He takes a rag from his pocket and carefully wipes the last day’s accumulation of snow from the plaque. The old parking lot nearby, and even the parts of the sidewalk that haven’t been shoveled are covered in inches of snow. But the memorial has barely any, even before he begins his work. He has been here every day, making sure these words can be read, though he knows that no one else will read them today. Everyone passes with their shoulders tense against the cold and their eyes scanning the sidewalk for treacherous bits of ice. That doesn’t matter to him.

When he goes, the flakes immediately begin re-whitening the brass surface. An hour later the letters have vanished; but he will be back tomorrow.

A bit of background:

In the economics world, behavioral economics is aimed at looking at how people actually make choices, instead of assuming that everybody has excellent information about the given state of markets and the future consequences of their options, and will choose what’s best for them, given their preferences.

In most experiments (and in anybody’s experience of real life) it turns out that people don’t always act to maximize their interests. We make stupid choices. We discount future gains too heavily. We smoke, drink, do drugs, party, don’t exercise, watch porn, drop out of school, quit our jobs and move to Europe to be writers in dying mediums. Null point pour les neoclassicism.

In this writer’s mind, and in others, the gropings of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are linked to behavioral economics, insofar as they chip away at the traditional foundations of the human spirit. These former two semi-disciplines, or intellectual movements, are aimed at grounding elements of our behavior, personalities, and perhaps cultures in our biology. Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an excellent primer on these ideas: In a nutshell, we are built initially from genetic instructions. This includes our brains, and our various neurochemical and hormonal eccentricities. These differences, from the very beginning, have consequences – some of us learn faster or slower in certain areas, some are fatter or skinnier (which has societal (but not deterministic) consequences), some are excellent athletes, some can swim through mathematics as though numbers are the sea and they dolphins. We are different from one another, mentally, physically, in every way that has anything to do with genes — and it makes more sense to understand this rather than pretend we start as identical beings, and grow apart.

So. We’re different. We’re not perfectly rational. Wolfe argues that these ideas are chipping away at the heart of old-style liberalism, the idea that we can and should choose our destinies for ourselves, with the minimum amount of interference from outside (with certain necessary caveats that increase the collective amount of autonomy available, such as: no, you can’t own slaves, asshole).

I think there are a few problems with this. I don’t think he gets evolutionary psychology or behavioral economics all that well. As many critics of these disciplines do, he confuses predispositions and statistical likelihoods with a kind of predetermination

(Christians and sociobiologists) both believe in predestination.  For the one we are stained with sin.  For the other we are products of our genetic makeup.  In neither case can we change our destiny.

This statement is bollocks. Sociobiologists (at least good ones) believe that we have constraints on our personalities and capabilities, just as we have constraints on our physical abilities. This isn’t a popular notion, particularly in America, but it is very, very far from the idea of predestination.  (I have these genes, thus I am more likely than someone who does not to express them by acting more aggressively than the norm; *not*: I have these genes, so I will be a rapist).

What Wolfe is really attacking, however, is the idea of the new “libertarian paternalists” that want to help us overcome our irrationalities by “nudging” our choices. Putting their fingers on the scales. It’s not really a new idea – we’ve tried to influence people’s consumption choices through things like “sin taxes” for years. But it, or this explanation for old behavior, is gaining ground as we see the very wide areas in which we don’t choose rationally.

….people should neither be left completely free to do what they want nor should they be coerced by government.  Instead their choices should be constrained by organizing them according to design principles that will produce the optimum outcome for themselves and their society.  Thaler and Sunstein call such design a form of “choice architecture.”… The goal of the behavioral economists is to give people choices over how much to save for their retirement or to recycle their trash, but to design the choices in ways that will overcome the irrationality and ignorance that shape individual decisions.

So: Sin taxes. Gas taxes, to lower people’s carbon production and push them to public transit (which they like in theory, but don’t do enough on their own). Anti-smoking campaigns. Anti-obesity campaigns. Structuring tax breaks so the benefits come in chunks, rather than all at once, so we are more likely to spend the money instead of save it.

These “choice architects” are undemocratically screwing with the way we as supposedly rational people are choosing, Wolfe argues. He seems to be disputing the idea that we are fundamentally irrational; believing, perhaps, that despite the evidence, it is better that we continue acting (as policymakers and as humans) as if we were perfectly rational, rather than accepting that we are not and working to ameliorate the consequences.

