Category: Equitablog

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Barry Eichengreen: “Whether significant changes [to the Federal Reserve] are warranted should depend on whether the central bank’s interventions… aggravated the recent crisis, as they aggravated… the 1930s. But the Fed’s critics have been curiously nonspecific about what they regard as the Fed’s mistakes. And where they have been specific, as with the accusation that the Fed was fomenting inflation, they have been entirely wrong…”
• Dean Baker: “In a Washington Post column on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Larry Summers raises the right cautions… a trade deal should have rules that prevent countries from… deliberately lowering the value of their currency… not be about special privileges for corporations… not jeopardize public health by raising drug prices. Nonetheless it looks like Summers is likely still going to come down for the TPP… rationale… making East Asian markets more open to the United States. This is hard to see…”
• Dean Baker: “A ruling for the plaintiffs would be bad news… lead to the collapse of the exchanges in [red] states, as more healthy people stop buying insurance…. [But] many of the one percenters in the health-care industry are card carrying Republicans who regularly buy tickets to top of the line fundraisers. These folks will not be happy about Republican state officials needlessly reducing the size of their trough… a powerful fifth column leaning on their representatives in the legislatures to create exchanges…”
• Jonathan Portes: Welfare Reform: A Plea for Better Journalism
• Marco Cipriani and Antonio Guarino: Herd Behavior in Financial Markets

1. Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron: Power from the People: “While causality is difficult to establish, the decline in unionization appears to be a key contributor to the rise of top income shares. This finding holds even after accounting for shifts in political power, changes in social norms regarding inequality, sectoral employment shifts (such as deindustrialization and the growing role of the financial sector), and increases in education levels. The relationship between union density and the Gini of gross income is also negative but somewhat weaker. This could be because the Gini underestimates increases in inequality at the top of the income distribution. We also find that deunionization is associated with less redistribution of income and that reductions in minimum wages increase overall inequality considerably…”

2. Trevon Logan and John Parman: The Rise of Residential Segregation: “The sweeping rise in both urban and rural segregation across communities in every region implies a significant drop in social interactions between black and white residents. Consider a city like Chicago… 1880 to… 1940…. Black residents rose from 1.2% to 7.7% of the… population. Unsurprisingly… 1% of white households had a black neighbour in 1880…. The percentage of white households with a black neighbour declined to only 0.4% in 1940…. The percentage of black residents with a white neighbour declined from 66% to only 5% over this period. This dramatic decline in opposite-race neighbours could have profound impacts on the evolution of racial biases and ultimately become self-reinforcing…. Changing racial attitudes requires interactions between the races. In this respect, the sweeping rise of residential segregation patterns over the 20th century may very well have created an environment that has allowed racial prejudices to harden and lead to the stubbornly persistent racial inequalities we see today.”

3. Jonathan Chait: How the White House Learned to Be Liberal: “Dan Pfeiffer… has been involved from the outset in navigating the central contradiction at the heart of Obama’s public persona: He ran as a figure who could overcome partisan polarization, yet he has instead presided over more of it despite accomplishing the majority of the substantive agenda he promised. Obama and his spokespeople have spent most of their administration quietly at war with the conventional wisdom in Washington over the cause of this failure…. Structural forces… rising polarization… the disintegration of restrictions on campaign finance… the news media… people select only sources that will confirm their preexisting beliefs. All of this combined makes communication with Republicans mostly hopeless…. Demographic change will eventually force Republicans to compete with Democrats for some of the same voters, reopening a national political conversation…. The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans…. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false, and that, in Pfeiffer’s words, ‘what drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.’ If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011…. Ever since Republicans took control of the House four years ago, [Obama’s] attempts to court Republicans have mostly failed while simultaneously dividing Democratic voters. Obama’s most politically successful maneuvers, by contrast, have all been unilateral and liberal…. ‘There’s never been a time when we’ve taken progressive action and regretted it.’ This was deeply at odds with the lesson Bill Clinton and most of his aides (many of whom staffed Obama’s administration) had taken away from his presidency. But by the beginning of Obama’s second term, at least, the president seemed fully convinced…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Driftglass
• Cory Doctorow: IT Feudalism: The Surveillance State and Wealth Gaps
• Anthony Hensley: Kris Kobach Is The Most Racist Politician In America Today
• Eli Yokley: Did Bullying Kill Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich?
• John Scalzi: A Book Sale at the Cost of Your Conscience

