Has Thomas Friedman Learned His Lesson?

Or at least, a lesson? That was then (if you're impatient, skip ahead to 2:24):



This is now:

Today, Obama’s critics say he must do “something” about Syria. I get it. Chaos there can come around to bite us. If there is a policy that would fix Syria, or even just stop the killing there, in a way that was self-sustaining, at a cost we could tolerate and not detract from all the things we need to do at home to secure our own future, I’m for it.

But we should have learned some lessons from our recent experience in the Middle East: First, how little we understand about the social and political complexities of the countries there; second, that we can — at considerable cost — stop bad things from happening in these countries but cannot, by ourselves, make good things happen; and third, that when we try to make good things happen we run the risk of assuming the responsibility for solving their problems, a responsibility that truly belongs to them.

Friedman is often cited as an expert on the Middle East, but were that the case it should have been pretty obvious to him that his thesis for a war as a demonstration of "suck on this"-type resolve was deeply flawed. He may be a slow learner, but given his prominence it's very good that he's learning.

So Much for Airbnb

Reading Thomas Friedman's column about airbnb and our new "sharing economy", I was looking forward to a discounted stay in a Bethesda mansion with access to a giant swimming pool, perhaps even a guided tour of the grounds in a Lexus SUV (hybrid, in case you were wondering) driven by my host. Given the owner's self-described sacrifice, buying up 7.5 acres and building a giant mansion in order to save the rest of us from having that land redeveloped into a subdivision that could house many families, you might think he was also interested in sparing the area from a Holiday Inn.

More than 50 percent of Airbnb hosts depend on it to pay their rent or mortgage today, Chesky added: “Ordinary people can now be micro-entrepreneurs.” Jamie Wong, co-founder of Vayable.com, a platform through which locals anywhere can become custom tour guides of their area, told me: “I moved out of my apartment in central San Francisco, rented a cheaper annex in a friend’s home, and ‘airbnb-ed’ my apartment for $200 a night and earned about $20,000 in a year. It enabled me to bootstrap my start-up. Airbnb was our first round of funding!” And just think how much better all this is for the environment — for people to be renting their spare bedrooms rather than building another Holiday Inn and another and another. ... The sharing economy — watch this space. This is powerful.

Alas, as powerful as the "sharing economy" may be, it seems to be one in which people at the margins do the sharing - people who can't pay their mortgage, or have to save up for a full year to be able to afford even one Rolex marginally bootstrap their business ideas.

The End of Job Applications As We Know Them

First, a word in defense of Thomas Friedman (and his taxi drivers). Although he has the human tendency to seek points of view that reaffirm his own, at least he's sticking his head outside of the bubble and listening to somebody other than like-minded talking heads or agenda-driven "confidential sources". I also agree with Friedman's general conception that the job market is changing, as are the means by which people will find jobs and maintain their positions (or should I say, salaries) over their working lives. That said, in his column about a new website that tests the skills of job applicants... I think he's a bit too credulous toward the creators of the site he touts in his zeal to endorse a new era of employment.

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.

The problem I see with that is that designing tests isn't a one-off. If you want tests that are measurably effective at assessing worker's skills, you have to do a lot more than create a test for a given job. You need to test the test. Further, let's say you create a test with "the right questions" - how do you grade the answers? If we were talking about tests of math skills, that could be automated. But we're not - at least as highlighted in the column, these are subjective tests:

HireArt asks candidates to do tasks that mimic the work they would do on the job. If it is for a Web analytics job, HireArt might ask: “You are hired as the marketing manager at an e-commerce company and asked to set up a Web site analytics system. What are the key performance indicators you would measure? How would you measure them?”...

Sample question: “Kanye West just released a new fashion collection. You can see it here. Imagine you had to write a tweet promoting this collection. What would your tweet be?” Someone applying for a sales job would have to record a sales pitch over video.

Really, more than a test, that's more like creating a standardized set of interview questions and giving applicants time to think through the answers. In essence, rather than just submitting résumés, the applicants would be interviewing in writing. But who would review the answers, and based upon what criteria? Enter the human element. Or perhaps even the computer element - if you get 500 people applying for each job, odds are that the initial "scoring" is going to be a computerized process, or performed by somebody associated with the website as opposed to a person who would actually be making a hiring decision. If you were hiring a salesperson, how valuable would the pre-recorded pitch be, as opposed to tasking a candidate to make a pitch during the interview and seeing how they respond to you in the role of customer? How much time would you save, reviewing perhaps hundreds of videos from applicants as opposed to interviewing leading prospects?

So what does she advise? Sharef pointed to one applicant, a Detroit woman who had worked as a cashier at Borders. She realized that that had no future, so she taught herself Excel. “We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.”

From which I infer, she didn't get the job.

For some of us, the idea of somehow being tested before applying for a job is old hat. I can't recall the last job I applied for that did not want multiple writing samples, a sample document of some sort relating to the work I would be doing, or something else that would suggest qualification (or lack thereof) before I was selected for an interview. And I haven't applied for a job in a very long time. Perhaps outsourcing that sort of pre-screening will work for some employers.

However, I think the future lies in a somewhat different direction. While large employers may well continue to reach out to new college grads through sites like the one Friedman describes, more and more jobs are going to be filled through personal connections and networking. A commonly recited statistic is that 80% of job openings are never advertised. I see a future in which that rises well over 90%, as people rely more and more on sites like LinkedIn to find and check references on people who may not even be aware that they're being considered for a job offer. The test will in no small part be your actual accomplishments, as documented on your profile and as verified by trusted people in your extended network.

Actually, It's Not So Easy to Teach Yourself New Tricks....

An afterthought on Thomas Friedman's column,

But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.)

Well, quite clearly, college isn't cheaper than ever before. Quite the opposite. Even if, recognizing that your skills have become a bit rusty, you're inclined to go back.

I expect that Friedman is referencing the growing availability of online courses, free and paid, on a wide range of subjects. If you can put together an appropriate collection of such courses, you can approximate what you might learn in certain more expensive, formal educational programs. The first problem with that is curation - you generally won't know if a course is any good or how much you'll learn until you complete the course. The same is true to a degree with college courses, but the college has an incentive to curate the content and to try to ensure that courses are of reasonable quality. Similarly, colleges put together curricula to help students pick "majors" and "minors" and, ideally, take an appropriate set of courses to obtain an appropriate level of knowledge to justify being granted a degree. When you're putting together your own set of courses on the Internet, it can be difficult to know where that process begins and ends. If you are acting out of mere personal interest, sure, it's cheap and easy. If you're trying to teach yourself cutting edge job skills in your spare time, it's not easy and (assuming the material is available online) isn't necessarily cheap.

I have seen interesting programs that promise, somewhat convincingly, to take people from the beginner level to "competent and employable" in a block of time comparable to a college semester. For example, this program to teach Ruby on Rails. I think colleges should do a lot more to create and implement that type of program. But such a program is neither cheap nor easy. Sure, you can quit your job and with some decent guidance and luck in finding good resources, as well as a lot of motivation and sufficient aptitude, achieve reasonable mastery of Ruby on Rails in, say, twelve weeks. But... that's a luxury few people have.

Perhaps Friedman is thinking back to the days when he typed his columns and learned to use a word processor, but if we're serious about "inventing" jobs through a demonstration of skill sets and achievements not broadly shared by a larger pool of job applicants, for most workers I think things are getting harder. Not only are skills of that type increasingly complex, they become obsolete much more quickly than the important skills of the past. Picking the right skills to master, finding the time, finding the resources, and keeping current or moving on to the next thing? Easy? Come on.

