Small Precautions

The essential contradiction of neoconservatism

2012-01-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

The essential contradiction at the heart of contemporary American neo-conservatism, phrased as a takedown of Bill Kristol:

Abroad, Kristol's U.S. government can do no wrong. At home, it can do no right, or more precisely, it should do no right. In his 1994 and 2009 memos counseling his fellow Republicans on Clinton-care and Obama-care, respectively, Kristol cautioned GOP legislators not to let the Democrats create universal health care, lest it win them the support of a grateful nation. [NB: here's a link to the 1994 memo.] That government is best, Kristol believes, that governs least at home and transforms nations abroad.

Kristol's neo-con incoherence remains a major tendency in American conservatism, no matter the total discrediting of its case for the Iraq War. Championing radical anti-statism at home, and such anti-statist demagogues as Sarah Palin, while radically overestimating our government's capacity for nation-building abroad, Kristol has produced a body of thought that is an intellectual nullity -- an intellectual nullity, moreover, that is the centerpiece of what passes for Republican and right-wing thinking.

Hammering on this contradiction is a core wedge issue: if you don't think the government can be effective in a wealthy, stable country that we know intimately -- like, say, the United States -- how on earth can you believe that the US government has any hope of being effective in a benighted, godforsaken place like Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, or Somalia?

What I read this year

2011-12-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

The books, as always fewer than I expected:

Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops, and You
Richard Graham, The Idea of Race in Latin America
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism
Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers
Georges Simenon, Dirty Snow
Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico
Enrique Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico
Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico
Scott Carney, The Red Market
Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez
Christian Smith, at al., Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood
Boucek & Ottaway, Yemen on the Brink
Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen
Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord
Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States
Peter Tamas Bauer, From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays
Salvatore Lupo, History of the Mafia
Francis Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order
Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia
World Development Report 2011
William Appleman Williams, Contours of American History
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country
Georgi Derluguian, The Deepening Crisis: Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism
Antoine J. Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare
Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale

The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

2011-11-20T10:01:00.001-08:00

A former student of Jurgen Habermas, Wolfgang Streeck, has an important new article in the New Left Review, entitled "The Crises of Democratic Capitalism." It describes the ineluctable contradiction between two principles of allocation under democratic capitalism: the democratic, which proposes that society's resources be distributed, first and foremost, on the basis fo social rights to various benefits we have become familiar with under so-called "welfare states," on the one hand; and the capitalistic, which argues that society's resources should be allocated on the basis of individuals' contributions to marginal productivity, as evaluated by the market, on the other.

For decades, Streeck argues, the contradictions between these two modes have been papered over by various political tricks, but these tricks have finally run out as of 2008, and now the question lies nakedly before us whether the system is going to be run according to democratic principles to protect the economically marginal, or for the benefit of economic powerholders. He enlarges on this:

In the four decades since the end of post-war growth, the epicentre of the tectonic tension within democratic capitalism has migrated from one institutional location to the next, giving rise to a sequence of different but systematically related economic disturbances. In the 1970s the conflict between democratic claims for social justice and capitalist demands for distribution by marginal productivity, or ‘economic justice’, played itself out primarily in national labour markets, where trade-union wage pressure under politically guaranteed full employment caused accelerating inflation. When what was, in effect, redistribution by debasement of the currency became economically unsustainable, forcing governments to put an end to it at high political risk, the conflict re-emerged in the electoral arena. Here it gave rise to growing disparity between public spending and public revenues and, as a consequence, to rapidly rising public debt, in response to voter demands for benefits and services in excess of what a democratic-capitalist economy could be made to hand over to its ‘tax state.’

When efforts to rein in public debt became unavoidable, however, they had to be accompanied for the sake of social peace by financial deregulation, easing access to private credit, as an alternative route to accommodating normatively and politically powerful demands of citizens for security and prosperity. This, too, lasted not much longer than a decade until the global economy almost faltered under the burden of unrealistic promises of future payment for present consumption and investment, licensed by governments in compensation for fiscal austerity. Since then, the clash between popular ideas of social justice and economic insistence on market justice has once again changed sites, re-emerging this time in international capital markets and the complex contests currently taking place between financial institutions and electorates, governments, states and international organizations. Now the issue is how far states can go in imposing the property rights and profit expectations of the markets on their citizens, while avoiding having to declare bankruptcy and protecting what may still remain of their democratic legitimacy.

I have two critiques of the the piece. First, it isn't as sharp as it might be on how an ideology of endless growth was was the key point of conjunction between the democrats and the capitalists, in that it allowed all parties to imagine that politics could center on splitting the marginal extras rather than on redistribution as such. If you believe that we are in an era where growth maybe has gone away (or can no longer be presumed), then we're back to zero-ish-sum political-economics games, and the politics of such games are far nastier than the politics of splitting a growing pie.

The second critique is more fundamental, and that is that the piece sets up a too-neat division between the two poles he is describing. It ignores that the neoliberal economic order is not actually a "free market," but rather one in which the government very much takes an active role in shaping and controlling market outcomes — in favor of incumbents and the rich. In other words, Streeck takes too seriously the neoliberal claim that the political economic order of the last forty years has moved us toward a Hayekian model of "deregulation" and non-interference in the pure workings of the capital markets. In fact, the real political economy of the last 30 years has involved massive government interventions in markets in favor of the capitalists. A Hayekian world would be better than the crony capitalist one we actually have. In other words, we don't have a deregulated market (in housing, finance, energy, what have you); we have a market characterized by regulatory capture.

To see the difference, just look at what was happening three years ago. Whatever you think of the wisdom (political or economic) of the bailout of the big financial firms and automakers, it certainly was not the case that the government didn't manage the market. This is exactly what so infuriated the true believers on the right about the bailouts — it was naked government interference in the market, a clear violation of their ideological principles. For the left, on the other hand, it showed that the rhetoric of market discipline had been class-warfare malarky all along: something that only applied to poor people, not to capitalists. And for the last three years, the neoliberal technocrats have tried to sweep this naked emperor back under his rug: nothing to see here, move right along.

Hat tip: MC.

The anatomy of deviant globalization

2011-10-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

It is well known that Cyprus is one the epicenters of deviant globalization. Located on the periphery of the European Union — in all senses: geographic, moral, economic, political, etc. — Cypriots are in a perfect position to offer all sorts of "arbitrage" services, from financial arbitrage, e.g. off-shore tax havens (and its deviant twin, money laundering) to climate arbitrage, e.g. tourism (and its deviant twin, human trafficking). But one other realm of arbitrage, which I didn't know about, is Cyprus's position as a provider of globalized medical services, particularly, fertility services.

This description of Cypriot market-making for human eggs, from Scott Carney's superb The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, is a textbook description of how deviant globalization works, at bottom, via moral arbitrage:

Cyprus has more fertility clinics per capita than any other country, making it one of the most highly egg-harvested locations on the planet. Whether licensed or unlicensed, they offer IVF as well as a range of fertility services, even some that are typically proscribed elsewhere, like selection. The fertility business here blends the shady netherworld of gray market financial transactions with the commercialization of human tissue. People travel here from Israel, from Europe, from all over the world. Couples who want a child can find cut-rate help here; while poor women find a market for their eggs. Cyprus is an egg-bazaar that capitalizes on both sides of the supply-and-demand equation. Internationalization has made oversight laughable.

As Carney tells it, the Cypriot fertility market began with the recognition that its peripheral position within "Europe" put it in a good position to exploit gaps in the global regulatory apparatus regarding a repugnant market, in this case, the market in human fertility. With the benefit of local governmental "benign neglect," medical entrepreneurs (not just Cypriots, actually) set themselves up as a broker and arbitrageur for would-be donors (mainly from Russia and the Ukraine) and eager buyers (mostly from Europe, who want "whiter" babies, and Israel, which recently banned the sale of human eggs).

The sting to this classic deviant globalization story, as usual, is in the tail: while this fertility market began as a deviant globalization pure-play, over time, it began to spill over into the local economy. Set up at first to meet global demand with imported supply, local fertility clinics began to draw on "local talent." The result is that, by now, 1 in 50 eligible women donate eggs annually in Cyprus (compared with 1 in 14,000 in the US, for example). Of course, the irony is that these "local" donors are usually also Russian and Ukrainian women, who have arrived in Cyprus for, ahem, other reasons.

On Rupert Murdoch

2011-07-14T14:01:00.001-07:00

Conrad Black on Rupert Murdoch:

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company. He has difficulty keeping friendships; rarely keeps his word for long; is an exploiter of the discomfort of others; and has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him in any country, except Ronald Reagan and perhaps Tony Blair. All his instincts are downmarket; he is not only a tabloid sensationalist; he is a malicious myth-maker, an assassin of the dignity of others and of respected institutions, all in the guise of anti-elitism. He masquerades as a pillar of contemporary, enlightened populism in Britain and sensible conservatism in the US, though he has been assiduously kissing the undercarriage of the rulers of Beijing for years. His notions of public entertainment and civic values are enshrined in the cartoon television series The Simpsons: all public officials are crooks and the public is an ignorant lumpenproletariat. There is nothing illegal in this, and it has amusing aspects, but it is unbecoming someone who has been the subject of such widespread deference and official preferments. (via The Daily Beast.)

OK, so I had to make it 25 books

2011-06-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

In the order in which they were published:

G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism
Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
Paul Fussell, Class
Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
Mike Davis, City of Quartz
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine
James Scott, Seeing Like a State
John Robb, Brave New War
Misha Glenny, McMafia

And, if I really had to boil it down to the ten that probably most influence my thinking today (not necessarily the same as the ones who made the biggest impression on me when I read the book), it would probably be Nietzsche, Polanyi, Canguilhem, Kuhn, Bell, Davis, Jameson, Ferguson, Scott, and Robb.

Favorite nonfiction books

2011-06-21T07:16:00.001-07:00

Since everyone seems to be doing it, here's my dozen favorite nonfiction books (in no particular order), defined as books that changed the way I looked at the world in some fundamental way:

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
James Scott, Seeing Like a State
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Paul Fussell, Class
Misha Glenny, McMafia
Mike Davis, City of Quartz
Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces

What strikes me most about this list is that I read almost every one of these books in the 1990s. Does that mean I don't read enough any more, or simply that it's hard for a book to shake me from my preceptions?

Five stages of global warming denialism

2011-06-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

I think there are five successive variants of climate change denialism. I'll try to assign names to people who subscribe to these at some point later, but for now I'd like to just note these:

Those who deny that the climate is changing at all.
Those who admit that the climate is changing, but who say it has nothing to do with human GHG emissions (e.g. it is "natural variation").
Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, but who say that for the most part it won't have malign effects on humans.
Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, and that it will have malign effects on humans, but who say that there's nothing we can do about it.
Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, and that it will have malign effects on humans, and that we could do something about it, but who think that this "something" is a lower priority than other things we could be doing to improve the human condition.

I guess if I were to provide a basic summary of what I think of each of these positions it would be, respectively: delusional, anti-scientific, historically blind, defeatist, and a sign of poor priorities.

A constitutional amendment that would save $2B a year

2011-06-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

From the Economist:

The constitution calls for an “actual enumeration” of the population. That may make newfangled census methods vulnerable to challenges from the courts. A Supreme Court ruling already limits the use of statistical sampling, which adjusts survey data to include more accurately minorities, who are generally undercounted by older methods. In December the Government Accountability Office noted that the census’s cost has on average doubled each decade since 1970. Without “fundamental reforms”, the next one could cost $30 billion. [Emphasis added.]

How about this for a simple, massively cost-saving Constitutional Amendment:

The decennial census shall be conducted using modern statistical methods.

A carbon-intensive lifestyle = the moral equivalent of slaveholding

2011-05-24T21:41:00.000-07:00

I was listening last night to a Terry Gross interview with Adam Goodheart, Washington University history professor and author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening, on the significance of this year's 150th anniversary of the Civil War. At one point (about 25:45 into the interview), Goodheart uses a fascinating analogy to explain how antebellum Americans rationalized slave ownership:

Thinking about how interwoven slavery was into Southern society, into American society… one example I use with my college students …is to talk about today, when many of us recognize that in burning fossil fuels we're doing something terrible for the planet, we're doing something terrible for future generations; and yet, to give this up would mean unravelling so much of the fabric of our daily lives — sacrificing so much, becoming these radical eccentrics, riding bicycles everywhere — that we continue guiltily to participate in the system. And, that is something that I use as a comparison to slavery, that many Americans in the North (and even, I believe, secretly in the South) felt a sense of shame, knew that this slave system was wrong, but were simply addicted to slavery and couldn't give it up.

Part of what makes this analogy brilliant is that it illuminates equally well in reverse: 150 years from now, the remaining humans (that is, those few who retain the capacity to recollect the golden age of the late 20th century) will look back at those of us who lived in huge heated and cooled houses, drove gas-guzzling cars to things we could have walked to, and jet-setted around the planet for fun — all in the plain knowledge that our actions were willy-nilly destroying the planet for the future of race — and they will wonder: what they hell were they thinking? And the answer will be precisely the one that Goodheart suggests: we knew perfectly well that what we were doing was wrong, but we were too weak to make the shift, too afraid of giving up the material and social benefits associated with a plainly immoral way of life, and frankly too afraid of the social opprobrium that would accompany actually leading our lives the right way, right now.

Sure, there are individuals out there who are trying to live carbon-neutral lives, and who spend a lot of time trying to convince the rest of us to do it. And how are they described by the mainstream? Consider Saul Griffith's profile in the New Yorker, which describes him as, well, a radical eccentric, riding bicycles everywhere. Or John Michael Greer, whose wonderful Archdruid blog gets dismissed by (a very green) Stewart Brand as "a bit woo-woo" (personal communication). But don't blame the press; almost all of us, faced with the stark reality of having to live with radically less — which is what any effective limitation of GHG emissions MUST mean — ultimately lack the moral courage to embrace the changes.

Of course, there are obvious differences between these two things. Slavery inflicted a living hell on people right there in its immediate present day (though these things were over the horizon of most Northern textile manufacturer enjoying the cheap cotton, as well as many a fine Southern lady sitting up in the plantation manor house) whereas the human destructiveness of our collective GHG-intensive lifestyle is "over the horizon" both geographically and temporally — that is, the suffering will mostly take place decades from now, in the economic and ecologically marginal communities of Asia, Latin America, and above all Africa.

Likewise, the sorts of rationalizations that people use to justify their ongoing participation in the system are also a bit different. In the case of slavery, it was an ideology of white supremacy that claimed that blacks were "naturally" inferior to whites, and therefore deserved and perhaps even needed to be enslaved by whites. By contrast, today the ideology that justifies continued GHG profligacy is techno-optimism, the cheery belief that if humanity can just get wealthy enough fast enough and/or get the carbon prices right, then a technical fix will inevitably emerge (and get deployed in time!) to prevent excessive CO2 buildup and the ensuing train of ecological and civilizational calamity. In both cases, however, the fervency with which the advocates hold these ideological commitments does little to cover for the poverty of the moral imagination involved.

I am quite sure that people 150 years from now — when the CO2 PPM is twice what it is now; when global temperatures will likely be many degrees higher than they are now; when climate-change-exacerbated hurricanes, droughts, and floods will have destroyed many of today's global cities; when hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people have been killed or displaced by climate change — will look back with wonder at the gutlessness of all of us who rationalized the lifestyles that led to the destruction of the very lifeworld we allegedly so cherish. Contemplating the ruins, our grandchildren will ask about us the same question we today ask about slaveholders: how could they possibly have thought that what they were doing was OK?

A few years ago I interviewed David Reiff about the likely impacts of anthropogenic climate change on human civilization. As we discussed the abject refusal of contemporary national or global leadership to make hard choices about cutting back emissions, David argued that the ultimate problem is not the leaders, but the followers — that is, all of us — who just don't want to contemplate cutting back, who in fact have literally no conception what cutting back means. David concluded our chat with a simple, powerful phrase: "Our grandchildren will curse us."

GBN in Conversation: Deviant Globalization

2011-04-06T08:56:00.001-07:00

Global Business Network is hosting a talk next month on the topic of our new book, Deviant Globalization. Here's a precis of the conversation:

Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century analyzes the dark side of global trade: the illicit flows, black markets, and trafficking in drugs, human bodies and other 'repulsive' commodities that are as much a part of the new world (dis)order as legitimate global corporations and financial markets. These deviant industries represent more than just a stain on legitimate business or the growing pains of a global economy; they pose clear and immediate risks to supply chains, intellectual property, brands, and employees. And they deeply affect the socio-political foundation on which business rests in places from the favelas of Brazil to the slums of India to -- ultimately -- the skycrapers of Wall Street and Washington DC. But if you see deviant globalization for the human and economic energies it holds, rather than only through a moralistic lens, there's enormous opportunity to be found. What Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber call 'deviant entrepreneurs' know things about innovation and growth that legit businesses, NGOs, and governments can and should learn from. That doesn't mean doing illegal things, it means understanding how no-holds-barred innovation works in underregulated spaces.

The event is by invitation only and will be taking place the evening of May 10, at the GBN headquarters at 101 Market Street, in the San Francisco financial district. If you're interested in attending, let me know.

Libya as example of R2P?

2011-03-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

There have been not a few commentators, from the bleeding hearts on the liberal left to the usual suspects on the neocon right, who have been celebrating the raining down of Tomahawk missiles on Libya as a wonderful return of morality to foreign policy. In particular, there has been all sorts of palaver about how the much-ballyhooed efforts of Europeans in 2005-6 to instantiate a permanent "responsibility to protect" (R2P) the weak from the depredations of their own governments has finally found its clarion case in Libya, thus putting behind us all our painful failure to act in places like Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere. No sooner does Qadaffi roar about how he will pursue the rebels without mercy than "the international community" (e.g. the UN Security Council) votes to impose a no fly zone. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!

