Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2329

Harper Gets His Majority

Stephen Harper came into the election campaign close to a majority and with tonight's results he now has one:

Elsewhere in Canada, the separatist Bloc Québécois collapsed almost entirely sending a huge parcel of seats to the NDP.

Outside of Québéc the center-left Liberal Party lost ground to both the NDP and the Conservatives, and vote-splitting between Liberals and the NDP seeks to have given Harper the crucial seats he needed to get over the 50 yard line. Back in the 1990s, a divided right made the Liberals the dominant party in Canadian politics. For the past five years, it's been just the reverse as divisions on the left keep throwing elections to Harper. It'll be interesting to see if Canada manages to evolve toward a stable two-party system.

Orlando Fact Of The Day

Michael Winerip in the NYT: "There are 2,953 homeless students attending Orange County Public Schools, up from 1,463 in 2008."

A reminder that you don't win the future by allowing sky-high unemployment to persist for years.

What Is The Alternative To American Decline?

The Weekly Standard's cover package assailing Barack Obama's weak foreign policy seems ill-timed. Still, Bill Kristol is raising important issues here:

Thanks for confirming that our current president believes his task is to accommodate American decline. Thanks for reminding us how high a priority he places on appeasing those who revile us. And thanks for explaining that our Leader from Behind sees his role as "shepherding us through this phase" of appeasement and decline.

That's all very polemical, but Kristol is raising the right issues and revealing that Obama has them right. The United States currently accounts for about five percent of the world's population. The only way for us to maintain enduring military hegemony over the planet under those circumstances would be for huge swathes of the planet to permanently consign themselves to poverty. Currently, however, the very large nation of China is following the trail of export-led growth already blazed by smaller countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan and is growing quite rapidly. India, taking a different approach, is also growing very fast. And natural resource exporters such as Brazil and Nigeria are benefitting from this process and appear to be improving other aspects of their policy regime at the same time.

It might be politically convenient to just pretend this isn't happening, but it doesn't make a good deal of sense. Managing America's relative decline while continuing to improve our absolute living standards is a completely appropriate mission for a 21st century statesman. What's Kristol's alternative? Launch wars with Iran, Syria, and North Korea while deepening our involvement in Libya and Afghanistan and watch the Chinese laugh?

Endgame

With my arms folded tight:

— Barney Frank says Eric Cantor's effort to credit Bush for Osama's death is sad.

— Missed connection from the Osama's dead party by the White House is also sad.

— Peter Beinart

Comparing Voldemort and bin Laden

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Speculation about whether Osama bin Laden's death will provide a lift to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 strikes me as unseemly, and sort of unnecessary—the movie is going to open huge no matter the circumstances. But if folks are going to go there, it's worth remembering, especially given the emerging meme that the information that lead to bin Laden's death was initially obtained by enhanced interrogation techniques (a claim former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has debunked), how J.K. Rowling feels about torture. Rowling worked at Amnesty International before she was a globally famous author, and her commencement speech at Harvard in 2008 pulls goes into some depth about the impact that experience had on her. She said:

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.….

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

In the Harry Potter universe, characters who torture other people are, without exception, morally crippled. The damage done to the Longbottoms by the Cruciatus Curse, Bellatrix Lestrange's torture of Hermione Granger in Deathly Hallows, the ongoing stain on wizarding society that is the use of dementors at Azkaban (Rowling is clear that Barty Crouch, Jr. is insane and evil, but also that the threat of the dementors contributed to his insanity), or the tortures house-elves are forced to inflict upon themselves, the Harry Potter books are adamantly anti-torture. Harry's actually admonished at one point to preferring disarming his opponents to causing them pain, but he sticks to it fairly stubbornly. If we're going to look for wildly speculative parallels between Rowling's fictional universe and our own, it's worth remembering that this is one area where the two struggles against evil don't match up.

What's Next For The 10 Most Wanted List?

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, I wonder who'll replace him on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list?

My personal favorite on the list is Irish mob chief Whitey Bulger whose amazing story (recounted in Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob) includes massive FBI misconduct, a brother who was also president of the Massachusetts State Senate, and various other "stranger than fiction" goodies.

Worthwhile Canadian Blog Post

Sentiments you won't hear expressed during an American election campaign: "[A]ll of the candidates are actually reasonably thoughtful and intelligent and progressive people (by international standards) who probably want the best for Canada."

