Matt Yglesias

Gaza

By Matthew Yglesias

I can’t keep up with the claims and counterclaims about the Gaza relief flotilla and the attack on it, but obviously the idea behind the flotilla was not just to deliver supplies but to try to elevate the level of attention being given to the actual situation in the Strip. As this recent human interest piece on Gaza’s surfers reminded us in early May before this particular controversy “[u]nder an economic embargo enforced by the Israeli government, only basic foodstuffs and humanitarian supplies are allowed into Gaza.” The intention of this is to make economic conditions unbearably bad and it’s been a big success!

Gaza doesn’t contain nearly enough arable land to support the Strip’s population as subsistence farmers. Which of course is true of many other places on earth. But the effect of the embargo is to make meaningful commercial activity in Gaza nearly impossible, pushing living standards down to what would be a below-subsistence level were it not for the trickle of aid that flows in. The Hamas authorities exercise some fairly rough justice over the area, extremist groups burn down summer camps and Israel launches airstrikes periodically sometimes injuring dozens sometimes hurting no one. The overall situation is incredibly bleak. Construction supplies aren’t allowed into the area, so it’s been impossible to rebuild since the war there from a couple of years back, and all the physical infrastructure is just degrading over time. Israel is attempting to defend itself from the sporadic rocket fire that’s emanated from the area since the IDF abandoned trying to directly administer it during Ariel Sharon’s administration, but the level of human suffering—we’re talking about a place where 1.5 million people live—being inflicted is just staggering.

NSS and the German president

By Ryan Powers

So Horst Köhler resigned Germany’s (largely symbolic) presidency in the wake of a bit of an uproar over the way he recently characterized his country’s military presence in Afghanistan. The Times explains:

Usually, German leaders justify their soldiers’ presence in the American-led coalition by saying they are needed to thwart would-be terrorists who might use Afghanistan as a base for attacks in Europe.

But, in his contentious remarks, Mr. Köhler said: “A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”

The fact that his brief remarks even elicited a response let alone led to a resignation is striking when we compare that to the “Use of Force” section of Obama’s National Security Strategy in which Köhler’s sentiments are essentially laid out as official U.S. policy:

The United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests, yet we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force.

In addition to a little bit of politicking, I assume this has something to do with the Germany’s post-WWII anti-military mentality. But when we’re surrounded by rhetoric objecting to the fact that Obama won’t bomb Iran, it is a little surprising to see such tame language result in a President’s resignation.

You can’t be poor if you own a cellphone

By Jamelle Bouie

Robert Samuelson invokes a familiar canard in his column complaining about the Obama administration’s choice to use a new definition of poverty developed by the National Academies of Science:

The official poverty measure obscures this by counting only pre-tax cash income and ignoring other sources of support. These include the earned-income tax credit (a rebate to low-income workers), food stamps, health insurance (Medicaid), and housing and energy subsidies. Spending by poor households from all sources may be double their reported income, reports a study by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Although many poor live hand-to-mouth, they’ve participated in rising living standards. In 2005, 91 percent had microwaves, 79 percent air conditioning and 48 percent cellphones. [Emphasis mine]

With microwaves, air conditioning and cell phones, it’s clear that poor people aren’t nearly as poor as we think they are! I mean, it’s not as if poverty is concentrated in the nation’s two warmest regions — the South and the West — where air conditioning is a necessity, and it’s not as if cell phones are a cheaper alternative to landlines, and critical to navigating the world of low-wage service jobs. I guess you could call microwaves luxuries, but even that’s ignoring the fact that the are for more likely to consume frozen and prepared foods that need microwaving.

So in Samuelson’s column, what you have is another attempt to minimize the actual poverty of poor people by pointing to items that are actually necessary to surviving in low-wage service economy. Indeed, by the end of the piece, Samuelson is a step away from lamenting that the new poverty measures will force the government to do more to combat poverty, as if what we do now is adequate. Of course, given Samuelson’s routine Hooverism — “deficits are more important than everything else!” — and his disdain for Social Security and Medicare, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Exchange Rates and Stimulus

By Matthew Yglesias

The much-discussed question of the dollar-RMB exchange rate hasn’t actually been talked about all that frequently during my trip to China. But it did come up at our most recent meeting (admittedly only because I asked a question about it) and our host offered the predictable-but-not-unreasonable response that though there’s a sound case for gradually changing this any Chinese leader is going to have to be reluctant to take any kind of sudden measure that would be likely to throw some huge number of Chinese people out of work.

What I’d wished he’d added is that there really ought to be a way out of this dilemma, namely for revaluation to occur in the context of the U.S., Europe, and Japan committing to more expansionary measures of a monetary or fiscal (or both) nature. For whatever reason, western political leaders seem to have determined that an extended period of badly elevated unemployment is a small price to pay to head off the possibility of hypothetical future inflation. China’s leaders, more sensibly in my view, have the priorities the other way around—trying to keep an eye on inflationary pressures, but predominantly focused on the actual and present danger of labor market collapse. But it’s just really hard for China to pull this off on its own and the Chinese economy simply isn’t big enough to serve as the engine of global demand. Making life easier for China’s economic managers isn’t the reason western leaders ought to do more, but it’s certainly true that better policy in the west would give them more wiggle room in a way that ultimately would make it much easier to resolve the contentious currency issue.

