Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 599

Chapter Nine for Puerto Rico?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is the latest Democratic official to follow Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s lead and come out in favor of federal bankruptcy protection for Puerto Rico. The Wall Street Journal reports:

About an hour into the flight to the commonwealth, Mr. Cuomo said for the first time that he supported giving Puerto Rico the ability to pursue bankruptcy protection, a position that puts him in line with most of his fellow Democrats.

Mr. Cuomo also endorsed the notion of giving Puerto Rico “relief from the Medicaid cap,” saying the territory should have “fairness” with regard to Medicaid reimbursement.“This is a situation that is not all of their making,” the governor said during the flight, “They are unique in the way they are governed with federal laws.”Besides, Mr. Cuomo said, “the problems of Puerto Rico will wind up migrating to New York.”Prominent Democrats, including Puerto Rican New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and presidential contender Hillary Clinton, whom the governor has endorsed, have long backed giving Puerto Rico’s municipal agencies the ability to seek chapter 9 bankruptcy.

A federal law giving bankruptcy protection to Puerto Rican government agencies could raise some thorny legal issues. Bondholders bought these bonds under one set of rules; can Congress change the rules of existing contracts in a way that would disadvantage good faith purchasers of debt? And if that does happen, what would be the consequence for other government entities and U.S. financial markets if politicians can change the rules whenever they don’t like them?

At the same time, Puerto Rico does have some legitimate grievances. The islanders haven’t dug this pit all by themselves. They have had help from Washington.As we’ve written before, however, the bottom line has to be ‘real relief for real reform’. The feds could consider ways to help with the territory’s debts if Puerto Rico makes real, lasting changes to policies that have helped to produce this meltdown. We’re talking about things like the end of public unions, drastic changes in governance, haircuts all around, and tax reforms.Many of these will be as unpopular as anything the Germans suggested to the Greeks. But bankruptcy is a sign that you are doing something terribly wrong, and it would be unrealistic of Puerto Rico to expect the U.S. Congress and Treasury to act as permanent enablers of unsustainable behavior.Update: A working group set up by Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has just released a plan to cut spending and overhaul taxes, but that they claim would still not allow Puerto Rico to meet its obligations to bondholders in the next five years, even if it was wholly approved by Puerto Rico’s legislature. Something tells us from initial reports that this is not the reforms we are looking for.)

Breakneck Change in Tumult-Filled Times

It’s been widely noted in various newspapers and websites that Elizabeth II became the longest-reigning monarch in British history yesterday, passing her great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Victoria, who was born while George III (whose reign from 1760 to 1820 was the longest before Victoria’s) was still king, reigned from 1837 to 1901. A dashing young army officer and war correspondent who was elected to Parliament in Victoria’s old age was Queen Elizabeth’s first Prime Minister more than 50 years later when she came to the throne in 1952. His name was Winston Churchill.

From George III to Prince William in three lifetimes: it’s a staggering thought and one that should remind us that the world of fashionable thought and establishment politics, which looks so imposing and permanent, shifts with dizzying speed. In George III’s time, the industrial revolution was just kicking off, the United States was a weak emerging power, and the absolute monarchs of Europe were firmly in the saddle.During Victoria’s reign, Britain rose to the zenith of global power as the Industrial Revolution transformed the world. Slavery was abolished, democracy took root in Britain, France became a Republic, and nationalism began to break up the great autocracies: Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were staggering toward their demise. The first stirrings of nationalism in what would become the Third World were beginning to be felt, and the ideas of an obscure German socialist, Karl Marx, were resonating in world politics. The railroad and the telegraph had created networks of communication and information that eclipsed anything known in the past; the human race blew through more change, and more disruptive change, in Victoria’s long lifetime than ever before.During Winston Churchill’s political career, the pace of change accelerated still farther. Radio didn’t exist when Victoria died; Elizabeth II’s coronation would be televised. Fascism and Communism conquered more than half the world. The British Empire fell. Nuclear weapons transformed international politics and cast a shadow over the human future that is still darkening today. 2500 years of imperial history came to an end in China. The British lost India. Hundreds of millions perished in the two most destructive wars humanity had ever known. The United States became the supreme global power. Stalin and Mao instituted the most monstrous and murderous dictatorships ever seen. Jazz swept the world; modernism swept the arts. The automobile age changedQueen Elizabeth’s reign has seen more of the same. The Cold War came and went. China became a great power. Half of Africa converted to Christianity. India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons. The Civil Rights movement shook the foundations of American society; feminism and the gay rights movement challenged assumptions that for millennia seemed unshakeable and permanent. The rise of the internet transformed communications as profoundly as the rail and telegraph did during Victoria’s reign. The computer is proving to be the most revolutionary invention that humanity has come up with, and the transformation of human society by the information revolution is still in its early stages.All three lifetimes have been marked by two continuities: one is the presence of accelerating, transformative change in every dimension of human life; the other is the smugness of establishments and fashionable pundits who assume and believe that the important questions have been answered by and large, and that nothing important will change.That the British monarchy and the American constitution have survived these tumult-filled times is a remarkable example of political stability in the midst of revolution; it would take a more confident prophet than me to predict what will happen to these, and to many other institutions and ideas that seem so solid and permanent today over another long lifetime.Our British allies are singing “God Save the Queen” to mark a great moment in a distinguished reign; “God Help us All” is what the historian is led to murmur as the waves of change keep pounding the shore.

