Results for “culture that is germany” 105 found
Is the future of the European periphery a bright one?
Hugo, a loyal MR reader, asks:
…based on this sentence: “I am pessimistic about the survival of the full eurozone, which is not the same as being pessimistic about Europe”
What’s the non-pessimistic, post-Eurozone scenario?
Wouldn’t that leave Greece and Portugal and maybe a couple of others as the Euro equivalent of the US Rust Belt, but with no federal support & much-reduced ability for people in those countries to migrate to areas where there is job growth?
Greece has made very good progress on cutting spending and limiting patronage (where is the Cato study?), although the whole package probably can’t work in such a deflationary environment, not to mention the riots in the streets. They’ll probably have to give back at least a third of what they have done on the reform side, but a lot of inefficiency has been rooted out for good. The country doesn’t have to have a miserable future, just look at recent Turkish growth. Of course Greece needs to default (again, and less selectively) and that will require in the short run yet more spending austerity because the borrowing still is financing their current budget.
Portugal made significant economic gains before joining the eurozone. Its manufacturing probably won’t come back but old people like the place and that will continue to help them as Europe ages. They can sell real estate and vacations and produce services and a bit of agriculture. Neither Greece nor Portugal faces much risk from Chinese or Asian competition; those “Rustbelt” problems lie largely in the past and have already hit them and been absorbed.
EU subsidies are not the path to wealth and in part they lock those economies into low-productivity growth ag. sectors; that’s a mixed blessing. And who says a eurozone implosion would cause those subsidies to go away? Northern Europe already has allocated that money and perhaps wishes to retain influence over their neighbors, maybe all the more in a volatile environment.
Portugal is not reaping major gains from the right of its citizens to migrate to Germany and besides maybe that won’t go away. Schengen could fail and Germany still might prefer Portuguese immigrants to the relevant alternatives.
Currency depreciations of 40 percent or more won’t hurt Portugal or Greece!
By no means am I an extreme optimist about these countries, but I think they will do OK, at least once they get past the short run. Why shouldn’t they? Human capital levels are not superlative but they are entirely acceptable for mid-level European existence and the climate is superb in both places. All they have to do is wave a magic wand and imagine themselves outside the eurozone, and outside their current fiscal shortfalls, just don’t ask me how they get there.
China at the frontier
Following previous efforts (http://www.genomics.cn/en/news_show.php?type=show&id=644 and http://www.genomics.cn/en/news_show.php?type=show&id=647), BGI, based in Shenzhen, China, and its collaborators at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, as well as a growing number of researchers around the world “crowdsourcing” this data, are exploring in-depth the European disease outbreak helping trace the origin and spread of the lethal E. coli strain. Different sources have reported that two strains, 01-09591 from Germany isolated in 2001 and 55989 from Central Africa in 2002, are highly similar to the 2011 outbreak strain. Based on the most recently curated assembly publically released by BGI yesterday (ftp://ftp.genomics.org.cn/pub/Ecoli_TY-2482), these strains have an identical Multi Locus Sequence Typing (ST678) based on analysis of seven important “housekeeping” genes*.
BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute) was founded in 1999 and has become the largest genomic organization in the world. With a focus on research and applications in the healthcare, agriculture, conservation and bio-energy fields, BGI has a proven track record of innovative, high-profile research which has generated over 178 publications in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science.
Londenio’s four questions
This was his request:
1. How should I explore the German New Cinema (Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders, etc.) ?
2. If I liked Benedict Anderson’s *Imagined Communities*, what should I read next?
3. Who is the Douglas Hofstadter of Economics?
4. What is the first non-personal question you would ask if you were to wake up from a 10-year-long coma?
Answers:
1. Herzog’s Nosferatu, Kaspar Hauser, und Little Dieter (German-language version only, and a very underrated movie) are my favorites from this tradition, which past Herzog I do not much admire or enjoy. Not long ago I saw Herzog’s early documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?, 44 minutes on Netflix streaming, highly recommended, mostly it is footage of auctioneers talking really really fast, and percussively, to a partly Amish audience.
There is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Fassbinder films I do not enjoy. Try also the TV serial Heimat, which properly can be considered cinematic.
2. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures, by me.
3. If you mix together Kenneth Boulding, G.L.S. Shackle, and Nassim Taleb, you might get an economics approximation of Hofstadter.
4. Are there major wars going on and how bad are they?
Stata Resources
Here are some Stata resources that I have found useful. Statistics with Stata by Hamilton is good for beginners although it is overpriced. For the basics I like German Rodriguez’s free Stata tutorial best, good material can also be found at UCLA’s Stata starter kit and UNC’s Stata Tutorial; two page Stata is good for getting started quickly.