But there at least two reasons to be skeptical about this narrative of how Libya represents a new dawn for humanitarian interventionism and R2P. First, the vote in the Security Council is not nearly what it appears from the headline. Notably, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Germany abstained from the vote. Although Qadaffi has no friends left who are actively willing to cast votes to defend his regime, the BRIC nations have been increasingly vociferous in denouncing the intervention by the French, British, and Americans. Even more shocking is that Germany, one of the original promoters of the R2P principle five years ago, pointedly refused to vote in what supposedly was a black and white test case. When countries representing half the world's populations and the majority of its economic growth are refusing to participate in this new moral foreign policy, it's hard to argue that we are seeing some emergent new framework for international relations.

Second, the reasoning for applying a no fly zone to Libya is so selective as to make a mockery of the R2P principle itself. Where is the no fly zone over Yemen or Bahrain, where Western-supported dictators are slaughtering civilians? OK, you might say, but it's not like Saleh or al-Khalifa are strafing their civilian populations from the air, or vowing a war without pity. Of course, that's exactly what Israel did in Gaza yesterday, and it's just a few years ago that then-Israeli PM Olmert promised a campaign "without hesitation and without pity"... but curiously, no "no fly zone" over Palestine seems to be in the works.

Ultimately, I think Eugene Robinson gets the real story behind the Libya intervention exactly right, particularly in his last paragraph:

Gaddafi is crazy and evil; obviously, he wasn’t going to listen to our advice about democracy. The world would be fortunate to be rid of him. But war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standard we set for defiant ones. If not, then please spare us all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms. We’ll know this isn’t about justice, it’s about power.

Cross-posted at Humanity.

Image of the day II

2011-03-11T11:58:00.001-08:00

Image of the day

2011-03-11T11:13:00.001-08:00

No just today's tragedy, but also warning about the warming future...

Defining victory in Afghanistan

2011-03-06T06:19:00.000-08:00

Critical to any effective strategy (corporate or military) is to be judicious about where to play. As a general rule, one shouldn't pick battles that one can't win. In Afghanistan, our biggest problem is that the United States has yet to define victory in a way that is achievable.

If the US continues to insist on defining victory in Afghanistan as "leaving behind" a social and political system in which the men there treat their womenfolk in a way we deem appropriate - the implicit argument, for example, of idiocies like the Time Magazine cover on the right - then there is little doubt that we'll be banging our heads against the mud walls of their villages for the rest of this century.

On the other hand, if the US chooses to define success as making it clear to the local Afghan leaders (yes, including the Taliban) that they must prevent terrorists from planning attacks on the West from their territory - and should they fail to do so, that we will rain holy hellfire down on their fields and villages - then we can probably find an exit in reasonably short order.

Top 10 films noir

2011-02-15T05:16:00.000-08:00

Inspired by this post on the intellectual history of commentary on noir films (how is that for meta?), here are my ten+ favorite films noir:

Classic Noir

The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Third Man (1949)
Sunset Blvd (1950)

Neo-noir

Chinatown (1974)
Blade Runner (1982)
After Dark, My Sweet (1990)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Fargo (1995)
Memento (2000)

There are a lot of debates about what makes a film noir, and whether in fact it is a genre unto itself, or simply a style. My own sense of it is that noir began as a particular genre, growing out of interwar German expressionist filmmaking (M is often named as the originator of the genre), but evolved into a "style," that is a set of "noirish" elements -- including character types (grifters and conmen, cynical cops, private eyes, femmes fatales); stylistic points (urban nightscapes, rain or fetid heat, rotating fans, voice-overs); plot elements (heists gone wrong, adultery, double-crosses); settings and locations (from anonymous small towns and seedy hotels to Los Angeles and Central European cities) -- that can be introduced or remixed into any other genre. Thus it is possible to have "Sci-fi noir" (e.g. Blade Runner), "Western noir" (e.g., 3:10 to Yuma), "Comedy noir" (e.g. Fargo), "Horror noir" (e.g., The Brute Man), and so on.

Ultimately, what makes a film noir is less any of the above elements than a certain sensibility of what one might call alienated fatalism: a sense that the world as a whole is ultimately defined by corruption in every sense of that word (moral, financial, physical). Some critics have naturally chosen to label that attitude as a "cynical" but I would reject that; as always, the word "cynical" is just a scare word that foolish optimists use to malign realists. With that said, I should admit that my interest in deviant globalization is closely related to my predilection for film noir.

China: "There was no morality after 1989"

2011-02-11T11:35:00.000-08:00

Michael Anti explains how China's attitude toward development changed after 1989:

It's a brief clip, but I I'd note two important things about it. First, Anti clearly has a sense of the way any economy is embedded in and posterior to a particular moral order. And while he is circumspect about why "1989" was a turning point, it's clear that 1989 represented a radical moral shift, and that in his view, this moral shift is anterior to and the basis for the mode of development which China has been pursuing ever since. (As an aside, this perspective is also interesting from a periodization perspective, since most people tend to date the definitive break point in China's economic development to the "opening up" that Deng Xiaoping promulgated from 1978-79 - though scholars like Arne Westad have argued that even this rupture was based on economic lessons learned earlier, during the Cultural Revolution.)

Second, Anti is clearly a man whose intellectual armature has been forged by a deep engagement with Marxian and Hegelian thinking. The two minute discussion is a textbook example of the dialectical imagination in action: the "one the one hand, on the other hand" turns; the sense for historical dynamics being driven by systemic contradictions; the underlying assumption that capitalism fundamentally involves melting all that is solid and profaning all that is holy; and finally, the unspoken sense that the task of the analyst is to face the realities of capitalism with sober senses, to realize what capitalism does to man's real conditions of life, and to his relations with his kind.

Hat tip: MC.

Quote of the Day: Max Weber

2011-02-01T05:41:00.000-08:00

Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation":

The early Christians knew full well the world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.

Remediating Deviant Globalization

2011-01-31T02:51:00.001-08:00

I've written and spoken a lot about deviant globalization, and the book is coming out in a few weeks. But I want to address an issue that people often raise with me when I introduce the concept of deviant globalization, namely: what is to be done? how do we avoid just taking a cynical view of the entire lurid spectacle? what are the possible avenues of remediation?

There are no easy solutions, but I think the short answer is, "Where possible, legalize it; when it's morally impossible to legalize it, do everything you can to reduce regulatory gaps." In other words, efforts like CITES for wildlife smuggling, or the Basel Convention for waste flows (to cite two examples), are on the right track — though the latter has huge loopholes and the former doesn't address capacity issues.

Even more importantly, the concept of deviant globalization has important things to say about what policy-makers should NOT do. Above all, policy-makers should avoid indulging locally specific moral codes, since that simply creates arbitrage opportunities for bad actors. (Not to mention political perversions: Bootleggers & Baptists, QED. Note how Humboldt County, the capital of domestic U.S. marijuana growing, voted against marijuana legalization last November.)

In short: If you can't universalize/globalize both the underlying moral principle and the enforcement capacity, then you've either got to give your moral principle up, or else accept that the uneven efforts to impose them are likely to end up empowering bad actors who will profit off of your moral outrage. (And it gets worse: these deviant entrepreneurs sometimes begin to act like termites on the very framework of the state, e.g. the Taliban, the Sinaloa Cartel, the 'Ndraghetta, etc.)

That's not a very pleasant thing for policy-makers to hear, but it's the fundamental lesson of our work. And analytically, it provides powerful predictive insights.

Three-Fifths Compromise & "Radical" Reconstruction

2011-01-26T06:41:00.000-08:00

Over on Andrew Sullivan's blog, Chris Bodenner quotes a reader pointing out a crucial but poorly understood point about the notorious "Three-Fifths Compromise" in the original US Constitution, which was that its overt function was not to denigrate blacks per se, but rather to reduce the political power of the slaveholding South:

I'm continually surprised at how many people don't understand the three-fifths compromise in the original U.S. Constitution, usually describing it somewhat like Cord Jefferson does: "the three-fifths compromise, in which the government decided that black slaves were subhuman." The clear implication here that the Constitution codified a black slave was worth only 60% of a normal human, because they didn't count as much as "free Persons" in establishing proportional representation in the House.
But this understanding is completely backwards; black slaves would have been better off if the Constitution counted them at one-fifth, or not at all. The southern states would have been much happier had the slaves counted as whole persons, or better yet, 5 persons each!

Quite as Andrew's reader says: during the Constitution, Southerners argued that slaves should be apportioned at 100 percent, whereas Northerners argued they should only count for 20 percent - or perhaps not at all. The issue had nothing directly to do with racism, but rather was entirely about political power in a broad sense.

Just as important is how this inversion of the conventional misunderstanding helps us understand what took place after the Civil War, when the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments granted blacks full citizenship status — namely the North's effort to impose what came to be known as "Radical Reconstruction," which sought to guarantee blacks' civil rights over the howling protests of the white supremacists in the South.

In the (white) South, Reconstruction was represented as a violation of state sovereignty by a vindictive and socially utopian North. But in fact, it was nothing of the sort: it was a direct effort to make sure that an unregenerate South would not be able to undermine the political sovereignty of the North. The great post-bellum fear in the North was that, if blacks were not granted full political power, then the former Confederate white supremacists would be returned to the union, but now with even greater political power than they had had in the antebellum period, since all the former slaves (who formerly had counted for only 60% for apportionment purposes) would now count at 100% for apportionment purposes, thereby granting more political weight to the old Southern political elites.

So-called "radical" reconstruction was motivated, in other words, by the "radical" idea that the former confederates should not be rewarded for their treason by being reincorporated into the national fold with even more power than they had had before the war. Only actually giving blacks real political power could prevent this outcome, as everyone at the time well understood.

Alas, subsequent history shows that those fears were hardly misplaced. As we all know, "radical" reconstruction failed, blacks were disenfranchised, and for at least the next century precisely what the Radicals feared in fact took place: the racist southern political class would continue to punch far above its national weight until at least the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and arguably until 2009.

P.S. Noah Millman makes an appropriate rebuttal to the purely political interpretation offered above:

The three-fifths compromise was, from a purely practical perspective, a positive inasmuch as it weakened the South relative to the North. But it was hugely negative from an ideological perspective because it established in America’s founding document that slaves were not analogous to women and children – that they were something less than full (nonvoting) members of the community.

Quote of the day: Deng Xiaoping

2011-01-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

This is how Deng rationalized the slaughter of protestors in Tiananmen in 1989:

Imagine for a moment what could happen if China falls into turmoil. If it happens now, it'd be far worse than the Cultural Revolution.... Once civil war got started, blood would flow like a river, and where would human rights be then? In a civil war, each power would dominate a locality, production would fall, communications would be cut off, and refugees would flow out of China not in millions or tens of millions but in hundreds of millions. First hit by this flood of refugees would be Pacific Asia, which is currently the most promising region of the world. This would be disaster on a global scale. So China mustn't make a mess of itself. And this is not just to be responsible to ourselves, but to consider the whole world and all of humanity as well.

Obviously not a Kantian....

(Hat tip: MC.)

The rot spreads

2011-01-23T05:15:00.001-08:00

The Economist has a very cool interactive map of drug flows through Mexico:

MANGOs

2011-01-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

So, we're all familiar with the concept of NGOs. But this concept has recently undergone a radiation event, and has spawned an increasingly abstruse variety of subgenres:

INGO: international non-governmental organization
GONGO: government organized NGO
GRINGO: government regulated and initiated NGO
QUANGO: quasi-autonomous NGO
PANGO: party affiliated NGO
RONGO: retired officials NGO
DONGO: donor-organized NGO
DINGO: donor international NGO
CONGO: co-opted NGO
BINGOs: business interest NGOs
BONGOs: business-organized NGOs
and finally, my personal favorite... MANGO: a mafia-organized/operated NGO

For more on what all this means, with examples, see this academic paper.

Arguing with a child

2010-12-22T10:22:00.001-08:00

I realize it's stupid, and I shouldn't do it, but I just can't help myself. Jonah Goldberg (yeah, that's right, the chickenhawk par excellence) today asks a question about the difference between European socialism and American liberalism which he claims is serious rather than rhetorical:

What exactly differentiates the goals, ambitions and/or philosophical drives of, say, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party from European social democrats? Is there anything fundamental to social democracy that Nancy Pelosi (forget Obama for the moment) disagrees with because she is a liberal and not a “socialist”? Is there anything Nancy Pelosi believes about the role of the state that would cause the average Swedish or British social democrat to object?

I am sure that there are some cultural differences to account for. Swedes are culturally different from Belgians who are different from San Francisco liberals. But are they philosophically all that different?

OK. Let me try to explain this very slowly, using no big words.

American liberals believe that the government should offer a "social safety net," including elements such as unemployment benefits; cash transfers; food stamps; price subsidies for "essentials" such as food, electricity, public transport, or housing; public works; public subsidies for health care; public education; and so on.

"Socialists" (European or otherwise) believe in all that, too, of course. But what they also believe in is the collective or common ownership of the means of production, at least for major industrial components ("the commanding heights"). [Aside: there are important debates about how this should be implemented -- through state ownership, worker cooperatives, or what have you.]

This distinction is what sets off American liberals from European socialists. The belief in collective ownership is held by very sizable minorities in most European countries, and in fact is a programmatic element of the party platforms of many European social democratic parties. By contrast, in America, almost no one believes in collectivizing the means of production; and it's certainly not a view propounded in any fashion by Pelosi, much less Obama.

On the basis of this distinction, it is clear that the recently-passed health care bill, despite the Luntzian claims of a "government takeover," was a perfect example of non-socialism: yes, the federal government put into place mandates and subsidies (e.g. liberalism); but what it did not do was to nationalize (e.g. to collectivize the ownership of) the health care industry (e.g. socialism).

Either Goldberg understands this distinction, and chooses to ignore it because it would collapse his ability to red-bait, or he really is incredibly stupid.

(Update: OK, maybe not "stupid," but at minimum willfully obtuse.)

U.S. demography

2010-12-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

Data from the Census:
IFRAMES not supported

When will China overtake the US economy?

2010-12-18T07:03:00.000-08:00

A neat tool from the Economist. The future is sooner than you think.

More nGram timesucks

2010-12-18T03:20:00.001-08:00

I mentioned the shifting shape of utopia in yesterday's post, using Google's nGram reader to track the rising fortunes of the idea of human rights and the (entirely non-coincidental) falling fortunes of collectivist hopes for human emancipation. Well, above is a better version, this time comparing "socialism" to "human rights."

Well, here's another one, this time that tells you something about the social attention to the endless wars on drugs.

And this one ain't bad either: "capitalism" v. "globalization":

The Last Utopia

2010-12-17T08:15:00.001-08:00

I'm finally setting down to read my friend (and Humanity colleague) Sam Moyn's wonderful new book The Last Utopia, on the rise of the discourse of human rights. The book is filled with many wonderful observations, and its central thesis is powerful and revisionist. In a nutshell, the book argues that the contemporary concept of human rights discourse did not emerge, as the standard story inside the human rights community usually has it, in the late 1940s, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, much less with the French and American revolutions in the 18th century (as others have argued), but rather much more recently, in the late 1970s - specifically with Jimmy Carter's inaugural address in 1977.

But to me the most striking aspect of Sam's argument is his claim that the rise of individualist human rights discourse is a direct result of the collapse of collectivist notions of human emancipation - specifically, the exhaustion of revolutionary idealism in the wake of the 1960s. (In this sense, Sam's book can be read in interesting counterpoint to Jeremy Suri's The Global Revolutions of 1968, which tracks the common global fervors of "youthful idealism," and the common reactions of the Establishments from Prague to Paris to Peking.) As I say, an interesting claim, and one that I buy intuitively.

But can we actually "test" this proposition? Well, it just so happens that Google Labs has just launched a new tool, the nGram Viewer, which lets you graph and compare phrases over time. And so I decided to plug in the two key terms in question here, namely "human rights" and "revolution" to see what I would get. And here you have it:

So what we see pretty clearly here is the way that revolutionary expectations and discussions (among English language books) peaked right around 1970, and human rights discourse takes off right around 1977, just as Sam's qualitative analysis suggests. Not that this is proof, but it's pretty compelling evidence.

Academic v. popular history

2010-11-25T08:43:00.000-08:00

I wrote last month about "rightwing productions of history" by non-academic historians. My central point was that the political right engages in a self-conscious effort to implant (largely tendentious) memories or understandings of key episodes from the past, a process they partake in not by contesting academic historians but by bypassing them. (Note the noncoincidental similarity, here, to the way that Sarah Palin essays to channel her communications around and away from traditional media "elites" — that is, the keepers of professional standards.)

Of course, that they can get away with this is made possible by the increasingly cloistered nature of academic historical writing, which has opened up a discursive space for historians who write for the general public rather than just for each other. Gordon Wood explains the evolution of this growing (and in my view lamentable) separation:

Independent scholars such as Chernow, David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Jon This gap between popular and academic historians has probably existed since the beginning of scientific history-writing at the end of the nineteenth century, but it has considerably widened over the past half-century or so. During the 1950s academic historians with Ph.D.s and university appointments, such as Richard Hofstadter, Samuel Eliot Morison, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Allan Nevins, Eric F. Goldman, Daniel Boorstin, and C. Vann Woodward, wrote simultaneously for both their fellow academicians and educated general readers.

This is normally no longer possible. Academic historians now write almost exclusively for one another and focus on the issues and debates within the discipline. Their limited readership—many history monographs sell fewer than a thousand copies—is not due principally to poor writing, as is usually thought; it is due instead to the kinds of specialized problems these monographs are trying to solve. Since, like papers in physics or chemistry, these books focus on narrow subjects and build upon one another, their writers usually presume that readers will have read the earlier books on the same subject; that is, they will possess some prior specialized knowledge that will enable them to participate in the conversations and debates that historians have among themselves. This is why most historical monographs are often difficult for general readers to read; new or innocent readers often have to educate themselves in the historiography of the subject before they can begin to make sense of many of these monographs.

