Quotulatiousness

December 10, 2015

“I rank the odds of a Trump presidency somewhere below the odds of my winning the lottery”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Megan McArdle has toyed with the idea of classifying Donald Trump as a fascist, but is unwilling to go there for good and proper reasons:

Should we hunker down for America’s version of Mussolini/Hitler-style fascism, a la It Can’t Happen Here? Not quite. Douthat wrote a second column, pointing out the ways in which Trump is different from typical fascist leaders. Classical fascism is obsessed with tradition and secret knowledge, which feels backward in our modernist, diverse country.

The more important distinction, to my mind, is that Trump doesn’t have an organization so much as a mood.

Actual fascists, let us remember, were born out of a brutal world war that resulted in territorial losses, and left a lot of demobilized soldiers running around with dim economic prospects. Whatever your opinions on the war on terror, it is not the same scale as World War I, and it has certainly not left the U.S. in the kind of parlous condition in which Hitler and Mussolini were able to grow smaller radical groups into national mass movements. Trump himself doesn’t have that kind of dedication to his cause; just try to imagine him leading a coup, landing in jail, angrily penning The Art of the Struggle.

Implausible. Trump has far too much to lose, and too little to gain, to embrace truly revolutionary fervor.

Nor is he operating in a weak state with a short and spotty democratic history. The U.S. government has ticked along for going on 250 years, through multiple crises and an armed insurrection. Americans are pretty emotionally attached to its institutions, for all the complaints about them, and precisely because we are ethnically diverse, we tend to rest our national identity heavily upon our political institutions: not the expansionist “Drang nach Osten,” but the Constitution … the huddled masses yearning to breathe free … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have failed many times to live up to our ideals, but we have never stopped professing them.

All this matters. The main problem with fascists, after all, is not that they have creepy cartelist economic notions and uncharitable immigration policies; the problem with fascists is that they had a tendency to go on killing sprees against neighbors, internal minorities and their political enemies. I don’t like Trump’s economic pseudo-policies, or anti-immigrant sentiment. But they are so far from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy as to be differences in kind as well as degree. And America has neither the weak institutions nor the revolutionary organizations necessary for a Trump Reich to fester.

December 9, 2015

Bernie and the Snake People

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Katherine Ernst on the odd match of Bernie Sanders and his Millennial Snake People supporters:

A friend, who like me straddles the demarcation line between Millennial and Gen-Xer, was being bombarded at her Millennial-filled office with endless pro-Bernie Sanders “memes.” Things had reached a comic nadir (or zenith, depending on your perspective) with the non-ironic electronic dissemination of a doctored image of Sanders — framed by a heavenly rainbow — with a kitten under each arm: “I FIGHT FOR THE 99 ‘PURR-CENT,’” the bold white letters proclaimed. Quipped my friend: “I eat lunch by myself most days now.”

I commiserated. The same stuff was spamming my social media feeds; Bernie-fever sometimes seemed more intense, more omnipresent than the Obama-gasms of seven years ago. “Feel the Bern” jokes abounded, as did links to left-wing philippics on how Bernie was going to right all capitalist and racist wrongs. Most common were pics of the candidate in heroic, Soviet-worker-like pose — made by his campaign for the express purpose of “grassroots” reposting — next to quotations such as, “I have opposed Keystone from day one.”

My friend and I were not imagining things: the millennial love affair with Sanders is real. A recent NBC News-Survey Monkey poll found that “Millennials … are more than twice as likely to vote for Sanders than Clinton, leading her 54 percent to 26 percent.” The Guardian notes that “On Facebook 1.8 million people like Sanders’s page, 0.6 million more than the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, and 1.6 million more than Republican Jeb Bush.” The New Yorker concurs: “Today’s Millennials, who will make up thirty-six percent of eligible voters in 2016, have no such candidate to call their own, except for Sanders. If they were to vote at their capacity, they’d be the country’s largest voting bloc.”

