For this countdown, I’ll stick to TV commercials from the ’60s and ’70s. No doubt I’ve missed many worthy ones; some that belong here just haven’t made it to YouTube (yet).
OK, let’s start with number 10, a saucy little number courtesy of Noxzema: “Take it off. Take it all off.”
In that faraway land, ethnic stereotyping wasn’t just commonplace — it was good marketing!
In these two old TV ads, the Chinese get bashed for a buck. First, here’s the classic “ancient Chinese secret” spot from Calgon:
And here’s a Jello commercial. Look at the poor Chinese baby, trying to eat Jello with chopsticks!
The cover story of the July issue of Reason is an excerpt from my book entitled “The Aquarians and the Evangelicals.” The article is now available online here.
And now, courtesy of the bottomless YouTube archives, here’s some video accompaniment.
Representing the Aquarians, here’s Timothy Leary in his prime, extolling the virtues of LSD:
And in the evangelical corner, here’s Billy Graham — being interviewed by Woody Allen!
How do you react to this anti-war ad from the doomed 1972 McGovern campaign? Do you roll your eyes at the “Americans are babykillers” theme? Or do you reflect, in light of today’s mess in Iraq, on all the lives sacrificed for nothing between 1968 and 1972?
Well, it doesn’t matter what you think now. What matters is that Americans at the time rejected McGovern overwhelmingly. And that, ever since, the ghost of McGovern has haunted the Democratic Party. They’re still under his shadow today — which is why, notwithstanding the spectacular botch Bush has made of things abroad, most Democratic politicians feel they must proceed gingerly in opposing his policies.
A couple days ago in his “Best of the Web” column, James Taranto took a shot at Michael Bloomberg for bemoaning the nation’s distressing level of scientific illiteracy. The Bloomberg comment in question:
“It’s probably because of our bad educational system, but the percentage of people who believe in creationalism is really scary for a country that’s going to have to compete in a world where science and medicine require a better understanding.”
Taranto, who admits to not sharing the “creationalist” view himself, nonetheless lambasted Bloomberg’s remark as “appalling in its arrogance and ignorance. He suggests that anyone who believes in the biblical account of creation is unqualified to do medical research or any other kind of science. This is a complete non sequitur, and it is belied by” the stories this week about Isaac Newton’s apocalyptic crystal ball-gazing.
Now, since Bloomberg is toying with a presidential run, he may have been unwise to denigrate the beliefs of 42 – 60 percent of his fellow citizens. But he’s got a point. And the fact that Isaac Newton wasted a good chunk of his immense brainpower on trying to predict the end of the world doesn’t undermine that point one bit.
Newton’s fascination with biblical prophecy is well known; it’s in the news this week simply because some of his manuscripts revealing that fascination just went on exhibit in Jerusalem. By the way, Newton was equally obsessed with alchemy. If, perchance, distressing numbers of Americans still believed you could turn lead into gold with a philosopher’s stone, would Taranto think that was okay because Newton believed it, too?
Newton’s irrational side is simply evidence of the fact that, 300 years ago, the scientific worldview was still in the process of emerging from the primeval soup of supernaturalism and superstition.
I caught a glimpse of that transition years ago while visiting Florence. At the Museum of the History of Science there, Galileo’s middle finger is on display, encased in glass on a marble stand:
I’m a sucker for sacred relics, so I had already seen a whole bunch of saints’ bones on that trip. And then to see the father of modern science idolized in similar fashion — it struck me as such a fitting symbol of the new era’s dawn, when science and superstition were still thoroughly jumbled together.
Given that the scientific worldview had to emerge out of a pre-scientific intellectual milieu, it was inevitable that many of the greatest pioneers of the scientific approach would still have one foot firmly planted in the old realm of spirits and miracles. Copernicus, for example, was a monk; Kepler was an astrologer and mystic.
Today, however, the differentiation of the scientific worldview from traditional conceptions of the cosmos is considerably farther along. A 1998 survey of National Academy of Sciences members found extremely high levels of religious skepticism: only 7.0 percent believed in a personal God, and only 7.9 percent believed in immortality.
Bloomberg was right. The fact that creationism remains so widespread in our country is not a good thing. Yes, you can be a scientist while believing all kinds of weird things outside your field. But, practically speaking, it’s pretty much impossible to be a working biologist if you buy the Genesis story as fact. And given all the possibilities for revolutionary biological breakthroughs in the coming years, it’s a shame that our pool of potential biologists is smaller than it otherwise could have been.
