Link exchange - on GDP, left and right...

A few things I recommend reading:

A lot of good stuff from Matthew Yglesias some thinking on the issue of growth, resource allocation etc. Brings back to the issue that GDP measurement is awfully inadequate - maybe, since there is no better single indicator, we should start tracking a combination of indicators?? (like GDP, health data, income distribution, GDP composition etc.) - and also a nice post on health care...


And from the Dish on prohibition - reminding us that the desire to modify the other is not only from the right, but also from the left...

Enjoy!

Left and right - alternate edit

Here is the original version of my post on left and right, which I had lost...some few additional ideas, so I just post it too...

First, let me link again to this excellent description in Secular Conservative:

The Secular Left asks, why not?
The Secular Right asks, why?
The Religious
Left demands that we should, “Because god wills it!”
The Religious Right
asserts that we can’t, “Because god forbids it!”

Brilliant. Reminds me that in my opinion the pre-Enlightenment thinkers, in particular Montaigne and Pascal, were real temperamental conservatives: they could see all the evil with the status quo, but thought efforts to change it would likely make things worse. Many, but not all, Enlightenment thinkers thought the world could be improved, easily...Some were more realistic, in particular Voltaire: he cared, but was highly sceptical too...



Here is the post itself - sorry, not edited:



What are left and right? One of the smartest accounts of it is certainly Marchel Gauchet’s in the Lieux de Memoire, t.1 – unfortunately not available on line… In a nutshell, both are a lot about identity, memory, emotional links to one side or the other. One comes from a “left” or “right” family. In Italy, I have even seen this partly linked with and/or replicated by attachment to a football team. One supports the Roma or Lazio because grandfather did – and often this means also that one supported the Communists, or the (Neo-)fascists, etc. So, left and right as identity markers, taking partly over from the village, or religion, etc., in a time of urbanization and secularisation.
What might left and right otherwise really mean, in terms of politics and ideology. Two ways to approach this: “temperament”, or precise ideological contents. I tend to think temperament makes more sense (see in secular conservative the summary). Here is why: ideology-wise, what was left became right, and now maybe the opposite may become true…
Ever since the French Revolution occurred, and the terms made their debut, there has been a “race to the left”, or a gradual entry into the mainstream of ideas that were first thought revolutionary, but then were pushed “rightwards” by the emergence of more “progressive” ideas. This movement was essentially driven by the left becoming the party of “equality” rather than “liberty” (not necessarily against liberty, but with more emphasis on equality). This analysis is best seen in Furet- La Revolution Francaise.
There has always been a tension, however, and a return movement too. As the left became more associated with promoting/protecting certain social categories, it took a certain “corporatist” character, that was more in keeping with what the right had been in the early days of the French Revolution. This is not just a recent evolution, but one that was visible in the second part of the 19th century already.
Some transfers of ideas from left to right (or vice-versa) were also not just the result of the emergence of more radical proposals, and the “natural” push of previous radicalism “rightwards” as a result, but of a real “takeover” of ideas by the other side. This is most famously the case of nationalism which, while introduced in the Revolutionary times by the left (i.e. the Revolutionary movement), was taken over fully and with enthusiasm by the (far) right, and became a fantastic driver for it, in the late 19th century – and onwards, forever as it seems.
Interestingly, one could have assumed that, since the extremes of both left and right had demonstrated their essential similarity in results in the 1930s, the understanding of the misleading nature of left and right as ideologies would be understood. The Cold War, however, prevented this – but on what ideological delusion was it supported?
> some real issues: colonies, foreigners, sex, change?? Culture??
> Poverty/ what to do about it?
> Temperament
> At the end – Montaigne/Pascal/jansenistes vs. Lumieres (but maybe not all of them? Voltaire as right-wing libertarian or not even – conservative??) – in fact drawn both to the realism of the first and their attention to perverse unexpected consequences AND to the world changing enthusiasm of the 2nd (because otherwise nothing ever happens)

What talent?

The Economist is full of discussions on executive pay. Many interesting points. But I would strongly raise doubts about this: yes, you certainly want the best talent you can get to run your financial industry. But how do you get the best talent? Is it always a matter of money? do you really believe that the top bosses who miserably failed were so much clever than their staff? (I take staff just to keep this within a group of people with the same technical background) And: do you believe that the “best” people (whatever that means) make their decisions based only on the pay package? Once you earn “more than enough” (say, a couple of hundred, or of millions, if you will), will you really be primarily motivated by more if you have any kinds of brains? Even taking star executives, do you think Bill Gates, Larry Page or Steve Jobs were/are motivated primarily by making more billions?
Sounds just silly to me. Supposing that if you can’t pay outrageously more than what is needed even to live a very lavish lifestyle, you won’t get talented people, is an insult to the word “talent”, and to intelligence. This post by Matt Yglesias makes far more sense! If you deserved the reward, you deserve blame - if you don't deserve the blame, you did not deserve the reward...Read it!

Allocation of resources – the invisible hand, socialism, and the mystery of social life…

