return the IMF to its roots, “that fiscal consolidation line, which I think is right.”

She knows this is a tough sell. “You first have a period [after making cuts] where growth takes a hit and goes negative”—and with that come unavoidable human costs in lost jobs and social services. Political feuding over controversial cuts will only make the pain worse. How should ordinary people cope? She pauses. “It takes courage.”

Read the whole story (and watch some video from my interview with Lagarde) here.

Stories this complex, with tentacles that reach deep into multiple powerful institutions – News International, the Metropolitan Police, Downing Street – need to be tackled like a hydra, from all sides at once. One news outlet can try to do it all, but, as Rusbridger’s article shows, it works better if each news team has time to focus deeply on one angle, and the ability to share findings freely with those who are coming at the beast from another side. Moreover, a story of this type, one that will raise shocking questions about institutions so embedded in our society, whose authority and honesty we are taught to trust, cannot break through if it comes only from one corner. True though the revelations may be – and Davies’ work was flawless - they are too easy to dismiss until they have been cross-checked and verified by multiple voices.

Read the whole post here. It’s a follow-up to this post on the hacking scandal, which looked at the importance of introducing transparency to the reporting process.

All of a sudden, we might be on the verge of having four women in the four most powerful development policy roles.

I celebrate this. But I am not satisfied. Because despite the increased visibility of women in development policy, the central role of gender equality in economic development is under-appreciated or misunderstood.

More on why women in power doesn’t necessarily mean empowerment for all women here.