So advising academic historians that they have to write more stimulating prose if they want to enlarge their readership misses the point. It is not heavy and difficult prose that limits their readers; it is rather the specialized subjects they choose to write about and their conception of their readership as fellow historians engaged in an accumulative science.

The problem at present is that the monographs have become so numerous and so refined and so specialized that most academic historians have tended to throw up their hands at the possibility of synthesizing all these studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus the academics have generally left narrative history-writing to the nonacademic historians and independent scholars who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists.

Will the European Union survive?

2010-11-22T04:14:00.000-08:00

Der Spiegel provides a very German take on the Euro zone crisis that inadvertently is revealing of how the monetary crisis is ultimately a political crisis for the very soul of the European Union:

A deep divide between two almost irreconcilable camps runs through Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel heads one camp, consisting of the northern European countries. Merkel sees herself as the defender of a culture of stability of the sort that Germany has maintained since the days of the deutschmark. Her goal is to prevent the monetary union from becoming a kind of transfer union, with Germany as paymaster.

The second camp consists of the so-called PIIGS states, which have accumulated too much debt in the past and are now hoping for help: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. They want the thing that Merkel wants to prevent: a union in which the strong pay for the weak. Europe's institutions are now maneuvering between these two camps.

Certainly, that's how Berlin would like to portray the issue: as a bunch of lazy, profligate Southerners who are trying to get the industrious Germans to pick up the tab for years of spendthrift freeloading.

Of course, there's an alternate perspective of the underlying causes of the Euro zone crisis, namely that the real driver was the actions of German and French bankers, who after providing the credit that fueled a mad speculative bubble, now want to make the taxpayers and social service consumers of the South bear all the burden of the shared folly. Naturally, this is the narrative preferred in Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, and Athens.

From the perspective of the PIIGs, in other words, the question is whether the Germans can get away with imposing what amounts to a vicious structural adjustment program (SAP) on their fellow euro-zone members. In other words, are the Germans going to be allowed to do to PIIGs what the US did to Latin America in the aftermath of the 1983 debt crisis?

That story is worth remembering in some detail. What happened in that case was that US banks, flush with petrodollars from the Middle East, had gone on a huge lending spree in the 1970s to Latin American governments, which used the money on a mixture of corrupt payoffs for rich elites and promises of social welfare for the middle classes. By the early 1980s, as interest rates skyrocketed, these countries were no longer able to service their debts. Mexico declared in 1982 that it was not going to pay, several other Latin American countries followed suit, and for a few months that winter it looked possible that the entire global capitalist banking system might implode.

To make a very complicated story short, what happened next was that the U.S. and the IMF agreed to restructure the Latin Americans' debts, in exchange for the imposition of "structural adjustment." The SAPs contained a number of critical elements, which in principle were designed to ensure the fiscal health of the debtor governments, but which also entailed a de facto form of national and transnational class warfare: the rolling back of state ownership of key industries; the lowering of tariff barriers; the restriction of the autonomy of unions; the curtailing of price controls on food, water and other life essentials; and the scaling back of social welfare promises.

This process of economic restructuring is most often remembered as having been responsible for producing a so-called "Lost Decade," in which economic growth rates plummeted across Latin America. But arguably what went lost was something much bigger than a mere decade of productivity. In fact, the SAPs ultimately involved the wholesale abandonment of an entire social-political vision, namely the promise of "development" as a process of building a "social modernist" welfare states akin to those enjoyed in the Global North. In other words, it spelled the end of a certain kind of social dream, a certain kind of political ideal -- the dream that they would one day converge with the wealth and lifestyle of the North.

Now, the U.S. bankers and politicians could get away with destroying this dream in part because they themselves didn't really believe in that dream any longer (if indeed they ever had); in part because the U.S. people felt no political or social solidarity with the Latin Americans; and in part because Latin American elites were disunified in their response to the demands of Washington and New York

By contrast, the whole point of the European Union is supposed to be about pan-continental political solidarity in the name of building social welfare states. Furthermore, the social democratic nature of all the European governments means that throwing the middle classes under the banking bus is anathema - especially if it's "our" (Greek, Spanish, etc.) middle classes and "their" (German, French) banks.

So that's the key question: Is the European Union a fundamentally socially democratic institution? a collection of social and political equals who will stand together in a time of hardship? If that's the case, then the Germans will have to pay. Or alternately, will the Germans succeed in getting the taxpayers and social service consumers in the PIIGs to pay? In which case the beautiful dream of pan-European solidarity will be revealed as a lie, and it's hard to see how the European Union survives as a political project.

Milton Friedman famously predicted that the European Monetary Union would not survive the first recession. The political assumption underpinning this prediction was that the Germans ultimately did not feel political and social solidarity with Italians, the Greeks, and so on, and that in a crisis, the Germans would refuse to pay for the Southerners and the Southerners would refuse to take the German medicine. We're about to find out if Friedman was right.

Modern and postmodern developmentalism

2010-11-21T05:55:00.000-08:00

For a good sense of what development in Africa today is and isn't, you can do worse than to read this excellent if troubling New York Times article on Chinese business practices in Zambia:

As in many other African nations, the Chinese are an enormous economic presence in this impoverished but mineral-rich country.... Chinese investment here amounted to $1.2 billion in just the past year, according to the government. Nearly two-thirds of new construction involves Chinese-run companies, said Li Qiangmin, the Chinese ambassador in Lusaka, the capital. In this nation of 12 million where a small minority of workers, perhaps one in 10, have salaried employment, the 25,000 jobs provided by Chinese-backed businesses and projects are badly needed.

But many Zambians complain that these powerful foreigners are permitted to play by their own rules, plundering the country more than developing it and abusing workers as they go.

You see here the direct backlash against "thin" forms of extraction, in contrast to the "thicker" forms of development that existed in the past.

The standard early postcolonial relationship of extraction was that the foreign investors got the minerals and/or cheap labor, and the locals got "development" in return, the latter understood as the building of institutions and infrastructure that would direct the nation-state as a whole toward eventual attainment of a liberal welfare state. This noble idea was of course more honored in the breach than in the observance, but nonetheless, it was a deal that made a certain kind of sense - both sides were clearly supposed to be getting something worthwhile out of the relationship. This arrangement, this ideological ideal, is what I refer to as "modernist" developmentalism - that is, it was a form of development that aimed at creating replicas of the modernist ideal-type limned by the New Deal-ish United States.

That vision of development is long gone, killed by decades of secular economic decline, and officially buried by structural adjustment programs promoted by the neoliberals at the IMF and the Bank. (For more on this historical shift, consult James Ferguson's or Achille Mbembe's work.)

What replaced the classic postcolonial development discourse is what I would call a "post-modernist" form of developmental practice of the sort sketched in the New York Times article quoted above: we still have a foreign power - a Chinese state-controlled company, in this case - extracting minerals, but there is no longer any pretense about providing a wider, deeper, "thicker" kind of development that benefits the Zambian people and nation as a whole. On the contrary, with the Chinese bringing in their own labor and their own technology, their impact on the local economy is more or less ring-fenced around the mine head. And while the Chinese like to present this form of investment as a sign of their respect for the "sovereignty" of the local peoples, it's not at all clear what the local (in this case) Zambians get out of this sort of deal. Hence the backlash.

Political responsibility for the crisis

2010-11-21T04:28:00.001-08:00

Kevin Drum nicely summarizes the political responsibility for the current crisis:

The facts of the past decade are pretty clear, after all. George Bush inherited an uncommonly vigorous economy from Bill Clinton: growth was high, business was booming, wages were growing, and the federal government was running a surplus. This ended in 2001, but it ended with one of the mildest and shortest recessions on record and provided Bush with a chance to fully apply Republican orthodoxy to the economy: multiple rounds of tax cuts, light regulation, and the most business friendly atmosphere from the White House imaginable. The result was catastrophic. The Republican expansion from 2001 through 2007 was the weakest since World War II: productivity and GDP gains were mediocre, employment growth was weak, and wages were stagnant. Only corporate profits prospered. And this period of historically weak growth was ended by a financial disaster worse than any since the Great Depression. That's the Republican legacy of the aughts: a strong economy turned first anemic and then completely crippled.

My only quibble is that I would argue that the seeds of the crisis were laid much earlier, in the deregulations and tax-cutting of the 1970s and 1980s. These policies inaugurated the intertwined processes of deindustrialization, growing inequality in income and wealth, and exploding personal debt that are at the root of the crisis.

But these too were projects and policies of the right, so in terms of political score-keeping, this longer history only buttresses Drum's analysis.

None more bitter

2010-10-26T15:52:00.001-07:00

Rightwing productions of history

2010-10-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

My dissertation advisor David Hollinger, about to assume the Presidency of the Organization of American Historians, has a terse rebuttal to the Wall Street Journal's claim that the Tea Partiers are promoting a more accurate version of the past than that produced by professional historians. While such a brief rejoinder is probably the organizationally appropriate response of the President of the OAH to such slander, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a little more context for this skirmish between the official head of professional American historians, and what we might call the counter-professional version of American history that is widely promoted in places like the the op-ed pages of the WSJ or the Washington Post.

Over the last forty years, the production of American historical memory has been quite radically transformed. With the effective victory of a capacious, polysemous understanding of the past - which is the hallmark of professional history today - those who prefer a smaller, more politically or religiously sectarian view of the past have withdrawn into (or perhaps less pejoratively, have developed) their own historical epistemology, one that is barely in dialog with what professional historians do. The creation of this parallel, unprofessional historiographic universe is a politically self-conscious project of the American right, central to their effort to roll back the twentieth century's expansion of political inclusiveness, social tolerance, and the welfare state.

Producing an American past usable for the political right constitutes a sizable industry, one with far more influence than most professional historians realize - certainly more than I realized when I was in school. For example, I can't tell you how many people I meet - people who think of themselves as passionately engaged with the past - who really believe that, say, Mark Moyar's absurd interpretation of the Vietnam war, or Amity Schlaes's ridiculous interpretation of the New Deal, or Paul Johnson's tendentious interpretation of the Enlightenment [sorry, I refuse to link to such tripe], define these episodes wie sie eigentlich gewesen. Some such readers know that professional historians take such books about as seriously as professional athletes take the participants in "Wipe Out"; but insofar as they are even aware of the dismissiveness of the professionals, such readers tend to regard the attitudes of the professionals as merely typical of "liberal, elitist bias."

Despite certain notable exceptions, the political right in this country has largely given up even trying to fight with professional historians over the meaning of the American past. Rather than try to battle over truth using accepted professional standards of evidence and argument, the political right has taken their partisan interpretations of the past directly to the people, for example via the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard, where one well-argued piece can gain a wider readership (and more political influence) than a hundred articles in the Journal of American History.

There's an underlying irony here, which is worth underscoring: while the political right has largely lost the interpretive battle for the American past among professional historians, they remain far more sensitive than the political left to the political importance of dominating popular understandings of key episodes from the past. They understand that inculcating the belief that the New Deal was somehow constitutionally illegitimate, or that the Civil Rights movement somehow represented federal overreach, or that the Vietnam War was somehow winnable but for perfidy at home are crucial in order to be able to promote the policies that they prefer in the present - whether it means rolling back the welfare state, ending affirmative action, or promoting aggressive neo-imperialist wars. This is precisely why partisan bloggers like Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, or Stanton Evans write books like Liberal Fascism (about contemporary liberalism's genealogical roots in interwar fascism) or In Defense of Internment (which describes FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans as his finest moment) or Blacklisted by History (which argues McCarthy was good and right about domestic Communism, and has been unfairly maligned by quisling-ish liberals and academics).

While such arguments might seem so grotesque as to be not worth dignifying with a reasoned rebuttal, we should not let scientific-professional judgments obscure the political influence that such books and arguments command among the hoi polloi. Though measuring these things is difficult, I strongly suspect that texts such as these have far more impact on the popular historical memory (and thus on contemporary politics) than virtually any Bancroft prize winner, appalling as that may be for professional historians to admit.

The reason why these books have such political impact is simple: it is because they are conceived and written first and foremost with a contemporary political intervention in mind.¹ Indeed, the whole point of these para-historical productions of the right, their whole reason for being written, is not to "get the past right" but rather to influence contemporary politics. From a methodological perspective, right-wing popular historiography starts with a contemporary political or policy objective, then chooses an historical episode through which to convey the critical contemporary political point, and finally selectively marshalls evidence to support their contemporary political purpose. For these "historians," creating an accurate and complete representation of the past is entirely beside the point. (Indeed, even raising the issue of objectivity or balance is likely to get you labelled a liberal-biased pettifogger.)

The contrast with professional historians' standards of evidence and argument couldn't be sharper. Closeted positivists all, professional historians consider it their duty to capture the nuance, contradictions, and unknowability of the past, even where that conflicts with or complicates the usability of their conclusions for contemporary left-liberal (or any other) politics. Indeed, most academic historians are vaguely - or more than vaguely - embarrassed when they see such similarly partisan texts for "our side" of the political debate. (Just consider how most of us regard, say, Howard Zinn; or how our instinct is to bicker and quibble with a book like Nixonland.)

We are thus left with a profound irony. On the one hand, because professional historians basically support their view of the past, the political left for the most part doesn't bother to produce popular histories designed as interventions into contemporary politics. On the other hand, the professional historians fail to return the love, producing histories which are full of complexity and nuance, rather than pointedly partisan talking points. On the contrary, professional historians' efforts to capture the ambiguity and contradictions of the past tends to render problematic any simple lessons for the political present. It's only a small overstatement to say that professional historians, whatever their politics, are in the business of trying to render the past politically unusable. Ultimately, appreciating the perplexing richness of the past, which is what professional historians do, makes it difficult to produce historical narratives that serve a politics of slogans and zingers.

By contrast, the one-sidedness of the right's interpretations of the past is precisely what makes it politically powerful: having dispensed with the difficult task of trying to get the past right, the right finds it far easier than the left (with its crotchety insistance on empirical truth and complexity) to produce a past that has obvious and unambiguous political implications for the present.

1. Right-wingers assume that professional historians approach the past from the same (e.g. primordially political) perspective as they do, and that therefore what they are doing is simply providing a corrective to the leftist political bias of the academy. But in fact, contemporary political questions are almost never the point of intellectual departure for professional historians. Rather, professional historians usually begin in one of two ways: either they begin with a body of evidence historical evidence - an archive of some sort - and are seeking to make sense of it in some way; or they begin with some historiographical debate - trying to extend, rebut, or revise some existing (professional) historical perspective on whatever the topic at hand is. As a result of these approaches, professional historians tend to be much more fixated on methodological and evidentiary issues, which also helps explain why they tend to be less interested than popular writers in creating narratives focused on dramatically compelling characters and "events."

Adam Smith, notorious socialist

2010-10-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

Adam Smith, on the righteousness of progressive taxation:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

(Source: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book Five, Chapter II, Article I.)

Face of the Day

2010-10-14T02:54:00.000-07:00

Man carrying a shark to market in Mogadishu:

Hat tip: The Guardian and MC.

Negative growth: literally inconceivable

2010-09-12T07:12:00.000-07:00

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding

To a large degree, the very idea of something called "the economy" is coextensive with the idea of economic growth. When John Maynard Keynes wrote his General Theory, there was no reified entity called "the national economy." Adam Smith never used the phrase; neither did Karl Marx; nor did any of the neoclassical economists. Rather, the word "economy" refered simply to the process of individuals allocating scarce resources.

In fact, the first effort to analytically and statistically instantiate "the economy" as a holistic and unitary object probably occurred in 1928, with the first Soviet "National Accounts," which formed the basis for Stalin’s first Five Year Plan—arguably the first full-spectrum "national economic growth" plan ever put forth by a government. For capitalist economies, the idea of national income accounting was developed in the late 1930s by Simon Kuznets as a way to test the efficacy of Keynesian theories for generating aggregate economic growth.

Here's the key point of this mini-history: as a body of positive theory, modern macroeconomics is built around the normative assumption that what economies are supposed to do is grow. (And it’s not just economics: modernization theory in political science and sociology also assumed the viability of endless growth.)

This fundamental theorical assumption in the social sciences in fact merely reflects a similar set of assumptions at the core of modern politics: in a nutshell, modern politics in all countries in the world over the last century or so have been built around the normative assumption that endless growth is not just the solution to overcoming distributionist conflict, but also sustainable in perpetuity. In other words, the macro-political problem the planet now faces is underpinned by a fundamental theoretical problem: the very notion of "the economy" takes for granted the idea of an endless "more." Political will aside, political officials and policy intellectuals (to say nothing of businesspeople) literally don’t know how to think about an economy predicated on principles other than expansion and growth.

Quote of the Day

2010-08-12T05:39:00.000-07:00

Emile Durkheim, on the social consequences of economic disasters:

In the case of economic disasters, something like a declassification occurs which suddenly casts certain individuals into a lower state than their previous one.... Time is thus required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things. So long as the social forces thus freed have not regained equilibrium, their prospective values are unknown, and so all regulations are lacking for a time. The limits are unknown between the possible and the impossible, what is just and what is unjust, legitimate claims and those which are immoderate. Consequently, there is no restraint upon aspirations....

(From On Suicide)

Modernization theory never dies (Chinese city planning edition)

2010-08-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

High modernism in architecture is strongly associated with the figure of Le Corbusier. This version of high modernism sought to impose rectilinear, uniform solutions on everything, from the architecture of cities to the lives of men, literally bulldozing anything in its way. Consider Le Corbusier's infamous plan for the right bank of Paris.

In the arena of development studies, High Modernism has been grandly criticized for its indifference to the richness of premodern social orders, and for its brutal simplifications that often have produced political monstrosities, from Stalinism to Tanzania. Modernization theory was the American entry into this hall of horrors, and although it continues to live a troglodytic existence in the life of the American Mind, it is today an officially repudiated doctrine.

