The Brunch Table

So it looks like the New York Times has embraced the idea that the World Bank/IMF causes severe economic damage to poor countries. These institutions offer loans in exchange for the broad adoption of Reagan-style laissez-faire policies, which have a lousy overall track record when it comes to creating wealth. As a result, borrower countries typically end up in worse financial shape than when they started.

This was considered an unacceptably radical position just a few years ago, when Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz advanced it in his great book Globalization and Its Discontents. (There’s even a photo of burning fire on the cover.)

Stiglitz’s argument is simple: countries borrowing money are not that different from people borrowing money–in each case, there’s “good debt” and “bad debt.” Poor countries are poor because their economies can’t generate enough wealth for enough people. And the quickest cure for that is usually infrastructure, defined as whatever increases the overall wealth-generating capacity of the economy. Tap water, roads, reliable electricity, and vaccinations are common examples: that’s good debt. Problem is, infrastructure investment is precisely what laissez-faire ideology forbids. Therefore, whatever a country ends up spending a World Bank/IMF loan on, it’s unlikely to increase the country’s ability to create wealth, which means it’s going to be very difficult to pay back the loan: that’s bad debt.

Keynesian economics, first adopted by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and now used by most of the world’s rich countries (the U.S. prominently excepted), argues the exact opposite. Build the infrastructure first, Keynesian doctrine says, even if you have to go into debt, and wealth creation will follow. Now, Keynesianism was orthodoxy in the U.S. from 1932 up till the Reagan era. Even Nixon, Depression kid that he was, stuck to the basic principles–to an extent that’s hard to believe today.

It didn’t quite sink in for me until I saw a UPA Cold War propaganda short at this year’s Ottawa Festival, trumpeting the capitalist virtues of advertising–and realising that the Voice-of-God narrator was talking about Keynesian capitalism. I can’t find a link–shame, the UPA educational shorts are graphic-design marvels–but i took notes:

“In a feudal society, income distribution is a pyramid.” [Xylophone scale.]

“In an industrial society, income distribution is a diamond.” [Balloon-stretch sound.]

That’s a graphical representation of the Keynesian middle class, pumping their increased disposable income into the economy.

“The New Deal gave every two American consumers the buying power of three.” [Timpani drum.]

Surreal.

I think this interview with military historian Chalmers Johnson is exceptional. He basically argues that, at the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were left in superior but “unstable” positions relative to the traditional imperial powers of Europe and Asia. We both then proceeded to squander this temporary advantage through a series of unwise foreign and domestic policy decisions that, collectively, produced the resource-sapping Cold War:

“It’s not at all clear that we’ve won the Cold War. Probably, we and the U.S.S.R. lost it, but they lost it first and harder because they were always poorer than we were.”

This inspired me to go looking for other stuff on Johnson, which led me to a second, equally good article of his. Here, he elaborates on the same idea, arguing that we face a stark choice similar to that of the postwar British Empire. Heavily damaged by the Nazi invasion, Britain no longer had the resources to maintain military control over its colonies. It could either impose tyranny at home and extract the missing wealth from its own citizens–or it could voluntarily give up the empire, accept a reduction in its global influence, and use the dividends of peace to rebuild itself.

He quotes Hannah Arendt:

“On the whole [the British Empire] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”

Looks like Bush’s crony Lord Black is now accused of stealing $84 million from one of his own newspaper companies, looking at a life sentence if he’s convicted. Yes, his name is really Lord Black. He’s probably best known in his native Canada for demanding legal recognition of his aristocratic title–and then, in 2001, loudly renouncing his citizenship and moving to the UK when he didn’t get it. But in the States, if you’re not Jewish, or more specifically if you don’t have Jewish Republicans in the family, you probably haven’t heard of Conrad Black, Baron of Crossharbour. (You don’t have to be Jewish, of course, to appreciate the awesomeness of that name. I can only imagine that he turned to publishing after failing to get into Hogwarts.)