None of this is lost on Sanders. Indeed, his whole campaign is about getting college kids frothed up on “revolution.” As he told Bill Maher: “[W]e’re being very aggressive in reaching out to young people … what we want to do is tap, Bill, the idealism of the kids. And what the kids are saying, for example, is that this country should lead the world in transforming our energy system and dealing with climate change.” Indeed, in successive debates — including one held 24 hours after the Isis attacks in Paris — Sanders identified climate change as our “greatest national security threat.”

December 8, 2015

Kind words for “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy?

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Patrick Crozier says we shouldn’t automatically believe the “common wisdom” about the career of Senator Joe McCarthy:

The vast majority of books and articles written on the subject claim that [Senator McCarthy] made it all up. M. Stanton Evans begs to differ. In Blacklisted by History: the Untold Story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies he argues that in the vast majority of cases those accused by McCarthy of being communists were exactly that. Some were out and out spies. Some were agents of influence. Some were happy to help in the running of communist front groups. But the argument still stands: they were aiding a power that was hostile to the United States.

Evans comes to this judgement mainly by leafing through the files that have become available. These include the FBI files and what have become known as the Venona transcripts: Soviet messages de-crypted by the US military in the 1940s.

It is important to realise that these weren’t just spy games. Communist activity had a real impact. In the early 1940s, for instance, John Stewart Service, the State Department’s man in China produced a string of reports. In them he praised Mao’s Communists to the hilt claiming that they were democrats and successfully fighting the Japanese while condemning Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) for being incompetent, corrupt and uninterested in prosecuting the war. This was a travesty of the truth. Reports like this led to the KMT being starved of money and weapons which may well have tipped the balance in the Civil War leading, in turn, to the misery that was subsequently inflicted on the people of mainland China.

So, if he was right why has he been condemned and why does he continue to be condemned by history? Some of it appears to have been McCarthy’s own fault. He puffed up his war record. He over-stated his case. He bullied witnesses. He made the odd mistake. He criticised revered war heroes. Some if it was snobbery. McCarthy was from the wrong side of the tracks. There was no Ivy League education for him. He left school early but through hard work still managed to become a lawyer. He was also a Catholic. But most of it was because he was up against the combined forces of the communists and the establishment.

The Tydings Committee – a special sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – was established to get to the bottom of his initial 1950 claim that there were 57 communist agents working in the State Department. It did no such thing. In fact it didn’t even try.

According to Evans it was a cover up from start to finish. There was almost no attempt to get at the facts. Often a denial from the accused was sufficient. At one point they even asked the leader of the US Communist Party if certain people were members. He had to be prompted to say “no”. Most of the hostile questioning was not aimed at the accused – who were often evasive – but McCarthy himself. An inordinate amount of time was given over to attempting to prove that McCarthy had initially claimed a figure of 205 rather than 57 – as if it mattered. There was a definite suggestion that State Department personnel files had been tampered with. It was no great surprise when the official report concluded that McCarthy had made it all up.

December 7, 2015

If not amnesty, then what?

Filed under: Americas, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer cuts to the chase on the whole amnesty “debate” in US politics:

Mickey Kaus wonders why the GOP elite is still “clinging to amnesty” for illegal immigrants. I have the same thought every time I hear someone rail against “amensty”: What the f*ck else are we going to do? Put 12 million people in jail for violating immigration laws? Are we really talking about deporting 12 million people? Do you have any idea how ugly this will be? I don’t want to commit a Godwin’s Law violation, but rousting people — whole families — out of their homes at gunpoint and loading them up on trucks and trains to be shipped en mass somewhere else — does this sound like any other 20th century event to you? If you wanted to find some other precedent for this that was not the German shipping of Jews to Poland, what would even be close?

Looked at another way, the disastrous government and civil war in Syria has created, by UN estimates, 4 million refugees. At a stroke, do Republicans really want to create 12 million refugees?