Chinglish

By Matthew Yglesias

You hear a fair amount about “Chinglish”—hilarious inapt translations of Chinese phrases into English—and thought I haven’t actually seen a ton of it, I did find this book title at an airport bookshop to be pretty amusing:

Lurking behind the Chinglish phenomenon is the reality of a rapidly developing country of 1.3 billion people that’s making a rather intensive effort to learn English. The trouble here is that not only is it hard for Chinese speakers to learn English and vice versa (in the sense that the languages are much more different than English and French or English and German) but that there are some rather basic capacity bottlenecks that make mass-instruction in a foreign language hard to pull off. We had a tour guide today at the forbidden city who spoke English very well but had a very strange accent. Initially I thought that he must have been taught English by an Australian or perhaps studied abroad there. But it turned that he’d learned English from a native Chinese speaker who himself had learned from a native Chinese speaker who in turn had learned from a guy from Leeds in the UK. So I was listening, essentially, to a very capable individual doing a copy of a copy of a northern English accent.

In principle, there’s probably a huge opportunity for China to import actual native speakers of English from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand to teach China’s more advanced students and help them obtain a greater level of fluency. But more broadly as China continues to develop it seems to me that we’ll probably see some erosion of English’s current status as a global lingua franca.

Eleven Women Wearing the Same Mama-Bear Suit

No, this is not a "Mama Grizzly." But I promised you pandas and pandas ye shall receive. cc photo from Flickr user beautifulcataya.

By Dara Lind

I wasn’t persuaded by the argument Hanna Rosin put forward a couple of weeks ago that the tea-party movement was inspiring a new wave of women, particularly the working mothers Sarah Palin identified as “mama bears,” to run for office. As E.G. of the Economist’s Democracy in America blog pointed out at the time, there’s a big difference between women getting involved in electoral politics on an organizational level, as most of the women in Rosin’s article are, and women becoming candidates themselves. E.G.’s explanation:

I’m not especially impressed by the number of women who hold leadership positions in the party apparatus itself. You often see that in political parties—women are the county chair or are on the board or are holding the fundraisers. It’s largely economic. Women are more likely to be at-home parents, to have wrested some flexibility from the workplace, to have a partner who makes more money than they do. That gives them the latitude to pursue what are, for the most part, volunteer commitments. If these jobs don’t translate to more women being elected to higher office, what’s the point?

(Incidentally, I think this phenomenon’s actually a lot more pernicious than E.G. makes it out to be. Politics is a lot like, say, higher education or advertising insofar as there’s a big difference between the people in “management” roles and the people who are respected as leaders in the field. Few students who want to go into academia say “Yeah, maybe I’ll be a famous historian, but I really want to be a college dean!”; by the same token, most kids with political aspirations want to be like Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, not Tim Kaine or — heaven forbid — Michael Steele. The fact that women are getting sorted into administration instead of leadership indicates that the dynamics that keep women underrepresented in elected office and high-profile professorships are probably more complicated and harder to fix than they seem.)

When I read in Mark McKinnon’s latest GOP press release Daily Beast column that “a record number of women — and Republican women” are running in this election cycle, however, I was ready to have my mind changed. Maybe Palin’s “mama bear” meme and the tea party movement’s anti-credentialist rhetoric really are encouraging women without backgrounds in politics to jump in!

If such women do exist, though, they’re sure as heck not represented among the candidates Palin’s endorsed as “Mama Grizzlies.” Of the eleven women McKinnon profiles, six are currently holding elected office, with two others (an autism advocate and a Fox News analyst) professionally involved in national politics. If Rosin took the “mama bear” meme from Palin to describe the women she was inspiring to get into the fray, Palin takes it back to label a group of women who would still be involved in politics, and possibly even running in the races they’re in now, if neither she nor the tea-party movement had existed.

Furthermore, two of the three “Mama Grizzlies” who don’t have political backgrounds are Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Fiorina and Whitman both got into their races by positioning themselves as experienced former CEOs whose business and management acumen would make them levelheaded, efficient officeholders. This isn’t high on the list of Acceptable Personas for Women in Politics — a list already much shorter than its equivalent for men. (Not that I have much love in my heart for Republican CEO fetishism, but if they’re going to do it they might as well let women in on the game.) By draping the “Mama Grizzly” label over a couple of politicians who really aren’t portraying themselves as “mama bears” at all, just because they happen to have R’s by their names and two X’s in their genomes, Palin’s doing her part to keep the ways we see women in politics limited to a few gendered archetypes.

The GOP could be celebrating the fact that it’s now drawing women from a slightly broader range of backgrounds to run for office. But instead, its need to co-opt the Tea Party seems to be leading it to identify Fiorina and Whitman with a trope that women are getting into conservative politics because of their convictions, not their expertise. Meanwhile, the women who actually are getting motivated to get into conservative politics where they hadn’t been before are getting shuffled into the administration of the tea party movement, just like their counterparts have long gotten shuffled into the administration of both major parties. One paw forward, two paws back.

Credible commitments and the National Security Strategy

By Ryan Powers

I don’t have much to add to what other, more knowledgeable folks have already said about Obama’s new National Security Strategy. But I wanted to reiterate a point that both Yglesias and Walt made regarding the need for making U.S. foreign policy and national security commitments more credible. Perhaps the best way to do that is to quote Keohane and Nye from their 1998 Foreign Affairs article, Power and Interdepence in the Information Age. They outline what credible commitments look like when fulfilling those commitments are less about material power and more about power derived from credibility in the international system:

The low cost of transmitting data means that the ability to transmit it is much less important than it used to be, but the ability to filter information is more so. Political struggles focus less on control over the ability to transmit information than over the creation and destruction of credibility. … Much of the traditional conduct of foreign policy occurs through the exchange of promises, which can be valuable only insofar as they are credible. Hence, governments that can credibly assure potential partners that they will not act opportunistically will gain advantages over competitors whose promises are less credible. During the Cold War, for example, the United States was amore credible ally forWestern European countries than the Soviet Union because as a democracy the United States could more credibly promise not to seek to exploit or dominate its allies. Second, to borrow from capital markets at competitive interests rates requires credible information about one’s financial situation. Finally, the exercise of soft power requires credibility in order to be persuasive. For instance, as long as the United States condoned racial segregation it could not be a credible advocate of universal human rights. But in June 1998, President Clinton could preach human rights to the Chinese–and in answer to a question at Beijing University about American shortcommings, could frankly admit that the United States needed to make further progress realize its ideal of equality.

