Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 577

Clinton Tries to Surf Tide She Can’t Block

The Democratic frontrunner announced yesterday that she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade agreement with Asian countries that she played a major role in promoting when she was Secretary of State. Clinton’s announcement, which could make it more difficult for the Obama administration to get TPP get through Congress, is widely seen as an effort by Clinton to insulate herself against attacks from Bernie Sanders, who has long opposed the agreement, and distinguish herself from Vice President Joe Biden, who is considering a presidential run. More, via PBS:

Just days after the U.S. and 11 nations released a monumental trade deal that still faces a fight in Congress, Hillary Clinton says she does not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Speaking with Judy Woodruff Wednesday, the Democratic presidential candidate said that as of today, given what she knows of the deal, it does not meet her bar for creating jobs, raising wages for Americans and advancing national security.

Speaking at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, as part of a two-day swing through the leadoff caucus state, Clinton said that she’s worried “about currency manipulation not being part of the agreement” and that “pharmaceutical companies may have gotten more benefits and patients fewer.”“As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it,” Clinton said, later adding, “I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.”

One of Hillary Clinton’s biggest problems, now as in 2008, is how far left the Democrats have moved since her husband’s time in office. The centerpiece accomplishments of the Clinton administration—forceful U.S. world leadership, welfare reform, fiscal balance, tough crime laws, the defense of heterosexual marriage, don’t ask don’t tell, close political links with Israel, and the end of the era of the big government—are now all despised as evil Republican ideas by a party that has repudiated much of its post WWII legacy.

Secretary Clinton has had to run to keep up, and nobody was happier to make her look old and conservative than then-Senator Obama during the 2008 primary campaign. Over and over he outflanked her from the left, with new and more evolved positions.But now Secretary Clinton has found an issue where she can evolve faster than President Obama: trade. He is committed to the TPP, a deal which is deeply Clintonian. The TPP promotes free trade and it is an exercise in American leadership. It is also, despite some ugly crony flaws, an exercise in economic liberalization and pro-capitalist policy. But unfettered from office, Hillary can turn against a very Clintonian agreement she once supported, driving a wedge between Biden, should he run, and the unions and leftist groups whose importance in Democratic politics has grown.This may not be the end of the story. American politicians excel at throwing chum to the base while running for office, without feeling in any way bound by their rhetoric when it comes to actual governing. A President Hillary Clinton could throw interest groups under the bus with the best of them, and few people in the U.S. understand the importance of TPP to U.S. Asia policy as well as she does. Her new opposition to the deal, then, is less a predictor of what she will do in office than an expression of the political calculations she and her campaign has made. The Democratic Party is running left, and presidential candidates need to run fast enough to stay at the head of the parade.Whether the country as a whole is running this far left is another question. In 1972, the Democratic left triumphantly selected George McGovern and then lost 49 states, and that’s a historical parallel that bears watching here. Mrs. Clinton knows that history, too—and will try to keep the Democrats from jumping off the cliff even as she does what she thinks she must to position herself as a candidate the left can live with today.

Will the Real Middle Class Please Stand Up?

There are few prouder boasts for the government of an emerging economy to make than that it is “raising millions of citizens out of poverty.” It is a boast that several governments have made with confidence in recent years. They are generally joined by a chorus of approval from boosters looking to promote the next great consumer market opportunity, and to reassure investors with the prospect of social and political stability that a large and growing middle class is conventionally assumed to guarantee. At the moment, the entire continent of Africa is receiving this kind of broad-brush treatment. Yet who exactly constitutes the “middle class”? As a study of India, Brazil, and South Africa shows, the answer varies from country to country, and sometimes within one. The question couldn’t be more crucial, however, for these countries’ chances of reaching the next rung of prosperity.