Besieged Gazprom Gives Ground to Brussels

Score one for Brussels. The EU is finally, haltingly moving away from the onerous long-term, take-or-pay contracts Russian gas firm Gazprom has foisted on its Western customers. Yesterday marked Gazprom’s first public auction of gas in Europe, and three more will follow this week. Those auctions mark a shift in the continent’s gas market towards spot pricing, and will come as welcome developments for countries like Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and of course Ukraine, all of which are locked into above-market prices for Russian gas. The FT reports:

[I]t demonstrates a shift in Gazprom’s strategy towards Europe, which had previously been characterised by hostility towards the commission’s goal of creating a freely traded market. As recently as last year, Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s chief executive, told a conference that Europe had “shot itself in the foot” by pushing the idea of a spot gas market. “This concept of spot trading bears grave risks to the European gas market,” he said.

On Monday, Alexander Medvedev, Gazprom’s deputy chief, said that the move was a response to the evolution of the market. “The European gas market changes constantly and, meeting its challenges, we want to test the new form of trading the gas and see what benefits it can bring to seller and buyers,” he said. Gazprom may hold additional auctions in the future, the company added.

What changed Moscow’s mind? Well, one of the biggest complaints European customers had with their Gazprom contracts was the fact that the price of natural gas was tied to the price of oil. That was an expensive correlation as recently as a year ago when crude was trading near $100 per barrel, but with oil going for less than half of that today that linkage isn’t doing Gazprom any favors. By making these small first steps towards spot pricing, Gazprom may be acknowledging that Russia doesn’t see oil prices spiking upwards again anytime soon.

Of course, the price of oil isn’t the only thing at play here. Gazprom is under investigation by the European Commission for violating anti-trust rules, and as the FT explains, the company is being blocked from fully utilizing an important pipeline across Germany:

Brussels and Berlin have frustrated Gazprom by blocking it from using more than half of the pipeline’s capacity in line with regulations designed to ensure a more competitive EU gas market.

Full use of the pipeline is crucial for Gazprom’s future plans to reduce transit of its gas through Ukraine. Without it, the expansion of the Nord Stream pipeline across the Baltic Sea, which Gazprom along with five European partners announced last week, would make little sense, analysts say. “It’s really critical for Gazprom to use more than 50 per cent of Opal,” says Ms Mitrova.

The volumes being sold are too small to make this reflective of any kind of sea change, but it does seem to indicate a change in thinking. For a continent that has struggled with its dependence on Russian gas supplies, even something as small as that will be cheered.