The economy may have become slowly the most fascinating mystery around…
Physics and biology have made so much progress as to render the natural world at least understandable enough that we can work on it in a way our ancestors would not have imagined possible: flying, going to the moon, curing many diseases (or blowing ourselves up, big time).
Psychology is frustrating, but at least at the individual level there are many cases when patterns can be understood, and help given. And when not, at least you can always take pills – they will never be enough to eradicate urangst, or despair. But you can track their action, however limited or short-lived.
Not so in economy. It still seems that even economists mostly make wrong predictions and propose solutions, which don’t work. And non-economists generally appear lost, mostly resorting to fully inadequate tools: morality (“the modern economy is bad”), childish voluntarism (“let’s just create jobs and/or distribute money and/or whatever”)…What is exactly the matter?
Until “recently” (two centuries ago, even for most of the world a couple of decades ago), the issue of producing and allocating goods was relatively simple: shortage was the rule. There was mostly not enough food, not enough non-food items, not enough luxuries of course. This did not mean that there was no economy to think about: it took a long time for the right concepts to come around, but slowly emerged the ideas of specialization and comparative advantage, the notion that free trade could benefit both parties, and some understanding of that most vexating of all issues, currency. At least, on the latter, it was understood that the supply of currency had as much impact on the price of goods as the supply of goods themselves. And there was much thinking about resources allocation and privat property, from Rousseau to Marx, for instance. And still, not much was understood at all, and “solutions” proved worse than the ills in many times – just think about the Soviet Union as an experiment of solution…
Now, what gradually happened was that the very underpinning of the world so far was changing radically: penury was on the wane. Productivity and machines made such progress that there is now more food than we can eat overall (or at least there is the potential for it) and there are certainly more goods than we can “reasonably” consume (hence the constant product “innovations” – and don’t think it would be any different if we were to add more poor countries: markets saturate rather quickly in a world of such productivity as ours). There is no real shortage of food or non-food, there can only be a shortage in some places where the economy is too little developed, and of course there can be a shortage of land, which is a rather special good in that respect! What we have not developed, however, is any understanding of what to do with this…
Don’t get me wrong. We know a couple of things which don’t work: centralized planning (too few people to decide too many things just cannot work – it is like trying to handle complex processes with one old processor, instead of a massively parallel computer, to take a tech-analogy – and in addition central planning gives too much power to a few, and this is a great source of corruption), for instance. And we also know (more or less) that there appears to be a few economic “laws” that you ignore to your own risk: inflating money devaluates it, say, and a lot of other good things on interest rates, public borrowing, administrative barriers etc. Even so, it seems most people have never heard of them. Recently, in a rare display of intelligence, Sarkozy’s government announced that they were considering re-introducing economics teaching in high school (whoever was the moron who took out the miserable 2 hours that used to be taught during only one year, as if even this was too much!?).
But more fundamentally, the tools, both mental and factual, are still the ones developed for a world of shortage. And so is the vision of income allocation. The interesting situation is that:
- We have a world of potential sufficient supply of pretty much everything for pretty much everybody, if the best technology were used everywhere
- Given the number of more or less idle people around (unemployed or underemployed, in rich and poor countries alike), there is the potential to produce really a great deal more
- The few problems on the way are:
o If you produce these additional goods and potential clients do not have the resources to buy them, you lose money, and you have to find this money somewhere (see “does not grow on trees”)
o If you first distribute money around to poor people so they can purchase something, you create inflation
o Experience has shown to whoever cares to look that full-scale “socialism” (in the sense of state property and state-ordered distribution of income) corrupts ethics absolutely, ruins the economy and destroys freedom – if anyone has doubts, I volunteer to organize tours of the worst bits of the former Soviet Union.

Looks like a pretty evil conundrum: we have the resources to feed and clothe all, but we don’t know how to allocate them better. Should this not be a topic for research? How to do it in a way that works, that is…and without going back to closed borders where you make people everywhere worse off.

A couple of small bits of elements for potential ideas:
- Probably not the best approach to throw millions of money at some executives, as if they were such a rare resource – I mean, good management skills are rare, but that rare?? Rising inequality is kind of not exactly what seems to make the most sense in terms of allocating resources better (I mean better here not from a moralperspective, that it would be better if poverty were to disappear, but from an effectiveness perspective, that a better distribution would be one that reduced crises, by having more spread consumption and more stability in the system…I am dreaming!)
- Maybe at least part of the answer (and also part of the expanation of why the “financial world” has looked so out of control in recent years…) is in this fundamental innovation of the last 30 years: capital has grown increasingly mobile, across borders and inside borders. This is great, it has allowed considerable innovations, and massive growth in a number of countries that once looked desperately poor. But this has not been accompanied by more freedom of movement for labour. Quite the contrary, with all rich countries clamping down on immigration. It means poor countries workers are “locked in” and have a bad bargaining position, while rich countries workers can resist salary changes, but then see their jobs move overseas…Not that it is so simple, but I guess part of the answer lies there somewhere.

Just thoughts. I have no theory and I think the problem is so complex that it may largely lay beyond our capacity to solve it. After all, this is about psychology, compounded billions of times. What makes people work, strive, etc. The total failure of the large-scale experiment to replace private property and market by state property and planning should make us humble and careful – but it should not prevent from asking the questions…

The fetichism of life?

You noticed I put a question mark. I am not sure myself. Is it an obsession, a wrong one – or also partly a good one.
Let’s start by some of the facts:
- The Greek and Roman would not fret about ending their lives early (the suicide of choice was drinking poison) – on the contrary, living on when all was lost would have been seen as cowardly. They also had no major issues with abortion, or infanticide, when socially appropriate…Myths are full of (usually failed) infanticide attempts targeting heroes foreseen to supplant the current ruler…
- The Old Testament took already a much more restrictive view (abortion and infanticide were not condoned, and there was a general prohibition on murder…but Jewish resistants against the Romans are known to have committed suicide when it was clear that all was lost, in the last rebellion). On the other hand, many parts of the Old Testament are full of divine orders to eradicate the enemy down to women and children, or to retaliate one to one…
- Jesus did not (if my memory does not fail me) speak specifically of either suicide, abortion or whatever. I don’t even recall him speaking about murder. It was too obvious for him, probably. But he stopped a crowd from stoning a sinner. And he refused to fight when arrested. He refused the sword.I would suggest his message could be summarized as: (i) violence is to be relinquished, (ii) pardon is stronger than violence, (iii) do not judge, only preach by your own example…
- The different so-called “Christian” churches (I would strongly argue as to whether they really preach, and practice, “Christian” virtues) developed their dogma in different layers, but over quite a few centuries and thousand of pages of theological writings, ended up with a strict prohibition of (i) suicide, (ii) abortion, (iii) supposedly, all kinds of murder. Except that at the same time the churches also developed a huge “arsenal” of justifications for (i) individual murder in the form of the death penalty (with or without horrendous tortures, depending on the times) and (ii) mass murder in the form of war. Let me be provocative and not go into all the justifications that were developed for each of them – just state the point…
- Now, what about our times? A contrasted situation, I would say:
o After having had the deadliest wars in history, Europe and the US moved to wars, where we aim at having not more than a couple dozen casualties, or if possible none at all – but wars everywhere else are deadlier than ever, and we have more than a hand in many of them…
o Most democraties and most developed countries (and, in fact, a number of other countries in the world!) have abolished the death penalty. And at least proclaim their faith in international law, meaning that they relinquish the right to start a war. All interesting steps, because they mean that one does not apply anymore a double standard to murder, some licit and some not – all murder becomes forbidden, so even the state can not order it anymore. As is well known, the US has a “complex” relation with internaional law (repeatedly going to war without international agreement or being attacked) and with the death penalty (legal in most of the states, but not all).
o Abortion is legal in most of the developed world, and much of the developing one. But at least the christian churches are fighting hard against it (most prominently the catholic one).
o Torture, well, is supposed to be illegal in most of the developed world…for what this means…
o What is just as interesting is the attitude to life saving: in rich countries at least, one will go to extreme lengths to save lives – not only through medical care, to extreme costs sometimes even when there is little hope, but also through “prevention”, which increasingly rhymes with “prohibition”, attempting to avoid harm by avoiding all “risky” behaviours, from walking on cliffs, to driving too fast, to drinking and smoking etc.