Christopher Baum’s book An Introduction to Modern Econometrics using Stata is excellent and worth the price. The world is indebted to Baum for a number of Stata programs such as NBERCycles which shades in NBER recession dates on time series graphs–this was a big help in producing graphs for our textbook!–so buy Baum’s book and support a public good.
I have found it hugely useful to peruse the proceedings of Stata meetings where you can find professional guides to using Stata to do advanced econometrics. For example, here is Austin Nichols on Regression Discontinuity and related methods, Robert Guitierrez on Recent Developments in Multilevel Modeling, Colin Cameron on Panel Data Methods and David Drukker on Dynamic Panel Models.
I found A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics very useful and then I lent it to someone who never returned it. I suppose they found it very useful as well. I haven’t bought another copy, since it is fairly easy to edit graphs in the newer versions of Stata. You can probably get by with this online guide.
German Rodriguez, mentioned earlier, has an attractively presented class on generalized linear models with lots of material. The LSE has a PhD class on Stata, here are the class notes: Introduction to Stata and Advanced Stata Topics.
Creating a map in Stata is painful since there are a host of incompatible file formats that have to be converted (I spent several hours yesterday working to convert a dBase IV to dBase III file just so I could convert the latter to dta). Still, when it works, it works well. Friedrich Huebler has some of the details.
The reshape command is often critical but difficult, here is a good guide.
Here are many more sources of links: Stata resources, Stata Links, Resources for Learning Stata, and Gabriel Rossman’s blog Code and Culture.
Assorted links
1. As I've been saying, derivatives clearinghouse regulation isn't working. And that was supposed to be one of the best, least controversial, and most non-partisan parts of Dodd-Frank.
2. Arnold Kling, China, labor markets, Hayek, Hilferding. Uh-oh.
3. Are people backing away from the school choice movement?
4. Can you tell if someone is Mormon by looking at him?
5. What (some white) progressives don't understand about Obama.
Le Club Pigou?
French tourists who run into trouble after taking unnecessary risks overseas could have to pay for their rescue and repatriation under legislation debated today by MPs in Paris.
The proposed law, put forward by a government tired of having to foot the bill, would enable the state to demand reimbursement for "all or part of the costs … of foreign rescue operations" if it deems that travellers had ventured knowingly and without "legitimate motive" into risky territory.
According to the foreign ministry, the bill is an attempt to encourage a "culture of responsibility" among French travellers at a time of frequent kidnappings, hijackings and civil instability across the world.
Germany already does this to some extent; for instance a German backpacker rescued in Colombia had to pay twelve thousand euros to cover the cost of her helicopter trip. The full story is here.
What I’ve been reading
I've been trying not to read too much during my stay in Berlin, as an experiment in information processing and to see how it changes my thoughts. Still, I've been reading a bit and here are a few of the books:
1. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz. A bit stolid, but a good general overview of an era I very much would like to be able to visit. That said, deflation and fascist political movements make for an obviously nasty combination.
2. My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic, an interview with Charles Saatchi. Entertaining throughout, plus you can read it in a few minutes time. This is the sort of book Felix Salmon would blog. Saatchi claims that Pollock, Warhol, Judd, and Hirst are the four artists from recent times who will pass into history as the immortals. The others will be swept away.
3. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, by William Rosen. This is a popular treatment of some of the themes in Jack Goldstone's excellent work on engineering culture in England. I don't think this book has anything fundamentally new, but about half of it I found to be worthwhile reading. The other half is OK summaries of various economic theories.
4. William Voegeli, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. Voegeli has a good basic point, namely that a) the welfare state is here to stay, and b) we need to set limits to it. At some point the book runs into diminishing returns. Arnold Kling wrote a good review of the book, plus he had lunch with the author.
5. Herta Müller, assorted. When she won the Nobel Prize last year, I was skeptical. In Berlin I've been reading her work, much of which is set in Berlin, and I like it. It helps if you have a connection to those who have left formerly communist countries. In English, I suggest The Land of Green Plums as a starting point.
6. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. This one is a re-read, as I will teach it next spring in Law and Literature and I am studying it well in advance. This is Rushdie's most significant achievement and one of the truly excellent novels of the last thirty years. It's not an easy read, but worth the commitment if you haven't already done so. Sadly, this book seems to have fallen into a commercial black hole; you can't even get it on Kindle.