The past is another country — a dirt-poor country, that is.
In my book, I tell the story of Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant who eventually found his calling as the chronicler of the Lower East Side’s les misérables. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, was a powerful prod to the social conscience when it was written; it is an equally powerful prod to the historical imagination today.
It is difficult for us to conceive how poor our country was just a century or so ago. Yet in the New York of Riis’s day, approximately 100,000 children lived on the streets, eking out survival by selling newspapers, blacking boots, begging, and stealing. “In warm weather a truck in the street, a convenient outhouse, or a dugout in a hay barge make good bunks,” Riis wrote. “Two were found making their nest once in the end of a big iron pipe up by the Harlem Bridge, and an old boiler at the end of the East River served as an elegant flat for another couple.”
Riis arrived in the U.S. in 1870. After three years of odd jobs and a stint of begging, he finally found steady work as a police photographer for the New York Tribune.
How the Other Half Lives is illustrated with Riis’s photographs — including the one above, entitled “Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street.” Here’s another great shot — “Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street”:
Tomorrow marks the 40th anniverary of the opening of the Monterey Pop Festival, the signature event of the Summer of Love. Organized by rock producer Lou Adler and John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, the event ran from June 16 to 18, 1967 at the Monterey Fairgrounds in Monterey, California.
Yes, Woodstock was more famous, and infamous, but Monterey was first. The first open-air rock festival. With the first major public performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding.
Here are some highlights from the wonderful documentary by D. A. Pennebacker.
Gotta start with Hendrix. Here he is setting his guitar on fire:
And here’s Janis doing “Ball and Chain”:
Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song” was my favorite tune when I was four or five years old. It was a frequent eight-track request during outings in the family car:
And finally, here’s Norah Jones’s dad:
My book was reviewed by Chris Tucker in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News. Here’s a snippet:
Brink Lindsey, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, has written a wise, revealing book combining the long sweep of history with a documentarian’s eye for detail. Mr. Lindsey shows how contemporary America was born from the Industrial Revolution’s uniting of God and Mammon into “a single, world-transforming faith” known as the Protestant work ethic….
We’re not all Donald Trumps, and some of us do live in poverty, but no country in history has lifted more people into that realm of freedom than America has since World War II. This singular achievement, Mr. Lindsey argues, underlies everything we are today as more material freedom begets more social freedom in an apparently unstoppable cycle.
Meanwhile, historian Fred Siegel (author of the Giuliani bio The Prince of the City) discusses my book in the new issue of City Journal. He says some very nice things, but he concludes on this critical note:
Lindsey rightly emphasizes how affluence can soften some conflicts, but—as seen on the Internet daily—it can also provide a megaphone for ideologues to use politics as an outlet for their private passions.
While issues central to the 1960s, such as race, are far less salient today, the underlying dynamic remains unchanged. The “brights” of the “creative class” think that they need to rule as a matter of professional responsibility. An irreconcilable tension exists between those whose expertise gives them a sense of earned superiority and small-business people who cater to what people actually want. In the period ahead, that conflict is sure to be posed in environmental terms, as the public hears that it must submit to technocratic mandates to save the planet. It’s hard to see how we’ll compromise over these tensions, let alone agree on Lindsey’s libertarian version of political truth. Notwithstanding Lindsey’s logic of history—like Fukuyama’s before him—we should expect shocks ahead.
In his Friday column David Brooks (TimesSelect) offers an 800-word “Hamiltonian” manifesto. It starts with this typology of current schools of thought:
First, there are the limited government conservatives, who think taxes should be low and the state should be as small as possible. Second, there are the Hamiltonians, who believe in free market capitalism but think government should help people get the tools they need to compete in it.
Third, there are the mainstream liberals, who think government should intervene in small ways throughout the economy to soften the effects of creative destruction. Fourth, there are the populists, who believe the benefits of the global economy are going to the rich and we need to fundamentally rewrite the rules.
So where do I fit in? Obviously, as a Cato Institute libertarian, I can claim membership in the limited government conservative club. Meanwhile, though, in an article for The New Republic, I proposed a “liberaltarian” alliance between pro-market liberals and pragmatic libertarians on the following terms: “On the one hand, restrictions on competition and burdens on private initiative would be lifted to encourage vigorous economic growth and development. At the same time, some of the resulting wealth-creation would be used to improve safety-net policies that help those at the bottom and ameliorate the hardships inflicted by economic change.” So while I’m clearly not a mainstream liberal, I’m at least open to doing business with people of that description.
