Am I Dreaming?

I never thought I'd see the day when Emmanuel was optimistic about either a G-20 meeting or the Doha round of WTO meetings. But today he is optimistic about both. First, the G-20:

Somewhat to my surprise, the finance ministers' get-together in the run-up to the 24-25 September G-20 meeting has yielded results to build on. ...

I hope these two themes of enhancing LDC participation in global economic governance and reducing unwarranted banker compensation are followed through. As the title says, it's promising and not fulfilled action.

I don't see how "reducing unwarranted banker compensation" will help improve stability, but I completely agree that increasing LDC participation in the IMF and other economic institutions is a good thing. I remain skeptical that the current power structures in those institutions will be overturned unless the rising LDCs force the issue themselves, but that may happen too.

Next, Doha:

It is thus with guarded optimism that I note discussions in Delhi have exceeded my modest expectations. Following from a recent post, India has been able to get services on the agenda.

Once again, I agree with Emmanuel that the opening of the services and agricultural sectors of the industrialized world should be on the agenda. And the LDCs have shown that they are capable of blocking Doha if they don't get enough concessions. But one of the links cited by Emmanuel has this ominous quote from USTR Kirk:

"We have missed so many deadlines," said U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, Reuters reported. "Substance will drive this process, not setting deadlines and timelines."

So let's not get ahead ourselves (not that Emmanuel is); there are some signs for optimism, but there have been before as well.

Sentence of the Day

That order must precede liberty can be questioned on logical and empirical grounds. Logically, one might ask why creating order should take precedence over safeguarding liberty. It might be preferable to create authority and safeguard freedom simultaneously.

That is Mark Kesselman in the October 1973 issue of World Politics, responding to Sam Huntington's claim that political order must precede liberty in political societies.

Dodging the "G" Word

AFoE links to this BBC report indicating a possible thaw in relations between Turkey and Armenia:

They are to hold six weeks of domestic consultations on the move after which their parliaments will vote on it, their foreign ministries announced.

Negotiations on the mending of ties have been brokered by Switzerland.

The two countries remain deeply divided over the fate Armenians suffered under Turkish Ottoman rule.

Turkey has resisted widespread calls for it to recognise the mass killing of Armenians during World War I as an act of genocide.

Interestingly, an impetus for this has been soccer: the two nations are in the same World Cup qualifying group, and are playing next month in Turkey. The Armenian president has plans to attend.

The Turkish-Armenian border has been closed for more than 15 years and the two sides have been in some state of conflict since Armenia gained its independence in 1991. The controversy goes much further back than that, of course, and Turkey's refusal to acknowledge the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire -- in which 1.5 million Armenians were killed -- has made peaceful relations between the two basically impossible. In fact, that genocide inspired the first use of the phrase "crime against humanity".

The U.S. has not formally acknowledged the genocide either, since that would involve alienating a chief Middle East ally when it already has so few. But most of the rest of the OECD has declared the "events of 1915" (as Turkey calls them) to be a genocide, as have other countries, international organizations, and over half of the individual U.S. states.

The lack of universal international condemnation was encouragement to Hitler, who said 70 years ago (on the eve of the invasion of Poland) that he would not hesitate to murder without mercy, and had no fear of retribution because "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" This quote marks the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. (image above).

So it is a good sign that Turkey and Armenia are moving towards re-establishing normal relations and re-opening the border. But it will be even better when an honest accounting of the 1915 genocide is taken so that real reconciliation can take place.

For further reading on U.S./Turkey relations, and why Turkey is the most anti-American country on earth, see this report at e-IR. The nut: many Turks dislike American support for Kurds, and are scared of American imperialist instincts in the Middle East.

The Softer Side of Henry Kissinger

The NY Times ran a short profile on Jon Huntsman Jr., the new U.S. Ambassador to China. He represents a bit of a departure from previous ambassadors: he's a former governor (of Utah), speaks Mandarin fluently, spent several years in Taiwan as a Mormon missionary, and his family has had significant business dealings in China (he claims to have no personal stake in the chemical company that bears the family name). It appears that his primary mandate is to get movement on climate change coordination, so good luck to him.

