In an open letter to David Cameron, Sebastian Coe and others, Stephen Fry has called for a “absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014”. His argument is that by turning a blind eye to the persecution of homosexuals in Russia, the Olympic movement would be repeating the mistakes of 1936:
There was a swift and brutal reaction to Fry’s letter – not from Vladimir Putin, but Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail:
This is unfair. The comparison that Fry actually made was between Putin’s Russia today and Hitler’s Germany in 1936. The anti-Jewish measures enacted up until that point were deeply unpleasant, but a mere shadow of the horror that was to come.
This is Fry’s description of the situation in Germany at the time of the Berlin Olympics:
And this is the parallel he draws with the present-day plight of homosexuals in Russia:
So, despite what his critics might say, Fry is not comparing the Holocaust to a ban on gay pride marches. He is comparing harassment and discrimination with harassment and discrimination. That, of course, still raises questions about whether the scale and intensity of the two situations can be legitimately equated. One also has to doubt whether Russia in 2013 is really on the same trajectory as Germany in 1936.
Then again, the moral case for action doesn't depend on whether the present situation for gays in Russia is as bad as it was for German Jews in 1936, but whether it is bad enough.
That, of course, would require one to draw some kind of line – and, having done so, to consider how it might apply to other cases. For instance, Andrew Pierce raises the matter of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when things in China were also bad enough for the enemies of the Communist government (and still are). Furthermore, if Russia is to be ruled out as an Olympic host as a result of laws which discriminate against homosexuals, then what about those countries in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere in which homosexuality is banned altogether?
Quoting from the Olympic Charter, Fry calls upon the Olympic movement to act upon its stated principles. The following seems especially relevant:
Yet if such a principle is to be applied at all, it must be applied consistently.
Matthew Yglesias does not like school summer holidays. In fact, writing for Slate, he comes across like a warm-weather Ebenezer Scrooge:
To make matters worse, the impact of educational outcomes is cumulative:
Summer babies born to the poorest households therefore go through school at a double disadvantage. We should at least think about improving their chances.
David Cameron likes to talk about the ‘global race’ – by which he means the neverending struggle to stay competitive in a globalised world. ‘Oh, but it’s not a race’, certain sniffy commentators reply – making the rather facile observation that economic competition doesn’t have a finishing line.
That much is obvious, but it's missing the point of Cameron’s analogy. As on the track or the turf, the meaning of the global race is that if you don’t keep up you become irrelevant. The amount of financial and human capital in the world may grow over time, but at any one time it is limited, and with more places for it to go than ever before, the greater the likelihood of some places being left behind.
One such place is Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy last month – the largest American city to have done so (thus far).
A few figures, from Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review, show just how far Detroit has fallen:
While the city is getting more expensive to run, its remaining inhabitants are less able to pay for it:
This is remarkable because, as Jay Zawatsky notes in the National Interest, “in 1960… Detroit was the wealthiest city per capita in America among cities with more than two hundred thousand residents.”
From richest to poorest in just two generations, how did such a catastrophe happen?
There are obvious industrial explanations – and few cities are as closely identified with one particular industry than Detroit (a.k.a. Motown). The problems of the major US motor manufacturers in adapting to globalisation are well-documented; but, as Justin Fox argues, the blame for Detroit’s decline cannot be confined to local boardrooms:
Fox blames this on the city’s divisive racial politics, which produced a “governing class clueless about and to a certain extent disdainful of economic reality and a regional economic elite with few ties and little loyalty to the region's main city.”
Jay Zawatsky, quoting Mark Steyn, has no doubt as to who he blames – the “malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents.” He goes on to note that:
So, were does Motown go from here? Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, has suggested that Congress "pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or 10 years, start businesses, take jobs, whatever." Meanwhile, Detroit’s own mayor plans to abandon some of the city’s neighbourhoods in order to save the rest.
These are last ditch measures. But it all goes to show that while you can’t win the global race, you can certainly lose it.
Scattering nuggets of gossip on his way, Christopher Buckley contributes an eye-opening book review for the New York Times. His theme is Washington’s big money politics:
The answer to that is not very well, says Mark Leibovich, whose book This Town, gives Buckley plenty to get stuck into:
There always was a lot of money in US politics, but it’s now reaching a whole new level:
But then comes the most shocking statistic of the lot:
Instead of going home, these so-called ‘formers’ hang around the corridors of power – an army of the political undead, representing vested interests not the public interest.
Of course, ex-politicians are as entitled as anyone else to make a living – especially those quitting politics before retirement age. Some – like our own esteemed editor – go on to higher and better things. But, the American situation, in which getting on for half of all legislators turn into lobbyists, is deeply problematic.