Basically, he’s a baby Rupert Murdoch, a foreign friend of the Republican Party who ferrets out new constituencies and tries to trick them into voting against their own interests with a seductive, custom-made news spiel. In 1989, Black bought the venerable conservative Jewish paper The Jerusalem Post (published in Israel, but written mainly by Americans for American readers). He turned it into a Republican organ, part of a broader Reagan-era effort to woo conservative Jews away from federalism, which from the early 20th century up to the present day has meant the Democratic Party. (Since 1868, when the 14th Amendment made institutionalized religious discrimination illegal, voters belonging to minority religions have tended to back the federalist party for their own protection. Stephen Feldman’s book Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas has more on that history.)

Throughout the ’90s, the revamped Post was made to serve as a “gateway drug,” gently priming its mostly-elderly niche readership for entry into the far larger, Christian-oriented world of Fox and Clear Channel. To use a classic example, a Post article on a Nationalist terrorist attack in Israel might make a casual reference to the subversive anti-war activity of “leftist college professors.” That’s a weird non sequitur in an Israeli context–in a country where military service is compulsory and the most notorious draft-dodgers in public life tend to come from the religious right. But anti-intellectualism is a familiar ideological tack in the U.S., dating right back to our Puritan beginnings (and becoming even more entrenched after universities proved crucial in organizing opposition to the Vietnam War). Growing accustomed to this new vocabulary, I’d bet that after a while the hapless Post reader no longer finds a speech by major Republican mouthpieces like Limbaugh or O’Reilly quite so alien.

If only the upcoming trial could occupy enough of Lord Black’s time to keep him from preying on my relatives in the near future. (To be fair, he sold off the Post in 2004, but its new outlook and function haven’t changed.)

The full text of Obama’s official campaign announcement is pretty good stuff. But what I find really remarkable is the fact that he apparently wrote it himself. The last President to write his own speeches was Calvin Coolidge. (To be fair, this is probably the only nice thing you can say about Calvin.)

When I was in high school, each of my two newly-formed stepfamiles began to argue for opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Interestingly, I don’t recall either of my parents taking a special interest in the subject while they were still married–make of that what you will.) It took about ten years, but I eventually found a helpful and pleasantly objective history book, visited Israel myself, and was even lucky enough to bump into an NPR reporter on a tour bus there who let me follow her around while she interviewed people in the street (fortunately for me, via interpreter). I don’t mean to suggest that this gives me any authority to speak about the conflict itself, but at least I’ve now got an opinion of my own. And, out of respect for the actual experts, I’m sure as heck not gonna tell you what it is.

Now, while I’m proud to say that there are many positive aspects to reaching out and engaging people in a dialogue on the subject, a pleasing lack of interminable warmed-over email-forward arguments is conspicuously not among them. Even if we no longer waste trees with this stuff, we’re still burning perfectly good coal. And the quality of the debate rarely advances past the level of a post-Thanksgiving-dinner family squabble.

And that’s why I’d like to share with you this fine example of an interminable warmed-over email-forward argument. Not as something to be actually read and studied, but as a sort of flying drone thing to practice your lightsaber skills on, if you’re so inclined. Because, well, after putting up with a decade’s worth of this kind of stuff, I do feel like I’m getting to be an expert on reading about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I’ve developed a rule for myself that I find very useful. If you follow it, you could drastically reduce the amount of time you have to spend wading through a lot of boring and profoundly unhelpful writing. I hope this tactic will preserve your interest, stave off confusion or outright despair, and let you build an informed opinion if you haven’t already. The secret is, before you actually devote time to reading the linked article, you scan it. Look for the following words:

1. oil
2. Wahhabism
3. Ottoman Empire

I should emphasize that these words don’t need to be present as part of any particular case for either side. And I’m definitely not suggesting that we should agree on whether oil, Wahhabism, or the Ottoman Empire play any particular historical role. Instead, the mere presence of these words is a sign that the author has actually given the topic some serious thought. In my opinion, any discussion of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that fails to mention at least one of those three things will, most of the time, turn out to be absolutely worthless. Simple as that.

Louis and the Nazis: in which British journalist Louis Theroux travels around California, knocks on the doors of self-professed Nazis, and asks permission to hang out with them for the day. Quietly squirmy and brilliant.

