Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 592

Decline that Never Quite Becomes a Fall

One big reason the Federal Reserve decided against raising rates had nothing to do with the state of the domestic economy, The Financial Times reports:

The Federal Reserve held interest rates at historic lows as concerns about an increasingly brittle global economy overshadowed evidence of a resilient US recovery.

The US central bank maintained its 0 to 0.25 per cent target range for the federal funds rate, ending weeks of feverish speculation over whether it would raise rates for the first time since before the financial crisis.

For years, we’ve been hearing  about the ongoing American decline. We’ve been told that emerging markets and particularly the BRICS are transforming the world and that the old rules no longer apply. We created the G-20 because of the widespread belief that the U.S., even with the other G-7 countries, was no longer strong enough economically to set the agenda.

Yet here we have the G-1 holding the switch on which that the global economy depends. The vaunted BRICS have to be protected from the economic disaster that a Fed rate rise would be for them. The Federal Reserve System of the United States is the world’s de facto central bank.That doesn’t mean that the world economy is in a good place; clearly when interest rates can’t be raised from their present derisory level something is seriously wrong. One suspects that several factors are at work: the over-saving of Asian and oil economies accumulating huge reserves; rapid falls in prices not fully captured by economic statistics so that real interest rates (interest rates minus the rate of inflation or plus the rate of deflation) may be higher than the numbers we are looking at; the gradual deflation of a vast global bubble in excess manufacturing capacity and the consequences of government efforts to enable a soft landing; under-reporting of the shadow economy of, for example, oligarchs in Russia and princelings in China. To say nothing of vast off-the-books liabilities for pensions and other entitlement type spending in the advanced world. Central bankers have their work cut out for them these days.The United States, especially to those of us looking from up close, often seems to be a stumblebum lurching from one folly to the next. And that’s often true. But what we forget is that, erratic as our national performance might be, the other big economic and political groupings—Europe, China, Japan, India, Brazil and so on—have problems of their own. Even with all its flaws, the U.S. still looks like the fastest runner in a slow field.

EU Stakes Out Climate Summit Position

Environment ministers from around the EU met in Brussels today in an attempt to get the bloc on the same page ahead of this December’s climate summit in Paris, the idea being that a cohesive bloc could sway negotiations more than a fragmented one. As Reuters reports, member states were able to agree on an approach to Paris:

European Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said Friday was a good day and ensured the 28-member EU would be “a deal-maker, not a deal-taker” in Paris, where U.N. talks begin on Nov. 30. The bloc would not sign a global pact that was not ambitious enough, he said.

There were concerns going in to these talks that coal-dependent Poland would push back on these goals, with one eurocrat admitting to Reuters ahead of the meeting that “[w]e’re going to have lots of trouble.” Those worries center around Polish parliamentary elections next month. Poland’s right-leaning Law and Justice Party (PiS) is expected to have a big day, and members of the party have already been threatening to throw a wrench in the Paris negotiations. “Any binding stance that would be accepted at the conference in Paris will be harmful to Poland, so a failure of the summit is in Poland’s interest,” said PiS parliamentarian Piotr Naimski.

But the talks produced a platform, albeit one with some compromises:

The haggling to accommodate Poland substituted a long-term goal of 60 percent versus 2010 levels with one of at least 50 percent versus 1990, which EU officials said was effectively the same.

It also switched the word decarbonisation with “climate neutrality”. Polish officials said that allowed for technological solutions, such as carbon capture and storage, to do some of the work, reducing the need to change the fuel mix.

So the EU will be heading in to Paris intent on producing a climate treaty with some reach emissions reductions targets, a provision for five-year check-ups, and language assuring the commitment towards working towards climate neutrality (rather than decarbonization, as most EU members not named Poland would have liked). Already green groups are heaping on the scorn, upset that the supposed leading green voting bloc at the Paris summit would be swayed by the concerns of one of its fossil fuel-reliant members. “The EU’s position is still far from what is needed to reach an effective global deal,” said Greenpeace EU’s energy policy adviser Jiri Jerabek.

In a way, we’re getting a look at a microcosm of the Paris negotiations. Poland was able to force through a change in language and a different emissions target. If greens are already miffed at the watering down of green ambitions, just wait until they see what happens when the developing world sits down to the negotiating table.