Definitions of the “Middle Class”Inevitably, figures supporting the claims of an expanding middle class vary from study to study, yet some have achieved wide currency. For instance, the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil has been able to make enormous political capital in the last few years from the narrative of the country’s growing middle class, especially the claim—a favorite of President Rousseff’s—that “40 million Brazilians were lifted from poverty into the middle class between 2001 and 2011.”Studies of the Brazilian middle class largely employ a definition developed by the federal government’s Secretariat for Strategic Affairs, which classifies people as middle class if they have the relatively low household income of between $161 and $564 per month. The growth of this “new middle class” has been impressive. Between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of people that could be thus classified grew from 35 percent to nearly 50 percent. In 2011 Brazil’s population was almost 197 million, so the middle class now consists of nearly 98 million people.Black Brazilians account for 80 percent of new entrants into this class. People from rural areas and from the relatively impoverished northeast, along with workers in the informal sector and domestic servants, also account for a growing proportion. This increased social mobility has had an effect on Brazil’s extremely high rate of inequality: the income share of the new middle class and the poor has risen rapidly at the expense of the richest 10 percent. Between 2000 and 2009 the accumulated rate of real per capita income growth of the richest 10 percent was only 10 percent. By comparison, the real per capita income of the poorest 50 percent grew by 68 percent. The Brazilian poor averaged a Chinese-style growth rate of 6.8 percent per year during that period, a rate nearly six times greater than that of the traditional middle classes.India has achieved significantly higher growth rates than Brazil and South Africa recently, but with a population of 1.2 billion it is much poorer than the other two. Gross national income (GNI) per capita in 2013 was $5,350, compared to South Africa’s $12,530 and Brazil’s $14,750.To cope with the considerable variation between India’s middle class incomes and those of other countries, it is useful to employ a distinction between “local” and “global” middle classes. This allows analysts to assess the rate at which people are moving out of lower income quintiles, while also permitting an evaluation of the much smaller income group near the upper end, which has standards of living and aspirations comparable with middle classes in richer countries.The “local middle class” consists of urban Indians earning between 75 and 150 percent of the median income. The local middle class makes up 40 percent of the urban population and consists of about 150 million people. The “global middle class” is defined as people in households that consume between $10 and $100 per person per day. About 12.5 percent of India’s urban population fits into this category, or about 50 million people. Together the two classes comprise some 200 million people, just under a fifth of the population.The local middle class is more diverse and widely spread. It is split along language, ethnic and caste lines. Access to higher education is the key to becoming a member of the global middle class. People in this class are largely English-speaking and mainly upper caste. They are heavily concentrated in two states, Delhi and Maharashtra.By global standards, unusually large numbers of both classes work in the informal sector. The proportion of the local middle class working in this way is 70 percent, and for the global middle class it is still very high, at 40 percent. Of course, the informal sector spans a wider range in India than in most other developing countries. Literally hundreds of laws push firms and people into informal, unregistered work.In South Africa, researchers use two definitions to encompass very different income groups. The first is the “literal middle”, that is, the 4.2 million households that are middle class by virtue of being in the middle of the country’s income distribution. This group is made up of households with monthly per capita incomes between $190 and $570. They constituted 31 percent of the population in 2008. By comparison, those in the “relatively affluent middle” (a further 4.1 million households) find themselves in income brackets that are more typically middle class by global standards, ranging between $700 and $5,000. They constituted 30 percent of the population in 2008. Clearly this is far too wide a range of life circumstances from which to draw meaningful social and political generalizations.Approaches other than measurement of income tend to find smaller middle classes in South Africa. The South African Advertising Research Foundation uses Living Standards Measures (LSMs), which include variables such as location (metropolitan, urban, rural), access to services (including financial services) and possession of consumer durables. It found that 23.5 percent of South Africans (about 12.2 million people) were middle class in 2010. It is interesting to note that in 2006 some 42 percent (19.9 million) of South Africans self-identified as middle class, according to the global World Values Survey.The racial makeup of the middle class is also important. A study in 2012 by the Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing, based at the University of Cape Town (UCT) defined black middle class adults as meeting at least three of four requirements: car ownership, a post-secondary degree, and a household income between $1,400 and $5,000 per month. It found that:

The black middle class more than doubled between 2004 and 2012, from 1.7 million to 4.2 million individuals.
The average monthly income for a black middle class household in 2012 was $2,100, compared to $2,500 for a white middle class household.
The annual spending power of the black middle class is $42 billion, compared to $32 billion for the white middle class (3 million adults).

The myriad definitions and local peculiarities of middle classes in emerging democracies signal that changing patterns of growth, employment and the organization of work, as well as government-mandated schemes of redistribution, have transformed many of the traditional assumptions about and expectations of working and middle classes.

