Roger Cohen's Fantasy of Air Power and Influence

Come on, Roger -- you know better than this.

There was a moment in the Syrian conflict when decisive military aid to the opposition could have changed Assad’s calculation. President Obama mouthed vague promises of arms and allowed Assad to regroup.

First, you're awfully mealy-mouthed in your claim.... "decisive military aid" (whatever that is) could have (but might not have) changed Assad's "calculation" (presumably not to sue for peace, and broker some sort of imagined, long-term peace deal that made nice with some of the dissident groups, disarmed other factions like ISIS and stabilized his country). The conceit here seems to be that there's a magical point that the U.S. could have caused the warring parties to reach where the opposition factions would not have been quite strong enough to topple Assad, but where he would have been sufficiently weakened to be convinced to give them enough of what they wanted to lay down their arms and unite behind his reformed government. It's an interesting fantasy, but not one I think could have been turned into reality. Assad and his military would not want to relinquish power to their blood enemies, nor would those enemies happily again subject themselves to his rule (or that of his hand-picked successor, if part of the fantasy is that he agrees to step down).

Cohen buys very strongly into the notion that, as a bombing campaign appears to have tipped the balance in the Bosnian conflict, it's a tool that can magically change the balance favorably to U.S. interests in pretty much any conflict. Drop enough bombs from a safe altitude and the facts on the ground inexorably change in your favor. Cohen is apparently unaware of the basic facts of the conflict in Bosnia. That was not a conflict that ended based on air strikes alone, no boots on the ground, but was a conflict that involved a significant deployment of ground forces to cement and maintain the peace. The initial troops were NATO forces, and those troops were eventually replaced by E.U. forces. Where does Cohen believe that the troops will come from to secure a post-bombing peace accord in Syria, even if we assume that the fantasy scenario would be achievable? Is there a single western nation that is interested in committing troops to such a venture?

Further, even during the bombing campaign, it was key that Bosnian and Croatian ground forces were able to go on the offensive. While Cohen seems to believe that various Syrian opposition groups might fill that role, he doesn't identify which ones or how we could be sure that the ones who ended up in the leadership of a theoretical alliance of opposition groups would be the factions we would want to prevail. You don't have to look past what is presently happening in Iraq to recognize that some of the groups operating out of Syria are hostile to U.S. interests, nor what happens when you arm a weak group and a stronger, anti-western faction steamrolls them and takes their U.S.-provided arms. The lesson of Bosnia may be that a western air campaign can help achieve balance between two armed factions fighting on the ground below, but it should be recalled that victory still required the two warring sides on the ground to be roughly equivalent in strength.

More than that, we have a fantasy of finding huge numbers of trustworthy, U.S.-friendly factions that the U.S. can arm, that can be trusted to work together against the government, to hold onto those arms, and to ultimately either so threaten the Assad government as to force it to become more inclusive and progressive (and friendly to the west) or to topple it and impose a more progressive, pro-west government. I'm reminded of G.W. Bush's joke, where he pretended to search for Iraqi WMDs in the Oval Office -- where are we supposed to find these factions, and in those numbers?

And that's not where the silliness ends,

Force in the absence of a sustained political and diplomatic strategy leads nowhere. This has been Obama’s failure in Afghanistan, where the United States never invested much capital in a diplomatic solution involving negotiation with the Taliban; and in Iraq, where the president allowed American forces to withdraw without leveraging the massive U.S. investment there into ensuring that the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki reached out to the Sunnis and Kurds.

What does Cohen believe would happen if the Obama Administration openly declared that it was in negotiations with the Taliban, and hoped to integrate the Taliban into the Iraqi government? Was Cohen asleep during the Bowe Bergdahl foofaraw, in which Republicans couldn't shove themselves before cameras quickly enough to declare that the Taliban is a terrorist organization with which we should have no dealings at all? Did he miss the dire warnings that five Talibani prisoners, having been released, were going to pose a grave and continuing threat to the safety of the United States? Did he miss that, behind the release of Bergdahl, it is inescapable that negotiations did involve the Taliban? We should be able to infer from those facts that, at least at some level, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban and that the negotiations likely do involve trying to keep it from attempting to destabilize or overthrow the Afghan government, but that it would be ridiculously stupid for the Obama Administration to publicly announce that any such negotiations are occurring.

As for the president "allowing" U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq, Cohen seems to have scrubbed from his memory banks the fact that George W. Bush negotiated the withdrawal date for combat forces, and that the Iraqi government was not willing to enter into a new status of forces agreement with the immunity clauses required by the United States for a continued military presence. What would Cohen have had Obama do? Disregard the concerns of the military, ignore the wishes of the sovereign government of Iraq, and keep the forces in place? I'm also reminded of Tom Ricks' concession that, although he initially wished that the U.S. could have kept forces in Iraq, in hindsight it's a good thing that the U.S. did not as it would presently be in the position of having to massively reinforce that deployment or withdrawing -- neither of which are good outcomes. Cohen seems to disagree -- so he would have us send tens of thousands of combat troops into Iraq to secure the Sunni areas were ISIS operates, even as Iraq's own army chooses to turn and run?

The past months have constituted a low point in American foreign policy: the rampage by the Sunni fanatics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria through wide swathes of Iraq; President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and successful troublemaking in eastern Ukraine; Syria’s descent into ever further horror; China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea; the failure of U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian talks.

Sure, but it's a bit much to imagine that the president could have done much on any of those fronts. The problems in Iraq are borne of the final status of forces agreement, negotiated by G.W. Bush, and the poor governance of the Shiite leadership of Iraq, the leadership of a government that formed and came to power under G.W. Bush. It was entirely predictable that Maliki's actions would eventually create a crisis -- it was much less a question of "if" than "when". As for Putin's actions in Crimea, what use of forced does Cohen imagine would have deterred him? The same sort of chest-thumping machismo that didn't deter Putin from taking military action in Georgia when G.W. Bush was President? Does Cohen believe that the U.S. can credibly threaten China with military reprisals? Does Cohen believe that the "Israeli-Palestinian talks" had any chance of success under Prime Minister Netanyahu, or that there was some magical reason to believe that this was the one time that doing the same thing over and over again would achieve a different outcome? And if it's a show of military force that makes the difference, how did G.W. Bush's "roadmap" work out, back when he was eagerly starting wars in the Middle East?

Even leaving aside the fact that Cohen's imagined outcome of a bombing campaign is fantastical, the notion that all of these events can be pinned on Obama because he didn't bomb Syria is absurd. One could make a similar list of bad events under G.W. Bush -- North Korea and Pakistan going nuclear, the abject failure of his Israel-Palestine peace initiative, the catastrophic failure of his policies in Libya, China's actions in the South China Sea to assert sovereignty over those waters (no, they're not new), Putin carving territories out of Georgia.... Should we mention the incompetence that led Iraq into civil war, or the failure to stabilize Afghanistan? The list goes on.

Fundamentally, Cohen seems to have lost track both of history and of the limits of what happens when you apply force (particularly when you do so in a half-hearted manner, such as "Let's do airstrikes and see what happens, but make abundantly clear we're never going to have boots on the ground") in parts of the world -- in this case, parts of the world that are not exactly sympathetic to U.S. foreign policy interests. He falls into a long line of armchair commentators who seem to believe that people on the ground don't mind being bombed, as long as those bombs are delivered by the U.S. Air Force or NATO. Were he to pay better attention to his history, it's difficult to believe that he would have written that column.

The Not-So-Cheap, but Colorful, iPhone

With Apple releasing a "cheap" iPhone that's $100 less expensive than its flagship model, and with the price gap being even smaller in China, the Wall Street Journal opines that the new iPhone may not be cheap enough for China.

