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.

“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.”

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.)

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.

(direct link)

“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.

“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?

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!

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.