U.S. Schools Have Always Kinda... Sucked

Thomas Friedman has noticed that, based upon international tests, U.S. students lag behind their international peers. I don't want to diminish the importance of education, improved schools, improved pedagogy, universal education and the like. I don't want to assume that the factors that have helped the U.S. succeed in the past, despite problems with public education, will continue into the future. But....

The bad news is that U.S. middle-class students are badly lagging their peers globally. "Many assume that poverty in America is pulling down the overall U.S. scores," the report said, "but when you divide each nation into socioeconomic quarters, you can see that even America’s middle-class students are falling behind not only students of comparable advantage, but also more disadvantaged students in several other countries."

That's not new. That's "same as it ever was".

Part of the problem, at least to me, is obvious: On the whole, our nation does not value education. We give it a great deal of lip service, but at the end of the day we're not willing to open our pocketbooks to better fund public schools, we're more interested in cutting teacher pay, autonomy and benefits than in creating an environment that will attract the best candidates to teaching as a profession, and we get much more excited when Johnny makes it onto a varsity sports team than when he enters the science fair - and while the football team gets equipment, coaches, dedicated facilities, the science fair gets one day with the gym filled with folding tables. We have a range of taunts and epithets to direct at kids who excel academically. If you control for parental focus on academics, as opposed to parental income, you'll find a lot of academic achievers in this country.

Part of the problem, though, may be that there's not actually a problem. At least insofar as the middle class is concerned. We, as a nation, are presently obsessed over early childhood education - how much academic material can we cram into kindergarten and first grade. But kids who go to schools that follow the Waldorf method don't get much exposure to academics before the age of seven, and they do fine. It is reasonable to infer that when kids come from families that value education, that read, they catch up. And while I think it would be better to offer a more rigorous high school education than what we see in a lot of U.S. schools, to allow kids to push themselves without taking A.P. courses or taking classes at the local community college, the kids who aren't pushed into getting top PISA scores go on to college and catch up.

The focus on PISA reminds me of the talk about how not enough students are pursuing STEM degrees, even though the evidence suggests a significant surplus of STEM graduates as compared to job openings. By way of example, my brothers both went out of their way to avoid math in high school, and again in college. Their PISA scores would have been pretty awful. One is now a lawyer (a profession in which it is easy to avoid even the most basic math), and the other is doing very well working for a Fortune 50 company. That should come as no big surprise to Friedman - I doubt that the math requirements of his job often exceed having his word processor tabulate the word count of a draft column.

Something else that's interesting about PISA, particularly given Friedman's emphasis on China, is Professor Yong Zhao's observation that nations with the highest PISA scores tend to have low scores on measures of "perceived entrepreneurial capabilities". That is to say, if you put too much emphasis on having students score well on PISA mathematics, you may do so at the expense of giving them the opportunity to learn the real world skills necessary to drive business success. I'm not advocating that we choose - I would like to find a way to do both - but there's a price to chasing the highest test scores, while the reward may turn out not to be improved business competitiveness. Professor Zhao is also not enamored with the notion of chasing after China's test-driven model of education, a system from which he graduated.

There's another cost to high stakes testing, one that was revealed in the D.C. schools under the Leadership of Michelle Rhee: If you put enough emphasis on testing, you create a huge incentive to cheat. I once followed a link to a Chinese website that sold aids for cheating on exams - and some of the stuff would inspire jealousy even in the James Bond character, Q. Chinese students are reported to have a relatively cavalier attitude toward cheating. Everybody does it, right? But hey - it does inspire a certain form of entrepreneurship....

So what’s the secret of the best-performing schools? It’s that there is no secret. The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They "work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement." They are "data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality." And they promote "the active engagement of our parents and families."

Another trip to the mission statement generator? Oddly, no mention of start times, but then the mission statement says nothing about choosing the correct data.

So yes, let's take Friedman's suggestion and "raise the bar". I expect Friedman will be telling us where we will get the money for the type of teachers and schools he envisions in... well, probably not his next column, but we can hope it won't take more than a Friedman Unit or two. While we wait we should consider which bars we should be raising - as we don't want an effort to improve the nation's schools to turn into a trip hazard.

You Won't Save Middle Class Jobs with Talk About Teaching Motivation

A few days ago, Thomas Friedman took a kernel of truth and attempted to run much too far with it. At this point there is immense downward pressure on middle class incomes and job security, and in many fields - particularly those likely to offer the best wages - it is more important than ever to maintain an up-to-date skill set if you want to remain employed. I'm all for teaching students at all levels to be more entrepreneurial and about the expectations they are likely to face in a future job market. I question the conceit,

Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever.

Specifically, what middle class jobs are being pulled up? Also, frankly, the correlation between wages and "skill" is far less precise than Friedman assumes. If you have unusual skills that happen to be in demand, you are much more likely to get a job and a decent wage than you are if you have far more developed skills that happen to be in low demand or aren't materially different from the skill set held by the larger applicant pool. Part of the problem with telling workers, "You're responsible for your own career development" is that it's much easier to evolve skills that ultimately become commonplace or obsolete than it is to identify and master new skills on your own time and your own dime that your employer may not presently value but will ultimately prove to have significant value in the marketplace.

Friedman seems excited by the notion that knowledge is becoming unimportant,

I tracked ["education specialist Tony] Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

Frankly, hearing a statement like that from a self-described "education specialist" would leave me looking for a new expert. Let's use a simple example from early elementary school - math facts. It is very difficult to progress in mathematical knowledge and skills without a mastery of basic math facts, because if you can't do simple math problems quickly in your head you will not develop the speed necessary to keep up with the rest of the class as lessons become more complex. Sorry, no, "You can use a calculator instead", is not an answer. First, if you need a calculator for basic math facts it's still going to slow you down. Second, it's a highly unusual person who succeeds in math-dependent fields who cannot do basic math problems in her head, and quickly solve problems that would confound most of the rest of us (we might not even know what information to punch into a calculator or how to order the operations) with pen and paper.

Friedman might object, "But math is different." But it's really not. You're not going to be a good lawyer unless you have a decent understanding of the legal principles you encounter. You're not going to be a good doctor unless you quickly recognize medical conditions and symptoms within your field of practice, and know how to perform a physical examination. Friedman's perspective is probably colored by his profession - few pundits have any meaningful subject matter expertise, so they spend much of their time aggregating information and whittling it down to column length. To some degree you might be able to get away with that as an "education expert" - you're not likely to be called upon for instant answers, and to the extent that your primary focus is on research and publication you're going to be drawing upon a broad variety of sources to produce your next paper. But even in that latter context, you need enough knowledge of your subject matter to know what has come before, as you're not going to successfully publish papers that betray a fundamental ignorance of the research that has been done in the past - and you can't trust Wikipedia to bring you up to speed.

But more than that, if you want to become good at grappling with a particular set of ideas or concepts, you need to actually wrestle with the facts. You can't learn or be taught how to be a good thinker without a framework. There's a reason that traditional education typically begins with a survey course - to provide students with the necessary foundation to understand more complex concepts and ideas. As much fun as it might be to pretend otherwise, "They can look it up on the Internet" isn't a substitute. If you don't learn the basics, you're going to end up in over your head.

There's something of a tension in Friedman's assertion,

My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job.

As evidenced by his continued statement,

Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it.

First of all, there's no evidence that jobs are going away. No major employer is casting off its employees in favor of an all-independent contractor workforce. Nor is outsourcing key functions all it's cracked up to be - when Boeing attempted to minimize its in-house expertise and rely on contractors... disaster followed. One of Yahoo!'s recent steps to re-invigorate its corporate culture was to stop employees from working at home. If there's evidence that employers are moving away from the concept of "jobs" and "employees", it's well-hidden.

