Cambodian Genocide Denialism in Counterpunch
I was shocked by the latest issue of Counterpunch which includes a truly offensive article full of praise for one of the greatest mass murderers in human history, Pol Pot.
“The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot, a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch.
…St Francis and Leo Tolstoy would have understood him.
The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western invention.”
As if praise for Pol Pot were not enough, the author doubles down with support for Stalin and Mao.
“…To me, this recalled other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor. The people now in charge of the US, Europe and Russia want to present every alternative to their rule as inept or bloody or both. They especially hate incorruptible leaders, be it Robespierre or Lenin, Stalin or Mao – and Pol Pot.”
I consider this article to be on par with Holocaust denialism and praise for Hitler. Counterpunch is a leftist periodical but it is not without mainstream support and respect so I think this is worth calling out.
For the record, the most credible sources all estimate excess deaths under Pol Pot’s brutal regime of between 1.4 and 2.2 million people, approximately 20-25% of the entire population. The estimates come from three types of sources, 1) Interviews with survivors about relatives and neighbors killed, 2) Demographic estimates from before and after the Khmer Rouge which even today show massive discrepancies, especially for men of the relevant ages and 3) Surveys of mass graves. A good review is here. See also Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Project which does not overlook US involvement. None of this is especially controversial so Wikipedia is a good overview:
In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labour was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into “Old People” through agricultural labour. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.
…Modern research has located 20,000 mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia. Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 740,000 and 3,000,000, most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease.
The U.S. State Department-funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project estimates approximately 1.7 million. R. J. Rummel, an analyst of historical political killings, gives a figure of 2 million.
A UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed, while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a “most likely” figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that “these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution”.
The bias against stale labor
Rational or not? Brian Leiter reports:
Philosopher Daniel Weiskopf (George State) calls my attention to a quite startling ad for a job in English at Colorado State University, which requires that applicants have earned the PhD since 2010! As the linked post notes, given the state of the humanities job market, everyone knows there are lots of very good candidates with PhDs from 2009, 2008 and, horrors, even 2007 who still haven’t found suitable appointments. This ad promises to consign them to the discard pile without even looking at them.
There is another example here. By the way, here is a Leiter post updating us on Grayling’s New College of the Humanities.
Assorted links
How random are RCTs?
From Hunt Allcott and Sendhil Mullainathan, “External Validity and Partner Selection Bias”:
Program evaluation often involves generalizing internally-valid site-specific estimates to a different target population. While many analyses have tested the assumptions required for internal validity (e.g. LaLonde 1986), there has been little empirical assessment of external validity in any context, because identical treatments are rarely evaluated in multiple sites. This paper examines a remarkable series of 14 energy conservation field experiments run by a company called Opower, involving 550,000 households in different cities across the U.S. We first show that the site-specific treatment effect heterogeneity is both statistically and economically significant. We then show that Opower partners are selected on partner-level characteristics that are correlated with the treatment effect. This “partner selection bias” implies that replications with additional partners have not given an unbiased estimate of the distribution of treatment effects in non-partner sites. We augment these results in a different context by showing that partner microfinance institutions (MFIs) that carry out randomized experiments are selected on observable characteristics from the global pool of MFIs. Finally, we propose two simple suggestive tests of external validity that can be used in the absence of data from many sites: comparison of observable sample and target site characteristics and an F-test of heterogeneous treatment effects across “sub-sites” within a site.
The gated paper is here, ungated here. For the pointer I thank @JustinSandefur.
*Innovation Economics*
That is the new book by Rob Atkinson and Stephen Ezell. It is far more mercantilist than I feel comfortable with, yet it is full of information and argumentation, and it is a book one can profitably engage with. Here is one excerpt:
The largely consensus view among U.S. economic elites is that the massive U.S. job loss in manufacturing is simply a reflection of manufacturing doing well: using technology to automate work and to become more efficient. It’s the agriculture story they tell us…
There are two big problems with this view. The first is that it is not supported by the official government data. In fact, U.S. manufacturing lost jobs much faster in the 2000s than in the 1990s, even though productivity growth was similar during the two decades. In the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment fell 1 percent, while productivity increased 56 percent. Yet, in the 2000s, manufacturing employment fell 32 percent while productivity increased only slightly faster, 61 percent. So, clearly, higher productivity was not the main cause of the manufacturing employment collapse.
As Michael Mandel has pointed out repeatedly, there are also problems with the data, and here are our authors on that point:
…a closer look reveals that every durable goods industry grew more slowly in output than GDP except one: computer/electronics which grew a whopping 720 percent faster than GDP…To put this in perspective, this one sector accounted for 113 percent of U.S. manufacturing output growth in the 2000s, even though, in 1997, it accounted for just 12 percent of manufacturing output.
Note that a lot of this measured growth is quality improvement in computers, rather than growth of the sector in the traditional sense of having a rapidly expanding industry. Employment in that sector fell. The performance of the other manufacturing sectors is not so impressive:
…during 2001-2010, manufacturing minus computers actually lost 6 percent of its value-added. Output of the electrical equipment and wood products industries declined by 7 percent, plastics by 8 percent, fabricated metals by 10 percent, printing by 12 percent, furniture by 19 percent, nonmetallic minerals and primary metals and paper by 31 percent, apparel by 34 percent, and textiles and motor vehicles by 39 percent. In other words, thirteen manufacturing sector that made up 58 percent of U.S. manufacturing employment all produced less in 2010 than in 2001, all at a time when the overall economy grew 15.8 percent.