With the cheaper phone, Apple will no doubt gain sales and market share. But it will still fail to reach the majority of city dwellers, according to a projection from the Wall Street Journal based on income distribution data from research firm CEIC Data.

The projection, developed in consultation with analysts, assumes that a working, urban family would be willing to spend, at most, half of its total monthly income on a single smartphone. Working on that assumption, around 260 million Chinese urban residents could potentially be willing to buy the iPhone 5c. That means cheaper iPhone effectively doubles Apple’s addressable market from the 125 million who would be willing to shell out for the more expensive handset.

My guess? Apple will sell iPhone 5c's as fast as it can make them, rendering moot the idea that it would sell more at a lower price. You can only sell your product as fast as you can make it. The new design is visually striking, and I think that's about more than just giving people a variety of colors to choose from. I think Apple designed the 5c with the goal of letting its customers in nations like China telegraph to their peers, "I can afford an iPhone." Given how status-conscious and luxury brand-focused Chinese consumers are reported to be, that's no small consideration.

It also means that an Apple phone is still too pricey to appeal to roughly 430 million people, or 62% of the country’s urban population.

So... only 263 million prospective customers, who happen to be the more affluent members of Chinese society. Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones last quarter, worldwide.

I appreciate the article's assertion that most Chinese consumers are looking for a phone that costs less than half of the price of a new iPhone, with many wanting to pay less than a quarter. But that's not a market that Apple is presently willing to serve, nor would it make sense for Apple to abandon its traditional business model and to start producing iPhones that could be sold at that price level. Will that give Android an advantage among bargain hunters? Yes, as will the array of larger-screened Android phones. But you don't make profits by selling low-quality merchandise at razor-thin margins, which is why Apple and Samsung are the only mobile phone manufacturers who are presently earning a significant profit from phone sales.

Smartphones will eventually become commoditized, a process that is accelerating with the release of attractive Android phones from several of Samsung's competitors. Apple won't be able to sustain its margins forever, although it is positioned to be the last man standing. The trick then becomes, how to leverage your platform into continued, significant profits. Apple has a number of advantages in that respect, including the fact that it has been careful to maintain backward compatibility in its devices. With most iPhones running the latest version of iOS, and with every iPhone built to Apple's standards, third party manufacturers can develop products and services that connect with the iPhone much more easily than they can with Android devices. It can only help Apple if, while Android remains the operating system of choice for bargain hunters, it holds its position as a phone of choice for affluent consumers around the world.

Even as the WSJ article suggests that Apple needs to make cheaper phones, it acknowledges the problem with that position:

Ma Tao, who owns a shop on the second-story of the electronics mall, echoed concerns that have already been voiced by some analysts: that the new phone would lead to a short-term spike in sales, but that it would erode Apple’s reputation as a maker of luxury high-end phones in the long run.

Meanwhile, the phone vendor they interviewed suggests that Samsung sales in China will suffer as customers opt instead for a considerably cheaper, Chinese "equivalent". It may turn out that Chinese consumers opt for the flagship iPhone, in silver, graphite or tacky gold, and those products are also designed to telegraph, "This is an iPhone". I'm taking a "wait and see" position on whether keeping the price "that close" will turn out to be a mistake, but I'm suspecting that for now it's a good move to maintain luxury pricing and to appeal to brand-conscious Chinese consumers, giving them a discount but also a brightly colored excuse to argue, "I picked this one because it's my favorite color, not because I wanted to save money".

I think that the article glosses over one of Apple's significant problems in the Chinese market - the size of its displays. The concept of a phone that you can operate with one hand is great, and Apple should continue to offer the standard sized iPhone. But if you've ever squinted at a small screen, consider what it would by like to read Chinese or Thai characters on an iPhone screen, or to enter text in an Asian script. Then consider the population that wants a bigger screen because it's better for videos and games. Or because they only want one device, and are attracted to the phablet.

If I were Apple... and I admit an uncanny knack for being incorrect in my Apple-related predictions... I would be thinking about releasing a larger-format iPhone no later than a year from now, and ideally in the spring.

Don't Mess With Mom

'Cuz that's when the knives come out.

Guangdong Propaganda Department: Do not reprint, report, or comment on the incident of a ten-year-old girl in Hunan challenging the head of the Administration for Industry and Commerce to a fight.

The Top Issues That Romney Should (But Won't) Address

If Mitt Romney wants to move the campaign from the non-serious to the serious, to move from fabricated attacks to substantive discussion, ere are some issues I would like to see him address:

1. Climate Change: Let's skip past the B.S. and acknowledge the facts. The world is getting hotter and all of the world's nations are going to be affected, some far more seriously than others. What policy should the U.S. take in response to climate change, and if you propose anything but inaction how will you lead the world on the issue?

2. Trade Deficits: If our nation runs a trade deficit, that deficit must be "paid for" with some combination of government debt or private debt. Do you believe that foreign nations will, in effect, subsidize our consumers forever, or do you believe that the trade deficit matters and should be reduced? If you want to reduce trade deficits, what steps will you take to bring about a reduction? If not, how do you propose that our nation's position in the global marketplace can be sustained over the long-term?

3. Terrorism: Since George W. Bush left office, the approach to the "war on terror" has shifted from starting large, traditional wars in nation states to launching small commando raids and drone strikes around the world. While a good case can be made that the new approach is the better one for combating groups planning terror attacks against the U.S., its interests and allies, the lack of Congressional oversight over the choice of targets and use of drones creates serious questions about the proper scope of executive power, while also raising serious resentment against the U.S. in areas where drone strikes are occurring. What will you do to address those concerns, and what will be your policy on the selection of targets (including U.S. citizens) and whether and when to order commando raids or drone strikes on selected targets?

4. Military Spending: Do you believe that there is any waste, fat or excess in the U.S. military and defense budgets? If not, please make the economic case for our present weapons systems, actual and under development, vast network of military bases, and other expenditures that come under frequent attack, even from within your party? If so, what programs would you modify or cut? What military expenditures do you deem the most crucial to the nation's interest, and which do you deem to be the least? How would you search for efficiencies and, once identified, how would you implement more efficient practices or policies? How will your policies, one way or the other, affect military spending in present and future budgets? How will they affect national defense, as well as overseas military commitments and activities? Are there any world conflicts in which you would increase or decrease a U.S. military role and presence and, if so, which ones, for what purpose, and at what cost?

5. Russia and Eastern Europe: What are your policies on our relations with Russia and Eastern Europe. Over the course of your campaign you have proposed a number of policies that would antagonize Russia, and have criticized Obama Administration policies on U.S.-Russian relations that appear to have significantly improved our nation's relations with Russia. What will be your approach to Russia, issue-by-issue, and what impact do you expect those policies to have on U.S.-Russian relations or Russian cooperation with U.S. political, military and economic goals? For example, allowing former Soviet Bloc nations to join NATO, whether or not such a move might be justified for other reasons, or implementing ballistic missile defense technologies on Russian's border, could cause Russia to cease its cooperation with and facilitation of U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan, to cooperate with sanctions against nations like Iran, or otherwise act in a manner contrary to U.S. goals and interests. What balances will you draw, and why do you believe they will work?

6. Banking Regulation: Even after the near-collapse of the financial industry and the government bailouts of banks, some of the nation's (and world's) largest financial institutions have continued to engage in acts that range from incompetent to reckless to criminal. What regulations would you support to prevent a recurrence of a financial industry collapse? How can you guarantee that the U.S. taxpayer will never again be asked to bail out bankers - let alone before every penny of shareholder and bondholder money has been extracted to try to solve the bank's problem without moral hazard?

7. Health Care: If you truly are of the position that the Affordable Care Act is an atrocity that must be repealed, despite its remarkable similarity to the plan you signed into law as governor of Massachusetts, exactly what do you propose to implement in its place? One would expect a business leader to look at other companies and identify possible ways to increase efficiency or save costs - would you look to other approaches to health insurance in the industrialized world, and bring their best elements to the U.S.? If so, which ones? If not, why not?

