Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 165

What OPEC is Up Against

American oil production has surged in recent months. U.S. drillers once again got their feet under them after a petrostate production cut helped induce a minor bump in global crude prices, and as a result prices have once again fallen well below $50. This is the pendulum swing of supply and demand, and sure enough, now that we’re back to bargain prices again, analysts are expecting American drilling activity—or more accurately, the number of U.S. rigs in operation—to take a hit through the end of the year. The FT reports:

For 23 consecutive weeks, the number of rigs seeking US crude has climbed. The latest tally from services company Baker Hughes, due on Friday, is likely to bring the streak to two dozen. With the West Texas Intermediate oil price at $45 a barrel, the rig count will probably plateau, if not decrease, in the second half of 2017, analysts say. However, investors bullish on oil should pause before betting US output will soon retreat.

We’ve been through this before, back when the U.S. rig count crashed in the wake of the crude price collapse three years ago. Back then, some observers were surprised to see American oil output stay relatively high, relative to the amount of rigs operating in the country’s shale fields. But much of this discrepancy can be put down to a structural problem with using rig count as a metric for predicting output: during tough times, the worst performing and highest cost rigs are shut off first, effectively culling the herd and leaving the big gushers still in operation. If America’s rig count is due another drop, we can expect a similar pattern to occur, with the strongest and most productive projects continuing to churn out the crude.

Then, too, there’s the issue of our so-called “fracklog” of drilled but uncompleted wells, also called DUCs. Though bargain prices have forced a number of shale firms to shut down projects, they haven’t sat idly by, and instead have prepped future fracking operations by drilling the necessary wells ahead of time, awaiting an upturn in prices before they actually get down to business. The upshot of that is that, if and when global supply and demand start to rebalance and prices rise again, U.S. shale producers will be primed and ready to take advantage of that rebound, and will quickly be able to boost their production. As the FT notes, that “fracklog” has grown in recent months:

One measure of the latent supply is the number of DUCs, or “drilled but uncompleted” wells. These holes await the attention of a hydraulic fracturing crew to release oil from shale rocks. The DUC population in the four main US shale oil regions increased by 22 per cent to 5,005 between December and May, according to the Energy Information Administration.

This is the new oil reality. It’s characterized by cheaper prices, true, but today’s market also now relies on U.S. shale companies to be the new global swing producers, supplanting what has long been OPEC’s role at helping balance supply and demand. The key difference today is that it’s market forces—not strategic thinking from the cartel—that are moving the arm of this pendulum. That, and the fact that oil prices have now stabilized at a price less than half of what they were just a few years ago. It’s a brave new world.

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Legal Weed, Lower Grades

The marijuana legalization juggernaut is probably irreversible. National opinion has swung strongly in favor of the legalizers, eight states have sanctioned recreational use, and others are likely to follow. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions of all people seems to recognize that vigorous enforcement of federal marijuana laws is politically untenable.

But as policymakers set the parameters for our more permissive world, it’s important to take into account the potential social fallout. A recent study from the Netherlands found evidence that access to legal marijuana significantly reduces college students’ academic performance. From the abstract:

We find that the academic performance of students who are no longer legally permitted to buy cannabis substantially increases. Grade improvements are driven by younger students and the effects are stronger for women and low performers. In line with how cannabis consumption affects cognitive functioning, we find that performance gains are larger for courses that require more numerical/mathematical skills. Our investigation of underlying channels using course evaluations suggests that performance gains are driven by an improved understanding of the material rather than changes in students’ study effort.

America’s experiment with legal weed is also unlikely to be cost-free.

And if studies like these keep accumulating, showing that there are real costs to regular recreational drug use, it’s not at all unreasonable to think that universities and workplaces—private institutions—will start testing more stringently, and enforcing prohibitions of their own. And that would be all to the good.

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A Race to Nowhere

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

James Q. Whitman

Princeton University Press, 2017, 224 pp., $24.95

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Adam Cohen

Penguin Press, 2016, 416 pp., $28

If slavery was America’s original sin, as so many commentators have said, then race-based restrictions and eugenic sterilization were the twisted progeny of the nation’s exile from Eden. Two recent books by prominent legal scholars explore these dark corners of American history with new insight. No one comes off looking good in either book, but that is typically the case with the consequences of an original sin. If racism is the fundamental flaw in the American character, it will inevitably come out even in our heroes.

In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Yale Law School Professor James Q. Whitman makes a credible case for his assertion that, by the 1930s, “America was the obvious preeminent example of a ‘race state,’” even if he falls short of proving the thesis implicit in his book’s title that the United States actually served as the model for Nazi tyranny.

By “race state,” Whitman does not merely mean that racial groups suffered discrimination as Jews did in early 20th-century America. He means a nation that systematically divides its people into different classes of citizenship along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. For the United States as a whole and Southern states in particular, Whitman argues, an inferior sort of citizenship existed for blacks and Native Americans. Nazi Germany, of course, was targeting Jews, not blacks, for a second-class citizenship of a kind far worse than the discrimination that Jews had long suffered throughout Europe. Just how much America served as a model for that effort remains unclear.