If our definition of middle class is so broad that almost everyone but the poor or the very rich is middle class, what has happened to the working class? “Working class” is as slippery a term as middle class. Organized labor’s assumption (especially powerful in South Africa) that the unemployed, the informal sector and semi-skilled, skilled and even lower professional workers in the formal sector can be covered by the uniform category “working class” simply does not fit reality. At the same time, people who are middle class in terms of their place in the income distribution and perhaps even by virtue of possessing post-secondary qualifications may be militant trade unionists.The Politics of Emerging Middle ClassesThe expansion of middle classes across the emerging world poses many tricky political questions, including that of apportioning credit for this success between state-led programs of redistribution (including affirmative action to remedy past exclusions) and market-driven economic reforms.In Brazil and South Africa, market and state have both played roles. In both countries, long-term ruling parties have been in a position to claim the lion’s share of credit for the state. They have no room to be complacent, however. Beginning in 2013, several democracies across the emerging world were shaken by angry protests that were remarkable for their size and suddenness. What shook the governments most was that the people driving the protests were mainly the new middle classes, the beneficiaries of the economic growth and the government policies that had lifted them out of poverty.Far from passively and gratefully enjoying their new status, however, citizens in Brazil, India, and elsewhere took to the streets to express their frustration with corruption, rising prices, poor services, and other grievances, and to demand more accountable government. This was a wake-up call to governments in several countries—most of which had been in power for multiple terms—not to take this growing constituency of upwardly mobile, mainly urban voters for granted.South Africa has had its share of protests, many of them violent, by the poor and marginalized, mainly about corruption and failures of service delivery. The new middle classes are more tightly bound into South Africa’s ruling alliance, however, that those of other countries. Their militancy is more likely to be expressed through lobbying within it for increased affirmative action and empowerment policies as well as by organizing strikes and other forms of activism by public sector unions.This spirit of challenge was carried over into the Brazilian and South African general elections of 2014, though without decisive result. Incumbent President Rousseff barely scraped home in Brazil, while in South Africa, the ANC’s massive majority was slightly dented nationally and more significantly impaired in the country’s main cities. However, such defection from the ANC as there was by different levels of middle class voters has proved difficult to interpret. It seems likely that such switched votes were shared between the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA) and the newly-founded, radical, populist, nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)—a sign of dissatisfaction among the new middle class citizens, but not of organization.In contrast, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a landslide victory in the Indian election in 2014, and secured the first parliamentary majority by a single party in the lower house, the Lhok Sabha, since 1984. The party, which ran on an explicitly market-oriented, jobs, growth, and good governance platform routed the Indian National Congress, which had been in power since 2004. In contrast to the BJP, Congress had run an election campaign focused on expanded entitlements. There was a swing towards the BJP among all classes in India: just under 50 percent of the middle class voted for the BJP and over 50 percent of the upper class. People who are at the middle of developed and developing countries’ income distributions may experience radically different living circumstances according to which they belong to, which makes comparisons and generalizations difficult. The middle classes of the U.S. and Europe may be “stressed” or “struggling”, but the economic hazards and deficits of good public services experienced by the “fragile” middle classes of Latin America and Africa, who risk relapsing into poverty, are of a different order.What is less well understood is that generalizations are as difficult to make across emerging economies as they are between emerging and advanced ones. This means that there is no reliable template of the implications for democracy and economic growth of the expansion of middle classes in (relatively) fast growing middle-income countries, never mind in the developing world as a whole.South Africa provides a good example of this.A Militant Middle ClassGrowth in South Africa’s new middle class has been driven very largely (but not exclusively) by expansion in numbers of public servants and their ability in recent years to achieve above-inflation wage increases unrelated to productivity.In short, South Africa’s public servants are numerous and comparatively well remunerated. This is largely because they are highly unionized and trade unions wield political power quite disproportionate to their numbers in the population by virtue of the main trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), being embedded in the ruling ANC Alliance.In 2013, 1.25 million people worked for national and provincial governments. This was a 25 percent increase over the 2005 figure, although to some extent this represented a recovery after job losses in the period of fiscal retrenchment between 1996 and 2000. The increase was also due to the fiscal space allowed by a period of sustained economic growth between 2000 and 2009. If employees of municipal government and state-owned enterprises are added, the figure is 1.96 million, representing about one in seven of South Africans in formal employment (13.7 million).The public sector wage bill is the largest component of government expenditure. In the 2014–5 budget, R450 billion was earmarked for the wage bill, 36 percent of the 1.25 trillion budget. This was an improvement on the 40 percent in the 2013 budget and 45 percent in the 2011 budget, indicating the importance of a three-year wage deal, concluded in 2012, in controlling public sector remuneration.In its 2015 Budget Review, the National Treasury (the Ministry of Finance) noted that “most” public servants were in the top 30 percent of earners nationally. Cosatu’s own figures in 2013 revealed that over half its members earned more than $500 a month, which in a country where nearly 40 percent of the potential labor force is unemployed, or has left the labor market in discouragement, is a comparatively substantial salary.Take schoolteachers, for example. In 2011 the National Planning Commission (the body responsible for the government’s flagship National Development Plan) reported that South African teachers are, in terms of purchasing parity, among the highest paid in the world. Over 80 percent of South Africa’s 425,000 teachers and lecturers belong to trade unions: 240,000 of them belong to the Cosatu-affiliated South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU). SADTU is the biggest public sector union in the federation, which has become largely dominated by public sector unions, whose members are middle class by any of the definitions in common usage. In 2014–15, the education budget accounted for 20 percent of government expenditure: salaries, the overwhelming amount for teachers, take up 78 percent of this expenditure.Rating agencies and international financial institutions have identified the expanding public sector wage bill as the greatest threat to the country’s fiscal stability. Negotiations began in late 2014 for an agreement to replace the 2012 deal, which has now lapsed. The unions’ initial demand was for an increase of 15 percent (three times the current inflation rate) for a one year deal and a more than tripling of the housing subsidy, which helps public servants to buy homes—a typical South African middle class benefit. The government offered 5 percent in each of three years.Over six months of standoff followed during which it became clear that a settlement substantially above inflation for only one year could trigger a downgrading of South Africa’s sovereign debt to junk status. The government’s stance was that any such settlement would be paid for by shrinking the size of the public service. In the end, the public servants settled for 7 percent in the first year of a three-year settlement, inflation plus 1 percent in the two subsequent years and a 30 percent increase in housing subsidy. In 2007 and 2010 public servants went on strike for more than three weeks in each case. Strike action was avoided this year, possibly due to the unions’ awareness of the macroeconomic consequences. However the combination of wildly unrealistic militancy followed by acceptance of much more modest gains, without any concessions to productivity typifies the instability of “middle class” industrial relations in South Africa.South Africa provides an unusually good example of how diverse middle classes can be and how varied their political roles are in a democracy. In each of the three countries described here, new middle classes have made it plain that they cannot be taken for granted by governments—no matter how much these rulers claim that their policies have legislated these classes into existence—nor do they make generalizations about democracy, growth, and middle classes easy to draw up.One conclusion that the South African example does invite, however, is that middle-class growth too heavily biased toward the public sector is dangerous. This in turn highlights the importance of structural reforms, which all three of these developing democracies neglected in their years of (relatively) high growth. It is these economic reforms that will encourage the growth of a more independent, less state-oriented, more entrepreneurial middle class that is less of a special interest and more of a force for accountability.For this to happen, all three countries now need a second wave of remarkably similar and bold reforms: a deepening of democracy, transparency, and accountability; further market liberalization; a more competent state with a positive attitude toward business; and a new approach to expanding opportunities for the poor. These policies will return a higher, more inclusive growth and ensure political stability, both greater achievements to boast about even than an expanding middle class.