   What concrete proposals can you share to address healthcare costs and healthcare inflation? Should the government have a policy on end of life care and, if so, what should that policy be? If not, how do you propose to get health care costs in check without taking a position on the leading contributor to that cost?

8. Employment and Wages: Do you believe that a strong middle class is important to American Society? Are you concerned that middle class wages are stagnant, middle class jobs are disappearing, and middle class workers are feeling enormous financial pressure? If so, what policies do you propose that will help improve the financial well-being of the middle class and expand the pool of middle class jobs? If not, why not?

9. National Debt: As a businessman, you did not shy away from debt. Quite the opposite, one of your tactics was to acquire companies with low debt and then significantly increase their debt load. If you would add debt to a company to invest in infrastructure or extract profits for your investors, aren't you confirming that the problem is not the debt itself but the cost of that money? As head of a private equity firm, if you acquired a business enterprise is able to borrow at extremely low rates, rates that with inflation amount to a break-even or possibly even a negative interest rate, what would you do? Would you apply different principles as President, refusing to borrow what amounts to "free money" in a time of crisis to invest in the nation's infrastructure at a time when such an investment could significantly boost employment and future competitiveness? If so, why?

10. Deficit Spending: You have argued against deficit spending, even in a time of severe economic crisis, but you have not proposed a credible plan for balancing the budget. You have instead endorsed a budget that cuts unspecified domestic spending, cuts taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, and as a result increases the budget. If you in fact are concerned about deficit spending, exactly what cuts will you made to reduce domestic spending? Will you make any cuts to military spending and if so, exactly what will you cut? If it is necessary to raise taxes to balance the budget, what taxes will you raise and by what amounts?

11. Infrastructure Improvement: On a related note, our nation has a lot of looming problems - decaying roads, bridges and water distribution systems, an archaic power grid, and the like. We are even lagging other nations in telecommunications and high speed Internet services. What policies will you enact to address those issues? How much money will you allocate to those issues and, if none, how would you justify a continued neglect of infrastructure for an additional four to eight years under your leadership?

12. Iran and North Korea: As you know, our nation and our allies have employed sanctions against "rogue regimes" for many decades. Until a few years ago, proponents of sanctions could point to Libya as "the exception that proves the rule," with Gadhafi's abandonment of certain weapons programs offered as proof that sanctions and international isolation can work. If the goal is merely to slow the development of weapons programs sanctions may have an impact, but there's no evidence that sanctions will stop the development of such programs.

    You have expressed that it is important to address North Korea's military posturing and nuclear arsenal, as well as the possibility that Iran might develop nuclear weapons, but to achieve those goals you focus on new, stronger sanctions. Exactly what new sanctions do you propose, and what evidence can you offer that they will work? What will be the measure of success or failure for your sanctions, and what additional steps will you take if your sanctions fail? Under what circumstances would you find that war with Iran or North Korea was in the best interest of the United States and, for each nation, describe what you believe the war would look like, the anticipated cost of the war, both economic and human, and your plan for the post-war period.

13. Campaign Finance Reform and Transparency: Do you believe that it is important to reduce the influence of wealthy corporations and individuals on elections, or at least to slow or stop the trend by which election costs are skyrocketing and politicians start fundraising for the next election the day after they win the current election? If so, what concrete measures do you support to address the issues of campaign funding and donor transparency? If not, why not?

14. The Middle East: What policies do you favor to produce politically stable, politically friendly governments in the Middle East, and how will those policies be implemented by your administration?

15. China: You have expressed that China doesn't play fair in the global marketplace. At the same time, China has emerged as a very important economic partner, providing labor for many U.S. and international corporations while also investing heavily in U.S. Treasury Bonds. What are the exact issues you hope to resolve between the U.S. and China, what steps will you take to address those issues, what will you do when China inevitably pushes back, and what do you believe will be the consequences of your policies and action on relations and trade between the U.S. and China?

16. Immigration: Unlike most Americans, your family has directly benefited from the immigration policies of one of our neighbors, Mexico, and your grandparents were able to take up residence in Mexico in response to what they perceived as religious persecution in the United States. As a business leader you are familiar with companies that bring workers into the U.S. on various types of employment visas. As a homeowner, you have used immigrant labor to maintain the grounds of your home. How have your experiences influenced your perspective on immigration? What is your preferred immigration policy for the United States, including for family reunification, asylum, for skilled workers, for unskilled workers, and for international students and scholars?

17. Pakistan and Afghanistan: What are your proposals for creating and sustaining stable regimes in Pakistan and Afghanistan that, even if not friendly to the U.S., are at least not unfriendly and are unwilling to host groups that are hostile to U.S. interests? What will you do to address the possibility that Pakistan might export nuclear technology, or that a collapse of its government might cause nuclear weapons to fall into unfriendly hands?

18. Poverty: Speaking in broad terms, we have two populations of people in poverty. The first group will emerge from poverty over time. The second group will not, and is at risk of becoming part of a generational cycle of poverty. What help can and should the government offer to each group? How can we help ensure that people in the first group do successfully emerge from poverty, rather than potentially falling into the second group? What policies do you propose that will help us break the cycle of poverty, first by helping impoverished adults find their way into jobs and careers, and second to minimize the risk that their children will become part of a cycle of poverty?

19. Intellectual Property: As you know, intellectual property law is very important to inventors and businesses. If you cannot protect your inventions and your creativity you operated under a severely reduced incentive, perhaps even a disincentive, to make serious investments of time and money in new technology and new ideas. At the same time we have created a byzantine system of patents that makes it virtually impossible to produce a new technology that doesn't violate somebody's patent, and literally impossible for a company to be certain that its new invention is not going to be subject to a claim that it violates a competitor's patent, or one held by a "patent troll". We have allowed copyrights to be extended well beyond the life of the creator, stifling derivative works even long after the creator's death.

    What policies do you propose to protect inventors on both sides of the equation - those whose inventions merit protection, and those who become the targets of demands or litigation despite their having no knowledge or awareness of the patent they have allegedly infringed and having made a good faith effort to respect the intellectual property rights of others? How will you balance those interests? What measures do you propose to protect companies from international or domestic piracy, and how will you balance the rights of intellectual property owners against the privacy rights of consumers, their right to use or control their own legitimately purchased or licensed products, and their legitimate fair use of copyrighted material? Would you support or oppose a new SOPA/PIPA-type law? If the former, under what terms? If the latter, on what basis, and would you veto any such law that came across your desk?

20. Federal Criminal Law: Do you agree that federal criminal laws extend too far into the realm of state and local concerns, and criminalize a lot of conduct that should at most be the subject of a civil legal action? If so, please share some examples of criminal laws that you believe represent federal government overreach, and what steps you will take to roll back or at least prevent additional overreach.

21. The Economy: We have been experiencing slow economic growth and slow job growth for far too long. As you know, the President's role in both boosting the economy and affecting job growth are overrated, but the President is in a position to advocate for economic policies and to influence the decisions made by the Federal Reserve. Assuming that the sluggish recovery continues, what policies do you propose to speed up the recovery and why do you believe they will be effective? If the recovery slows or stops, or we fall back into recession, what policies do you propose to respond to those problems and why do you believe they will be effective? If another catastrophe occurs, be it an economic bubble, a collapse of the Euro, or some other factor or catastrophe we may not have even considered, what measures will you take to insulate the U.S. economy from catastrophe and why do you believe those measures will be effective? What steps, if any, would you take to help stabilize the economic situation in Europe, or an economic problem that develops elsewhere in the world that might affect the U.S. economy? As you know, there was ample warning of both the Internet bubble and the housing bubble, yet concerns were dismissed. What steps will you take to identify growing problems, including economic bubbles, and how will you react if a potential problem is identified?