The evidence Whitman presents to argue that America was a race state is a disturbing brew of laws and practices going far beyond the familiar accounts of Jim Crow segregation we neatly confine in our collective memory to the pre-Civil Rights Act American South. Critical to America as a race state, according to Whitman, were racial restrictions on immigration, citizenship, and marriage. These, coupled with de facto and de jure segregation and eugenics legislation at the state level, supposedly provided Hitler with his model for the infamous Nuremburg Laws.

Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 limiting entry visas based on national origin, the United States imposed racial or ethnic restrictions on immigration. Whitman depicts these laws as making America “the global leader in racial immigration law,” but he provides no comparative historical context. During the interwar period, for instance, the newly formed ethnic states of Central and Eastern Europe that replaced the multi-ethnic Austria-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires excluded ethnically diverse residents in a far more draconian fashion than did the United States. Conditions became so dire that the League of Nations authorized Nansen Passports for displaced citizens. Holders included Marc Chagall, Aristotle Onassis, and Igor Stravinsky.

Post-World War I European horrors do not absolve America of its guilt, but they do mean that America hardly stands out as a global leader in racial immigration law. From time immemorial, states have imposed race-based limits on immigration, accepting their own types and barring others. Hitler didn’t need America as a model, other than as proof that a supposedly progressive democracy could also act in such a manner. The Harding Administration’s America First policies and the crude nativism of Harding’s Vice President and successor, Calvin Coolidge, simply added the United States to the litany of nations restricting immigration in the postwar collapse of comity.

Legal limits on citizenship for some residents, rather than immigration, provide Whitman with better evidence of American racism. At the time of Hitler’s rise, America classified Native Americas, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos as non-citizen nationals—but this applied to Native Americans living on reservations and Puerto Ricans and Filipinos living in their homelands, which were American dependencies. African Americans were systematically denied the right to vote in Southern states. These laws and practices created second-class citizenship based on race or ethnicity. For Puerto Ricans and Filipinos, however, the situation was similar to the second-class citizenship of the native people living under European colonial rule throughout Africa, Asia, or the Pacific.

As Whitman notes, Hitler at first sought to encourage the emigration of Jews by stripping them of rights and treating them as second-class; the “final solution” extermination policy came later. America did not systematically encourage emigration by either African Americans or Native Americans. The parallel with America rested in Hitler trying to subjugate an established domestic community with theoretical and to some extent real legal rights, but differences persisted. As a group and individually, German Jews had greater economic power than African Americans or Native Americans, and the latter’s legal rights were problematic in much of the country compared to those of German Jews. For Hitler, Whitman states, segregating Jews was not a viable option; all-but-forced emigration, followed by genocide, was. In America, as in South Africa, segregation or apartheid remained the favored means. U.S. policies could offer analogies that, as Whitman shows, Nazi officials eagerly collected and used but, as he concedes, not a template or model. The Ottoman Empire could have provided a template for treating religious minorities as second-class citizens, and its successor state, Turkey, could have provided a model for ethnic extermination. For understandable reasons, American parallels proved more appealing to Nazi officials and propagandists than Turkish ones.

The Nazis hit pay dirt with American state anti-miscegenation laws. Having dozens to choose from, they could pour over all manner of limits on whites marrying non-whites, as that term was varyingly defined, with prison time for violators plus annulment of the marriage and possible termination of parental rights. “Draconian penalties of this kind represented a sort of law that only the United States had to offer,” Whitman writes in a welcome bit of comparative analysis. “The only other even partially comparable example that the Nazi literature highlighted in the early 1930s was found in South Africa, which penalized extramarital sex between the races, but not marriage.” Some American states did that, too. And the American laws remained on the books more than two decades after the Allied armies swept the German ones into history’s dustbin. Of course, unlike the German laws, the American ones did not apply to marriages between Jews and non-Jews because they invariably categorized Jews of European ancestry as white.

Whitman touches only lightly on eugenics, the then-widespread urge to channel human reproduction along lines of supposed hereditary fitness. For a generation or more, the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900 gave wing to the notion that it was as simple to breed superior humans as thoroughbred horses. Except for the purported support that it gave to immigration restrictions and anti-miscegenation laws, eugenics does not feature prominently in the creation of the American race state in Whitman’s presentation. The nation’s worst eugenic excesses involved compulsory state sterilization laws, which typically targeted mentally ill or developmentally disabled citizens regardless of race. Most victims were white. Whitman recognizes that the mere fact that Germany adopted similar laws and then turned them on Jews and gypsies does not necessarily support his thesis:

American eugenicists, as repellant as they were, did not advocate mass euthanasia. In any case, eugenics, which was widely regarded as respectable at the time, was an international movement, whose reach extended beyond the borders of both the United States and Nazi Germany. The global history of eugenics cannot be told an exclusively German-American tale.