What I want to do here is assess my Hamiltonian credentials. According to Brooks, “We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital. Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.”
I accept the main thrust of this Hamiltonian critique of the status quo. The market currently provides big incentives for getting a college degree (the so-called “college wage premium”) — and big disincentives for dropping out of high school (virtually a guarantee of socioeconomic failure). But as I wrote in my book:
For while economic incentives matter, sometimes culture matters more. And many Americans have been raised in a working-class culture that does not sufficiently encourage education or long-term planning. As a result, they lack the skills that are now so highly rewarded — and what is worse, they lack the capacity to develop those skills.
I expanded on this point here:
Today many people do not live as fully as they might. It has always been thus. Formerly, though, the fact was an unavoidable corollary of scarcity: the division of labor was too crude to allow any but a small minority to develop their intellectual capacities. Today the main problem is the comparatively much more tractable problem of cultural lag. The division of labor has now attained such a level of complexity that there are more openings for people with high skills than there are people to fill them. At present, then, the primary obstacle that prevents more people from living better is the persistence of cultures maladapted to current circumstances. Working-class culture has become, to a significant extent, obsolete: it does not raise people to develop the planning, networking, and analytical skills that are the admission ticket to the golden circle. Underclass culture, meanwhile, has been dysfunctional since its inception.
For more about the cultural divide, I recommend reading Annette Lareau.
Brooks and I agree, then, at least on this diagnosis: one of the major challenges facing the country is devising public policies more conducive to a culture of human capital development. But what’s the right prescription?
In his column Brooks endorses a grab bag of nostrums: bigger child tax credits, upping the earned income tax credit and extending it to single men, sending nurse practitioners to assist single-parent families, subsidizing quality preschools, encouraging quality teachers through merit pay and changed certification rules, senior citizen mentor programs, national service, portable pensions and health insurance, an immigration system that better rewards skills, and increased government funding for basic research.
I’m not going to take the time to go through these in detail. Of the lot, expanding the EITC strikes me as the activist measure most likely to do some good (in terms of encouraging labor force participation and thereby combating underclass pathologies). Some of Brooks’s proposals seem like Clintonesque microprograms that are really more about symbolism than actually making a cognizable difference (nurse practitioners, senior citizen mentors). And I’m not at all clear how national service, portable pensions and health insurance, and more basic research funding — regardless of what I think of them on their own merits (I’m against, for, and undecided, respectively) — are supposed to encourage poor and working-class young people to develop marketable skills.
The data suggest that early, intensive, and sustained intervention in kids’ lives is necessary to make any kind of difference. But what makes anyone think that the educational establishment that so egregiously fails to serve poor kids today can take on such an ambitious mission?
Number one on my own human capital agenda would be something missing from Brooks’s list: expanding educational competition any way you can (tax credits, vouchers, fewer regulatory obstacles for home schooling and charter schools, per-student funding). I don’t see how you can be serious about upgrading human capital without taking on the fundamental systemic flaw in the current educational system.
Put me down, then, as someone who supports libertarian means for Hamiltonian ends.
I’ll be the first to admit, though, that educational reform is no silver bullet. Cultural pluralism is and will be an unavoidable fact of American life. This is especially true given the large inflows of low-skilled immigrants from Mexico and Central America — and neither Brooks nor I favor Canute-like measures to sweep back that tide.
On this important and divisive issue, then, both Brooks and I agree that libertarian ends trump Hamiltonian ones.
George Will gives my book a thumbs up in the upcoming New York Times Book Review. Here’s a snippet:
“Americans,” Lindsey writes, “have become a different kind of people,” transformed by capitalism’s fecundity. Although often “derided for its superficial banality,” materialism has resulted in “a flood tide of spiritual yearning.”Various scolds and worrywarts have exclaimed, with Wordsworth, that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” To such Jeremiahs, Lindsey provides an essentially cheerful, although not altogether so, counterpoint: affluence has made America a more libertarian, and hence a nicer, place.
Especially since my book stakes out a “beyond left vs. right, red vs. blue” position, it’s incredibly gratifying to get positive feedback from Jon Stewart, on the one hand, and George Will on the other. Maybe I’m on to something!
Copyright © 2007 Brink Lindsey