22. Subsidies: When, if ever, should the government subsidize private enterprise? If you support subsidies, when should subsidies be given? What form should they take - cash grants, conditional loans, loan guarantees, tax credits, tax exemptions, etc. - and under what circumstances? How should the amounts of any subsidies be determined? What form or forms of government subsidy should never be extended to private enterprise, and why?

Note, I'm not offering these as questions for a debate between the candidates - as questions that can be avoided or evaded. If I want to see somebody talk around the issues, I can turn on the television and listen to the pablum that the mainstream media deems to be sufficient - assuming I'm lucky enough that somebody in the mainstream media is even asking about the big issues - or look at the candidates' websites. I would like to hear substantive commentary on these issues.

Please note also, by implication these are issues that have not been adequately addressed by the Obama Administration. In some cases, through its action or inaction, we know where the Obama Administration stands, and where its rhetoric departs from its actions. I would welcome the Obama Administration to specifically address these issues, the extent to which its present policies have failed, and its plans to resolve any shortcomings or improve how it handles these issues in the future.

All You Need to be Rich....

Is to be poor. A bit simplistic, perhaps?

Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills....

Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”

That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.

Wouldn't it be interesting if poor nations, instead of being poor, were... rich? And yet for some reason they're not.

It's pretty amazing to me that Friedman can hear somebody explain that countries like "Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part... because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them", and have that be his takeaway. If you look at nations hit by the resource curse, how often do you find a nation where everybody has a pretty good standard of living? How often do you find, on the other hand, a country with weak institutions of government, kleptocratic leadership, and a population that for the most part lives in conditions somewhere between dismal and squalid?

As is his wont, Friedman also disregards the inequality of opportunity in nations like India and China, the extent to which large numbers of people in those countries have been treated, in effect, as natural resources - cheap labor for international companies. He seems to have retreated into his fantasy world in which any population, no matter how poorly governed, impoverished, downtrodden and oppressed, could transform itself into another Singapore within the space of a few years.

What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.

Say what? Let's turn to the list of nations Friedman singles out as being resource-rich but faring badly on PISA: Qatar, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria. Exactly when was it that those nations had the emphasis on education - the "instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills" - that Friedman would have us believe that they "lost" when they discovered their natural resources? Perhaps this reflects the fantasy thinking that led Friedman to believe that Iraq could be turned into a progressive democracy within a few years of a military invasion - the extent to which a nation's culture, history, governance, and the population's present education level factor into its chances of flourishing and producing a population of highly educated, innovative citizens.

The Impact of Economic Opportunity on Behavior

Back when I first started practicing small town law, I represented a significant number of criminal defendants. From the moment I stepped into District Court for the criminal docket, it was an education in a subculture with which I had little prior background. You would see defendants in custody sitting in the jury box as they awaited arraignment, fresh from a night in jail, most yucking it up like they were at summer camp. The smell of a crowded courtroom was usually an unpleasant mixture of body odor, alcohol (from sweat and boozy breath) and cigarettes. No small number of the defendants present had been there before, and with most you had a strong sense that they would be back.

For most of us, the idea of getting through six months or a year without committing a criminal act, let alone being caught and prosecuted, doesn't seem like that big of a deal. For the District Court regulars, it's a real challenge. I represented a number of defendants who couldn't even make it from the day they entered their plea bargains to the date of their sentencings without getting arrested. While investigating cases and interviewing witnesses, I was introduced to households in which a five minute visit would require a shower and a change of clothes - usually due to their being thick with cooking grease, overwhelming 'pet odor' or decaying filth, but other not-so-pleasant odors could enter the mix. At court hearings, I would at times have to remind clients that jewelry that included drug symbols or implied gang activity had best not be worn.

In reading the pre sentence reports of some of these offenders, it was no mystery as to why many of them weren't faring well. Actually, sometimes it was a testament to human resilience - how would you hold up, for example, if your childhood involved witnessing the murders of both of your parents in separate incidents? Odds are the experiences wouldn't inspire you to become Batman.

Sometimes, when working with the defendant, I would meet a spouse who you would think would have a strong civilizing effect on the offender, and you could see that spouse's influence on the children. But it was sometimes quite clear what would happen to the spouse and children if they remained within the defendant's family unit. Odds are, a cycle would continue. And yes, you would see multi-generational patterns.

Within the community, you would find people working hard to live law-abiding, peaceful lives. People trying to get and hold jobs. People who did hold steady jobs. People whose homes were, by any standard, immaculate and well-ordered. Yet their neighbors couldn't hold it together, and the general state of the neighborhood had a spillover effect. Valuables were subject to being stolen, the streets could be unsafe, kids were in danger of being recruited into gangs or as street dealers. And for those who came from the most troubled families, the family itself was akin to a bucket of crabs - try to climb out, and one of your kin will latch onto you and try to pull you back into the bucket.

One thing that was perfectly clear is that there was a multi-generational cycle in effect, with factors including mental illness, substance abuse, and childhood trauma repeating themselves through parents, children, and grandchildren. Another thing that was perfectly clear is that the families and communities where you would see that cycle were economically depressed. There were few job opportunities for young people, many of the adults were unemployed, and those who worked were for the most part making modest wages, near minimum wage.

Another thing that was perfectly clear was that there were no easy answers to breaking the cycle. I recall one particularly odious, abusive offender, about to go to prison, subtly threatening his wife (the victim of his crime of felonious assault) with what he might do if she divorced him. She was there, showing support, along with their son who looked to be about eight years old. You knew that she, and more so their child, would have little chance of escaping the cycle if she stayed with him.

David Brooks believes that our ability to observe this cycle is a relatively new thing,

Over the past 25 years, though, a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.

The funny thing is, Brooks seems to view that as a retort to the people who have been criticizing his report on Charles Murray's new book. To the contrary, people seem to be criticizing Brooks for imagining that we're seeing a mysterious transformation of human nature that is leading to economic decline, as opposed to economic decline that leads to entirely predictable patterns of behavior. Brooks' critics are acutely aware of what happens if you destroy the economic foundation of a population. Resorting to the same quote of Paul Krugman that I used yesterday in response to Ross Douthat,

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, [sociologist William Julius] Wilson published 'When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,' in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

People who are concerned with wage stagnation and loss earning potential at the lower end of the labor market - an effect that has crept up into the middle class - are acutely aware of how you can destroy a community and create a set of perverse influences and incentives that create a poverty trap. And experience has taught us that it's much better to keep people out of that cycle than to try to break the cycle. Fifty years of experience demonstrate quite clearly that we're absolutely terrible at finding ways to break that cycle.

Brooks continues,

Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values.

This is true to a degree. Most of the people in what Brooks calls "disorganized neighborhoods" - note how he uses every euphemism he can find to avoid references to the economics of the people and communities he's discussing - have values and goals that are not dissimilar to those in more affluent communities. But they have social deficits. Many lack job skills, not just in terms of marketable skills desired by employers, but the basic sense of what an employer expects and how to behave in a workplace.

I recall one woman who I would see every few months. She always had a job - always a different job. Interpersonally she was engaging and pleasant. But she had a problem taking direction from supervisors, and was reaching an age when a lot of her supervisors were younger than her. These are the people who might be helped by basic training in how to behave during an interview, how to behave on the job, and sometimes even such mundane details as why you need to show up to work on time and why your boss thinks it's a big deal when you blow off a day's work because you have a really bad hangover.

Brooks talks of "social capital" while avoiding the question of how other types of capital, specifically money, factor into the "enactment" of values. When you have enough money to live in a safe neighborhood with decent schools, and where you and your children are exposed to a peer group that has internalized the standards of behavior that are expected in school and in the workplace, gaining that "social capital" can be effortless. When you live in a society, as we do, where about 80% of jobs are filled through personal connections, having people in your life who can make those connections for you is a big deal.