Blue States Experiment with New Retirement Models

One way government can help encourage innovation and growth in a post-blue model era is by weakening the link between employment and benefits. We can already see a labor market emerging where people cycle through several short-term jobs, or work more than one part-time job at once, or freelance for a living, or self-employ, or work one principal job while driving for Uber on the side. In the context of this new economic reality, tying benefits like healthcare and retirement security to employment makes workers less flexible and labor markets less competitive. So we are intrigued to see some (mostly blue) states taking a modest step toward making benefits portable. The Wall Street Journal:

In July, Oregon became the third state to enact legislation creating automatic individual retirement accounts for workers who don’t have retirement plans at work. The plans are an attempt to cushion the blow for millions of workers who could someday find themselves too old to work but short of savings, state officials said. They are also an attempt to protect taxpayers in the future, said Oregon Treasurer Ted Wheeler. […]

The gradual but broad shift away from old-fashioned pensions—which provided lifetime retirement payments to retirees—has left millions of Americans unprepared for retirement, experts say.In the private sector, nearly 44% of prime-age workers don’t have access to a retirement plan at work, according to Labor Department figures analyzed by Nari Rhee, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. […]California was the first state to pass legislation in 2012 setting the stage for automatic retirement accounts for workers without coverage. Illinois enacted a similar law in January. Connecticut’s plan could be in place by next year, and legislation is pending in New Jersey and Massachusetts. In some states, such as Maryland and Maine, efforts have foundered in the legislature. For now, only Democratic-controlled legislatures have enacted the plans.

It’s important to make it as easy as possible for workers to save for retirement, and the auto-enroll IRA-type plans (where a percentage of your paycheck is automatically sequestered into a retirement account unless you opt out) make sense for many workers and industries. After all, retirement security is a public concern as well as a private one: it is in the public interest for people to build up savings for retirement so that they are not dependent on income-support programs after they are too old to work.

The government role in such programs should be as small as possible: more setting up the architecture of the system than administering or micromanaging it. One reason so few employers offer retirement plans is that well-intentioned regulations have made the system incredibly expensive and cumbersome to operate. Clearly a state-encouraged retirement system needs some regulation; just as clearly, overregulation and the creation of slush funds of capital managed by politically appointed officials would be costly and dangerous. At the same time, private investment firms can’t be allowed to take unreasonable risks or impose excessive costs on unsophisticated workers, many of whom will lack experience in investing or managing assets.Plans of this kind are going to play a larger role in the 21st-century labor landscape as more people job-hop and part-time their way through long stretches of their careers. Getting them right is important; we need different states to try different models to see what works best.Red states need to think about alternative models for encouraging saving in the post-blue economy. Helping moderate and low-income people prepare for a secure retirement shouldn’t be a partisan concern.

How Cheap Crude Hurts Renewables

Plunging oil prices are putting the squeeze on more expensive renewable energy sources—but maybe not in the way you’d think. With crude prices less than half of what they were last summer and the world awash in natural gas, it stands to reason that wind and solar, two energy sources already struggling to compete with fossil fuels, might be reeling. But as the FT reports, heavy government subsidies complicate the relationship between green and brown energy, making this more of a political question than a market one. The story quotes Ben Warren, of Ernst & Young, who states that falling costs and the structure of its contracts have protected renewables from oil’s price plunge in the marketplace. But, nevertheless, a challenge remains: If a nation “doesn’t see renewables as making an affordable contribution to the energy mix over the longer term, then there is a risk subsidies will be reduced or withdrawn.”

So while the energy market may be distorted by state-backed funding, a world flush with fossil fuels going at cheap prices is one in which politicians will find it increasingly difficult to justify the costs of propping up expensive renewables. The UK is already experiencing a renewables retrenchment, with the Cameron government rolling back support for green sources that now look to languish.Subsidizing current-generation renewable energy technology has never made less sense. Solar panels and wind turbines couldn’t out-compete fossil fuels on price last summer when oil was well above $100 per barrel, and they can’t now with oil under $50. These energy sources could one day be an important component of a reliable, consistent, low-cost, and low-emissions global energy mix, but they’re clearly not there yet. If politicians are so keen to be seen spending money on eco-endeavors, they’d be much better served focusing time, effort, political capital, and, of course, government dollars on research and development rather than the direct subsidization of today’s renewable technologies.

Hundreds of Refugees in Germany Convert to Christianity

A must-read article in Christianity Today profiles a church in Berlin that has seen astonishing growth from Muslim refugees who have converted to Christianity:

Pastor Gottfried Martens has seen his congregation at the evangelical Trinity Church grow from 150 to more than 600 in just two years, describing the number of conversions as a ‘miracle’, according to Associated Press.