Here, a second recent book picks up the thread.

 

In Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, lawyer and journalist Adam Cohen, a former president of the Harvard Law Review, offers a compelling, personality-driven history of American eugenics centering on one critical legal case. America’s role in what Whitman depicted as an international movement takes center stage in Cohen’s book, which includes some discussion of the American contribution to Nazi eugenics.

As Cohen notes, eugenics was born in Britain but received its fullest legal expression (at least so far) in the United States during the first four decades of the 20th century. His story centers on the adoption of Virginia’s 1924 eugenic sterilization law and the subsequent litigation upholding its constitutionality in the 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell. At the time in the United States, eugenic sterilization laws of the type enacted in Virginia enjoyed widespread (albeit not universal) support from conservatives and progressives alike, Republicans and Democrats, scientists and physicians, Christians and agnostics.

As a modern scientific concept, the idea of positive eugenics, which involves encouraging the “best” humans to mate and reproduce, was revived and given a measure of credibility during the late 19th century by the English polymath Francis Galton. He saw it as a logical consequence of Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest thinking applied to human society, or “Social Darwinism” as it was dubbed by its critics. Eugenics did not immediately gain wide support because most late-Victorian naturalists, including Charles Darwin but not Galton, thought that living things, including people, could pass on characteristics acquired during their lifetime such that neither favored nor disfavored traits were necessarily fixed. Further, virtually all pre-20th century scientists (including Galton) subscribed to a blending view of heredity under which children inherited a blend of their parents’ or ancestors’ traits. In this view, the challenge laid not so much in pulling inferior families up to the norm (because that should happen naturally through cross-breeding) but rather in keeping superior family from falling back toward it. Thus Galton stressed positive eugenics.

Early in the 20th century, mainstream scientific opinion was won over to eugenics following the rise of Mendelian genetics. They held that parental and other ancestral traits reappear in children and more remote descendants without blending. Early geneticists saw this process applying in a simplistic, one-to-one fashion to many severely disabling traits, including the sort of developmental disabilities supposedly at issue in Buck. This view spurred interest in negative eugenics, which involves discouraging or stopping persons with disfavored traits from procreating. Eugenicists reasoned that if severely disabling mental conditions were Mendelian characteristics, then for the sake of society and themselves, carriers should not breed. Of course, the triumph of eugenics built on a history of increased public acceptance of a competitive struggle for existence as the driving force for social and economic progress, as reflected in the writing of such enormously influential intellectuals as Herbert Spencer and John Fiske. It only took a slight twist of reasoning to transpose accepting the natural selection of the fit into encouraging the intentional elimination of the unfit.

By 1920, in an era when genetics was institutionalized at both state land-grant and private research universities, every American geneticist either endorsed eugenics or did not publicly dissent. Many prominent psychologists, sociologists, and physicians approved of it. Their professional associations followed suit, most notably the American Genetics Association and many state medical societies. A large circle of distinguished professionals added their vigorous support—including renowned zoologist and Stanford University’s founding President David Starr Jordan, Harvard University biologists Edward East and William Castle, American Museum of Natural History President Henry Fairfield Osborn, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and inventor Alexander Graham Bell. A wide range of American political leaders, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge endorsed eugenic measures, and their appointees sat on the Supreme Court that heard Buck. Wealthy philanthropists and foundations vied to support eugenics research and lawmaking. Indeed, the Virginia eugenics sterilization law upheld in Buck was derived from a model statute drafted by the Eugenics Education Society with funding from both the Carnegie Institute and the widow of railroad magnate E. F. Harriman. Advocates supported by the Rockefeller and Russell Sage Foundations lobbied for enactment of eugenics legislation throughout the South. The passage of Virginia’s sterilization statute was therefore not the isolated act of a single racist state.

By focusing on that one state and its infamous statute, however, Cohen brings the whole movement to life and gives it a gritty, personal, and intensely human feel that succeeds in assigning individual blame and injury rather portraying it as the product of abstract social forces. Underscoring this approach, he tells the story in a series of two-chapter-long mini-biographies beginning and ending with ones featuring the passive female victim, Carrie Buck. In between these bookends come two chapters each on four main male protagonists: the law’s leading local proponent, the Superintendent of Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded Albert Priddy; national eugenics champion Harry Laughlin of the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenics Record Office; the law’s reluctant author and courtroom advocate Aubrey Strode; and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the Supreme Court decision with transparent enthusiasm and rhetorical flourish. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Holmes famously declared.

By 1927, the octogenarian Holmes had gained near-legendary status as a hero of American law largely on the basis of his majority and minority opinions in favor of upholding the constitutionality of Progressive Era social legislation. He did so, as Cohen documents, less out of support for such laws as out of his legal-realist conviction that whichever side prevails in the political contest of lawmaking should have its will carried out in practice. Of course, in writing for the Court in Buck, Holmes did not need to fall back on the principle of judicial deference to legislative decision-making. By temperament and philosophy, as Cohen also shows, Holmes supported eugenics. As early as 1873, he argued that the law “must tend in the long run to aid the survival of the fittest,” and two decades later he hailed a future when science would “take control of life, and condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy.” On this and other evidence Cohen writes, “Holmes, who had spent much of his life as a judicial spectator, leapt to life as an enthusiastic advocate for the eugenic cause.”