China Selling U.S. Treasurys

China, Russia, and Brazil are unloading huge stores of U.S. debt, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Central banks around the world are selling U.S. government bonds at the fastest pace on record, the most dramatic shift in the $12.8 trillion Treasury market since the financial crisis.

Sales by China, Russia, Brazil and Taiwan are the latest sign of an emerging-markets slowdown that is threatening to spill over into the U.S. economy. Previously, all four were large purchasers of U.S. debt.Few analysts expect much higher yields in the Treasury market as a result. Foreign private purchases of U.S. debt have increased amid pessimism about the world economic outlook. U.S. firms and financial institutions continue to buy Treasurys, as do some foreign central banks.

Just a few years ago, American politicians and researchers were panicking that BRIC countries, particularly China, would eventually control America by owning all its debt. That prediction looked silly then, and it looks even sillier now. As U.S. banks buy up foreign governments’ stores of U.S. Treasurys, it is increasingly Americans who owe themselves a debt.

Europe Uses the Carrot and the Stick on Immigration

Hundreds of thousands of migrants could be deported from the EU in the coming weeks, according to a report by the Times (of London), which claims to have received a leaked document outlining the deportation scheme. Those traveling to Europe solely for economic reasons that have been denied asylum are the targets of the plan. The EU will reportedly threaten economic sanctions against the migrants’ home nations that refuse to take their citizens back. In addition, the plan is said to include provisions for the confinement of those migrants who have been denied asylum to prevent them from avoiding deportation. Up to 60 percent of those marked for deportation currently succeed in absconding from authorities before they can be sent back.

Meanwhile, after two days of meetings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the European Commission has released a vague provisional plan for addressing the migrant crisis in cooperation with Ankara. The plan would direct money—€1 billion, plus access to additional funds totaling as much as €250 million—to help Turkey build infrastructure for managing the migrant flow. The plan also dangles the prospect of hastening visa-free travel for Turkish citizens in Europe. Turkey, for its part, claims it has spent around €8 billion so far, and the €1 billion offer is therefore nowhere close to sufficient. Ankara also has broader geopolitical demands, including the establishment of a “safe zone” inside Syria’s borders and, at the most ambitious, the toppling of Assad (which Russian involvement has now rendered less likely.) And, in any case, little substantive progress on the plan is expected before Turkey’s elections in November of this year.Think of these two stories as the opening proffers in an important, complex geopolitical negotiation that’s going to take place over the next few months and on into the new year. Europe wants its immigration crisis to end, and to do that it needs the cooperation of a series of “safe” countries. These come in two forms. The first form is places like Turkey, which are not themselves war zones, but are near war zones and are often the first steps on the journey refugees have been taking to Europe. The second form is countries (usually in Africa) that have been producing economic refugees. The latter are not themselves failed states, and Brussels needs their cooperation on deportations and resettlement.It’s no secret that the EU has made a hash of its immigration policies so far, just as it has flubbed so many crises in the last decade. But Europe still has an immense advantage: money. Consider all of the trouble that Russia has been causing in Syria lately—and then consider that Russia’s GDP is equivalent to Italy’s, which is just one part of the EU, and a part that Brussels and Berlin consider relatively poor and mismanaged.If the Europeans want their problems to go away badly enough, they can probably pay to make them disappear. If the EU wants to keep the Syrian refugee situation contained in Syria’s wider neighborhood—or help stem economic migration from Africa—it has the means to do so. The EU could pay to resettle refugees closer to Syria, to get “gateway” nations to stop the flow of refugees from hitting European shores (or greatly attenuate that flow), to deport and resettle illegal economic migrants, to buy the cooperation of the non-European countries that would need to be involved in the process, and then to absorb the remaining refugees still in Europe.Or so the hope goes. But the other countries involved know this too—and they know the political pressure in Europe to fix the crisis is growing. Nations from Turkey to The Gambia will probably demand a high price for their cooperation. And it will take clarity and political will on Europe’s part, as well as the money, to make this work—and those are things that have been on short supply in the EU for a while now. We should never underestimate the ability of Eurocrats to make a hash of things.But these negotiations are important. As Ross Douthat has pointed out, Europe is under immense, long-term, demographic pressure from its neighbors, particularly from Africa. Whether it manages to sort out a functioning immigration and border enforcement system will go a long way to determining whether this year is seen as a one-off, war-driven refugee crisis or the start of a long-term flow of immigration, undertaken without legal sanction or popular approval, that the Continent is not culturally, politically, or economically prepared for. Making this crisis a one-off will require the cooperation of partner countries, so keep an eye on stories like these two as negotiations unfold.