With regard to Israel’s nukes and China’s human rights, the Obama administration efforts are looking a bit like the Keohane and Nye vision in which the U.S. tries to hold all states — the U.S. included — accountable to their international commitments. But in other areas — especially with the CIA’s airstrikes in Pakistan — there seems to be a little cognitive dissonance.

Boehner Boasts That GOP is the ‘Party of No’ When It Comes To Gulf Oil Leak

By Satyam Khanna

Kathleen Parker interviews House Minority John Boehner, who appears to proclaim that the GOP is applying the “Party of No” strategy to the Gulf oil leak:

For Boehner, being called the “Party of No” isn’t a regrettable invective. It is a strategy aimed at highlighting the contrast between those running things and those who want to run things. That deafening silence you hear from Republicans about the gulf oil spill? All the better for Americans to hear the glubglubglub of Democrats and the administration going down the drain.

First, it wasn’t long ago that the GOP shunned the label “party of no” (instead using “party of better solutions.”)

Second, I admit that the Party of No strategy, at least at this point, is probably a political winner. But that isn’t going to be any comfort to the Louisiana fishermen, tourist industries, and the coastal communities devastated by the leak. For all the GOP bellowing about the “failure of leadership” of the Obama administration, Boehner’s statement is a reminder to the people actually affected by the oil catastrophe where the national GOP’s priorities are.

The Strange Case of Adrian Fenty

By Matthew Yglesias

Colbert King has an informative column about the political woes of DC Mayor Adrian Fenty who seems to be in real danger of losing his re-election bid. To me the bottom line is this:

Still, it’s ironic that Fenty is viewed so harshly among blacks. He can point to improvements, and not just in the lives of gentrifiers. School performance has improved, crime is down, and public health and municipal services are better since Fenty’s election.

Fenty’s not a God or anything, and Fenty-era improvements (like the Williams-era improvements before them) are largely improvements from a very low base. But still give the man some credit! What’s a mayor supposed to do if not preside over population growth, rising test scores, falling crime rates, and improved municipal services? As Gray outlines, Fenty’s personality and style and that of several of his key appointees have pissed various people off and DC Council Chairman Vincent Gray is capitalizing on the idea that maybe we need a kinder, gentler approach to civic reform. But do we? If something’s broken, but it’s in the process of getting fixed, why fire the fixers in favor of nicer people?

The “General Glut”

By Matthew Yglesias

Read Brad DeLong on the correct policy response to a “general glut,” which is to say “a situation in which there is excess supply of not one or a few but all commodity goods and services.”

In an odd way, commentators on the economy have a strong bias toward talking about supply-side problems. Misguided policies that prevent the economy from operating as efficiently as it might. Policies like a “License Raj” that stifles innovation and entrepreneurship among a nation of over 1 billion in South Asia. Policies like Mao Zedong’s Five Year Plans that trampled on the aspiration of another nation of over 1 billion in East Asia. But though the policy environment is not ideal in China or in India it’s really extraordinarily better than it was in the recent past. And the physical infrastructure is much better too. And something similar, though to a lesser extent, could be said about improved governance in Indonesia and Brazil. A number of Central European countries have likewise been rescued from Communism and embedded in liberal democratic regimes. Meanwhile all around the world transmitting information is dramatically cheaper and easier than at any time in human history. And yet in newly productive China and India hundreds of millions of people continue to live lives as subsistence or near-subsistence farmers. This in a world where the total production of calories far, far, far exceeds the number of calories needed to keep five billion people alive.

To say that the world has solved its supply-side problems would be absurd. Greece really is overburdened with bureaucracy, Italian governance is a mess, we have too many useless homes in the Inland Empire and the suburbs of Las Vegas, and too much of Ireland’s GDP growth was based on a tax haven accounting gimmick. But Greece and Ireland are tiny, Italian governance has always been a mess, and the value of homes in the Inland Empire and the suburbs of Las Vegas has always been tiny relative to the vast productive capacity of the United States. To think that Greek overborrowing and over-bureaucratization could somehow maroon a global economy that’s featured the invention of the Internet and the liberalization of China and India is slightly insane. We right now have the capacity to produce more—much more—than has ever been produced before in the history of the planet. There are dozens of supply-side policies that could be improved in every country on earth, but that’s not a new fact about the world. What’s new is the lack of demand, the willingness of the key leaders in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Washington, Berlin, and now it seems London as well to tolerate stagnation and disinflation in the face of some of the most exciting fundamental new opportunities for human economic betterment ever.

The Nordic Passion for Coffee

By Matthew Yglesias

I’ve been reading Steig Larsson on my China-travels and I’m generally obsessed with Sweden (long story short, it’s very different from China) so that’s why you’re seeing an improbable amount of Sweden-blogging even while I’m over here. At any rate, David Kamp reviewing The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest writes:

Larsson’s is a dark, nearly humorless world, where everyone works fervidly into the night and swills tons of coffee; hardly a page goes by without someone “switching on the coffee machine,” ordering “coffee and a sandwich” or responding affirmatively to the offer “Coffee?” But this world is not dystopian. The good guys (or, I should say, the morally righteous people of all genders) always prevail in the end.