In China, on the other hand, modernization theory is not regarded as a historical curiosity of American mid-century hubris, but rather as a blueprint for their own contemporary efforts to bring themselves into the final stage of history, what modernization theorist Walt Rostow famously described as "the age of high mass consumption." And guess what, their taste in city planning reflects this heritage, as one can see from this billboard advertising a construction plan in Shenyeng, Manchuria:

David Harvey explains the crisis

2010-07-13T02:01:00.001-07:00

"It's the nature of capitalism, stupid":

Whether you buy the Marxist analysis, much less the Marxist prescriptions, you can't deny the centrality of a point Harvey only makes in passing, which is that there's no way we can get out of this crisis the way we did the last time (that is, in the 1970s/80s), namely by re-disciplining labor to rein in costs and supporting aggregate demand by issuing lots of cheap credit. Those byways have been exhausted, and so how (or if) we can get out of this crisis remains radically unknown.

Hat tip: JH

The collapse of communism & the rise of deviant globalization

2010-06-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

When Communism collapsed during the 1980s, what died was not just the particular collectivist economic system and authoritarian politics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Cremated along the corpse of Communism was the broadly civic-minded conception of development as the central responsibility of the state – a conception that had been largely shared by communists and liberals during the Cold War.

In the wake of this ideological collapse, what emerged was the so-called "Washington Consensus.” Coined by former World Bank economist John Williamson, the phrase described the paradigmatic program of economic “reform” imposed on parts of the Global South during the 1980s and 1990s by the IMF, and generally with the support of the US government. Pointing to the undeniable corruption, inefficiency and rent-seeking of most states in the Global South, the neoliberals associated with the Washington Consensus demanded that aid recipients slash public bureaucracies and services, reduce dependence on foreign aid, dismantle trade barriers, and curtail the political power of organized labor. Pioneered as domestic policy in Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain and Ronald Reagan’s United States, the programs associated with the Washington Consensus soon became a model that London and Washington sought to export to the Global South and the post-Communist world. As Dani Rodrik put it, "'Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize' became the mantra of a generation of technocrats who cut their teeth in the developing world and of the political leaders they counseled." "There is no alternative," Margaret Thatcher famously declared.

Where such programs were imposed, they often led to what might be called the "hollowing out" of the state. The physical buildings and institutions of those states remained in place, but the ambitions and capacities of those states shriveled. This late- and post-Cold War hollowing out of states, particularly in the Global South, had two important results. First, it signaled to everyone in these countries that, "you are on your own." The end of the promise of building a public goods-providing state – or rather, the revelation that this promise had always been empty – unleashed a flood of survival entrepreneurship throughout the Global South, above all in former Communist states. As the Iron Curtain fell, some people entered legal industries; many others, however, pursued faster profits in the deviantly globalized marketplaces of the post-Cold War world or were lured into the role of foot soldiers in flourishing deviant industries. The second and equally important impact of hollowed states was the dismantling of the regulatory capacity in the Global South. These weak states lacked the institutions and the practical capacity to enforce the rules of international transactions, liberating both the forces of mainstream as well as deviant globalization.

The meaning of deviant globalization

2010-05-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell, here's how I would summarize my theoretical-historical argument about deviant globalization:

The modernist promise of complete, inclusive, efficient, equitable nation-building failed (for many reasons), and we can't go back to that. Since we can't go back, we should stop holding the high-rectitude bureaucratic-modernist state up as the tacit normative standard, which is what we do when talk about "failed states" and "transparency" and "good governance" and so on.
Instead, the reality we've got in the Global South is deviant globalization, warts and all.
What's more, deviant globalization isn't all bad, since it markedly increases the overall income of these communities, even if it has lots of unpleasant externalities. (But hey, all industrial capitalism has nasty externalities — visited the Gulf Coast lately?) It sure beats a predatory state.
In some cases deviant entrepreneurs even start to backfill some of the functionality that modernist states used to promise (and usually failed to deliver) — health care, education, infrastructure, social insurance, security, justice, etc. Needless to say, state incumbents find this highly threatening, even if they have no one but themselves to blame.
But: deviant entrepreneurs deliver these political services in a partial, exclusive, inequitable (and often inefficient) way. Indeed, they don't even pretend to try to be complete, inclusive, or equitable. They are delivering services to clients, not benefits to citizens; this is "privatization" albeit perhaps not exactly as Maggie Thatcher imagined it.
In sum, the social-political ambition of these deviant entrepreneurs is far smaller than their state-based predecessors, but then again, so is their hypocrisy. (Just compare Mobutu Sese Seko to "El Chapo" to appreciate the difference.)
The one place that the hypocrisy still flourishes is among western policy analysts, who continue to measure and discuss these countries according to a series of metrics and morals based on a long-discredited vision of what the nation-state could and should be.

Update: The practical choice for countries in the Global South is not "Should we try to be more like Singapore, or more like Denmark?" Rather, the real choice is more like, "Do we want to be more like Venezuela, or more like Mexico?" These are not pleasant choices, but we may as well face them with open eyes rather that holding on to absurdly antiquated and historically discredited conceptual and political standards.

Black market sanction busting

2010-05-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

Riz Khan discusses how sanctions regimes creates vast profit opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs, who in turn become political forces in their own right.

My Long Now talk on Deviant Globalization

2010-05-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

It's long, but hopefully worthwhile. Comments most welcome.

Magical climate thinking

2010-04-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

One reason why so many greens put so much faith in cap-and-trade is the belief that once the price of carbon is set appropriately, this will create incentives that will inevitably push scientists and inventors to come up with solutions to our energy needs. Several things can be said about this touching dual faith in markets and technology.

First, this claim is based on a discredited supply side economics view of invention. Just because there is an economic incentive to invent something, doesn't mean that inventing it is technically or physically possible, or even if it is invented, that other barriers to deployment won't arise. An analogy should make the point clear: vast economic incentives exist to invent pills that would cure alcoholism or drug addiction, and indeed much snake oil gets peddled claiming to provide such benefits. You may have noticed, however, that substance abuse doesn't seem to have disappeared from our society. Given the addiction of modern civilization to cheap energy, the parallel ought to be unnerving to anyone who believes that technology will pull our the climate rabbit out of the fossil fuel hat.

Second, the hopes that many greens place in a technological deus ex machina is an expression of faith in the old high modernist verities every bit as profound - and every bit as rational - as Augustine's faith in Christ. Very telling in this respect is the totemic way in which the Manhattan Project, the ultimate high modernist technological triumph, is regularly invoked as a supposed model for developing breakthrough Green technologies, despite the radical differences between building a weapon and remaking the entire global energy system. In truth, the belief in a technological fix to the climate solution is the ultimate form of high modernist magical thinking. It's no coincidence that the phrase "technological fix" was invented in the early 1960s, the heyday of modernization theory, by Alvin Weinberg, a nuclear physicist and chief administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the Manhattan Project period through the 1980s. (See Weinberg's essay "Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?" [1966].) Weinberg claimed that nuclear power would create limitless energy, allowing age-old social problems to be overcome while minimizing political conflict over distributional issues - an argument that should feel uncannily familiar to all those who believe that technological breakthroughs will allow the climate crisis to be overcome without fundamental political conflict.

Update: Here's Steve Chu artfully backpedaling from the idea of a green Manhattan Project.

The second great tragedy in life

2010-04-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

This story drives home a point I've been making for quite some time:

The right is acting like the left did in the early 1970s. In both cases, it's the aftermath of having had a President who achieved virtually all the party's maximalist goals and, as a result, is widely perceived to have ruined the country. What do you do when it turns out that your cherished goals actually hosed the country? While some people (the moderates) beg for moderation and/or ditch the party, others (the radicals) double down and say that the Dear Leader didn't go anywhere near far enough and, further, that the moderates in their party were a big part of the problem anyway. Also, in both cases, the succeeding president (Nixon, Obama) is anathema to everything that the former ruling party, both its moderates and radicals, believe in, which only exacerbates the ire and craziness.

The result is an intra-party circular firing squad, threats and actual instances of violence, and all in all an unseemly spectacle that alienates the mainstream of the country.

Why modernization theory never dies

2010-04-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

How many times does chapter 7 of this book need to be written: “Theories That Won’t Pass Away: The Never-Ending Story of Modernization Theory.”

After going through the usual suspects of modernization theory (Lerner, Shils, etc.), and pointing out all the internal contraditions and tensions, Wolfgang Knobl concludes out that modernization is a pretty lousy theory in terms of explanatory power, and is probably better thought of as a series of modernization "discourses" rather than as a "theory" at all.

But this leaves us with a paradox, he notes: "Why will the theory not die despite all its weaknesses and failures? [This] endurance is based on the fact that the term 'modernization' as well as the related term 'modernity' has a strange kind of (normative) attraction for all those — politicians or intellectuals — debating the contours of contemporary and future societies...." (p. 105).

This is correct, but it begs the question: what is the nature and source of that "strange kind of (normative) attraction"? In other words, what is the normative appeal of something positively misleading? For this, I think one must resort to explanations that are ultimately psychological:

Implicit in (and central to) modernization theory is a just-so story about our own civilizational superiority, and more important, our civilization finality — nothing will ever supersede "us." We are the ultimate, final perfected incarnation of mankind’s historical development. This is a deeply self-flattering idea.
The theory provides a neat (overly neat) closure to a lot of messiness, and so appeals to a desire for cleanliness, parsimony, clarity, and other Protestant psychic virtues.
The underlying historical metanarrative of modernization puts a happy gloss on various ecological and cultural losses and destruction caused by industrial and commercial civilization that might otherwise be hard to stomach. All these losses are in the name of a worthwhile higher goal, namely the completion of mankind’s historical perfection. It thus appeals to our sense of moral purpose.
It implies that “all good things go together” and that losers in the process can either be paid off or considered a worthwhile price in the process. The implication is that no ultimately painful choices need to be made. As anyone who's ever had a destructive habit they didn't want to break (quite yet) knows, this idea is also extremely psychologically appealing in an Augustinian manner.
It suggests that antinomian movements (from Marxism to Al Qaeda) that resist this narrative and lament the losses or object to the direction of change are fated no matter what to lose their struggle against. It thus provide confidence in long and painful political-historical struggles.

There are probably additional reasons why modernization theory continues to survive despite its manifest failures as an explanatory tool, but these are certainly among the central appeals of the theory. If you have other ideas, please note them in the comments.

GOP today = Dems in the early 1970s

2010-03-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

Watching the GOP in circular firing squad mode in the aftermath of David Frum being sacked from AEI over mild ideological heterodoxy, on the one hand, and generalized extremist rightwing craziness, on the other, is eeriely reminiscent of the way the Democratic party went off the rails in the early 1970s. This is a theme I've touched on before.

The reason for this similarity is quite straightforward. In the 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats basically achieved most of the maximalist policy ambitions of post-Roosevelt liberalism: immigration reform, voting rights, medicare, etc. Likewise, in the 2000s, under George Bush, the Republicans basically achieved most of the maximalist policy ambitions of post-Reagan conservatism: massive tax cuts for the wealthy, wars of choice against foreign enemies, a rollback of restrictions on executive action, the utter dis-regulation of financial services, and so on.

In each case, the country ended this run of policy accomplishment by plunging into chaos that was clearly linked to (if not caused by) the policies that had been enacted under the President. The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed urban rioting, a rising fiscal deficit and contracting dollar, rising inflation, an intractable war, a secular loss of American power and authority... and a consequent collapse of political civility. The symbolic center of the liberal meltdown was the Tet Offensive of 1968, which seemed to give the lie to everything that the sitting Democrat stood for, ideologically and practically, discrediting him both in the eyes of the opposing party and in the eyes of his own political base. Since 2008 we've seen a financial meltdown due to dis-regulation, a rising fiscal deficit and contracting dollar, an intractable war, a secular loss of American power and authority... and a consequent collapse of political civility. The symbolic center of the conservative meltdown was the Great Financial Panic of 2008, which gave the lie to everything that the sitting Republican stood for, discrediting him in the eyes of both the opposing party and his own political base.

Indeed, 1968 and 2008 were the key years. In 1968 the liberal-centrist-establishment wing got to nominate its candidate (Hubert Humphrey), who then got beaten by Nixon. A figure who was anathema to everything that post-Roosevelt liberalism represented, Nixon was elected mainly because voters were disgusted by the colossal mess that his liberal predecessor had made. The resulting fingerpointing led to a vicious fight between the liberal-centrist-establishment wing of the Democratic Party and its leftwing base. Over the next four years, the Democrats entered circular firing squad mode, fighting over ideological litmus tests as well as practical electoral tactics. More notoriously, they also took to the streets, rioting against Nixon's policies in a way that was highly alienating to mainstream voters. Eventually, this degenerated into various forms of low-level domestic terrorism (e.g. the Weathermen, Black Panthers, etc.). As a result, the "brand" of liberalism was tainted in a permanent way with the protesting extremists -- the latter being profoundly ironic, given the fact that the left extremists were at least in as much revolt against the moderate liberal establishment of their own party as they were against the conservatism of Nixon. The ultimate irony, of course, is that from a policy perspective, Nixon was in many ways a liberal... Clean Air and Water Act, wage/price controls, a continuation of the war in Vietnam with a view to eventual disengagement, etc.

Now flash forward to 2008 and consider how similar the situation is: In 2008 the conservative-centrist-establishment wing got to nominate its candidate (John McCain), who then got soundly beaten by Obama. Anathema to everything that post-Reagan conservatism represents, Obama was elected in 2008 mainly because voters were disgusted by the colossal mess that his conservative predecessor had made. The resulting fingerpointing on the right has produced the vicious fight we are currently witnessing between the conservative-centrist-establishment wing of the GOP and its scary rightwing base -- of which the Crist/Rubio battle in Florida is emblematic. Just as the Democrats were in Nixon's first term, the Republicans are now, as I mentioned up top, in full-scale circular firing squad mode, fighting over ideological litmus tests as well as practical electoral tactics, and also revolting against Obama's policies. Low-level domestic terrorism seems a possible eventual result, and indeed may already have begun to emerge. Finally, one strongly suspects that the current Tea Party behavior and thuggishness will taint the conservative "brand" in a permanent way -- again ironic, given the fact that the rightwing extremists are as much in revolt against the moderates of their own party as they are against the liberalism of Obama. And again, the ultimate irony is that from a policy perspective, Obama is in many ways a conservative... his health care bill, for example, is basically a clone of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts bill (let's not mention his conduct of the ongoing wars...).

So, what does this historical parallel tell us about what might happen next? First, it tells you that the conservatives are likely in 2012 to follow the path that the Democrats did during the 1972 -- nominating a base-pleasing but unelectable candidate. She will lose catastrophically, which will only exacerbate the intra-party hatreds. Second, it tells you that the fight for the soul of the Republican Party is likely to go on for a long time, and that it will be very ugly and that it will leave lasting scars and resentments. Third, it tells you that conservatives have a very long way to go before they can come up with any remotely appealing original ideas about governance, much less reasonable ideas about how to solve the messes that their policies made.

Quote of the day: Brzezinski

2010-02-19T08:36:00.000-08:00

Here's how Zbigniew Brzezinski, in 1968, explained the likely fate of the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union is at the "beginning of a sterile bureaucratic phase" which was likely to lead eventually to disintegration followed by a new political order characterized by "assertive ideological-nationalist reaction, resting on a coalition of secret police, the military, and the heavy industrial-ideological complex." (Quoted in Engerman, Know Your Enemy, p. 224.)

An uncannily apt description of Putin's Russia today, no?

Jeff Rubin on the impact of oil price spikes

2010-01-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

Worth watching in its entirety:

Notes on decline: Orville Schell

2010-01-08T03:37:00.001-08:00

Orville Schell provides the barest sketch of what's broken in the United States today:

The federal government, essentially busted; Congress, increasingly paralyzed and largely incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems; state government, largely broke; the Interstate highway system and our infrastructure of bridges and tunnels, melting away like a block of ice in the sun because maintenance and upgrading is so poor; dikes, water systems, and many other aspects of the national infrastructure which keeps the country going, similarly old and deteriorating; airlines, some of the sorriest in the world with the oldest, dirtiest, and least up-to-date planes and the requisite run-down airports to go with them; ports that are falling behind world standards; a railroad passenger system which, unlike countries from Spain to China, has not one mile of truly high-speed rail; the country’s financial system whose over-paid executives not only ran us off an economic cliff in 2008, but also managed to compromise the whole system itself in the eyes of the world; a broadcast media which -- public broadcasting and aspects of a vital and growing Internet excepted -- is a grossly overly-commercialized, broken-down mess that has gravely let down the country in terms of keeping us informed; newspapers, in a state of free-fall; book publishing, heading in the same direction; elementary education (that is, our future), especially public K-12 schools in big cities, desperately under-funded and near broke in many communities; a food industry which subsidizes sugar and starch, stuffs people with fast-food, and leaves 60% of the population overweight; basic manufacturing, like the automobile industry, evidently headed for oblivion, or China, whichever comes first; the American city, hollowing out and breaking down; the prison system, one of America’s few growth industries but a pit of hopelessness.

A fair summary, though as Schell himself points out, this really only scratches the surface.

I used to say that there was nothing like travelling -- and even more, living -- abroad to make you positively reevaluate the United States's capabilities and performance. I no longer feel that way. My last trips to mainland Europe, and even to Latin America (!!), have really underscored to me the U.S.'s relative decline.