The White House’s Childish Dig at the Pope

Pope Francis will be at the White House next Wednesday as part of his tour through the United States in coming days—but this welcoming ceremony could have a distinctly chilly tone. The WSJ reports that the Vatican has some objections to the White House’s guest list:

On the eve of Pope Francis’s arrival in the U.S., the Vatican has taken offense at the Obama administration’s decision to invite to the pope’s welcome ceremony transgender activists, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an activist nun who leads a group criticized by the Vatican for its silence on abortion and euthanasia.

Bishop Gene Robinson, who has also been invited to the pope’s welcoming ceremony, is a former Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay Episcopal bishop in the U.S. He is also an ex-spouse in a same-sex marriage. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.Another guest, Mateo Williamson, is a former co-head of the transgender caucus of Dignity USA, a group for LGBT Catholics. He said the Vatican’s disapproval of his presence at the ceremony “speaks to the necessity for continued dialogue” between transgender Catholics and the church hierarchy. […]Mr. Williamson, who is transgender, said he would be attending the ceremony as a guest of Vivian Taylor, a transgender woman who was invited by the White House and who formerly served as executive director of Integrity USA, an LBGT advocacy group in the Episcopal Church.

This is an astonishing display of bad manners. It would be one thing to invite a LGBTQ guest who held a position or a place in society that made him or her an obvious pick. In that case, it would be wrong from the standpoint of both etiquette and morals to deny an invitation. It would also be another matter if the White House is doing this with the foreknowledge and support of the Vatican. If Jesus could eat with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, it’s possible Pope Francis would be fine with a few guest with whom he disagrees on some points of personal morality. A joint decision with a Vatican that is fully happy with the guest list would be perfectly acceptable.

But at least one top Vatican official, unnamed by the Journal, issued a critical response to the list. If that official’s views are representative, it would appear that the White House did not run the list by the Vatican and the Obama Administration has gone out of its way to invite people whose presence is intended to imply criticism of the beliefs of his guest of honor. This is sophomoric and disgraceful. If the Catholic Church is so immoral that you feel that all decent people need to be at war with it, then you should treat the Pope’s visit as a private matter and ignore it. But if you want to show respect to the head of a faith that tens of millions of your fellow countrymen think is important, invite him and treat him with honor.If the White House truly did this without Vatican support, this is behavior you’d expect to see from middle school students rather than the head of state of a serious country.

The Fig Leaf Falls from U.S. Syria Strategy

UPDATE: The White House has announced that it was prepared to engage in military-to-military talks with Russia over the fate of Syria. No word yet on the Russian response, if any.

Fast on the heels of the news that only four or five men are left in the America’s Syria force, President Obama is rethinking his Syria strategy, considering whether to replace the failed attempt to train a Syrian force with a new approach. More:

Under one proposal being crafted at the Pentagon, the $500 million train-and-equip program—a core component of the U.S. Syria strategy—would be supplanted by a more modest effort focused on creating specially trained militants empowered to call in U.S. airstrikes, defense officials said […]

“I’m someone who has supported the president on many issues, and on this one I think we’ve made a major mistake by being so standoffish and uninvolved,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who advised President George W. Bush on Iran policy as undersecretary of state for political affairs and U.S. representative to NATO.

“I hope that there will be a sea change in the administration, that they will recognize that they need a comprehensive policy. It may take years to succeed, but you’ve got to start,” Mr. Burns said. “If this administration doesn’t, no matter who we elect in 2016—Republican or Democrat—will have to.”

It’s impossible for the White House to pretend anymore that America’s current Syria strategy is anything but a ruin. Even some of the President’s strongest defenders are throwing in the towel on his Syria strategy. One can only hope that the sheer magnitude of his failures in Syria will lead President Obama to review the assumptions that got him into this mess, but, at least at the moment, the Administration still seems convinced is the path to a solution in Syria involves getting buy in from Russia and Iran.