No Keynesianism in the Berliner Morgenpost
Some of you thought that I was making fun of Germans by scrutinizing one of the local newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost. Quite the contrary, the paper is more sophisticated than its American equivalents and furthermore I enjoy reading it myself. What I am making fun of is people who have unrealistic expectations of how Germany can be slotted into this or that academic plan, without recognizing the realities of national and regional cultures.
Other people have suggested that Die Zeit or the FAZ are more representative of German opinion. Among elites for sure, but if you walk through Berlin for days you will see the Berliner Morgenpost for sale much more often, by an order of magnitude.
Anyway, I noticed a piece in the 12 June edition, entitled "Germany is driving European economic growth." What's most striking about thie article, and other sources, is how much Keynesianism has failed to influence either German policy or German public opinion. In the piece, there is no mention of international imbalances or aggregate demand issues, but rather Germany is lauded for exporting so much and for serving as the economic locomotive for European economic activity. Furthermore this is a news story, not an Op-Ed.
Germany, of course, is one of the most successful countries in the world since its postwar reconstruction. (You could make a good case for giving Germany the "best country award" for the last fifty or sixty years.) Yet German policymakers adhere reasonably consistently to the following views:
1. It is the long run which matters and we should be obsessed with the long run consequences of our choices.
2. Economic growth comes from high productivity, most of all in quality manufacturing.
3. Borrowing to finance consumption is a nicht-nicht. Savings is all-important.
4. If we need to make a big change, we'll all grit our teeth and do it. For instance Germany has done a good deal, on the real side, to restore its export competitiveness in the last ten years, not to mention unification and postwar recovery.
5. These strictures should be enforced by rigorous rules, to limit temptation, because indeed you will find cases where it appears to make sense to break the rules.
6. Values matter, as do norms of cooperation.
7. Don't obsess over the creation of too many low-wage jobs, because in the longer run it will be bad for your cultural capital. If need be, pay people to be unemployed, but hold high human capital. In the longer run, try to educate them up to higher productivity and thus employment.
8. Be obsessed with self-improvement, most of all at the personal level.
(If you're wondering, the recent talk about coalition collapse is not challenging these basic principles. There is talk about not cutting some kinds of government spending, or raising taxes on the wealthy, or whether the ruling coalition can get things done, or whether the draft should be abolished, or whether Germany has mishandled the Euro crisis. German politics produces a lot of government spending, and that is part of the above vision, but there is a great concern about whether it is paid for in the proper way.)
Most Keynesian economics makes good sense to me, especially at the methodological level. But when it comes to principles for guiding a country…? The numbered items above are not exactly my preferred list (especially not for the United States), but they have worked out very well for Germany. I would not so lightly toss them away. Might these principles be better, all things considered, than the Keynesian alternatives?
I'm a fan of the northern European social democracies, but in part they succeed because those countries don't follow all of the prescriptions you might hear coming from their boosters in the United States. For instance American liberals often admire the activist government in such countries, but it's built upon a very different set of cultural foundations. I hear or read liberals calling for the comparable interventions but usually remaining quite silent about the accompanying cultural foundations or in some cases actively opposing them.
The cultural elements of the current Keynesian debates remain underexplored in the United States, but they are fairly well understood in Germany.
Berlin memories
I first visited Berlin in 1985, while traveling with Randall Kroszner. We drove to West Berlin by car and we were terrified for the few hours we were underway in East Germany. Randy did not drive over the speed limit once. I was hardly a communist sympathizer but still I was unprepared for the day trip to East Berlin. I saw soldiers goose-stepping down one of the main streets. In the stores old ladies yelled and swung their brooms at me. Many buildings still had bullet marks or bomb damage from World War II. In a restaurant we ate a rubber Wiener Schnitzel and shared a table with an East German family; they did not have enough trust in their government to speak a word to us. I was unable to spend my mandatory thirty-mark conversion on anything useful; I carried back some Stendahl and Goethe but didn't want the Lenin. This was in the capital city in the showcase of the communist world.
My biggest impression was simply that I had never seen evil before.
In the summer of 1990 I stayed in a dorm in East Berlin. Everyone seemed normal. Cute girls smiled. Yet there were few signs of modern German life as a Westerner might understand it; it was as if I had stepped into an alternative science fiction universe. The Vietnamese ran the street markets and Russian still mattered.
In 1999 I heard an emotional performance of Fidelio there and most of the audience cried.
I like spending time in Berlin. But I am never sure I like Berlin itself, West or East. Berlin is Germany being imperial. Berlin is Germany looking toward the east. Today Berlin is Germany pretending it is normal, while not yet having a new identity. Here is Kurt Tucholsky (in German) on Berlin. Here is a silly quotation about Berlin:
“Berlin combines the culture of New York, the traffic system of Tokyo, the nature of Seattle, and the historical treasures of, well, Berlin.”