(direct link)

From today’s New York Times:

“A city-financed report by Ms. Rice released Friday said Los Angeles needed a ‘Marshall plan’ to address gang violence in light of a growth in gang membership and a lack of a comprehensive strategy to curb the problem.”

and, in a second unrelated article:

“A coalition of community groups is calling for the city Department of Education to develop a ‘Marshall Plan for middle-grade schools,’ saying that all too often, the sixth through eighth grades become ‘pathways to failure.’”

Heck, maybe what we really need is a plain old Marshall Plan.

I’m used to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s intelligent, impassioned attacks on American private health insurance, like this one, from 2005, and this one, from 2006.

“A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.”

So I’m not sure what to make of this one, from 2000, in which he’s just as enthusiastic, but his position seems to be exactly reversed.

“I don’t think that the case against the American health-care system stands or falls on the treatment of some women who happen not to have adequate insurance for their highly premature babies. And I would also point out that if we examine closely the history of care for premature babies that all of it came from America. This is a classic condition for which the American health-care system pioneers treatment.”

I wonder what on earth happened in the intervening years to change his mind so dramatically?

This has already been covered in Boingboing, but I think it’s worth drawing attention to–a speech by journalist Tom Stites about the importance of literacy for democracy. He doesn’t just speak in abstractions (obviously, he’s going to be strongly in favor of both, right?).

He argues that the ’80s shift to big-box retailers, who don’t typically advertise a great deal, has done the most to strip newspapers of advertising revenue. Papers began courting luxury goods to fill the gap, resulting in an overall repackaging to appeal to upper-class readers. It’s not a nostalgia piece about the overall quality of journalism–in fact, he argues that journalism back in the day was actually worse. It is, he claims, fundamentally a marketing problem, and a very serious one: if citizens of a democracy don’t read news, they can’t stay informed enough to use their votes wisely.

“There are 130 million Americans over 18 whose incomes are down the scale from the publishers’ favored top two quintiles…my mother was a single parent who worked retail and I know how we struggled financially. Nonetheless, my mother subscribed to The Kansas City Star and read it every day. But that was back in the old days, the way-long-ago days when I was a kid, when newspapers still wanted everybody to read them…

So my plea to all of us, myself included, is that we keep America’s discarded readers in mind as we work to strengthen journalism and shore up our withering democracy. We need to remember that they’re citizens, too, and to take care to make sure they have easy access to quality journalism that squarely addresses the issues that affect their lives. Unless we do, there’s a good chance that our democracy is doomed. Or, at the very best, our democracy will be disfigured by a class divide that’s the 21st century equivalent of our nation’s earliest days…”

On a side note, I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkin’s newest book, The Ancestor’s Tale. At one point, he’s explaining the process of domesticating animals, and wraps up by wondering to what extent we’re self-domesticating. When we alter our own environment (for instance, with the invention of agriculture), we place new biological demands on ourselves. He cites lactose intolerance as an example of a trait that wouldn’t affect a hunter-gatherer, but becomes a life-threatening liability in a developing agricultural society that grows heavily reliant on dairy foods.

His final example, though, is considerably more provocative. You can measure relatively little difference, he says, between the brain of a person speaking French and a person speaking Chinese. However, you can measure an enormous difference in the brain of a person reading either language, compared to a person speaking. This, Dawkins suggests, means that literacy is becoming a critical part of our self-domesticating process.

Taking Dawkins and Stites together, I think you get one heck of a more compelling argument than Levar Burton, despite his many good points, ever made.

Happy 4th!

So the U.S. Journal of Religion and Society publishes a study suggesting that, around the world, religious belief in society is inversely proportional to social health. But it takes the London Times to report this. The conclusion is pretty grim:

None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction…Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion…The United States’ deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth…[but is] the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health.

This Harper’s article by Rebecca Solnit may be overexposed already, but it connects in precise language the laissez-faire conception of government and its wretched inability to deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. How, she asks, does this “limited government”–in which the citizen has a correspondingly limited voice–deal with its constituents?

We were told of “riots” and babies being murdered, of instances of cannibalism. And we were provided an image of authority, of control—of power as a necessary counter not to threats to human life but to unauthorized shopping, as though free TVs were the core of the crisis…

The most hellish image in New Orleans was not the battering waves of Lake Pontchartrain or even the homeless children wandering on raised highways. It was the forgotten thousands crammed into the fetid depths of the Superdome. And what most news outlets failed to report was that those infernos were not designed by the people within, nor did they represent the spontaneous eruption of nature red in tooth and claw. They were created by the authorities.”