It’s worth pointing out that as best I can tell from my limited—but much more extensive than the average American’s—experience with the Nordic countries, that this coffee-obsession is an authentic quirk of Swedish life and not of Larsson’s prose.

The Swedes are actually a bit less coffee-mad than the Finns, Norwegians, Danes, or Icelanders but as you can see here all the Nordic peoples drink a ton of coffee, in the Swedish case a bit less than twice as much per capita as Americans do. The Södermalm area of Stockholm where Mikael Blonkvist and Lisbeth Salander live and Millenium and Milton Security are headquartered is just littered with coffee houses like nothing I’ve ever seen in America (incidentally, this is where I stayed when I was in Stockholm on the recommendation of a blog reader—it’s a hugely fun neighborhood, definitely stay there if you visit). Personally, I drink way more coffee than the average American and find this aspect of Swedish life congenial. Even I, however, had to balk at the extreme quantity of coffee I was served in Finland where consumption is absolutely off the charts.

China, conversely, has been a real coffee dystopia where American junketeers stagger about zombie-like and decaffeinated. Even at fancy international business hotels the breakfast pours are comically stingy, and I’m amused by not surprised to see that Wikipedia lists average Chinese coffee consumption as approximately zero coffee per person. That said, the Ming Tien Coffee Language chain has a few outlets here in Dalian and is quite good.

Goodbye to Dalian

By Matthew Yglesias

This morning I’m leaving Dalian for Beijing. Of course you can’t really understand a place in the few days I’ve spent here, but what you can say based on three nights in this city is that it’s a very pleasant place. Quite prosperous and not nearly as much of a madhouse as Shanghai. It’s a modest-sized city with I think about 1.2 million people in the urban area proper and has a much higher air quality than the other two Chinese cities I’ve seen or what one generally hears about China. The traffic is also reasonably well-behaved. In a sort of interesting twist for a westerner, it’s a very prosperous and very internationalized city, but its main business links are with Japan and South Korea so it’s also very Asian.

This is also, I believe, the only part of China that was really colonized in the recent past. The essential basis of the city is the old Russian port of Port Arthur (actually a ways to the south of where the modern city is) that Japan took over after the Russo-Japanese War and then the Soviets took back after World War II and then handed back over to China in the mid-fifties. Consequently, some of the older stuff in the city has cyrillic signage and there’s a “Russian Street” near the core of downtown. They say that during the summer a substantial number of tourists from the Russian Far East still come to the beaches here and the cuisine is a bit Japan-esque to my eye/tongue.

What sort of doubly-distinguishes Dalian’s economic development from the rest of coastal China is for one thing a much heavier emphasis on IT as opposed to manufacturing and also a greater emphasis from city officials on environmental protection and “livability.” This is attributed in the city’s narrative about itself to the vision of former local party boss Bo Xilai who’s considered a big rising star in Chinese politics (apparently in China a 60 year-old politician can qualify) and has since been dispatched to run Chongqing the largest and most important city of western China and one that I gather is considerably less prosperous and functional than the coastal areas. That in turn is an interesting aspect of the Chinese system, sort of as if doing a really good job as governor of Massachusetts would get you dispatched to go try to clean up Illinois state government. That seems like a good idea in many ways, and the switcheroo reflects the next phase of where the Chinese government is trying to go with its development—more “spreading the wealth around” to non-coastal areas, and more emphasis on the coast in improving quality of life rather than building factories everywhere.

The Problem with “Do-Something” Government

By Dara Lind

Jamelle’s post about Arizona SB 1070 and “colorblindness” is spot-on, but I wanted to draw one of his points out a bit. Unlike, say, Jim Crow laws — which had no purpose other than targeting African-Americans — my take on SB 1070 has been that it really is intended to target undocumented immigrants, but will inevitably target Latinos. Jamelle and Adam Serwer, in his original post, both touched on this, as did Monica Potts at TAPPED earlier in the week: racial profiling is sometimes codified in policy, but it can also be, as I put it earlier in the week, a “habit of mind” — a heuristic. A police officer doesn’t need to be told to target someone who looks likely to be a criminal; the problem is what mental shortcuts they’re going through in order to determine what “looking likely” means. I don’t think of SB 1070 as a racial-profiling law; I think of it as a law that will cause widespread racial profiling.

The Arizona politicians who passed the bill don’t agree with this interpretation, but when asked by the New York Times, a majority of the American public did. But — as Matt pointed out at the time — they support the law anyway. This, to my mind, might even be scarier than the willful ignorance of Arizona Republicans; the public understands that SB 1070 will impose on the civil rights of Arizona’s Latinos, but they think that’s less important than the fact that it “does something” about illegal immigration. (A majority of Americans continue to support immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship, incidentally, so it really is a question of doing “something” — anything — rather than enacting a more restrictionist immigration policy.)

This is a problem. Believe me, I understand the American public’s frustration with government inaction in general, and inaction in fixing the immigration system in particular. But there are some things more important than government “getting things done,” and protecting the dignity of its people is one of those. Red tape exists for a reason sometimes.

Sometimes I worry that this point isn’t getting made frequently enough in political discourse, on either side. Conservatives have long said that government needs to be more efficient, like the private sector. But the same habits of mind and “prioritization techniques” that drive private-sector efficiency can lead to, say, racial profiling when used by government. Meanwhile, both of the signature domestic issues of the liberal movement — health care and climate change — have led liberals to endorse centralized, technocratic solutions to problems too big for anyone but the federal government to solve. Call it the Daft Punk theory of governance. But it’s hard to focus on government Doing Things to address these problem, and still get the message across that in some cases — like when civil rights are at stake — government shouldn’t necessarily be as brutally “efficient” as it theoretically could be.