Brooks asserts,

Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.

Really? My stepfather came from a working class family in the North of England. His grammar school graduating class included about twenty students, the vast majority of his classmates having dropped out along the way. My high school was both a neighborhood school for a working class area of my city and an academic magnet school. I was surprised by how how small my graduating class turned out to be, given the population of the school. Yet I can't say that my stepfather, who has a laundry list of degrees and certifications including a Ph.D. in physics, or I (only one post-graduate degree, alas) are "much worse off" for our experiences. We both had the opportunity to attend good schools, and the British government at the time made my stepfather's college education virtually tuition free. My paternal grandfather went to night school but was not able to finish. My father grew up with the expectation that he would attend and graduate from college. So did I. And you know what? That's a much bigger deal than the drop-out rates in our respective high schools.

What does differentiate [African American men who complete college], the study suggests, is a complex stew of mostly external factors that appeared to give them a sense that college was not only possible but expected, and engaged them academically and otherwise in their schools and colleges. Among those influences: involved parents with high expectations for them; at least one K-12 teacher who took a personal interest in their academic and personal future; adequate financial support to pay for college; and a transition to college in which high expectations were set for them as much if not more by influential black male juniors and seniors at their institutions as by formal programs designed to smooth their way.

So while Murray writes one book suggesting that underachievement by African Americans is dictated by genetics, and another suggesting that underachievement by lower-SES white Americans is driven by values, there in fact appears to be a significant commonality - you know, as if we're all human beings under our skin, behaving as humans do. As for the notion that wealth is somehow earned through good genes and good upbringing, a somewhat controversial study found an interesting commonality between African American students and legacy students enrolled at Duke University - legacy students underperform those admitted through regular channels and have a pattern of switching to softer majors. And yet why am I thinking that a typical legacy student has a significant advantage over a similarly situated African American graduate, or for that matter even an outstanding non-legacy graduate, despite a weak academic performance? If underperforming legacy students like Dan Quayle and George W. Bush hadn't been from rich, powerful families, do you think we would have heard of them? Oh, that's right, it's all about their good values - as demonstrated in G.W.'s case by indifference to academics, years of drunken self-indulgence, DUI's and the like.

Brooks also informs us of "attachment theory", pursuant to which "children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives", a fact that Brooks appears to believe is a revelation but is something you might otherwise learn in psychology 101. Brooks also asserts that "people raised in disrupted circumstances find it harder to control their impulses throughout their lives", something you would think he would understand to undermine his thesis that the tail wags the dog. Does he imagine that families within the bottom thirty percent of wage earners have been moving into neighborhoods in which their children are raised in "disrupted circumstances" because they like run down communities and underfunded schools? Or is that a consequence of the significant reductions in the number of middle class jobs available to workers with fewer job skills, and the overall reduction of wages for most jobs that remain available?

Brooks, like Murray, fixates on an artificial start date as the benchmark for middle class values, an era of cheap higher education, significant economic growth, strong labor organization, and of middle class blue collar jobs that carried good benefits. Brooks could look to many centuries of history preceding that point in time to get an understanding of how an impoverished underclass behaves, and could easily find arguments similar to his own about how it's all a matter of values. Less sympathetic, as in the past it seems people were more willing to attribute bad values to the poor rather than softening things up with terms like "social capital", but there for him to read.

Instead, Brooks focuses on what, by historical standards, is a snapshot. The rise of a significant middle class. Apparently the values that allow for a robust middle class were lying dormant for centuries until they were finally set free in the mid-20th century, only to immediately being to fold in on themselves. And it is those values that led to economic growth, and the growth of job opportunities and wages at the bottom end of the labor pool, the economic realities of the time being irrelevant.

After gently faulting Murray for failing to address "social capital" in his book, Brooks sneers,

Meanwhile, his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism: It’s all the fault of lost jobs. People who talk about behavior are blaming the victim. Anybody who talks about social norms is really saying that the poor are lazy.

That is apparently aimed at Paul Krugman, and particularly the quote I shared above:

Liberal economists haven’t silenced conservatives, but they have completely eclipsed liberal sociologists and liberal psychologists.

If Brooks believes his comment is a fair representation of the position of liberal economists, it can only be ascribed to weak analytical skills. Theirs is not an argument of "It's either economics or values," it's an observation that when you undermine the economic stability of families and communities, you undermine the rewards and incentives that support stronger families and the pursuit of higher education, and increase a significant amount of stress and trauma into families, while undermining their ability to obtain the tools necessary to rise, through such factors as economic distress, economically depressed neighborhoods and weaker schools.

Even noneconomist commentators reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.

I don't know who Brooks is speaking of here, but it's safe to say that it's not the most appropriate target for that criticism - people on the political right who say things like, "How can that family be poor when they have a car, a television, a cellular phone and a microwave oven?"

Brooks declares,

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.

In 1937, George Orwell described the British working class,

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that 'they' would never allow it. Who were 'they'? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently 'they' were omnipotent.

A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere.

And oh, the "disorderliness" of the community,

There is always something to be done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn round. No sooner have you washed one child's face than another's is dirty; before you have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due to be cooked. I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To begin with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting you in the face every time you move and the children as thick underfoot as toadstools!

Orwell noted the impact of high unemployment on people who could not find work,

But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven't met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don't they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude--and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home--you also need peace of mind. You can't settle to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

And what of workers whose job skills had become obsolete?

Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else. How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and everybody knows it. You can't go on looking for work every day for seven years.

And the influence of consumerism and vice?

Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot offish-and-chips. Milk costs threepence a pint and even 'mild' beer costs fourpence, but aspirins are seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet. And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope ('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake.

You would think that Britain was a hopeless case, and might have imagined that WWII would seal its fate. Oh yes, WWII was the beginning of the end for Great Britain as a world power, but despite the "disorderly", traumatized working class communities, and their emphasis on bling over education, their economic experience mirrored our own, with the rise of a significant middle class including solidly middle class blue collar jobs. Astonishing how similar the behaviors of the working poor of the 1930's are to the behaviors Brooks sees as the cause of the plight of the present working poor - and funny how those values shifted and changed based on wages and job opportunities.

Brooks, from his privileged childhood and exceptionally privileged adulthood, cannot understand why working class kids might drop out of high school. Everything old is new again. Back to Orwell,

To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.

Brooks no doubt grew up in a household like mine - not in the sense of SES, as I expect his family was exponentially more wealthy than mine, but in the sense of there being a constant expectation that he would attend and complete college. How can somebody not see the value of high school, the most basic academic qualification for entry into the job market? How can somebody not want to at least create a foundation for college, even if they defer enrollment? It has to be a matter of values, not economic, right? But funny how the values that led the sons of coal miners to drop out of school were transformed along with the British economy moving into the 1960's, the starting point for the Brooks/Murray model of middle class values.

The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them.

What jobs does Brooks imagine himself to be describing? The jobs held by the legions of Foxconn workers who sit in cubicles for long hours, assembling electronic goods for more affluent and mostly western buyers, before retiring to company dormitories for their night's sleep? The issue isn't that we don't have workers capable of performing that type of task, the problem (if you can call it that) is that the workers of our nation have enough better alternatives that you could not maintain a sufficiently large, stable workforce to keep one of Foxconn's gargantuan company towns in operation. Yes, it would take a considerable amount of time to train a staff of supervisory employees sufficient to oversee such an operation, but that's because no such operations exist in this country. Does Brooks think that the work culture of China's massive manufacturing plants represents a value set our nation needs? Their lives are certainly structured - maybe that's enough for Brooks.