Now, what puzzles me is how to interpret all this. Should we read it as a general line of progress, that is not yet fully perfected, whereby life is increasingly “sacred” (even, interestingly, to atheists), and should be saved at all costs – but with strong disagreements remaining on suicide, abortion…and war (and the death penalty, to some extent, though this is only a serious debate in the US – in Japan and Europe, it gets discussed little, though both are on different sides of the issue).
Now, let’s think provocatingly:
- There are some human beings who are so far beyond the borders of social life, and are so clearly without any hope of any pshychic improvement, that one can wonder whether locking them up for life is appropriate – think, on obviously different scales, Hitler, or Fourniret (a particularly horrid French serial killer who murdered in particularly gruesome way dozens of young girls). Should they be executed?
- Since war appears to be just as much a part of human life as it ever was, in spite of all pretence to the contrary, does it make sense to always refuse it – or is it better to keep the possibility to intervene, as it is clear that sometimes it will result in lessharm, not more (think WWII, Bosnia, or a number of other cases, where non-intervention was unfortunately shocking, say Cambodia, Rwanda…)?
- Should we really forbid people to end their own lives? Should we keep people “alive”, when their mind is already dead, and their body cannot move anymore, and they live only through the tubes, connected to them?
- Is abortion murder? Even when the embryo is a small cluster of cells? Who should judge?
- Should safety always trump freedom?
- When will we simply reach the economic limit of over-medicalization of the last months of life?

Quite a lot of questions, because I am torn. On the one hand, I think the increased respect for all life is one of the defining strands of human progress, if there is such a thing. On the other hand, maybe, as the Greeks believed, measure is key in all things, and maybe we are on the edge between respect and fetichism of life?

Abortion – never ending…

Again a post reacting to one of Andrew’s readers: this time the reader objects against Andrew considering that a true believer/Christian/Catholic should stand up against torture at all costs, but not making the same point about torture. In other words, for the reader, abortion=torture.
Interesting that the debate rages so intensely in some countries, and not at all in othes. Interesting how different the perspective.
I agree actually that there is an analogy, particularly if you think about late abortions. But I would strongly disagree that partial analogy means identity.

On a related note - I completely agree that women should be rulers of their own bodies, and not someone else for them! But the question again: when does the small other inside become her/his own body as well? To me, clearly, not before s/he can move! That's all for now on this topic I hope...

M/B-u/o-mba-i/y

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers, technically correctly, disagrees with Rushdie’s vision of Mumbai-the-new-name as being a product of Hindu nationalism (and by the way the reader seems to miss the attribution: the source is Rushdie, not Hitch, who just relayed Rushdie’s point of view…). When I say “technically correctly”, I mean that my limited knowledge (and lack of time to investigate) mean that I assume this reader is probably right in saying that Mumbai is the ages-old name of the city in Mahrati. And of course Mahrati is the language of the majority of inhabitants, and of the country around the city.
Now, remember, that was not quite the point. In fact, Rushdie’s point is that the city was (still is) a cosmopolitan metropolis, formed of many (really many) ethnicities, religions and what not. And that the name of this melting-pot was “Bombay”. “Mumbai”, indeed, brings it back to its Mahrati name. Yes, it can be seen as a decolonizing gesture, as this reader argues. It can also be seen as de-cosmopolitizing. Probably both are somewhat true.
Just reminds you how complicated it is (and risky, when you do too little research!) to write about India!

Excommunication, yet again

I was struck by this post – Catholic fundamentalists in the US are continuing to say Obama voters are in a state of mortal sin. Sorry, correction: mainstream Catholic clergy is saying this. Yes, they are fundamentalists in a way, but not as a splinter group.
It is so unthinkable to have such a situation in France now that I somehow understand why the French, from the right nearly as much as from the left nowadays, have kind of become obsessed with our “laïcité”, i.e. the very strict separation of religion (not only churches, religion itself) and state. It verges sometimes in the (to my mind) ludicrous or fundamentalist or weird, when for instance the French media and chattering classes suddenly talk of nothing else than a couple teenage girls trying to wear a scarf at school (and unvaryingly failing).It took hundreds of years of hard fighting to take out religion from politics, and many are scared that it is just waiting around the corners, awaiting any opportunity.
Probably much of the irrational reactions to Islam have to do with this (the other source, of course, is plain fear of the other, a.k.a. racism). The splitting of religion from state, as all pseudo-pundits are wont to say, is impossible in Islam. Well, sort of. Let’s say, it runs against a long and powerful tradition. But it was exactly the same in Christianity for 1500 years and some…Until it finally happened, but not with the churches’ blessing (!), you can be sure! It happened against them – so it will happen in Islam, eventually.
What puzzles me, in that context, is that many well-meaning Americans seem to think Islam is particularly threatening, or something. At the same time, their churches remind me of the worst they see in Islamic fundamentalists…Go figure...

Benedict (Benoit) XVI and Sarkozy

Not really...in fact, the Pope just proves that Sarkozy is just amateur when trying to be an early 19th century reactionary. Benedict just takes it away...