December 6, 2015

Does Canada have a “hero complex”?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Spiked, Irene Ogrizek looks at Canada’s view on the Syrian refugee crisis:

The Syrian refugee crisis is testing the limits of public compassion. As Sweden and Germany struggle with overwhelmed infrastructures, some states in the US have simply said no to refugees. For those Americans, memories of 9/11 were revived by the Paris attacks, and a collective sense of hunkering down and sitting out the finger-pointing asserted itself. In Canada, our new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, promised to bring 25,000 refugees over before Christmas. He has since taken the advice of his advisers and come up with a more reasonable timeframe. Canada will accept 10,000 before Christmas and 15,000 in the two months following.

As a nation of immigrants, there is reflexive awareness around the issue of immigration in Canada. It evokes deep feelings of patriotism and provides an opportunity for collective and individual heroism. Even a cursory look at our mainstream media reveals the pressure to be heroic. ‘As a nation, we must step up to the plate’ and ‘Canadians are compassionate and sponsor refugee families’, are common refrains. As the refugee crisis has unfolded, this desire to be heroic has manifested itself in an attempt to conquer perceived public fears of terrorism – and migration’s alleged role in spreading it.

However, in this, our politicians and media outlets are being disingenuous. It isn’t terrorism per se that frightens Canadians, but the domestic loss of freedom that so often follows terrorist attacks — a freedom, as evidenced in our laissez-faire attitude to law enforcement, that Canadians cherish. No offence to Brits or Americans, but Canadians don’t want to live under constant surveillance or become vigilant, gun-toting citizens. We really do prefer our boring status quo.

So why is the template of heroism so important? Mythologist and author Joseph Campbell says the hero’s adventure is ‘one he is ready for’ and that the ‘landscape and the condition of the environment will match his readiness’. But what happens if there are no opportunities to prove oneself, especially in a country as sedate as Canada? The late New York Times columnist David Carr said of his drug-addicted young self: ‘Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril. When there is no edge, we make our own.’ There is a similar edge to this explosion of pro-refugee altruism in Canada — and, just like Carr’s experience, it has its roots in intoxication.

December 4, 2015

The moral wretchedness of BDS

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Brendan O’Neill talks about the anti-Israeli BDS movement:

There are many weird and angry political movements in the 21st-century West. But it’s hard to think of any as ugly, vindictive and packed with prejudice as the Israel-bashing BDS movement.

BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Its backers want every institution, retail outlet and right-minded person in Christendom to refuse to have anything to do with Israel and its apparently wicked wares and people.

They want us to stop buying Israeli produce. To refuse to read books written by Israeli academics. Even to refuse to listen to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, lest its beautiful music infect our minds and make us think for a dangerous split second that Israel might just be made up of people like us.

The ugliness of BDS was thrown into sharp relief yesterday, when it was revealed that a former Cambridge academic refused to answer a 13-year-old girl’s curious questions because the girl is an Israeli.

Marsha Levine, a supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, is an expert on horses. Israeli schoolgirl Shachar Rabinovitch emailed her to ask her some questions, saying “I know you are a very important person and I’ve read your articles about horses”.

Ms Levine’s response was like something out of a Grimms’ fairytale: an angry woman barking irrationally at an innocent, inquisitive girl who made the mistake of (virtually) knocking on angry woman’s door.

“I’ll answer your questions when there is peace and justice for Palestinians”, she said. “You might be a child, but if you are old enough to write to me, you are old enough to learn about Israeli history and how it has impacted on the lives of Palestinian people.”

And that was it. Ms Levine refused to respond to a schoolgirl’s questions about horses because the schoolgirl lives in a part of the world where there is conflict. Actually, scrap that. She refused to answer the girl’s questions because of the girl’s nationality. Nasty stuff.