Permadisclaimer: my positions on immigration politics and policy are entirely my own, and are in no way associated with my employer or any other organization.

Drones and the Rule-Based Global Order

By Matthew Yglesias

Trouble in droneland:

The American military released a scathing report on Saturday on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by a team of Predator drone operators helped lead to an inadvertent airstrike this year on a group of innocent men, women and children.

Obviously killing civilians is horrible, as well as strategically counterproductive, and killing civilians by the dozens is just awful stuff. But the relevant authorities do seem to me to be quite earnest and at least somewhat successful in their determination to mitigate the extent to which these things happen. The problematic aspect of the drone attacks that I haven’t seen discussed as much as it deserves is really on the Pakistan side of the border and concerns the National Security Strategy’s stated aspiration to create a rules-based global order.

Simply put, having the CIA conduct a secret undeclared de facto war in Pakistan is kind of the reverse of rules-based activity. There’s a colorable rationale under existing rules for unilateral military action in Pakistan under the UN Charter’s absolute recognition of a right to individual and collective self-defense. But this isn’t military action, it’s CIA action. And by definition covert use of force is not rules-based. Now I think you could fairly say that a world of “liberty under law” is a regulative ideal rather than an actual reality, so it’s not per se a violation of the relevant principle to engage in activities outside the rules. Simply pretending that an airtight rules-based global order exists doesn’t make it so. At the same time, to say “the rules-based global order is an aspiration rather than a reality, therefore we can operate outside the rules whenever it’s convenient” actually makes a mockery of the aspiration. And the covert actions in question are some of the worst-kept secrets in the world. So I think there’s a real problem here that’s worthy of more critical thinking.

Ultimately the United States is judged more by what actually happens than by what policy documents say, and I think it’s important to do more to align what we’re actually doing in this regard with our big-picture policy aims.

China’s Lack of Mega-Rich

By Matthew Yglesias

China’s growth has been accompanied by some stark increases in inequality, but it seems noteworthy to me that one area in which the People’s Republic is a real laggard is the development of mega-rich individuals. For example, according to Forbes’ authoritative list the world’s top 100 richest individuals includes zero citizens of mainland China. The richest man in the country, Zong Qinghou, clocks in at number 103. Probably given Chinese growth and the continued economic weakness in the developed world he’ll be able to crack the top 100 soon. But his $7 billion fortune is dwarfed by other developing world tycoons like Carlos Slim (Mexico, $54 billion) Mukesh Ambani (India, $29 billion) or Eike Batista (Brazil, $27 billion).

Part of the issue here is the existence of Hong Kong as a separate jurisdiction which contains a number of mega-billionaires. But the basic reality is that China’s state-led model of economic growth has created huge increases in per capita income and led the PRC to surpass Japan as the #2 economy in the world without creating much in the way of really big really successful new firms. Instead China’s largest companies are basically controlled by the state.

As a bonus fun counterpoint fact, egalitarian Sweden has a wildly disproportionate number of mega-rich citizens. With only 9 million people and an overall GDP less than ten percent the size of China’s, Sweden boast two of the fifteen richest people on the planet—the heads of Ikea and H&M. That’s in part just a coincidence, but I also think it reflects the reality that high taxes and high public spending aside the modern-day Nordic countries actually have a very neoliberal underlying economic structure whereas China is very much the reverse.

Land Prices and the Chinese Public Sector

By Matthew Yglesias

On the morning of May 29 my group was taken to see the village of Cha’an outside Dalian. Or perhaps I should say the former village. What happened, essentially, is that back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures. You see some stories of Chinese people being serious dispossessed in this kind of process, but in the case of Cha’an the local authorities seem to have decided (wisely, in my view, as well as fairly) that it doesn’t make sense to treat people poorly. So people who lost homes in the reconstruction were compensated with multiple homes in the new Cha’an.

We spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.

This all naturally raises the question of how the village government was able to finance all this. The answer is that they used the rising price of land near prosperous Chinese cities to do it. Transforming Cha’an into a more modern, more compact, less agricultural area freed up plenty of land to sell to developers on which to build factories and offices and that gave them the money they needed to update the infrastructure and give everyone one or more free apartments. In principle, this is exactly what governing authorities in a rapidly growing country ought to do. Indeed, this is precisely the strategy Paul Romer recommends for his “charter cities” concept.

It does however put the apparent real estate boom in China in a somewhat different light. I was told earlier in the trip that Chinese banks are actually not particularly exposed to the real estate market with regulators mandating that mortgages compose no more than seven percent of the total assets of any bank. But insofar as Chinese land is also experiencing a price bubble, this means that Chinese municipalities may actually be quite exposed to a potential sudden crash in revenues. I’m not sure that’s what’s happening since a bubble in land prices and a bubble in housing prices are different things (Robert Shiller lays this out nicely in The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It by the way—you can’t build more land, so land prices really should escalate over time as long as GDP grows, whereas increased demand for physical structures should just spur construction and not sustained price increases) but the psychological predicates of the two seem similar enough that they probably go in tandem.

Which is really too bad, because in a lot of ways a look into the modest homes of today’s Cha’an really does drive home the extent to which the improvements in human welfare that China has achieved over the past 20-30 years have been absolutely enormous.