There are several problems with this approach. In the first place, Russia and Iran both want to erode U.S. power. Putin sees the United States as an enemy and adversary to be weakened and wounded however possible. That doesn’t mean he won’t, on occasion, bargain with us, or that we shouldn’t bargain with him. But it does mean that he will ask a high price in any deals we do, give as little help as he can, and take any opportunity that arises to impose yet more pain on the Obama Administration. The same thing is true of the mullahs; the nuke deal, even if they stick to it, is justified in their minds as a way to weaken the American role in the region and to enhance their own.But doing deals with Iran doesn’t only give the country potential advantages over the U.S.; it also intensifies regional tensions. As long as the Sunnis see the U.S. looking for ways to cut a deal with Shi’a Iran, Sunni mistrust will grow, and Sunni support for radicals will grow. Obama’s approach to Syrian stability alienates the Sunni world and destabilizes the region he hopes to calm down.The United States has the means to change the game in Syria. There are strategists in both the Pentagon and the State Department who have good ideas about how, even at this difficult moment, we could move toward a better future while keeping our risks and costs reasonably low. But it is getting harder every day. One of Putin’s goals is to close the jaws of the Syria trap shut on President Obama—putting him in a situation where he has no good options and indeed no acceptable bad ones.

Russia’s Third Circles

As TAI already noted this morning, General Lloyd J. Austin III, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, indicated that the Pentagon was still completely flummoxed as to what Russia’s broader objectives were in sending arms and troops to Syria. That’s troubling but not surprising in light of other troubles that are also not surprising. Thus, Austin indicated that the total number of Syrian “moderates” trained and presently fielded by the U.S. military thus far equaled “four or five.” Not four or five platoons or companies (and certainly not divisions), but just four or five guys—for an effort budgeted originally at $500 million. What good are four or five guys, except maybe to set up a breakfast eatery to serve the tens of thousands of immoderate fighters all around them who, after all, gotta find nourishment from time to time?