December 3, 2015

Bombing probably won’t change anything in Syria

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charles Stross looks at the role of Turkey in the fight against ISIS (that is, Turkey’s actions within the theatre of war, not strictly speaking, actions against ISIS):

Turkey was, prior to 1918 and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the hegemonic imperial power in the middle east, in the form of the Ottoman Empire. Syria was as much a part of Turkey’s “sphere of influence” as the Eastern Ukraine was of Russia’s — incidentally, another zone where the post-1918 settlement is going up in gunsmoke and it’s raining airliners. More to the point, geopolitically Turkey is in a weird position. It was roped into NATO in the wake of the second world war as part of the USA’s policy of encirclement of the USSR—but Turkey’s national aspirations are intrinsically at odds with some of its NATO partners, spiking on occasion to the level of warfare. Let us not forget that Turkey was also the imperial hegemon that ruled Greece and the Balkans. And today Turkey controls a vital regional resource — the tributary rivers that flow into the Euphrates, the main supply of irrigation of water into Syria and northern Iraq. Turkey has been damming the Euphrates and restricting the water flow to Raqqa province, violating international water sharing conventions. Syrian anger over the Güney Doğu Anadolu project was a major reason why the Assad government began providing material support to the PKK insurgency in Turkey. In turn, Turkish control over the Euphrates headwaters is a potent weapon against the Kurdish independence movement.

I’m an outsider and not adequately informed on this area. However, it looks (from here) as if the Turkish centralizing obsession with suppressing the PKK has led to the destabilization of Syria and northern Iraq. Syria’s government encouraging a push towards water-intensive agriculture coincided with the most intense drought on record in Syria, from 2007 to 2010, then ran into the generalized political discord of the Arab Spring: the Ba’ath government badly mishandled the demographic/economic situation during the 00’s and it would be a mistake to lay the blame for the Syrian civil war entirely on Turkey. However, cutting the river water supply to a drought-stricken region in the middle of a period of popular discontent didn’t help.

Today, 4 years after the war began, Syria is a shattered mess. It’s noteworthy that Da’esh controls areas where the water supply has been most badly affected, crippling agriculture, the main support of the poor, mostly conservative Sunni locals. Add in lots of former Iraqi army officers (pushed into fighting by the de-Ba’athication policies imposed by the US occupation and then the anti-Sunni policies of the subsequent Shi’ite government in Baghdad) and a seasoning of Wahhabite fanatics, and you have the recipe for Da’esh to get started, take root, and hold territory.

December 2, 2015

The two Enlightenments

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Nigel Davies pops up for one of his very occasional blog posts, and in this one he explains that there are actually two different Enlightenments, not just the one we tend to casually refer to:

There is the English style Liberal Enlightenment (sometimes called the ‘moderate’ enlightenment according to sceptics like Jonathan Israel), accepts that people are people, so we can only do the best we can do to get them to all agree and play happily together.

Then there is the European style Radical Enlightenment, which believes that the only way to make people play well together is to change them, by moulding them into better people. Into people who are designed, built, trained, and FORCED, to fit the correct mould.

If you are a victim of the superficial attractions of the fuzzy idealism of the Radical Enlightenment, you probably believe that the state, and its education and punishment systems, are there to make people fit into a ‘socially desirable’ mould.

[…]

If you are such a person, you usually call yourself by benign titles like ‘socialist’, or a ‘multi-culturalist’; or perhaps by titles that have gone out of fashion but mean exactly the same sort of state intervention in people’s lives like ‘Eugenicist’ or ‘White Man’s Burden’ worker; or perhaps you even still hang grimly on to the ultimate idealism of sickening movements like Communism or Fascism. (See any recent European news for samples of both.)

No matter which of these fantasies you are attached to, you become a dangerous fundamentalist the second you believe that ‘the world would be a better place if everyone thought the same way’.