Still convinced that the tail wags the dog, Brooks sees a need "to rebuild orderly communities". Without explaining what policies he in fact endorses, he favors government intervention:

Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.

But what has actually changed in the "disorderly communities" that Brooks describes, as compared to those that predated the 1960's? Brooks points to out-of-wedlock childbirth, but makes no mention of declining divorce rates or the fact that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was extraordinarily high in the 1950's. Is he arguing for more shotgun weddings, even if they end in divorce? For imposing significant social pressure on young women not to carry their babies to term, or to give their babies up for adoption?

Brooks argues that marriage rates were high during the period between 1912 and 1962, but makes no explanation for why it took fifty years for "middle class values" to emerge and supposedly transform the economy or why, in his mind, those values proved to be so fragile. He argues, "Community groups connected people across class", which I guess means that people used to attend church more regularly. But seriously, marriage rates, in-wedlock births and "community groups" are the only differences he sees between orderly and disorderly communities? With "orderly communities" peaking in the 1960's, little things like this or this get flushed down the memory hole? Yeah, we were all "one big happy".

Brooks closes by arguing, "The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975." But David Frum (a guy Brooks perhaps believes is a liberal economist) reminded us know who actually stopped thinking in 1975, perhaps a bit earier:

In the first long quoted passage from Coming Apart, I asterisked one of Murray's statistical claims, a claim stating that wages have stagnated for the bottom 50% of the white work force. That claim is true if you draw your line, as Murray does, beginning in 1960. But put your thumb on the left side of the chart, and start drawing the line beginning in 1970. Then you notice that median wages have stagnated for the whole bottom 75%—and that the median wage only begins to show significant improvement over time when you look at the top 5%.

So again, it's values? And somehow the deteriorating values and "disorderly communities" of the bottom 30% of wage earners have caused wages to stagnate or drop for a full 75% of wage earners over a forty year period? Amazing.

Update: Taking issue with Brooks' suggestion that a key issue in the plight of the working poor is their high school graduation rate, Lawrence Mishel responds,

Brooks’ assumption, I guess, is that many workers have low wages because they never completed high school. He’s not alone in thinking that there are a lot of high school dropouts, but this is definitely not true. As the graph shows, the share of the workforce (ages 18-64) who have neither a high school or further degree (including a GED) has dropped tremendously in the last four decades, from 28.5 percent in 1973 to just 8.4 percent in 2011, a trend true among men as well as women.

Why Won't Pete Hoekstra Stand Behind His Words

When you choose to run an ad during the Superbowl attempting to blame a single U.S. Senator for the fact that we have a budget deficit, purport that it's because of the deficit that jobs are outsourced to China, you feature a Chinese woman with a stereotypical accent addressing the Senator with a childish distortion of her name, and "thanking" the Senator for sending jobs to China.... You have chosen to run an ad that is factually challenged, to say the least, ethnically insensitive, and evocative of the period in which outsourcing to Asia fueled sentiments that contributed to a particularly sorry episode of anti-Asian violence in your state. That's gutsy, right? Going "all in". Who cares about the facts, as long as you win, right?

But Pete Hoekstra, the politician who ran that ad as part of his primary campaign to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabenow, is backing away from it. At first, Pete seemed proud of his ad:

"We knew we were taking an aggressive approach on this, but we're in a time when people are fed up with the spending and we wanted to capture that frustration," Hoekstra said. "It hits Debbie smack-dab between the eyes on the area where she is most vulnerable."

After all, what politician isn't vulnerable to, you know, outright lies.

Hoekstra is now switching to a different ad that doesn't include his prevarications about China. Although Hoekstra won't admit it, it's implicit in his act of pulling the ad that he believes his campaign will be damaged if he continues to run it. Mark Brewer, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, commented,

"Hoekstra is replacing this ad because he knows it is indefensible and untrue.... Hoekstra is trying to blame others for the country's debt, but even people in his own party are pointing out that he voted for the Wall Street bailout, giveaways to special interests and trillions more in deficit spending.

Hoekstra's opponent for the nomination, Clark Durant, has also criticized the ad,

"Congressman Pete Hoekstra claims to know a lot about China," the announcer says. "Does he know the Chinese word for hypocrisy?" Chinese characters come up on the screen, captioned "Hypocrisy."

"Hoekstra attacks Debbie Stabenow for excessive spending, but like Stabenow, Hoekstra voted to increase the debt ceiling and spending by trillions of dollars," the announcer says with a split screen of Stabenow and Hoekstra. "And Hoekstra voted for the Wall Street bailout."

It's more fair to say that spending and the deficit are a bipartisan issue, although it should be pointed out that the present deficit is largely a creature of George W. Bush's spendthrift policies. Clark apparently doesn't understand the difference between a trade deficit and a budget deficit or the impact of austerity measures during a recession. He apparently also wants us to believe thad had he served in Congress instead of Hoekstra he would have opposed Bush's spending policies. Yeah, right.

Come on, Pete - You went all in with your ad, so why don't you get right out there and defend it? Pulling the ad, switching the URL and trying to pretend that nothing happened?

Interestingly, the most noteworthy people who are actually responsible for outsourcing jobs from Michigan to nations such as China and India are Republican Party insiders. Maybe for his next ad Hoekstra can show Dick DeVos standing in front of a Chinese factory producing goods for Alticor / Amway, whining, "Debbie Stabenow made us open this factory. She made us. Her Svengali-like powers controlled our business decisions more than a decade before she was elected to the Senate!"

Thomas Friedman's 'Lake Wobegon' America

Thomas Friedman trips over his own words with his claim, "Average is Over". He skips over the easiest ways to join the wealthiest Americans - being born rich - and the second best way, his personal method, marrying an exceptionally wealthy heir or heiress.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

This is fair to a point. I do sense that unless you're firmly ensconced in the privileged class, a typical job of the future will demand a lot of you - continuously working to stay at the top of your field. Fewer and fewer jobs will let you coast, or allow you to be the person who knows the way things used to work.

But Friedman doesn't appear to understand the law of averages, or the joke of Lake Wobegon. Average is determined mathematically, so even if everybody improves there will remain an average. It's not possible for everybody in every field to find an "extra" that makes them above average. People who can distinguish themselves and prove their value will find it easier to earn a decent wage, and some will rise in wealth and position, but that won't eliminate either the average or the fact that our society includes a lot of dead-end jobs in which being above average simply means you work harder for the same or a slightly higher rate of pay.

Friedman is excited at the idea of going to a restaurant and ordering his food using a tablet rather than being served by a waiter. I expect he's excited for the rest of us, as it's difficult for me to imagine Friedman spending much time in a restaurant where his napkin is not recovered and folded neatly, awaiting his return from the restroom.¹ That is to say, Friedman is in a class of wealth that makes it unlikely that he wants to play with a tablet computer to learn what's on the menu, or where he would have to tap the equivalent of a call button to get his water glass refilled.

I think a tablet could be an effective tool at restaurants where people presently queue to place their orders. Rather than waiting in line, trying to decide what you want, you can sit down, take your time, and not have the person behind you sighing loudly at your lack of familiarity with the menu.

There's something else that Friedman is missing in his excitement over iWaiters. The fact that they're not actually a labor saving device - they're a labor shifting device. Perhaps that's why I see them falling into place in a restaurant that doesn't have waiters. In those restaurants you're already used to having what was once the restaurant's job shifted to you - collecting your food at the counter, carrying it to your table, filling your own drink, throwing away the trash at the end of your meal. Banks use ATMs and online banking, grocery stores have self-serve checkout, bag your own groceries. In most states it's rare to find a full-service gas pump. The need for labor hasn't disappeared - it has just been shifted from the provider to the customer.