A cause-orientated reformer himself with service as an ACLU lawyer and aide to the current New York Mayor, Cohen strives to assign individual human agency—credit and fault—and show that people can make a difference. He makes a point of stating that “Holmes could have led the Supreme Court in a completely different direction.” The law, as Cohen documents, was riddled with flaws and the case corrupt from beginning to end. Despite Holmes’s assertions to the contrary, Carrie Buck neither qualified for sterilization under the statute nor had fair representation in court. People caused the injustice done to her and could have prevented it at several points. Holmes, Laughlin, and Priddy were hopeless advocates, Cohen suggests, but Strode knew better. He becomes the cautionary character in Cohen’s tale for those of us who fail to stand against evil.

I see American eugenics as more the result of newfangled scientific ideas combining with old-fashioned racist and classist impulses than of the acts of a few critical people. Nevertheless, I suspect that both Cohen and I would draw a similar basic lesson from the episode: One should cultivate a healthy skepticism of simplistic scientific solutions to social issues, especially when these solutions run counter to traditional moral values, and one should also err on the side of kindness in policymaking.

Unlike Whitman, Cohen does not focus on American laws and practices as models for Nazi Germany, but the parallels shine through nevertheless in his close study of Laughlin and Holmes. Publications by Laughlin’s Eugenics Record Office hailed Nazi eugenics programs and Laughlin both advised Nazi scientists about eugenic sterilization and received an honorary degree from the Nazi-dominated University of Heidelberg for his work on racial cleansing. The eugenics-inspired Immigration Act of 1924, for which Laughlin testified before Congress, helped to keep out Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. “The Jew is doubtless here to stay and the Nordics’ job is to keep more from coming in,” he wrote to eugenicist Madison Grant in 1932.

As it happened, Grant’s tome, The Passing of a Great Race, did influence Hitler, who was said to have written, “The book is my Bible.” And when Nazi officials were tried at Nuremberg for mass sterilization and other crimes against humanity, they cited Holmes’s words in Buck v. Bell in their defense: “It is better for everybody if society, instead of waiting until it has to execute degenerate offspring or leave them to starve because of feeble-mindedness, can prevent obviously inferior individuals from propagating their kind.” American law may not have served as the model for Nazi race and eugenics practices, but the Nazis used it to justify and defend them.

Human rights are more easily trampled than protected, which is all the more reason to act without reproach when dealing with our fellow men and women. Through their study of American race law and eugenics, Whitman and Cohen remind us that bad individual acts can have horrific human consequences, and also that what happens in one place need not stay in that place. Less portentous but not necessarily less interesting, they can also cast a hero like Oliver Wendell Holmes off his pedestal.

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Japan’s Labor Shortage Will Change the World

Japan’s labor shortage continues to climb and has reached its highest point in 43 years, Financial Times reports:

The ratio of open jobs to applicants in Japan hit a 43-year high in May, as labour shortages in the world’s third-largest economy become ever more extreme.

The closely watched indicator of Japan’s market rose 0.01 points to a reading of 1.49, the highest since February 1974, as companies struggle to fill positions from an ageing and shrinking workforce. The indicator covers all jobs, permanent and temporary. […]

Another landmark is close, as the jobs-to-applicants ratio for regular, full-time workers rose to a high of 0.99.

That implies there will soon be a full-time position with benefits and some job security for every applicant — a transformation in the Japanese labour market.

The consequences of Japan’s labor shortage will change the world. Coping with the labor shortage caused by falling birth rates and resistance to immigration in Japan will accelerate robotization. Because of the worker shortage in affluent Japan, there will be a rich market for labor-saving devices that will accelerate the development of the “post-human” workforce.

The implications are already visible. Years ago I saw the first beer-pouring machines in the lounges at Narita Airport, with no human bartender needed. That was tech nobody would bother to invent in a country with lots of poor young people looking for jobs, but in Japan it made sense.

And what happens in Japan won’t stay in Japan. New tech is relatively expensive to develop for the first time, but once it is invented, it can be replicated cheaply. So machines developed in the unusual Japanese market can and will be cheap enough to use in labor markets where workers are much cheaper than Japan.

Worker shortages in Japan will lead to worker surpluses elsewhere. Winter is coming.

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Trump to Xi: The Honeymoon Is Over

Three months after their friendly Mar-a-Lago summit, the honeymoon between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may officially be over. Signs of tension have been accumulating for weeks, from Rex Tillerson’s threat of secondary sanctions over North Korea to President Trump’s menacing tweet that China’s efforts to restrain Pyongyang had “not worked out.” This week, with South Korea’s president visiting the White House, President Trump fired several shots across the bow.