Or, as the great social commentator of the modern media — Joss Whedon — put it, in the immortal words of Captain Reynolds (in the movie Serenity)…

    “Sure as I know anything, I know this. They will try again… a year from now, ten, they will swing back to the belief that they can Make People Better…”

No matter how many times they fail, or how appalling the results, ‘they’ keep believing that their idealistic fantasy just needs a bit of ‘perfecting’. It is simply beyond their comprehension that you cannot build a stable, or indeed sane, system on Radical Enlightenment beliefs.

The Liberal Enlightenment gave birth to the dozens of Constitutional Monarchies of the older parts of the British Commonwealth, or of the Protestant parts of Northern Europe — Scandinavia and Benelux etc. Countries that, despite their whacky, cobbled together and often unwritten constitutions, have generally had between two and five centuries of internal peace and economic development. (Unless attacked or invaded by their Radical Enlightenment neighbours.)

The Radical Enlightenment gave birth to the — literally — hundreds of ‘Republics’ that tend to break down into political chaos, dictatorship, civil war, mass murder or genocide of their own people, or just violent attacks on all their neighbours. Usually within twenty years of being founded.

From the French Terror to the Napoleonic wars; from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi state; from the Soviet Socialist Republics of XXX, to the Muslim Republics of XXX, to almost any post WWII African or Asian republic you care to name — including most ‘new Commonwealth’ ones; or indeed the interwar Western European or postwar Eastern European ones.

The four, FOUR, successful republics out of the hundreds of failures — that have not been just tiny city states like Singapore — are: Switzerland, Finland, Israel, and Botswana. Three that held together mainly because they were monocultures under constant threat from invaders for most of their existence, and the third an effective tribal monarchy even if it is not called one.

(The United States is the standout weirdo of the modern world… enough English Liberal Enlightenment in its legal structure to keep it to only a single Civil War — and only 600,000 dead — despite the unstable French Radical Enlightenment elements in its constitution. But if you watch the US Congress — Liberal Enlightenment — and President — Radical Enlightenment — systems in conflict recently it constantly amazes that it works at all…)

You cannot build a state purely on Radical Enlightenment ideals, which is why all such states run in to trouble sooner or later. Usually much sooner. Which just reinforces why the US hybrid state and other Radical Enlightenment states (even functional Constitutional Monarchy states like Australia that should know better) trying to force illiterate tribal cultures in Central America and Asia and Africa and — more recently — the Middle East: to become ‘democratic republics’ has been so woefully unsuccessful. (And which has also dropped the average survival of modern ‘republics’ to even lower levels, because the ‘imposed’ idealistic republics are even less successful than the ‘revolutionary’ idealistic ones.)

December 1, 2015

Britain’s welfare system

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill says it’s time to smash the welfare system because it’s too badly broken to fix:

… however much the the apologists for the Byzantine system of welfarism might kick and shout, we need to get the facts out there, and we need to talk about them frankly.

The fact that more than half of Britain’s households, 13.7m, receive more in welfare benefits than they pay in taxes. The fact that this represents a rise from 45.9 per cent of households in 1997 to 51.5 per cent today. The fact that 20.3m families now receive some kind of state benefit. The fact that for 9.6m of these families, benefits account for more than half of their income. The fact that nearly five million people have their rent paid by the state. The fact that vast numbers of people, first through Incapacity Benefit and then through Employment Support Allowance, have been redefined by the state as ‘incapable’ — of work, of independence, of dignity, in effect — and have been put out to pasture. There are parts of Britain where a state-sanctioned culture of incapacity has deadened community spirit, destroyed its soul.

The growth of welfarism in recent decades, the replacement of economic vision and the creation of new wealth with a colossal system of state charity and therapy, has terrible consequences. It dents individual ambition, and corrodes social solidarity. When people are invited to rely for their every financial and psychic need on the distant, faceless state, then they’re less likely to rely on their own volition and on the support and kindness of neighbours and friends.