I just found an amazing article, an English translation from Le Monde Diplomatique. It’s called “What’s the Matter with West Virginia?”, dated October 2004. The perspective of French journalist Serge Halimi, following Bush on a tour through my hometown of Huntington–it’s remarkable, if only because the place hasn’t been written about much since the days of Mother Jones and the Redneck Rebellion.

…the natural beauty of the area concealed its poverty. Summer visitors to the Appalachians saw mountains, rivers and forests, but not the poor. The same is true now. You have to leave the freeway and venture along narrower roads (well surfaced, thanks to the influence of one of the two senators in Washington)…

(That would be Robert Byrd, the reformed ex-Klansman who for years has been tirelessly luring the odd governmental office or heavy industry to town, and plying them with incentives to try and keep them. He’s indirectly responsible for creating both my parents’ jobs.)

I’ve been engrossed in work this week, so I’m only now realizing how badly things are going in the aftermath of Katrina. Like many others, apparently, I saw the reports that New Orleans hadn’t been completely leveled, breathed a premature sigh of relief, and went back to what I was doing.

And then the flooding began in earnest.

What surprises me most is how disorganized the official response seems to have been so far—JWZ has a good roundup. I hope there are serious political repercussions from this—this is what governments are supposed to be good for, after all.

I used to think that J. G. Ballard’s High Rise was merely a vicious satire, but then I read “Trapped in the Superdome”. (Fortunately, it does sound like they’re working on getting people out of there now.)

And once again, we see struggles over ice.

It’s unnerving to watch the fabric of civilization unravel at the edge of our country.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster reminds me of an old argument about comparing religions, something I picked up from Simon Blackburn’s excellent intro-to-philosophy book Think. If I get it right, it goes something like this:

1. A purely religious proposition, by definition, can be neither proven nor disproven…

2. …but religious propositions from different religions do disagree with each other.

3. So, while you can start with religious propositions and come up with some theories about the physical world…

4. …you’re in effect only arguing for all unproveable propositions, not just the ones you personally prefer.

5. So you can’t really win the argument until you can explain why your propositions are correct, and your rival religions’ propositions are wrong.

This, Blackburn says, is the problem with Pascal’s famous Wager. By proposing an infinite reward in Heaven and an infinite punishment in Hell, he can convincingly argue that you’d better go to Mass. But this logic only works if you’re already a believing Catholic like Pascal. What do you do if you’re a Protestant, and believe that Mass is, at the very least, a less-than-optimal way to attain the reward and escape the punishment? The very fact that Protestants repeat their own version of the Wager, with Pascal’s specifically Catholic instructions edited out, is proof that it doesn’t hold up. How can it work as an argument for one specific religion?

And when it comes to Intelligent Design™, we’re dealing with an even narrower fan base than Pascal’s. Ever wonder why the U.S., alone in the industrial world, has remained unaccountably suspicious of the science of biology? It’s because of John Darby, a 19th-century British preacher who came to America to spread his “Darbyist Heresy” in peace, attracted, ironically enough, by our relative religious tolerance.

Today known by the more polite name of Dispensationalism, the Heresy proposed a precise 6,000-year historical timeline ending in the Rapture, in which good Darbyists will be transported bodily up to Heaven to escape the Apocalypse. (Interestingly, while Darbyist version of doomsday has no real precedent in Abrahamic theology, it bears a remarkable resemblance to Ragnarok, the end-times scenario in western Europe’s old Norse religion.) So unlike stalwarts like the Anglican Church, which gradually dropped their more abstract objections to Darwin (he was an ordained minister, after all), the Darbyists have a serious, specific problem with an old earth–it means their train, so to speak, isn’t arriving on schedule.

The problem is, of course, that any argument you can cite in defense of Darbyism also opens the door to the FSM. Blackburn wraps up the Darbyist Heresy with great bit from David Hume:

…a man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert or conjecture that the universe sometime arose from something like design. But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard, and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance. It is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors. It is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him…And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.