As to the (let’s be generous) five guys, I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. Unlike the Iraqis we trained at great cost, there is no indication that these guys have stripped down to their underwear and run away from the combat zone. At least not yet. At roughly $100 million budgeted per guy, we should be confident about that much, right? Of course, to be fair, there were others trained—maybe fifty or sixty guys—but, as we know, their attempt to infiltrate into Syria from their training bases, mostly in Turkey and perhaps a few coming from Jordan, did not go so well. In late July they got ambushed by Jabhat al-Nusra forces, probably on a tip from Turkish intelligence. Most were killed, some were captured, some joined their attackers, and some ran away (but no underwear could be seen). It’s too much to say that this was for the best, but at least these guys then did not have to face the question of whom they were supposed to fight. Any Syrian Sunni in his right mind (and the Turks, too) knows who the real enemy is: The Assad regime and its Alawi henchmen, and the Iranian-backed mercenaries of Hizballah who are helping them. But U.S. trainers, according to the dictates of Administration policy, were duty-bound to point them toward ISIS.Why has this U.S. training effort for Syria been so small and pathetic? Because, say some, the Obama Administration so ordained, lest a serious effort interrupt the systematic appeasement of the Iranian regime en route to the July 14 nuclear deal. Say others, the effort was small because of persistent slippery slope worries that have dogged U.S. calculations about Syria from the start of the civil war. The matter was over-determined, then, the result being that the Administration only pretended to do something in Syria over the past few years, just to deflect a bit of pressure. As hidebound and lethargically bureaucratized as the Pentagon can be, even it is capable of spending $500 million more usefully than this.Look at Iraq. That training effort has also been largely a failure—no one is talking anymore about the Iraqis taking Mosul back, since they cannot even secure much closer-by Ramadi and Fallujah. But at least the Iraqis have more than five guys. Nevertheless, just as General Austin and his colleagues seem not to know what the Russians are up to in Syria, so too do they still not understand what has gone so wrong in Iraq. Even Secretary of Defense Carter has from time to time spoken of this issue as though he doesn’t understand its essence, which is perhaps most troubling of all, since he is a very smart and capable guy.So let me, if I may, just spell it out. Ash, there is no Iraq “of the heart.” Shi‘a farm boys or urbanites from Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere in the south, who make up the vast bulk of the Iraqi Army today, do not identify with the drier climes of the Sunni homelands to the north and east. They do not know the lay of the land there; most have never gone there out of uniform; they feel no affinity (asabiyya) with anyone who lives there; and they do not think of it as part of their historical patrimony. The problem is not just that they do not know how to handle their weapons, or how to do logistics, or how to follow orders from officers they don’t much trust; it’s that they lack any personal reason to risk their lives for something they just don’t know how to care about. They may fight for tribe or clan or sect or home soil, but not for abstraction called “Iraq.” After all these years screwing around in that country, it is dismaying that we continue to unwittingly project our own frames of reference onto Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, and so on. But from all appearances, that’s what we do best.So now we know why there is no moderate U.S.-trained Syrian military force, and why, even if by some miracle the Shi‘a-directed and led Iraqi Army could retake Mosul, a Sunni city, it could not directly or readily rule it anyway. (This is the same reason, more or less, that the Houthis, who are Zeidis, could not hold southern Yemen, which is Sunni.) We thus understand further that, for all practical purposes (and not even bringing the Kurds into the picture), there is no more unitary polity known as Iraq.Nor is there anymore any unitary polity known as Syria, proved by the fact that its regime has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran—an Iran apparently ready to bargain away large swaths of Syrian real estate (rumors spread amid tentative post-nuclear deal diplomatic jockeying that the Iranians, on Assad’s “behalf,” would seek only Damascus, the Qusayr pivot toward the west, and Latakia) and to overturn Syria’s traditional caution against pissing off the Israelis near the Golan Heights. And here we come, finally, to what the Russians are up to.As military campaigns are wont to do, the Syrian civil war has known many battlefield fluctuations over the past few years. In the beginning, the regime was reeling so badly and so quickly that President Obama felt safe in demanding that “Assad must go,” since that seemed likely to happen anyway regardless of what we did or, more accurately, didn’t do. This was like urging a floating stick in the Niagara River to go over the Falls. But alas, then the Syrian opposition failed to get its act together for the big push to the palace, and the Iranians and the Russians came to Assad’s aid just in the nick of time. The situation stabilized and then gradually turned around, especially thanks to Hizballah shock troops introduced in a few crucial battles, notably the battle for Qusayr in April 2013.Then, for a while, the regime kicked ass, but only for a while. The coalescence of Jabhat al-Nusra, the sudden rise of ISIS, and the gradual manpower shortages afflicting the Alawis eventually shifted the momentum back against the regime. In recent months, things have gotten worse and worse. Without going into the bloody details, regime forces have been forced to retreat on several fronts, not least around Aleppo and all along the border with Turkey. Assad himself has admitted losses; the complaints of the Alawi clans have grown more vocal over the human costs of the war and the penetration of murderous hostile forces into parts of Latakia Province itself. Some 7,000 members of Iraqi Shi‘a militias hurried to Damascus to protect the capital. They were followed by battalions of Iranian Quds forces. And that having failed as well to provide the necessary protection, enter the Russians, stage right.Now, anyone who thinks that Russian military involvement in the Syrian civil war is a new thing simply has not been paying attention. There have been weapons deliveries aplenty almost from the start, and there have been advisers playing critical roles. As I pointed out already years ago, this became evident in the regime’s brutal tactics aimed at civilians, because those tactics mirrored exactly Russian tactics used in Chechnya.But now we have a far more