Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 541

Americans Saving More Ahead of Holiday Shopping Season

Could it be that an epidemic of prudence and common sense is sweeping across a troubled land? The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. consumers have grown increasingly cautious ahead of the holiday shopping season, a potential weight on economic growth during the final months of the year.

The latest evidence: Americans last month socked away much of their income from rising wages, pushing the personal saving rate to its highest level in nearly three years.“Consumers have the wherewithal to spend, they just don’t want to,” Michelle Girard, an economist at RBS Securities, said in a note to clients.It isn’t clear whether October will prove to be a one-month blip—setting up a holiday spending splurge—or a broader pullback amid mixed economic signals at home and trouble overseas.

Americans need to save more money, so despite wails of despair from the companies who want us to go deeply in hock to buy shiny and meaningless trinkets, this is basically good news.

People are worried about rising health care costs and spiraling college tuition for their children, and in addition want to sock away some money for retirement. At a time when dysfunctional government and weak Presidential leadership makes people edgy about the future, Americans seem to putting more money aside for a rainy day.It’s a wise choice. As the endless holiday shopping season sets in across the country, Americans should resist the mindless shopping frenzy, and think instead about making lasting memories for those we love best. Sharing with the poor, welcoming the lonely into our homes and lives, and giving time rather than glittering toys to those around us will make the holidays bright.And, despite the hysterical handwringing from economists who think that imprudent consumer spending is the only thing that can make the economy grow, the real basis for a healthy national economy remains the spirit and character of the American people. Stepping back from the Santa-industrial complex and the debt and consumption merry-go-round will make us better people and strengthen the invisible and intangible but ultimately indispensable foundations of our society and economy this year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving has come around once again, and we at TAI hope, dear readers, that it will be a happy day for you and yours. The occasion is an excellent time to read a vintage essay by our own Adam Garfinkle: “Tolerance, Forgiveness, and Gratitude.” A taste:

As others have pointed out, forgiveness is not just the appeasement of anger. It cannot be achieved by paying blood money for wrongs done. True forgiveness is possible only among those whose humility enables tolerance. We can forgive others, thus breaking the primitive spiral of harm and revenge, because we recognize our own moral frailty, our own capacity for falling short. To forgive others is to tolerate their imperfections, something we can do in expectation that others will forgive us when we fall short. It makes the offering and acceptance of sincere apologies possible. It makes peace as opposed to mere truces possible. It helps, of course, to have an image of God as a merciful and forgiving power, an exemplar for those created in His spiritual image, for the concept of forgiveness to take firm root in a culture […]

And of course all of this bears on how we understand gratitude, or thanksgiving. We count blessings often not of our own making when it comes to material things. When it comes to human interactions, we must be participants to merit the even more sublime blessings of toleration and forgiveness in our societies. To express gratitude for these “higher angels” of our nature, I suggest, is something to think about on this Thanksgiving Day.

And while you read Garfinkle’s essay, or otherwise go about the business of the day, here are some songs appropriate to the celebration.

First up, “Tis By Thy Strength the Mountains Stand,” a classic song of the “shape note” genre so popular in America in the 18th and 19th centuries (h/t B.D. McClay)

Here are the lyrics:

Tis by thy strength the mountains stand,

God of eternal power;

The sea grows calm at thy command,

And tempests cease to roar.Thy morning light and ev’ning shade

Successive comforts bring;

Thy plenteous fruits make harvest glad,

Thy flowers adorn the spring.Seasons and times, and moons and hours,

Heav’n, earth, and air, are thine;

When clouds distil in fruitful showers,

The Author is divine.Those wand’ring cisterns in the sky,

Borne by the winds around

With wat’ry treasures well supply

The furrows of the ground.The thirsty ridges drink their fill,

And ranks of corn appear;

Thy ways abound with blessings still,

Thy goodness crowns the year.Next, here’s the black gospel version of a hymn popularized by Ira Sankey, the singer who worked with the great 19th century evangelist D.L. Moody.

When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed,

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,

Count your many blessings, name them one by one,

And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

Refrain:

Count your blessings, name them one by one,

Count your blessings, see what God hath done!

Count your blessings, name them one by one,

*Count your many blessings, see what God hath done.

[*And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.]


Are you ever burdened with a load of care?

Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?

Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly,

And you will keep singing as the days go by.
When you look at others with their lands and gold,

Think that Christ has promised you His wealth untold;

Count your many blessings—*money cannot buy [*wealth can never buy]

Your reward in heaven, nor your home on high.
So, amid the conflict whether great or small,

Do not be discouraged, God is over all;

Count your many blessings, angels will attend,

Help and comfort give you to your journey’s end.

*Alternate text.

And finally, the classic Thanksgiving hymn, “We Gather Together.”Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Thanksgiving Dinner Keeps Getting Cheaper

For many Americans, it may not feel like things are going very well lately, but in some critical ways, life in America is better than ever. From Cato:

In 1986, Thanksgiving dinner cost $28.74. In October 1986, an average worker made $8.96 an hour. That means that s/he had to work 3 hours 12 minutes and 27 seconds, or 50 minutes and 30 seconds longer than [a] worker today.

So, enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner and rejoice in knowing that you have worked almost an hour less to earn it than would have been the case in 1986.

This isn’t just true of Thanksgiving. From refrigerators to shoes, basic necessities cost us far less than they did previous generations. We cover a lot of bad news at TAI, from terrorist attacks to the rising costs of health care and education. But, in general, the future is still bright. For the past three hundred years, pessimists have repeatedly predicted disaster—and human ingenuity has repeatedly proven them wrong. Across many domains, material goods keep getting more affordable and people continue to get healthier. Here at TAI, we’re thankful for that.

What’s Next for Abenomics

With Japan back in recession for the second time during Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s tenure, the future of Abenomics has been in doubt. Yet now we’re starting to get some idea of what’s next. From Reuters:

Japan’s government plans to raise the minimum wage and introduce other steps to revitalise the economy, but the draft of stimulus measures seen by Reuters on Monday appeared to break no new ground on reforms that analysts say are needed to end decades of stagnation.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government will also offer some financial support to people living off their pensions to bolster consumer spending, a copy of the draft obtained by Reuters showed.

Citing unnamed sources, the Nikkei newspaper said on Monday that the government is planning to raise the minimum wage by 3 percent. But the draft didn’t provide any specifics and analysts say the government will need to do more to foster durable growth.

On the one hand, the failure of Abenomics may have little to do with the wisdom of its architect. Chinese weakness is dragging down Japan and causing regional uncertainty that further undermines hopes that Japan can restore the dynamic economy it had in decades past. But, on the other, Japan has major structural deficiencies that minimum wage increases simply won’t solve. Japan has heavily committed itself to a reform-resistant blue model. Today’s globalized, increasingly automated world doesn’t support that kind of economy. Japan, like other developed countries, needs to figure out a new way to adapt.

There are reasons to be hopeful. In an information economy, Japan has a lot going for it. Its education system rightly takes heat for failing to instill a creative impulse in students (threatened cuts to humanities departments would only exacerbate the problem), but Japanese citizens are still very highly-educated by world standards. Back in the 70s and 80s, partly on the strength of its education system, Japan became a high tech powerhouse. It remains one, and as world militaries and manufacturers look to replace people with robots, Japan’s deep knowledge of automated systems will come in handy.Washington needs Tokyo to counterbalance China and to reinforce the Asia-Pacific network of countries challenging Beijing in the South and East China Seas. Moreover, Japan is the only regional power with the economic muscle to compete with China for development contracts throughout Asia. Make no mistake: The success of Japan is a key American interest.

Le Pen Leads First Poll after Paris

The first poll taken since the Paris massacre a week and a half ago indicates that Marine Le Pen’s Euroskeptic Front National would lead the pack in the first round of voting in France, taking 29 percent of the vote in regional elections. A center-right coalition of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Républicains, UDI, and MoDem would garner 27 percent, with Hollande’s Socialists third at 22 percent.

Europe’s far-Right will gain a lot of strength after the Paris attacks—and for that, you can largely blame the centrists.Not surprisingly, figures like Marine Le Pen are making hay. Just after the attacks, Le Pen called for the “immediate halt” of the admission of refugees. Hungarian President Viktor Orban crowed that he was right all along. But in doing this, the far-Right is essentially doing what it’s always done. And what gives it oxygen is also the same thing as ever: The centrists declare any discussion of immigration (other than “it’s wonderful!”) off-limits, and so drive concerned voters to where they otherwise would not go.Even in the wake of Paris, Euro-centrists couldn’t seem to stop preening, impugning their own citizenry, and generally insisting that all must go on as before. Less than a day after the attacks, EU President Jean-Claude Juncker declared that, “there is no need for an overall review of the European policy on refugees.” And while President Hollande has taken an admirably tough line on foreign policy and European matters, on November 18 he declared that France would increase its refugee intake over the next two years, to 30,000, in a speech whose upshot was that “France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives.” Everything can go on the same as before, at the very least.