While I was reading Mark Danner’s insightful analysis of this year’s presidential race in the New York Review, this particular passage struck me:

Of course whatever its virtues as a campaign theme, the picture the President offered was not especially “fact-dependent.” Many well-known facts—on which Kerry, in his campaign, had laid such stress—were either irrelevant to it (the missing weapons of mass destruction, which went unmentioned) or directly contradicted by it (the failure to demonstrate connections between Iraq and the attacks of September 11). But the facts did not matter—not necessarily because those in the stadium were ignorant of them, though some certainly were, but because the President was offering in their place a worldview that was whole, complete, comprehensible, and thus impermeable to statements of fact that clearly contradicted it. The thousands cheering around me in that Orlando stadium, and the many others who would come to support Bush on election day, faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts.

It caught my eye because it was strikingly similar to a passage in a book I recently read called What the Best College Teachers Do. The passage described research done by Ibrahim About Halloun and David Hestenes in the 1980s to determine what knowledge students were taking away from an introductory physics course. What they discovered is that while the students learned how to mechanically compute Newtonian results, they still thought about motion in an Aristotelian way. The course had taught them formulas, but hadn’t succeeded in giving them true understanding. (You can download the actual papers here and here if you’re curious.)

In the experiment, they showed the students some experiments with results that the Aristotelian model couldn’t account for, and asked the students to explain why this was happening. Bain writes

What they heard astonished them: many of the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion. Instead, they argued that the experiment they had just witnessed did not exactly apply to the law of motion in question; it was a special case, or it didn’t quite fit the mistaken theory or law that they held true. “As a rule,” Halloun and Hestenes wrote, “students held firm to mistaken beliefs even when confronted with phenomena that contradicted those beliefs.” If the researchers pointed out a contradiction or the students recognized one, “they tended at first not to question their own beliefs, but to argue that the observed instance was governed by some other law or principle and the principle they were using applied to a slightly different case.” The students performed all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting and revising the underlying principles that guided their understanding of the physical universe. Perhaps most disturbing, some of these students had received high grades in the class.

Coming back to the presidential race, is it any wonder that if students sitting in a class for a whole semester can still discount facts that don’t fit in their comfortable worldview, that voters informed by snippets of media don’t do much better? Effective teachers, the book theorizes, are able to avoid these results by focusing on the students’ learning processes, leading them in the right direction by posing provocative questions and presenting knowledge as its own reward, rather than as something to be checked off on a scorecard. How could those teaching methods be employed to sway voters’ political beliefs?

Just discovered the blog of British journalist George Monbiot…remarkable stuff.

Take this, for example:

…this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don’t understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.

Puritanism is perhaps the least-understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America.

But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation…Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God.

Yeah, that’s right…read ‘em and weep. I think yesterday I said they didn’t have the balls to actually exceed the exit polls’ margin of error with their e-vote counts? Ha.

The excerpts from Osama’s tape last week that I read in the Washington Post didn’t include one of the more interesting sections–the one in which he brags about the cost-effectiveness and economic focus of Al-Qaeda’s tactics and how they intend to continue “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”. Bruce Sterling points out the relevant sections from the Al-Jazeera translation of the speech, and John Robb refers to his earlier discussion of the strategy.

VerifiedVoting.org’s TechWatch program is a great idea: they’re getting a bunch of geeks of all stripes together to act as election monitors this year, the theory being that we’ll be better qualified to notice and articulate what went wrong if some of the new voting machines flake out. I hope that many of you will go sign up for it yourselves, regardless of who you’re going to vote for this year; as it stands now, both major parties have already suffered apparent miscounts from electronic voting machines in various local elections. And if you’re in Florida, send email to voteprotect-fl@verifiedvoting.org right away, because they want to have people in place for the August 31st primary election.

Watching mock news interviews done by Ali G. or the Daily Show correspondents, I’ve sometimes wondered how the participants felt about the interviews. Thanks to the magic of Google News, I’ve tracked down a few news stories about the fake news stories on the Daily Show:

• A Round of Shots
• 1/5 Amendment
• Sticker Shock
• Thong of the South

Should any of those sites accost you and demand a username, you might want to avail yourself of the invaluable services of BugMeNot.