Lagging Indicators
Around this time in an economic recovery, you begin to see dopy articles about the “jobless recovery” like this Washington Times editorial. There’s a better one comparing this time to 1990-91, but I can’t seem to find it. Anyway, I’ve been following these things since the 1974 recession, and the language is always scary, indignant and wrong. Through all the “jobless recoveries” from 1974 to 2003, the civilian work force has grown from 91 million to 147 million, an expansion of about 60%. Check the BLS.
Gimme a break. The unemployment is not a leading or co-incident indicator. That’s why they call it lagging, because it lags!
Those fellows years ago at the NBER were pretty bright in constructing the economic indicators.
So what would we select as lagging cultural indicators. I think we should select old people, and, particularly, people who have been sheltered from as much change as possible. Why that would be tenured university faculty, senior public employee union officials and the Supreme Court of the United States. These people look at the world with cultural hindsight.
I think that Justice Scalia’s calculatedly severe dissent in the Lawrence case is, among other things, an effort to position himself precisely as Justice John Marshall Harlan did in Plessy v Ferguson.
Only Justice Scalia wants to be both Harlan and Earl Warren.
Here’s Lincoln Caplan in the WaPo:
In the Lawrence case, Scalia fearlessly dishes out anger and accusation while making some scary predictions. Writing for himself, and for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia charges that the majority “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda” and “taken sides in the culture war.” The ruling, he warns, entails “a massive disruption of the current social order.” It effectively calls for “the end of all morals legislation” against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity,” he writes.
But Scalia wields his harshest language against an 11-year-old landmark ruling from which he already (famously) dissented. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court upheld the right to abortion in part because overturning Roe v. Wade would “subvert the Court’s legitimacy” by surrendering an established precedent to “political pressure.” Scalia declared then that he was “appalled by” the reasoning. In this term’s sodomy case, the justice mocks what he calls “the famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage” in the Casey holding (“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”) as “the passage that ate the rule of law.”
Scalia’s derision speaks to the heart of his views. In the Casey ruling, he notes, the majority stressed stability and precedent. “To tell the truth,” Scalia writes in Lawrence, “it does not surprise me, and should surprise no one” that by spurning stability and striking down precedent in Lawrence, the court has revealed its own yawning hypocrisy and “exposed Casey’s extraordinary deference to precedent for the result-oriented expedient that it is.” In an added dig at what he regards as the court’s spineless flip-flop, Scalia flaunts his own consistency. He treats his Casey dissent as a precedent for his most recent one.
Scalia’s consistency. Let’s see how this all plays out in fifteen years or so, when Scalia will be perhaps a lagging indicator of today’s Republican majority, and, if I am correct, national consensus.