Shorter Brad DeLong

"I like it when Ron Suskind uses nefarious tactics to make people I do not like look bad; I do not like it when he uses them to make my friends look bad."

Jacob Weisberg has it right, I think. But then I didn't spend dozens of posts in the middle of the 2000s giving lots of credence to Ron Suskind, so I've really got nothing at stake.

Tyler Cowen on Immigration

Very good:

In other words, immigrants may be competing more with offshored workers than with other laborers in America. ...

We see the job-creating benefits of trade and immigration every day, even if we don’t always recognize them. As other papers by Professor Peri have shown, low-skilled immigrants usually fill gaps in American labor markets and generally enhance domestic business prospects rather than destroy jobs; this occurs because of an important phenomenon, the presence of what are known as “complementary” workers, namely those who add value to the work of others. An immigrant will often take a job as a construction worker, a drywall installer or a taxi driver, for example, while a native-born worker may end up being promoted to supervisor. And as immigrants succeed here, they help the United States develop strong business and social networks with the rest of the world, making it easier for us to do business with India, Brazil and most other countries, again creating more jobs.

[I]t’s not all about one group of people taking jobs from another. Job creation and destruction are so intertwined that, over all, the authors find no statistically verifiable connection between offshoring and net creation of American jobs. ...

When it comes to immigration, positive-sum thinking is too often absent in public discourse these days. Debates on immigration and labor markets reflect some common human cognitive failings — namely, that we are quicker to vilify groups of different “others” than we are to blame impersonal forces.

The current skepticism has deadlocked prospects for immigration reform, even though no one is particularly happy with the status quo. Against that trend, we should be looking to immigration as a creative force in our economic favor. Allowing in more immigrants, skilled and unskilled, wouldn’t just create jobs. It could increase tax revenue, help finance Social Security, bring new home buyers and improve the business environment.

And yet many do not see it that way. This is not just an American problem. Migrant workers are also viewed suspiciously (at best) in developed Europe, are treated miserably in the Middle East, and are largely prohibited in China.

I wish this sort of economic argument would be persuasive, but in the end I don't think it's enough. I think people view society largely in terms of identity and ownership, and they don't want to lose control of that even if it would benefit them materially. I wish I was wrong about that. I don't think I am.

Trivia Time (E.U. Currency Arbitrage Edition)

Q. What does this quote refer to:

“A hundred years have passed,” the article noted, and “we Italians still have to put up with the same old filth.”

Is it:

a. Caricatures of Italians as mafioso in American pop culture.

b. Poor inspection of canned tomatos by the Italian government leading to an outbreak of salmonella.

c. Swiss xenophobia.

d. Corruption in the Italian parliament.

If you answered "c.", congratulations. Apparently a far-right Swiss party has been running explicitly racist ads that portray (Italian) rats nibbling on Swiss cheese. The rats represent legal Italian immigrants who work in Switzerland, which borders Italy to the north. It seems that this stems in part from the fact that Switzerland has ratified labor accords with the E.U., but has no adopted the Euro:

The global financial crisis has accentuated tensions here, especially since border workers began moving from jobs in sectors like construction, factory work or domestic help to jobs in areas that the Swiss hold sacred, like banking. ...

In the past, Mr. Rusconi said, “you had to beg Swiss graduates” to work in advanced service sectors like banking, insurance or financial services. “Now you have qualified people speaking four languages who are unemployed” because of competition from equally qualified Italians, who work for less money because exchange rates favor the Swiss currency. Claudio Pozzetti, a representative of the Italian trade union C.G.I.L. for border workers said this claim was untrue.

“And we have to fork out unemployment insurance to these young Swiss, so the damage is twice as great,” Mr. Rusconi said.

Nice little bit of currency arbitrage for Italian workers: Italians work for Swiss francs (which have recently strengthened relative to the Euro, prompting attempted devaluation), convert those to Euros, and pocket the difference. Swiss workers face increased competition, which flattens wages and increases unemployment. Swiss employers save money by hiring Italians. Add it up and you get vicious racism from the largest party in the Swiss Federal Assembly. Great.

You know Europe's in bad shape when even meek Switzerland is all messed up.

UPDATE: A commenter reminds me that the SPP has a tradition of being vicious racists, which I knew but had somehow forgotten about. Previous installments have especially focused on Muslims. Remember the minaret ban? See here and here and here for previous examples.

Europe According to Americans

Larger version here. Via Kottke, who points to the home site which is full of maps of stereotypes.

Examining Islam

Via Henry Farrell, a paper in the new issue of Comparative Political Studies:

Islam and Large-Scale Political Violence: Is There a Connection?

M. Steven Fish, Francesca R. Jensenius and Katherine E. Michel

Are Muslims especially prone to large-scale political violence? From Montesquieu to Samuel Huntington, prominent modern analysts of politics have regarded Muslims as unusually inclined to strife. Many other observers have portrayed Islam as a peace-loving faith and Muslims as largely pacific. Yet scholars still lack much hard evidence on whether a relationship between Islam and political violence really exists. Precious few studies adduce empirical evidence on whether Islamic societies are actually more or less violent. This article assesses whether Muslims are more prone to large-scale political violence than non-Muslims. The authors focus neither on terrorism nor on interstate war. Instead, they investigate large-scale intrastate violence. The article makes three contributions. First, it offers useful data on Islam and political strife. Second,it investigates whether Muslims are especially violence prone. Relying on cross-national analysis, the authors find no evidence of a correlation between the proportion of a country’s population that is made up of Muslims and deaths in episodes of large-scale political violence in the postwar period. Third, the authors investigate whether Islamism (the ideology), as opposed to Muslims (the people), is responsible for an inordinate share of the world’s large-scale political violence. They find that Islamism is implicated in an appreciable but not disproportionate amount of political violence.