First on Thursday came the secondary sanctions, per the Washington Post:

“Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced a finding that Bank of Dandong, a Chinese bank that acts as a conduit for illicit North Korean financial activity, is a foreign bank of primary money laundering concern, and FinCEN has proposed to sever the bank from the U.S. financial system,” the Treasury Department said in a notification.

In addition, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated two Chinese individuals and one Chinese company “in response to North Korea’s ongoing WMD development and continued violations of UN Security Council resolutions,” the notification stated.

As the Post reports, the sanctions came after Treasury gave China 30 days to step up pressure on a list of Chinese firms that were illicitly dealing with Pyongyang. Unsatisfied with China’s lackluster response, Trump pulled the trigger on sanctions to call Beijing’s bluff.

A few hours after the sanctions shock, the State Department dropped another bombshell on the Chinese, announcing an upcoming to Taiwan. The news quickly sent Beijing into a tizzy, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanding that the U.S. revoke its decision and claiming that the move “[ran] counter to the consensus reached by the two presidents” at Mar-a-Lago.

Still reeling from those two developments, the Chinese woke up on Friday to a the following scoop from Axios: Trump is preparing to launch a major trade war with China, overruling nearly his entire cabinet to impose massive, punitive tariffs on steel and other goods:

With more than 20 top officials present, including Trump and Vice President Pence, the president and a small band of America First advisers made it clear they’re hell-bent on imposing tariffs — potentially in the 20% range — on steel, and likely other imports.

The penalties could eventually extend to other imports.Among those that may be considered: aluminum, semiconductors, paper, and appliances like washing machines.

One official estimated the sentiment in the room as 22 against and 3 in favor — but since one of the three is named Donald Trump, it was case closed.

Time will tell if a trade war will actually happen. But in any case, the Chinese have a lot to think about; have they underestimated Trump’s willingness to escalate—and overestimated their own ability to control him with false promises and symbolic concessions?

Buckle up, folks. This could be a bumpy ride.

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Beijing Plows Ahead in the South China Sea

China continues to make rapid progress in militarizing the South China Sea on President Trump’s watch, Financial Times reports:

Over the past three months, China has built four new missile shelters on Fiery Cross, boosting the number of installations on the contested reef to 12, according to satellite images provided to the Financial Times by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.

China has also expanded radar facilities on Fiery Cross and two other disputed reefs — Subi and Mischief — in the Spratly Island chain, and started building underground structures that Greg Poling, AMTI director, assesses will be used to store munitions.

“We haven’t seen any slowdown in construction, including since the Mar-a-Lago summit,” said Mr Poling. “The islands are built and they are clearly militarised, which means they already got over the hard part. Now every time they put in a new radar or new missile shelter, it is harder for the world to get angry. They are building a gun, they are just not putting the bullets in yet.”

As the Australian expert Euan Graham explains, the buildup on China’s manmade islands has already changed the status quo in ways that will be hard to reverse:

“They already exert a strategic effect by projecting China’s presence much further out,” said Mr Graham. “They will not prevent the US Navy from operating in their vicinity, but they will complicate the threat environment for US ships and aircraft — by extending the [Chinese navy’s] surveillance and targeting net, as well as the envelope of power projection.”

Much of the blame for Beijing’s domination of the South China Sea can be laid at President Obama’s feet, given his consistent passivity in the face of China’s expansionism. But Trump has hardly changed Beijing’s calculus. Early on, he was surprisingly silent on Chinese buildup in the South China Sea (perhaps hoping for cooperation on North Korea); only lately has his administration begun to speak out strongly and conduct freedom-of-navigation exercises there. But neither Trump’s initial quiescence nor his recent tougher gestures have slowed the relentless forward drive of its construction.

Could that conceivably change? Hope springs eternal, and there have been recent rumblings that Trump is fed up with Beijing’s failure to deliver on North Korea and could turn up the heat on other fronts, including the South China Sea. But given the extent of China’s progress, it is difficult to imagine how this genie can be put back in the bottle.

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Japan Doesn’t Have a Chance to Meet Emissions Targets

President Trump (deservedly) drew the world’s ire when he decided to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord that the start of this month. But whatever the motivations behind that decision, it has given us an opportunity to more closely scrutinize an agreement that had faded into the back pages after its much-heralded signing in December 2015. It won’t surprise regular readers that, under closer examination, that voluntary deal, entirely devoid of any whiff of an enforcement mechanism, is looking exactly as flimsy as we thought it would be. The latest proof of that comes to us courtesy of Japan, whose post-Fukushima, nuclear-less national energy mix is certain to emit more than Tokyo’s self-imposed Paris targets:

Even as it champions the Paris climate agreement, Japan – the world’s fifth-biggest carbon emitter – continues its massive reliance on coal and natural gas, putting it out of step with the rest of the Group of Seven bloc and even South Korea. Coal is seen by Japan’s powerful industry ministry as an important part of the country’s energy mix after the closure of nuclear reactors in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Coal now accounts for about 31 percent of Japan’s power generation mix. Over the next decade, companies plan to build 41 new coal-fired power stations, according to data from government and companies.