Best movies of the 1990s

2010-01-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

Since my post on my favorite movies from the Aughties was pretty popular, I though I might also list my favorite movies from the 1990s, again judged by the standard of how much of an immediate, visceral impact they had on me:

Pulp Fiction
Goodfellas
Naked
The Matrix
There's Something About Mary
Short Cuts
American Beauty
Raise the Red Lantern
The Sweet Hereafter
Breaking the Waves
Husbands and Wives
Reservoir Dogs
Leaving Las Vegas
Fargo
Hoop Dreams
Delicatessen
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Ulysses’s Gaze
Strange Days
Thelma and Louise
The Thin Red Line
Before Sunrise
Groundhog Day
Terminator 2
Bad Lieutenant
Silence of the Lambs
The Crying Game
Wayne's World
Being John Malkovich
Menace II Society
The Grifters

Update: I added the four in italics, which I had forgotten about earlier. I should also point out the many movies that I saw and didn't much like, that many others would probably put in their own top list, e.g.: Sleepless in Seattle, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Ghost, Edward Scissorhands. LA Confidential, Good Will Hunting, The English Patient, Enemy of the State, Men in Black, The Wedding Singer, Titanic, Philadelphia, JFK, Schindler's List, Wag the Dog, Blade, Ghost, A Few Good Men, Shakespeare in Love, The Phantom Menace, The Truman Show, Rush Hour, La Vita e Bella, Unforgiven, Boyz in the Hood, Pretty Woman, American Pie, Saving Private Ryan, Basic Instinct, 12 Monkeys, and Sense & Sensibility... to name a few. A lot of those were watchable, but most of them were either sententious, syrupy, simple-minded, or somehow flawed in a way that brought me up short in mid-viewing.

10 Dumbest quotes of the decade

2009-12-29T12:32:00.001-08:00

There were a lot of dumb things said in the 2000s. These are the winners, based on their feculent combination of overweening confidence and total empirical misassessment:

"Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground--to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial average." - James K. Glassman, November 2000
"One of my highest priorities is to restore investor confidence in Enron. This should result in a significantly higher stock price." - Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, 21 August 2001
"Don't worry, it's a slam dunk." - CIA Director George Tenet, referring to the intelligence indicating that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, 21 December 2002
"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would to take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." - U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, 28 February 2003
"There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad" - Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (AKA "Comical Ali," AKA "Baghdad Bob"), 7 April 2003
"You go to war with the army you have." - U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 8 December 2004
"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." - U.S. President George W. Bush, addressing FEMA coordinator Mike Brown, as the New Orleans levees are failing, 31 August 2005
"The fundamentals of the economy are strong." - U.S. Senator John McCain, 15 September 2008 (the day Lehman Brothers collapsed)
"All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years." - Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, unable to name a single newspaper or magazine she reads, interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, 1 October 2008
"This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." - U.S. President Barack H. Obama, describing the Afghan war, 17 August 2009

Designing appropriate responses to the security threat posed by climate change

2009-12-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

Determining the appropriate policy response to the security threats posed by climate change requires properly identifying the nature of the threat, so that the correct sort of security knowledge and technology can be mobilized to counter the threat. Critics of the “securitization” of the climate change impacts debate are not entirely wrong that the debate itself, if misconceived, has the potential to misdirect security resources away from the security platforms in most urgent need of shoring up in the face of climate change.

Specifically, the security platforms in most urgent need of attention in the face of the climate change threat are ones related to vital systems and population security, and only secondarily to sovereign state security. The most immediate security threats posed by climate change will involve acute insults to and chronic compromising of critical infrastructure, including energy production and delivery systems, transportation networks, agriculture, and water supplies. Just as severe will be the threats to population security, above all to public health and economic well-being, some of which will happen because of the direct effects of a hotter, more volatile climate, and some of which will be a second-order result of the damaging effects of climate change on critical infrastructure.

These climate-related threats to vital systems and population security should be the highest priorities for governments. This means redoubling investment in the technology designed to address these threats: improving preparedness, resiliency, and redundancy in the case of vital systems; and more effective development programs in the case of population security, including investment in biosurveillance, health care delivery programs, and programs to improve economic growth. In addition, a great deal of attention should be paid to ensure that the anticipatory adaptations, by both the private sector and governments, focus on delivering Pareto-efficient benefits, rather than simply on redistributing the risks and threats associated with climate change.

In the longer run (toward the second half of this century) the threats to vital systems and population security may become so severe that they indeed begin to seriously impact sovereign state security of large, populous nations. Already we have the foretaste of that future by examining the fate of small island nations. These pioneers of the brave new climate future only show to the economically and technologically more advanced nations the image of their own future. Mass refugee crises and environmentally failed states, each of which for different reasons may seem to necessitate the intervention of armed forces, will become an increasingly pressing possibility as the century advances. And the environmental conditions under which these armed forces will be forced to operate will be increasingly harsh.

It is thus crucial that security analysts be able to correctly characterize the different threats posed by climate change, and above all not to assume that the military should be the primary vehicle for addressing these threats. Using soldiers to improve civilian preparedness and the resiliency of vital systems not only is obviously inefficient, but also is likely to be ineffective. Likewise, asking the military to address the ongoing climate change threat to the health and well-being of the population will not work well. Nor does it make sense only to invest in upgrading military response capacity at the expense of improving vital systems security and population security technologies. The armed forces are only well-suited for dealing with climate change threats once they have cascaded into sovereign state security threats. Ultimately, using the military to address vital systems and population security threats is as inefficient as using emergency rooms to provide primary care, and to invest in military systems as a way to deal with the climate change threat, at the expense of improving public health and the resiliency of critical infrastructure, is akin toa state that neglects to provide primary care, only to deal with a much more dire and expensive crisis in emergency rooms. It is therefore crucial that security planners learn to correctly identify and differentiate the different sorts of threat posed by climate change, and design and fund threat-appropriate responses, rather that assuming that a single class of preparation will be sufficient.

Why Copenhagen will go nowhere

2009-12-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

Gwynne Dyer explains why the Copenhagen climate summit will go nowhere:

Everybody involved knows what the one really fair and effective deal would look like, although they feel doomed to settle for something much worse. In this case, the fair and effective deal would take full account of the history, and it would look like this.

It would require the rich, industrialised countries to take really deep cuts in their emissions: 40 percent by 2020, say, and another 40 percent by 2035. The developing countries would cap the growth in their emissions at a level not much higher than where they are now—but they must be allowed to go on growing their economies, which means that they will need more energy.

All that extra energy has to be clean, or else they will break through the cap. They will therefore have to get their new energy from wind farms or solar arrays or nuclear plants, all of which are more expensive than the cheap coal-fired power plants they rely on now. Who pays the difference in the cost? The rich countries do, by technology transfers and direct subsidies.

What makes this lopsided deal fair is the history behind it. Emissions in the developed countries have stabilised or declined slightly (except for Canada, where they continue to soar), but they are still at a very high level. Indeed, what has made these countries rich is burning fossil fuels for the past 150-200 years—and in doing so, they have taken up almost all the available space.

In the early 19th century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air was 280 parts per million. It is now 390 ppm, and four-fifths of that extra CO2 was put there by the ancestors of the one billion people who live in the developed countries. The point of no return, after which we risk runaway warming, is a rise in average global temperature of two degrees Celsius. That is equivalent to 450 ppm of carbon dioxide.

All we have left to play with is the distance between 390 ppm and 450 ppm, and on a business-as-usual basis we’ll cover it in less than 30 years. All the economic growth of rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil—3-4 billion people—has to fit into that narrow band of 60 ppm that the developed countries left for them.

That is why the post-Kyoto deal must be lopsided—but it is still politically impossible to sell that deal to people in the developed countries, most of whom are (wilfully) ignorant of that history.

Dyer, like virtually all liberals on this topic, fails to grasp the nettle here. The truth is that a two-thirds reduction in global emissions, which has got to be the long-term goal, means -- indeed, requires -- a radical revolution in economic expectations: it will mean not just smaller cars, but less travel, less air conditioning (in an ever hotter world, ugh), less heating, less housing, less clothing, less meat, less procreation... in general, it means LESS.

Such a shift would entail a most profound political transformation: for at least the last sixty years, and arguably the last two hundred, modern governments (of whatever ideological stripe, from Lenin to Hitler to Thatcher) have staked their claims to legitimacy on the premise and promise of delivering MORE. This ideology of endless growth -- call it "development" or "modernization" or whatever you'd like -- is the common assumption across all political systems; it is the fundament of how modern societies and polities understand what we are all about.

The Republicans are alas not wrong when they say that a serious effort to restrain greenhouse gases means a full-scale assault on "the American way of life." Few climate-change liberals are actually willing to admit this openly, even to themselves. (Nick Stern's line that, "Oh, it's only going to cost us 1% of GDP" is just hooey.)

Abandoning the ideology of endless growth means nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of government and society. Pace Dwyer, that is the real reason why it is "politically impossible to sell that deal to people in the developed countries" -- not because the masses are "wilfully ignorant of history," but because elites (political and economic) have no idea how to legitimate themselves absent the promise of endless growth.

Until we abandon the ideology of endless growth, there will be no popular will to significantly curb GHG emissions, nor any elite will to do.

Eventually, of course, the ideology of endless growth will give way, as all ideologies eventually do. But personally, I doubt that it will happen voluntarily. Rather, as the impact of global warming starts to become severe, smashing cities and dessicating countrysides, it will make further growth impossible. What will replace it will be a focus on saving what we can of what we have left.

Happily, I also doubt that any of this will happen in my lifetime (then again, I don't give myself that much time), but I think it's very possible that this transformation will begin to take place toward the end of the century.

Then again, if humanity has kept burning coal/oil in a BAU manner for another half century, then the amount of baked-in climate change the planet will be in for is truly scary to contemplate.

Louis XIV famously remarked, "Après moi, le déluge." Our generation is rendering this prediction literal.

An open letter to so-called 'climate change skeptics'

2009-12-03T05:10:00.001-08:00

As I've been posting recently on climate change-related issues, I've been getting a lot of flak from wingnuts who are claiming that climate change is a cult, some kind of a modern environmentalist religion, bent on encouraging reckless and unnecessary governmental interventions into the economy and society. More recently, the denialists have felt emboldened by the revelation that a few scientists at the Hadley climate research unit in Britain have been fooling around with some of their data. They claim that this represents the "nail in the coffin of anthropogenic climate change". They claim, further, that it is they, the climate change deniers, who are in fact the true bearers of the properly skeptical scientific method, whereas all the thousands of other actual scientists who have been involved in climate research for decades are just a bunch of socialist conspirators.

Now, in general it's a waste of time to argue with people who are ignorant, insane, or deliberately mendacious -- which are really the only three possible ways to explain these opinions. But since this political movement is feeling its oats this week, I think it's worth writing an open letter to the self-styled "climate change skeptics." Here goes:

I should begin by confessing: I was a skeptic for many many years myself -- for most of the 1990s, in fact. I just didn't think that the puny human race could possibly affect something as mighty as the planetary climate. Could we humans actually be a geologic force? It seemed absurd on its face.

Then I sat down and actually read the third IPCC report (2001). Have any of you high-minded "skeptics" have actually read any of the IPCC Reports, or any other serious climate science studies? (Or do you learn all your "science" from the op-ed pages of the WSJ and talk radio? Just askin'.) If not, I recommend it. Because I have to tell you, it's impossible to read that report and come away unconvinced that our fossil fuel-based civilization faces anything other than a very serious long-term problem with the climate.

In truth, I would mainly feel sorry for you skeptics, if your political effect weren't so pernicious. It's like you're a bunch of kids sitting on the beach who've built a huge sand castle at the water's edge at low tide. Along comes another kid who says -- hey, you guys are going to have a serious problem when the tide comes in. It's not "dogma" or "religion" on his part that makes him say that. Nor does it make you clever to argue that the parents disagree about just how high the tide is going to be; or to holler about the local fisherman lied last week about the tidal schedule; or to tell your little brother, who's crying about the impending doom to his castle, that a "tidal wave" isn't actually caused by tides; or even to observe that the local tides have been a lot lower than expected the last few days. All those sorts of argument -- which are precisely the kind that you deniers generally make -- is mere sophistry, and it would be simply laughable if the problem weren't so serious.

But it is serious, and you guys are a bunch of ostriches.

Let's be absolutely direct: the statement that human civilization faces a very serious long-term climate problem isn't a matter of dogma, and it isn't religion -- even if, as you rightly point out, some people treat it as such. Rather, it's simply a matter of reading the evidence. That evidence is incredibly broad-based, and has been produced by literally thousands of scientists working in more than a dozen fields, ranging from atmospheric chemistry to glaciology to palynology to ecology to archaeology.

Are there some liars and frauds among these? No doubt. Are there a few individual credentialed scientists who deny the theory of climate change wholesale? No doubt. But that proves literally nothing about the collective body of evidence -- a body which points entirely in the same direction, even if all the precise feedback mechanisms of this incredibly complex thing called "the climate" are not fully understood in all their interrelated detail.

The bottom line is simple: if humans keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the rising rate we're doing now, then the planet's climate is going to change as radically as it did at the end of the Pleistocene. Will that mean the end of homo sapiens? Highly unlikely. Will it mean the end of modern civilization? Almost certainly.

Now, with that said, there's plenty of room for debate about what is to be done about this challenge, who should do it, how fast it needs to be done, and so on. I'm actually with Bjorn Lomborg (and if you don't know who he is and what he says, then you don't even belong in this conversation) on a lot of his criticism of the more alarmist wing of the climate change debate.

But to deny the fact of anthropogenic climate change itself is criminally insane or ignorant.

In truth, allowing deniers to have a voice in the policy debate about what to do about climate change makes as much sense as allowing Christian Scientists to have a voice in health care reform. Alas, there's a huge constituency that desperately wants to believe that climate change science is bunk, because they (very rightly, in my opinion) realize that dealing seriously with GHG emissions will require dismantling or at least radically scaling back their fossil-fuel-intensive way of life. But that motivation doesn't make their beliefs honorable, much less correct.

The lived experience of climate change

2009-12-02T05:21:00.000-08:00

What will be the lived human experience of climate change? To date, most answers to this question have tended to succumb to one of two characteristic kinds of cognitive biases. The first sort of bias is to assume that the impact will unfold gradually and steadily, perhaps even below a level at which it will be noticeable within a single human lifetime. Humans have developed this bias on the basis of several millennia of an unusually stable global climate. Insofar as the climate has changed in the last four or five thousand years, the shifts have been minor and slow, barely noticeable as such to the inhabitants at the time. For example, the Little Age, which lasted about from AD 1450-1850 made some marginal farmland less cultivatable (most notably killing off the Norse settlement in Greenland), but was not formally observed by those who lived through the period, but instead was only reconstructed by paleoclimatologists in the twentieth century.

However, recent climate science has shown definitively two fundamental facts. The first is that the rate of increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is unprecedented, perhaps in the entire geological history of the earth, and that such atmospheric shifts have in the past always resulted in a radically changed climate on the earth. The prospects are alarming: should humans burn all remain fossil fuels over the course of the next couple of hundred years (or if warming of the arctic tundra incites a feedback mechanism releasing large amounts of methane), then absent some radical carbon sequestration or geoengineering, CO2 atmospheric carbon levels will reach levels that have not been seen since the Eocene (~50 million years ago) – when sea levels were 150 feet higher and palm trees shaded crocodiles on Alaska’s North Slope.

The second important recent scientific discovery is that the climate stability of the last five or six millennia is in fact relatively unusual. During many phases of the last two hundred thousand years since homo sapiens emerged there have been wild swings in the climate from century to century or even decade to decade. Despite this history, however, scientists (including the IPCC scenarios) tend to forecast incipient climate change as a steady, continuous (albeit perhaps rapid) ascent to a hotter and more hydrologically active Earth. We see this in innumerable steadily upward sloping curves that show increases in carbon load, temperature, rainfall, and so on. Only rarely is it considered that in fact the lived human experience of these changes may be something quite different.

In meteorological terms, it may be reasonable to depict climate change as a steady progression towards a warmer Earth. In fact, the lived human experience of climate change is likely not to be one of steady continuous change, but rather will take the form of a series of bone-jarring discontinuities: climate change will be experience as a series of sudden "events" that radically destabilize existing physical infrastructure, political institutions, and human lives, in each case producing sudden phase shifts from one state to another, akin to the physical shift that H2O experiences at 0°C from ice to water, or at 100°C from water to vapor. Stewart Brand quotes me on this point in his new Whole Earth Discipline:

"While a single extreme event may be relatively easy to withstand, a second in succession is likely to be far more devastating, as normal resiliency measures are built to deal with one but not multiple consecutive extreme events." Governments, [Gilman] concludes, "will experience climate change not as a smooth transformation, but rather as a series of radical discontinuities—as a series of bewildering 'oh shit' events. Environmentally failed states are a nontrivial possibility."

The severity and rapid succession of these weather events are likely to test the systems that support our nations like nothing we have seen in modern history.

In fact, not only at the first-order level of changes to the weather, but also (perhaps even more so) at the level of second order impacts, the changes being wrought on by global climate are likely to take the form of abrupt, phase shifts. For example, at the first-order level of the weather, a coastline may remain more or less stable and constant for decades, and then suddenly and permanently shift abruptly back by hundreds of meters in the aftermath of s single massive storm surge. At the second-order level, likewise, a civilization may remain more or less stable, even in the face of repeated weather-related crisis, before finally tipping over into full-blown collapse. As Brand explains:

Repetition knocks you down; duration kills you. Complex societies can handle drought, but not multi-decade drought. That's the historic civilization killer, says archaeologist Brian Fagan. It brought down the ancient empires of West Asia and Central America. When the rains fail, agriculture fails, the cities convulse and empty, and what’s left of the society builds shacks in the ruins of its former glory. In this century the effects of rising sea levels, catastrophic as they may be, could look temporary and fixable compared to the effects of permanent drought.