How Fracking Is Helping America Get Greener

Fracking shale has kicked off an oil and gas renaissance in recent years here in the U.S., but as quickly as it has remade our energy landscape, it has also became a focal point for environmentalists’ ire. For many greens, the spike in natural gas production is necessarily a step in the wrong direction because, as they see it, a fossil fuel’s a fossil fuel. But not all brown energy resources were created equal: Natural gas emits roughly half the greenhouse gases as coal, and releases much fewer local pollutants. And now, as the EIA reports, shale gas is displacing large quantities of dirtier-burning coal:

Earlier this year, natural gas-fired generation surpassed generation from coal for the first time. This switch occurred in April, generally the month with the lowest demand for electricity. In times of low electricity demand, many generators schedule routine maintenance, and utilization rates for generating plants are low. As demand increases during the summer, output from both coal- and natural gas-fired generators increases.

Total electricity demand, excluding demand met by distributed (largely renewable) sources, increased from 384 billion kilowatthours (kWh) in July 2014 to 398 billion kWh in July 2015. Coal-fired generation fell from 150 billion kWh to 139 billion kWh, while natural gas-fired generation rose from 114 billion kWh to 140 billion kWh. This decrease in coal and increase in natural gas occurred in every region of the country: the Mid-Atlantic region had the largest decline in coal-fired generation, followed by Texas, while the Southeast and Central regions had the largest increases in natural gas-fired generation.

This is what real green progress looks like. Innovative new drilling techniques have helped companies profitably tap a greener resource, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions even as they’ve cut Americans’ heating bills.

Moreover, natural gas-fired power plants are uniquely suited to complement renewable energy production. Solar and wind farms can only produce power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, so grids still must rely on another, more consistent source to help fill in those gaps. Gas-fired plants can be brought on and offline relatively quickly and cheaply, making them the ideal match for the renewables greens are so eager to see successfully deployed. Thanks to fracking, we’ve got an overabundance of that natural gas, and it’s cheap!We’ve said for years now that shale gas is fracking green, and the EIA’s latest numbers help to prove our point. Lacking cost-effective, scalable storage options, we can’t run society on renewables alone. Any rational green should be able to see the eco-merits of the shale boom, but, sadly, that class of environmentalist seems to be in short supply.

BDS MIA in Beijing?

A new investment fund in China is aiming to help investors direct venture capital to Israeli start-ups. The Times of Israel reports:

One of the biggest microcredit and wealth management firms in the world, CreditEase China, is actively seeking out investments in Israel. CreditEase has partnered with veteran investors in Israel Tayman Kan and Benjamin Weiss to establish the CreditEase Israel Innovation Fund (CEIIF), its first Israel-focused venture-capital/private equity fund.

The fund has raised $30 million so far. And the story of how that money was raised is a testimony to the enthusiasm for and confidence in Israel in China’s investment community, said Benjamin Weiss, who along with fellow investor Tayman Kan is managing partner of the fund.“We raised the money for the fund in mid-August, during what was the worst week for the Chinese economy in many years,” said Weiss.

Thirty million dollars is not a huge sum of money for a venture capital fund, but this fund is more evidence that Chinese investors are still directing resources to Israel as they pull back in emerging markets around the world. It’s a promising sign for Israel that money continues to flow into the country despite global economic uncertainty and some rather restive neighbors. Meanwhile, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions activists in the West should take note: Beijing apparently never got your memo.

Looking for Jesus on Planet Gliese 832c

On September 29, 2015, NASA announced new evidence of the presence of liquid water under the surface of Mars. This item even found its way onto the first page of The New York Times (despite all the competing news from Pope Francis, President Xi Yinping of China, and the ongoing invasion of Europe by hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East). Mars, the “red planet” virtually in the back yard of our Earth, has for many years been the focus of human imagination about intelligent creatures in outer space. Science fiction has generated libraries of books about “little green men” from Mars coming to visit. I suppose that the latest news from NASA will revive these fantasies, though if there is life in these underground puddles at all, it is unlikely to be more interesting than (at best) bacteria—quite unable (as in that classic cartoon) to walk up to a horse and say “take me to your leader!”