Under the Paris deal, Japan has pledged to trim its carbon emissions by 26 percent in 2030 from 2013 levels. The ministry estimates that Japan’s emissions could exceed its 2030 target by 70 million tonnes if all the coal power plants were built.

We are shocked—shocked!—that Japan isn’t on track to meet its voluntary emissions reduction goals. This makes sense, though, when you consider that the country is desperate to replace its massive fleet of (zero emissions) nuclear reactors with fossil fuel-fired power plants. That transition was always going to entail an increase in emissions.

The only reason this is a story, though, is because Japan put forth an unrealistic target for itself, one that it’s now in all likelihood not going to meet. It did this while talking publicly about the importance of global emissions reductions, because Tokyo’s policymakers—like those found in the capitals of countries around the world—know that there’s no cost to talking a big game on climate. Paris can’t punish Japan for this, so what we’re seeing is simply a country playing the hand it was dealt as best it could.

Meanwhile, the United States is heading out of the Paris agreement while simultaneously reducing its greenhouse gas emissions on the back of surging shale gas production. This is the irony wrapped in all the hypocrisies of global climate mitigation efforts: the one major developed country most hostile to the Paris deal is also the one furthest along the road towards meeting its goals.

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The Smallness of the Health Debate and the Failure of Elite Imagination

Lurking beneath all the vicious barbs and apocalyptic claims being hurled about in the fight over Obamacare and its potential replacement is a sense of resignation—resignation that our healthcare system is basically stagnant, that costs will continue to consume a larger and larger share of our national income, and that major changes in the way care is delivered or regulated are basically impossible.

The debate we are having is therefore about how best to distribute what is assumed to be a constant amount of suffering—about who should be screwed over the most as the system as a whole continues to stagnate and underperform. Obamacare imposed higher costs on the young and raised taxes on the rich while adding millions to the Medicaid rolls—a second-rate government insurance system that may or may not improve health outcomes. The GOP would lower insurance costs for the young, raise them for the rich, and shrink the Medicaid rolls reduce the deficit and deliver a big tax cut, mostly to high-earners.

In other words, the parties are locked into a more-or-less zero-sum fight over resources that leaves the underlying deformity of our system unaddressed: Healthcare costs too much, whether it is paid for by government or private insurance. Our existing healthcare system is on a trajectory to bankrupt the country no matter how we distribute the costs. There was a time when wonks on both sides expressed more interest in addressing the roots of this cost disease. But today—whether because of a loss of national confidence, or a deficiency of ideas, or because of rising partisan balkanization that makes everyone simply want to protect their own without regard for the country’s long-term health and prosperity—the totality of our health debate has been reduced to a single, narrow question: How much should government subsidize health insurance as the system as a whole continues to sink?

There is no answer to that question will satisfy Americans in the long run. So whatever the fate of the Senate’s hastily drafted and deeply unpopular Obamacare repeal, the wider healthcare policy agenda should focus like a laser on making care less expensive—on achieving the kind of positive-sum outcome that has always been the key to America’s economic success.

What if instead of simply rolling back Obamacare’s taxes and transfers, Congress passed a smorgasbord of experimental measures aimed at bringing prices under control in the long run? There are a number of ways we can reduce cost by increasing the supply of care. For example, we could tweak our immigration system so that more well-qualified doctors come to work in the United States (the U.S. has fewer doctors per capita than many other advanced countries) and certify more medical education programs. We could encourage a more efficient distribution of doctors by offering medical school loan forgiveness for doctors who work in places with a care shortage, as Thomas Jefferson University’s Drew Harris has proposed. We could encourage an overhaul of occupational licensing restrictions so that physicians assistants and nurse practitioners can perform a greater range of primary care functions.

Then there are ways to improve competition and increase efficiency. We could repeal regulations that have encouraged hospital consolidation and encourage tougher anti-trust oversight when care providers seek to acquire their competitors. We could pass tort reform that limits malpractice payouts and reduces “defensive medicine”—and extract other cost-lowering concessions from the doctors’ guild in exchange, as a 2014 Health Affairs article suggested. We could reform HIPAA privacy laws to make it easier to gather big data about health outcomes and ultimately deliver better treatments at lower cost.

There are also more radical ideas. For example, the federal government could create a prize fund for medical innovations as a partial replacement for our current intellectual property system that gives pharmaceutical companies temporary monopoly power over their inventions. The liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz discussed the potential benefits of this approach in 2006: “Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies.” The rewards would be big enough to incentivize or even expand research and innovation while significantly reducing drug prices.

And because healthcare cost inflation is ultimately a threat to America’s public health in addition to its fiscal health, it makes sense for research on cost control to be a priority for institutions like the NIH. Figuring out how to deliver basic care at a more reasonable price will save more lives in the long run than most new cutting-edge discoveries.