Who nudges, is his ultimate question. Who is elitist enough to decide what’s “best” for us, and structure our alternatives so we are more likely to choose well. Which, fair enough, it is never a pleasant idea to hear from the government that: This is the best for you. Despite your stupid desire to eat fatty foods, smoke, etc., we simply won’t let you. (Or wait, maybe that sounds suspiciously familiar. Something about drugs, alcohol, speed limits, dress codes, hate speech prohibitions…)

We don’t like people trying to affect our supposedly free choices. We want the government out of our heads. So we leave the space wide open for psychologically sophisticated marketers, I suppose…

Wolfe’s argument fundamentally hangs on the idea of transparency. He argues that the construction of “choice architecture” can not be transparent. I see no reason why this should be the case. We have always had policy goals, which amount to ideas about how society should look. These policy goals are developed by the government and its advisors. The government is elected. We have the ability to write about and criticize the government.

So, yes, I think Wolfe is wrong. But I do think this debate about human nature will structure the political debates of the future. Are we rational or are we not? Are we identical in every way or are we not? It will be important to remember that “all men are created equal” is poor science (Men? Created? Equal? Really?); however, as a political statement meaning that every person should be given equal rights, or should be given roughly equal opportunities (two very different ideas), it remains extraordinarily powerful.

In an especially rich essay, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists”—in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988), edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg—Hall wrote: “The first thing to ask about an ‘organic’ ideology that, however unexpectedly, succeeds in organizing substantial sections of the masses and mobilizing them for political action, is not what is false about it but what is true.” What, in other words, actively makes sense to people whose beliefs you do not share? Hall proposed that leftist intellectuals should not answer that question by assuming that working-class conservatives have succumbed to false consciousness: “It is a highly unstable theory about the world which has to assume that vast numbers of ordinary people, mentally equipped in much the same way as you or I, can simply be thoroughly and systematically duped into misrecognizing entirely where their real interests lie. Even less acceptable is the position that, whereas ‘they’—the masses—are the dupes of history, ‘we’—the privileged—are somehow without a trace of illusion and can see, transitively, right through into the truth, the essence, of a situation.”

This has fairly widely been dubbed the most boring election in history. Which — aren’t we in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression? Wasn’t there a gigantic financial crises this time last year, technically on Merkel’s watch? Shouldn’t there be a revolution or something (and come on, 12 percent for the Linke, the former East German state party, now a left opposition, doesn’t count)?

It’s astonishing how badly the left has come out of this crisis. It’s not that the right has fantastic ideas; certainly not in the States, where they’ve collapsed into sputtering brain-fevered monosyllables. But there is no coherent alternative to centrism today. Everyone is spending like mad, in a Keynesian approach to the post-Friedman global economy. Angie’s social market economy is not radically different from what Obama wants to do the States; and here, because she’s staked out that centrist ground, she wins.

Her new partners, the liberals, want tax cuts. Maybe they’ll get some, but Germany is awash in debt, at least by its standards, and if George W. Bush has shown anything, it is that shotgun-targeted tax cuts don’t produce anything but pain and messes that have to be cleaned up later. Not much room to maneuver in that respect.

So where is the coherent left? Certainly not in Germany. Or in France. Even socialist Sweden has a center-right government. There are good ideas coming from the left, like New Deal-type spending on green technology; but this can be adopted just as well by the center-right, and will, by Merkel.

We need a new labor movement; something that reflects the realities of today’s economy. Something that represents, or is grounded in, the interests of deliberately mobile, flexible workers. Freelancers and contractors, programmers and writers and service types. Based on an economics that understands that people aren’t rational, that the free market fails miserably in many areas (but actually does work pretty well in others), and doesn’t let finance types assure the world that they’re getting hugely rich because what they’re doing is really, really good for everybody.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Until last week, Mr. Moussavi was a nondescript, if competent, politician — as one of his campaign advisers put it to me, he was meant only to be an instrument for making Iran a tiny bit better, nothing more. Iranians knew that’s what they were getting when they cast their votes for him. Now, like us, Mr. Mousavi finds himself caught up in events that were unimaginable, each day’s march and protest more unthinkable than the one that came before.

Is this the hallmark of a revolution? That events sweep away intentions, that actions inspired by old models have unexpected consequences (and become new models themselves), that the people involved are thrust into roles that seem only afterward to have been cut for them like gloves?

Moussavi is a member of the loyal opposition, being driven into rebellion against a regime, but not initially or intentionally against a state. The students and tech-savvy Iranian citizens on Twitter are reinventing political organizing on the run. with the help of western hackers. Everyone, on both sides, is groping through the fog.

Blood has already stained the streets, and was shown immediately around the world, thanks to cell phone cameras; and yet there is a disturbing triumphalism on the part of western Twitter observers, crying that “The revolution will be Twittered” — perhaps true, perhaps even a moment of radical significance in the history of political organizing and communication — but it is easy to forget that we aren’t revolutionaries ourselves, that our blood and families and lives aren’t on the line; and that others, the students and football players and the now-millions of protesters, face potential torture or execution in the coming days.  This isn’t YouTube, this is real life.