Second, Friedman's expansion upon his comment reveals what I previously suggested. The issue is much less, "There won't be jobs in the future," and much more, "If employers realize that your skills aren't special your earning capacity will flatten or decline, and if your employer decides that your skills are obsolete you'll probably be shown the door." More than that, while corporations might historically have helped employees update their skills or develop new skills, Friedman sees that cost and burden as being shifted to the employee. I think he's correct, but as with professionally managed pension funds vs. individual retirement accounts I think he's missing something important: the professionals have access to information and resources that allow them, on the whole, to better predict market trends and by scaling up their operations they can take advantage of efficiencies that should allow for better training at a lower cost. When you transform that into, "Every man for himself", no matter how well you try to prepare employees for their "self-managed" future you will see a great number of them flounder or drown.

Friedman continues by speaking of the importance of motivation, more specifically of "intrinsic motivation":

Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously.

That observation is, for lack of a better word platitudinous. Of course people who are intrinsically motivated to learn and expand their skills will do so. They always have and they always will. The problem is that the forces Friedman describes are extrinsic - they come from outside the worker. Fear of job loss can be a powerful motivator, but it's extrinsic. The statement only has significance if we can teach intrinsic motivation, but unfortunately that seems to be much more a component of personality than a product of a particular pedagogy.

Which is probably why, when asked how to produce more intrinsically motivated students, Friedman's expert may as well be clicking on a "mission statement generator":

“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”

To me, that sounds a lot like doubling down on the status quo (although if student work is assessed through the year rather than through high-stakes standardized testing, that would be a positive step)... but with badges. (Pieces of flair?) What's missing? Anything concrete. If I were the type of boss Friedman predicts for our collective futures, and somebody handed that statement to me as a meaningful reform proposal, he would quickly find himself testing his ability to invent his own job.

Try, Try, Try to Understand....

Why would Thomas Friedman want Susan Rice to be Secretary of State when he can have a magic man. Alas, if only Steve Jobs were still with us....

Thomas Friedman Pulls His Asbestos Undershorts Out of Storage

In simple terms, following the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, three positions emerged on what should happen in the Palestinian lands Israel captured during the war:

1. "Get Out Now" - the position taken by then-M.K. Uri Avnery, that Israel should resist the temptation to try to significantly adjust its borders and settle the territories, and end its occupation as quickly as possible, lest it be drawn into a long-term occupation from which it would become increasingly difficult to extract itself.

2. "We All Know What Will Happen" - the position taken by much of the world, that the length of the occupation was a distraction and that eventually the two sides would reach an agreement creating a Palestinian state on most or all of the occupied territories, with some amount of border adjustment and land swapping.

3. "Dig In" - the position taken by certain Israeli politicians and generals, that they should set up a context for annexation of great swaths of the occupied territories, and to make it politically difficult for future leaders to agree to any borders approximating the Green Line, or perhaps to any concession of land at all.

During the years leading up to the second Intifada with its associated rash of Palestinian suicide bombings, Thomas Friedman fell into camp #2. He had a tendency to lecture both sides about the outcome that he viewed as inevitable, while hewing to a form of centrism that both sides in the conflict seemed to view as insufficiently sensitive to their concerns. It was a big picture view, one that avoided the need to address the complexity of actually getting to a final resolution. Following the collapse of peace talks, and more so 9/11, it's not so much that Friedman fell into a different camp, so much as he backed off his prior tendency to lecture Israel.

Prior to his retreat from the issue, Friedman's suggestion that Israel was not offering enough, that trying to change facts on the ground was a fool's errand, that the two sides should put aside feelings and history and accept the invevitable, earned him the enmity of people who disagreed with him. Needless to say, as you move toward people who hold more extremist views the reaction to Friedman became correspondingly shrill and hostile. Over the interim, open hostility toward Friedman seemed to diminish, but his critics have long memories. With this reengagement of the conflict, it's time once again for the asbestos undershorts.

I was thus a bit surprised to see Friedman be this direct:

Israeli friends have been asking me whether a re-elected President Obama will take revenge on Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the way he and Sheldon Adelson, his foolhardy financier, openly backed Mitt Romney. My answer to Israelis is this: You should be so lucky.

Ever since Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, there has been a sense that presidents have an obligation to try to mitigate or end what was once deemed the Middle East crisis, to help Israel maintain its democracy, borders and Jewish character while ending years, turning into decades, of Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. Friedman correctly states that the American public is demanding that the President focus on domestic concerns, as well as international conflicts that directly involve or threaten the U.S., and correctly states that in this context (as in pretty much any other) negotiations work best when the participants in a negotiation invite a mediator to help them polish off an agreement as opposed to when the mediator is asked to start negotiations by dragging the two sides to the table.

But I think Friedman misses some important components relating to why the issue has diminished in the minds of the U.S. public, and why pressing for negotiations is not a priority for the president. First and foremost, U.S. domestic concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was driven in large part by intensive news coverage. During the 1980's, it was not at all atypical for the evening news to sound like this: "Now news from the Middle East. A riot broke out in Ramallah when..." ar "a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem café...." Between Israel's security measures, changes in Palestinian leadership, and the significant number of other Middle East crises, conflicts and wars, that's no longer what Americans hear. Israel-Palestine has dropped considerably from the top spot of Middle East crises that the Americans want to resolve.¹

On the other side of the equation, a persistent effort to depict Muslims as irrational actors with whom you cannot negotiate, and who can't be trusted to follow a deal to which they agree, has eroded support for negotiations among factions that might otherwise press the President to become more involved. If, as certain Israeli leaders have argued, there's no one to talk to and no way to reach a meaningful agreement, why go there? Some raise similar arguments about Israel and leaders like Netanyahu - if there's no reason to believe that Netanyahu has the will or that he could get the authority to carry out an agreement involving the evacuation of Israeli settlements, why pretend that there can be a real negotiation - the gulf between what he can offer and what a Palestinian leader might accept may be too broad to bridge. Also, while Clinton might have been persuaded to provide funds to help Israel compensate Israeli settlers who had to leave their homes as part of a final deal, the present economic situation makes it highly unlikely that Congress would presently provide such a subsidy.

The conflict has reached a point at which there's little upside for a President in seriously engaging settlement. George W. Bush created a model of non-serious engagement, window dressing, and President Obama was not helped by his early effort to restart negotiations. If I were Obama and Netanyahu proposed that I attempt to mediate the conflict, and invitation I doubt Netanyahu is at all inclined to offer, and Abbas was willing to participate, my response would be simple. "No problem. Send me your maps of your proposed final borders and we'll start from there." Negotiations with no maps? What do they say about trying the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result?
---------------
1. David Ignatius wrote a recent column outlining what he sees as the President's foreign policy priorities - China, Iran, Afghanistan, then "the Middle East" which he subdivides into "the metastasizing Syrian civil war, solidifying democracy in Egypt and rehabilitating a broken Israeli-Palestinian peace process". I'll grant that Afghanistan is in South Asia, albeit bordering the Middle East, but last I checked Iran was part of the Middle East. By Ignatius's measure, that would make Israel... a distant number four on the list of Middle East priorities, and number six on his global list?

Ignatius suggests that in the Israel-Palestinian conflict Obama should engage in "a round of secret contacts to build up the local players who can be America’s partners for peace". Putting aside for the moment that if Ignatius knew about them, they wouldn't be secret, is he serious? These secret contacts would presumably be on the Palestinian side, so... is he talking about Hamas? Is Ignatius offering a plan or a fantasy?

And You Know That Because....

