Status quo Sunday at the New York Times

I had the oddest sense of deja vu while reading Ross Douthat's column about the Affordable Care Act today immediately after reading Tom Friedman's column about Israel. 

Both were sleight-of-hand defenses of a status quo: an Israel continuously extended on theft of land and a welfare state in statsis that Douthat would not have adapt to mitigate new problems of wealth distribution and risk transfer.

Friedman's column is a mealy-mouthed plug for a book by Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, which may well be better than Friedman's characterization.  It begins with an even-handedness trope: a plea to view "the real Israel, not the fantasy, do-no-wrong Israel peddled by its most besotted supporters or the do-no-right colonial monster portrayed by its most savage critics." Fair enough. But the column sanitizes the colonial reality, flashing briefly on a bloodless freeze-frame of expelled refugees in 1948 rather than engaging with the continuing and accelerating gobbling of the West Bank.  It then devolves into que sera piety: Palestinians should suck it up and get on with their lives. And by the way, the failure of two-state negotiations is all their fault:

Generalizations about generations are generally fatuous

Generalizations about generations -- particularly boomer-whacking ones -- always drive me around the bend. I don't know whether I'll muster the energy to take on Jim Tankersley's extended mock-formal indictment of the boomers, but for the moment let me pull up the gist of a post taking a whack at Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest.  And do read Hal Espen on boomer-bashing -- link in the footnotes.

...Friedman expands the attack to encompass a more familiar target -- the boomers:

We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.

Ezra Klein, what about that Paradox of Power?

It's not often that I feel impelled to dispute a conclusion with Ezra Klein, but today is one of those occasions.

Noting the irony inherent in the fact-set that a) Republicans continue to make sympathetic noises about the Bowles-Simpson plan, b) Obama has floated plans that are both less substantive and to the right of Bowles-Simpson, and c) Republicans reflexively reject -- nay, demonize -- anything with Obama's stamp on it, Klein makes a case that Obama should press "reset" and throw his weight behind the plan:

Either way, there’s no reason Democrats should be rejecting Simpson-Bowles on behalf of the Republicans. And, to be fair, that’s not all that’s going on here: The Obama administration doesn’t like the defense cuts or Social Security reforms in Simpson-Bowles, and they’re skeptical that the tax reform process could really generate as much revenue as the document promises. So their thinking was that they could work off of the Simpson-Bowles proposal and come out with something better.

That’s pretty much what they tried to do in April. But because that plan had Obama’s name on it, it was dismissed as a liberal nonstarter. Their strategy, in other words, was a huge failure, and over the past year, they’ve watched the deficit debate move far, far, far to the right.

Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether Obama stands to gain now by embracing Bowles-Simpson.  I think Klein misconstrues the cause of Obama's "huge failure" in the spring and summer of this year. The failure lay not in the composition of his plan nor in his abstention from wholehearted advocacy of Bowles-Simpson.  It stemmed from his agreement to negotiate under the debt ceiling deadline, which he not only accepted but embraced as "a unique opportunity to do something big."

The moral equivalent of warmongering

William James' 1906 essay The Moral Equivalent of War (which James Fallows recently induced me to read) derives its strength in large part from the avowed pacifist James' willingness to take seriously the arguments of those he seeks to correct -- theorists who avow openly that war is the highest crucible of human virtue and therefore essential to human progress. Hence his search for a less destructive 'equivalent' means of mobilizing human passion and effort.

Thinking again about the thirty year-old pastime of boomer-bashing (see Thomas Friedman; my response here), it seems to me that underlying that impulse is a repressed sympathy for the kind of openly avowed militarism that no one would subscribe to today. Here is James' distillation of one such thinker's doctrine:

Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their considerations. The Philosophie des Krieges, by S. R. Steinmetz is good example. War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential form of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor — there isn't a moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another.

Excoriating the postwar generation constitutes a back-door endorsement of the notion that peace and prosperity corrupt and that war cleanses.

Few today would greet the onset of a cataclysmic new war with the enthusiasm of the English poet Rupert Brooke, marching off in 1914:

Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest*

Confirmation bias, thy name is Thomas Friedman.

Leave it to Friedman to decide, as the U.S. struggles out of the steepest recession in 70 years, that our troubles are due to the moral failings of baby boomers, set off by a cartoonish Goofus/Gallant contrast with the Greatest Generation.  His column putting this moralizing mush across is so jaw-droppingly sloppy that it seems self indulgent to try to debunk it.

First, Friedman uncritically retails Robert Samuelson's recent claim that poor U.S. student performance can be ascribed to poor student motivation --and conveniently ignores Samuelson's main explanation:

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

Never mind that the percentages cited do not exactly suggest absenteeism and apathy to be epidemic: Samuelson acknowledges (while underplaying) that the chief cause of stagnant test scores is a wider pool of graduates:

The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out compared with about 25 percent today) and adolescent culture has strengthened, the authority of teachers and schools has eroded.