One of these converts is Mohammed Ali Zonoobi, a carpenter from Shiraz, Iran, who was recently baptised.Zanoobi was introduced to the Bible aged 18 and attended secret services in Iran. When several of his Christian friends were arrested, he fled with his wife and two children to Germany.For Zonoobi and his wife Afsaneh their baptism marks a new beginning. “Now we are free and can be ourselves,” she said. “Most important, I am so happy that our children will have a good future here and can get a good education in Germany.”

As touching as Zonoobi’s story is, cynical observers—including among the refugees—suspect more worldly motives behind the spate of conversions:

However, there are concerns that some are not genuine converts, rather professing a Christian faith to boost chances of staying in the country. […]

Congregation member Vesam Heydari told AP, “The majority of Iranians here are not converting out of belief… They only want to stay in Germany.”

This certainly wouldn’t be historically unusual. People can have lots of motives for changing religions; many converts to Islam over the centuries converted to get better jobs, avoid discrimination, and pay less in taxes.

So this is not necessarily a sign of some kind of spiritual awakening. But it does demonstrate a deep and profound disenchantment with the world that Islam has created in the Middle East—or rather that the clash of radical Islamist visions and identities has created in the region. Viewed in this light, the conversions can be seen less as a vote “for” Christianity in many cases than a vote “against” the tragic realities of the Middle East today.That points to a danger for Islam: The pressures of intellectual and social modernization colliding with sectarian radicalism—and all in a region characterized by repeated economic and political failures—can create a civilizational crisis of confidence. Some respond by radical fundamentalism, trying to drown out the disturbing and critical voices in their own heads. Others say nothing but quietly distance themselves from the ideologies and practices of a world they see as failing. Some struggle to develop a concept of their faith that is resilient and open enough to coexist with modernity. And still others look for alternatives in other belief systems, religious and non-religious.All these responses and more are taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere today. We shouldn’t miss that the internal crisis in Islamic civilization is as deep and as difficult as the external crisis we see unfolding on the beaches of Europe and in the killing fields of war-torn Middle Eastern countries.

The Persecution of a Nobel Laureate

The story of Timothy Hunt, the British Nobel Laureate in Biology whose career was ruined in a flash this summer by misleading allegations of sexism, is a story about the convergence of some of the most destructive trends in modern Western intellectual culture: vindictive political correctness, social media shaming, fact-free reporting, and academic spinelessness. The current issue of Commentary has an authoritative feature story by Jonathan Foreman on the Twitter-driven persecution of the hapless 72-year old scientist whose comments about women in science to a room full of reporters were maliciously misinterpreted to cast him as a misogynist:

Speaking for fewer than five minutes, Hunt praised female scientists with whom he has worked, and then he said this:

“It’s strange that a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls.”

It is not clear whether Hunt had already mentioned that he and his wife met and fell in love when they were working in his lab, or whether he assumed that everyone in the room was aware of this fact and therefore the context of the remark. Hunt continued: “Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science despite the obstacles and despite monsters like me!”

A few hours after the lunch, a British science journalist named Connie St. Louis sent out a tweet to her followers that read: Nobel scientist Tim Hunt FRS says at Korean women lunch “I’m a chauvinist and keep ‘girls’ single lab.

Shared more than 600 times, the St. Louis tweet ignited a combined Internet, social-media, and then print-media firestorm with astonishing speed.

From that point, it was only a matter of days before Hunt was ejected from University College London and the Royal Society with apparently no attempt on the part of these institutions to discern what Hunt had actually said, besides glancing at outraged tweets. Like so many people confronted by a social media mob, Hunt felt compelled to apologize, and barely resisted the outrageous punishments and condemnations heaped upon him.

Some of Foreman’s most compelling passages come when he tries to place the Tim Hunt saga in political context. He describes the ideology that brought Hunt down as

a phenomenon that combines modern ideology with quasi-Victorian notions of “respectable” behavior and feminine fragility. For these witch-hunters, there can be no toleration of “inappropriate” speech by the contemporary equivalent of “Society.” The wrong kind of joke, breed of joke-teller, or even the wrong political opinion, moreover, creates a “hostile environment” that supposedly intimidates the sensitive victim to such a degree that she cannot function on an equal level. The Hunt affair shows that this way of thinking doesn’t hold sway on American campuses alone. It has crossed the Atlantic and spread outward and upward.