Thomas Friedman says,

I know Romney doesn’t believe a word he’s saying on foreign policy and that its all aimed at ginning up votes: there’s some China-bashing to help in the Midwest, some Arab-bashing to win over the Jews, some Russia-bashing (our “No. 1 geopolitical foe”) to bring in the Polish vote, plus a dash of testosterone to keep the neocons off his back.

Wow. Friedman not only knows that Romney doesn't mean what he is saying, he knows why Romney is saying something other than what he truly believes. Darn shame, then, that Friedman has told us neither how he gained his special insight into what Romney believes, nor what Romney actually believes.

Now, Romney is a politician, the creature that spawned the joke, "How do you know when a politician is lying" ("His lips are moving"), so it's not entirely unfair for Friedman to listen to Romney and think, "That's a load of hooey meant to get him votes from people who don't see things as clearly as I do." I personally don't believe a word the man says on any subject over which he has reversed his position - which, to date, means his views on privilege for people of wealth, his belief in private equity investment, and that he should not have to disclose additional tax returns and... I'm not sure that there's anything else. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on the listed subjects because of his consistency and, frankly, because if you look at his positions in unvarnished terms it's hard to believe he would adopt them thinking that they would help him win an election - and with everything else he has followed the polls. I suspect he's sincere in his religion, as well, but he has spent little time talking about it.

What to make of the fact that Romney has largely avoided contradicting himself on international issues. My sense is that Romney has no interest in foreign affairs and more or less echoes his advisers on the subjects Friedman lists. If I'm wrong, Romney has terrible judgment on foreign policy. If I'm correct, Romney has terrible judgment in picking advisers. It's ugly either way. The claims he's making don't seem designed to help him win - they seem like the sort of things his advisers believe, with there being little concern about disclosure because so few people follow or care about these issues.

It may be that Romney doesn't believe what he's saying - that he and his advisers decided on a series of foreign policy lines that they believe will appeal to a certain element of the Republican base but not alienate other voters. But I see no evidence that would support Friedman's assumption that Romney does not believe what he's saying.

By the end of the column I was left with the impression that I was looking at a lot of projection and wishful thinking. "Romney say's he believes X, Y and Z, but those positions are terrible, so I refuse to accept that he believes them. I think he secretly holds my views on those matters."

I won't believe that Romney share's Friedman's views until I hear them from Romney's lips. No, that won't work - that would be a flip-flop. So let's instead say... until I see convincing evidence that Romney holds those views. For now, how about any evidence? Perhaps in Friedman's next column?

A Blast From The Past: Germany is Doooooomed

Thomas Friedman in 2005, advising Germany and France to "Follow the Leapin' Leprechaun":

Germany and France are trying to protect their welfare capitalism with defense. Ireland is generating its own sustainable model of social capitalism by playing offense. I'll bet on the offense.

Do you think that offer is still good?

Sometimes You Just Have to Wonder....

How many times can Tom Friedman say, in essence, the same thing without any apparent thought beyond, "If politicians do exactly what I think they should do, everybody will love them"? All Obama had to do was serve up Tom Friedman-endorsed entitlement cuts and austerity along with the stimulus program, drown out the right-wing media machine that deliberately distorts the facts and his record, and run a squeaky clean campaign that would make John Kerry's response to the Swift Boat liars seem effective, and... trust Tom Friedman, he'd win!

Given that he has all the answers to the nation's woes, and knows exactly how to persuade the people, get the opposition party to go along with his legislative initiatives, and win overwhelming electoral majorities, all I can say is that it's a darn shame Friedman is a pundit instead of the savior our nation so needs.

Americans Elect and the Disconnect Between Policy and Politics

A few weeks ago when I read Thomas Friedman's editorial, "Down With Everything", there was a lot to like. There was an overt recognition that our nation's political problems arise in large part from structural problems, particularly with the U.S. Senate, and (although omitting discussion of the problems that would result from trying to diminish the input and influence of special interests) how powerful special interests have an undue influence on policy. Friedman also acknowledges the role of government and regulation in creating the nation's economic success.

The editorial, though, reflects Friedman's (dare I say) anti-democratic tendencies. He loves magic men - individuals he perceives as able to transform governments, institutions and popular movements - and there's virtually nothing that he doesn't seem to believe could be improved by finding a Steve Jobs or a Nelson Mandela to bring about reforms that Friedman himself cannot articulate - but which we are to assume would fix (or perhaps, more modestly, significantly improve) whatever is wrong. He has shied away from proposing a "magic man" solution to the problems of the United States, perhaps because in his heart he realizes that such an approach is inherently anti-democratic, or perhaps because he recognizes that "magic man" arguments work best when people don't know much about either the proposed leader or the organization or movement he would supposedly transform. But he does love his super committees:

If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.

Filibuster reform has never been high on Friedman's list of priorities. But supercommittees and "up or down votes"? He loves them. Even if it means pretending that a committee has succeeded when it failed... that is, if a report that comes from the committee's leaders accords with Friedman's own notions of good policy.

On one hand, you might think that Friedman is suggesting that the problem is institutional, and that what we really need to do is to find a way to get our government to focus less on politics and more on policy. The problem with that argument, it would seem, is that Friedman's own policy goals (which are most commonly articulated in the form of massive cuts of Medicare and Social Security) are impeded less by factionalism and more by democracy. George W. Bush's (terribly misguided) proposal to partially privatize Social Security failed not because he couldn't have mustered enough votes, but because too many Senators recognized that they would not be reelected if they supported the changes.

Simply put, an era of supercommittees would do little to insulate Congress from wealthy and powerful special interests. Those interests would help define the scope and power of the supercommittees and limit the scope of their authority. What they would do is allow Members of Congress to tell their constituents, "It's not my fault that these cuts went through - I didn't vote for them." Such an approach does nothing to remedy the institutional problems that, in Friedman's view, necessitate the foisting off of every difficult issue to such a committee, nor do they do anything to educate the public as to why reforms - even reforms that are unpopular or that will detrimentally affect the voter - represent good or even necessary policy. It does little, perhaps nothing, to reduce the power of the special interests that so heavily influence government, instead creating a context in which special interests will battle to influence the supercommittee process. And to the extent that it allows the government to move forward even when a majority of legislators are not willing to act responsibly, it effectively divorces their decision-making from the goals, priorities and interests of their constituents. Also, as with the committees that currently exist in Congress, powerful voices on supercommittees will themselves become targets for lobbying.

Friedman also makes the assumption that supercommittees will always work for good - by which I mean that they will always advance the policies that Friedman personally supports. Although some, at times most, Members of Congress may demagogue about the importance of issues that Friedman regards as inconsequential, or advocate policy reforms that Friedman regards as misguided, Friedman seems to believe that they will never be able to either control the creation of a supercommittee on one of those issues or that a majority of a supercommittee's members will focus on irrelevancies or advance bad policy.

To some degree, Friedman's wishful thinking is borne of a history in which supercommittees have been created to address a specific, genuine problem, with members selected in a manner that makes it pretty clear whether the committee will succeed and what its conclusions will be. But the less consensus there is for any given policy solution, and the more supercommittees you create to bypass the normal legislative process, the more examples of incompetence, outside influence, and even corruption you will find. It's a simple truth of bureaucracy - open, democratic processes are apt to seem messy and disorganized, whereas closed, non-democratic processes are apt to be more efficient but less responsive. As we move in the direction of "every important decision shall be decided by supercommittee", we move toward a closes, non-responsive, non-democratic form of government.