Samuelson's stats don't fully capture the extent to which full access to a high school education was broadened in the postwar era.  According to Stephen J. Rose's Rebound, in 1960 (the baseline for Samuelson's snapshot of U.S. high school students' educational achievement over time), only half of workers had a high school diploma, almost 30% had some college, and 10% had a college degree. Today, Rose writes, "these numbers are completely reversed": only 10% lack a high school diploma, 60%  have some postsecondary education, and 30% have at least a 4-year college degree.

Our Undemocratic Constitution, cont.: fixes from Calif. and Down Under

I generally take Thomas Friedman's enthusiasms with a spoonful of salt (especially his corporate enthusiasms). But today he retails two interesting ideas from Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution and Stanford  (interesting that Friedman cites only Stanford) that could lead toward fixes in Our Undemocratic Constitution. First:

let every state emulate California’s recent grass-roots initiative that took away the power to design Congressional districts from the state legislature and put it in the hands of an independent, politically neutral, Citizens Redistricting Commission. It will go to work after the 2010 census and reshape California’s Congressional districts for the 2012 elections. Henceforth, districts in California will not be designed to be automatically Democratic or Republican — so more of them will be competitive, so more candidates will only be electable if they appeal to the center, not just cater to one party.

There's an element of trying to jump off your shadow in creating depoliticized commissions.  The experts are usually picked by elected officials, and no one is ideology-free, of course. But that doesn't mean that commissions don't work.  Politics can be sublimated if not eliminated. Commission members are not up for election, they are picked in a manner that balances their political propensities, those selected generally have a reputation as reality-based nonideologues, and they are forced to work together.  The base closing commission worked; the 9/11 Commission did some good, in truth-telling if not in policy results; the Social Security commission at least provided some cover or impetus for politicians to strike a deal; and the President at least has high hopes for the "MedPAC on steroids" in the health reform bill.

A "consensus" sans democracy?

Katrin Bennhold reports in the International Herald Tribune  (as noted today by Thomas Friedman):

And as developing countries everywhere look for a recipe for faster growth and greater stability than that offered by the now-tattered “Washington consensus” of open markets, floating currencies and free elections, there is growing talk about a “Beijing consensus”...

Some suggest that China’s lack of democracy is an advantage in making unpopular but necessary changes. “It is more challenging for democratic systems because every day they come under public pressure and every short period they have to go back to the polls,” said Victor Chu, chairman of First Eastern Investment Group in Hong Kong, the largest direct investment firm in China. “China is lucky to have the ability to make long-term strategic decisions and then execute them clinically.”

During the last great crisis of Western capitalism, many people felt the same way about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.  The current Chinese government is a far more rational and accountable steward of the common weal than either of those monstrosities.  But I imagine that the advantages of dictatorship will eventually once again prove illusory -- or more accurately, the costs of repression will in the fullness of time be revealed to outweigh the benefits, and democracy will emerge once again as the worst form of government except for all the alternatives. As Gideon Rachman observed this past fall, the Chinese government relies currently relies on a social contract that will likely at some point show its fragility:

The government’s neurotic obsession with achieving its totemic figure of 8 per cent growth a year hints at the country’s continuing political fragility. Without a democratic mandate, the Communist party relies on rapid growth to keep the system stable. Somehow the country needs to make the transition to a system in which the government can draw upon alternative sources of legitimacy. Twenty years after the Tiananmen massacre, the Communist party shows no outward sign of contemplating a transition to a more democratic system. Meanwhile, the Chinese media speculate openly that social unrest could rise to dangerous levels, if economic growth slackens.

As the government moves now to "clinically" put the brakes on an overheating economy, here's hopeful for managable crises, and peaceful transformations.

Score one for Thomas Friedman

I usually don't have much use for Thomas Friedman's column: I often find him credulous, obvious, and tendentious. But "obvious" has its good side, and he's been hammering home the need to tax energy for a long time. His prescription for Obama today is dead-on:

Today’s financial crisis is Obama’s 9/11. The public is ready to be mobilized. Obama is coming in with enormous popularity. This is his best window of opportunity to impose a gas tax. And he could make it painless: offset the gas tax by lowering payroll taxes, or phase it in over two years at 10 cents a month. But if Obama, like Bush, wills the ends and not the means — wills a green economy without the price signals needed to change consumer behavior and drive innovation — he will fail.

The two most important rules about energy innovation are: 1) Price matters — when prices go up people change their habits. 2) You need a systemic approach. It makes no sense for Congress to pump $13.4 billion into bailing out Detroit — and demand that the auto companies use this cash to make more fuel-efficient cars — and then do nothing to shape consumer behavior with a gas tax so more Americans will want to buy those cars. As long as gas is cheap, people will go out and buy used S.U.V.’s and Hummers.

During the transition I've wondered: beyond the terrifying deficits that Obama clearly needs to run up in the next two years, how can he secure the long-term fiscal health of the Federal government? I see three broad focal points: 1) reform healthcare in a manner that, whatever the initial Federal outlay, slows the growth of medical costs by a) reducing the role of private insurance, b) changing doctors' incentives (payment per procedure) and disincentives (through a measure of tort reform), and c) rewards preventive care; 2) cut spending on big-ticket military hardware (but not on the kind of counterinsurgency capabilities that Gates wants to bolster); and 3) tax the hell out of energy consumption -- with the offsetting tax cuts (at first) that Friedman suggests.