The most important paper I have read this year so far, at least as far as changing my view of our history and thus of where we are today:

Trevon Logan and John Parman: The Rise of Residential Segregation: “The sweeping rise in both urban and rural segregation across communities in every region implies a significant drop in social interactions between black and white residents…

Consider a city like Chicago… 1880 to… 1940…. Black residents rose from 1.2% to 7.7% of the… population. Unsurprisingly… 1% of white households had a black neighbour in 1880…. The percentage of white households with a black neighbour declined to only 0.4% in 1940…. The percentage of black residents with a white neighbour declined from 66% to only 5% over this period. This dramatic decline in opposite-race neighbours could have profound impacts on the evolution of racial biases and ultimately become self-reinforcing…. Changing racial attitudes requires interactions between the races. In this respect, the sweeping rise of residential segregation patterns over the 20th century may very well have created an environment that has allowed racial prejudices to harden and lead to the stubbornly persistent racial inequalities we see today.

The extremely estimable (but unfortunately ill: we very much hope that he and his doctors and nurses restore him to his normal superb weblogging and life-enjoying form quickly) Kevin Drum flags what he (correctly) calls “a bit of an odd column today”(http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/03/yes-education-matters-its-not-answer-growing-income-inequality) from David Brooks.

I cannot be the only one to find that David Brooks’s failure to either type links into his pieces nor find it worthwhile to refer to those he is criticizing by name makes his columns hard to decode.

But I think today it is worth the effort. Let us start with:

David Brooks: The Temptation of Hillary: “For many years, Democratic efforts to reduce inequality and lift middle-class wages…

…were based on the theory that the key is to improve the skills of workers. Expand early education. Make college cheaper. Invest in worker training. Above all, increase the productivity of workers so they can compete. But a growing number of populist progressives have been arguing that inequality is not mainly about education levels. They argue that trying to lift wages by improving skills is an ‘evasion.’ It’s ‘whistling past the graveyard’…

Who are these “populist progressives”?

Well, they are, among others, Lawrence H. Summers:

Lawrence Summers: The Future of Work: “Whether you think it is due to technology or to globalization or to the mal-distribution of political power…

…something very serious is happening in our society…. I think the [education] policies that Aneesh is talking about are largely whistling past the graveyard. The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs. If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. Unless you’re doing things that have things that are effecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs…

It is the “whistling past the graveyard” that is the flag.

If you are an insider you know that Brooks is talking about Larry. If you are an outsider, you don’t. And if you are an insider, you also know that Larry Summers is much more often classified as a “neoliberal” than a “populist progressive” in intellectual beastiaries. So something is going on here…

Brooks continues:

The real problem, some of them say, is concentrated political power…. Others say the problem is stagnation… the private economy isn’t generating jobs. Or it’s about corporate power…. People in this camp point out that inflation-adjusted wages for college grads have been flat for the past 14 years. Education apparently hasn’t lifted wages. The implication? Don’t focus on education for the bottom 99 percent. Focus on spreading wealth from the top. Don’t put human capital first. Put redistribution first…

And here I gotta say two things:

1. No quote–not from Larry, not from anybody else. The “don’t focus on education for the bottom 99%” isn’t Summers–or any other “populist progressive”. It is Brooks’s research assistants failing to find words in the record, and Brooks resorting to putting words into the mouths of others.

2. If Brooks had insisted on a quote from the author of the “whistling past the graveyard” phrase, he would have exploded his thesis sky high.

From last month:

Lawrence Summers and Ed Balls: Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity: “Many kinds of public investment–including spending on public transportation, water, power, education, and research and development–have positive social rates of return when executed well… and such investments may even pay for themselves….

…Expand educational opportunity to increase human capital and support economic mobility: Supporting early childhood education: …Evaluations of high-quality preschool programs in Boston, Massachusetts, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, showed that children gained an additional year of learning in language, reading, and math. These gains in the early years go on to positively affect everything from high school graduation rates to lifetime earnings… make the most profound difference in the lives of low-income children and children of color….