The point is that health policy focus less on marginally expanding or restricting the share people who get government help buying insurance and more on how to make healthcare cheaper overall. Americans will never be satisfied with an endless tug-of-war over how to direct scarce resources while the system gradually succumbs to cost disease; that’s why voters punished the Democrats for Obamacare and are likely to punish the Republicans if their bill goes through.

Republicans, in particular, suffer from a narrative deficit when it comes to healthcare. They have been declaring for years that by repealing the Affordable Care Act they would return the American healthcare system to its imaginary former glory. In fact, the healthcare system faced major problems before the ACA—some of which the law made better, and some of which it made worse. The crud that has been accumulating in the system can’t be addressed all at once. Reform should be repositioned as a series of incremental steps in the direction of lower-cost care care plus a temporary compromise over Medicaid and subsidies to tide us over until the good times arrive.

This is a more challenging and by necessity more experimental project, and it will never be fully complete. But it has the potential to start breaking us out of the despairing confines of right-left Obamacare debates, which suggest a society that has lost the confidence and imagination to reform its institutions to address its gravest challenges.

The post The Smallness of the Health Debate and the Failure of Elite Imagination appeared first on The American Interest.

Downfall of the Caliphate

Since 2014 when it suddenly and dramatically captured a territory the size of Great Britain, the fight against ISIS has been grueling. But that fight to eliminate ISIS’ territorial control in Iraq and Syria now appears to be reaching its conclusion. The last neighborhoods of Mosul under ISIS control are on the verge of falling to the Iraqi security forces, though a street-by-street battle through the warren-like old city remains:

#Iraq #Mosul Old city (48 hours) difference.

Extremely tense urban warfare in very narrow alleyways & 80k civilians held hostage by #ISIS. pic.twitter.com/DbPGK3dec7

— Iraqi Day

Peter Berger, RIP

Usually upon receiving news of a death, I do not weep unless the deceased is a close relative, a dear friend, a teacher, or either a great musician or a comedian. That’s just the way I am. When I heard of Peter Berger’s passing on Tuesday’s night, I wept. He qualified thrice: as a friend, a teacher, and as a comedian.

Peter Berger (along with the late Thomas Luckmann) changed my life. When I read The Social Construction of Reality early in my graduate school career—it was probably around 1973 or so—a shiver of inner recognition went up my spine. Not many books do that to a person in a lifetime, so you tend to remember the ones that do.

The phenomenological approach seated in The Social Construction of Reality taught me a new way to understand the relationship between me as an active perceiver and the world—natural and social—being perceived. It hit me around page forty or so: an ontological bombshell.

I do not remember how exactly the book came to my attention, except that I am certain that no political science, history, or Middle East studies professor of mine at the time at Penn included it on a class reading list. I do remember realizing somewhere in my mid-twenties that the yawning poverty of so-called theory in international relations was pushing me to want to know more about the foundations of the other social sciences and of philosophy, which I had informally minored in during my undergraduate days. My best guess as to what happened is that a visiting professor in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the time, Yaron Ezrahi, alerted me to Ernst Cassirer, and from Cassirer it was an easy slide to Edmund Husserl, Susanne K. Langer, and Karl Popper. And from there, given the presence of Philip Rieff, E. Digby Baltzell, and, newly arrived from Berkeley, Erving Goffman in the Sociology Department, it was a short hop, perhaps with some faculty help, to sociologists Berger and Luckmann, and then from there flung forth toward Clifford Geertz in anthropology, David Apter in a rare corner of political science, and others until finally I plunged back to the ur-source of phenomenological sociology, Alfred Schütz.

(Some years later, after I received my doctorate, I was invited to pinch-hit for an ill faculty regular to teach the Penn poli sci “Introduction to IR Theory” undergraduate course. I included many of the aforementioned writers in my syllabus and gave very short shrift to the standard IR theory pretenders of the day. The students liked it a lot, especially Berger and Luckmann. But when the department elders got wind of what I was doing, they banished me from ever teaching that course again. That was one of several intersecting experiences that persuaded me never to become a full-time academic.)

Further neck trills followed in the ensuing years as I read more Berger—The Sacred Canopy, in particular—and others, and as I got to know Erving Goffman some. (By the time he got to Penn I had finished my Ph.D. course work, so I just sat in now and again when he taught, read his books, and on a few occasions visited him in his Rittenhouse Square apartment to talk and learn from him.)

I felt blessed for having passed through this gamut. Like most Americans of my generation, I had been a default two-dimensional positivist without even knowing what that was. I thought social science was about the picture alone, taking the camera for granted. I had no idea that natural and social reality obeyed different rules because the camera turns out to be a far subtler, and constitutive, tool than I had imagined. Now I knew: What had been a two-dimensional world had blossomed into a three-dimensional one, allowing me to look back on my former cognitive cage to behold how primitive, how childlike, it was. I felt like I had started to become an intellectual adult, and, more than anyone else, I had Peter Berger to thank for that.