Here is the Berlin Sony Center. Here is the Reichstag. Here is the Jewish Museum. Here is Knut, from the Berlin Zoo.
Outliers
The book is getting snarky reviews but if it were by an unknown, rather than by the famous Malcolm Gladwell, many people would be saying how interesting it is. The main point, in economic language, is that human talent is heterogeneous and that the talent of a particular person must mesh with the capital structure of his or her time if major success is to result. The book is best read as a supplement to Ludwig Lachmann’s Capital and its Structure. The main enduring insight of both Lachmann and Gladwell is simply how much we live in a world of complementarity rather than substitutability.
Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton (check out the headings to these links) appear nor does the phrase "multiplicative model of human success." A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add. Everyone should read Simonton, noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics.
If you ask too much from Outliers it will fall apart. It is too easy to find contingency in the world and Gladwell doesn’t begin to look for a theory of which contingencies are interesting or not. For instance arguably Ludwig van Beethoven would not have been a great composer if:
1. An extra butterfly had died two million years ago.
2. The outcome of the Thirty Years’ War had been different.
3. The Germany of his time had not had fortepianos.
4. His parents had conceived their child one second earlier.
5. Haydn had not paved the way.
#3 and #5 seem more interesting than #1 and #4 but that’s because some contingencies just don’t help us understand the world very much. Gladwell never gives us enough theoretical structure to see why his contingencies are the relevant ones. Simply showing the contingencies in personal histories is not, taken alone, very enlightening.
Gladwell’s contingency stories skid out of control. At one point it seems the main claim is that the steady accumulation of advantages is what matters, but once you ask which advantages end up "counting," the claim collapses into tautology.
There is also a "PC" undercurrent in the book of "don’t write anyone off" but if everything is so contingent on so many factors, maybe writing people off isn’t such a big deal. It could go either way. It depends.
Gladwell deliberately steers us away from the contingency of genetic endowment (even for a given set of parents, which sperm got through?), but if you hold everything else fixed you can assign a very high marginal product to the genetic factor if you wish, usually up to 100 percent of a person’s outcome. That mental exercise is verboten but somehow it is OK to hold the genetic endowment constant and vary some other historical factor and regard that as a meaningful contingency. See the discussion of Beethoven above, especially #4 on the list.
Gladwell descends into the swamp of contingency but he is unwilling to really live in it and take it seriously or, alternatively, to find a way out.
In reality the complementarity concept is easier to work with and also more fruitful for thinking about policy implications or for that matter the implications for management or talent training. Success is fragile but foster competing cultures based on clusters of talent motivated by rivalry and emulation. Don’t filter out the eccentrics or the risk takers. That’s about where David Hume ended up but Gladwell never gets anywhere close.
It’s still a good book and a fun book. You can order it here.
The new attack on free trade
It is by Erik Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich, and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor; here is a home page for the book. The title is misleading and sounds too monocausal. Reinert’s well-written book in fact revives the arguments of Friedrich List, Henry Carey, and the 19th century protectionists. In his view many forms of manufacturing are increasing returns to scale activities and help support civil society in the longer run. Agriculture and the sale of raw materials are "Malthusian" sectors with diminishing returns and they are unable to create a stable middle class. The solution of course is to stop pushing free trade upon the third world and thus allow it to develop. Reinert claims Tudor England, 19th century America (though see Doug Irwin’s revisionist work), Bismarckian Germany, and pre-reform Latin America as data points on his side. Unlike many critics of free trade, he does fully understand Ricardian and other theories of comparative advantage.
I don’t think his main claims are crazy and they are by no means theoretically impossible. I wish however he had devoted more attention to the following:
1. Many other preconditions — most of all educational potential and some decent institutions — must be in place for tariffs to spur economic development in this manner. Not all regions can create sustainable increasing returns to scale industries in manufacturing, tariffs or not.
2. Reinert cites many historical examples but doesn’t establish that they all apply, or apply with the force he suggests. The book is a polemic, as might be written by an advocate of free trade.
3. On average the free-trading poor nations have had higher growth rates than the protectionists; see the work of Anne Krueger. India is one obvious case of a miscalculated protectionism.
4. More often than not, tariffs and trade protection are abused for purposes of corruption and special interests.
5. Reinert himself stresses that the proper growth path requires a later move to free trade. This development is by no means automatic, given that protectionism creates its own special interests.