There may be both strategic and humanitarian arguments in favor of continuing to admit refugees, but the rhetorical tone on display from several of Europe’s highest-profile centrists, before and after the attacks, has seemed almost designed to alienate concerned citizens. All across Europe, citizens—many of whom are by no means aspiring fascists—have concerns about the newcomers that Paris only heightened. Many, though by no means all, of these questions are rational, not racist. As Ross Douthat, quoting in part an excellent Reihan Salam piece, pointed out last week:

The second danger is one for the longer term, and it’s tackled effectively by Reihan Salam over at Slate. “Given the manifest failure of France, Belgium, and Germany to successfully integrate native-born Muslims into the cultural and economic mainstream of their societies,” he asks, “despite decades of fitful efforts to that end, what reason do we have to believe that these governments will succeed in 2015?” (Especially since the failures of assimilation to date have occurred with populations that arrived gradually rather than suddenly, in eras of stronger economic growth and political optimism, etc. etc.)

And if they fail — when they fail, really, let’s be honest — then Europe will end up with more Saint-Denises, more Malmös, more Molenbeeks, and many more young men primed for anti-Semitic rabblerousing or recruitment to jihad. Today’s refugee flows are potentially linked to tomorrow’s terrorism, in other words, in the same way that the economic migrations of the 1970s and 1980s are linked to Euro-Islamism today. And European policymakers have a responsibility to consider that experience and imagine not only the threat spectrum of 2016, but what that spectrum might look like in 2025 and 2035 as well.

Douthat and Salam hit on an aspect of the debate that most U.S. coverage has thoroughly missed so far: The attackers were second-generation, European-born Muslims and that provides many Europeans with more reason to be concerned with immigration, not less.

You have to govern with the populace you have. If most of your populace is concerned with immigration, you have to address those concerns, not condemn their benighted provincialism. And that latter course is an especially bad tack if their concerns aren’t actually all that stupid.In August, we noted a common dynamic in Europe in which “the failure of the elites to respect the will of the large swathes of people creates an increasingly illiberal right-wing backlash, which in turn drives moderates to vote for the left, and so on in cycles.” Usually, that’s the way things work. But if the elites continue to ignore the legitimate concerns of security-conscious citizens, it may be enough to break that cycle and put a nasty party in power in one or two places.Some of those nasty parties were already close to power even before Paris. At various points this fall, polls showed the Sweden Democrats as the largest party in their country, and the Dutch PVVs at an all-time high in theirs. Marie Le Pen was already leading early projections of the French presidential race. Since Paris, in Germany the AfD has risen to third place in polls, surpassing the Greens for the first time. And among the Eastern European Visegrad countries, Viktor Orban is now listened to more than reviled.These groups are by and large bad news; some of them, such as Le Pen and Orban, are very bad indeed. And they’re gaining because the center has responded to popular concerns about immigration with few plans and even less sympathy. The elites will eventually have to face elections—and after Paris, those may not go quite as usual. Will the centrists wake up in time?[Edited]

The End of the Fifth Republic?

The strategy of terrorism, as has often (but not often enough) been remarked, it to trick stronger powers into doing counterproductive things. The terrorist attacks of November 13 in Paris, coming on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo attack in January, has awakened a more authoritarian France. I say “awakened” and not “created” because that authoritarian France has long been there, slumbering away beneath the delightful veneer of café life and the mildly sordid machinations of French politics.