But the most interesting part of the article comes at the end:

Mr. Huntsman’s fascination with China goes back to July 1971, when as an 11-year-old he visited the Nixon White House with his father, who was then serving as a special assistant.

At the time, he says, he met Henry A. Kissinger and helped carry his bags to a waiting car, which was about to take Mr. Kissinger to the airport on a secret and historic mission.

“I said to him, ‘Where are you going?’ ” he recalled Wednesday. “And he said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone. I’m going to China.’ ”

Thirty-eight years later, so is Huntsman Jr., and godspeed. I pretty much despise Kissinger, but it is funny to visualize that anecdote. Actually, it's funny to imagine any interaction between Kissinger and a child.

The Amorality of Public Goods

The other day I wrote a post trying to parse out how and why superior societal goods -- like environmentalism, universal health care, public education (esp. higher education), sustainable agriculture, labor rights -- have a high income elasticity of demand, and what that might mean for our conceptions of public morality. In other words, as societies get richer, they demand more of these things and often use moral arguments to support the cause. Indeed, moral claims seem to rise proportionately to income: poorer societies demand less of their governments and civil society than richer societies. The flip side of this occurs when societies get poorer: the morals get relaxed a bit and some compromises get made for pragmatic reasons.

Apropos of that observation comes this piece by economic historian Robert Fogel, winner of Nobel Prize, who observes that health care is a superior good:

The main factor is that the long-term income elasticity of the demand for healthcare is 1.6—for every 1 percent increase in a family’s income, the family wants to increase its expenditures on healthcare by 1.6 percent. This is not a new trend. Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875. All of this has been made possible by the growth in the productivity of traditional commodities. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it took 1,700 hours of labor to purchase the annual food supply for a family. Today it requires just 260 hours, and it is likely that by 2040, a family’s food supply will be purchased with about 160 hours of labor.

Consequently, there is no need to suppress the demand for healthcare. Expenditures on healthcare are driven by demand, which is spurred by income and by advances in biotechnology that make health interventions increasingly effective. Just as electricity and manufacturing were the industries that stimulated the growth of the rest of the economy at the beginning of the 20th century, healthcare is the growth industry of the 21st century. It is a leading sector, which means that expenditures on healthcare will pull forward a wide array of other industries including manufacturing, education, financial services, communications, and construction.

Of course there is a need to suppress the demand for health care; namely, that the government can't afford to guarantee full service to the entire populace under the present cost structure. But in strict terms Fogel is absolutely right: rising health care costs are no problem in and of themselves. Instead they signify a good thing: more people are buying more health services, which pushes prices up.

But at the same time that consumption rises, expectations of the appropriate baseline rise. A citizen of America in 1960 would be shocked and amazed at the amount of public provision of health care for the poor and elderly in 2009, and the range of options available to those who can't pay for them on their own. Now nearly everyone believes that we can and should do better; we only argue about the best mechanism for extending coverage. What has happened in the meantime? Our society has gotten much richer, and can therefore afford to spend more time and money on the provision of public goods. The acceptable floor has risen along with societal wealth.

Similarly, developing countries are almost universally less concerned about climate change than developed countries, despite the fact that most of the adverse effects from climate change will be located in the developing world. Why is that? Because they are still primarily concerned with feeding, clothing, and sheltering their citizens in the short run. Anything more abstract than that gets put on the back burner.

