Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

I have long felt that there is a space in U.S. politics for a party which holds traditionally right-wing views on social issues but traditionally left-wing views on economic issues. Many voters in the U.S. vote against their economic interests in support of their social views. The limousine liberal is a cliché, a wealthy person who votes in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy. Conversely there are many poor people who vote for Republican candidates because they oppose abortion, accepting the fact that those same candidates will vote to cut services their supporters rely on every day, such as food stamps and WIC. So why not a candidate who stands against abortion, against teaching evolution in schools, against gay marriage, but in favor of governmental support for the poor? Some conservative Democrats do take that position, but they are a small minority within the party.

I read recently that France’s National Front has moved into exactly this space. Marine le Pen the traditionally right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic party to be more of an economically left-wing, socially anti-immigrant party. I disagree with her positions in many ways, but I wonder if any U.S. politicians will see an inspiration there.

I suppose the flip side would be socially left-wing and economically right-wing, but many Democrats are in that space already. It pretty much describes Bill Clinton, for example, and Barack Obama is not far off either. The Republican party has been steadily shifting rightward economically–Obama is well to the right of Nixon on economic issues, for example. I don’t know if the Republicans are leading the Democrats to the right, or if the Democrats moving right are pushing the Republicans into ever more extreme positions in order to differentiate themselves.

A New York Times op-ed column by Edward E. Kaufman Jr. and Carl M. Levin warns that if steps are not taken, “our stock markets will have become a casino.” It seems a bit late for that. While there may still be some predictability to the market in the long-term, in the short-term it is already a casino. Sophisticated investors hold all the power and can easily take outplay the amateurs. As far as I can see the short-term market is wholly disconnected from any underlying financial reality.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people looking for jobs at places where I work. I don’t think I’m a particularly good interviewer, but I have developed a few rules of thumb. The purpose of an interview is to see whether somebody can do the job. In my case, the job is programming.

Past experience by itself is not a good guide, as many people can slide through a company without accomplishing very much. Academic experience is also not a good guide, as the experience and goals of programming in an academic setting are very different from working in industry. The ideal way to find out whether somebody can program is to ask them to write a program. Unfortunately, writing a real program takes time, and the interview is time-limited. it would in any case be unfair to candidates to ask them to undertake a serious piece of work in order to get a job. Since most programming is tweaking, maintaining and debugging large existing pieces of software, it would also be good if one could ask a candidate to debug some large program. Unfortunately that too takes time, and it doesn’t allow for the knowledge about a program one would naturally gain on the job. Despite these drawbacks, I do usually ask people to write a short program, simply to verify that they are able to write some kind of code. But I don’t put too much weight on it, unless of course they can’t do it. I’ll add that when writing a program in the stressful interview situation, whether they make any mistakes when writing it is not important, but not being able to see mistakes is a concern.

In any case, I find it more important to know whether they understand the complex layers of software which comprise modern systems. A good programmer understands all the layers of the machine from the processor up to the application. Knowing all the details is not important. But knowing how it fits together is. Here the challenge is distinguishing people who just know the terminology from people who really know how it works. One of the things to look for with these questions is a quick ability to see that they don’t know something, coupled with knowledge of how to find out.

Unfortunately, all the knowledge in the world combined with great programming skills does not mean that the candidate can actually do the job. This gets into much fuzzier areas like whether they can take direction when necessary, whether they can work on their own when appropriate, whether they will make forward progress or get stuck. I don’t know how to figure these things out. The best I can do is ask about their past experiences, and listen closely to the way they talk about things. Are problems ever their own fault, or always the fault of someone else? How long does it take them to accomplish tasks? Have they finished things in the past or always moved on before completion?

A final lesson I’ve learned is that as an interviewer, I don’t have to be fair. Good candidates will find a job somewhere even if they had an off-day when I spoke with them. Hiring the wrong person will be costly every day until they leave. If somebody seems intuitively wrong somehow, then it’s better to trust that intuition than to hire somebody who won’t work out.

Now, a cute kid story.

My daughter asked me why some people used to wear hair shirts and the like. I tried to explain about mortification of the flesh as a way to improve the spirit, how people tried to ignore their physical body to pursue a closer relationship with God. This naturally led to a discussion of the difference between salvation by faith and salvation by works. I’ve been reading a world history book to her (A Little History of the World, by E. H. Gombrich). We recently covered the Reformation and the associated religious wars. I explained that one of the key doctrinal differences between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was the idea that faith is what matters, not good deeds.

My daughter said that she felt that God would favor good deeds rather than faith, so I asked why. I thought she would say something about how it’s good to make other people happy, but what she actually said was that if you only focus on faith you will serve as an inspiration to other people to only focus on faith, and that that will lead people to using the aforementioned hair shirts, and that God would surely not want you to encourage other people to hurt themselves. I’m not sure this entirely holds up, philosophically speaking, but it was a very interesting idea for me because I would never have thought of it myself.

While I am often surprised by what other people think, I have after all spoken with my daughter almost every day of her life. While I often don’t know what she is going to do, this is probably the first time she has surprised me with a truly new thought, one that I would not have thought myself. It’s a strange feeling.

Later, in discussing the way that Martin Luther advocated removing the priesthood as an intermediary between people and God, she said that evidently Luther was the inventor of the phrase “Oh My God!”

During the Reagan administration, the U.S. reduced tax rates and increased defense spending. The national debt as a percentage of overall GDP increased from 32.5% to 53.1% (Reagan called this increase in debt the “greatest disappointment” of his presidency). During the first Bush administration, it continued to rise, reaching 66.1%. During the Clinton administration, the government raised taxes, the economy grew, and defense spending was reduced somewhat; the debt decreased to 56.4% of GDP. During the second Bush administration, again taxes were reduced and defense spending was increased; the debt increased to 83.4% of GDP.

Today fiscal conservatives are arguing that the high levels of debt require that government spending be reduced. At the same time, the plan put forward by Republican representative Paul Ryan, and strongly supported by the Republican House, calls for more tax cuts and higher defense spending. While it’s understood that his plan will not be adopted, it’s hard to see how it can be a serious proposal for debt reduction.

It’s clear that the U.S. has a high level of debt due largely to past steps of reducing taxes while increasing spending. One can argue details back and forth quite a bit, but it’s also clear that the debt has increased significantly under Republican administrations. Fiscal conservatives now argue that the high level of debt shows that the U.S. can not afford social programs like Social Security and Medicare. But while one can argue about increasing health care costs, history suggests that that simply isn’t true. What is true is that the U.S. can not steadily cut taxes without cutting spending.

It’s perfectly consistent to say that the U.S. should be a low-tax, low-service country. But arguments about debt which don’t mention the possibility of tax increases are not telling the whole truth about how the U.S. got into its current situation. What has happened, intentionally or not, is that tax cuts are being leveraged to reduce spending on social programs.

Incidentally, I think most people agree that governments should use tax money to invest in infrastructure. It’s generally most efficient to let the government build and maintain roads and bridges, as they require a large investment and the payback is indirect. I think one could make a good argument that health care is another form of infrastructural investment, an investment in people, which is most efficiently done by government.