Eliminating financial barriers to higher education: As recently as 1996, the United States had the second highest share of adults who earned postsecondary education credentials and the highest share of adults with university degrees…. The United States is also showing more-pronounced downward educational mobility. Twenty-nine percent of American men and 17 percent of American women had less education than their parents, compared with the OECD average of 19 percent for men and 13 percent for women…. We should make higher education virtually free at a community college or a public four-year college so that all high school graduates and their families have no doubt that they can afford higher education….

There is a clear need to develop and expand the skills of workers who do not go to university…. Apprenticeship is good example of skills training that has worked in many advanced economies…. Switzerland, Germany, and Austria have long-established apprenticeship systems that are renowned for their high quality. A majority of young people from these three countries enter the workforce through apprenticeships, which are available across a wide range of sectors and occupations…

Does that sound like: “Don’t focus on education for the bottom 99 percent. Focus on spreading wealth from the top. Don’t put human capital first. Put redistribution first…” to you?

I thought not.

Those quotes from the Center for American Progress’s Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity are as accessible to Brooks’s research assistants as is the “whistling past the graveyard” quote, which comes from Summers’s argument that education policies have limited–not zero, limited–purchase on reducing inequality. Not limited purchase on spurring growth, mind you. Limited purchase on reducing inequality.

So then Brooks half-backtracks:

Over the past few months a stream… have moved from the human capital emphasis to the redistributionist emphasis. (It’s a matter of emphasis, not strictly either/or)…

But then re-reverses and says not that the need for redistribution is overemphasized but rather that it is “wrong”:

Unfortunately, this rising theory is wrong on substance and damaging in its effects….

And Brooks then proceeds to make a remarkable statement:

Since 2000, the real incomes of the top 1 percent have declined slightly. If you limited your view to just those years, you’d conclude that there is no inequality problem, which is clearly not true…

He is looking at the white-triangles line in this graph from Piketty and Saez–a graph he does not link to, and which he does not cite:

Brooks does not remind his readers that the year-2000 was a boom year, in which capital gains realizations boosted the incomes of the financial sector and of the superrich in general above their trend, while 2013 was not. A global warming denier might look at the white-triangles line and say that there is a sense in which the rich today have lower incomes and are less well-off than the rich of 2000. Nobody else would.

And, indeed, if Brooks had printed that graph alongside his column, he would have exploded his thesis sky high–for the trend of the income of the top 1% since 2000 has not been a slight decline but a rise.

I find it… distressing and disturbing… that Brooks refers to this graph without providing his readers with a link to it.

I find something else more disturbing: Only somebody who knew that starting in 2000 misrepresented current trends would even think to start in 2000–rather than in 2003, for the past ten years of data, or 1995 or 2001 or 2004, to compare mid-business cycle observations. Only somebody really up on the data would know that the just-released 2013 Piketty-Saez estimate is lower than the 2000 number. This is not a calculation that you would think to make and report unless you already knew that it tended to produce a distorted impression in your readers.

Makes it damned difficult to have a good faith, substantive policy dialogue.

Just saying.

Brooks continues:

The redistributionists seem to believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken. That growth has permanently stagnated. That productivity should no longer be the focus because it doesn’t lead to shared prosperity. But their view is biased by temporary evidence from the recession. Right now, jobs are being created, wages are showing signs of life. Those who get more skills earn more money. Today’s economy has challenges, but the traditional rules still apply. Increasing worker productivity is the key. Increasing incentives to risk and invest is essential. Shifting people into low-productivity government jobs is not the answer.

It’s clear why Clinton might want to talk redistribution. On substantive policy grounds, it would be destructive to do so. And, in the general election, voters respond to the uplifting and the unifying, not the combative and divisive.

As somebody who works for a think tank called the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, let me say that what we–and every single other “populist progressive” I can see right now, including Lawrence H. Summers–want is equitable growth. That has two parts: The first is equitable–which involves distributing the fruits of the economy less unfairly than the past generation’s trends have led them to be distributed. The second is growth–in which education has, as Larry and Ed point out at exhaustive length, a major role to play.