In other words, public concern is something of a luxury good. And that's a good thing. We should hope that as we get richer we should be more and more concerned with broad provision of public goods. But it should also give us some pause when making moral claims about public policy. For one thing, it will make it more difficult to get broad consensus if the wealth distribution is unequal (think about the problems of international coordination on issues like climate change). For another, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea that morality is (or should be) determined by public goods relative to wealth levels and I suspect that most others are as well. I would never judge the morality of a society by regressing its wealth on the number of public bus routes. Public policy requires pragmatism and the consideration of a wide array of public and private interests. If we reduce every policy debate to dueling accusations of immorality then we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

In a somewhat related vein, Chris Bertram and Julian Sanchez discuss Ronald Dworkin's thoughts on health care. Dworkin is a utilitarian and redistributionist, but even he argues that any public provision of insurance above a socially-accepted minimum is unjust, as are any Canada-style prohibitions on top-up coverage. Interesting stuff.

Another European Cartoon Scandal

The Arab European League, a Nasserist nationalist group, has published a cartoon denying the Holocaust (and implying that it is a Zionist hoax) on their website as an act of "civil disobedience". This is intended as a protest against a ruling exonerating a Dutch politician who posted the infamous Danish "Muhammad cartoons" on his website. It appears that the AEL may be prosecuted for the Holocaust cartoon even while no prosecutions came from the Muhammad cartoons. Naturally, European Arabs aren't too happy about the perceived double standard. Frankly, I don't know enough about the Dutch judicial system or the specifics of either case to know whether that reaction is justified or not, but I suspect that it probably is.

Which is not to say that I think the Dutch politician should be prosecuted along with the AEL; I don't think either should be. Even if you think these two animations are not morally equivalent, they are certainly categorically inseparable and I think that hard rules should hold fast: either the freedoms of speech and press should extend to offensive materials or they should not. I believe that they should.

The Dutch prosecutor is apparently arguing that the Danish cartoons do not incite violence while the AEL cartoon does. It's a strange claim considering that (so far at least) the Danish cartoons DID incite violence, if only in response, while the AEL cartoon has not. In any case, should charges of inciting violence be issued when no violence has actually occurred? That's a tough pill for me to swallow.

As I said, it's certainly possible that I am missing some relevant details on this case. But based on what I can tell the Dutch court seems to be applying a double standard. For the sake of principles, they shouldn't.

ht: Passport

Newsflash: Obama Continues to Punt on Trade

Trade is the largest campaign issue to be completely ignored by Obama. We've at least had proposals (sometimes legislation) for fiscal stimulus, cap and trade, Main Street bailouts (e.g. Big Three), and health care reform, plus a major shift in our strategy in Afghanistan. But very little on trade other than oblique, hypocritical references in G20 communiques to "avoid protectionism".

Perhaps this is to be expected -- Obama does have a lot on his plate at the moment, and he's only been in office for a little over 7 months -- but perhaps not. During the campaign Obama couched the review of trade treaties as a major plank of his efforts to support Main Street. Trade was just below health care in this regard. Meanwhile, Obama has unabashedly used the economic crisis to open every can of worms but trade, so it's not proper to say that he's taking things one at a time. Moreover, Obama has three FTAs sitting on his desk that have been negotiated, agreed to, and signed; he hasn't sent any of them to Congress for ratification. The virtual lack of any movement on any trade-related issue is actually somewhat stunning.

So IELPB got a little excited when U.S. Trade Rep. Kirk indicated that Obama would issue his first major trade policy sometime before the G-20 meetings later this month. Alas, such excitement was misplaced:

Washington Trade Daily just tweeted:

USTR Kirk just told reporters President Obama will deliver his long-awaited trade policy speech sometime before the G-20 meeting Sept 24.

"Long-awaited" is right. I had been expecting to spend much of the past few months blogging about the new Obama trade policy, but there has not been much to blog about. I wonder if Kirk and Obama talked about the speech during their golf outing yesterday. It's good to hear that the top trade person has direct access to the President!

UPDATE: Sigh. Washington Trade Daily has the following update:

USTR now says no Obama speech on trade soon. But will say something before the September 24 Pittsburgh G-20. A "tweet" maybe?