If one sort of cognitive bias is to assume that climate change will be experienced as a steady, progressive event, then an equally pernicious cognitive error is to assume that the impact of climate change will be sudden and extreme, involving the total collapse of human civilization virtually overnight, such as that depicted in the (alas, quite silly) movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. As with the previous sort of cognitive error, this view does contain a kernel of truth, as a corrective to the cognitive bias that assumes that climate change will be a smooth, gradual process, one that will give individuals, corporations, and governments plenty of time to plan and adjust. However, the image of human civilization flipping wholesale from our currently allegedly stable climax state to a globally synchronized civilizational collapse is deeply misleading, at two levels.

In the first place, as population ecologists have long known, collapse usually is not an overnight event where a population moves from a climax state to total annihilation. Rather, collapse more typically happens as a phased process, taking the form of what be might described, to invert the phrase of Stephen J. Gould, as a series of "punctuated equilibria." For example, the environmentally-induced "collapse" of New Orleans is in the process of taking place in just such a phased manner. The first crisis took place with Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, which destroyed half the city, of which only a fraction was rebuilt. Today, New Orleans has restablized as a smaller, less complex urban environment. However, when the inevitable next major hurricane hits, again a major portion of the city is all but certain to be destroyed, of which again only a portion (if any) will be rebuilt. And this cycle may repeat itself several times before the city is eventually abandoned altogether. Each of these hurricanes forms a "punctuation mark" that marks a phase shift to a new (lower) level of organizational complexity and size, which itself will remains largely stable until the next punctuating event. And of course, in the meanwhile, life continues more or less normally in the rest of the United States, albeit with significant impact on surrounding communities that are absorbing climate refugees from Louisiana.

The second way in which the specter of radical and total collapse is misleading is that it usually assumes that the impact will take place uniformly, that is, that civilizational collapse will affect everyone equally everywhere. Nothing could be further from the truth. William Gibson is often quoted as saying, "The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed" and he's absolutely right. But what's less frequently remarked is that this insight applies not just to the cool gizmos and innovative forms of social organization and other similar romantic objects of futurists, but just as much to the nasty impacts of burgeoning global public bads, including those produced by climate change. Thus the victims of vast cyclones in the Ganges and Irrawaddy deltas, or unending droughts in Yemen and Darfur, or cataclysmic brushfires in Australia are all "living the future" just as surely as the whiz kids of Silicon Valley or Bangalore.

Movies of the decade

2009-11-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

My top ten movies of the decade, based purely on how much of an emotional impact they had on me:

United 93 An almost perfect movie that imagines what it was like inside the one hijacked 9/11 flight that missed its target. The closing sequence, not despite but because of its inexorability, is perhaps the most physically powerful scene I've ever experienced in the movies. I was completely overcome.
The Lives of Others Three hours of shots of interiors and dialog, with virtually no action whatsoever, that nonetheless offers a riveting recreation of the psychology of a police state, from the point of view of a true believer in the system who is nonetheless a humanist.
Children of Men What if the experience of life inside the Gaza Strip became the pervasive future, in a world with no children, and therefore no hope for the future? The dystopia is so comprehensive that even the redemptive moment feels merely like a prelude to worse horrors.
In the Mood for Love A sad and beautiful account of the possibility of romance in the shadow of life's disappointments. Subtly erotic, with an endless parade of beautiful outfits for Maggie Cheung.
Waltz with Bashir An animated Israeli movie about the difficulty of working through memories of extreme trauma. The animation induces in the audience the same sense of dissociation from the depicted events that the characters in the film experience as they try to remember what they went through as young soldiers in South Lebanon, in the run-up to the Ariel Sharon-sponsored massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Borat Vile, obscene, politically incorrect -- and utterly hilarious.
The Diving Bell & the Butterfly Grim yet oddly humorous first-person account of what it is like to lose all one's physical capacities while maintaining an intact mind.
Memento A classic film noir that puts you in the hero's no-memory shoes by being narrated backward. Carrie-Anne Moss does a brilliant turn as the femme fatale.
Sideways Side-splittingly funny account of a couple of odd-bedfellow friends going on a joint bender in opposite directions.
Downfall The definitive view from inside Hitler's bunker (in odd ways parallel to United 93's reimagining of a hellish scene from the inside). Bruno Ganz gives the performance of the decade as Hitler.

For a longer list, check out this one from the Times (of which I've seen about half).

Not with a bang, but in a rolling boil....

2009-11-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

Tim Flannery summarizes James Lovelock's prediction as to how continued greenhouse gas emissions will impact human civilization:

Lovelock has spent most of his career trying to understand the consequences of increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. In his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, he argues that Earth's system of self-regulation is being overwhelmed by greenhouse gas pollution and that Earth will soon jump from its current cool, stable state into a dramatically hotter one. All climatologists acknowledge the existence of such climatic jumps—as occurred for example at the end of the last ice age. But chaos theory dictates that the scale and timing of such leaps are inherently unpredictable, which means that they cannot be incorporated into the computer models of Earth's climate system that such scientists use to project future climate change. Yet this is precisely what Lovelock attempts to do—using his own computer modeling—in The Vanishing Face of Gaia. A new climatic jump, he concludes, will occur within the next few years or decades, and will involve an abrupt increase in average global surface temperature of 9 degrees Celsius—from 15 to 24 degrees Celsius (59 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit). Such a shift, he contends, will trigger the collapse of our global civilization and the near extinction of humanity.

This will be a temperature jump greater than that while occurred at the start of the Holocene (the end of the last Ice Age), but with humans now overwhelmingly sedentary, our capacity to move in response to the northward shift of climate zones is much less than it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Abrupt change in the weather will be followed somewhat more slowly, but perhaps even more devastatingly, by the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and consequently rising sea levels. Even under Lovelock's most dire scenario, this process will unfold over several hundred years, albeit mainly in the form of statis followed by sudden shifts in coastlines after storm surges. Florida will shrink like this:

Long before sea levels rise 50 meters, however, half of Bangladesh (home to 150m+ people) will go underwater:
Where will those 100m people go?

Modernization theory never dies

2009-10-16T07:58:00.001-07:00

Steve Coll, the President of the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank, trots out the classic liberal reason for neoimperial projects, namely, we have to bring modernity to the barbarians. You think I exaggerate? Here he is, verbatim:

United States has a vital national security interest in a stable, modernizing South Asia. Pakistan, India, all of South Asia -- a billion and a half people are on the cusp of joining modern Asia in a march to prosperity, political normalcy and stability.

If Pakistan blows up, if the Taliban succeed in radicalizing local populations, then this region will be chronically unstable for years to come.

And why does that matter to the United States? Not least because there are more than 100 nuclear weapons already finished and extant in this region. But this is a region that, like Southeast Asia and Latin America, has the opportunity to stabilize, gel, integrate economically and march toward modernity.

As always, that "march to modernity" is depicted as basically a historical inevitability as long as some disease of the transition process is not allowed to go untreated, which we can do by surgically removing the tumor of anti-modern forces.

The Taliban are essentially all that stands in the way of that project. It's more complicated than that, because the Taliban are a creature of dysfunctional Pakistani security services and lots of other unsolved problems. But the United States has a vital national interest in making sure that the Taliban do not destabilize South Asia.

Farcical, I know, but this is literally the EXACT SAME argument that liberals made for escalating in Vietnam during the 1960s: just a small nudge and these people will arrive at the promised land of modernity -- that is, become just "like us" -- and we'll never have to worry about conflict with them ever again. We know how that worked out last time. (For more on that history, read here and here.)

Hat tip: RM.

The project in Afghanistan

2009-10-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

Question: what do you get when you cross Don Quixote and Sisyphus? The answer: General Stanley A. McChrystal!

Dexter Filkins, in his nearly hagiographical profile of Gen. McChrystal, summarizes the aims underpinning McChrystal's call for more troops for Afghanistan as follows:

What McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge — a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men.

In other words, the goal is to turn the most socially and politically devastated country on earth, one rife with hostile religious fanatics, into a kind of Asian Switzerland. No duh that's going to take a lot more troops and resources.

Let's be blunt: this is completely insane as an objective--insane in the same way that jumping out of an airplane with no chute is insane. Nation-building of this sort has never succeeded anywhere, and not for lack of trying. What's more, if that's the objective, then the resource commitments that McChrystal is asking for are bathetically modest. The 40,000 extra troops that McChrystal wants aren't going to come anywhere close to doing the trick.

There's an entirely different alternative, of course, which is to redefine US and NATO objectives in Afghanistan, and to match the resources to meet that redefined objective. Here's one thumbnail alternative: pull back from local commitments, work on developing intelligence sources, and make it clear that we will kill from afar anyone we can see consorting with known bad guys. It ain't very humanitarian, but at least it's a project that can succeed and won't bankrupt the nation.

Obama/Gorby??

2009-10-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

A few times over the last year, I've asked whether Obama might end up in the role of an American Gorbachev, graciously ushering his country to a lesser global role.

Today, Glenn Beck points out that the last sitting head of state to win the Nobel Peace Prize was... Mikhail Gorbachev.

More on the politics of deviant globalization

2009-10-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

I am reading Stephen Ellis's fantastic paper (sub req.) on the evolution of "West Africa's International Drug Trade," one of the most detailed and insightful analyses I've seen of the social, economic, political, and historical contexts for the rise of deviant globalization.

The paper is worth reading in its entirety, but I'd like to take this chance to riff on some of the political themes that Ellis alludes to but does not develop fully. Ellis notes that deviant globalization thrives in political contexts where there is "ineffective policing, governments who have a reputation for venality, and a relative lack of international attention" (p. 194). The point is deeper than merely the banal insight that corruption and crime go hand in hand. Rather, there is a broader political context for deviant globalization, in that black market economies both reinforce and are reinforced by "local authorities operating unofficial networks of governance rooted in local social realities" (p. 195).

Generalizing these insights, we can observe that deviant globalization undermines the authority of the central state by focusing the production and reproduction of political capital on local rather than national-level institutions. This is precisely why the UN Office of Drug Control, for example, argues that crime "hinders development." But this is true only if we insist on conceiving of "development" in the mainstream sense that pervades the thinking of the United Nations, the US government, and most "development" NGOs. In this mainstream sense, which has a hoary intellectual history, "development" is predicated on (if not, indeed, coterminous with) the extension of centralized state authority.

Of course, that mainstream conception of "development" is at odds with the ambitions of locals (and not just elites) for whom the central state does often literally less than nothing for them. The empowering of the centralized state is, for many deviant globalizers, simply a way to improve the capacity of remote elites to rob them. And while that might strike the UN as a laudable definition of development, you can understand why, say, Afghan opium farmers would take quite a different view of what "development" means.

For most poor people, insofar as "development" means anything, it is not about state authority per se, but rather about more practical matters like earning money and getting social services such as education, infrastructure, health care, etc. Among mainstream developmentalists, however, the myth still is that the state is the institution that delivers such services, but the truth is that the post-structural adjustment state (that is, most Third World states today) is at best intermittantly effective at delivering such services.

In most places, the rolled-back post-neoliberal state has been the reality for so long that people's political ambitions are no longer focused on state-building or state-capture (except, perhaps, to take over the rents that accrue to running a kleptocratic state). Over the last 20-30 years, what has collapsed is a grassroots belief that a "modernizing" or "developmental" state will be the primary vehicle for improving the lives of the masses. A state-centric conception of development may still animate some elites in Washington, New York, or London, but in most of the rest of the world, the people have, shall we say, moved on. Having made a virtue of post-SAP necessity, deviant globalizers now actively prefer to operate in "crippled state" environments.

The goal for such actors remains what it ever was: to make a living and to increase their political authority and autonomy. What has changed is the mechanism, and one of the most popular ones has been to join up in illicit economies, where participants can make windfall profits by arbitraging the moral compunctions of the West. This has been going on for so long by now that this alternative mode of "development" (if that term still means anything so redefined) is spawning a set of political commitments that are orthogonal to traditional national ones. Tip O'Neill's famous observation that all politics is local has never been more true than in today's deviantly globalized world.

Finally, one cannot overemphasize what a huge ideological shift this redefinition of development represents -- a complete sea change from the Marx-inspired revolutionary ambitions of yesteryear's underclasses. As Jon Lee Anderson notes in his New Yorker article on Rio's gangs, quoting a former Marxist guerrilla turned politician:

"Nobody wants to make revolution anymore. What these people with the guns want today is their immediate share of the consumption culture. It's so childish, and morally childish, and they kill like children too--like in a kid's war game" If they ever acquired an ideology, they could threaten the state, he said. "For now they are a totally entropic and anarchic group of young people who have figured out how to get what they want, which is basically, clothing cars and respect."

Indeed what has happened in Rio applies, in varying degrees, throughout Latin America--most notably in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia. Two decades after the collapse of Communism, the region's Marxist guerillas have disappeared, only to be replaced by violent drug mafias.

So, to end this long post with another thought that could be the subject for an equally lengthy post, the answer the question "Who won the Cold War?" is that the gangsters did.

How the Internet can strengthen dictatorships

2009-10-05T14:03:00.001-07:00

Quote of the Day

2009-09-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

Gore Vidal, speaking in Britain, explains how Obama misunderstands today's GOP:

Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word 'conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they’re fascists.

How international relations have changed

2009-09-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

I just re-read Susan Strange’s The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, conceived and written in 1989-1993, first published in 1996, and now in its 12th reprinting. It stands up remarkably well as a description of the way that authority has been ebbing away from sovereign actors toward (on the one hand) big businesses, bankers, and accountants, and (on the other) nongovernmental organizations and criminals. Strange's basic argument for why international relations must take into account sub-national actors strikes me as having been largely validated by the events of the last decade and a half:

State power is declining. It is less effective on those basic matters that the market, left to itself, has never been able to provide – security against violence, stable money for trade and investment, a clear system of law and the means to enforce it, and a sufficiency of public goods like drains, water supplies, infrastructures for transport and communications…. Many states are coming to be deficient in these fundamentals. Their deficiency is not made good by greater activity in marginal matters, matters that are optional for society [such as greater regulatory meddling or social legislation].

I recommend the book warmly.

However, there are also two particular ways in which the book strikes me as notably dated, and not just because she won the methodological argument about making the discipline of IR more inclusive.

First, it’s striking how large the shadow of Communism looms in the book. Throughout the book, centrally planned socialist alternatives remain alive as a counterpoint to the emergent global political economy. Were the same book to be written today, no one would bother to make such contrasts. When she was writing the book in 1994-5, however, centrally planned socialism remained the conceptual elephant in the room, albeit less for its threatening aspect than for its putrescent stench. A student reading the book for the first time today, for whom centrally planned socialism exists only as a discredited anachronism in places like Cuba and North Korea, will doubtless wonder why Strange keeps contrasting the emergent system she is describing to a mode of political economy which today seems as dead as feudalism.

The second shadow that looms over the book (in this case, cast not from the past but from the future) is the rise of China, the prospect of which appears nowhere in the book. When discussing possible objections to her thesis, Strange acknowledges that East Asian state-led development may be an exception to her argument. Her referent countries, however, are limited to the (then so-called) "Asian Tigers," that is Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore -- which she rightly dismisses as exceptions produced by the Cold War. But the notion that mainland China might soon emerge as a worldbeating economic player, still led by the centralized political power of the Communist Party, remains completely unforeseen. Here the dating is obvious: no one today could write about the relationship between the balance of power between states and non-states without including an extensive discussion of the Chinese example. For Strange in 1995, however, China warrants only a couple of passing mentions, most of which are in reference to the historical importance of the Chinese Triad gangs.

None of this is to take away from Strange’s book, which as I say remains largely correct, as well as beautifully and concisely written. But it does show how much the world has changed in the last fifteen years.

What to remember about 9/11

2009-09-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

From John Robb, fighting words (in several senses):

The only portion of the American national security system that actually worked on 9/11 was.... drum roll please.... the formation of spontaneous civilian militias. From the counter-attack on the one plane that didn't hit its intended target to militias that evacuated people in NYC. The hideously expensive agencies and departments did nothing (which is one of the reasons, as perverse as it sounds, we went to war in Iraq: to decisively prove the utility of these agencies and departments before a global audience).

Collapsitarian quote of the day

2009-09-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

John Michael Greer, author of The Long Descent and the most thoughtful of the collapsitarians, fisks a recent debate in The Guardian about whether the end of industrial civilization is nigh.

His conclusion is that, yes, the end is certainly nigh, and that we who are alive today should appreciate our unique privilege at living in this historical moment, and not the ones that came before or will come later. Money:

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren's grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that....

We do no one a favor, least of all ourselves, by trying to sugarcoat that very unpalatable reality. Nor do we gain anything by playing the fox to industrial civilization's grapes, and insisting that the extraordinary gifts the recent past has given us are sour because they are about to pass out of our reach. During the age that is coming to an end, the billion or so of us who have lived in the industrial world have enjoyed comforts and opportunities that our species had never known before and almost certainly will never know again. Those could never have been anything but temporary, they were distributed no more fairly than anything else passed around by human hands, and a wiser species would likely have had more common sense than to launch itself on the trajectory we followed, but it's as distorting to dismiss the extraordinary achievements of our age as it would be to ignore the terrible cost for those achievements that will be paid by us and our descendants.

Stoicism rather than fatalism seems like the order of the day.

Twittering instead of blogging

2009-09-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

If you're wondering where the blogging has gone, it's mainly migrated to Twitter. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/nils_gilman.

Deviant Globalization Journal: Kidney Market

2009-09-04T08:58:00.001-07:00

CNN claims ten percent of kidneys globally are trafficked illicitly:

The Station Fire

2009-09-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

Amazing time-lapse footage of the San Gabriels from the L.A. Basin:

Building a Better Liberia

2009-08-31T02:47:00.000-07:00

Clearly there is hope now for West Africa:

Photo credit: JB

Whose side of modernity are the Taliban on?