I note that the near-total lack of check and balances on a Canadian Prime Minister backed by a parliamentary majority should call into question the American conventional wisdom that multiplication of veto points and supermajority is necessary to produce near-median outcomes. Under Brian Mulroney the country was governed by a Progressive Conservative Party that won the allegiances of the median voter by being so moderate that it was eventually undermined by the creation of a further-right splinter party. Then Liberals won a bunch of elections by being the centrally-positioned party on the ideological spectrum. And now under Stephen Harper's minority governments the big political mission has been Harper's efforts to persuade people that his real agenda is a moderate one and he can be trusted with a majority. The American system encourages politicians to make extremist promises to their base while the Canadian one challenges politicians to reassure voters.

High School Drop Outs Suffer From Extremely High Unemployment Even When There's No Recession

Here's a chart from the St Louis Fed:

This kind of thing makes me wonder how much of a difference could be made by pure information. How many 14 and 15 year-olds are aware of this correlation? How might their behavior—and that of their parents—change if they were better informed? My dad dropped out of high school and he's turned out fine, but I think that still wasn't a decision with a positive expected value. People suffer from optimism bias that can be further exacerbated by bad information. After all, it's not totally obvious what job-relevant skills one learns in 12th grade.

Medellín as a Mass Transit Success Story

Francis Fukuyama and Seth Colby write about the incredible turnaround in Medellín, Colombia focusing on the mayor's theory that improving the physical environment in the city's poorest neighborhoods has made a huge difference:

The most striking feature of Fajardo's approach was his plan to erect high-quality public architecture in Medellín's poorest neighborhoods. "Architecture sends an important political message," he says. "When you go to the poorest neighborhood and build the city's most beautiful building, that gives a sense of dignity." Fajardo and his colleagues believed in social urbanism: the idea that modernist buildings and transportation systems of the sort Libia Gomez now enjoys would help bridge the enormous gulf of distrust separating the poor from mainstream society. In barrios like Santo Domingo and Comuna 13, the city created digitized maps of every street and building, noting where drug gangs operated and money flowed, and devised architectural features to disrupt them.

I saw a big exhibit about this at MOMA last year, and my reaction was to think that this story underrates the extent to which the improvement is being driven by the practical advantages of better transportation infrastructure much more than the rest of this stuff. Imagine a poor farming village located across a dangerously fast-flowing river from some vacant fertile farmland. Build a bridge over the river and the villagers will prosper. Build a road connecting a town to a gold mine and the town will prosper. Well, the "resource" that brings people to a city is access to the other people and especially the commercial centers where people with money are gathering to conduct business. Giving people the practical opportunity to get downtown is a huge driver of prosperity and economic opportunity and the Metrocable system seems like a very smart transportation solution to the specific geography of the city.

Elite Macroeconomic Policy Failure Drives The Rise of the European Far-Right

Marine Le Pen is the leader of the far-right National Front party in France (and the youngest daughter of its founder) and looks like she may be poised to outpoll incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy in the French presidential election next year. Russell Shorto has an excellent profile of the woman in the new NYT Magazine that naturally includes reflections on the broader electoral success far-right European parties have been having. As he puts it on his blog, the new far right is "mixing frank right-wing anti-immigrant policies with a very left-wing social agenda, which includes a critique of capitalism and a call for a return to state regulations."

Here's Le Pen laying it out:

Signaling a clear break from her father and the right in general, she has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. "For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector," she told me. "But I'm convinced that's not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand." The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

I think that when the far-right has been successful, it's almost always by pairing the politics of violence and racism with a critique of laissez faire capitalism. It's not a coincidence that Mussolini was a dissident socialist before he was a fascist, and Hitler, too, forged an alliance with the German business community while remaining critical of free markets as such. The common thread here is that this is what happens when the elites running a capitalist political economy fail. And a failure of the elites who run the system is exactly what the US and Europe are living through right now, and we lived through a bigger one in the 1930s. There's been a bit of a bloggish contretemps lately over whether or not JM Keynes was in some sense an advocate of "central planning," and this reality is the right lens through which to view his intellectual project. His idea was that only through accepting the need for an important government role in economic stabilization could the underlying project be saved. Otherwise, if crisis is inevitable and all efforts to fix it are counterproductive, then Marx or Le Pen or Hitler or someone is right and the system has to be torn down.