Trust Women

By Ali Frick

This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Dr. George Tiller’s murder, a terrorist act committed to stop him for providing women with safe, legal abortions. The murder was only the most obvious sign that the anti-abortion movement is winning, steadily shaving away women’s constitutional rights. Jezebel notes a study showing that fewer and fewer medical professionals are going into the field of reproductive health and services. And yesterday, the New York Times discussed the latest method right-wing forces use to intimidate women seeking abortions:

Over the last decade, ultrasound has quietly become a new front in the grinding state-by-state battle over abortion. With backing from anti-abortion groups, which argue that sonograms can help persuade women to preserve pregnancies, 20 states have enacted laws that encourage or require the use of ultrasound.
[...]

Late last month, Oklahoma went a step further. Overriding a veto by Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a law mandating that women be presented with an ultrasound image and with a detailed oral description of the embryo or fetus.

21 states have introduced ultrasound laws in 2010 alone. It has become increasingly clear that the Democratic Party isn’t interested in being the backbone of a pro-choice movement. Now, I’m not one to say we should have scrapped health care because it reaffirmed the Hyde Amendment, but did you notice how during that debate, the Democrats’ defense was that it perpetuated Hyde? There was hardly a single voice stating that Hyde is bad policy, that it punishes poor women for trying to exercise constitutional rights, that it sets up tiered access to fundamental rights.

Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller for eight years, implores the pro-choice community not to abandon women: “The time has come for us, as a movement, in our own collective ways, whether it’s through education or activism or political engagement, to meet the anti-woman forces on their ‘own’ turf. We must not cede any section of this country.”

We need to reaffirm Tiller’s motto: “Trust women.” These ultrasound laws are such an insult to women because they presume that women have no idea what they’re doing. Again, the Times:

Like other patients, Laura, who has a 17-year-old son, said she took offense at the state’s implicit suggestion that she had not fully considered her choice.

“You don’t just walk into one of these places like you’re getting your nails done,” she said. “I think we’re armed with enough information to make adult decisions without being emotionally tortured.”

This weekend, let’s include Dr. Tiller among those we remember for fighting to defend the rights of all Americans.

Swedish Murder Rate

By Matthew Yglesias

This Foreign Policy article on Steig Larsson and the decline of the Swedish utopia concludes with what seems to me to be a whopper of a factual error:

If you look at the statistics, Sweden is not a particularly violent country, nor a particularly lenient one to criminals. It is in about the middle of the European averages for both figures. There were 230 homicides in Sweden in 2009, compared with 143 in Washington, D.C., which has a population a bit more than half Sweden’s size. But compare these figures to what they were in the years when Sweden looked like a utopia. In 1990, there were 120 homicides in Sweden, and 472 in Washington. There is a convergence here that doesn’t flatter Sweden.

In fact, there are 9.3 million people in Sweden and only 600,000 in Sweden. In other words, Sweden has about fifteen times the population of Washington DC and less than half the murders. Stockholm is a bit larger than DC, and its murder rate of 3 per 100,000 in 2009 is way lower than DC’s murder rate of 24 per 100,000. And indeed you can see that the relatively low level of violent crime in Sweden is a necessary backdrop for the plot of Larsson’s books. In The Girl Who Played With Fire a triple-murder in Stockholm becomes a major news story that dominates nationwide media attention for several days.

Endgame

By Matt Zeitlin

I run more game than the Bulls and Sonics

- Is this why Judd Gregg didn’t take the Commerce Secretary offer?

- Angry that Guantanamo isn’t closed? The administration hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory, but neither has Congress.

- The one word essay prompt at All Souls always seemed like a great thing if you wanted to test people’s ability to pull clever,  substance-free thoughts with lots of highfalutin references out of their asses. I do, however, wonder what Derek Parfit wrote for his.

- ESPN is trying really, really hard to get Americans interested in the World Cup, and not by overhyping the U.S. team.

- On that note, the MLS still kinda sucks.

- Leon Wieseltier on Sheikh Jarrah.

- Peter Beinart: dirty stinking commie.

- Quantum mechanics is not “responsible” for postmodernism. The difficulty of interpreting language or constructing grand narratives out of social phenomena has nothing to do with not being able to know with the same precision the momentum and position of a particle. If we had a pre-quantum mechanics understanding of the world, it would have no bearing on the validity, truth or usefulness of the claims and arguments of postmodernists.

I know some of you might not like Nelly, but he’s playing at Northwestern tomorrow and “Country Grammar,” for what it’s worth, holds up.

Have a fun weekend.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Silver-Spoon Vanguardism

By Dara Lind

The furor over Facebook’s latest changes to its privacy settings has died down over the last week, and I’m a bit dismayed. Sure, as announced by Mark Zuckerberg on Monday (in a Washington Post op-ed clearly more aimed at the legislators who’d hauled him in to testify last week than at his site’s actual users) the settings have now been tweaked to give people “easier control over their information.” But Facebook’s gotten really good at this game by now — the company’s patron saint of customer service is apparently Lucy Van Pelt — and it’s odd that the people who were in an uproar a few weeks ago seem, for the most part, to have been pacified merely by the fact that some concessions are being made, rather than stopping to think about how long they might last.

This is silly. Zuckerberg has always been quite honest about the fact that Facebook will continue to move toward greater publicity with user data. When he’s forced to apologize, as he was in the Post this week, he doesn’t apologize for doing things with users’ information they never wanted to happen — he apologizes that “sometimes we move too fast.”

Zuckerberg seems to think that full publicity is the inevitable future. He said in January that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” The problem is that actual social science research shows this isn’t true. The Pew Research Center reported this week that (in the words of Web-sociology guru danah boyd) “young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults.” Surely Facebook, if it wanted, could figure out that its line about a youth-driven juggernaut toward publicity isn’t borne out by the data — it’s not like it doesn’t have the user data of hundreds of millions of users at its fingertips. So what gives?