2009-07-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Apposite to my screed the other day about the stupidities derived from using modernization theory to understand the Afghan situation, here we have an important article about how Pakistani efforts to "restabilize" the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which had been run by the Taliban until the recent Pakistani army offensive, are being hampered because the "landowners are still in exile."

Reading the article, it's quite clear that what the Pakistani regime wants is to reestablish the feudal land tenure system, whereas what the Taliban stands for (economically) is the dethroning of these "traditional elites." Without belaboring the point, it's quite clear that the Taliban is hardly a "traditional" force, and the Pakistani army certainly should not be assumed to be unambiguously on the side of "modernity."

The more general point is that whenever"the language of modernity/modernization" gets deployed as an alleged explanatory vehicle, it's almost always obscuring a (usually confused) ideological agenda. "Modern" is assumed to be good and desirable (though the actualy substantive content can vary) whereas its opposite is bad. But even a cursory glance at the Taliban should give pause to such analysis.

The pervasiveness of modernization theory

2009-07-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

This post is pretty narrowly associated with my academic interests, but one of the things that continues to stun me about modernization theory is how it just won't go away. It's been attacked, discredited and destroyed in more ways than Robert Deniro in Cape Fear, and yet likewise, it seems almost impossible to kill off. Not only does it still get a respectible hearing in the Establishment foreign policy press, it also continues to explicitly inform policymaking in the many critical theaters. Specifically, the militarized nation-building projects the U.S. is pursuing in both Afghanistan and Iraq remain deeply indebted to a theory that one would long ago have thought was not just dismantled intellectually but also discredited politically.

And yet, you can't excape arrant nonsense like this, from Michael Daxner's contribution to the latest issue of the eminently mainstream if wonkishly liberal World Policy Journal:

As a whole, Afghans want their collective integrity and dignity restored; they want and need the traumas from 30 years of terrible violence to be eased with food, justice, and employment. They want their long efforts toward modernity revived. Indeed, though it may be difficult for Westerners to imagine that Afghanistan even remotely resembles a modern nation, there have been significant attempts to modernize the state and society stretching back nearly a century from King Amanullah Khan, who assumed the throne in 1919, through President Daoud Khan, who initiated progressive rule from 1973 to 1978, and on through the Soviet occupation. Even the last 30 years of war effectively continued the process of modernizing the country--in its own rather cynical, but apparently irreversible, way. Stinger missiles, sattelite phones, guerrilla warfare tactics, and the ever-present Toyota Hi-Lux (a 4x4 vehicle favored by the Taliban) are all vestiges of this modern era. We must understand that decades of conflict have created enormous tensions between traditional lifestyles and modern attitudes.

Where to begin? Note first the condescending attitude toward the reader, that dresses up misleading platitudes as profundities that we probably just don't get. Then consider the embedded assumption that there is a "collective" Afghan people, who have a single discernable will. (That would be the "nation" that the coalition forces are supposedly helping to "build.") Then there's the assumption that what this collective will desires is some quantum Daxner calls "modernity," which is not only the desired future of this supposedly unitary Afghan people, but also, oddly, part of Afghanistan's past, which we detect in residual form in "Stinger missiles, satellite phones, and guerrilla warfare."

Those menacing "vestiges" do not cause the author to question whether there might, in fact, have been something not so great about those anterior modernizing efforts, from the ecologically disastrous dam-building of the 1950s, through the sanguinary Soviet occupation, down to the galvanzing discipline of the Taliban. Failing that, Daxner assumes that the opposite of modernity must be "tradition," thus failing to grasp the nature of the forces who oppose what he calls "modernity."

In fact, virtually the reverse of all these assumptions is closer to the truth about Afghanistan. First, the Taliban are not a "traditional" group in any sense of the word. They are an artifact and output of the horrors the country has experienced over the last 50 years--a reaction, quite specifically, to the manifold and inevitable failures of the various awful modernizing projects that Daxner speaks of with bizarre reverence. In other words, while the Taliban is undoubtedly vicious, culturally retrograde, and completely disdainful of all the pieties of liberal humanitarianism, we should not let this obscure the fact that they are also adamantly opposed to "traditional" tribal leadership, and by some measures (not unrelatedly) the most effective centralizing political force that Afghanistan has ever experienced.

What's more, pace Daxner, Afghanistan is not a nation in any meaningful sense of the term (e.g. a people who imagine themselves as forming a single community). In fact, other than a sliver of once and future expats (and, ahem, the Taliban), there's virtually no one in the country that actually wants an effective, unified central government. Rather, Afghanistan is a multiethnic land run by warlords whose power bases reside in the control of various local resources (poppies, timber, fruit), from which they extract rents and in exchange for which they deliver (more or less capriciously) various kinds of political goods to the local populace, including education, infrastructure, security, and justice. No one with any power wants the country converted into some Asiatic version of Switzerland, which is apparently Daxner's fantasy.

All this has sharp implications for policy. It's true that the occupiers are not universally scorned. After all, they provide a resource stream from which rents can be extracted. But the interest in effecting the changes that these humanitarian "development" moneys are supposedly trying to bring about is minimal at best. For this reason, any political alliances we may form can only be tactical. Trying to produce a politics based on parliamentary democracy is worse than simply a waste of time: it is actually likely to make the overall situation more combustible. In general, trying to judge success or failure in Afghanistan according to a yardstick defined by an idealized fantasy of the West will only lead to the wrongs kinds of conclusions about what is relevant to American or NATO security concerns in the region.

Of course, if you see the world through the lens of modernization theory, you'll never get any of those insights. Which is why it's so scary that, despite everything, despite half a century of everything, modernization theory continues to occupy Washington's mind like some horrible intellectual golem.

McNamara: A Knave, not a Fool

2009-07-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

Robert Strange McNamara died last week, and with his passing virtually all the major policy players involved in the conception and implementation of the U.S.'s initial strategy in Vietnam have now died.

McNamara occupies a special place in the history of the War, first as the Defense Secretary who oversaw the escalation from 1961-1967, and much later (much much later), and almost as famously, for his public self-flagellation over what he called in his 1995 book In Retrospect the "wrong, terribly wrong" nature of the War.

For some time in the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War was often known as "McNamara's War." There was a good reason for this. One of the most disturbing things about the Vietnam War was the way it appeared to be a grotesque apotheosis of instrumental rationality bereft of all moral grounding: McNamara's decisions about strategy and tactics for killing millions of peasants were cost-benefited, game-theorized, and run through all the latest and most rigorous forms of algorithmic analysis. This approach to the War belonged entirely to McNamara, the former Ford Motor Company CEO and "whiz kid," who more than anyone else embodied what David Halberstam called, in one of journalism's most witheringly ironic phrases, "the best and the brightest." Whatever one's critiques of War, one would have been hard pressed to deny the stringently "rational" nature of the War.

I came to McNamara as a young historian of American ideas and foreign policy during McNamara's heyday, so my revulsion from McNamara was not viscerally bound up with the immediate politics of the War. Instead, it had more to do with McNamara's insidious effort to rehabilitate his moral reputation late in life with the publication of In Retropsect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, and even more with Errol Morris's brilliant but flawed movie, "The Fog of War." I say "flawed" because Morris bought McNamara's self-perception that his late-in-life alleged mea culpa constituted some kind of "moral seriousnessness" on McNamara's part.

It did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, to his dying day McNamara never understood the moral nature of what he had done in Vietnam. The "lessons" he drew from his experiences running the Vietnam War were all operational, instrumental lessons--lessons about how to improve cognition, decision-making processes. If only we had had better information about the enemy, McNamara begs, or better communication channels with the enemy, then it all would have turned out so much better. In sum, McNamara's desperate plea in both "The Fog of War" and In Retrospect is for people to perceive his role in the War as the result of foolishness, not knavery.

In fact, however, the essential moral crime of Vietnam was not that it was operationally mishandled, but that it was evil--it was evil for the United States to kill millions of peasants on the other side of the world over an ideological dispute. Full stop. And that core moral point is one that McNamara never, ever copped to.

Yes, a better operational approach might have made some marginal difference. But the fundamental problem was not an operational but a moral one. As someone once remarked about Samuel Huntington, who suffered from the same moral blindness as McNamara, he "lost the capacity to distinguish between genocide and urbanization."

When pressed by skeptical boomer interviewers, McNamara insisted that he was not asking for forgiveness, that he was not apologizing. Indeed he was not. Because to ask for foregiveness, or to apologize in a serious way, would have meant acknowledging the moral weight of his crimes--something he never did. His much quoted phrase about the War being "wrong, terribly wrong" was widely misinterpreted as an (all-too-belated) moral reckoning. But it was no such thing. In fact, what McNamara meant by this phrase was that, in his mind, the whole war was the result of a misunderstanding. The only surprise about the fact that the Vietnamese reacted to this interpretation with polite skepticism... is the fact that they were polite.

McNamara was knave, not a fool. Or perhaps he was a fool, too, but above all and to his end he was a self-serving, morally unserious knave.

The difficulty with writing about apocalypse

2009-06-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

I read Matthew Glass's Ultimatum this weekend. Only so-so. What's weak about it, as a scenario exercise, is that Glass creates his imaginary future by running forward a rather extreme set of climate numbers, and the most optimistic numbers about Chinese growth, but otherwise holding everything entirely static. Thus, despite the fact that vast evacuations of costal areas are now necessary (something he portrays only from the Olympian heights of the White House war room) and the Chinese economy is now twice the size of the U.S.'s, political alignments both domestically and globally are unaltered. How realistic is that?

What makes it so hard to prognosticate a couple of decades out, on virtually any subject, is that there are so many moving variables that one has to consider. Things Glass doesn't bother to consider, for example, is how radical genetic engineering may fundamentally change conceptions of practices of life; how major shifts in geopolitical alignments can take place very quickly (France-German, 1945-1951; U.S.-China in 1971; U.S.-Iran in 1979; U.S.-Russia in 1989, etc.); how aging populations may fundamentally change immigration politics; how coming egenry shortages are going to fundamentally shift adaptation options; and so on.

The result is that the book reads like a Bolshie Brit's fantasy about what it would be like if a belligerent version of Obama had been elected President in 2033, and then appointed Bill Kristol as his Secretary of State.

However, within that structurally weak frame, the novel is quite illuminating about how lefty Brits view American and Chinese politics today, and why ever getting an emissions deal done will be impossibly difficult.

Finally, Glass never considers that as the catastrophe happens, it may not even really be perceived as a catastrophe at all. That's the key insight of J.G. Ballard in The Drowned World.

Right wing extremists

2009-06-10T12:16:00.001-07:00

Remember that DHS report on the threat posed by domestic "right wing extremists" -- you know, the one that got the, well, right wing extremists so up in arms (if you'll pardon the expression)? Turns out to have been pretty prescient. First in Kansas, now in DC.

More here.

The Underground, Underwater

2009-06-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post this morning:

When anti-narcotics agents first heard that drug cartels were building an armada of submarines to transport cocaine, they thought it was a joke. Now U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles.

An experimental oddity just two years ago, these strange semi-submarines are the cutting edge of drug trafficking today. They ferry hundreds of tons of cocaine for powerful Mexican cartels that are taking over the Pacific Ocean route for most northbound shipments, according to the Colombian navy.

The sub-builders are even trying to develop a remote-controlled model, officials say.

"That means no crew. That means just cocaine, or whatever, inside the boat," said Michael Braun, a former chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration..."This is definitely the next generation of smuggling conveyance," said Joseph Ruddy, an assistant U.S. attorney in Tampa who prosecutes narco-mariners.

I am in the middle of reading a book called "Wired for War" which looks at the evolution of armed and autonomous robots in military operations. The author, mostly, looks at it from the perspective of established armed forces, but one can hardly ignore the more criminal possibilities. I know that martyrdom is portrayed as a virtue in reporting of terrorist operations, but that has to be a tough recruiting pitch. The assault on Islam by neo-cons was a failure, but I wonder if --when personal sacrifice is no longer a barrier to entry-- our current policy of peace through understanding will turn out to be yet another example of “fighting the last war.”

David Carradine, R.I.P.

2009-06-05T13:12:00.001-07:00

So David Carradine, who was found dead yesterday in a Thai hotel with a rope around his genitals and neck, apparently died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. Which prompted the director of Thailand's Central Institute of Forensic Science, Pornthip Rojanasunand, to make the following sage pronouncement:

"If you hang yourself by the neck, you don't need so much pressure to kill yourself. Those who get highly sexually aroused tend to forget this fact," Pornthip said.

Pornthip?

When you've lost Peggy...

2009-05-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

The Republicans are in such serious circular firing squad mode that Peggy Noonan is using the WSJ op-ed page to opine that the movement to derail Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court is populated by "idiots" and juveniles.

Green shoots?

2009-05-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

All the perfervid talk of the economy showing some "green shoots" because the second derivative of some key economic variables has turned positive is producing a classic suckers' rally. In order to believe that the economy really has found a bottom, you need to believe all of the following:

That the stock market won't overcorrect to the downside, the way it has in every previous major recession of the last century. Hmmm:

That the real estate market is at or near the bottom. Hmmm:

That the U.S. Fed has the information and tools to thread the needle between deflation and inflation: specifically, that Geithner and the other central bankers will (a) know exactly when to pull back on the massive amounts of liquidity they have injected into the markets, and then (b) actually be technically capable of doing so, and then (c) won't end up yanking the cord too hard.
That the Japanese and the Chinese will keep buying Treasuries, come hell or high water.
That all the various government stimulus bills are actually an efficient allocation mechanism and that there actually exists aggregate global demand such that the stimulus bills bring back jobs and growth in the medium term.
That the intellectual awareness of the benefits of free trade will outweight the populist pressures of democratic polities during a major recession.
That there are no big exogenous shocks, such as a major war in the Middle East, or a return of the swine flu in nastier pandemic form when the season returns in the Fall.

If you believe all that, well, then dive right in! Then again, if any of those propositions seem dubious to you, you might want to wait a little (or a lot) longer.

Bibi v. Barack

2009-05-21T04:35:00.000-07:00

The first of presumably many meetings between Obama and Netanyahu happened yesterday, with much chatter ahead of time that Obama was planning on taking a harder line on Israel's ongoing settlement activities in the West Bank, but that he was facing a tough customer for his tough-love approach in Netanyahu, whose overriding goal is to get the U.S. willing to apply a military force against Iran (the diplomatic euphemism is "serious consequences") if Iran doesn't clear back away from militarily useful nuclear activities. So how did it turn out?

The NYTimes piece offers a pretty curious piece of reporting on the matter:

Mr. Netanyahu got his timetable. “We’re not going to have talks forever,” Mr. Obama said of Iran, assuring Mr. Netanyahu that he expected to know by the end of the year whether Iran was making “a good-faith effort to resolve differences.”

But Mr. Obama did not get his settlement freeze. In fact, Mr. Netanyahu told him it would be politically difficult for him to halt the construction of settlements. That is a hurdle to the administration’s broader peace objectives because Israel’s Arab neighbors have characterized a freeze as a precondition for them to establish normal relations....

The two leaders set up working groups to deal with Iran, the Palestinian issue and Israel’s Arab neighbors. The groups will meet periodically, Israeli and American officials said. Agreeing to meet with Israel regularly to discuss the administration’s progress with Tehran keeps the pressure squarely on the United States, analysts said.

The first thing that's striking about this is the presumption that the US-Israel relationship is now adversarial. But what's even weirder is the notion that Israel is somehow capable of "pressuring" the United States. How can Israel, which is the biggest aid recipient of the U.S. and has a population, economy, and military which are each about a 50th of the U.S.'s, "pressure" the U.S.? I suppose there may be an answer to this, but it's one that the pro-Israel crowd typically responds to with puerile screams that anyone who is critical of Israel's policies or wonders why the U.S. has unfailingly backed these policies is an "anti-semite."

The second odd thing about this adversarial framing is the way that mostly unnamed sources allegedly representing both sides claim that their guy got the worse of the exchange:

“I’m asking the question, did our president get suckered?” said Martin S. Indyk [whereas] an Israeli official said [that] “Obama may be slightly less experienced than Netanyahu, but Obama knows exactly everything that the U.S. is doing."

Pretty darn weird. Reminds me a bit of how both Reagan and Gorbachev aids claimed that the other guy was getting suckered during their Reykyavik summit--the one that basically ended the Cold War.

Optimists are never pleasantly surprised

2009-05-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

I've made a number of dire predictions on this blog, some of which haven't happened (yet) and some of which have been disturbingly vindicated over the last year--notably the prediction that the money center banks would in one way or another be nationalized.

In general, I would argue that most risk and security managers are overly Gaussian in their sense of what to plan for, refusing toplan for long tail risk -- a point emphasized by the Economist's recent survey of how god-awfully the banking industry did in anticipating how bad the crisis could get:

Even Goldman Sachs, widely regarded as the best manager of risk in the industry, did not foresee quite how bad things could get. The bank's most demanding pre-crisis stress test—known as the "wow," or worst of the worst, test—took the most negative events to have happened in each market since 1998 and assumed that they got 30% worse and all happened at the same time. That still wasn't pessimistic enough.

That still wasn't pessimistic enough....

On regulatory capture, from finance to narcotics

2009-05-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

A very useful discussion of how regulatory capture takes place:

Two archetypal scenarios for regulatory capture exist. The first is an underpowered, understaffed regulator working to control a wealthy, concentrated industry. In these situations, the sheer imbalance in resources means that the regulated parties can reward or punish the agency, but not vice versa. Predictably, rational bureaucrats will choose to cater their policies to the benefit of the subjects instead of suffering their wrath – recall, a regulatory job well done rarely carries any significant benefits to its engineers. The Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service is a perfect example of a body that appears to have fallen prey to this pattern. Even a person of upstanding moral character can understand the difficulty of resisting the repeated entreaties of Exxon and the like for the sake of sticking to an unadulterated scheme of allocating oil and gas exploration rights. Someone sitting at the MMS desk may well wonder if anyone would ever notice a shift away from the prescribed approach towards one that favors the companies they deal with on a day-to-day basis. These incentives to cooperate exist even though the relationship between the regulator and the regulated parties is facially adversarial, with MMS holding rights that producers want but cannot get.