And with the enormous expansion in the power of telescopes, the search for extraterrestrial life has been looking farther afield. Astronomers have been making lists of far-flung stars with planets that might be able to support life. The one given the name “Gliese 832c” is, at the moment, a plausible candidate. (Don’t ask me to give its location on a map of the galaxy. I imagine that Gliese is the name of the astronomer who found the star, a very big one. The “c” stands for the location of the planet as number 3 going out from the mother star.)The Spectator is that delightful British magazine, which claims to have been continuously published since its foundation in 1828 (I can’t vouch for this claim). It is sardonically conservative both on culture and politics, and has a bevy of writers with a fine sense of the English language. In the issue of September 19, 2015, it has a piece by Alexander Chancellor, a regular columnist, which ponders the question “How do you address extraterrestrials in outer space?” If you think that only somewhat deranged British eccentrics would pay attention to this question, let me try to dissuade you from this mistaken judgment. Chancellor is cautious about the chances of the question becoming practically relevant. He mentions the remark by one Anders Sandberg, who is connected with something called the Future of Humanity Institute (in Oxford, of all places), to the effect that the nearest plausible planet is ten light years away from Earth, which would mean a wait of 200 of our years for a reply to reach us from there.Apparently there is ongoing discussion about the initial messages coming from our end. Already in 1972 a plaque attached to a spacecraft had pictures of a naked man and a naked woman, so that folks out there would know what we look like. Recently Dr. Jill Stuart, an “expert on space policy” (?) at the London School of Economics, has expressed worry that such pictures may give the wrong impression, because they are “western-dominated” (even though the naked figures show no racial features) and because the male of the species is in a “macho posture”. Probably any politically-correct design concocted by a concerned committee at the LSE would be useless, since the recipients on, say Gliese 832c, would have no idea what to make of these images—Sandberg observed that maybe their species would not have eyes. Be this as it may, Yuri Milner, a Russian tycoon, has offered a million dollars for the best image of homo sapiens to be broadcast from Earth (perhaps the winning image will be of a half-naked Vladimir Putin in martial-arts position?). According to the Spectator story, the same Yuri has already invested $100 million to develop better radio telescopes to listen for any intelligible messages coming in.What does any of this have to do with religion? Everything, I would suggest.Contemplating the night sky full of stars probably led individuals to a sense of both awe and vulnerability even in ancient times—say, some Israelite resting alone for a quiet moment in the clear desert air on the endless journey to the Holy Land. I don’t think it is an oversimplification to say that all religion is an attempt to answer the question whether we insignificant beings are alone in the universe. Alleged answers then come, in innumerable versions, asserting that no, we are not alone, and that there is an order of meaning that encompasses the distant stars and our own rather pitiful lives. But modern science has vastly (indeed “astronomically”) expanded our perception of the star-filled sky—millions and millions of galaxies expanding or contracting, with a strange counter-world of “dark matter”, operating by laws that are increasingly unimaginable and incomprehensible. And now come along some astronomers—mind you sober scientists, not initiates of some mystical doctrine—who claim that there is actual empirical evidence of not just the immense universe of the galaxies that our telescopes explore, but of a possibly infinite number of parallel universes operating by laws that we cannot imagine in our wildest dreams.The Biblical tradition revolves around the parochial history of an obscure tribe with misty origins in the ancient Near East, and then around the even more parochial events spanning a few decades in just one corner of that part of the world. Yet out of this tradition have come three world religions, with claims of cosmic significance. I think that in the case of Christianity the Johannine portions of the New Testament already express this claim (notably in the prologue to the Gospel of John), but the Apostle Paul as well alludes to the cosmic import of the Christian message of redemption, as in Romans 8:22: “For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together with us”. I think it is fair to say that Greek Orthodoxy (more emphatically than its Latin counterparts) has put the cosmic Christ at the center of its thought and piety. This emphasis is expressed most powerfully in the Orthodox Easter liturgy, where the risen Christ “tramples death with death, and brings life to those in the grave”. Such intuitions of cosmic redemption can be found most readily in the (often heretical) Jewish, Christian and Muslim mystical movements.I also think it is also fair to say that redemption as a cosmic rather than primarily historical drama is stronger in the religions emerging from the Indian subcontinent than in the more historically oriented monotheisms of west Asian provenance. A prototypical example of the Indian religious imagination is the myth of the ultimate god Vishnu exhaling to create worlds and then inhaling to destroy them again, this endless process continuing over vast cycles of time. Individual souls, fated to participate in these cycles through the iron law of reincarnation, finally (in the most sophisticated versions of Hinduism) find redemption by escaping these cycles of rebirths and deaths by merging with the ultimate divine reality of the universe. Buddhism (especially in its Mahayana forms) is rooted in the same cosmic perceptions. A famous example of this is the so-called Vimalakirti Sutra, whose original Sanskrit text originated in India in the first century CE (it became very influential in Chinese and Japanese translations in East Asia). The text begins with a huge assembly of gods, boddhisatvas (individuals who have attained Enlightenment but forego final redemption to help others get there), and less exalted arhats (Enlightened ones), and other supernatural characters—each of whom rules over an entire world (or Buddha-field). Most of the text is then taken up with Vimalakirti promulgating his doctrine of “inconceivable liberation” to this very mixed congregation. (I may not have gotten all details right here. I am relying on the translation, from a Tibetan version, and commentary by Robert Thurman, an American Buddhist scholar).Enough of these global excursions. Back to the contemporary fascination with putative “little green men”:In September 2015, in one of those impromptu exchanges for which journalists love Pope Francis, he was asked whether he would baptize a “Martian”; Francis said yes, if the latter asked for it. A more reflective answer about baptizing “aliens” was given already in 2010 by Guy Consolmagno, an American astronomer and Jesuit priest, now director of the Vatican Observatory (I don’t know just what they observe over there). He replied that he would baptize them “if they have a soul”; he didn’t say how he would find out. It seems to me that there are more fundamental questions behind these rather lighthearted exchanges: the drama of redemption in all branches of monotheistic religion is mainly understood in connection with the ultimate fate of human beings. But what about the fate of the entire universe? Is it too in need of redemption? In Christian terms: Is the cosmic Christ engaged in redeeming all of creation, which obviously is still flawed? There is a very applicable Jewish idea here, that of the “repair of the universe”/tikkun olam; it originated earlier in rabbinical Judaism, but became central to a school of Kabbalah developed by Isaac Luria in the 16th century CE (in the town of Safed in northern Israel).The term “unidentified flying objects”, or UFOs, was coined by the US Air Force in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. Such objects were sighted in various places, and the American military was always concerned that the Russians may be up to some new tricks. After a long investigation the Air Force concluded that there were harmless explanations of all “sightings”—not in terms of secret enemy weapons, and certainly not of invaders from outer space. Nevertheless a cult emerged around these UFOs. It flourished for a while; for all I know it still does. It had an interesting paranoid dimension: the US government was accused of a big cover-up, motivated by a desire not to alarm the public or by the need to protect counter-measures (against aircrafts either from Russia or from alien incursions). Early in my career I had a fleeting experience with the UFO cult; by then I had developed a sensitive nose in detecting religious phenomena—my nose told me in no uncertain tones, “We are dealing with religion here!”I was invited to a meeting of a “UFO club” by the secretary of a research project I was working with, a middle-aged woman who, it turned out, had an absorbing interest in UFOs. The meeting, as usual, was devoted to the analysis of a particular “sighting”. The analysis was supposedly strictly objective and scientific. It was anything but that. It was clear from the beginning that those present (about twenty or so) fervently hoped that there had actually been a landing by an alien spaceship. The location of the alleged landing was in a remote desert area in the Southwest. The evidence consisted of various reports by individuals who had seen the spaceship and its crew (described in some detail, more or less humanoid). A key witness was the local sheriff, who gave the most detailed report, and who actually claimed to have conversed with the aliens and to have visited their vehicle. The discussion was increasingly excited, as the group moved toward the (probably foregone) conclusion that this was a real event—aliens had landed in America! I listened, said nothing.Then, alas, there appeared a dissenter. A young man, apparently a visitor rather than a regular club member, began to question this or that piece of the evidence. The group became increasingly angry. The dissenter went after the sheriff—why, the young man was asked, would he question the veracity of someone trained to be an objective witness. The young man fished out a couple of pages from the bundle of reports: on two occasions, it was reported, the sheriff had been visibly drunk when he arrived at the site. The young dissenter was yelled at by almost all the club members. It seemed possible that the verbal abuse would morph into physical violence. I made a quick departure from the scene.Both before and after this incident I have experienced other cases how believers react when their worldview is questioned. The cognitive defenses go up immediately: the sources for the dissenting views are attacked on methodological grounds, and the motives of the dissenters are impugned—typically judged to be incompetent to assess the evidence or, worse, accused of being paid for their testimony. Thus the damage to the passionately affirmed worldview is quickly repaired. This is how efforts to have a dialogue with fundamentalists commonly end in futility. There remains the age-old hope that the silence of the universe will be broken and that someone (even a little green man) will come and speak the redeeming word—listen, you are not alone!Jalaluddin Rumi (13th century CE) is one of the greatest Muslim mystics (Sufis). He lived for much of his life in Konya, Turkey (where among other things he founded the Order of Whirling Derwishes). The following poem seems an appropriate ending for this post. Rumi mostly wrote in Persian; his poetry is considered one of the high points of that language. I read the following in an English translation; I hope that, whether accurate or not, it gives the flavor of his faith:

I prayed to you in the morning. You did not answer me.

I prayed to you in the evening. You did not answer me.

For many years I prayed to you. You never answered.

Then one day, unexpectedly, I heard your voice.

You said: In my silence I spoke to you.

Shale Boom Putting Cash in Americans’ Pockets This Winter

Booming energy production has the U.S. awash in oil and natural gas, and those low prices promise to translate to cheaper heating bills for most Americans this winter, according to new analysis from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). And it’s not only homes heated by natural gas that will be saving money in the coming colder months—houses heated by propane and heating oil are also expected to see discounts. The New York Times reports:

The nearly half of American households that are heated with natural gas can expect a decline of 10 percent in their gas spending, the agency said. The department’s Energy Information Administration, in its Winter Fuels Outlook report, forecast a 6 percent decline in residential natural gas consumption this winter because of higher temperatures, while prices will be 4 percent lower than they were last winter.

An even bigger savings will go to homes that rely on heating oil, mostly in the Northeast, with households saving 25 percent. Retail prices are expected to be 15 percent lower, while consumption is expected to be 11 percent lower. The average household could pay roughly $460 less than last winter.Propane users, mostly in rural areas and in the Midwest, are expected to spend 21 percent less this winter than last. Total electricity expenditures are expected to be 3 percent lower than last winter.