On Goldman's summer forecast

How long ago seems a sunny forecast on rising global wealth delivered this summer by Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill:

It is also evident that poverty is dropping dramatically around the world. According to our calculations, the number of people living on incomes of less than $1,000 dollars a year ($2.75 a day) has already dropped significantly from about 50 per cent of the world's population in the 1970s to 17 per cent by 2000. According to our numbers, it could be as low as 6 per cent by 2015. On the more familiar World Bank definition of one dollar a day, the same dramatic shift is evident. Probably no more than 5 per cent of the world's population now suffers this indignity. Of course, this is too much, but as long as the forces of globalisation continue we expect it to drop further.

O'Neill also claimed that 70 million people year are joining the "world middle class" and forecast acceleration to 90 million per year by 2030, "even allowing for a global slowdown."

How does the much more severe-looking worldwide recession affect these projections? On the one hand, on the long view, even a prolonged downturn should not compromise the broad upward trend of human wealth spreading planet-wide -- any more than the rise of radical Islam or of petrodollar-fueled autocracies erases the broad movement toward democracy among the world's nation-states.

On the other hand, the last Depression triggered world war. Prolonged stagnation or contraction could swell the ranks of those receptive to radical ideologies, or destabilize China or India, or help turn any number of countries' frustrations toward outward aggression.

Back in 2001, when India and Pakistan last faced off, Thomas Friedman suggested that India had too much of a stake in its emerging economic strength to throw it away on a potentially nuclear conflict. I thought the logic was dicey then - reminiscent of pre-World War I claims that the economies of Europe were so interdependent that the bankers would always put the brakes on major conflict. But to the extent that growth and hope were restraining factors, those restraints may give way as economic woes mount.

Conversely...a pause in breakneck development in emerging markets may also provide an opportunity for more sustainable growth -- particularly with stimulus packages in the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere pointed toward developing alternative energy sources. And if the slowdown proves to be a "correction" in a non-euphemistic sense, it will lead to increased saving in the U.S. and increased consumption in countries that have been developing rapidly. Can we rebalance without cataclysm?

Friedman gets "got your back" backwards

As is his wont, Thomas Friedman today takes a useful concept and beats it to death, oversimplifying in the process.

The concept is that the single most important factor in a secretary of state's effectiveness is whether the secretary has the president's full backing:

what made [Secretary of State James A. Baker III] an effective diplomat was not only his own skills as a negotiator — a prerequisite for the job — but the fact that his boss, President George H.W. Bush, always had Baker’s back. When foreign leaders spoke with Baker, they knew that they were speaking to President Bush, and they knew that President Bush would defend Baker from domestic rivals and the machinations of foreign governments.

That backing is the most important requirement for a secretary of state to be effective. Frankly, Obama could appoint his dear mother-in-law as secretary of state, and if he let the world know she was his envoy, she would be more effective than any ex-ambassador who had no relationship with the president.

Fair enough. But most people viewing this appointment would be more worried about whether Clinton will have Obama's back than vice versa. A president can't be effective if the secretary of state --or any other top-ranking member of the foreign policy team--freelances, has her own agenda, goes rogue obviously or covertly, creates facts on the ground.

To be fair, Friedman does tack around to this point eventually. But he views it through the wrong end of the telescope:

My question is whether a President Obama and a Secretary of State Clinton, given all that has gone down between them and their staffs, can have that kind of relationship, particularly with Mrs. Clinton always thinking four to eight years ahead, and the possibility that she may run again for the presidency. I just don’t know.

Every word that is said between them in public, and every leak, will be scrutinized for what it means politically and whether there is daylight. That is not a reason not to appoint Mrs. Clinton. But it is a reason for everyone around the president-elect to take a deep breath and ask whether they are prepared to have the kind of air-tight relationship with Mrs. Clinton that is required for effective diplomacy.

Finally, to hammer his point home, Friedman gets the history underlying the political cliche of the season exactly backwards:

When it comes to appointing a secretary of state, you do not want a team of rivals.

"Team of Rivals" is of course the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin's group biography of Lincoln's chief rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860, all of whom ended up in his cabinet. Lincoln's Secretary of State, William H. Seward, was indeed in a situation closely analogous to Hillary's. The odds-on favorite for the nomination, he bitterly resented having it snatched by the less experienced but more politically nimble Lincoln. At first, he assumed -- and openly proposed to Lincoln -- that he, Seward, would effectively lead Administration policy. Lincoln swiftly disabused him of that notion -- and almost as swiftly earned his trust and admiration. Seward eventually wrote to his wife, "the president is the best of us." The bond between them became the stuff of legend.

On the other hand, another member of Lincoln's "Team," Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, worked tirelessly to undercut Lincoln, and indeed plotted to replace him as Republican nominee in 1864. At the same time, for all the knives he tossed at Lincoln's back, he effectively financed a war of unprecedented expense.

In short, Friedman's use of the team of rivals trope tells us exactly nothing. Would Clinton be a Seward or a Chase in Obama's Cabinet? Probably neither.