Welfarism is a classic good intention turned hellish: in the name of helping people it actually weakens both individual pluck and community zest. Of course, the loudest cheerleaders of welfarism — the comfortable, cushioned liberals who shout down anyone who criticises the welfare state — have no experience of this. They don’t even want to see it on their TV, as their lust to censor Benefits Streets demonstrated. Yet a few miles from the leafy suburbs in which they churn out their defences of welfarism there will be communities branded incapable and made divided by that welfarism.

Some people say, ‘But welfare benefits is not a huge part of government spending!’ This is true. It accounts for somewhere over 20 per cent. Or they say, ‘And old people get most of it!’ This is also true, and I think it is quite proper: the generational jihadists who moan about pension spending don’t seem to realise that old people who have worked or child-reared all their lives deserve society’s help in their twilight years, and that this is massively different to giving state largesse to fit, young 25-year-olds.

But my concern with welfarism is not how much it costs the government but the costs it has for community life, public spirit, the self-willed individual. Welfarism should be radically rethought not in order to save a few billion quid but in order to reverse the state’s spread into communities and to repair the self-belief and independence of working-class and poorer sections of society.

November 30, 2015

QotD: That dangerous “slippery slope”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I know a lot of people worry about slippery slopes; give the culture warriors an inch and they’ll take a mile. I think this is a very backwards way of looking at things. Like, the anti-gay people talked about a slippery slope and fought desperately hard against gay marriage, even though it was pretty hard to find anything actually objectionable about it other than that it might be on a slippery slope to worse things. That desperate fight didn’t delay gay marriage more than a few years, and it didn’t prevent whatever gay marriage was on a slippery slope to. What it did do was totally discredit conservatives in this area. Now any time anyone makes a family values argument, even a good family values argument, people can say that “family values” is code for homophobia, and bring up that family values conservatives really have held abhorrent positions in the past so why should we trust them now? It gave liberals huge momentum, and if there is a slippery slope then all that opposing gay marriage did was destroy the credibility of anybody who could have stopped us going down it.

Opposing a good idea on slippery slope grounds is a moral failure and a strategic failure …

Scott Alexander, “The Wonderful Thing About Triggers”, Slate Star Codex, 2014-05-30.

November 29, 2015

President Nero

Filed under: History, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Last month, David Warren wrote about the Emperor Nero as if he were a modern American president:

While Rome burned, it is said, the Emperor Nero golfed, partied, and selfied. This, anyway, is my updated account. In an earlier version, he played his fiddle. The fire, which broke out in the evening of 18th July, 64 anno Domini (or 817, ab urbe condita), continued for a week, levelling ten of pagan Rome’s fourteen districts, and leaving at least half a million homeless. I gather it started in the merchant quarter, where fires usually started, back then. There were lots of merchants; there were lots of warehouse fires. And this despite numerous municipal regulations.

Read your Tacitus, however, and you will see that this rumour has been corrected. In fact, Nero rushed back to Rome from his palace at Antium (just outside the Beltway), took charge of the fire-fighting operation from the first night, opened public buildings and his own gardens to shelter the dispossessed, and made immediate arrangements to import huge quantities of grain into the city, for distribution free or at nominal cost. Criticisms of his Department of Homeland Security were feverish and unfair.

There is another problem with this rumour. The violin was not invented for another fifteen hundred years. Those still circulating the story should say he was playing on his cythera, instead. Nero was an enthusiastic and accomplished amateur musician; perhaps some people resented it. He was a man of culture; an Ivy League guy. But he was also an accomplished politician, and nobody’s fool.

Rumours that he set this fire himself are about as likely as rumours that George Bush started Hurricane Katrina. It would not have been in the chief executive’s interest to do so, in either case. For Nero was already sinking in the polls — curiously not because he’d ascended to office by having his mother kill his uncle, then killing his mother in turn; or many similar instances of hardball. Politics was politics then as now; success is to the ruthless. No, Nero was unpopular thanks to his growing reputation for ineffectuality. His failure to stop the fire hurt him in the same way as Bush’s failure to stop the hurricane.