overt Russian role: advanced tanks and other equipment, a forward air base, and probably Russian pilots flying combat missions. Why? General Austin and his colleagues may be “flummoxed,” but that’s their problem. I’m not.As in Ukraine, Russian aims are best defined by a set of concentric circles, the innermost circle being the most defensive and least ambitious, and the outermost the most offensive and expansive. In Ukraine, the innermost circle concerns the creation of yet another rubble heap on the Russian periphery—conventionally called a “frozen conflict.” These rubble heaps are designed to make Ukraine (and Georgia, and Moldova) very unappealing to Western institutions such as the European Union and NATO. By making sure that countries on Russia’s periphery do not prosper from free economies joined to pluralist politics, the Russian regime believes it protects itself from contagion that could spread to Moscow.The next circle outward would not just paralyze an unfriendly Ukrainian government but suborn or replace it. This would not require an actual march to Kiev, of which the Russian military is probably not capable. If that were to work, and Russians arms could walk forward instead of fight forward, the outer circle then becomes not just stopping NATO and the EU from expanding eastward, but destroying them politically. How? Send “little green men” (meaning: use hybrid warfare) against a NATO member, probably a Baltic State, and watch as a feckless U.S. and European response essentially destroy the credibility of NATO and, with it, the entire U.S.-led global alliance system.Of course, this is pretty dangerous, and despite a lot of nuclear rocket rattling lately from Moscow, few Western analysts think Putin would be so crazy as to risk a nuclear war to complete the third circle. The Western reaction to Russia’s Ukraine operation has been pretty flaccid, but not entirely so. The shift in the German attitude is most relevant here, and that must have been a key determinant of Putin’s inclination for risk-taking.Ah, but not even a successful consummation of the outer circle in Ukraine—if Putin were willing to risk it—could destroy the European Union. This is where Syria comes in.In Syria, the innermost Russian circle of aims concerns propping up Assad, the only ally Russia has (if one doesn’t count Viktor Orban’s Hungary) and the only place (Tartus) that Russia has a military base beyond its own frontiers. Besides, the Russians just don’t like regime change, any regime change, because to them it reflects badly on their own possible future. As Ivan Krastev has pointed out, Russia today behaves a lot like Russia in 1848, when Nicholas I, hearing of the uprisings against the conservative order further to the west, was reportedly ready to send the Russian army to break down the barricades in Paris. (He satisfied himself by sending it only as far as Poland, of course.) The Putin regime is reactionary to the core, and Syria is a test case following that of Libya, as the Russians probably see it.The intermediate circle has to do with coercive diplomacy—the only kind that really matters when discussions are not conducted among friends. If there has to be a political settlement to the Syrian civil war, the best way to get the largest share of influence at the table is to torque the battlefield in one’s favor. And one may reasonably infer that Moscow prefers a political settlement to either Assad’s defeat or a continuing stalemate, because a stalemate aids ISIS, and that, in turn, threatens to spill over into Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya (again), and other parts of the Russian Federation that are not all that firmly in hand as it is.And the third, outer circle, the most ambitious one? Consider that, so far, the brutality of the Assad regime, aided by Iran and its proxies, has made more than four million of Syria’s 24 million people refugees, and killed more than a quarter of a million. Many more are internally displaced persons; exactly how many, no one really knows. This has been done over the course of several years with, frankly, a not-too-impressive Syrian order of battle. The Russians could, if they wanted to, double the number of dead Syrians and perhaps triple the number of refugees in just a couple of months. The Russians are very well practiced at migratory genocide, after all; they earned their stripes doing just that in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.But why do this? To destroy or seriously degrade the viability of the European Union, which is perhaps incapable of holding itself together in the face of such pressures. It is already decaying rapidly over the prospect of dealing with fewer than a million asylum seekers. What if it has to deal with two million, or three, or more in just the next six to nine months?Just as attacking a Baltic State hoping to politically destroy NATO would be a high-risk undertaking, turning Syria into a free-fire zone in the hope of politically destroying the European Union would be as well. Which doesn’t mean the Russians won’t do it if they think the benefits exceed the risks. There are risks of deploying to Syria in the first place; ISIS swarm tactics could kill a lot of Russian soldiers, and Russian participation in combat could aid ISIS recruitment more than harm the proto-state the Caliph al-Baghdadi and his friends are trying to consolidate.As in Ukraine, however, the Russian calculation of benefits as against risks in Syria turns on what others do, notably on what restraints and countermeasures they can muster. If EU member states keep henpecking each other over the asylum crisis, it is likely—all else equal—that the Russians will be encouraged to make Europe’s dilemma worse. As for a possible U.S. reaction, the Russians probably discount anything serious from the current Administration—an Administration that seems somehow unable to frame what is going on in Europe right now as the long-term security issue that it of course is.And why shouldn’t they discount the U.S.? President Obama seems ready to meet Putin in New York over Syria, breaking his colonial New England-style shunning behavior. And Sergei Lavrov’s foot is so far up John Kerry’s gastrointestinal track by now that the Secretary must be tasting bootblack. The Russians are playing a weak hand, and they may come soon to regret the risks they are taking, but it seems unlikely that anything U.S. policy will mete out during the next 14 months could translate those risks into actual liabilities.And so it is, strange as it may sound, that the verve of a “conservative” German Chancellor whose refugee policy, as a colleague has put it, appears to originate from Human Rights Watch, whose energy policy resembles that of the early Greens, whose defense policy seems to derive from the peace movement, and whose social policy (minimum wage) is set by the trade unions, is pretty much all that stands between the Russians and their goals. Her and those five guys in Syria.

