Smartest Things I Read Today

Think tanks in DC call themselves non-partisan. But of course, that’s not true, because they’ve already made up their minds. They’re not thinking at all. Merely arguing.

Seth Godin

If the Catholic Church wasn't a religious institution, would we be handling the situation differently?

"They would have been arrested under the RICO federal laws already and they would have been considered organized crime," 

Pennsylvania State Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat, told Salon. Rozzi is more than just a proponent of passing new legislation to help victims of childhood sex abuse, whether from employees of the Catholic Church or other organizations; he is also a victim himself, one who was raped by a priest in a rectory shower in Pennsylvania when he was 13 years old.

Economically, the country has changed surprisingly little since 2008. The big banks have returned to risky practices, and Republicans are trying to undo the Dodd-Frank reform law, which was enacted to prevent another collapse. The distribution of income and wealth in America is as lopsided as ever. Despite almost ten years of economic growth, real wages are stuck at their pre-crisis level, while corporate profits are soaring and stock prices have reached record highs. All the misshapen economic trends of the previous decade are still with us.

The lasting effect of the crisis is in our politics. The Presidency of Donald Trump is an overdetermined fluke, an accident with a thousand causes. Among them is the catastrophic event that gutted millions of lives and ended in no fair resolution, only cynicism. The economic indicators are strong right now, but before long there will be another financial crisis. They come every seven or ten years, each bearing the features of its time. If the previous one was the result of overconfidence in free markets, the next might be triggered—as in Turkey today—by the behavior of an authoritarian leader. When it comes, we’ll be less prepared to address it than we were in 2008. This President has made an enemy of facts, Congress no longer passes rational laws, and American democracy is ten years unhealthier.

George Packer

Wisest Thing I Read Today

Most Interesting Perspective of the Week

Since then, analyses from investment banks and researchers have estimated that 40 to 60 percent of the savings from the tax cut are being plowed into buybacks. One analysis of companies on the Russell 1000 Index—which consists of big firms, much like the Standard & Poor’s 500 does—found that companies directed 10 times as much money to buybacks as to workers. As such, Milani and Tung said they expect the math on corporate spending on shareholders versus workers to become even more exaggerated in the coming years.

In the meantime, corporate boards are poised to spend hundreds of billions more on their own shares, benefiting executives along with the mostly wealthy Americans who own stock. Just this week, Caterpillar, for instance, said it plans to spend $1 billion buying back shares in the latter half of this year, before kicking off a new $10 billion round on buybacks starting in January. It is also in the midst of laying off hundreds of workers.

ANNIE LOWREY is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, covering economic policy.

Wisest Thing I Read Today

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). 

Humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time trying to control the world than trying to understand it. 

Yuval Harari