Benedict's envoy to the United Nations, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, has
announced that the Vatican will oppose a proposed U.N. declaration calling for
an end to discrimination against homosexuals. At first blush, no one should be
surprised to find the Catholic Church hierarchy butting heads with gay rights
activists. But this particular French-sponsored proposal, which has the backing
of all 27 European Union countries, calls for an end to the practice of
criminalizing and punishing people for their sexual orientation.

and why should I not post MORE on mortages?

One more thing: the disease of a-history. Anyone having ever studied any tiny bit of history would avoid building a business model on the expectation that housing prices would never go up...

Is the mortgage crisis just a massive failure of consumer protection policy?

I mean, I am not a financial expert (not that experts appear to have fared so well!) - nor do I know much about mortgage (I don't even exactly have one...in France you mostly end up with some sort of state-sponsored mutual insurance on your housing loans, which mean your house is not mortgaged...). But then again, I am some kind of pseudo-expert on all things regulatory, at least outside of the financial sector. And one thing on which I have spent a lot of time (fighting corrupt bureaucrats loving to abuse their powers, particularly in the former Soviet Union) is consumer protection. So I know a tiny bit about it. And it strikes me that the reason this mortgage crisis is really huge in the US, and not in Europe, is consumer protection. European financiers are just as mad (madder?) and greedy (greedier?) as the American ones (and by the way, greed is arguably a virtue for a financier?) - so they invested in US mortgages, far more than in European ones (the UK might be a partial exception). Why? not just because the US had stronger growth - just simply because it had all these mortgages, I mean these crazy ones!

Why this is not discussed more broadly strikes me as a crazy form of US-centric provincialism: regulations on what loans financial institutions can be allowed to make to borrowers, and to what information they are required to provide to borrowers.
In other words:
- consumers/borrowers should be very clearly explained the risks and downsides of the products they take- some products might be too risky to be allowed altogether (not a favourite of mine but at least worth discussing)
- lenders could be required to strictly check the indebtedness of potential clients, and forbidden to lend beyond a certain limit (of course, if the client lied, s/he would be responsible
- but if the bank lent in spite of information meaning it should not have lent, it could find its loan agreement unenforceable).There has been much work on consumer/lender protection done in several EU states, including France (and including, another provision suggested in one of the posts, standardized loan agreements).

Experience suggests it works pretty well - again, European banks were just as greedy and dumb as US ones (see their exposure to sub-prime and CDOs etc.) and EU consumers are certainly not smarter than US ones - but there is no subprime mortgage crisis in, say, France or Germany. QED. Regulation makes sense when it is smart - consumer protection, through requirements to inform transparently and through interdiction of certain types of transactions, when too much risk is involved, is a good example. All regulatory reform experts now look far more to the EU as a place where smart regulation is being experimented, as to the US. Even the UK, when it developed a regulatory reform programme (Hampton Review), looked at the Netherlands - not at the US.

India, Pakistan, Kashmir - Salman Rushdie is the best analyst

Don't bother with bad journalists and pseudo-experts. Read some of the best modern litterature AND get some of the best insights into some of the most crucial political problems of our time.
"The Moor's Last Sigh" will explain Bombay/Mumbai to you. "Shalimar the Clown" gives a deep, painful and very balanced account of Kashmir's strategy - and of how it infects India's attempt at being a democracy. "Shame" is the history of Pakistan's gradual political disintegration due to its inner contradictions. No better and more suitable reading these days.
Just read them - you'll be glad you did!

immigrants

So Sarkozy won because he bashed immigrants. And he still does bash them, as much as he can. Small gestures, hunt every day. Expelling hundreds, thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians in the last month before they joined the EU (and returned legally, after a trip home courtesy of the French taxpayers) just to inflate numbers. Increasing several times over a couple of years the number of years spouses of French citizens have to wait until they become French. And who opposes this? No one it seems.

But why? If the left is the party of the poor, and/or the party of equality, it has a duty to defend the immigrants, which generally are the poorest. It also has a duty to support immigration, because what makes wages so low in poor countries and makes "offshoring" jobs so easy, is that capital can move (which is GOOD, it means poor countries can go out of poverty!) but labour cannot (which is BAD - it means capital has a much stronger negotiating position). If labour could move more freely, wages would go up faster in poorer countries. This is exactly what happened in Eastern Europe since it joined the EU, contrary to what paranoid French afraid of the "plombier polonais" thought...

Well, all this are idealistic reasons. Don't expect anyone to act on them. So what, let's turn to pure power politics. France has long had one of the most "liberal" (precisely, etimologically) citizenship regimes around - if you are born here, you are French. So France has millions of French citizens of (recent) foreign origin. They could easily turn around elections the way blacks did for Barack Obama in many places...But no one bothers to talk to them! Just as any other poorer and generally less educated and less influential minority, they vote less than average. And no one is trying to organize them, mobilize them. No wonder the left has written off so many cities with large immigrant populations, which instead elect solidly far-right mayors (either officially far-right, or de facto). How dumb are our political elites, I wonder?

...the worst right in the world...

Some years ago, a right-wing politician wrote a book called "La droite la plus bete du monde" - the most stupid right in the world. I think I remember his idea was that France was essentially conservative, and somehow the right still managed to lose elections. I can't remember what his solution was, does not matter either. My point is: the right we have now in France, or at least the President and his cabinet, are really among the worst in the world. Granted, they still have Berlusconi to look down to, but soon they won't even have Bush.

I keep fighting against this French disease of misusing and abusing this beautiful word: "liberal" (often additioned with "neo"). I argue with good friends saying Sarkozy is "(neo)liberal". I mean, seriously, people? Even in the French meaning of "supporter of free markets": Sarkozy is more statist than the Socialists, he wants a French sovereign funds to hold "golden shares" in key industrial companies! His few free market proposals are usually withdrawn as soon as anyone screams against who could damage his prospects, say taxi drivers in Paris, even though there are NO TAXIS there at night, on Saturdays etc. Let's not liberalize, it could cost votes. So he is a liberal?

Well, surely he is no political liberal. Even though the cabinet in the meantime backed down and criticized the district attorney who ordered the raid (remember, the cabinet appoints district attorneys in France), the police two days ago raided a high school and went with dogs in classrooms to, apparently, look for marijuana (seems they found nothing of notice). They searched kids, rather brutally. Scared the hell out of them. Just read.
Or the hunt for illegal immigrants, including kids at school. Or the proposed reform whereby 12 years old could now be imprisoned. Or the proposal to lock up psychiatric hospitals completely, as if these were not enough hard for their patients. I mean, liberal? Do words have a meaning?