Indeed, French officials for many years have been doing things with respect to intelligence collection and suspect interrogation that are nigh unthinkable in the United States or in today’s Germany. There is no robust equivalent of the American ACLU in France and this, like most everything else in comparative politics, has historical and, for lack of a better term, socio-psychological sources.The difference matters, because there is a potential in recent French government actions to actually bring down the Fifth Republic, the sturdiest of all French republics—but perhaps not sturdy enough.When I moved to Paris from London at the turn of the present, prematurely graying century, it was like moving from fire to ashes. I soon learned never to ask for meetings on a Monday or Friday, since many Frenchmen had quietly implemented the four-day workweek. The sense of stagnation was made all the more glaring by the fact that Paris is full of memories of better times, magnificent times. It was in those days that a poll in Le Figaro showed that the foremost ambition for French university students was to find public-sector employment. Such is the enduring draw of the École Normale Supérieure system and the public largesse it produces for the elite; the private sector is a place, most young Frenchmen seem to believe, where one must work more to earn less.Of course, it is not all bleak. The world’s favorite holiday destination has high productivity, very decent grub, and the trains run on time. And yet the French seem to have lost faith in the future. In 2013, a much-debated Ipsos study found that only 5 percent of those polled believed that “things will get better.” A large majority of viewed globalization as a “threat.” The poll also revealed a broad distrust toward Muslims and a strong sense many Frenchmen feel that their views are not represented by the political system. Some 62 percent reported that they did not feel at home in their own country.France is proud of its intellectuals. They have long been granted the role of guiding the nation, a position again very different from the social status of intellectuals in the United States (where they are dismissed as eggheads who cannot even tie their own shoelaces), Germany (where discipline-bounded scholars have cachet), and other Western countries. And French thinkers have been ferrymen of a special kind in the transition from the pre-Freudian to the post-Freudian understanding of threat. Before Freud “danger” was out there, in the dark; in the post-Freudian era the darkness is seen to dwell within each of us. This insight is central to understanding the increasingly introverted tendency in French thinking over recent decades. French intellectuals underestimated the extent to which monitoring the finer nuances in one’s moods depended on an absence of external threats. If there really is a killer on the loose in the darkened streets of your town, the labyrinths of mind and language start to quickly seem irrelevant, and by implication that also goes for those who wander those labyrinths.The sense of decline and the absence of useful intellectual leaders make Frenchmen unpredictable when the external threat now manifests itself in bursts of semi-automatic rifle fire. The French live in the Fifth Republic because the four republics preceding failed to resolve the great questions of their day. While we in the West tend to see France as a strong unitary state, the country is actually deeply divided and politically unstable just below the thin veneer of stagnant stability. In that sense the terrorist attacks of November 13 could not have happened in a worse place, or at a worse time.The attacks, which left 130 people dead, were the latest in a long series of terrorist attacks in France this year. For a long time France seemed immune to Islamist terror. Some believed it was because the country’s assimilation policies toward immigrants was working, and was often positively contrasted with Britain’s multiculturalist approach. There was also a general confidence in country’s eight different intelligence services with expertise on radical Islam. But the combination of the refugee crisis spawned largely from the Syrian civil war, new communications technologies, and the phenomenon of Islamism-cum-youth-rebellion amid what some see as a hollow materialism have combined to exceed the state’s allocated resources to protect its citizens from a small fraction of the country’s five-million strong Muslim community.France now finds itself a preferred target in part because Socialist François Hollande has used his presidential powers to initiate a series of military interventions: in Mali and elsewhere in the Sahel, in Syria, and in Iraq. And French forces have inflicted painful defeats on Islamists of various acronyms in Africa and the Middle East. At the same time the economy has left little scope for dashing leadership at home. But what Hollande does abroad and at home are intimately connected, and they would be in the mind of any French leader today. Thus, as the debate in Europe quickly focused on whether NATO should invoke Article V in the face of the November 13 attacks, as the alliance did in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Hollande wisely declined these overtures. It is not in the NATO’s interest that the Article V, with its iron-studded promise of collective defense, should be once more banalized into an overstated declaration of sympathy.France has also sought not to wholly “EU-ropeanize” crisis. Yes, it invoked a symbolic EU defense arrangement, but it also reimposed border controls, openly challenging the Schengen zone agreement. Seen from Paris, the EU’s plans to offer visa-free travel for Turkey’s 75 million people and Ukraine’s 45 million starting in 2016 has left an impression of a Union elite utterly divorced from reality. The much too farsighted visionaries in Brussels seem to be the last people in Europe today to understand that it would be politically unwise to increase immigration right now.France has also so far resisted calls for EU summits to “talk about it.”Instead, Hollande has chosen the brutal-yet-unbound Russia as his preferred partner in its “war” against the Islamic State, and he has tried to revive the hoary Gaullist tactic of playing mediator between Moscow and Washington. The latter is unlikely to work very well unless the Russians change their minds about local Levantine priorities. The former may bring outright disaster. In the wake of attacks, France has gone into authoritarian high gear: Police and gendarmes are kicking down the doors of known Islamists all over the country. The President has requested a three-month state of emergency in which basic civil rights will remain suspended.For a mild-mannered social democrat leading an old world democracy, these measures seem somewhat excessive from a security point of view. But politics, ah, that is something else again. Hollande’s radical resolve indicates his tenuous grasp on power; the measures appear to be an attempt to communicate with the country’s alienated citizens, to say to them that the state stands ready to defend them—both against the terrorists and, sotto voce, against Marine Le Pen. Whether the French believe this is entirely contingent on whether the measures work, and they may work in the short term. But suspending the civil rights of an already alienated minority may deepen polarization in the longer run. It may also spark another round of Muslim riots, like those of 2005.When Islamists massacred the staff of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January, France responded with a solidarity march. French and Davos elites held hands and the maligned National Front was not invited. When the terrorists once again struck France, the country has shown a different, more authoritarian side, and it has thus succeeded in raising the political stakes all around—the electoral ones that are obvious, and the deeper constitutional ones that no Frenchman so far has dared to speak of in public. If Islamists succeed in bringing terror to the streets of Paris yet again, all bets are off for the longevity of the Fifth Republic.