It’s a strange thing having a ringside seat at what seems genuine revolution. I re-tweet what seems important news. I tried and failed to set up a proxy server to relay Iranian traffic (but new instructions are out, I will try again).  Yet it’s not about me, or the Westerners watching.

But the fact that we *feel* otherwise, and that we can talk or hear directly with the participants, is another step toward the eradication of borders. In his speech today, Khamenei blamed the protests on the interference of the Enemy, the United States, Europe, Israel. That message will certainly resonate; but Twitter has allowed real people to work together, to speak to each other despite the impositions of prejudices and propaganda, to feel each other’s similarities and humanity in a visceral way.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, on the streets, online, or in history. But we can only learn from the past, not predict the future from it.

Good luck to the people in the streets, and in #IranElection.

What Berlin does is fires. Cars, for the most part, often as many as one a night. It’s a kind of sport for the left wing, what they call autonomous left groups. While not exactly supporting this, I’ve had a hard time feeling sorry for people who have had their Mercedes or BMWs burned in the middle of the night here. This isn’t a particularly supportable reaction — a childish one, even, and easy for me as I don’t depend on a car for a job, to drive a child to school, etc. — but people who have their Mercedes or Audis burned in a city that offers such excellent public transportation haven’t drawn any tears. There’s insurance, and it’s a message not to get too attached to things.

The last few weeks has seen a sharp climb in the number of cars burned, in part related to “Action Weeks,” a several-week long protest against gentrification in the city. The police have recorded 27 cars burned in the first two weeks of June. But Tuesday night was something a bit different — the arsonists attacked a company that primarily delivers food to schools, preschools and senior citizens’ homes, burning the delivery trucks in the yard in the middle of the night.

A mistake? According to the article, the company is viewed by the autonomous groups as “providing help to asylum seekers” — another variation on the left/right political divide that makes me scratch my head. I’m used to right-wingers being anti-immigrant; but I suppose the save-our-jobs anti-capitalist left might swing into this kind of racism as well.

Of course it’s possible that the company burned the trucks itself. For the insurance, or some other less transparent reason. It might not have been related to Action Weeks. But if so: WTH? I am sympathetic to arguments focusing on the rapaciousness and ammorality of modern financial capitalism; the moral arguments of classical (not black-block) anarchism, if not its psychological acuity, resonate deeply with me. I have no patience for false ideologues who attack services for the elderly.

Protest fail.

It’s ongoing now, if slowing down. It’s modern, unfiltered news, which means rumors and speculation. But it is a way to be in the stream of events that CNN or a newspaper can never be (though the YouTube BBC video, filmed like a hidden camera because the authorities apparently arrested the reporters and took their earlier tapes, gives some sense for this.)

Despite what some Twitterers are proclaiming, this is not a substitute for mainstream media, even if some outlets are doing a terrible job. Apparently CNN in the US dropped the ball on this story badly, though overseas seems good, and I’m still reading the NYT, BBC and the Guardian. However, this real-time info scratches any itch that cable news ever did. Fast information, and the sense for what it’s like on the ground, to *live* an event instead of read about it, is coming from Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube today.

Here’s a list of twitterers worth following, when the #IranELection flow gets to be too much: http://tr.im/or5k.

This Flickr set is unmissable, though the photos on blogs and other sets are outstanding too.

Gag.

What this means is that thousands of couples who have married in the last few months now face the prospect of the state revoking that status. Hundreds of thousands more lose the right. A jarring reality, given the sense of new dawn elsewhere in the country.

But a friend and fellow writer, Paul Festa (whose marriage is one of those now truly at risk) writes persuasively in The Daily Beast that opponents of Prop. 8 see some silver lining in the numbers — 52 percent support for this proposition, compared to 61 percent support for a same-sex marriage ban in 2000.

If you really want to know who will decide this issue if it comes up in 2012, ask 14-to-17 year olds, who will be voting in their first presidential election. Those straight supremacists playing with Mormon campaign contributions? Culture war dead-enders. Last night the gay movement lost a battle. The war, launched in the early 1950s by activists Harry Hay, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, we’re winning decisively.

Worth a read.

It is encouraging, even inspiring, that an American political system showing such tattered edges over recent cycles can lead to this. A majority of the country has repudiated Bush and the party that spawned him. The tragedy is that we’ll be living under Bush’s shadow for years to come.

Already the conservatives are debating strategies for opposition. That’s natural. I would love to see the spirit of McCain’s gracious concession speech inspire Washington for at least a few months, but more likely is that aside from McCain himself, the minority party will leave the hard choices entirely to the new majority, and let the Democrats take the blame for the sacrifices that will be need to be made.

But that’s later. Today’s for dancing.