So if he is no liberal and not even a free-marketeer, what is he? An early 19th century "reactionnaire" (not even a conservative), this is what. Decrease taxes for the rich. Beat the hell out of the poor. Lock up foreigners and expel them, even the children, they are filthy. Scare the "bourgeois" and keep their votes.

Sarkozy is not France. He won (massively) only the "over 60s", and Segolene Royal (narrowly) won all the other age groups. He represents fear. Reaction. Brutal and unjust order. And, yes, sometimes he does do a couple of reforms which make sense (more autonomy for universities, which have less in France than in any other country with a decent higher education system - or a bit less red tape here and there), but this is on a really dark background.

Now, actually voters seem to think that socialists are better at running things, and they elected them massively at the local level. But why do they always run an identity-based campaign, talking only to their own frightened old "petits bourgeois"?

Segolene actually had some good points in her campaign, including not leaving "law and order" to the right, but at the same time talking to the immigrants' children. But she was a lousy campaigner and debater, and is far too much showing her arrogance (all politicians are arrogant - it is a question of showing it), and she does say a lot of nonsense too. Delanoe would have been good - but claiming the liberal heritage sunk him - can you imagine this? several centuries of progress, you just can't claim them as yours! How stupid are these people? Oh, when will we get open primaries?

McKinsey survey - what business think Government should do, what they expect Government will do...

I loved this one -

the only significant gap between wishes and expectations is regulatory reform. No one expects it to move forward - expectations that Governments will make their countries more attractive for investment are very low...

On reality denial - the French Left

It could seem that my "transatlantic" focus is rather one way if I continue talking only about American politics...no worries!

[This post was started a couple of days ago and not finished...so it might look a bit old to French readers, but not so to others...]

The French Left has recently been giving a particularly absurd show - but unfortunately this has deep roots, and is not mere aberration. Looking at what befell the candidates for Socialist Party leadership is enlightening.



The Socialists just went through several months of campaigning, and finally an election by the party members, for their "General Secretary", i.e. party leader. Many things were weird:

-> A bit over 50% of card-carrying party members voted - so the leader was elected by maybe a total of 60,000 votes or so. The Socialists are a party that typically will aim at getting from 6 to 12 million votes or so in a general election - not much of a primary, really!

-> One of the frontrunners, the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe, narrowly got pushed out after the first round, after having been an early frontrunner. Delanoe's sin: he expressed in June his identity as "a socialist and a liberal" (the latter being in France understood generally as "free-market fanatic", which is not how he meant it of course). Given the general hyper-statist mood (financial crisis...), this clearly cost him a lot.



-> The two ladies who made it to the second round, Martine Aubry (the eventual winner by a handful of votes) and Segolene Royal (who was not a good loser, once again) fought bitterly and appeared to be rather from enemy camps than from the same party. What was weird was their political positioning:

> Aubry positioned herself as a "true left" believer, a kind of "historical socialism" stalwart - although she is the daughter of previous European Commission President Jacques Delors, of centre-left democrat-christian fame, and herself an able technocrat with a history of close relations with business circles. She was supported by the absurd (let's not say "unlikely" - this is not "unlikely" but clearly absurd!) alliance of the eurosceptic/old left wing of the party, and the clearly "social-liberal" (as we say in France) side of it (whose leader, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, could not run because he is heading the IMF...).

> As usual it would be difficult to say exactly what Segolene Royal stood for but she was arguably a combination of "more to the left" (popular participation is her great topic, as opposed to decisions coming from the top) and "more to the right" (a liking for law and order topics and, most importantly it seems, a professed openness to maybe one day discuss the possibility of talking to the Centre in order to consider some kind of "let's not call it an alliance but..."). The latter (readiness to talk to the Centre) was attacked by her internal opponents in pretty much the way the US neocons attacked Obama for his professed openness to maybe talk possibly one day to adversaries of the US. Seems the neocons are not the only absolute morons around.


So, in short, the leardership election was won "to the left", and through a vote involving a handful of card-carriers. And what does this "left" mean?

Marcel Gauchet in Lieux de Memoire has analyzed "left" and "right" not anymore like what they pretend to be, but as identities. As such, it does not matter so much what ideologies they cover, but rather whom you belong to. In this sense, they are still valid: there are still people who relate to them, and are convinced to be right...But what does this mean, except for this identity, which could be a secular, urban replacement of the old religious and village identification...?

Francois Furet in his books on the French Revolution showed how, starting from the Revolution onwards, what had once been the "left" of ideas and parties (and politicians) got constantly pushed to the "right" by the emergence of more revolutionary, further "left" ideas and movements. The criteria of being "more revolutionary" being to be for more equality - not more liberty.

I guess we have arrived at the point where we have gone full circle. Some ideas have been going from left to right, then back and forth - such as nationalism, the engine of the Revolution, then later in the 19th century becoming the source of a major right wing movement - and now? are not many defenders of the nation-state, again, on the left? The left never really was the party of the movement, is it still the party of equality?

Probably there is a lot to gain in trying to understand "left" and "right" as temperaments: "why not" against "why", "it could get better" vs. "it could get worse". But it is doubtful whether the French left even still matches this description, and it is Sarkozy's strength to have understood it: most of the left speaks only of preserving, conserving, defending...Not much optimism that things could get better!

Now, why did I name this post "reality denial"? Because the current state of affairs of the left in France is:
- a strong (both through public presence and votes) far-left movement that is against "capitalism", markets, globalization, private property, name it (and which is partly "alternative", i.e. ecological, libertarian in social issues - but only partly so)
- a mainstream socialist party, which is led by graduates of public administration, with a significant training in economics and international relations, but apparently pretend to be some communist operatives from the fifites...I mean, seriously, this is what they talk about:
-> globalization is BAD BAD BAD - just ask the millions of Chinese, Indians and others who escaped poverty in the past twenty years what they think? but never mind, it seems equality is meant only for French state employees??
-> markets are REALLY EVIL - never mind that the left wing governments under President Mitterrand did probably more market friendly reforms than the right, and that, unsurprisingly, combined as it was with reinforced (but "traditional French", one could say) public investments and planning, it worked, with France enjoying a very good time in the nineties, with strengthened competitiveness and a modernized country
-> more more more regulation is GOOD - no one even dares talk about reducing bureaucracy and red tape. Any "deregulation" is just evil - full stop - move over.