The Costs of Imperial Power

The horrendous ISIS attack on Paris once again raises the question of American responsibility for the immense mess in the Greater Middle East, from Libya to Pakistan, out of which emerged the radical Islamism that has by now become a global threat. There is an underlying historical question here. After World War II, the United States became an imperial power. Was this position in the world deliberately sought, or did it happen willy-nilly (perhaps as happened with the British Empire, supposedly acquired in “a fit of absentmindedness”)?

Then there are questions concerning much more recent developments, which are now hot partisan issues in American politics.Who is more to blame: George W. Bush, under whom imperial power became reckless, or Barack Obama, under whom it became dominated by the overriding principle of using it as little as possible? This is not the place to delve into this morass of analytic and moral questions, not least because I’m unsure how to answer them (my political antipathies, more than my sympathies, are quite non-partisan). One fact seems to be quite clear: The exercise of imperial power has considerable costs—and the American public is less and less ready to shoulder them.As I was troubled by these questions in recent days, I remembered three incidences in my past, one in childhood and two much later. There is no moral equivalence between the three, but they are nevertheless connected, in the geography of the soul, let us say. (I have mentioned two of these experiences before, in a childhood memoir published in 2008, in German only. I retell them here, in the probably safe assumption that few readers of my blog have heard of them, let alone read them.)My mother was Italian. Most of my childhood summers were spent with her family in Italy, very happy times away from school and other serious concerns in Vienna. We stayed several times in Alto Adige, the southern part of the Austrian province of Tirol, which Italy annexed after World War I and where it pursued a policy of Italianization, including the suppression of the German language.That policy was not very successful. My Italian childhood occurred in the Fascist period, during which Mussolini invaded Ethiopia (which the Italians called Abessinia) and made it into yet another colony in Africa. Italy already had three other colonies in Africa, but this, the largest one, was to be the “jewel in the crown.” On the basis of this expansion the king of Italy was now also crowned as Emperor of Abessinia. He was a very short man, especially if seen together with his very tall queen; his comical stature was compensated by a very tall helmet with a high plume on top—and now the title of “Re Imperatore.” The incident I remember took place in the town of Brunico (Bruneck in German). The local regiment of Alpini, the Italian mountain troops (who also wore a more modest plume on their hats), were marching off to Ethiopia. They were singing a marching song that was very popular then. The first verse went as follows: “Black faces of Abessinia, rejoice—we bring you our Duce and our King!” (The second verse, which could serve as evidence that the Fascist regime, prior to its fatal alliance with Nazi Germany, was then not yet racist, went like this: “Black girl of Abessinia, rejoice—now you are a slave, we will make you a Roman!”)Most, not all, of the others in the street watching the parade raised the right arm in the Fascist salute. I was there, with my mother and another woman, who must have been from Vienna because she spoke in German. She said: “Look at these poor Tirolian boys. They must go out in order to die in Africa!”Several decades later, I was no longer a young boy in Italy, but a still youngish professor in America. I was attending a conference at the University of Puerto Rico. I was staying with a faculty couple on a Sunday that fell during the conference and had no program. I suppose the day was left free so visitors could explore the island. We were having breakfast on the terrace, enjoying the early morning breeze before the onset of heat. My hosts were discussing what we could do during the day. They suggested that we should drive across the island. There was supposed to be a very good new restaurant on the other side from San Juan. We could have lunch there and I could see some sights on the way. We set off in a leisurely way (most activities in Puerto Rico are leisurely). Halfway across the island we hit a traffic jam, an unusual sight on a Sunday morning. It was a funeral. A very Latin American scene: The procession was led by a priest, preceded by a man carrying a large crucifix and accompanied by children singing mournful hymns. The casket was mounted on a truck, surrounded by loudly weeping women and a small group of other mourners. Bystanders crossed themselves, men took off their hats. The casket was covered with an American flag. Someone explained to us that the deceased was a soldier from the town who had been killed in Vietnam. All this under a blazing sun and a blue Caribbean sky.And I had to think of the poor Tirolian boys going out to die in Africa.As I write this, another memory pops up (an affliction of old men). Some years after the funeral in Puerto Rico, I was in India (lecturing again—what else?). It was also a Sunday, in Bangalore. I went with my hosts to morning prayer in the main Anglican church (now part of the United Church of South India). The congregation was almost all Indians, just a few whites. The Indians were barefoot. My hosts explained that this not a sign of religious reverence, but rather an indication that they felt at home (one takes shoes off in one’s own house, but I cannot vouch for this interpretation). The sermon and indeed the entire service was in Kannada, the local language. The church had been on the British “military lines.” At the time of my visit there was a statue of Queen Victoria in front (perhaps it has been taken down since, with the rise of Hindu nationalism). We looked around the church after the service. There were many tablets on the walls, all from the time of the British Raj, commemorating the death of soldiers stationed in Bangalore, both officers and enlisted men. Most had died of disease, some in battles going back all the way to the Indian Mutiny in the nineteenth century. I was struck by how young the memorialized men were.One more time my mind goes back to my Italian childhood (needless to say, this has nothing to do with Mussolini or anything political). The Fascist anthem began as follows: “Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza!”/ “Youth, youth, springtime of beauty!” So often does imperial power lead to the loss of young soldiers dying far from home.