If that "pre-G-20 statement" is anything like past G-20-related statements, there will be very little substance. Which is unfortunate.

The U.S. Navy Is on a Boat

Many of you may have already seen this, but for those who haven't: it's very funny but contains strong language.



This amateur video is a knock-off of the famous SNL skit, which itself is a satire (and also has strong language):



But as Attackerman notes, the Navy version has been removed from YouTube despite massive popularity. He speculates that somebody in the Navy wasn't too pleased:

Everything that follows is on the presumption -- not fact, but presumption; I don't know what really happened here -- that the junior officers who made the video got in some trouble for it. Again, I don't know if that's the case, but given the military's uncomfortable history with the blogosphere, it certainly can't be ruled out. Anyway: there is nothing offensive to the Navy about this video. If I was in the Department of the Navy and I saw this, I would think, "Great! These sailors glorified the service by making a four-minute commercial for it based on a popular-with-the-young-people sketch! They even put John Paul Jones in the T-Pain role!" A friend tells me it was getting a hundred thousand hits daily and you can see a number of sailors with similar ideas. Unless you want to tell me that sailors are offended by harsh language, this ought to be seen as a positive thing for the Navy. It's extremely unlikely that anyone the Navy might want to recruit could come away from that video thinking, "A Naval career is less attractive to me now."

I see his point, but I can also see the opposite view: even if the Navy thought this particular video was benign, there is a clear interest in not setting the precedent that junior officers can do almost anything they want on Navy vessels (and in Navy uniforms), post it to YouTube, and suffer no repercussions. Especially when tax dollars and public equipment are used on the project (which may have been the case here; see the helicopter shots).

Either way, I love this video and I'm glad it made it out.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Blogosphere?

Brad Delong falls into his own trap. He titles a post "No Jews Need Apply..." for the post-Buckley editorship of the National Review and quotes the following section from a 2007 TNR article:

To this day, Buckley's politics are grounded less in democratic values--"Democracy just doesn't work, much of the time," he observed in a 2004 column--than in the twin virtues of Catholicism and capitalism.... Gradually, [National Review] became less Catholic than "Christian." But that was the limit of Buckley's ecumenicalism. In 1997, when he was scouring the ranks of talented younger conservatives to find a new editor for National Review, Buckley eliminated one prospect, his one time protege David Brooks, a rising star at The Weekly Standard. In a memo to board members, Buckley reported that he had discussed Brooks with NR alum George Will: "I said that I thought it would be wrong for the next editor to be other than a believing Christian."

DeLong is gleeful that he has caught Buckley in trap ("How did I miss this?"), but if he had managed to read the beginning of the same paragraph he might've noticed this:

Broadly tolerant, Buckley extirpated anti-Semitism from the postwar conservative movement in the 1950s and has since jokingly proposed that Israel be made the fifty-first state.

Maybe, just maybe, Buckley's inconsideration of Brooks had nothing to do with the fact the Brooks is an ethnic Jew per se, and everything to do with the fact that Buckley wanted the National Review to continue its legacy as an overtly orthodox Christian publication. Given Buckley's known proclivities, this seems more likely than a spurious allegation of anti-semitism.

And anyway, would DeLong have preferred Brooks to be the editor of NR? I think not.

Brad DeLong expects more from the mainstream press and blogosphere. Maybe we should expect more from him.

Mash-Ups, Music, Borrowing and the Law

Really, really, really interesting lecture by Professor James Boyle over at Duke Law School. It really is worth your time to watch the lecture, especially if you're interested in music, the history of music and borrowing amongst musical artists. In this lecture for Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Boyle "describes the history of a single song - protesting the government's inept response after Hurricane Katrina - and its century-old lineage in the works of Kanye West, Ray Charles, and others. Each borrowed from others, yet borrowed in different ways, with different legal rules, in different musical cultures."

If you're pushed for time, definitely watch the first 20-25 minutes of the lecture to get the musical history behind the song and the crux of Boyle's argument.