Now, this really sounds like a party that is ready to govern in the 21th century, doesn't it? Flatly deny the tremendous positive changes that globalization has brought for such a large share of the world's poor (sorry, just count how many there are in China and India, who recently went out from poverty!). Deny the accomplishments of the governments you ran and the obvious merits of focusing the state on where it can do most good, and let the market decide of resource allocation. As if we had not had enough experience of governments (left and right) throwing billions of dollars at: steel (ended up downsizing and globalizing anyway), shipbuilding (ended up with the only shipyard remaining open being the one that was clearly competitive from the start), computers (ended up wiped away anyway), banks (anyone remembers how much state-owned Credit Lyonnais lost for the taxpayers!?)... And finally, always proposing just more more more more rules?! You must be kidding...?
But then, there is the right...

Giving thanks to whom?

I loved this secularist conservative/libertarian take on Thanksgiving:

The problem for the nonbeliever is not that there is no one to thank for our good fortune but that there are more targets of gratitude than we can possibly acknowledge.

And let me point to a few more posts on this brilliant blog, that proves that the American right is not yet entirely brain dead:

- on creationist nonsense:

...evolution is one of those things where I have a very high degree of certitude as to whether it is true or not, such that I feel ridiculous wasting my finite life discussing its truth or not.

- on left and right definitions:

The Secular Left asks, why not?

The Secular Right asks, why?

The Religious Left demands that we should, “Because god wills it!”

The Religious Right asserts that we can’t, “Because god forbids it!”

If the secular right defines itself this way, along Montaigne's tradition, then it makes sense to read what they write...

Detroit in dire straits...

[An easy pun: "detroit" in French means "straits"]

Massive arguments go back and forth on the auto-industry bailout, or absence thereof, in the US. I mean: the "US-based" car industry bailout, or whatever you'd call it. Seems no one is calling to bail out US-based Honda, Toyota, BMW and other factories. But to the point:
- free-marketeers, libertarians, deficit hawks and a lot of reasonable economists and other people make the (absolutely correct) point that bailing out failing industries is a tremendous waste of resources, and usually fails in the end. YES, this is true! France has had extensive experience with this in the 1980s, bailing out shipbuilding, steel and what not, mostly to very little results compared to the costs
- proponents of the bailout (an odd coalition of unions, car industrialists, some progressives though not so many, and obviously Michigan politicians...) argue that the Detroit Three have been sunk not by their bad management, bad cars, bad quality (bad work quality?), but also/mostly/whatever by the huge costs they had to bear for their pensioners, which in other countries are socialized.

Now, I find they have a point. There is no way in hell I'd buy a car manufactured in the US by either of the Big 3 (though I'd buy a European Ford or GM), but still: the US car industry used to have far more employees than it has now because ALL THE WORLD's car industry had far more. And in other countries pensions and health insurance are covered by either the State or some mutualized, nationwide scheme. Only in the US are the costs borne by the companies themselves.

There is a nice summary of the unending discussion of what is correct on this point here (the summary is not necessarily balanced, but nice nevertheless). But my point is:
- it is extremely unlikely that the bailout would do any good on the long term - it would probably be a huge waste of money - and probably there are far better ways to use this money to ease the pain for GM and Chrysler employees (seems Ford should survive)
- BUT if America wants to avoid this kind of mess in the future, looking at universal health care and another pension system could be interesting.

By the way: too late to discuss this today, but fascinating to see that so many on America's right still think that the US would get worse health care if there were a national system. The US spends far more on health than France or Germany, but gets distinctly worse health results. Interesting...

Political spectrum

"Obama is a socialist" -
now that he has been elected (and he has picked his economic team), we could laugh about this statement. But let's rather pick it apart:

(1) it means that "socialist" is an insult - interesting from Europe where pretty much every country is or has been governed in recent years by a socialist or social-democratic party...

(2) it means that, for many, any attempt at having the State provide some sort of health coverage for all and/or some kind of redistribution is "socialism" - which just indicates a very wide understanding of words indeed

(3) it illustrates the difficulty of communicating political debates across the Atlantic - some of the issues:

• the Republican party is now so far "right" that many of its members would not even be accepted in "mainstream" extreme-right/neo-fascist parties in Europe - they would have to go to the "lunatic fringe" of the splitter-microparties. Say, Sarah Palin. Why? because no one remotely electable in Europe would stand for creationism - put in another way: no one would vote for a creationist!
• the political discourse in the US is still defined at least in part by "fear of the reds", even though 1917 and the Cold War are long past - the only other country where I can think of something partly similar (on the right only) is Italy (but obviously with very different roots)
• at the same time, the US sees, and has seen, massive State intervention in the economy, and everyone wants more, or nearly everyone!

Now, Obama probably would sit somewhere on the centre-right in most European countries, simply because the political field is in a different place altogether. But, lest you think this means you can just say Europe is more to the "left" or America to the "right" - where do you expect the next Prime Minister or President to be black???

[and, a wink to despairing French leftists, where do you get real primaries to choose your leader?]

But this leads us neatly to the car industry, I guess?

About the unborn

The debate about abortion, or rather the abortion wars raging in the US, are difficult to understand from Europe, and in many ways.
Apart from a couple of Catholic "fortresses" like Ireland and Poland, not only is abortion legal in most of Europe, but it is mostly a non-issue. Now, it has not always been the case. The fight was intense in...the sixties and early seventies! More than thirty years ago... There are of course still people who strongly oppose abortion, but those for whom this is a key issue are a small minority, and located on the far right of the political spectrum. Abortion is simply not anymore an important topic of social and political confrontation. It is legal, and regulated, late abortions being generally banned or strongly restricted, counselling being often compulsory, etc. And in most countries there is State or at least public support to education campaigns on contraceptive use, to avoid abortion being the "contraception of last resort".
The US knows a strange situation indeed, whereby abortion, as made legal by the Supreme Court "Roe vs Wade" decision, is totally unrestricted - but where opposition to abortion is definitely one of the top issues politically, socially, culturally, name it. And it is certainly not a "fringe" position in the political spectrum.