Ivy League Presidents Try Appeasement

With their campuses rocked by social justice protests, anxious Ivy League presidents are trying to appease campus radicals with huge payouts to left-wing campus identity programs. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, wrote an apologetic campus-wide letter last week promising to create a new “university center” for the study of “race ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity.” He also pledged to double the budget for the African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic cultural centers, and to devote new resources to “educating our community about race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion.”

Not to be outdone, Brown University President Christina Paxson has answered protests by unveiling a $100 million program for creating “a just and inclusive campus community.” Among the budget items: “expand mentoring resources for students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and first generation college students”; create “workshops” to “foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression”; and “promote university-wide research and academic programming on Power, Privilege, Identity and Structural Racism.”

There is no doubt that there is still racism, sexism, and homophobia on college campuses, just as there is everywhere else in our society. But the idea that it can be stamped out with still more diversity training, still more cultural centers, and still more identity studies programs is a fantasy. American college campuses are already saturated with these programs (which, it goes without saying, inflate the budget of colleges whose degree programs are too expensive). If bigotry is still as widespread at Brown and Yale as the protesters claim, then perhaps the universities ought to try a different approach. After all, the available evidence suggests that diversity education programs are counterproductive, and segregated academic and residential programs may well exacerbate racial isolation and misunderstanding.

Ivy League presidents seem to think that these types of giant expenditures will save them from further protests and negative media coverage. But it’s only a matter of time before protesters take to the quad with megaphones again, protesting that administrators are trying to buy them off, without addressing any of the real underlying issues. And of course, the protesters will be right.

Renewables Are Undermining Germany’s Grid

Consistency is the most important goal for any power grid, but in renewables-crazed Germany that kind of reliability is becoming a distant memory as the country struggles to cope with the volatility inherent to those more eco-friendly power sources. Berlin has rapidly grown its wind and solar power sectors through the use of costly government subsidies called feed-in tariffs, and in so doing has overloaded its energy mix with sources that can only contribute intermittently (i.e., when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing). Sure, these green suppliers don’t emit the greenhouse gases and local pollutants that a coal-fired power plant might, but at least with coal (or any other fossil fuel, for that matter) you know what you’re getting.