There does not appear to be an ungated version anywhere.

On L'Affaire Peretz and Nativism

Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, recently wrote:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

This predictably led to a chorus of condemnations -- the best by James Fallows here and Nicholas Kristof here -- and rightfully so. Peretz eventually issued a partial apology, retracting the normative sentence in the quote above, but not the positive claim. As he put it:

The embarrassing sentence is: "I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse." I wrote that, but I do not believe that. I do not think that any group or class of persons in the United States should be denied the protections of the First Amendment, not now, not ever. ...

The other sentence is: "Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, especially for Muslims." This is a statement of fact, not value. In his column, Kristof made this seem like a statement of bigotry. But on his blog, he notes that he concurs with it. "Peretz makes some points that are valid, and I agree with him that Muslims haven’t said nearly enough about those Muslims who kill other Muslims—in Kurdish areas, in Iraq, in Western Sahara, in Sudan, and so on."

Most of the condemnations focused on the normative part, and many argued that Peretz should forfeit his upcoming Harvard honorarium (or that Harvard should withdraw it). Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, recalls an article written by the fabricator Stephen Glass, published by Peretz, that contained some pretty egregious stereotyping:

The story was a whirlwind of spectacular "gets" which could only have been executed by a crack reporter on his best day, or an outright liar willing to invoke every odious stereotype from Steppin Fetchit to Bruce Lee to Willie Horton. ...

This is all about firepower. The fact is that Peretz has the social and economic guns to be a bigot, to then be defended by even those who acknowledge his bigotry, and finally be honored at the highest levels of American academia.

The article, like most or all of those written by Glass during his tenure at TNR, was fiction. Coates' point is that it is precisely the sort of fiction that appealed to Peretz, which was how Glass got away with it. In fact, Coates didn't state his claim strongly enough. As Buzz Bissinger's original "Shattered Glass" article makes clear, the entire article was Peretz's idea, fueled by stereotypes towards minorities he already had:

The idea for Glass’s breakthrough piece, “Taxis and the Meaning of Work” (published in August of 1996), came from New Republic owner Martin Peretz himself. Peretz had spoken frequently about how black taxi drivers in Washington were being replaced by cabbies from other immigrant groups; he thought it revealed something important about the attitudes of blacks toward certain kinds of work.

All of this is uncomfortable enough to consider. But an even more distressing thought, for me, is that Peretz is almost surely right. Not right about limiting the civil liberties of Muslims, but right that their lives are treated cheaply, including by other Muslims. Even more worringly, what if Peretz's argument is taken further than even he took it: What if the lives of Muslims are not valued highly by us?

The Washington Post recently reported that a handful of soldiers engaged in murder campaigns that targeted Afghan civilians for sport. I assume this, like the Abu Ghraib disaster, is an isolated incident, but that's not really the point. After reading the piece a friend remarked:

[T]his isn't about U.S. troops, or even about this particular group of U.S. troops. It's too easy to blame this on the type of people likely to be soldiers, or say that this is a group of bad apples. In the right situation, this could be me. This could be you.

War may bring out courage and heroism in the human heart, and many of us like celebrating that. And there's nothing wrong with celebrating valor. But war also brings out brutality and nihilism. And that is why we cannot go to war lightly, why if war is to be an option, it must be the last option, a desperate refuge that we flee to with a heavy heart.

We generally don't think like that, especially in the run-up to wars. It doesn't enter our cost-benefit calculus. More broadly, I would say that specific tactics the U.S. military uses -- unmanned drones, targeted assassinations, extraordinary rendition, etc. -- certainly indicate that the U.S. government values Muslim life (at least in Iraq and Afghanistan) much less than it values American life.

Even more broadly, I would say that the U.S. government quite often values the lives of "others" much less than the lives of "us". Policy reflects that. Agriculture subsidies harm the poorest of the world's poor to benefit a small number of first-world producers, the U.S. "war on drugs" leads to thousands of deaths every year in Mexico and elsewhere, our immigration policies restrict the standards of living of the relatively poor, etc. I don't blame the government for taking these positions, because they are politically popular.

I do, however, blame American citizens for their nativist biases. They lead to immense suffering and death, for nearly no purpose. So while it is worthwhile to ridicule to Peretz's wrongheaded statements and attitudes, it is also worth remembering that the problem does not begin or end with him.

Pr(A|B) /= Pr(B|A)

William Easterly on the bias of reverse conditional probabilities:

{People perceive} from media coverage that the probability that IF you are a terrorist, THEN you are a Muslim is high. Unfortunately…{we are confusing} this with the relevant probability, which is the chance that IF you are a Muslim, THEN you are a terrorist (which is extremely low even if the first probability really is high, because terrorists are very rare).

Of course, in the case of the Cordoba House hysteria, the probability that an American Sufi Muslim was a 9/11 attacker is actually zero.

Easterly says that this bias is rampant across issue areas. I can think of many examples off the top of my head.