The British situation is not nearly as bad – not least because most of our MPs have very little influence while in office and even less afterwards. However, the fashion for increasingly youthful ministers means that ex-ministers are getting younger too – something which goes all the way to the top. Take the example of Tony Blair – Prime Minister at 43, ex-Prime Minister at 54.
Perhaps we should be less interested in the lives that politicians had before they got elected and more interested in what they get up to afterwards.
Warning to readers – today’s post is about the sordid reality of prostitution, not the airbrushed fantasy depicted in some parts of the media.
When a new brothel opened near the German city of Stuttgart in 2009, this – according Spiegel Online – is how the management advertised the venue:
In Germany this is legal – and has been since 2001, when the Greens and the Social Democrats voted for a new prostitution law, meant to improve working conditions:
One of the reasons for the decline in pay and conditions is the influx of women from eastern Europe. Official German statistics show that that there is less “human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation” than a decade ago, but not everyone thinks that this reflects reality:
So, what’s the solution? To go back to the days when the authorities hounded women off the streets, into police cells and back again? There is another way. In Sweden, they hound the clients, the pimps and the traffickers, not the prostitutes.
The Swedish approach, so very different from that of countries like Germany and the Netherlands, seems to be having some success, with prostitution now in decline.
Sweden still has a long way to go, of course. But as Pierrette Pape, of the Europe Women’s Lobby, points out, some attitudes can only be changed over the long-term:
Previously on the Deep End, we’ve explored the idea that the western world has entered a period of permanent low growth. The latest GDP figures may allay such fears, but it remains to be seen whether anything like a ‘normal’ rate of growth can be sustained without massive amounts of quantitative easing and public borrowing.
In a fascinating piece for New York magazine, Benjamin Wallace-Wells introduces us to the work of Robert Gordon and other ultra-pessimistic economists:
If that were not grim enough, Gordon believes that the previous era in which living standards doubled with every generation is gone forever. The high growth typical of the 20th century was a blip, the product of one-off, never-to-be-repeated transformative events like electrification and the introduction of public sewers.
If he’s right, then the consequences won’t just be economic. That's because rapid growth doesn't only make us richer, it also facilitates and inspires social change. For instance, feminist ideas have been around since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft, but a certain level of material progress was required before traditional gender roles could be permanently transformed:
Similarly, the idea of racial equality is not an invention of the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the post-war period that the civil rghts movement could draw upon sufficient support from that hotbed of revolutions – the middle class:
Martin Luther King also said “I have a dream”, echoing and expanding the idea of the “American Dream”. But as Wallace-Wells points out, this latter phrase was only coined in 1931 – i.e. once Americans had come to expect continual improvements in their prosperity.
To foresee an end to rapid growth is not to predict a reversion to a new dark age – but rather an end to the assumption that “things can only get better”.
The end of economic optimism will have a profound impact on our political development. For instance, if voters stop believing that growth will automatically deal with our debts, then that's bad news for the borrow-and-spend politics of the left. But the right will also need to rethink its message – especially on the issue of inequality. If the cake stops getting bigger, then there will be a lot more concern about the size of the slice taken by the rich.
These shifts in opinion are already underway – as shown by the public anger directed at bankers on the one hand and welfare claimants on the other. In other words, when new opportunities are hard to come by, it's not liberty or equality that people care most about, but fairness.
You might think that being an atheist is pretty straightforward – all you have to do is not believe in God (or gods) and you’re in the club. But as with theism, atheism comes in different forms where the central idea is bundled up with other essential ideas. If you dissent from these additional articles of faith then you are definitely not in the club, i.e. atheism has its heretics too.
In the English-speaking world, the dominant form of intellectual atheism is not only atheist in its essentials, but also neo-Darwinist and humanist. Thus when the distinguished American philosopher Thomas Nagel published an entirely secular critique of neo-Darwinism, he caused a bit of a stink. The Dawkins brigade were somewhat less than thrilled and it was named as the ‘Most Despised Science Book of the Year’ in the Guardian.
In a book review for the New York Times, Nagel introduces us to the thoughts of a fellow heretic (albeit one he has his own disagreements with) – the British philosopher John Gray, who though an atheist is not a humanist:
This is very naughty of Mr Gray, pursuing orthodox atheism to its logical conclusions is not something one does in polite society. And in any case, does he have anything to put in place of humanism?
As a matter of fact, he does. It’s set out in his book The Silence of Animals, a philosophy which Nagel summarises as follows:
But this is where Gray’s own logic runs into the buffers. You see, if we are supposed to just let the world be, to accept nature as it is, then surely that means we must also accept human nature as it is (humanity being an entirely natural phenomenon according to Gray). Yet, it is very clearly not in our nature let the world be – or to free ourselves “of the perpetual need for commentary, understanding and transcendence”.