Friedman seems to recognize the importance of having a government that can form good policy, although he shares the natural human tendency to define "good policy" as "policies I, personally, think are good." But to the extent that his proposed solutions to political gridlock aren't anti-democratic, they tend to focus on introducing more politics into the equation. I'm sure Friedman believes that by introducing third parties with additional ideas - ideas he once again assumes will correspond with his own - their ideas will resonate with the public, cause the other political parties to see the light, and cause powerful special interests who have kept those policies from being implemented to fade into the woodwork. Having lived in a couple of nations with multiple political parties, and having seen the political processes of many others, I think that concept of how a third party would work is naive.

Here is how [Americans Elect] will work.... First, anyone interested in becoming a delegate goes to the Americans Elect Web site and registers. As part of that process, you will be asked to fill in a questionnaire about your political priorities: education, foreign policy, the economy, etc. This enables Americans Elect to put you in contact with others who share your views so you can discuss them and organize together. Then you will be invited to draft a candidate or support one who has already been drafted and to contribute to the list of questions that anyone running on the Americans Elect platform will have to answer on the site.

“The questions, the priorities, the nominations and the rules will all come from the community, not from two entrenched parties,” said Ackerman.

Any presidential nominee must conform to all the Constitutional requirements, as well as be considered someone of similar stature to our previous presidents. That means no Lady Gaga allowed. Every candidate will have to post in words or video his or her answers to the platform questions produced by the Americans Elect delegates. In April 2012, the candidate pool will be reduced to six through three rounds of voting. The six, assuming they all want to run, will then have to name their running mates. The only rule is that a Democrat must run with a Republican or independent, and a Republican with a Democrat or independent.

“Each presidential candidate has to pick a running mate outside of their party and reaching across the divide of politics,” said Ackerman.

So the idea was not truly to open up the nomination process to non-traditional candidates - somebody you might want to run the nation but who had eschewed politics - for fear of a "Lady Gaga"-type nomination. And bipartisanship was fetishized to the point that a Presidential candidate would have to pick somebody from the other political party - presumably again somebody with a sufficient political résumé to be firmly associated with the other of the two major political parties - a policy that demonstrates no apparent understanding of the history of the Presidency and why we moved away from having a separately elected Vice President. And these Republican-Democratic teams would stand as something unique and apart from the Republican and Democratic teams they would be running against because... bipartisanship!

Commenting on the failure of Americans Elect, Daniel Larison observes,

Americans Elect failed because it stood for almost nothing, and what it did stand for (bipartisanship, mindless “centrism”) are things that the people who vote for third party candidates dislike or don’t value as something desirable in itself. Americans Elect is a financially opaque, unaccountable organization that pretends to be a vehicle of transparency and political accountability. It has no program or agenda, and it cannot identify substantively where the government has gone wrong under the current two-party system. All that it is capable of doing is complaining that members of the two parties are insufficiently chummy and collaborative, and it has presented this message at a time when there is not much confidence in either major party.

Successful third party candidacies have to tap into discontent with something specific about the incumbent, or they have to represent a more radical challenge to both parties. To the extent that it has a political position, it is the opposite of radical, and it has floundered because its backers don’t really disagree with Obama about very much in terms of policy. It an organization of Tom Friedmans with ballot access.

I think Larison is on to something about the circumstances under which third parties can emerge, particularly in the context of our system which is structured toward two dominant parties. But I think it's also fair to note that it's naive to posit that adding a third political party to an election is going to reduce the level of politics in government, any more than the panoply of Republican candidates in the recent nomination contest helped that party focus on key policy issues. The idea that a Presidential ticket split between two political parties is going to be the least politically contentious of the three (presumably) leading partnerships is interesting. I personally can't see how you could have two candidates who were more than nominally aligned with the two major political parties who would not be doing more explaining away of policy differences than elucidation of shared policy goals throughout the campaign and in the debates.

Fundamentally, adding another pairing of candidates to the presidential race (even if you assume that they will resonate to a greater extent than any of the other third party candidates who already appear on the ballot) does not seem to me to be an opportunity to shift the focus of the race from politics to policy. I don't share Friedman's certitude that the best policy decisions are reached by compromise between the two parties - that reflects, to me, Friedman's mistaken bifurcation of political views into two dominant camps, never mind how fractured those camps often are, and a mistaken belief that the two major parties are so completely correlated with and representative of conservative and liberal ideology that any compromise they fashion will be acceptable to both groups. Frankly, if it were that easy we wouldn't need supercommittees to protect elected politicians from being responsible for the actions of Congress. To me, Friedman seems to be among those who focus on the political horse race, assume that the campaigning and demagoguery are about policy formation not political victory, and thus believe that adding more politics to the fray will somehow lend itself to better policy formation. I would expect that, at best, the third party Friedman envisions might not make things worse, but better? I see no reason to expect that.

Paul Krugman has a criticism of Americans Elect that isn't entirely fair to its proponents:

So why Americans Elect? Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on.

Although perhaps Obama's proposed "grand bargain" on the deficit, rejected by the Republicans, should have established his crediblity with this particular group, the reason why "professional centrists" don't see themselves as Democrats, and see the Democratic Party as a part of the propblem, is that they tend to advocate both balancing the budget (now!) and the position that it's impossible to do so without massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Although for entitlement reform, when push comes to shove the Republican Party is more words than action, the Democratic Party is the primary defender of both Social Security and Medicare. (Never mind that, just as last time, you could get the Democratic Party to sign on to the modest reforms necessary to stabilize Social Security for the indefinite future, and that only the Democrats have introduced serious cost-cutting measures to Medicare as opposed to the Paul Ryan "unlikely to ever happen" privatization plan.)

When President Obama took office, the Democratic Party had a golden opportunity to demonstrate that it was a mature, capable and responsible political party, able to implement sound solutions to serious problems. Instead, just as it did during Clinton's early years, it proved fractious, unwilling to boldly tackle the big issues, and susceptible to extortionate demands from a handful of legislators who held deciding votes. When you hear prominent Democrats talk about healthcare reform you do not hear explanations of how they might have achieved a better bill - you hear complaints that the issue should have been deferred or abandoned. Extremism may not be the problem among Democrats, but opportunism, avarice and politics remain.

Still, that's not problems you're going to resolve by introducing a third "bipartisan" party.

Krugman optimistically expresses,

Americans Elect was created to appeal to this class of professional centrists — which meant that it was doomed to go nowhere. Because outside that class, the large number of people who believe in all the good stuff the centrists claim to favor are, you know, going to vote for Obama. The large number of people who don’t believe in any of that are going to vote for Romney.

The problem here is that a lot of centrists don't believe that President Obama is going to advance the policy goals they favor. They may not have any more confidence in Romney, perhaps less, but if they believe that entitlements are out of control they have seen three years of Democratic inaction on Social Security and cost-saving measures for Medicare that, at present, remain theoretical. As much as they may believe that President Obama would implement some sound policy reforms if presented with a blank slate, they recognize that he is at heart very conservative in his approach to reform. His most dramatic reform, the Affordable Care Act, is a modest echo of ideas of the Heritage Foundation and of his Republican opponent in the coming election. I think there would be appeal to voters who want to see the formation and implementation of good policy, to have a third party candidate who they believed could deliver what they want - what the country needs.

The problem for Americans Elect is that there is no reason to believe that they would deliver. That serious candidates would sign on, that the forced pseudo-bipartisanship of the ticket would be either genuine or helpful. That the contribution to an election would be anything more than adding more politics, more sound and fury, instead of bringing more attention to the most serious policy issues and the most credible responses to those issues. Were the focus on issues, not politics, Americans Elect could do something very different - attempt to articulate the issues, propose solutions, and ask candidates from across the nation to endorse those solutions. It could then articulate which candidates it most supported in any given race based upon the candidates' response. But alas, that would be a lot more work, a lot less fun, and may serve to highlight how it's less a matter of partisanship between the parties that's impeding progress, and more a matter of voters wanting to derive significant benefits from government without having anybody be asked to pay the bill.

