Disturbing articles in Austrian newspapers

The article is from Der Standard, one of the leading and most "mainstream" newspapers in the country.  It continues:

In light of the Lebanon Wars, many contemporaries stand before the question how one criticizes Israel in a "politically correct" manner.  Is that possible?  Naturally — if you observe just a few rules.

1. Look inside yourself and consider who you are.  If you are a Jew and live in Israel, then skepticism toward your own war machine is your first duty as a citizen.  If you are the grandchild of a Wehrmacht officer, the matter is somewhat different.

How about this?

Jews have no special duty to be moral, but rather an elevated need for security.  Auschwitz was not a school for good human behavior!

…Above all you should not compare Israelis with the Nazis and the designation of the Palestinians as "the new Jews" should be avoided.  This is not only tasteless, it is also factually completely false.

Criticism should be directed at making a "happy Israel" and most of all the criticism should not deny Israel’s "special status."

So what does the politically incorrect approach look like? 

Here is a related post by Andrew Sullivan.

China story of the day

A county in southwestern China has killed as many as 50,000 dogs in a
government-ordered campaign following the deaths of three local people
from rabies.

The five-day massacre in Yunnan province’s Mouding county that
ended on Sunday spared only military guard dogs and police canine
units, the Shanghai Daily reported, citing local media.

Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, it said.

Other killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get
dogs barking, then homing in on their prey. Owners were offered five
yuan (34p) per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent
in, it said. (AOL News)

The pointer is from EffectMeasure.

Climbing the Mountain

Here is Derek Parfit’s new book manuscript, on-line.  Thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.

Addendum: Parfit’s 1984 Reasons and Persons remains my favorite contemporary work in moral philosophy.  He is also the most important thinker on social choice paradoxes since Kenneth Arrow.  Since that time Parfit has been working on multiple volumes on the major problems of philosophy.  Many people who have seen advance drafts of Climbing the Mountain claim to be disappointed.  I will read it soon.

Fiasco, III

Don’t be distracted by Alex’s libertarian rhetoric on foreign
policy
.  It would not produce a very libertarian world.  It would lead
to um…fiasco.  Ask around in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or for that
matter Honest Europe.  That’s most of the free world.  Can anyone else protect Singapore or New Zealand?

Had Alex his way, the first Gulf War never would have
happened.  Saddam and his sons would rule Iraq, owning both Kuwaiti oil
revenue and nuclear weapons, and probably itching for a rematch with
Iran.  Sound like fun?

It is palatable to oppose the second Gulf War only because we fought the first.

Fiasco II

Henry at Crooked Timber challenges me to provide more background on why the fiasco in Iraq is another instance of government failure.  I do so in the comments to his post and expand somewhat here.

Government founders on problems of incentives and information.  On incentives: Should we be surprised that delays, errors and incompetence are more prevalent at the INS than at bureaucracies which must deal with citizens or which face competition from the private sector?

Of course not – but then what incentives does our government have to prevent abuse of foreign
citizens? Democracy in this case provides no checks and balances because of
anti-foreign bias, the ease with which the public can ignore the deaths of
innocents abroad, and the fact that foreigners lack representation in
our legislatures or the courts.  Thus, Abu Ghraib and the routine shooting of innocents is no surprise – this is what happens when government is unconstrained. 

What about the incentives to
start wars? Government is bad enough when we all have access to
information. What are we going to do when the major source of
information is the government itself and they ask us to trust but not verify? 

Is it a surprise that wars
are much more likely to be started when the economy is doing badly and
the President is low in the polls?  Not to me but I am dismayed that people continue to be surprised when Presidents lie to make war, as if this had never happened before.

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."  Lyndon Baines Johnson, October 1964.)

It’s naive to only blame particular people (Bush, Cheney et al.) and depressing when people at CT claim that if only "our guys" had been in power everything would have been ok.  When you see the same behaviour again and again you ought to look to systematic factors.  And even if you do believe that it is all due to Bush, Cheney et al. it’s not as if these guys came to power randomly, they won twice.  The worst get on top for a reason.  As a result, government ought to be designed (on which see further below) so it works when the knaves are in power and not just when the angels govern.

One response in several comments at CT is that these are arguments against democracy and not against government.  If only we had followed the experts at the Pentagon we would have been ok.  Frankly this response, which is an argument for Fascism, sickens me.   Factually the argument is incorrect, the Pentagon and not just the civilian leaders share much of the blame for our current fiasco.  Moreover, had we listened to the experts in the past, Curtis LeMay and his type would probably have sent us to nuclear hell by now.  I believe in democracy but I believe in it as a constraint on government.