Saving the Academy from Itself

The virtual absence of conservatives in some fields of social science is leading to poorer quality scholarship. That’s the concern expressed by Heterodox Academy, a new initiative created by a politically diverse group of academics led by Jonathan Haidt to target the lack of viewpoint diversity in academia. From the site’s mission statement:

Science is among humankind’s most successful institutions not because scientists are so rational and open minded but because scholarly institutions work to counteract the errors and flaws of what are, after all, normal cognitively challenged human beings. We academics are generally biased toward confirming our own theories and validating our favored beliefs. But as long as we can all count on the peer review process and a vigorous post-publication peer debate process, we can rest assured that most obvious errors and biases will get called out. Researchers who have different values, political identities, and intellectual presuppositions and who disagree with published findings will run other studies, obtain opposing results, and the field will gradually sort out the truth.

Unless there is nobody out there who thinks differently. Or unless the few such people shrink from speaking up because they expect anger in response, even ostracism. That is what sometimes happens when orthodox beliefs and “sacred” values are challenged.

The site also contains comprehensive documentation of the problem, including links to major academic papers, a blog that will host discussion and commentary, and a list of twelve potential solutions. Few of the proposed remedies—i.e., “expand organizational diversity statements to include politics”, “eliminate pejorative terms referring to non-liberals; criticize others’ scholarship when they use those terms”, and “be alert to double standards”—are groundbreaking, but all are quite reasonable. In any case, the real question is how these reforms—or, for that matter, any reforms designed to open the social sciences to new political perspectives—could actually be operationalized in the face of resistance from an academic establishment that thinks that things are just fine as is. After all, conservatives have been attacking left-wing bias in the academy for decades.

But there are reasons to believe that, as Haidt promises in the mission statement, Heterodox Academy “will be different.” For one, it’s not a conservative project aimed at reclaiming the ivory tower for political reasons; it’s an non-ideological project composed of accomplished researchers from across the political spectrum concerned first and foremost with improving the quality of academic research. More broadly, it eschews the gin-up-the-outrage strategy that has become commonplace among many dogged critics of political correctness. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported last week:

In recent years, Campus Reform and a similar publication, The College Fix, have emerged as major forces in academe’s ideological battles. Each routinely puts college administrators and faculty members on the defensive with articles alleging liberal bias or indoctrination. Each has demonstrated a knack for generating outrage by producing stories that spread virally through social media. Conservative radio and cable-TV programs and right-leaning websites amplify their reach by picking up their stories. […]

Campus Reform and The College Fix make no effort to hide their ideological slant. That’s apparent in their use of headlines and photos that portray colleges as beset by leftist tyranny and liberal excess. Recent headlines from Campus Reform include “Atheist organization goes after college football chaplains” and “UCLA student: criticism of my tampon column was sexist.” A recent College Fix headline said, “UNC’s ‘Literature of 9/11’ course sympathizes with terrorists, paints U.S. as imperialistic.”

There is clearly an important role for this kind of strategy, which helps mobilize public opinion against politically correct follies. But taken too far, conservative claims of victimhood and expressions of outrage can come to resemble the very political correctness they are supposedly trying to eliminate. Moreover, just as left-wing political correctness doesn’t actually change conservative opinion, exaggerated right-wing claims of persecution are unlikely to win over many moderate or left-of-center academics.

Heterodox Academy might be able to perform an important function that the activist sites can’t—that is, persuade social science professors that incorporating a broader range of political ideas would be beneficial to their fields. Ultimately, it is incompatible with academic freedom for political change to be imposed on the social sciences from some outside entity, governmental or otherwise. If they are to come at all, reforms must come from within the academy itself, and Heterodox Academy seems like a promising vehicle for bringing them about.