I suppose you could say that education and health care have in fact seen striking advances in productivity during this period. Or you could recall my portrait in The Great Stagnation of an economy which has only a very small number of dynamic sectors, with computers of course in the lead. Overall it is not a pretty picture.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
You will find it here. The contents include:
James Tooley on Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics: Banerjee and Duflo propose to bypass the “big questions” of economic development and focus instead on “small steps” to improvement. But, says Tooley, they proceed to make big judgments about education in developing countries, judgments not supported by their own evidence.
Why the Denial? Pauline Dixon asks why writers at UNESCO, Oxfam, and elsewhere have denied or discounted the success and potentiality of private schooling in developing countries.
Neither necessary nor sufficient, but… Thomas Mayer critically appraises Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey’s influential writings, particularly The Cult of Statistical Significance. McCloskey and Ziliak reply.
Was Occupational Licensing Good for Minorities? Daniel Klein, Benjamin Powell, and Evgeny Vorotnikov take issue with a JLE article by Marc Law and Mindy Marks. Law and Marks reply.
Mankiw vs. DeLong and Krugman on the CEA’s Real GDP Forecasts in Early 2009: David Cushman shows how a careful econometrician might have adjudicated the debate among these leading economists over the likelihood of a macroeconomic rebound.
Assorted links
*Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know*
That is the new Jason Brennan book, which has yet to arrive on my doorstep.
For the pointer I thank David Levey.
Is the Indian left preparing its cave-in on FDI?
It seems there is still some fight left in them:
…leftwingers inside and outside the Congress party, including a few of Mr Singh’s allies in the multi-party coalition, oppose economic liberalisation and in some cases regard retail reform as a capitalist plot masterminded by Walmart.
“The tragedy is that our prime minister has begun to worship the US,” said Sitaram Yechury, leader of the opposition Communist Party of India – Marxist. “Congress wants Indians to be slaves and foreigners to be our masters. We will not accept FDI [foreign direct investment] in retail. We will protest this decision till our last breath.”
On the political right, BJP leaders – backed by small shopkeepers wary of retail competitors – sense an opportunity to destabilise the government before its term expires in 2014 and are not shy in pursuing that goal through short-term alliances with the hard left.
Developing…
Are the Republicans preparing their cave-in on taxes?
“This is a referendum on taxes,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a senior member of the House Budget Committee. “If the president wins reelection, taxes are going up” for the nation’s wealthiest households, and “there’s not a lot we can do about that.”
Funny words from a party that might control Congress, or at least the House. Read the Constitution! Here is much more.
I’ve long maintained that Republican legislators do not hate high taxes, they only hate having to vote for high taxes. Come this December, they may pretend to voters that they are more or less powerless, while negotiating some concessions from Obama (and other Democrats) behind the scenes. A lot of them are probably relieved or happy that taxes can go up, and furthermore they can then complain about this the next time around.
Go ask Ramsay MacMullen
It used to seem shocking that five of the ten richest counties in the United States were part of the DC Metropolitan Statistical Area, but the 2011 American Community Survey numbers released yesterday show that the DC suburbs now account for seven of the ten richest counties in America.
Loudon, Fairfax, and Arlington in Virginia lead the way followed by Hunterdon County, NJ then Howard County in Maryland; Somerset, NJ; Prince William and Fauquier in Virginia; Douglas, CO; and Montgomery County, MD.
Here is more. File under “Makers vs. Takers.” Here is Will Wilkinson on making vs. taking.
Does work or school boost your vocabulary more?
From the new James R. Flynn book:
It appears that the world of work, which follows university, has been the main force behind the adult vocabulary gains of the last half-century…Note that in 1953, low-IQ people enhanced their vocabularies over the ages of 17 to 22 far more than low-IQ people did in 2000. I suggest the hypothesis that they were more likely to be settled in apprenticeships or adult jobs in those days than today. Even the high-IQ people increased their vocabularies more between the ages of 17 to 22 in 1953 than in 2000. Apparently being placed in work was more potent than being in a tertiary institution.
Isn’t it also the case that we have been moving to a flatter, simpler English for a long time? Try reading some James Fenimore Cooper. Plus schools are less likely to make you memorize long, classic poems, which is another good way of building vocabulary.
Assorted links
1. There is no great stagnation (video).
2. Update on the French economy (there is a great stagnation).
3. Interesting findings on poverty, mobility, and happiness.
4. Martin Wolf on the UK productivity and output puzzles.
Still the No Brainer Issue of the Year
In The No Brainer Issue of the Year I wrote:
Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open?
Once again, as the NYTimes reports, our dysfunctional political system has opted for Door #2:
A Republican bill to provide permanent resident visas for foreigners who graduate from American universities with advanced degrees in science and technology failed to pass the House on Thursday, a setback for technology companies that had strongly supported it.
…[The bill] would have eliminated an annual lottery and instead allocated 55,000 visas for legal permanent residency, known as green cards, each year to foreigners who have completed master’s and doctoral degrees from American universities in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Some life expectancies are shrinking
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.
And this:
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.
Here is more, scary throughout. We are not as healthy as we thought we were.