It sounds like much more fun to create a website through which we'll supposedly find ourselves a magic man and call that a solution.

Thomas Friedman's Can't-Win Strategy

Did I say "can't-win"? Friedman thinks the opposite - that if you're a presidential candidate and promise to govern the country exactly as he believes it should be governed, you'll win in a landslide. What does that entail? If you read Friedman, even occasionally, you already know: slashing Social Security and Medicare, and embracing budget gimmickry. Friedman first describes what he wants in a budget,

What do we need from a presidential candidate today? We need a credible plan to do three specific things: cut, tax and invest. As the economy improves, we need to cut spending, including all entitlement programs, to fix our long-term structural deficit. We also need to raise revenue through tax reform so we don’t just shred our safety nets and so we still have resources, not only for defense, but to invest in all the things that have made us great as a country: education, infrastructure, quality government institutions and government-funded research.

That is the same sort of thinking that landed us with an excessively complex, compromise-laden healthcare reform legislation: the idea that you shouldn't make a proposal that doesn't do everything that you want (or perhaps I should say, Friedman wants). In the context of the ACA, the law was supposed insure most Americans, limit abuses by the insurance industry, maintain or reduce present levels of healthcare expenditure and be revenue-neutral. We got that, at least in theory, but we would have been better off had we focused on tackling the elements separately - something that might be possible in a healthy political culture but was not even encouraged by pundits like Thomas Friedman. Commentators typically demanded that any bill meet all of those tests or opposed attempting reform.

As Friedman should know, were the Republicans interested in "saving" Social Security, a program that's not actually in very much trouble, a compromise bill could be hashed out and passed inside of a month. It's not complicated - adjust the tax rate, the cap on contributions, eligibility ages and... done. Just like last time.

As Friedman should also know, the path to winning elections does not include cutting Medicare and Social Security spending. Friedman doesn't like Paul Ryan's plan because Ryan's supposed cuts would "deprive the country of the very discretionary spending required to do what we need most: nation-building at home." As usual it's difficult to know if Friedman is speaking in ignorance of the facts or if he just doesn't want to be honest, but it's difficult to believe that Friedman isn't aware that Ryan's budget cuts are secret. It's also difficult to believe that Friedman thinks Ryan's plan would actually balance the budget. Or perhaps Friedman sees such a huge upside in privatizing and voucherizing Medicare and in slashing Social Security that he just doesn't care about the rest.

Except, that is, for bipartisanship.

Finally, the plan has to win bipartisan support, so the candidate advocating it not only wins the election but has a mandate to implement his plan afterward.

The Ryan-Romney budget fails that test.

Now in fairness, when Friedman describes something as "bipartisan" he actually means "consistent with what I want", with the remarkable conceit that if either Romney or Obama were to endorse doing exactly what he wants they would win an overwhelming mandate in the November election. But Friedman should also recall that it was not long ago that President Obama offered a "grand bargain" to the Republicans, a deal that included significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and the Republicans said "No". Why? Apparently because they believed that agreeing with a long-term budget plan that did everything that they supposedly want, they would help the President get reelected. Politics over policy. Sorry, Tom, but even if your policy ideas were good, "bipartisanship" is about politics.

Friedman clings to a nonsensical notion of what a budget can do,

Obama has proposed his own 10-year budget. It is much better than Ryan’s at balancing our near-term need to revitalize the pillars of American success, by cutting, taxing and investing. But it does not credibly address the country’s long-term fiscal imbalances, which require cuts in Medicare and Social Security.

Earth to Friedman: If a budget is better over a ten-year period, there's no need for further discussion or qualification. It's simply better. Why? Because even projecting out ten years we're engaged in a considerable amount of guesswork. Because the present Congress cannot bind future sessions of Congress to its budget priorities. Because you never know when another terrorist attack, war, or opportunistic President who wants to cut taxes for the rich will come along and adopt "deficits don't matter" as its fiscal policy.

Friedman remains dewy eyed about the failed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and "Simpson-Bowles" report as a blueprint for the future. Again, never mind the budgetary gimmickry such as arbitrary spending caps. Friedman is certain that a report that failed to win bipartisan report among members of the committee would have been embraced by Congress. What's more, he believes that Congress would have been so happy to pass a Simpson-Bowles flavored budget that they would have approved an infrastructure spending bill and might also have passed another stimulus bill.

If Obama had embraced the long-term deficit commission, he would have had a chance of combining it with some near-term stimulus — investments in infrastructure — that would have helped the economy and grow jobs. Without pairing it with Simpson-Bowles, Obama had no chance of getting more stimulus....

But had Obama embraced the bipartisan “Simpson-Bowles,” and added his own stimulus, he would have split the G.O.P., attracted gobs of independents and been able to honestly look the country in the eye and say he had a plan to fix what needs fixing. He would have angered the Tea Party and his left wing, which would have shown him as a strong leader ready to make hard choices — and isolated Romney-Ryan on the fringe.

What the bleep is he smoking?

First, "Simpson-Bowles" is bipartisan only in the sense that its authors were historically associated with the two leading political parties. It couldn't get majority support from the committee itself. Contrary to Friedman's suggestion there's no indication that Congress has ever been interested in passing it - after all, were they interested nothing is stopping them.

Second, you cannot "embrace" Simpson-Bowles, an austerity plan, and tack on stimulus spending. It's an inherent contradiction of the plan. Yes, I get the real issues - what's important to Friedman is that the plan slashes Social Security and Medicare, so he would be perfectly content with allowing the short-term picture to be out of balance in order to achieve his long-term goals. Except, as previously noted, the short-term is all that matters - the next Congress can be expected to have different spending priorities.

Third, you cannot "embrace" Simpson-Bowles and also tack on infrastructure spending. Simpson and Bowles took the position that "infrastructure was indeed a problem in need of upgrade, and... the solution is to reduce the deficit in order to free up the necessary funds to tackle the problem, rather than adding it to existing spending".

Fourth, if you're going to assert that a good budget will "invest in all the things that have made us great as a country: education, infrastructure, quality government institutions and government-funded research", it's fair to note that not only is Simpson-Bowles inconsistent with infrastructure spending, it proposed cuts to education spending. The more you get into the details, the more appears that Friedman is indifferent to "all the things that have made us great as a country".

Fifth, there is simply no way that either the Republican Party or mainstream media would have looked at a proposal from President Obama that said, "We embrace Simpson-Bowles. Except for austerity - we want another stimulus bill. And except for infrastructure - we want a huge investment in infrastructure. Oh yes, and except for education spending which should increase, not decrease," and not made the argument that he was in fact rejecting Simpson-Bowles, or at least the parts that mattered. They would observe a huge increase in government spending, a huge increase in the deficit, and that embracing cuts you're not willing to enact doesn't count for much.

Sixth, although Friedman may sincerely believe otherwise, cutting Social Security and Medicare spending are not popular. As Friedman knows, Ryan's reinvention of Medicare is a radical plan, well beyond the cuts proposed in the Affordable Care Act, yet Republicans engage in shameless demagoguery about those cuts.

Seventh, Friedman asserts,

Obama says his plan incorporates the best of Simpson-Bowles. Not only is that not true, but it misses the politics. Republicans will never vote for an “Obama plan.”

Why does Friedman imagine that Obama's presentation of the Simpson-Bowles plan with virtually nothing left intact, except the cuts to Social Security and Medicare that Thomas Friedman believes are the best part of that plan, would be perceived as something other than "an 'Obama plan'"?