This seems to be an accurate assessment. We have commented before on the strain of social liberalism that manifests itself as “a distinctive mix of cultural libertarianism on the one hand and cultural Victorianism on the other.” Many of the people heaping invective at Hunt did so just as much out of their support for female professional empowerment as they did out of their conviction that society must zealously punish those who expose women to offensive thoughts.

Foreman’s article, besides offering incisive analysis of the various insidious trends that define modern outrage culture, reminds us that it has real victims—in this case, a brilliant scientist whose standing with the public has been needlessly shattered. Read the whole thing.

Vatican Simplifies the Annulment Process

The Vatican today released reforms to the annulment process, a mechanism by which Catholics can apply to have their marriage declared non-existent on the grounds that it is invalid. (If a Catholic receives an annulment, he or she can “remarry” and still receive Communion, because the Church would not consider it a remarriage.) The WSJ has the run-down of the changes:

The new rules, based on a year’s work by a papal advisory commission, eliminate the requirement that any annulment granted by a church court must be automatically reviewed by another set of judges. U.S. bishops effectively suspended the requirement from 1972 to 1983, with critics saying it led to a loss of quality control.

The new rules also establish a new “fast-track trial” to be judged by the local bishop, who can grant an annulment in less than two months. […]Recognizing that an “accelerated judgment might endanger the principle of the indissolubility of matrimony,” Pope Francis said all such fast-track trials will be judged by the local bishop as a safeguard against excessive leniency.

It’s hard to judge how this will work out in particular cases, but it’s almost always a good thing when institutions simplify their procedures and cut the costs of using their systems (another change is that the process will be made free). An annulment system that gives answers faster and imposes fewer costs on those going to Church courts is a good thing in and of itself.

In the U.S., this announcement recalls the research of Charles Murray and other scholars who seem to have discerned an emerging two-track American marriage system. Among professionals and the upper middle class, marriage seems to be strong as an institution. There is, in other words, a cohort for whom permeant marriage seems to be a real and attainable ideal. That analysis suggests that easier annulments may not unleash an unstoppable torrent of “Catholic divorce” in the U.S. among that group, because many marriages remain sound and both parties are committed to making them work.But outside that economic sphere, there are others for whom that kind of marriage is becoming less relevant or achievable. The research, therefore, points to a major pastoral and evangelistic challenge for not only Catholics but all churches: The unchurched poor are missing out. Being in a stable marriage is one of the best ways to escape poverty and to assure a better future for your kids, and when religious bodies are failing to offer the pastoral and social support that makes that possible, everybody suffers—the poor more than anybody.But reaching the poor is only one of the pastoral challenges facing churches here. The theory behind the Papal move seems to be that a significant number of young people entering into marriage aren’t ready to make the kind of commitment that a Catholic marriage requires. This theory seems reasonable given the circumstances of contemporary society: The combination of a toxic hook-up campus culture and the rampant commercialization of sex makes it difficult for young people to achieve the clarity and maturity out of which genuine commitment can grow. At the same time, economic factors are making it harder for young people to achieve economic maturity—become self supporting—and this, too, is an obstacle to the development of the maturity that can make a lifelong commitment to another person possible. Add to that the pattern of breakdown in marriage—so many kids grow up in homes where marriage has become a fluid and temporary thing—and it’s clear that many people who approach the altar do so without the kind of mature and serious intent that Catholic marriage would require.It will be interesting to see if the Pope and the Church follow through on the flip side of this: If there are so many marriages that need to be annulled, there’s been a collapse in discernment. If annulments need to become simpler to get, then marriage should be harder to get into. Ultimately, from the Church’s point of view, the annulment process ought to simpler but annulments rarely obtained. That will only happen if the standards for allowing couples to marry are tightened up even as the Church facilitates annulment.

ISIS’s Sexual Enslavement—of Yizidis and Christians

As ISIS’s widespread enslavement of Yazidi and Christian women continues unabated, the Daily Beast offers a look at how some activists are working to buy back girls and reunite them with their families. From the piece:

“The goal of [the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI)] is to reunite families and bring them back to their villages. I’m not in the business of humanitarian work,” [founder Steve] Maman tells The Daily Beast.