I’m still not sure why Dani Rodrik thinks that invoking 4 and 5 amounts to playing politics, or guessing at politics, at the expense of substantive economics. I think of it as citing a downward-sloping demand curve in the time-honored tradition of political economy and public choice. Like so much of modern economic thought, it comes from Adam Smith.
No economist says "I favor a philosopher-King and here is what he should do. I can’t tell you what he will do, that is politics." Sub in "protectionist trade policy" for "a philosopher-King" and decide whether this sentence makes any more sense.
Europe at the Crossroads
In face of these issues, it is difficult to understand why half the EU budget is still devoted to subsidizing agriculture…
That is from Europe at the Crossroads, by Guillermo de la Dehesa. Contrary to what the above excerpt may indicate to some, this is not a "Europe-bashing" book. It is perhaps the best short, comprehensive overview of the European economies, their strengths, and their problems. Matt Yglesias makes good points about Scandinavia and competitiveness, but I cannot agree that the main problems of France and Germany are macroeconomic in nature.
Factory tours
Eric Rasmusen recommends factory tours. Along related lines, four of my favorite global sites are Gary, Indiana, the Ruhrgebiet near Duisburg, Germany, the harbor in Rotterdam (yes you can take a tour), and of course the view from the Pulaski Skyway. I call it "industrial beauty." And to think they asked me on New Zealand television whether New Jersey has more than one culture…
Is a bad American image bad for American products?
Some evidence indicates yes:
“It’s not like there’s a massive boycott,” said Miller. “Instead, it seems to be an erosion of support. It’s not falling off the face of the earth, but it is clearly a warning sign for brands.”
NOP found the popularity and consumption of US products had declined for the first time since the research programme was launched in 1998.
Until 2002, NOP found that brands such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were notching up healthy annual growth in terms of use and familiarity in international markets.
However, last year NOP discovered that the growth in popularity of all major consumer brands – including those from Europe and Asia – had stalled. Over the past 12 months the positive trend has gone into reverse, with US products hardest hit.
NOP found that the number of non-American consumers who “trust” Coca-Cola had fallen from 55% to 52%, while McDonald’s rating had slipped from 36% to 33%, Nike’s from 56% to 53% and Microsoft had fallen from 45% to 39%.
When people were asked about brands associated with “honesty”, Coca-Cola was found to have declined from 18% to 15%, McDonald’s from 19% to 14%, Nike from 14% to 11% and Microsoft from 18% to 12%.
The total number of consumers worldwide who “use” US brands was found to have fallen from 30% to 27%, while non-American brands remained stable at 24%.
The NOP annual study covers 30,000 people in markets around the world, and the latest survey was conducted between January and March – a period marked by the growing crisis in Iraq.
It also found the decline in interest and respect for US products was reflected in consumers’ view of American cultural values.
The percentage of consumers that believed honesty was an important attribute of American culture was found to be below 50% in a number of major markets such as France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Turkey.
In Germany, only 31% of consumers believed honesty was an American cultural attribute and in Saudi Arabia just 23% thought so.
While consumers in Muslim countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia were found to be least likely to share American cultural values, NOP also found people in a number of major European markets felt their own values were significantly different to American ones.
Compared with consumers in countries such as Venezuela, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brazil and Australia – over 75% of whom say they share American values – just 65% of UK consumers say they share US values.
If a bottle of coke is branded by the Coke name, we should not be surprised if “Coke” is branded by the international reputation of the United States. Above a certain level of income, at least half of our discretionary consumption is driven by the desire to affiliate and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing.
The psychology of defeat — hope for Iraqi reconstruction?
Here is a money quote from The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Schivelbusch:
“Losers who have completed the first stage of reaction to defeat – surprise, dismay, disbelief, and the search for scapegoats – begin to examine their history for the deeper reasons behind their failure. Forced to admit that they took a wrong turn somewhere, they try to ascertain where they strayed from the true path.” (p.69)
It gets better: “…conquered societies…strive to emulate the victors…” (from the inner flap).
There are some good examples: France after the Franco-Prussian War, Germany and Japan after World War II, parts of Germany after the invasion of Napoleon, or Russia after the 1905 war with Japan. Attaturk and Turkey, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Or Argentina after the Falklands. But I can think of exceptions. Did losing territory cause Peru to mimic Chilean organization? Did it do much for Bolivia? Poland has lost many wars, but fortunately stuck to its course rather than emulating the Russians.
What about contemporary Iraq? Here is a good review of Schivelbusch that raises the right questions. In any case reading his book made me more optimistic, though I would still like a comparative study of the successes and failures. Thorough defeat appears to be one key for later success. Schivelbusch suggests that allowing for a certain feverish insanity — including crazed dancing — after the defeat, might be another.