I read many highly interesting posts recently about abortion, and the (im)possibility of a compromise, in many excellent blogs. Too lazy to chase all of them but here is an excellent summary, courtesy Ross Douthat.
In a nutshell: however you turn it, this ends up being metaphysics or theology. It is so difficult to define "scientifically" a human being, that there is not much sense trying to pin down if and when the embryo or the foetus is/becomes human. I personally don't think that the early stages of cell division qualify as a human being as such, but one can argue that all the genetic information is there, thus it is a human being. I could respond using the "hardware" vs. "software" argument: the hardware is here (genetic information), but no software (the mind) - since there is not even a brain yet... But this would not convince the other side. Conversely, believers who hold that God infuses the soul upon conception will find the whole discussion absurd, but they cannot convince the non-believer...

There are many intractable debates, many issues where there is no "self-evident" truth. Abortion is a particular case: there is little doubt that, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, "every abortion is a tragedy" (even though I have my doubts about the very early ones, as I wrote above, but then again). But not all tragedies can be prevented. Not all tragedies are crimes. And there is also very little doubt that regimes of abortion prohibition do not result in less abortions, but in more hazards for women. So a compromise solution like adopted long ago in most of Europe seems obvious, and still...
Not sure when this issue will stop poisoning America's political life.

Where does the Church belong?

Separation of the Church and State? America has long had its own specific approach to this: Churches are fully separate from the State (understandably as the country was founded by "Nonconformists" who had to flee England because of religious persecution...) - but religion is everywhere (including a lot of swearing on the Bible, or on other holy books...). This is well known, so nothing new here...But what struck me recently is this:
- several Catholic bishops and priests, in their Sunday (and other) preaches, warned their flock against voting for Barack Obama
- some of them even hinted such voters could be in a state of sin, and thus unable to approach the communion
- and since the election this has continued - several Catholic columnists et.al. say that Obama's election is a sign of Catholic moral collapse etc.

I am not sure what is the most stupefying:
(1) that this can happen at all? I have to say that ANYWHERE in Western Europe (except maybe Ireland) this would be impossible to imagine - and not only in France (where the Revolution and the 1905 Separation of Church and State left the Catholic Church in relatively weak standing) but even in Italy (where the Church is powerful, active in politics, and strident about abortion)...such an intervention, in France, would certainly add an immediate 10% of the vote to the politician under attack...and result in the clergymen being sacked on the spot by their hierarchy...
(2) the reason why it happens? the only and exclusive issue is abortion. Now, we all know that abortion is everywhere in this Pope's (and the previous's) speeches and edicts, but not always in the Church's discourse in Europe. They also speak about social justice, peace, helping foreigners, and what not...Seeing the Church (rather: part of it, but still, during the preach) taking such a stance on the basis of abortion exclusively is impressive.

Which brings us to: this strange obsessive debate about abortion...

Of marriage (cont'd)

I am a poor blogger indeed. Working too much, I guess...I write dozens of posts in my head, but can't seem to write them. So here is an interim one to flag a couple of issues.



First, the issue of marriage. I love this by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Exposing far more beautifully than I could why he (they) is (are) not married. Well, for that matter, I married (partly for administrative reasons, as we are from different countries and visa issues can hurt) - just making the point that this is not the only option. The US seems to have considerable difficulty adjusting with the idea of a more flexible family. Trying by all means to have marriages all around does not seem to result in more stability, not even for children... Interesting that in France things seem to be going the other way: since the "PACS" (civil union) was introduced (supposedly for same-sex couples mostly), it has been widely used by heterosexual couples too, as a way to get (some of) the same tax and other privileges of married couples, without marriage. And children of the many many unmarried couples seem to be doing fine. Might it be that the American society has a problem with its fixation on marriage?

Now of course, part of the story is the symbolic of names like "husband" and "wife" - and I love this destabilizing shattering of the obvious:

I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.
Turns out it’s
fun.
Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.
She says,
correcting me, “He’s my husband,”“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

(through Andrew Sullivan)

But let's talk a bit about something else than marriage, lest one thinks I am obsessive...

What "transatlantic" - and a first post on human "software" and "hardware"

This is this blog's first post. I feel like it has to be a kind of introduction to the reader - but who wants to read a personal introduction on an anonymous blogger? Well, let's see.

First it's in English - and it is posted from France (and yes, I am French - not one of the many foreigners who have pushed real estate prices up in past years - though this may be past now... - not that I have anything against them in any event!) - that goes a bit towards the "Transatlantic" - and Trans-Channel, maybe.

Second, well, it's anonymous. Employees of public international organizations are not supposed to blog outside of the fence, or they do it anonymously. So I had to find myself some funny identity. Sorry, I stole from Voltaire, my master.

Then, let me not bore you about where I come from, but use it to start serious discussion. What got me writing, among other things, was the tension, between the cultures I (have to) operate in. I come from France, and feel deeply European. I work in a US-based multilateral structure, which is impregnated with American and to some extent British culture - and I lived in Central Asia, and tried to take something from there too. Maybe this last point is the third spike of the triangle, the one that enables to triangulate, to get out of the dilemma / opposition. So in short: the US and France / Europe: so close sometimes, so far often. And myself finding always that on some points one side seems helplessly backwards, but on the others, well, the other side is...Sounds abstract, but reflects the spontaneous feelings of many European and Americans when confronted with the other side of the Atlantic: a mix of admiration and puzzlement (at the absurdity of "these weird people"). Now enough already - let's get down to it.