If the Republicans won't vote for anything Obama endorses, no matter how good it is, by Friedman's "logic" the President must offer them somebody else's plan without regard to its quality, because in Friedman's mind a plan is only "good" if it can gain bipartisan support. Yes, folks, they pay him to write this stuff.

Friedman's conclusion is that "Obama is running on a suboptimal plan" (i.e., one that doesn't slash Medicare and Social Security") and that means "If he’s lucky, he might win by a whisker".

If Obama went big, and dared to lead, he’d win for sure, and so would the country, because he’d have a mandate to do what needs doing.

Friedman has a short memory. President Bush claimed a "mandate" to reform and privatize Social Security after his reelection, and his own party wouldn't back him. As shocking as it may be to Thomas Friedman, fount of conventional wisdom, rich beyond the dreams of most Americans, a lot of people actually depend upon Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare, and cuts to those programs are not popular.

For goodness sake, the Republican Party would like few things more than to slash or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. If there were a whit of sense to Friedman's notion that endorsing those cuts would pave a path to the White House, Romney would have been there months ago. Following Friedman's advice is a sure path toward making an election night concession speech.

What a Brilliant Idea, Tom

Once again, Thomas Friedman has advice for the Palestinians on how to achieve peace with Israel. Surprisingly it does not involve finding a Palestinian Gandhi (although perhaps he thinks of Marwan Barghouti as a Palestinian Mandela).¹

I can certainly see the efficacy of nonviolent resistance by Palestinians to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — on one condition: They accompany any boycotts, sit-ins or hunger strikes with a detailed map of the final two-state settlement they are seeking. Just calling for “an end to occupation” won’t cut it.

Actually, were he an honest man, Friedman would admit that he cannot see the efficacy in boycotts, sit-ins or hunger strikes. The media neither cares about nor covers them, freeing people like Friedman to ignore the long history of Palestinian peaceful protest and its failure to bring about results. I believe it was Moshe Dayan, many years ago, who commented on the phenomenon that, as of about twenty years ago, Israel's history was of refusing to make concessions during periods of calm then making concessions during periods of uprising, and expressing that it was no surprise that the Palestinian take-away was that only uprising would bring about concessions. The Israeli government under the likes of Ariel Sharon and Netanayahu internalized that message, and responded by refusing to make concessions under any circumstances. So here we are.

Friedman is talking about more than peaceful protest. He describes, "Unabated, disruptive Palestinian civil disobedience in the West Bank". What he fails to explain is how "unabated, disruptive Palestinian civil disobedience in the West Bank" would do anything but make the lives of ordinary Palestinians more difficult, let alone how it would inspire any action by Israel or the rest of the world. Guess what? It would not.

But that map thing, an interesting idea. Which isn't to say that Friedman is strong on the details:

Palestinians need to accompany every boycott, hunger strike or rock they throw at Israel with a map delineating how, for peace, they would accept getting back 95 percent of the West Bank and all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and would swap the other 5 percent for land inside pre-1967 Israel.

The five percent figure is not arbitrary. It's about the minimum amount of Land that Israel would have to cede back to the Palestinians in order to minimize the disruption to the massive population of Israeli "settlers" it has moved onto Palestinian lands. The five percent issue is more complicated than Friedman lets on, given that settlements were placed for strategic purposes and quickly transform a proposed map from having a neat, sensible border to an absurdity, with fingers of land crisscrossing the proposed Palestinian state in order to keep settlements deep within the occupied territories and a network of access roads.

If a Palestinian map simply showed a long line (for a road) with a big circle around Tel Aviv, Friedman would no doubt take strong issue with the notion that the Palestinians were offering a fair trade. But although quick to suggest that the Palestinians should give up the 5% of their own land most desirable to settlers "in exchange for" land inside Israel's present borders, there will be difficulty establishing the terms of a land swap that is equivalent. Also, even offering such a map legitimizes the presence of Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian land, the notion that Israel should not have to do anything to remove or reduce those settlements, and that whatever concessions the Palestinians make should be a starting point for the amount of land expropriated from the occupied territories for the continued enjoyment of settlers.

Friedman links to a proposal from the Washington Institute that includes a proposed map. The map highlights both how, even in a conservative land swap plan, settlements will carve up the proposed Palestinian state. Is Friedman claiming that all of the historic claims about Israel's need for defensible borders is propagandistic hogwash? Because how in the world would you protect those borders from, say, rocket attack? And yes, every time peace comes close to breaking out, anti-peace groups on both sides engage in provocations to try to scuttle the peace process, so something like that will happen. Does Friedman imagine that the final map will include huge "no go" areas for Palestinians in their own state, with similarly huge areas that will be under continued Israeli military occupation? The "Geneva Initiative" maps present similar issues.

The map proposals highlight the lack of bargaining power by Palestinians. The Palestinian side is asked to make enormous concessions as part of the settlement because it has no choice. The difficulty in presenting a map capitulating to the perpetual presence of settlements is that it destroys at the outset the credibility of the Palestinian negotiating team with the Palestinian people. They're giving up 5% of the occupied territories before negotiations even begin, while as Friedman knows the Palestinian people view themselves as having already surrendered 78% of their land in exchange for what they believed would be their own state on the remaining 22%. Even if the Palestinian people understand how negotiations will end they have to start with the Green Line.

But let's say the Palestinians come up with a map that they believe they can sell to the Palestinian people, and approach the Israeli government with the proposal that they agree on final borders for both a Palestinian and Israeli state. The first thing they might do is say, "Let's compare our map to yours." Surely, after all, if it's reasonable to expect the Palestinians to produce a map "to reassure" the Israelis, turnabout is fair play. Why are there no official Israeli maps proposing the settlement of land issues with the Palestinians? Why isn't Friedman calling on the Israeli government to produce a map? As Friedman knows, while Netanyahu has indicated that he will negotiate over borders if and when negotiations ever resume, he has long taken the position that discussion of borders be pushed to the end of negotiations. There are no official Israeli "starting point" maps, and those that have been offered by Israel in association with past negotiations have not been made public.

There's something else to consider here, which is that the problem of the settlements - the issue that Friedman sees as so central to the present conflict that it must be addressed up front with an extraordinary concession by the Palestinians - is entirely of Israel's creation. Why does Friedman overlook that history, four decades of explicit warnings about how the settlements were complicating the peace process, and the fact that the strongest proponents of settlement understood that and forged ahead with the intent of complicating or preventing the eventual creation of a Palestinian state?

This is not by any stretch of the imagination a one-sided conflict, but it is and always has been an asymmetric conflict. Fairness is something of a sideshow. It's reasonable to propose that the Palestinians will have to make disproportionate concessions in order to achieve a final resolution of the conflict, as they have next to no bargaining power and nobody to champion their cause. The eventual settlement will include a ridiculous border that keeps the bulk of the settlements inside of Israel. But I find it hard to believe that anybody, save perhaps Friedman himself, would view Friedman's proposal as serious: "Concede, up front 95% of what the other side demands, then give up the rest (or more) in negotiations."

Here's an idea - Israel and the Palestinians could agree to enter into a binding arbitration under which each side would submit a proposed map of the final borders of an Israeli and Palestinian state. A panel of arbitrators would then accept one or the other as a binding, final resolution of the border issue. We could even include the two maps Friedman mentions in his column as possible alternative choices, to try to diminish any chance of the panel's having to pick the lesser of two evils. Does Friedman believe that Netanyahu would agree to participate?
----------------
1. Friedman quotes a Ha'aretz article,

Barghouti, as Haaretz noted, “is the most authentic leader Fatah has produced, and he can lead his people to an agreement. ... If Israel had wanted an agreement with the Palestinians it would have released him from prison by now.”