Teachers’ Pensions Deserve Detention

Pension benefits for U.S. public school teachers work best for the long-timers while stiffing the young teachers who are supposed to succeed them. That’s the upshot of a piece in the Atlantic about two new studies on pensions put out by Bellwether Education Partners and the Urban Institute. Part of the problem is that career changes threaten teacher pensions. “In the typical state”, the piece notes,  “a teacher who changes careers (or, in some cases, moves to a different state to teach) sacrifices $5,000 a year in pension benefits, according to one analysis.” More:

[Bellwether’s Chad] Aldeman and his Urban Institute colleague Richard W. Johnson tallied the number of years a rookie teacher at age 25 would need to work in the same state before the teacher’s pension benefits exceed what he or she put into the plan as an employee. Twenty-five years is what they registered, suggesting that for many educators the pensions may be a worse value than a standard investment account. […]

The minimum number of years teachers must work before becoming eligible for even a portion of their pensions is known as a vesting period. A little over a dozen states, including states with large teacher populations such as Illinois and New York, have vesting periods of 10 years, meaning a public-school teacher in one of those states who leaves his or her teaching job in, say, nine years loses access to significant retirement dollars. In Massachusetts, Aldeman estimates a teacher in this situation would forfeit $105,000. That’s on the extreme end, though: The typical teacher forgoes about $22,000 for leaving before his or her retirement eligibility comes into effect.

This disadvantages younger or newer teachers who may only teach for a few years before either moving states or changing careers, not to mention provides a disincentive to get into teaching in the first place unless you’re really, really sure you want to stay in one place and one career for the duration. As we’ve said before, a rotating cadre of young teachers who may only stick around for a few years would bring a necessary vitality to our public school systems. The pension schemes encourage exactly the opposite.

And there’s another problem: the system itself is teetering. Teachers’ pension funds fall short of full funding by half a trillion dollars, and though they were designed not to rely on the contributions of young workers in a sort of Ponzi scheme, as the author of the study avers in the Atlantic, the plans are now “using are new teachers … to prop up the existing debt.” If you thought being tied to your teaching post in Poughkeepsie for thirty years was a deal-breaker, try that on for size.

U.S. retirement benefits for teachers need some fixing, though some of the suggestions (like cutting benefits for longtime teachers as well as for young or future ones) are the very definition of a hard sell. Switching to plan types that wouldn’t short-change youngsters quite so much, like 401(k)s, should receive due consideration. There’s room for improvement here, as we’ve all heard a teacher say at some point. Policy makers should take note.

Cascading Border Closures Rock Europe

Europe is experiencing a series of cascading border closures, rippling outward like circuit breakers tripping during a power surge. A week ago, Denmark suspended its rail link to Germany. On Monday, Germany closed its border with Austria. Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands all clamped “temporary” border restrictions into place.

On Tuesday, Hungary sealed its border with Serbia; yesterday, Hungarian border guards used water cannons, tear gas, and truncheons to beat back a sea of migrants. This in turn forced more than 5,000 people to seek an alternate path through Croatia north to Slovenia and Germany. Croatian authorities indicated that while they want to help, Croatia’s capacity for handling migrant flows was limited to the thousands, not to the tens of thousands. And then Slovenian authorities today announced that they would reinforce their border with Croatia, potentially creating another dead end for the thousands of migrants massing in the Balkans.This was inevitable when Brussels and Berlin signaled a determination to treat the immigration problem—which is a hybrid refugee crisis and migrant moment—in purely humanitarian terms. Those languishing in the south of Europe or even in refugee camps in Turkey heard the official declarations as an open-ended invitation to the generous, prosperous, new Germany; they rushed northward and overloaded the system.European leaders had no practical plans to deal with the wave of migrants they were encouraging. While some of the border shutdowns—such as Hungary’s—were triggered by ideology, many are a matter of logistics. Germany, it turns out, has absolutely no legal immigration mechanism. It hasn’t enforced a land border since 1995. Is it any wonder it wasn’t able to process the inflow into Bavaria, despite the government’s best intentions? Now, border controls are now rippling from the desirable destinations in Europe (Germany and Scandinavia) outward to its more remote borders.In Brussels, leaders failed to agree to a refugee-sharing quota scheme earlier this week, and may now have abandoned mandatory redistribution plans entirely. As the numbers continue to mount, absent a unified border-enforcement-cum-resettlement plan, a return to national borders may be the only way some governments can see to deal with the crisis.And while all of these measures are technically “temporary”, it doesn’t take Nostradamus to see a world in which they might be extended indefinitely. The end of Schengen is now being openly discussed.European leaders acted on ideology and sentiment, counting real-world planning as a sign of backward-looking hard-heartedness. The result is that well-meaning centrists have egg on their face, and, as Adam Garfinkle put it in a must-read essay on Sunday, “One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will.” As the European far right grows stronger, the Continent badly needs some adults who can balance do-gooder instincts with some practical sense. Will they step to the fore in time?