Somehow, I picked up psychoanalysis for this first post. Maybe fittingly, for it is in some way the history of the mind, and I have always believed in starting with history. So, p-analysis: still powerful in France, still influential in Europe, weak in Britain, obsolete in the US. Oh please, do not shoot! I do not pretend that this fully reflects reality, but relatively it does - meaning the gradation in prestige and influence is roughly in this order, and of this order of magnitude. And of course it is rather on the wane everywhere, in the intellectual debate sphere at least, and up to a large extent in teaching too. Among patients, I have no statistics - relatively, it is maybe declining, but because there are so many therapies developing. The overall market for psycho- and pan-therapy is growing so much, it seems at least all the analysts I know are rather refusing clients. But what I care about here is the intellectual field, precisely.

I remember already some lecturers when I was in grad school (that is, over 10 years ago) saying that purely neurological explanation of the brain was all the rage. Now again I am reading many posts on blogs I deeply admire (like Andrew Sullivan's) that again revolve around the brain being just a computer, sort of...There are actually quite interesting attempts, it seems, at creating computer replicas of the brain. Here is what the experimenters say:

They deal with the problem of free will, or, as they term it, the possibility of
a random or "physically indeterministic element" in the working of the human
brain, by declaring it a non-problem. They suggest that it can be dealt with
rather easily by "including sufficient noise in the simulation ...
Randomness is
therefore highly unlikely to pose a major obstacle to WBE."
And anyway: "Hidden variables or indeterministic free will appear to have the
same status as quantum consciousness: while not in any obvious way directly
ruled out by current
observations, there is no evidence that they occur or
are necessary to explain
observed phenomena."

Now, just one first observation: this whole metaphor of software and hardware, before even we start checking whether it can apply, before even we question if this can be the right metaphor - why not follow its inner logic...If the brain is like a computer, then surely it is the hardware. If it is a kind of hardware, then surely there is a software too. Maybe this is what analysts call "psyche" - call it what you will, the very inner logic of people who claim it is nothing but a computer suggests there is such a software. Now, obviously, it is a kind of massively evolutive, self-programming software. And most probably at different points in its own evolution it can take different turns because there can be several options, just like, say, in chess. Why is it not obvious, therefore, that saying "the human mind is all, entirely and exclusively about neuro-transmitters, neuro-receivers, chemical and electrical processes" does not in anyway prove that there is no such thing as a "psyche", or "soul", or whatever you call it. It just means that, well, whatever this "software" does, it does it through the operation of chemicals and electricity and/or it is a particular arrangement of chemicals and electricity. I mean, have any of these people (the authors of this brain-computer experiment, or the bio-psychiatrists who suggest that every human problem can be solved through the right pill...or more or less...) ever tried and use their computer with NO software installed. I guess they should...would save us from them writing anything! [Oh, by the way, yes of course really intelligent neuroscientists know this, I guess - but the moronic version of neuroscientists also exists, and is still active...]

Recently I was with my old grandmother. Her mind is failing with old age, and under the weight of a life full with more than one can bear. She bore it all, but losing memory, and gradually her mind, is probably some blessing in disguise, at least in part. But what is interesting, about my point: as she increasingly forgets (that guests are coming) and is unable to cope (with shopping, obviously, with cooking too, and even with simply entertaining some kind of conversation), she makes up whole stories: that we did not call, that if we called, we talked to someone else, that anyway she does not like Sundays (this is a Friday...), etc. Why, one could ask? If the brain is just about hardware, then senility is just gradual inability to function, so why is this defective hardware suddenly so creative and active when it comes to making up imaginary things? Because the internal logic of the software is at work: she has all her life had her own standards, and vision of herself. She is a mistress host, someone whose house is famed for her hospitality - or at least was. This cannot stop to be, so the mind will make up completely convoluted parallel realities so that it can continue to be. The software enters into a different "self-protecting" mode, and it re-programs itself in doing so.

Now, the inspiration to write this post did not only come from my grandmother. It also came from the campaign about Proposition 8 in California, the vote upon it, and the aftermath. What is the connection? Again, the nature of the mind, and of the human being, up to some point. Let me try and break this one in two parts, because the whole topic is so interesting (and yes, of course, it is not just interesting: the adoption of Prop 8 is a human tragedy, and I am on the side of those who lost, but with some difference in perspective...):

- the whole controversy on homosexual marriage, just as the controversy on abortion, reveals interesting and deep differences between the US and Europe - see next post...

- in the debate on proposition 8, one of the side topics is "innate" against "chosen", or some variation thereof. This is what relates to this post.

Now, what do I mean? Remember Sarah Palin (oh, I know, how could you forget this: her presence on the ticket meant that Obama's election was the equivalent of seeing a huge asteroid miss Planet Earth by a couple of miles...)? Well, in some interview, she went roughly: "oh, I don't mind gays, everyone should be free to chose, but etc.". And Andrew Sullivan, like many others, went: "homosexuality is not a choice" - one is like this, or not, and since one has no choice in the matter, denying marriage equality to homosexuals is a civil right issue, like denying it to blacks (or other colours, or whatever you may think of: midgets, say).

Now, I don't disagree with thrust of the argument (I have some difference on to whether the obsession with marriage is really such a good idea, but this is for a further post...), but there is a small nuance here. Being black, or small, or anything physically inalterable (exception made for the Michael Jackson approach), is something you really are born with, and pretty much does not evolve in any way during your life. This is a pure given. Sexuality is a much more fluid (and I would argue, therefore: interesting!) aspect of personality. Many heterosexuals can have homosexual attractions - and vice-versa. People have evolving sexualities, there is ample evidence of this. Now, I think psychoanalysts (I am going back to my original topic, finally!) have done a great disservice to themselves by being so much less clever than Freud was, and turning homosexuality back into a disease, and suggesting they could help to cure it, and one should aim at curing it. But what Freud said was quite different:

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too..."

Now, this may not be in politically correct style, and I don't say it is entirely correct either! But the suggestion that homosexuality could be linked not only to "innate" given, but also to the person's own history (and not necessarily only the relation with parents that supermarket-grade p-analysis ends up focusing on), with all its depth and complexity: why should this be shocking, or even surprising? If sexuality is not software, then what is?...

Actually, I found while editing this post a very similar view by (gay) writer Richard Rodriguez, through Andrew Sullivan:

...while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the
anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the
women's movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the
traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves
sexually -- even form our sense of what a sex is -- sets us apart from the
traditional roles we were given by our fathers.

Now, this is the point indeed.