The second standard scenario for regulatory capture takes place when the same agency identifies items to source from the private sector and supervises the production of these items. The Department of Defense springs to mind as an example. The Pentagon almost certainly has the best interests of the Armed Forces in mind when it sets out its procurement goals. The combination of public (“free”) money and a desire to avoid saying one’s coworkers and superiors made a mistake, however, means that projects live on even when they go horribly wrong. Private-sector contractors benefit from bloated budgets for littoral combat ships that suffer from fundamental structural defects (the program has since been scrapped), military officers occasionally pick up a kickback, and the taxpayer ends up footing the bill. The political prominence of the Pentagon aggravates the effects of regulatory capture, since colonels know they can fight off most allegations of inefficiency by claiming that a critic is unwilling to support the troops.

Which raises an interesting question: which of these two archetypal forms does the regulatory capture of the drug enforcement bureaucracy represent?

My sense is that it's a blended model. On the one hand, it's pretty clear that the current narcotics Prohibition, by providing a basis for extremely high profit margins, represents a pretty satisfactory situation for the drug lords, which is why the "facially adversarial" relationship is actually more symbiotic than it would appear, with the ongoing Prohibition regime also being extremely beneficial to the prison-industrial complex, DEA bureaucrats, enterprising prosecutors, etc. On the other hand, it's also true that the (recently surrendered?) "war on drugs" is a story littered with failures that no one in the anti-drug bureaucracy wants to come clean on, so long as the taxpayers are willing to keep footing the bill; so in that sense, it's also a bit like archetype two.

2009-05-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

Dmitry Orlov, commenting on the swine flu:

Another thing that's peculiar is that some nations, notably China and Russia, have banned the import of American pork. Many other countries are following their example. The flu is not spread through eating pork, and so banning it is an economic move and a symbolic gesture rather than a medically motivated public safety measure. But the popular appeal of the symbolism is irresistible: here they have a chance to ban American Swine!

American Swine come in three main varieties: the Hog, the Bankster, and the Neocon. The Hog is often a public safety menace, because factory farming practices result in large groups of immunocompromised animals confined in conditions that are perfect for incubating new diseases. These practices should be banned, and banning American pork around the world seems like a step in the right direction.

The Banksters who have crashed the world financial system through their fraudulent activities should be banned around the world as well. In addition, it would be nice if they were rounded up and herded into capitalist reeducation camps, where, thanks to hard physical labor, daily capitalist indoctrination sessions, and compulsory public self-criticism, they would, over the course of months or years, be reformed into model capitalists, ready to rejoin a free market economy. Perhaps our Chinese friends would be nice enough to send over some advisers, to help us set up these camps.

Unlike the Hogs and the Banksters, the Neocons who illegally murdered, imprisoned and tortured countless civilians across the world should be exported — extradited, that is, to stand trial at an international war crimes tribunal. The list is not that long: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales and a few others. All the ones who "were only following orders" are not important enough. The United States government is bound by international treaty to either prosecute or extradite these people. Since prosecution in the US is unlikely to be carried out properly, extradition remains as the only option. President Obama's recent paying of lip service to this being "a nation of laws" is no substitute for action.

Of the three varieties of American Swine, the actual pigs seem like the least troublesome, swine flu notwithstanding. We should certainly do all we can to stay healthy, but in the meantime we should stay focused on doing something about the other two varieties of American Swine.

Telling it like it is

2009-05-09T08:56:00.001-07:00

Bill O'Reilly makes explicit the conservative political agenda: to defend "the white, Christian, male power structure."

Methland

2009-05-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

A portrait of Sarah Palin's "Real America."

The bottom of the housing market?

2009-05-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Doesn't look like we're there yet, according to the number crunchers at Zillow. As shown in the purple line in the graph below, housing prices are continuing to fall at a dramatic rate, and indeed are doing so at an ever faster rate, as depicted by the orange line (e.g. the second derivative is still negative):
At this point, a third of all mortgages are under water, which means that 1 in 5 of all homes in the U.S. are underwater. If you look at housing prices relative to headline inflation over the last thirty years, we're still way overvalued:
Now think about what this means for the holders of all the securities backed by these mortgages (e.g. the banks)... then think of what that means for the real economy.

2009-05-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

Former Baltimore Sun reporter and the creator of The Wire (the best TV show ever made), David Simon talks to Congress about the crisis of news reporting:

Money:

It's nice to get stuff for free, of course, and it's nice that more people can have their say in new media. And while some of our internet community is rampantly ideological, ridiculously inaccurate and occasionally juvenile, some of it's also quite good, even original. Understand, I'm not making a Luddite argument against the internet and all that it offers. But you do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars where police officers gather. You don't see them consistently nurturing and then pressing others—pressing sources. You don't see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.

Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and, in some ways, most gratifying job I ever had. I'm offended to think that anyone anywhere believes American monoliths, as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives, can be held to gathered facts by amateurs presenting the task—pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care who it is they're lying to or who they're withholding information from.

Indeed, the very phrase "citizen journalist" strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Consider this: the LA Times is the only news organization that still has a reporter covering the budget state budget (which is $131 billion this year, including a $40B deficit). If that guy goes, who will be watching to prevent corruption? And obviously the politicians and lobbyists know this too. In other words, you're one reporter away from, in essence, a complete lack of accountability on the part of the government of the sixth biggest economy in the world. As he Simon says elsewhere, I'll stop worrying about the fate of investigative journalism when I see Huffington Post bloggers showing up week after week to the city council meetings of smallish American cities.

So what is to be done? Simon suggests:

But a nonprofit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything the government can do in the way of creating nonprofit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued. And further, anything that can be done to create financial or tax-based disincentives for bankrupt or near-bankrupt newspaper chains to transfer or donate unprofitable publications to locally based nonprofits should also be considered.

Lastly, I would urge Congress to consider relaxing certain antitrust prohibitions, so that the Washington Post, the New York Times and various other newspapers can openly discuss protecting copyright from aggregators and plan an industry-wide transition to a paid online subscriber base. Whatever money comes will prove essential to the task of hiring back some of the talent, commitment and institutional memory that has been squandered. Absent this basic and belated acknowledgement that content matters—in fact, content is all—I don't think anything can be done to save high-end professional journalism.

I personally don't think that non-profit is any kind of solution: it already exists, and doesn't seem to be staunching the bleeding. Perhaps there might be some hope if all the newspapers could be given an anti-trust exemption to be allowed to collude on collectively creating a micropayment scheme for news content.

I guess "rollback" ain't an option either

2009-04-30T08:43:00.000-07:00

Containment of the swine flu is no longer an option, according to the WHO. My guess is that the number of cases may abate now as the flue season draws to a close, but it may come back with a vengeance in the Fall. The real question will be whether the public health officials can come up with the right vaccine to beat the mutating virus. That flu infections come in waves is well known.

Cognitive Capture

2009-04-28T04:52:00.000-07:00

The idea that Washington is mentally enslaved to Wall Street has a hoary pedigree, and has received any number of articulations, ranging from socialist taunt that the state is the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie"; to the more rigorous concept of (more or less corrupt) regulatory capture; to the fashionable claim that the real reason why Washington won't cut off Wall Street's balls is not a result of "financial capture" (i.e. bribes, ahem, political contributions) but the rather because of some more sloppy kind of "cognitive capture."

I say "sloppy" because I think this phrase is rarely defined, and in fact is confusing. The concept of "cognitive capture" is already present in psychology, but is used to refer to a different phenomenon altogether, namely the way that, when an individual focuses mental energy on one issue, it can cause her to miss out other important things. Also called "inattention blindness," this explains why, for example, drivers talking on cell phones are more likely to crash. By contrast, the idea of "cognitive capture," as applied to Washington's relationship to Wall Street, signals not that DC policymakers are distracted from or inattentive to Wall Street, but rather that they suffer from a kind of slavish worship of financiers, who they see as the rightful titans of our society whose interests must therefore be identical with those of society.

My old colleague James Kwak is doing signal work in trying to provide the latter thought with a more substantive theoretical basis. Why, Kwak asks, is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner apparently unable to envision that the economic interests of the country might not be full aligned with the economic interests of Wall Street financiers? Why is he unwilling to consider solutions to the current crisis that would involve dethroning these oligarchs? Invoking Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" to suggest the mechanism by which this mental slavery is achieved, Kwak answers that Geithner has

internalized a worldview in which Wall Street is the central pillar of the American economy, the health of the economy depends on the health of a few major Wall Street banks, the importance of those banks justifies virtually any measures to protect them in their current form, large taxpayer subsidies to banks (and to bankers) are a necessary cost of those measures - and anyone who doesn't understand these principles is a simple populist who just doesn't understand the way the world really works.

This pithily captures the main mental problem in Washington these days: policymakers simply can't imagine any solution that involves the defanging of Wall Street, even though the only meaningful solutions are precisely the ones that do that. The Democrats are every bit as useless as the Republicans on this score.

Read the whole thing.

Tea -- or Whiskey?

2009-04-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

Among the many stupidities of the "tea party" astroturf campaign, perhaps the most annoying to me (as a historian) is that they've picked the wrong historical allusion. As everyone ought to know, the Boston Tea Party (and the American revolution more generally) was not a tax revolt per se, but rather was a revolt against taxation without representation.

By contrast, Obama's proposal to raise taxes (on the top 5% of Americans, to 1990s levels) is not being done without those being taxed having representation. The current crop of protesters had their chance to put forward candidates and vote in the 2008, and they lost.

In fact, the current protests are less like the Boston Tea Party than like the Whiskey Rebellion, when protests erupted in Appalachia over the decision of the (legally-elected) federal government to raises taxes in order to deal with a national fiscal and economic crisis (sound familiar?).

This decision infuriated whiskey-producing farmers and led to a rebellion, which Washington put down by personally leading a large militia out to Western Pennsylvania to demonstrate the authority of the federal government.

The Taliban as modernizers

2009-04-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest misconceptions of the War formerly known as Global-on-Terror was that theTaliban in Afghanistan (now also in Pakistan) was somehow a backward and "medieval" anti-modern sect. This misonception was largely driven by a focus on the rhetorical content of their ideology, with its emphasis on Koranic scripture, and their barbaric, profoundly anti-liberal attitude toward women, in particular.

In fact, the Taliban is much better conceived as the most effective and revolutionary modernizing force that this region has ever seen. The central social and economic fact of life in Pakistan is its unreformed, feudal economic system, with a tiny absentee landlord class literally lording it over a vast, impoverished peasantry which often suffers under the yoke of bonded labor. After independence from Britain in 1947, Pakistan never engaged in any kind of land reform, and the result is vast social and economic resentments in the countryside -- which the Taliban is now exploiting.

The Taliban's appeal, first in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, has been to challenge this social system in the countryside. As John Robb puts it, the Taliban's "plausible promise" is to deliver "economic and social justice through land distribution and sharia courts." This doesn't need to be centrally organized in a classic 20th century command-and-control insurgency, because modern technology allows political entrepreneurs throughout the Western subcontinent to tap into local resentments.

But this also suggests why the U.S. faces has few reasonable political options in Pakistan. One faction we could partner with is the Taliban itself, which is what a replay of the allegedly successful strategy in Iraq would entail. This seems implausible, not so much because of the Taliban's barbarism (which we could surely learn to ignore) but more because of their refusal to give up Bin Laden and Zawahiri. It's one thing to propose partnering up with the Saddam-sympathizing Sunni leadership in Western Iraq, once Saddam is deposed and dead. It's another thing to propose partnering with the Osama-sheltering Taliban.

Another option might be the Pakistani military, which was our main partner for a long time. The Pakistani military has long been considered the most "modern" faction in Pakistani life, and the kind of institution the U.S. could do business with. There are a number of challenges with this option, though. First, and perhaps least important, the Pakistani military is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution -- not just in that it often overthrows elected regimes, but also in its basic orientation toward popular control. Second, the military is increasingly Islamist and anti-American in its sympathies, particularly in the middle ranks, where the legacy of Zia's post-1971 push to Islamicize the Pakistani military. Third, the Pakistani military is clearly playing a double-game with the U.S. It wants to keep getting the multi-billion dollar military aid grants from the U.S., and to do this it needs to keep fighting the Taliban -- but also not to succeed in defeating the Taliban, which would also cause the U.S. money to dry up.

Which brings us to the apparently obvious third option, which is the official U.S. policy, namely to support the legally elected "democratic" government of Pakistan, now led by Benazir Bhutto's widower, Ali Zardari. Alas, the problem with these people is that they in fact represent the landlord classes. So-called "democratic" politics in Pakistan is generally a contest between feudal elites from Punjab versus feudal elites from the Sindh (the northern and southern reaches of the Indus valley). Neither group, obviously, has any interest in addressing the fundamental social resentments of the countryside, and the result is that these resentments have continued to fester for several generations. What happens when such social resentments are ignored is that eventually a political entrepreneur arises who can exploit them. And that exploiter is the Taliban. Thinking that a guy like Zardari, once described as the most corrupt man on earth, is going to address this social question is absurd.

Divorced from reality

2009-04-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not normally a big Bill Maher fan, but this is pretty good.

The Bushies' Monte Cassino moment?

2009-04-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

One way to look at the shifting debate over torture in this country is to see the Bushies as having been, almost continuously, backpeddling -- engaged in a carefully planned series of retreats to previously prepared lines of defense, much akin to the Nazi defense of Italy against the Aliies during WW II.

Line 1
During Bush's first term, the line of defense was: "We do not torture. There was no torture! You've got nothing to prosecute us for. Nothing!"

Then the Abu Ghraib pictures happened.

And with it fell that first and most robust line of defense.

Line 2
Over the course of Bush's second term, the Bushies' main line of defense was: "OK, yeah, sometimes we torture. But it's our POLICY not to torture. You can't prosecute political leaders for what a few 'bad apples' do!"

Now the OLC memos have come out.

After a bitter last stand by some brave footsoldiers, it's clear that this line of defense is being abandoned, and the Bushies are scrambling to assume their positions at the third line of defense, which they have been carefully preparing for some time.

Line 3
That new line of defense is: "OK, yeah, yeah, torture was our policy. But torture WORKED. You can't prosecute political leaders for doing stuff that worked to keeping the country safe!"

We'll see if that line works.

Line 4
If it doesn't, you can already see the next (and presumably final) line of defense, which is even now being prepared: "OK, yeah, yeah: we do torture, and yeah, doing so was in fact our policy, and yeah, OK, it didn’t work. But we thought in GOOD FAITH that it would work. You can't prosecute political leaders for something that was done in good faith!"

Quote of the Day

2009-04-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Reinhold Niebuhr, in 1952, with words that should have given pause six years ago:

A democracy can not of course, engage in an explicit preventive war. [However] the power of such a temptation to a nation, long accustomed to expanding possibilities and only recently subjected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberrations which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The certainty of the foe's continued intransigence seems to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future.
Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe. Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddies every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor. Unfortunately the only persuasive proof seems to be the disavowal of precisely those discriminate judgments which are so necessary for an effective conflict with the evil, which we are supposed to abhor.
There is no simple triumph over this spirit of fear and hatred. It is certainly an achievement beyond the resources of a simple idealism. For naive idealists are always so preoccupied with their own virtues that they have no residual awareness of the common characteristics in all human foibles and frailties and could not bear to be reminded that there is a hidden kinship between the vices of the most vicious and the virtues of even the most upright.

(The Irony of American History, p. 146-147)

The Torment of Secrecy

2009-04-17T12:32:00.001-07:00

I suspect that this statement by former CIA Director Michael Hayden is a litmus test for how people feel about government secrecy:

Money:

There are a lot of things that governments do, that aren't naturally or in the course of events immediately made public.

After all this [torture] began life as a covert action, whose definition is that the hand of the United States government is never acknowledged and the details of the operation are never revealed.

So, I don't think it automatically fits into the class of "the American people need to know."

Quote of the Day

2009-04-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (1922):

This guarding of our individualism against stratification insists not only in preserving in the social solution an equal opportunity for the able and ambitious to rise from the bottom; it also insists that the sons of the successful shall not by any mere right of birth or favor continue to occupy their fathers' places of power against the rise of a new generation in process of coming up from the bottom.

Climate Change - Leadership is Honesty

2009-04-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

This is exactly my position on cap-and-trade and climate change.

I love religion

2009-04-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

From here, via here:

When Jaaber Hussein signs an agreement with Israel's Chief Rabbis tomorrow, he will be inking the only Arab-Jewish accord sure to be meticulously observed by both sides. The deal will make him the owner for one week of all bread, pasta and beer in Israel - well a huge amount of it anyway. The contract, signed for the past 12 years by the Muslim hotel food manager, is part of the traditional celebrations ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Jews are forbidden by biblical injunction to possess leavened bread, or chametz, during Passover and ironically an Arab is needed to properly observe the holiday. The agreement with Mr Hussein offers a way of complying with religious edicts without having to wastefully destroy massive quantities of food.
...
Tomorrow, Mr Hussein will put down a cash deposit of $4,800 (some 20,000 shekels or £3,245) for the $150m worth of leavened products he acquires from state companies, the prison service and the national stock of emergency supplies. The deposit will be returned at the end of the holiday, unless he decides to come up with the full value of the products. In that case he could, in theory, keep them all. At the close of the holiday, the foodstuffs purchased by Mr Hussein revert back to their original owners, who have given the Chief Rabbis the power of attorney over their leavened products. "It's a firm, strong agreement done in the best way," Mr Hussein said.