He says that because he works with local brokers to buy back girls who have been repeatedly raped, beaten, and therefore are no longer wanted by their captors, he does not “purchase” them, but rather “refunds” them for their selling price. He describes the system as an underground railroad of sorts in which the women and girls are sent to Kurdish-run refugee camps for food and medical care before being sent to their ancestral villages under the direction of the Reverend Canon Andrew White, a former vicar from Baghdad who led the only Anglican church in Iraq.

The article is worth reading in full for its picture of the dilemma that Westerners seeking to liberate ISIS’s captives face: Does one pay a ransom, knowing that the money might support ISIS’s operations, not to mention encourage it to enslave more girls? Furthermore, critics, including some prominent Yazidis, have condemned CYCI for its refusal to give details about its rescue missions, and for what they say is an unrealistic number of captives it purports to have freed. The claims and counter-claims don’t resolve neatly in favor of any side of this debate, as the article makes clear.

Though the Daily Beast article gives voice both to CYCI and its critics, it reproduces a framing for which we criticized the NYT not long ago. Both news sources focus on ISIS’s sexual brutality towards Yazidi girls; as the Daily Beast put it, “according to the extremists’ own publications the Yazidis are unique in being specific targets for sexual violence and enslavement.” But as Nina Shea pointed out in her must-read article on this site, Christian girls too have been enslaved, with official sanction of ISIS’s religious authorities. She writes:

The Fatwa Department of the Islamic State made clear that the females of the “People of the Book,” including Christians, can be enslaved for sex as well, though Muslim “apostates” cannot. The number of Christian sex slaves is unknown. Three—Rana, Rita, and Christina—are publicly known. In March, 135 women and children were among those taken captive, from 35 Christian villages along Syria’s Khabour River. Their families, unable to afford the $23 million ransom demand, were told by ISIS, “They belong to us now.” The older women were released; the younger ones may be enslaved, though this has not been confirmed. […]

Under rules for “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour [of Judgment],” Dabiq gives a theological justification for selling women as war booty: “The enslaved Yizidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the polytheists were sold by the [Prophet’s] companions.” It also cites more recent precedents: namely, the “enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the Mujahidin there.”

Articles like the Daily Beast‘s and the NYT’s do a great service in shedding light on these unspeakable horrors, which the Western media has not covered extensively in the past. As Shea notes, while ISIS does not hide its slave markets, it does not produce and disseminate video of its sexual crimes as it does its gruesome executions. However, just as the Western media has an obligation to make this inhumanity public, so does it have an obligation to report it in full. For Shea’s whole piece, go here.

France Reaps the Rewards of Anti-Semitism

Anti-semitism and economic sclerosis are both not new stories in France. If you happen to be caught by both—say, as a young Jewish French entrepreneur—you might consider leaving for greener pastures. As the Wall Street Journal reports today, thousands of French Jews are doing just that, as the country faces a significant brain-drain to Israel:

Last year, 6,961 French Jews moved to Israel, more than double the number who relocated in 2013, according to Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption. More than 36% of those emigrants hold college degrees, 17% in engineering alone.

And the French government is aware of the problem:

When French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron visited Technion, the Israel Institute for Technology, this week he asked a group of students originally from France if they would ever consider returning home.

“For the holidays,” one student quipped. A computer-science major questioned whether France was doing enough to turn the page on a spate of recent anti-Semitic attacks.[…] As Mr. Macron visits the DLD tech conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday—wrapping a three-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories—a large part of his mission is aimed at luring Jewish investors and talent back to France.

Young Jewish entrepreneurs face forbidding obstacles in France: economic regulations that are hostile to start ups and flexible business models; anti-Semitism on the street and in the suites; a slow growth climate that is bad for all companies, new ones especially.

And so many have moved to Israel—and the French government is now trying to woo them back. We give points to the French government for realizing the cost of the brain drain and trying to lure people back, but it won’t be easy; France is a hard country to leave and people don’t make that decision lightly. It would be much smarter for the government to work harder to correct the conditions that made emigration so attractive in the first place.Historically, the flight of Jews is a harbinger of economic and social blight. Countries where Jews are uncomfortable are places where a lot of other things are going seriously wrong.