Governments also founder on problems of information.  Whereas the market makes use of highly dispersed information in the minds of millions of individuals thousands of miles apart the government bases its information on curveball and the musings of a cabal of neo-conservatives busy counting the chapters of The Prince for gnosis.  Yes, this case is especially ridiculous but have people not heard of the Gulf of Tonkin?  More generally, an economy cannot be centrally planned and neither can a society (let alone can a society be centrally planned from another country by people who don’t even speak the language).  The idea that our government, however competently run, can export democracy is simply the fatal conceit applied to foreign affairs.

Am I arguing that the market could have done it better?  No, believe it or not, my goal is not to efficiently kick the shit out of foreigners.  If something can’t be done well that’s an argument for not doing it – or at least not doing it often.  I will take the unusual opportunity to agree with John Quiggan who writes at CT that in war "the likelihood of disaster is so great that the bar needs to be set very high."  How high should the bar be set?  Well we could begin by taking the Constitution seriously when it states that Congress alone has the power to declare war.  (I know, the Constitution is a dead letter.)  And, if we really get ambitious, how about making the Department of Defense live up to its name?

Does blogging improve our lives?

I’m not talking about BlogAds revenue or better chances to write Op-Eds.  I mean our lives.  Ben Casnocha writes:

…I recently had a great solo dinner in Rome. I had a
terrific companion (newspaper) and good food. About 1/4 of the way
through this thought crossed my mind: "This is an awesome meal. I’m
going to blog it." I did. I was committed in my mind to making it a positive night overall, and it did end up that way. In sum: when
I know I’m going to blog an experience, I’m committed to making it a
positive experience, and since intention and reaction mostly define the
quality of an experience, it usually turns out positive.
True, I
could always commit to having positive days each day, but knowing I
will blog something introduces a weird form of "public accountability."

Ben is an excellent blogger; here are Ben’s impressions of France.  Is he right about blogging? 

Creative Destruction

Or should I have titled this post "Against National Champions"?  Here is Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung:

What is good for big business need not generally advance a country’s
overall economy. Big business turnover correlates with rising income,
productivity, and (in high income countries) faster capital
accumulation; consistent with Schumpeter’s (1912) creative destruction
and recent formalizations like Aghion and Howitt (1992). Turnover
appears to “cause” growth; and disappearing behemoths, more than rising
stars, drive our results. Stronger findings suggest more intense
creative destruction in countries with higher incomes, as well as those
with smaller governments, Common Law courts, smaller banking systems,
stronger shareholder rights, and more open economies. Only the last
matters more in lower income countries.

Here is the paper.

Trudie on time management

First, check out Tyler’s earlier tips on time management.  Read this one too.  That’s right, you.  The one who doesn’t usually click on the links.  Read them.  Don’t tell me you don’t have enough time.

The bigger question is whether time management is something you need to improve.  The "Friends" part of your brain sounds quite fundamental, why tamper with it?  Don’t think all that Bruckner stuff, or for that matter the Journal of Law and Economics, beats a good TV show.  (Even Nigerian movies can be worse than Law and Order, believe it or not!)  Cost-benefit analysis suggests that acceptance will come easier than change.

It sounds as if you are already an expert consumer, and indeed consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity.

Being "completely rational" would be a high form of hell.  Tyler tells me that his high levels of cultural consumption are his form of irrationality, not the contrary.  And most of his activities are quite passive; he has never been in a kayak, refuses to go "natural diving," and surely blogging does not compare with building a software company or hunting a boar.  Don’t confuse a restless nature with seizing life by the throat and living it to the fullest (although, of course, some people do both, including Tyler).  In any case the key is to enjoy and indeed cultivate the irrationalities you have (indeed that is all you have), at least provided they do not become destructive vis-a-vis other people.

Trudie again thanks Tim Harford for pioneering the concept of economic advice; Tyler has added Tim’s website to the Interesting People roll on the left hand side of this blog.

Fiasco

In Fiasco, Thomas Ricks says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed.  I have no quarrel with that.  What dismays me is that anyone expected any different.  All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies.  War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale.  The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.

If this war has been worse on these scores than others, and I have my doubts, we can at least be thankful that the scale of death and destruction has been smaller.  At the Battle of the Somme there were a million casualties and 300,000 deaths over the course of a few months.  If we remember previous wars more fondly this is only because those wars we won.  Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently. 

Is this a suggestion to put the current war in context?  Not at all. It is suggestion to put government in context.