If Friedman disagrees, why did he present that quote? But if he agrees, what's the purpose of arguing that the Palestinians should capitulate in order to try to get a peace deal from a government that does not want peace?

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.

Invest in the Future... But Not with Money?

Is Thomas Friedman advocating higher taxes?

In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.

In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning.

If he's advocating a tax increase on those who can afford it (i.e., people like Thomas Friedman) so that we can build and support better and more affordable schools and colleges, great. Perhaps he can devote his next column to explaining why he should pay more taxes and how much his tax increase should be.

But if he's simply serving up a standard dish of platitudes - we need to invest in the future, but right now we need to balance our budgets and tighten our belts - he reduces his entire column to a waste of time.

“The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”

There you go, Mr. Friedman - bring it on.

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.
--------------
1. In fairness, perhaps Friedman believes the iWaiter tablet will have an app that refolds his napkin.

Supporting Democracy Everywhere (Else) in the Middle East

Back in the 1980's, before he developed his "suck on this" attitude toward the Muslim world (an attitude I hope he now recognizes as misguided), I recall conversations in which Thomas Friedman's tepid endorsements of Palestinian rights caused people on the opposite side of the debate to speak his name with contempt, even to the point of labeling him a self-hating Jew. That reaction seemed, and seems, pretty much insane. Friedman is an ardent and consistent supporter of Israel, and his occasional criticism is about strengthening that state, not weakening it. A more fair criticism would be that, when confronted by those who will never agree to peace, he offers what amounts to a, "Just kidding" rather than standing behind his prior sentiments.

Friedman's most recent two columns remind me of why his writings on the Middle East are so frustrating. When Friedman writes,

I am awed by the bravery of the Syrian and Egyptian youths trying to throw off the tyranny of the Assad family and the Egyptian military. The fact that they go into the streets — knowing they face security forces who will not hesitate to gun them down — speaks of the deep longing of young Arabs to be free of the regimes that have so long choked their voices and prevented them from realizing their full potential.

is it not fair to note that he never voiced similar "awe" at the bravery of Palestinian teenagers who took to the streets to protest occupation, even at the risk of being injured or killed? It's not difficult to find even strong Israeli partisans who question the tactics of Israel during the first Intifada, and question whether the harsh treatment of teenagers during that period caused serious blowback, contributing to increased militancy and the much more violent tactics of the second Intifada. Like most in the media, Friedman can't seem to find space in his columns to cover non-violent protest in the occupied territories, unless it's against Palestinian authorities.

My position has long been that the best thing for the Palestinian people and the region would have been for Israel to change its tactics, supporting the development of real democracy during the period when the Palestinians had secular, western-focused leaders. That is, after all, what Israel did with great success within its borders - about 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab. There is no reason to believe that such an effort would not have succeeded in the occupied territories and, given Friedman's long-stated desire for the creation of a model democracy within the Middle East, it would seem to have been a natural argument for him to make. Yet even as he presently writes,

Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom. This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard.

He can't bring himself to include Palestinians youth in his editorial or to speak of (or distinguish) what they want. His only point of consistency is his resort to the need of a "magic man" to solve the problems of any given group, nation, or industry:

Can they each make it without one? Only if they develop their own Nelson Mandelas — unique civic leaders or coalitions who can honor the past, and contain its volcanic urges, but not let it bury the future.

Mandela spent a quarter-century in prison for refusing to renounce violent resistance to the Apartheid regime. Had he been released from prison before Apartheid was on the wane, he likely would have continued to support violent resistance as opposed to engaging in the political process associated with the end of Apartheid and the enfranchisement of all South Africans. But Friedman has never been one to bog himself down with mundane details - as I've previously pointed out, the Mandela he is talking about is the one played by Morgan Friedman in Invictus. His Gandhi is likely the one played by Ben Kingsley.

In his latest column, Friedman hints at a commonality:

Israel’s fear of Islamists taking power all around it cannot be dismissed. But it is such a live possibility precisely because of the last 50 years of Arab dictatorship, in which only Islamists were allowed to organize in mosques while no independent, secular, democratic parties were allowed to develop in the political arena. This has given Muslim parties an early leg up. Arab dictators were convenient for Israel and the Islamists — but deadly for Arab development and education. Now that the lid has come off, the transition will be rocky. But, it was inevitable, and the new politics is just beginning: Islamists will now have to compete with legitimate secular parties.

Both Egypt and Israel made a similar mistake when they saw the growth of secular opposition to their tactics. Egypt fostered the fundamentalist groups that turned into the Muslim Brotherhood and Israel exiled the PLO while funding and supporting Hamas. In a sense these tactics worked - they did weaken secular movements and move the affected regions away from democracy. But by the time it was apparent that the fundamentalist movements were a far greater danger than their secular predecessors, it was too late to turn back the tide. Even in bringing back the PLO as an armed governing body, between Hamas's foothold, the PLO's corruption and the continued occupation, it was too late to turn back the clock on Hamas. As much as Friedman hopes for secular democracy to prevail, without mentioning elections he notes "The two weakest states on its border — Gaza and Lebanon — are controlled by Hamas and Hezbollah."

Friedman offers a great deal of seemingly willful self-deception and half-truth in relation to Benjamin Netanyahu, noting that Netanyahu favors stonewalling on the peace process in the wake of the "Arab Spring", but failing to note that Netanyahu has been a staunch opponent of the peace process throughout his political career, and is in fact far better known for his efforts to impede the peace process or roll back progress.

Friedman expresses, "I understand Israel not ceding territory in this uncertain period", but fails to acknowledge that there has never been a period in which Netanyahu has been willing to strike a deal that would return occupied lands to the Palestinian people, and as always he is presently expanding the size, scope and population of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Friedman also fails to clarify that when he speaks of "ceding territory" he in fact is speaking of annexing territory - the 1967 Green Line border is well documented. The present dispute is not over whether Israel would cede so much as an inch of its own land - nobody has argued that it would do so except in the context of a voluntary land swap - but is instead how much Palestinian land Israel will demand be ceded to it as part of any peace deal.

Friedman pretends he doesn't understand what is happening,

What I can’t understand is doing nothing. Israel has an Arab awakening in its own backyard in the person of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. He’s been the most radical Arab leader of all. He is the first Palestinian leader to say: judge me on my performance in improving my peoples’ lives, not on my rhetoric. His focus has been on building institutions — including what Israelis admit is a security force that has helped to keep Israel peaceful — so Palestinians will be ready for a two-state solution. Instead of rewarding him, Israel has been withholding $100 million in Palestinian tax revenues that Fayyad needs — in punishment for the Palestinians pressing for a state at the U.N. — to pay the security forces that help to protect Israel. That is crazy.

Friedman knows very well what is going on. Netanyahu, and those in government who are further to his right, are hoping that Fayyad fails in his efforts and that they can use the failure as their next excuse for why it's not possible to work toward a final resolution that they do not want. They want peace, if we define that as a Palestinian population that is kept out of sight and out of mind, controlled such that it can inflict a minimum of damage outside of its confines. But a final agreement that formalizes a boarder and creates a Palestinian state? There has never been a whit of evidence that Netanyahu wants such an outcome, and surely Friedman is aware of the far more radical views of Avigdor Lieberman and his followers.

Israel’s best defense is to strengthen Fayyadism — including giving Palestinian security services more areas of responsibility to increase their legitimacy and make clear that they are not the permanent custodians of Israel’s occupation. This would not only help stabilize Israel’s own backyard — and prevent another uprising that would spread like wildfire to the Arab world without the old dictators to hold it back — but would lay the foundation for a two-state solution and for better relations with the Arab peoples.

I agree completely. But unlike Friedman, I won't be making excuses for Netanyahu when it doesn't happen.