Imagine my shock then when, some decades later, Peter Berger ended up on the editorial board of a magazine of which I became the founding editor—The American Interest. Never mind how that happened; the upshot was that over the past dozen years I got to meet, work with, and befriend a man who was to me a great personal hero. Peter was 22 years my senior, and of course his stature as a scholar only added to the natural distance between us. But he closed the distance with his collegial manner, and we became friends as well as colleagues. When I needed counsel in an area of his expertise, he gave it not just freely but gladly, in a spirit of creative collaboration.

I also from time to time asked for his help with my own thinking. To take but one example, about five years ago it dawned on me that the highly improbable nature of “origin” narratives in just about every religion was neither accidental, a vestige of primitive pre-scientific mindsets, nor anything of the sort. It was, I hypothesized, a deliberate means of solidifying “in-group” loyalty. So I looked around the literature some to find this idea, since it seemed unlikely to have been original to me. I couldn’t find anything in what was, admittedly, a truncated search, so I asked Peter. And here is how I described, in a brief May 2012 essay entitled “Improbable Beliefs,” what happened next:

Peter credited me with an original sociological point, but was immediately able to find those hints I suspected had to exist. The “core idea is not new”, he said, and directed me to the succinct remark of the early Latin church father Tertullian (c. 160–c. 220): “Credo quia absurdum”—“I believe because it is absurd.”…

In the sociology of religion, Peter noted that Durkheim implies a similar point in his classical work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. There is a passage where he explains the (from his viewpoint “absurd”) beliefs and rituals of Australian Aborigines as “having the sole empirical function of supporting collective solidarity.”…

Finally, Peter reminded me that his early interest in the sociology of religious sects led him to define a sect by the rigid cognitive boundaries it set up. “I asked myself from the beginning”, he wrote me, “How can people hold such obviously improbable beliefs?” It was in this context that he coined the phrase “plausibility structure”, which, in harmony with Asch and Festinger, suggests that given the right social context, a person will believe just about anything…. And then Peter concluded: “…and, I agree with you, the more absurd, the better for boundary maintenance.” … Imagine, then, my ambivalence at being told by a master of the discipline that I had had an original observation, only to be shown in the very act of his bestowing the accolade that it was not so original as all that.

Not only was Peter Berger that rare combination of kind and shrewd, he was also really funny, and eager to share the joys of humor. Though a professed “liberal” Lutheran—his words, not mine—he reminded me of my 15 Jewish uncles and aunts (and their 15 spouses), most of whom never forgot a good joke (and others, too) and never tired of retelling them, whether you wanted to hear them again or not. Peter and I told each other many dozens over the years; a telephone call with him, no matter the reason for the discussion, never ended without the balm of laughter stuck somewhere in the conversation.

When I learned a week or two ago that Peter had left the hospital for Boston’s Hebrew Rehabilitation Center, I sensed an irresistible temptation because of an old joke I know about a Jew ending up in a Lutheran rehab center. So I wrote him a long letter containing two jokes I hoped he had not heard—if there were any he had not heard. Humor is medicine; to laugh is to help heal. In that spirit I sent it, and in that spirit I hope he got a chance to read it.

Peter could tell a serious story, too. In one of my last conversations with him, he told me a story I will never forget. Let me try to reconstruct it for you as best I can. It is Hapsburgish, as many fine stories are.

As is well known, when Emperor Franz Josef died in 1916, his son Karl ruled briefly in his stead until the Hapsburg Empire was dismembered by the victorious allies after the World War. Karl and his wife Zita, whom he had married in 1911, went into exile. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived on for another 66-plus years. She died at the age of 96 on March 14, 1989.

Zita had a right to be buried in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, and the Austrian authorities agreed to that on the condition that the Hapsburgs paid all the expenses. The funeral, held on April 1, was huge—more than 6,000 mourners attended, including a personal representative of the Pope.

But the clerics discovered a problem as they anticipated the funeral service. Zita’s titles, as befitting an Empire that had married more than fought its way into expansionary greatness over the centuries, were very lengthy—and according to the order of the imperial funeral, all of them had to be read out loud as part of the ceremony. The titles included her own royal identity in the House of Parma and ended, two and a half pages later, according to the official list, with: “and the Duchess of Auschwitz.”

Should the officiating clerics say that, given the acquired sensitivities of that place name? They fell silent for several moments. And then, as though at once, they all knew and agreed: Yes, “Duchess of Auschwitz” should be said, and they all knew why: Because if the Hapsburg Empire had not been destroyed, there never would have been a death camp in that place.

I will miss the stories. I will miss the jokes. I will miss the wisdom and the good counsel. But most of all I will miss Peter Berger the man, the whole man, who can not be reduced to the sum of his parts as scholar, husband, parent, and all the rest of the pieces of modern modularity we recognize in a person. May the True Judge assure him a place in Paradise—in the liberal Lutheran section.

The post Peter Berger, RIP appeared first on The American Interest.