After consulting with a few focus groups, Nero decided upon a scapegoat. He chose the Christians. He accused them of complicity in setting the fire, and his subsequent persecution of them — which included the martyrdoms of Saint Peter and Saint Paul — probably improved his popularity rating, at least slightly. From what I can make out, the early Christians were not well liked. People thought they were spooky and weird.

November 27, 2015

Wealth, inequality, and billionaires

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Several months ago, the Washington Post reported on a new study of wealth and inequality that tracked how many billionaires got rich through competition in the market and how many got rich through political “connections”:

The researchers found that wealth inequality was growing over time: Wealth inequality increased in 17 of the 23 countries they measured between 1987 and 2002, and fell in only six, Bagchi says. They also found that their measure of wealth inequality corresponded with a negative effect on economic growth. In other words, the higher the proportion of billionaire wealth in a country, the slower that country’s growth. In contrast, they found that income inequality and poverty had little effect on growth.

The most fascinating finding came from the next step in their research, when they looked at the connection between wealth, growth and political connections.

The researchers argue that past studies have looked at the level of inequality in a country, but not why inequality occurs — whether it’s a product of structural inequality, like political power or racism, or simply a product of some people or companies faring better than others in the market. For example, Indonesia and the United Kingdom actually score similarly on a common measure of inequality called the Gini coefficient, say the authors. Yet clearly the political and business environments in those countries are very different.

So Bagchi and Svejnar carefully went through the lists of all the Forbes billionaires, and divided them into those who had acquired their wealth due to political connections, and those who had not. This is kind of a slippery slope — almost all billionaires have probably benefited from government connections at one time or another. But the researchers used a very conservative standard for classifying people as politically connected, only assigning billionaires to this group when it was clear that their wealth was a product of government connections. Just benefiting from a government that was pro-business, like those in Singapore and Hong Kong, wasn’t enough. Rather, the researchers were looking for a situation like Indonesia under Suharto, where political connections were usually needed to secure import licenses, or Russia in the mid-1990s, when some state employees made fortunes overnight as the state privatized assets.

The researchers found that some countries had a much higher proportion of billionaire wealth that was due to political connections than others did. As the graph below, which ranks only countries that appeared in all four of the Forbes billionaire lists they analyzed, shows, Colombia, India, Australia and Indonesia ranked high on the list, while the U.S. and U.K. ranked very low.

Wealth and political connections

Looking at all the data, the researchers found that Russia, Argentina, Colombia, Malaysia, India, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea and Italy had relatively more politically connected wealth. Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. all had zero politically connected billionaires. The U.S. also had very low levels of politically connected wealth inequality, falling just outside the top 10 at number 11.

When the researchers compared these figures to economic growth, the findings were clear: These politically connected billionaires weighed on economic growth. In fact, wealth inequality that came from political connections was responsible for nearly all the negative effect on economic growth that the researchers had observed from wealth inequality overall. Wealth inequality that wasn’t due to political connections, income inequality and poverty all had little effect on growth.

A different view of Uber and other ride-sharing services

Filed under: Business, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Robert Tracinski on Uber as a form of “Objectivist LARP“:

If it sometimes seems like it’s impossible to restore the free market, as if every new wave of government regulation is irreversible, then consider that one form of regulation, which is common in the most dogmatically big-government enclaves in the country, is being pretty much completely dismantled before our eyes. And it’s the hippest thing ever.

I was reminded of this by a recent report about yet another attempt to help traditional taxis compete with “ride-sharing” services like Uber and Lyft: a new app called Arro, which allows you to both hail a traditional taxi and pay for it from your phone. So Arro takes a twentieth-century business and finally drags into the twenty-first century. This certainly might help improve the taxi experience relative to how things were done before. But it won’t fend off Uber and Lyft, because it doesn’t change the central issues, which are political rather than technological.