Now, as Bloomberg reports, German energy traders are having so much trouble keeping up with the price swings caused by intermittent upstart suppliers that they’re turning to algorithms to do their jobs for them:

The price movements in the nine-year-old intraday German power market are “about 200 times that of financial markets,” said Karl Frauendorfer, a professor of operations research at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland who has worked with electricity traders for almost 20 years. “The volatility makes it impossible for humans to efficiently comply with risk limits.”

…The intermittent renewable output has made traders increasingly focus on hourly or 15-minute electricity contracts to quickly react to changes in weather that alter the power supply. That’s increased the need for algorithmic computer programs that can do the buying and selling on their own. […]“In the long run, it will be hard for companies to make profit in the intraday market without algorithms, computers will be faster placing orders and make better decisions,” Hendrik Brockmeyer, senior power trader at utility EWE AG, said by phone Tuesday. The company started using automated trading about a year ago. “It will become a necessity.”

But this is more than just a story of a profession having to lean on computing power to adapt to changing market conditions. The traders’ struggle is a symptom of a serious volatility problem for Germany’s grid. There are two sides to this. First, on cloudy, windless days, an energy mix too reliant on renewables will struggle to avoid blackouts. But, second, at times of peak renewables supply, the grid is overloaded, and that’s already proved a problem not just for Germany but also for its neighbors.

Because we lack cost-effective and scalable storage options, the inconstancy of renewables necessarily limits their share of an energy mix. Germany’s wind and solar power policy experiment isn’t just inflating household power bills. It’s also threatening grid stability—and it’s not just trading firms that are struggling to cope.

John Kerry Goes to His Happy Place

In the wake of the Paris attacks and the Turkish downing of a Russian bomber, John Kerry is going to the Middle East. . .to talk to the Israelis and Arabs about restarting the peace process. Aaron David Miller writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Having spent most of my professional life chasing after and believing in Arab-Israeli peace–particularly Israeli-Palestinian peace–I can understand the addictive power of the problem for U.S. presidents and secretaries of state. And this secretary of state, more than any of those for whom I worked, really believes not only in the importance of the issue but also in his own capacity to somehow solve it […]

But as Mr. Kerry makes yet another foray into the world of the never-ending peace process, here are some inconvenient and politically incorrect truths worth bearing in mind.–First, if there is any key to stability in the angry, broken, dysfunctional  Middle East, it certainly isn’t a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Yes, a resolution now would certainly boost U.S. credibility and take an important issue off the table. But given the region-wide melt down – Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen in varying forms of chaos and dysfunction; a rising Iran, and  the threat from ISIS — it’s no longer credible to argue that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a priority or that it’s even possible now.  A two-state solution may well be the least-worst outcome. But with all the other failing states  in the region, it’s worth considering why the U.S. would want to risk a failed or weak Palestinian one.

Miller’s other two points focus on the peace process specifically, and as usual, he’s a must-read for those interested in the subject.

Consider for a second the other worthy ways the good Secretary could be spending his time. A NATO country has just fired shots at the Russians, who incidentally have troops actively destabilizing Europe through Ukraine and, in conjunction with the Iranians, are sowing chaos across the Middle East. Yemen has basically fallen apart, and our Sunni allies are scared to death we’ve abandoned them. Afghanistan’s weak government is imperiled by the Taliban, and Libya is an ungovernable hell-hole. The God wars are raging across Africa—particularly in oil-rich Nigeria—as communal tensions between Muslims and Christians continue to flare into violence. In Latin America, the ongoing collapse of Venezuela continues to cause under-appreciated problems for the Caribbean. Meanwhile, Brazil founders, and Argentina, having finally decided to elect a non-Peronist leader, could use some attention. And in the Far East, there’s the little matter of the rise of China, tensions in the South China Sea, and our still-incomplete pivot to Asia. In other words, there is almost anything a Secretary of State could be doing right now that would potentially be more productive than this trip.But for John Kerry (and other Western diplomats just like him), going back to the Arab-Israeli negotiating table isn’t driven by external need. Not even he can think that resolving the border between Israel and the West Bank is the key to peace in the Middle East anymore. This is the Secretary going to his Happy Place—where there are Nobel Peace Prizes to be won, an age-old diplomatic puzzle to be resolved, and most of all, familiar problems to be confronted with familiar tools.It’s all so very comfortable. But that’s not the world we live in anymore. Time for Secretary Kerry—and the rest—to wake up. And maybe tell the pilot to change course for Ankara.