I suspect that while Zuckerberg spins publicity as a social good, he actually believes it’s a moral one. It’s a theme that’s become pretty common among execs of data-collecting, data-publicizing companies: making it so that anything anyone does can be seen by anyone they know is a way of keeping them honest. Check out this quote he gave David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, in an interview:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Easy for Mark Zuckerberg to say. He’s a white, cisgendered, presumably straight male who went to Exeter and Harvard and has only ever been his own boss. It’s fair to say that he’s been on the short end of a power dynamic much less frequently than the overwhelming majority of his users. The notion that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” is the sentiment of someone who’s never had to code-switch, someone who’s never had to be in the closet for fear of getting kicked out of the house, someone who’s familiar with the world of white-collar “networking” in which bosses are expected to have semi-social bonds with their employees rather than the world of enforced hierarchy in which bosses are on the lookout for off-the-job indiscretions to punish or exploit. For many, many people, having more than one identity isn’t a sign of “lack of integrity” because it’s not even really a personal choice. It’s the only way to survive in a world that isn’t always perfectly willing to accept and respect them for who they are.

This is especially true of the young people who are Facebook’s core users, and who are, as boyd points out, the least likely to be aware of what Facebook is doing with their user data. And Facebook is making no efforts to educate them. It may have finally gotten the message that some people care about privacy, but it’s still assuming that those people are an educated elite. This week’s concessions are great for the people who know about them, but the people whose lives could be materially changed for the worse by having a single identity forced on them may not know.

I really want GLSEN, or another national organization that deals with queer youth issues, to start hounding Facebook loudly — not just for the most recent changes, or the ones before that, but for the insensitivity the company’s philosophy shows for anyone who has to manage their identity to get by. Zuckerberg isn’t the moral vanguard; he’s trying to force users vastly less privileged than he is to accept a set of social norms that need a whole lot of privilege to keep them afloat. And right now, right after Lucy has placed the football back on the ground and everyone’s stopped focusing on the battle that’s just ended, is the perfect time to point out that Facebook isn’t just going too fast but moving in a bad direction.

National Security Strategy Returns Broad War Powers to U.N.

By Satyam Khanna

Yesterday, Yglesias outlined the rules-based system illustrated by the National Security Strategy. I think it’s worth diving into how exactly Obama has done this. Most interesting is how he has aligned the use of force doctrine with international institutions. Here’s Bush:

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. … the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.

And Obama:

When force is necessary, we will continue to do so in a way that reflects our values and strengthens our legitimacy, and we will seek broad international support, working with such institutions as NATO and the U.N. Security Council. The United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests, yet we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force. Doing so strengthens those who act in line with international standards, while isolating and weakening those who do not.

Under the U.N., generally, the only means in which a country can use force is in self-defense. You can see that self-defense is quite limited, as it must be “necessary” and after an “armed attack.” The UN Security Council, on the other hand, is given power to basically do whatever it wants; it can fight “threats to the peace,” however broad that may be (i.e., it can launch preventive wars, if it has the votes).

Bush’s “gathering threats” doctrine basically told the U.N. Security Council, “I want your broad and unlimited power to conduct warfare, even if I am not entitled to it under international law.” Left unanswered was why every other country in the world couldn’t follow suit, launching attacks against whomever they wanted “even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” International anarchy, really.

Obama’s NSS gives that power back to the U.N. Security Council. By preserving the right of self defense but adding the big caveat that the U.S. will “adhere to standards that govern the use of force,” U.S. is returning to the widely held view that countries can only use force in immediate self defense, and that anything more must be authorized by the procedures of international institutions.

This is a major, major victory for international stability, because, at least in theory, other rogue states can no longer look to the U.S.’s example to launch preventive war; they can only use unilateral force when it is absolutely, immediately necessary. The potential ripple effect of this NSS — a more stable, predictable system governing how and when nations can conduct warfare — is something to be proud of.

Update: As Matt notes, none of this is black and white. The use of drone attacks, for instance, raises some pretty serious questions about the right of self-defense in international law.

Memorial Day and Medals of Honor

By Ryan Powers

In honor of memorial day, I thought I’d note that the oldest surviving Medal of Honor recipient, John Finn died yesterday at the age of 100.

Finn’s write up reminded me that I also wanted to mention an on-going Medal of Honor dust up. 1st Lt. Alonzo Cushing died at Gettysburg in 1863. Margaret Zerwekh — a 90 year-old woman who lives on land once occupied by Cushing’s family in Wisconsin — led a 20-year-long campaign to get Cushing the Medal of Honor for his actions at Gettysburg. Cushing’s medal was recently approved by the Secretary of the Army and Zerwkh hoped that the medal would be presented to the mayor of Cushing’s birth place, Delafield, WI. But now some “New York interlopers” (!) from New York are trying to steal the show, apparently. All Things Considered had Zerwekh on last weekend, to explain the issue:

RAZ: When you finally heard from the secretary of the army that Lieutenant Cushing will be getting a Medal of Honor, what was your reaction?

ZERWEKH: I jumped up and down, and then I sat down, and I picked up the phone again and I called everybody who had supported the effort. Unfortunately, I called the Fredonia Public Library, which had given me information, that’s Fredonia, New York.

RAZ: Uh-huh. And that’s where he actually moved to as a young boy.

ZERWEKH: That’s where the family moved to. And so what happened when I called the library to tell them, they called the mayor, their mayor. And now the mayor of Fredonia is trying to get this medal.

Jerks. But perhaps better than these communities fighting over the medal, someone should locate Cushing’s descendants and present them with the medal. Some sort of Medal of Honor timesharing agreement just doesn’t really seem appropriate.