Brooks is, I think, playing a particular rhetorical game here.

His point is to claim that anybody talking about the “equitable” part at all is unconcerned with and ignoring the growth part. And so talking about the “equitable” part at all then becomes “combative and divisive”.

Now at some level he knows that this is not really true. We know that from the absence of quotes downplaying education from really existing “populist progressives”. We know that from the parenthetical half-backtrack of “(It’s a matter of emphasis, not strictly either/or)”. I, at least, sense a little uneasiness here–as if Brooks knows that he has gone over the line.

This is, however, another weight pointlessly added to our burden.

There will now be New York Times readers roaming the earth who have read David Brooks in good faith, and who will repeat sound bites like “the top 1% today are poorer than they were in 2000!” and “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political advisors are opposed to spending more money on American education!”

This makes it harder for those of us who are trying to carry on a substantive policy dialogue to actually do so.

And let me give the last word to Kevin Drum, who–more politely–is as dismayed as I am at the unhelpfulness of this contribution by Brooks:

I don’t quite get who Brooks is arguing against here. Larry Summers… has been clear that he thinks education is important, both individually and for the economy as a whole… just doesn’t think… [it] likely to have much impact on growing income inequality…. Brooks never even pretends to address this. I don’t think there are any prominent Democrats arguing that education isn’t important. Pretty much all of them are on board with good early-childhood education and better community colleges… [to] help individuals and make the American economy stronger. But will it rein in growing income inequality? As long as inequality is driven primarily by the gains of the top 1 percent–which it is–then it won’t. To address that particular problem, we have to look elsewhere.

Last week I noted my wife Ann Marie’s:

Now we have the sharp Rebecca Haw Allensworth and Aaron Edlin in the *Wall Street Journal**:

The remarkable thing to me is that [the dissent](http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-534_19m2.pdf) drew three–THREE!–votes: Alito, Scalia, and Thomas:

>The Court’s decision in this case is based on a serious misunderstanding of the doctrine of state-action antitrust immunity…. The Sherman Act does not prevent the States from continuing their age-old practice of enacting measures, such as licensing requirements, that are designed to protect the public health and welfare. The case now before us involves precisely this type of state regulation…. The Court [says]… the Board is not structured in a way that merits a good-government seal of approval… is made up of practicing dentists who have a financial incentive to use the licensing laws to further the financial interests of the State’s dentists….

>Professional and occupational licensing requirements have often been used in such a way…. [In the] Parker immunity… [case] the very state program involved in that case was unquestionably designed to benefit the regulated entities, California raisin growers. The question before us is not whether such programs serve the public interest. The question, instead, is whether this case is controlled by Parker…

Justice Kennedy–and the other five–would presumably reply that the California Agricultural Prorate Act did not delegate the state’s powers to a group of raisin growers and then cloak that group of raisin growers in the state’s antitrust immunity, and that if it had then Parker would (or should) have come out differently. And I, at least, would find that reply convincing.

What I do not find convincing is how Alito and company’s declaration in the first paragraph I quote that states are allowed to regulate commerce in the interest of “public health and welfare” has morphed by the end of the second to “the question is not… the public interest”. If you craft an exception so that states can serve the public interest, isn’t the scope of that exception properly drawn when actions taken under it do serve the public interest? What else could the question be?

And we have Alito, Thomas, and Scalia’s Parthian Shot:

>When the Court asks whether market participants control the North Carolina Board, the Court in essence is asking whether this regulatory body has been captured by the entities that it is supposed to regulate. Regulatory capture can occur in many ways. So why ask only whether the members of a board are active market participants? The answer may be that determining when regulatory capture has occurred is no simple task. That answer provides a reason for relieving courts from the obligation to make such determinations at all. It does not explain why it is appropriate for the Court to adopt the rather crude test for capture that constitutes the holding of today’s decision.

