Matt Richtel in the NYT about the the new generation’s brain being fried by technology:

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

Maybe. Certainly this line of research is worth undertaking. To me, though, brains that are wired to perform well in an environment of task-switching sounds like a step forward. When looking at something like the anecdote that opens the piece—a kid who’s supposed to be reading Cat’s Cradle but keeps screwing around online instead—I think it’s worth taking an initial stab at a more deflationary account.

Circa 1810 there were very few things one could do to entertain oneself at home. Even reading a book posed serious logistical challenges after sunset. Then throughout the 19th century, illumination technology steadily improved inaugurating a golden age of reading long books. Then in the early 20th century we got the player piano, better phonographs, the radio, movies, movies with sound, movies with color, broadcast television, broadcast television with color, cable television, the VCR, the Walkman, video rental stores, videogames, CDs, DVDs, on-demand television, MP3s, HDTVs, Netflix, YouTube, Blu-Ray, etc., etc., etc., That’s a large increase in the number of ways you could be entertaining yourself. But since the incandescent lightbulb and rural electrification, we haven’t devised new ways to fundamentally increase the amount of time one has in the day to do things. Under the circumstances, things that you could do in 1810—to wit, read a book—are bound to tend to get squeezed, neurology aside.

In his classic essay “The Perils of Presidentialism” (PDF) political scientist Juan Linz noted the striking fact that “the only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States . . . [a]side from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government—but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s.” By contrast, many parliamentary democracies have managed to hold together for a long time.

Linz briefly treats the question of why presidential democracy, which basically doesn’t work, has managed to work in the United States:

But what is most striking is that in a presidential system, the legislators, especially when they represent cohesive, disciplined parties that offer clear ideological and political alternatives, can also claim democratic legitimacy. This claim is thrown into high relief when a majority of the legislature represents a political option opposed to the one the president represents. Under such circumstances, who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies? Since both derive their power from the votes of the people in a free competition among well-defined alternatives, a conflict is always possible and at times may erupt dramatically. Theme is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate. It is therefore no accident that in some such situations in the past, the armed forces were often tempted to intervene as a mediating power. One might argue that the United
States has successfully rendered such conflicts “normal” and thus defused them. To explain how American political institutions and practices have achieved this result would exceed the scope of this essay, but it is worth noting that the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties—which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties—has something to do with it.

Linz’s article was published in 1990 at a time when the observation about the lack of ideological coherent and rigorous discipline had been true for the overwhelming majority of American history. And, indeed, as recently as 1988 one could have witnessed moderate Democrat Joe Lieberman successfully challenging incumbent liberal Republican Senator Lowell Weicker with the support of, among others, William F Buckley, Jr.

But it turns out that Lieberman vs Weicker was something of a dying gasp of a political order that was rendered obsolete by the civil rights revolution. Twenty years later we find ourselves several congresses into a brave new world in which every single Democratic Party legislator is to the left of every single Republican Party legislator. In terms of partisan politics, in other words, we’ve become a normal country. But as Linz observed, the “normal” outcome for a country with our political institutions and ideologically sorted parties is constitutional crisis and a collapse into dictatorship.

So far it hasn’t happened here. The 1998-99 effort to impeach Bill Clinton was sufficiently unpopular that moderate Republicans wouldn’t vote for it. Al Gore chose not to contest the legitimacy of the Supreme Court ruling that handed the White House to George W Bush despite the fact that the electorate preferred Gore. And by 2007-2008, Bush was so unpopular that the Democratic Party leadership felt the wisest course was to avoid provoking a crisis and basically just wait him out. But we live in interesting times….

Saw the Green Lantern trailer while I was at the movies watching Harry Potter:

It seems a bit weak to me. The normal problem you see with superhero movie series is that a lot of the iconic characters (Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-Men) have these thematically resonant origin stories that transcend the inherent goofiness of a superhero story. Then when you try to extend the series, the tendency is for things to bog down. But Green Lantern really isn’t like that. The origin of Hal Jordan is kind of banal, and the iconic Jordan plotlines I can think of are probably too bogged down in DC cosmos to make any kind of sense to normal people. I think a Kyle Rainer story might be more compelling in this context.

Why is it that we’re so focused on deficit reduction at a time when more urgent problems loom?

here is, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was featured on the New York Times op-ed page recently in defense of the deficit commission, describing the problem this way: “We have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford.” This is the same Glenn Hubbard who served as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser when Dick Cheney was saying that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” One imagines that if Hubbard was so concerned about deficits, he might have resigned in protest from an Administration dedicated to creating them. But, no, he’s here to speak truth to the powerless — to the middle-class folks whose major asset, their home, was trashed by financial speculators, thereby wrecking their retirement plans and creating the consumer implosion we’re now suffering. Hubbard is telling them they now have to take yet another hit, on their old-age pensions and health insurance, for the greater good.

The obsession with long-term deficits is not limited to conservatives. Exuberantly wealthy center-left types who staged a leveraged buyout of the Democratic Party’s economic policies in the 1980s — people like the deficit commission’s Democratic co-chair, Erskine Bowles — have been reliable foghorns for long-term middle-class sacrifice. They tended to be big supporters of the irresponsible federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and most egregiously, they shepherded the deregulation of the financial sector through Congress in the late 1990s. But unlike the Republicans, they trend toward fiscal responsibility. Pete Peterson, a nominal Republican who is a leader of this group, is in favor of higher taxes for the wealthy, means testing for Social Security and Medicare, serious cuts in the defense budget — and even a provision that would tax the profits of private-equity moguls as regular income instead of capital gains, a proposal that his former partner at the Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman, compared to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

The really noteworthy thing about Hubbard, it seems to me, is this. His administration was involved in deficit-increasing tax cuts. Fine. Maybe conservative care about the deficit, but care about low taxes more. His administration was also involved in deficit-financed wars. Fine. And deficit-financed increases in domestic security spending. Fine. And in deficit-financed increases in the “baseline” defense budget. Fine. Maybe conservatives care about the deficit, but care about hawkish security policies more. Fine. But his administration was also involved in a deficit-financed increase in Medicare benefits! So the concern is . . . what . . . ? But somehow now mired in a severe recession with huge quantities of idle resources and idle workers now we’re supposed to worry about the deficit.