When ‘colorblindness’ isn’t colorblind

By Jamelle Bouie

More good stuff today from TAPPED. Here’s Adam Serwer on the alleged “color-blindness” of Arizona’s recent immigration law:

One of the primary arguments of the “read the law” chorus is that since the law has a provision outlawing racial profiling it won’t unfairly target Latinos. This is basically an extension of colorblind racist philosophy into law — namely the text of the bill outlaws racial profiling, despite the fact that it is clearly aimed at the state’s Latino population. The reason you can pass a law that encourages racial profiling in spirit while prohibiting it in letter is that everyone has a concept in their head of what an “illegal immigrant” looks and sounds like. A police officer wouldn’t have to make a judgment based on race alone; as the civil-rights groups’ lawsuit points out, they could make such decisions based on racialized factors such as “language, accent, clothing, English-word selection” or “failure to communicate in English.”

In an earlier era, this same “colorblind racist philosophy” was used to craft laws targeting African-Americans. Rarely were Jim Crow laws explicitly racist, instead, they relied on “colorblind” mechanisms — like poll taxes and grandfather clauses — to achieve the desired, anti-black outcome. Arizona’s immigration law is obviously not the same as Jim Crow, but it’s animated by the same basic idea of “colorblindness” — if something doesn’t explicitly mention race, then it can’t be racist. And the converse is also true, anything that mentions race is de facto racist, even if it’s designed to ameliorate racial prejudice (see: Chief Justice John Roberts, 2007)

It’s tempting to lay this on conservatives as another example of their inability to understand racism as something broader and more pervasive than simple prejudice. And while that’s true, it’s not simply a conservative problem. Serwer noted in another post, that Americans of all stripes have trouble thinking about race in ways that move beyond hooded white supremacists and angry skinheads. As he put it:

This is part of why the American conversation on race is so counterproductive — it’s almost entirely focused on excluding almost every model of rational behavior from the category of “racism,” rather than examining the very real effects race continues to have on people’s lives. The

Yep, that gets to the nub of it.

Dalian Metro

By Matthew Yglesias

As you’ve doubtless heard, China is currently undergoing a massive boom in infrastructure projects. And as you can see in the United States, the future development of a metropolitan area tends to be shaped for a long time by infrastructure decisions made in the past. New York City was a big early builder of subways and commuter rail, whereas most of the Sunbelt invested early and often in freeways. These decisions aren’t irreversible, but there’s a lot of lock-in. If you don’t have transit, then the private sector doesn’t build transit-appropriate projects which makes adding transit a hassle.

Different Chinese cities have different approaches in this regard, but Dalian where I am today is currently investing in a substantial Metro system:

Right now it’s a modest two-branch affair, but within the next eight years four more lines should be built and right now you can see the construction all over the city. I obviously don’t have the knowledge of local conditions necessary to make even a sketchy evaluation of these plans, but as a transit fan it’s exciting to see. We met today with the top Communist Party official in the city, and he explained that he saw transit as crucial to avoiding endless traffic jams and that the subway is just one leg of an envisioned stool that also includes Bus Rapid Transit, regular bus, and light rail.

I’ve been interested to see that no Chinese city seems to be interested in implementing congestion pricing. This is really too bad, since currently conditions in China are ideal for it. Car ownership is still only a minority pursuit of the wealthy so raising funds by taxing congestion in traffic-plagued cities (of which there are certainly a few) in order to finance improved mass transit ought to be a no-brainer way of dealing with an economic and ecological problem while also improving the welfare of average Chinese people in a very direct way.

Upholding Our Promise To Iraqi Refugees

By Ali Frick

In an interview with the Washington Post published Thursday, Vice President Biden insisted that the American withdrawal of troops from Iraq will take place on schedule, reducing troops to 50,000 this summer. This is promising news. But as we leave, we can’t forget about the vulnerable populations we have left behind, and we must uphold the promise of Ted Kennedy’s Iraqi refugee law. A group I work with at school, the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, has laid out a few essential changes we need to make in our policies to ensure the protection of the most vulnerable Iraqi populations:

Use Existing Tools To Protect Iraqi Refugees: Kennedy’s 2008 Iraqi Refugee Bill authorized the Secretary of State to designate vulnerable populations of Iraqi refugees as part of the Priority-2 category, providing them expedited resettlement to the United States. So far, however, the State Department has not included any Iraqis in this category. The Department should act on this, and create transparent procedures for naming groups as P-2 status.

Move Immediately To Resettle Gay Iraqis: More than 100 gay Iraqis have been kidnapped, tortured, and executed by gangs and militias in Iraq this past year; the entire gay population has been systematically targeted. Secretary of State Clinton can designate LGBT Iraqis as part of the Kennedy bill’s P-2 category, which provides for expedited resettlement to the United States as refugees.

Uphold Our Promise To Iraqis Who Helped Us: US law allocates 5,000 “Special Immigrant Visas” (SIVs) annually to Iraqis who worked with the United States, but less than 17 1,000 are being granted. Discretionary relief often means applicants are inexplicably rejected without a way to appeal. State and DHS needs to streamline this process, institute auotomatic reviews for applicants, and produce its own reviews for Congress and the public.

For years, we ignored the refugee crisis in Iraq. We face different challenges in Afghanistan, where there are fewer liberal-ish neighboring states to which refugees can flee (most Iraqi refugees flee to Jordan and live there while awaiting resettlement). We have spent years trying to catch up to the problem in Iraq; as we leave Iraq — and hopefully Afghanistan — we can’t forget our responsibility to those we are leaving behind.