Again, this seems to make no sense. It is highly likely that regulatory capture has taken place when it leads to the delegation of state powers to a group of professionals drawn from only one side of a market. It is much less likely that regulatory capture has taken place when a regulatory board has members from diverse constituencies and when its actions are supervised by those elected by the voters. That the test is “crude” does not mean that it is a bad test–in fact, a crude test that is almost optimal is almost always a much better test than a complex one that would be optimal if it could be costlessly implemented. And that some rent-seeking and regulatory-capture remains outside is no more an argument for *laissez-faire* in this case than it would be for dropping laws against fraud.

Rather, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia’s opinions here seem to tie in rather well to one of Thomas Piketty’s major arguments. In a plutocracy, Piketty argues, the principal aim of government power is to preserve the rents that the rich have acquired and hold, not to advance societal welfare via increasing the efficiency of a competitive market.

Back when I first noticed the existence of right-wing law-and-economics as a movement, it argued that judges should make decisions to maximize the consumer surplus generated in a market (taking account of producer surplus would, it was thought, provide too much encouragement to rent-seeking). Then over the decades it shifted to maximizing the total of consumer plus producer surplus (as higher producer surplus would spur innovation, an activity with positive spillovers). Now it seems that the argument has become that judges should act not to enhance economic efficiency but rather simply to preserve property, even if the property is in the unusual form of the right to use the state’s antitrust immunity to shut down one’s competitors.

This is an interesting intellectual journey we seem to be on…

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Mike Konczal: “There’s no evidence that we are having a technology renaissance right now, or that technology has contributed in a major way to the weak recovery, or that a skills gap or other educational factor is holding back employment, or that highly skilled workers are having a great time in the labor market…
• Mark Thoma: How Inequality Harms Health–and the Economy
• Tim Duy: “The February employment report almost certainly means the Fed will no longer describe its policy intentions as ‘patient’ at the conclusion of the March FOMC meeting. And it also keep a June rate hike in play. But for June to move from ‘in play’ to ‘it’s going to happen,’ I still feel the Fed needs a more on the inflation side…”
• Evan Soltas: “A change in institutions towards ones that reduce the wage premium should also increase the hours premium…. Both periods of compression in the 1930s and the 1940s, then, seem to fit the pattern of institutions rather than supply-and-demand…”
• Tim Jenkinson et al.: Picking Winners? Investment Consultants’ Recommendations of Fund Managers

1. Stan Collender: This Will Be The GOP Congress’ Last Chance For Salvation: “[In] the debate on the congressional budget resolution… neither of the two procedural impediments that stopped the GOP dead in its tracks on DHS will exist. That will give congressional Republicans the only chance they may get all year to impose their preferences…. Budget resolutions can’t be filibustered… [are] a concurrent resolution…. In theory, therefore… both houses [should] adopt a Republican-preferred version of a budget resolution…. But… it’s not obvious that any budget resolution acceptable to Senate Republicans will go far enough to appease the House GOP…. This will be the GOP Congress’ best… opportunity…. If they can’t even agree on a budget, it will be the GOP itself that is to blame and damnation will likely be ahead.”

2. Sheryl Sandberg (2011): Barnard College Commencement: “Women all over the world, women who are exactly like us except for the circumstances into which they were born, [lack] basic human rights. Compared to these women, we are lucky…. We are equals under the law. But the promise of equality is not equality…. Men run the world…. I recognize that [today] is a vast improvement from generations in the past…. But… women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table. So today, we turn to you. You are the promise for a more equal world…. Only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve… gender equality. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored…”

3. Paul Krugman: Stagflation Predictions: “Matt O’Brien catches a piece by Dick Morris a few years ago predicting that Obama’s legacy would be stagflation. But I say, oh yeah? I’ll see your Dick Morris (who cares, really?) and raise you a… Paul Ryan: ‘Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation.’ That was, if you check the date, six years ago. But it’s worth remembering that not all prominent Republicans were predicting 70s-style stagflation; some of them were predicting Weimar-style hyperinflation instead…”

4. Nick Bunker: Weekend Reading: “Mike Konczal on… rebalanc[ing] ‘our intellectual portfolio of inequality stories.’ ATMs… [are not] technology displacing labor… reduce wealth inequality… by tax[ing] land… broken workers’ comp… France… family-friendly policies… no obvious relation between top tax rate and employment growth”

Should Be Aware of:

• Michael Sippey: “tl;dr: you can’t do it today. and i think you should be able to…”
• Abigail Moncrieff: “The JALSA argument is… (1) The plaintiffs’ interpretation might be unconstitutional. (2) The question… would be hard to resolve. And (3) a holding for the government would… avoid the hard question… [hence] the specter of unconstitutionality is a good reason not to venture in the plaintiffs’ direction…”
• The Uttermost West, Before the Thrones of the Valar, in the Timeless Halls
• Sean M. Carroll and Charles T. Sebens: Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty

1. Scott Lemieux: You Can’t Spell “Reformicon” Without “Con”: “Remember when Republicans were totally going to be the Party of Ideas (TM) because a small group of conservative intellectuals with little discernible influence on Republican legislators thought that George W. Bush-style supply side politics should be supplemented by some feints towards the middle class? Well, funny thing about that. Reformocon darlings Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have taken their massive regressive tax cut and made it… much, more more regressive, eliminating taxes on investment and inherited income entirely. So are reformocons upset about the betrayal? Is the Pope a Seventh Day Adventist? “Perhaps the fullest measure of the supply-siders’ triumph can be seen in the acquiescence of many of the reformicons themselves. Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, both reform conservatives featured prominently in the Times story, responded to the new Lee-Rubio plan with fawning praise. James Pethokoukis, a reformist conservative, calls the plan “a big step toward persuading middle-income America that Republicans care about more than just the richest 1 percent.” (If this is a big step toward persuading America that Republicans care about more than the rich, what would the next step be? Legalizing servant-flogging?) Perhaps the reform conservatives have capitulated completely in the name of party unity. Or maybe they were misunderstood from the beginning and never proposed to deviate in any substantive way from the traditional platform of massively regressive, debt-financed tax-cutting. Either way, the movement has, for now, accomplished less than nothing.’ But, gee, I can’t wait to hear their alternative health care proposal!”

2. Wisconsin Alumni Association: Forward Under 40: Trevon Logan ’99: “It’s no wonder that Trevon Logan was unanimously selected as co-chair of his Chancellor’s Scholars class at UW-Madison for three years in a row. His classmates knew even then: Logan was the sort of leader who inspired everyone to do their best. Today Logan is an award-winning teacher and scholar who recently became the youngest-ever president of the National Economic Association. He has also led several national initiatives to increase diversity in his field…”

3. Joshua Benton (2012): 13 Ways of Looking at Medium: “The individual sought self-expression and an audience; the organization sought sustainability and cash money…. Facebook built a way for people to express themselves… to… their self-defined network of friends…. Twitter… built a way for people to express themselves, in a format that was genius in its limitations and in its old-media model of subscribe-and-follow…. Tumblr, Path, Foursquare, and a gazillion others have tried to pull off the same trick: Serve users by helping them find an outlet for personal expression, then build a business…. Medium… degrades authorship… is built around collections, not authors…. The author is there as a reference point to an identity layer–Twitter–not as an organizing principle…. Medium wants you to read something because of what it’s about. And because of the implicit promise that Medium = quality…. Medium believes in editorial judgment–but everyone’s an editor…. The tension between what’s good and what’s new is a long-standing one for online media, and privileging either comes with drawbacks…”

4. John Herrman: The Next Internet Is TV: “Some of the most visible companies in internet media are converging…. Vox is now publishing directly to social networks and apps; BuzzFeed has a growing team of people dedicated to figuring out what BuzzFeed might look like without a website at the middle. Vice, already distributing a large portion of its video on Google’s YouTube, has a channel in Snapchat’s app, along with CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, Cosmo and the Daily Mail…. Websites are unnecessary vestiges of a time before there were better ways to find things to look at on your computer or your phone. What happens next?… The gaps left by the websites we stop looking at will be filled with new things, and most people won’t really notice the change until it’s nearly done…. The grand weird promises of writing and reporting and film and art on the internet [will] consolidate… into a set of business interests that most closely resemble the TV industry…. Wasn’t the internet supposed to be BETTER, somehow, in all its broken decentralized chaos and glory? The TV industry, which is mediated at every possible point, is a brutal interface for culture and commerce…”