Obama Talks Tough on China

As the White House gets ready for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s big visit next week, President Obama is planning to talk tough on cyber issues. The Financial Times reports:

Speaking to the Business Roundtable in Washington, Mr Obama said cyber espionage would “probably be one of the biggest topics that I discuss with President Xi”. The US president said he accepted that China and other nations, including the US, would pursue traditional espionage, such as trying to obtain transcripts of his conversations, but stressed that stealing commercial secrets was “an act of aggression that has to stop”.

“We are preparing a number of measures that will indicate to the Chinese that this is not just a matter of us being mildly upset, but is something that will put significant strains on the bilateral relationship if not resolved and that we are prepared to take some countervailing actions in order to get their attention,” Mr Obama told the trade group of business leaders.

This is not the first time we’ve heard Obama threaten this sort of action. Last month, The White House signaled that it was prepared to impose unprecedented sanctions against Chinese companies and individuals. Yet U.S. warnings seem to have little effect on Xi, who has kept the fortification of China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea right on track. We wonder if Obama might have had more success getting China’s attention if he had followed Xi’s lead: act tough, talk nice.

France Exercises Right to Ignore Science, Ban GMOs

Anti-GMO sentiment is picking up momentum in Europe, with France the latest to hop on the Luddite bandwagon. Brussels caved to pressure from green fear-mongering this spring by striking a dubious compromise, allowing its member states to opt-out of the cultivation and importing of genetically modified crops deemed safe by EU scientists. Since then, the entirely predictable has happened, as green-eyed countries have formed an orderly queue to exercise that opt out. Latvia and Greece were the first to submit their formal requests, and Scotland and Germany are both preparing to follow suit. And now, France is making its own formal request to eschew modern science and reject GM crops, as Reuters reports:

The European Union’s largest grain grower and exporter has asked the European Commission for France to be excluded from some GM maize crop cultivation under the new scheme, the farm and environment ministries said in a joint statement.

As part of the opt-out process, France also passed legislation in the National Assembly that would enable it to oppose the cultivation of GM crops, even if approved at EU level, on the basis of certain criteria including environment and farm policy, land use, economic impact or civil order, the environment ministry added.

In a sense, the EU’s strategy of assessing the safety of GM crops centrally, yet allowing member states to do what they will with that knowledge, does the technology a favor. It gives the policymakers and activists lobbying against GMOs no cover for their position—a dispassionate scientific review of these crops has shown them to be safe, so the contrarians have to justify their opposition on other criteria. France cites unsubstantiated doubts over GMO’s effects on the environment, but Scotland’s Rural Affairs secretary Richard Lochhead had a much more honest defense when he said his country wanted a ban to protect its “clean and green brand.”

In the end, that’s what the environmentalists’ opposition to GMOs boils down to—the complete rejection of science in favor of emotional or spiritual values. Both have a place in any discussion of something so intimate and personally relevant as the food we eat, but the willful ignorance of the former to justify the latter is, in the case of GMOs, a pernicious delusion. These crops can feed more people on less land in more extreme conditions with fewer pesticides, and do all of that safely. You’d think a movement that so often relies on appeals to science would understand that.