Friedman is also excited at the idea that a Chinese factory can retool on a moment's notice, and can pull its thousands of workers out of their dormitories to be retrained for the new system. "Sorry for waking you up - here's a biscuit and a cup of tea." No American plant can match that? Well, yeah. But for those of us who don't fetishize China, it would not be such a big deal if workers were trained on a more human schedule when they came to work from their homes, where they live with their families. As excited as Friedman gets about the idea that China is turning all of its workers into highly educated high performers, his anecdote belies that idea - he's describing a society of drones. Where does the reward of not being average fit into that world? "Good for you, you were 3% more efficient than your peers in fitting screens into frames. You get another biscuit."

Friedman is also excited about Siri, the voice interface to the latest iPhone. He quotes an executive of the company that developed the software, gushing about how good it is.

“Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”

Well, yeah, I guess I can see how Siri and similar programs going to take over the world's voice mail systems, perhaps reducing the frustration of the absurd menus most companies impose on consumers by allowing you to have a "conversation" with a computer. But we're not even to that point of the revolution. And many people, particularly those with more complex problems, will still prefer to talk to a human being.

I can imagine the frustration, also, of having a computer keep redirecting you from real answers to your issues, a'la Comcast, because the last thing they want to do is actually help you resolve a problem that should involve their crediting your account. Siri may become smart enough to understand what you're asking, but I can see her being programmed to give you a partial or inaccurate answer, anyway.

Friedman states that, as we enter an era in which "average is officially over,... nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education." Friedman should take a hard look at China, or at least his perceptions of China, as if he thinks about what is happening in that country he should be able to see that they are not trying to turn everybody into an "above average" performer. They'll help the children of the wealthy and of party elites through special schools and opportunities, and will identify some students by talent and nurture that talent, but in large part they understand that they need a lot of drones and, ultimately, their system collapses if their drones become too few or too expensive.

By G.I. Bill, does Friedman actually mean a G.I. bill? Join the military, get a college education? It seems not - I think he means a "G.I. bill" that does not actually require being a G.I. I agree with the sentiment that every American should have access to college, and will take it a step further and state that they should also have access to a K-12 education that gives them a chance to succeed in college. But I think Friedman falls into the class of people who believe that school makes you smarter, and that everybody is or can be college material. We will do better for our society by recognizing that some people aren't cut out for college, or should do something else first, than by trying to push everybody into college without regard for interest or aptitude. We do our nation no favors by pretending that everybody can be above average, or that everybody needs to be. We're a long way from being a true meritocracy.
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1. In fairness, perhaps Friedman believes the iWaiter tablet will have an app that refolds his napkin.

Bitter Pills from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs' comments to President Obama have been getting a lot of attention, and most of it seems to be critical. I have to say that if Steve Jobs was half as good at taking blunt criticism from others as he was at giving blunt criticism to others, it's no small wonder he was a good business executive. I also have to say that if I were meeting with somebody like Steve Jobs for ideas on how to improve the nation's economy, I would want to hear his actual opinions, not sugar-coated, eager to please, "everything's coming up roses" nonsense. If you want to know what it would take for Apple to open up a manufacturing plant in the United States, it's helpful to know that the CEO perceives a shortage of people with adequate education to oversee workers, and an educational system that is turning out people who are unprepared to be the workers at the plants he would open. His proposed solutions may have been simplistic, and more reflective of his reported propensity to divide people into two camps (the worthy, who will produce ideas and generate wealth, and everybody else) than of viable reforms, but at least you know where he's coming from.

One of the interesting things about major companies is that they have a lot of opportunity to open factories in relatively undesirable locations, with the locals rolling out the welcome mats and competing to offer the most generous incentives. But as the area in which you want to open a plant or put up a large building or warehouse store becomes more desirable, as a general rule, the offers diminish and the obstacles grow. I'm reminded of a Michigan community which had zoned a large tract of land as "light industrial" in the hope of attracting an industrial park, only to have it sit empty. A major retailer made noises about opening a location there - cheap land, close enough to major roads and population centers to be viable. A local store owner who, having spent decades pulling profits out of his store and putting nothing back in, fought tooth and nail to prevent the rezoning and, when it passed, litigated the issue. By the time the dust settled the land was rezoned, but the big box merchant had moved on. In China? The government was behind the redevelopment plan, so it would have happened. (And if the government wasn't behind it, odds are a 'consultant' could have found a way to bribe convince local officials to change their minds.)

Whatever Jobs thought about environmental regulations, I suspect that his objection was more to the inefficiency of local government and the ability of a local business or citizens group to tie things up for years. I suspect he was speaking from comparative experience opening Apple stores in the U.S. versus other nations. And I suspect he was thinking specifically of why the A6 chip was not going to be manufactured in the United States. For somebody in high tech, a six month delay in opening a chip factory may as well be a lifetime. For somebody in consumer electronics, a relatively small increase in production costs can mean the difference between profit and loss.

Jobs was reportedly 'infuriated' by President Obama's "focus on the reasons that things can't get done". That's what you might expect from a man who didn't have to accept excuses from those under him - "If you can't get it done, I'll put somebody else in charge." That's not even the way most industry works, though, and it's certainly not the way our form of government works.

Would I want to reinvent the country in a way that would have pleased Steve Jobs? From what I've been hearing, no, I would not. I believe China would be better off adopting some of our regulations than we would be in adopting their system of... what's the word for a totalitarian state led by a corrupt oligarchy that will treat you like a king if they expect to profit? There's no easy way to avoid problems and delays in rezoning, development and redevelopment that don't trample somebody's toes, and we know how Steve Jobs reacted when it was his own toes that were being trampled.

China's Advantage Being... What, Again?

Thomas Friedman continues to fetishize China. Friedman contends that there is a sense in Europe and the Middle East, at least on the part of the ordinary people asked to bear the cost, that capitalism has failed to live up to its promise:

That is because there is a deep sense of theft in both countries, a sense that the way capitalism played out in Egypt and Greece in the last decade was in its most crony-esque, rigged and corrupt deformation, letting some people get fantastically rich simply because of their proximity to power. So there is a hunger not just for freedom, but for justice. Or, as Rothkopf puts it, “not just for accounting, but for accountability.”

Instead of arguing that we can improve or democratize the systems that have led to these failures and perceptions of failure, as you might expect, Friedman sees China as having the answers:

But there is an adult lurking. China has been buying Spanish, Portuguese and Greek bonds to help stabilize these Chinese export markets. “These are delicate times, and we take a positive role,” Yi Gang, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, told the British newspaper The Guardian in January.

The solution, then, is communism? To create a police state that can keep people from organizing and protesting? To save money by keeping the bulk of the population poor and uneducated, largely destined either for rural poverty or to grind out their days in low-wage factories and sweatshops, while convincing the likes of Friedman that the schools that serve the wealthy and powerful are representative of the entire nation's academic progress? To manipulate national currencies to gain an advantage in the export market? Friedman lectures,

Either we both put our nations on more sustainable growth paths — which requires cutting, taxing and investing for the future — or we’re looking at a world in which democracies are going to turn on themselves and fight over shrinking pies, with China having a growing say over how big the slices will be.

If we're looking to become China, Friedman should be lavishing praise on Cantor, not criticizing him and his ilk. A government can save money if it doesn't much care if its population at large has access to decent health care, quality schools, access to higher education, decent roads, a middle class standard of living, clean water and air.... Such things don't much matter if your primary goal is to ensure the wealth and privilege of those already at the top. That's where Eric Cantor wants to lead the country. And yes, you can make that future a reality without raising taxes. So which is it - is Eric Cantor a problem, one of a class of "reckless baby boomer politicians for whom no crisis is too serious to set aside political ambition and ideology", or is he part of the solution, bringing the realities of China home to America. Capitalism? Democracy? Hardly. Bring on the communist, totalitarian state!