[…]

Uber has been hit with complaints that it’s running “an Objectivist LARP,” a live-action role playing of a capitalist utopia from an Ayn Rand novel. That’s pretty much what it is doing, and the results are awesome. And the benefits don’t stop with more drivers and lower rates. Uber is ploughing a fair portion of its profits into another wave of technological innovation—self-driving cars—that promises to offer even greater improvements in the future.

All of this should counter some of the despair about how to promote free markets, especially among urban elites who have been programmed by their college educations to embrace the rhetoric of the Left. Give them half a chance, and they will flock to capitalist innovations run according to the laws of the market.

The problem is that they don’t want to admit it. That’s where the euphemism “ride-sharing” comes in. To cover up the capitalistic nature of the activity, they tell themselves they’re “sharing” something that they are quite obviously paying for, and paying at market rates. Imagine what could be accomplished if they were just willing to drop the euphemisms and embrace the free market.

QotD: The myth of the “permanent majority”

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Many Republicans seem confident that last week’s performance in the mid-term elections bodes the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of the bright Republican future. Many Democrats seem confident that last week’s performance in the midterms was a mere blip on the way to the Emerging Democratic Majority. Both sides would do well to read Sean Trende’s 2012 book, The Lost Majority, which I made my way through this weekend.

To state Trende’s thesis simply: There is no such thing as a permanent majority. Parties are coalitions of disparate groups of voters, and they win by strapping enough different groups together to push themselves across the electoral finish line. Unfortunately, the broader your coalition, the harder it is to hold together. Those different groups may have radically different values and interests; satisfying one may end up alienating the other. Trende suggests that the longest-lived coalition was not, in fact Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famed “realignment,” which showed large cracks as early as 1937, but the Eisenhower coalition that lasted roughly from 1952 to 1988. As the dates suggest, the reason for unity was the external threat from the Soviet Union. That’s a pretty stiff price to pay for internal unity.

I took two major things away from the book: First, you can’t count on demographics to hand you a victory in such a vast and diverse country, because today’s coalition members may end up as a large and growing pillar of the opposition. And second, although both parties are constantly hunting for a mandate for radical change, the voters almost never deliver one. The party stalwarts may want to tear down the current edifice and start over, but the less ideological coalition partners are usually looking for some light redecorating, perhaps along with a specific personal interest like freedom of conscience in business operations, or less restrictive immigration policy. The harder the parties push on their ideological platforms, the faster the “coalition of everyone” starts leaking supporters to the opposition.

Megan McArdle, “No Party Will Get a Permanent Majority”, Bloomberg View, 2014-11-10.

November 26, 2015

QotD: Culture warriors

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Culture War 2.0 is as inescapable as it is obnoxious. Its loudest proponents, the Social Justice Warriors, live off a drama that they create, playing enlightened victim-activists fighting micro-struggles against micro-aggressions in areas most people have never even thought about.

The issues are ideological, but they’re mainstreamed by focusing on personal narratives. The victim-activists are usually millennials from wealthy families with useless degrees. It’s a story as old as radicalism, but in the dawn of the 21st century, it’s activism and culture war being replayed as farce.

Culture War 2.0 politicizes narcissism and insecurity. It obsessively masticates culture the way that its political predecessors destroyed people. Its target audience lives and thinks in terms of premium cable shows. They are to it what novels were to its 19th century counterparts.

Even its ideology is more grievance than theory. It only cares about theory to the extent of parsing the Victim Value Index and determining who has more or less privilege, who ought to feel more guilty and who ought to feel more victimized. This is ideology as soap opera. Politics as a means of deciding who gets to play what emotional role in a societal drama.

Its political expressions exist in the space of the personal narrative. In this tawdry post-Orwellian future everyone will get their essay of victimhood on Medium or ThoughtCatalog read for 15 minutes. Their drama will, very temporarily, be a trending topic. For a generation of overindulged children, broadcasting their petty pains is the closest thing their lives have to love and meaning.

Daniel Greenfield, “Our Insecure Culture Warriors”, Sultan Knish, 2015-11-02.

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