It’s often overlooked that high electricity and heating bills are a form of regressive taxation, felt most keenly by the poor and often unnoticed by the rich. Greens anxious to accelerate the deployment of current-generation renewables through government subsidization seldom think of the costs that such policies pass on to poorer consumers. Germany’s manic pursuit of solar and wind energy has saddled its people with some of the highest electricity bills in Europe, and it’s inevitably those least equipped to cope with those new expenses that are most affected by them.

On the flip side, here in the United States we’re seeing the welcome effects of burgeoning domestic energy supplies as producers, thanks to fracking, continue to churn out the hydrocarbons. That’s good news for businesses as well as households, and it’s especially beneficial for those Americans with tighter budgets. This winter we’ll be seeing yet another reason to hail shale.

U.S. Commander: Afghanistan Needs Us

General John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in his opinion, the United States should maintain a presence in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, as Politico reports:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is recommending a change in President Barack Obama’s plans of drawing down nearly all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

Army Gen. John Campbell told a Senate panel Tuesday he has given the president options that would diverge from the current plan to withdraw all U.S. troops beyond an embassy presence in Kabul after 2016.“Based on conditions on the ground,” Campbell said, “I do believe that we have to provide our senior leadership options different than the current plan we’re on, absolutely.”

Analyses keep changing, of course, but Campbell’s comments may be evidence that the White House is reconsidering the complete withdrawal promised by the end of President Obama’s tenure. During his remarks, Campbell acknowledged that ISIS is more established in Afghanistan than he said they were when he appeared before Congress in February. ISIS militants are locked in a struggle with the Taliban, and the Afghan government has promised to go after both groups simultaneously.

Obama’s rationale for doubling down on Afghanistan in the first place was that it was where the terrorists were. Given that the terrorists are still there, it may be difficult for him to justify a withdrawal. But our presence has lately caused a controversy, too. At the hearing, the general was also under fire for last weekend’s attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital, which Campbell called a “mistake” but declined to discuss further. However you slice it, the whole situation doesn’t look good for the United States. As WRM wrote yesterday, the Pentagon is, at this point, “running a vast, multi-country war effort that has become unhinged from any serious strategic vision.” The uncertainty about our policy in Afghanistan is part and parcel of that failure.

Who Doesn’t Want to Move America Forward?

Most voters would rather have a president who focuses on “moving America forward” than a president who focuses on “protecting what has made America great.” Does this mean the GOP is doomed if it doesn’t change its ways? That’s the argument political analyst Charlie Cook makes in a recent National Journal column:

One thing that jumped out of [the latest NBC/WSJ poll] spells bad news for Re­pub­lic­ans—and it’s only bound to get worse. It boils down to the two Amer­icas we have now—how the dif­fer­ences in out­look are gen­er­a­tion­al and how Re­pub­lic­ans should worry about align­ing them­selves in ways that, over time, will in­creas­ingly put them at a dis­ad­vant­age. Nos­tal­gia is great in its place. But in polit­ics, get­ting caught up in the past is per­il­ous.

Look at the re­sponses of 828 re­gistered voters when they were asked, “in think­ing about the next pres­id­ent,” which of two state­ments came closer to their point of view. The first choice: “It is time to have a pres­id­ent who will fo­cus on pro­gress and help move Amer­ica for­ward.” Or: “This is a time to have a pres­id­ent who will fo­cus on pro­tect­ing what has made Amer­ica great.” I must con­fess that the word­ing both­ers me a bit, be­cause people can define “pro­gress” and “move Amer­ica for­ward” in dif­fer­ent ways. Not sur­pris­ingly, 60 per­cent of the re­spond­ents pre­ferred to “fo­cus on pro­gress and help move Amer­ica for­ward”; just 38 per­cent chose “pro­tect­ing what has made Amer­ica great.” […]Re­pub­lic­ans, in oth­er words, risk isol­at­ing them­selves from young­er voters and in­de­pend­ents, in par­tic­u­lar, if they’re seen as cling­ing to the past.

But which party is more guilty of “clinging to the past?” Perhaps because the Democrats have energetically deployed phrases like “making progress”, and “being the right side of history”, and perhaps because issues like immigration and same-sex marriage have taken center stage in the last few elections, Cook seems automatically to associate Republicans with a politics based on the past. But as we have always emphasized on this blog, it’s not nearly that simple.

One of the major issues of our political moment is the ongoing collapse of what we call the mid-20th century blue social model. Thanks to globalization, new technologies, and demographic changes, this model is on its way out, and a more entrepreneurial, competitive, and unpredictable system is taking its place. And on many issues related to the decline of the blue model—propping up public sector unions, for example, or stifling the sharing economy—it is actually Democrats who are more likely be caught up in outdated approaches.That’s not to say Republicans have a fully formed economic program for addressing the decline of the blue model, or that they are doing a good job pitching a forward-looking agenda to voters. Redsters who just focus on cutting programs and government functions don’t have a holistic policy vision. But they have at least made some promising noises (like Marco Rubio’s speech in New York yesterday about the “on-demand” economy), while the Democrats’ economic agenda often amounts to doubling down on the 1950s economic model at all costs. So its not at all clear which party is stuck in the past.