"Except for All the Others"

The best secret police force on the planet....

Eminent Domain, Chinese Style

Wasn't this the plot of one of the Robocop movies?

How "Teach to the Test" Can Become a Trap

Here's an interesting essay describing how cultural factors in China make it extremely difficult for its schools to break away from a "teach to the test" model, even though that model is in many ways out-of-date and counter-productive.

Nearly 100% of Western reporters (NPR’s Luisa Lim being the only exception) ... assume that the “lower class” in China will rebel at any moment. Not true. Poor people in China accept that they are poor because they do not have an education; but if their child has the opportunity to get an education, then all is calm. Therefore, allowing some students to get into college without going through the merit exam is a problem for China because of where they come from in history…the severe social injustices of pre-1949. That is what NPR left out... listeners are left to just assume that all China would have to do is end the gao kao and China could let 100 flowers of creative teaching bloom.

China is working toward more creativity, but teachers teach as they have been taught. They do not know how to ask creative questions because they went through school memorizing for the gao kao. Without models, this is not easy to turn around.

The article expresses concern that the U.S. could similarly trap itself with "a Common Core national test (common 'yardstick') in 2014-15, and another name for that national test is 'gao kao.'" I don't think that the social issues in the U.S. would create the same difficulty in breaking away from a "gao kao" model, but I share the author's (and his host's) concern about the quality of education that is likely to result from taking U.S. education in that direction.

It's also interesting to me that for all the overstatement we hear about China, almost no attention is paid to the fact that China's approach to improving its educational system turns ours on its head. It should be no surprise given China's historic approach to sport, but when it comes to the population at large they appear principally focused on selecting children who display significant talent and giving them opportunities that are not available to society at large. You don't necessarily want to go to an average Chinese university if you can attend one in the west - the graduate of a typical Chinese college doesn't get a very large income boost ("the average college graduate earns just 300 yuan -- roughly $45 -- more than average migrant worker") and faces high rates of unemployment. The rural drop-out rate is very high. If you want to be like China, you don't focus on trying to get rural teenagers "college ready" - you focus on finding the best students and giving them opportunities well beyond what you're willing to offer their peers.

Thomas Friedman on Competition with China

Sometimes you have to wonder where Thomas Friedman's head is....

To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared. And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing. China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children — one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian — getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”

That is how they see us.

Here's the thing, Tom: When a state-run organizaton presents a state-approved, state-sponsored caricature of how its own citizens compare to those of other nations, even before you take notice that it's a communist, totalitarian state, the idea is not to convey "Here's what you already think." It's to convey, "Here's what you should think." In the context of the film at issue, if a chubby American whose idea of exercise appears to be putting on his Rolex in the morning or getting in and out of his Lexus SUV happens to be in the audience, nodding in vigorous agreement, all's the better.

You know what else? You don't have to go to China to hear that story. More than two thousand years ago Aesop wrote a version, the Tortoise and the Hare, which (believe it or not) was not intended as a wake-up call to us. (Granted, Ancient Greece did fall.) In terms of "Wow, look at those really big buildings," China's not the first totalitarian state to want to show off its prowess through massive building projects and it won't be the last.

That's not to discount China's role as a global economic competitor, or the problems we face at home. Friedman highlights problems faced by both nations,

The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty.

and

There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.

Friedman brings out his inner G.W. Bush ("If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator"), suggesting that China's system of government has resulted in the "average senior official [being] quite competent". His thesis, however, is internally inconsistent - in his own words there is a reason we can't "do it now" - our flawed and corrupted political system.

Friedman also quotes an Indian entrepreneur. Although it's not clear, I believe he's referring to an entrepreneur who is developing businesses in India, as opposed to the United States. And that entrepreneur sees democracy as part of the problem,

For democracy to be effective and deliver the policies and infrastructure our societies need requires the political center to be focused, united and energized. That means electing candidates who will do what is right for the country not just for their ideological wing or whoever comes with the biggest bag of money. For democracies to address big problems — and that’s all we have these days — requires a lot of people pulling in the same direction, and that is precisely what we’re lacking.

But that's not really, true, is it. India had a business boom based neither on those aspects of democracy nor upon a broad sharing of its new wealth with the public at large. As compared to the United States it has a serious problem with corruption and success in business can mean bribing a lot of people. Not so long ago, Friedman was lecturing us that we needed to prepare for our flat-Earth race against India, now it's apparently the U.S. and India against China. When you're in a race to the bottom for who can hand out the best business environment for sweatshops - no worries about labor laws, western-style environmental regulation, or paying taxes sufficient to help support a fully developed city or state - democracies will always lose to totalitarian states.

There are a couple of points worth making about what Friedman sees as our corrupt political culture. First, as bad as things are right now, they've been worse at various points in our nation's history. Second, if everybody pulled together and decided, "The government must have sufficient revenue to build quality infrastructure that will carry us through to the 22nd century, must reinvent higher education, must make large, bold investments in research and innovation," we would be left with a big question: How do we pay for all of that? It's easy if you're China - as long as the money keeps rolling in, the government can skim what it wants right off the top. Here it would require tax increases - and let's be blunt, the hyper-wealthy elites of our nation, people like Thomas Friedman, simply won't get on board with that.¹

Sure, Tom's willing to pay an extra 50 cents per gallon to fuel up his hybrid SUV, but only if everybody in the nation also has to pay the new tax. He's not shown any inclination to offer up any of his extended family's wealth, or to scale back his own lavish lifestyle. Not that Friedman's hypocrisy makes him any less correct than, say, carbon-burning, mansion-dwelling Al Gore; but I would be more enthusiastic when he made this type of argument if it didn't smack of, "Now everybody pull together - pick me up and carry me across the finish line before the burgers get cold."

I would suggest that for his next column Friedman approach this issue from a different angle. Rather than telling us what we need to do - things that, frankly, would likely get massive voter approval if funded, he should do us the favor of telling us exactly where the money will come from.

Update: Harold Meyerson makes some observations about China, and the role of large U.S. companies in both its growth and its status as a competitor, that Friedman appears to consistently overlook:

Consider the debate in Congress about whether to impose tariffs on Chinese imports if China continues to depress the value of its currency. Roughly 150 House members, including 45 Republicans, have authored a bill to do just that, and the Ways and Means Committee will take up the bill on Friday. Unions and some domestic manufacturers support the bill. But a large number of American businesses, in a campaign coordinated by the U.S.-China Business Council, oppose it.

Now, there's nothing un-American in opposing the legislation as such -- far from it. Support for and opposition to tariffs are both as American as apple pie. The question here is whether the 220 corporations that belong to the council -- household names such as Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Ford, GM, Wal-Mart, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan Chase, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Boeing -- are already so deeply invested in China as manufacturers, marketers or retailers that buy goods there to sell them here that their interests are more closely aligned with China's than with America's. Revaluing China's currency would be helpful to domestic U.S. manufacturers, their employees and the communities where those employees live and work, but America's largest companies have long since ceased to be domestic.

Given the explosive growth of the Chinese economy, it's a safe bet that every major U.S. corporation will devote greater resources to building, buying and selling there. But China, unlike the Obama administration, truly is guided by an ideology alien to most Americans -- Leninism -- and wields far greater control over what U.S. corporations can and can't do there than the U.S. government does over what corporations can and can't do here. Our leading companies' economic interests, and those of their Chinese hosts, whom they cross at their peril, are increasing likely to pit them against proposals that diminish China's edge, however obtained, in global competition.

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1. As a member of the Pulitzer Committee, did Friedman vote in favor of Kathleen Parker's award? Because, it should be noted, she's presently endorsing propaganda of a different sort, applauding the notion that we can have "smaller, more caring government, one that remembers us". Why am I instead reminded of the television edit, "Forget you."