We are not like the animals. Something within us is always looking for ultimate explanations. We can’t simply put it away, it is part of who we are.
It’s almost as if it were there for a reason.
The news that the British economy is growing again did not please everyone. Left-leaning economic commentators tried, but failed, to conceal their disappointment – desperately insisting that what’s happening is the wrong kind of growth.
At so early a stage in the recovery it is surely too soon to come to any conclusion, positive or negative. Instead, we’d do better to look back at the last few years – and try to provide some context for current developments.
In a guest piece for the Economist, John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics presents an overview of the the British economy since the crisis of 2008. The first thing he emphasises is the sheer depth of the recession we’re only just shaking off:
Van Reenen describes the period since the recession as the “worst recovery for 100 years”, but notes the disconnect between GDP and employment trends:
This, he says, is a “testament to the flexibility of the UK labour market”:
A less miserable way of looking at the situation is to recognise that British workers have done their bit for the recovery. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the owners of capital:
A 30% drop is a truly staggering figure. Van Reenen blames it on dislocations within the banking system and cuts to public infrastructure investment. These have certainly played their part, but there must be more to it than that.
Extreme pay restraint on the part of the workforce, plus a big fall in the trade weighted value of Sterling amounts to a double boost of internal and external devaluation. Yet despite this shot in the arm, investment and exports have remained anaemic.
The bog-standard leftwing response is to call for more stimulus, for instance, through a cut in VAT as advocated by the Shadow Chancellor. Rather embarrassingly for Mr Balls, consumption seems to have recovered without the help of his debt-funded temporary tax cut. In any case, it’s investment and exports, not consumption, that is the challenge here.
The bog-standard rightwing response is to call for supply-side reforms. In particular, it is argued in some quarters that employment rights should be weakened or ‘voluntarily’ surrendered in return for company shares. Whatever the merits of some of these proposals, the overall emphasis is economically and politically misjudged. British workers are the heroes of the recovery not the villains – and should be recognised as such.
The real reason why investment has been so weak since the recovery is that it was weak before the recovery. For a while this was disguised by the availability of cheap credit and the abundance of get-rich-quick schemes to pump it into, but when the flow of credit was turned-off the bubbles deflated. By privileging speculation over genuine investment, Gordon Brown’s boom-and-bust policies did lasting damage to the culture of enterprise in this country.
We all know that easy money makes for bad government, but, in much the same way, it makes for bad business too.
Two weeks ago the Deep End featured John Lancaster on the PPI mis-selling scandal. In a new article for the London Review of Books, he adds a twist to the tale:
Things have moved on since, as demonstrated by the latest GDP figures. Still it is extraordinary that before the start of this recovery (if that is what it proves to be), PPI fines were a significant source of growth – “a boost of 0.2 per cent to GDP” according to one estimate. Lancaster notes the irony:
This Government, unlike its predecessor, has not been slow in reforming our deeply dysfunctional banks; but, while acknowledging what has been done so far, Lancaster argues that the culture of banking is so rotten that the very fundamentals of the system have to change:
The argument here is that banks are just too big and complicated to allow top-down management – however saintly – ensure good practice. Something more pervasive is therefore required:
Drawing upon the work of Anat Admati and Martin Hellwegg, Lancaster’s answer is that the banks should carry more equity – meaning that their assets should exceed their liabilities by a greater margin than is currently the case. This would have an obvious cushioning effect against insolvency, but even more importantly it would bring about cultural change:
Would higher equity requirements mean less lending – for instance, to small businesses? Lancaster believes not, because loans to customers are on the asset side of a bank’s balance sheet. However, the banks still need to find the money they lend out. So, if they can’t borrow as much (loans to banks being on the liability side) then they need to attract more equity investment and/or reduce their running costs. The most obvious way of achieving the latter is to cut salaries and bonuses.
No wonder the bankers aren’t so keen.
Writing for the Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst gives voice to a growing concern:
Of course, this isn’t all down to technology – globalisation has played its part too. However, while the costs of shipping have gone up (and those of outsourcing have become more apparent), the costs of computing and robotics continue to go down. The fear, therefore, is that technological progress will push more people out of a greater range of jobs than ever before.
How will we cope? Instead of trying to predict the future, Daniel Akst looks back to the past, to a previous wave of automation in post-war America:
When the greatest economic minds of the era tried to predict the long-term consequences they usually got it completely wrong. For instance, this is what the economic historian Robert Heilbroner said about Herbert Simon – ‘a manifold genius who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics’ – when the latter predicted that the average family income would reach $28,000 by the early 21st century:
The idea that consumer demand might have a limit now seems absurd, and Simon rightly dismissed it by declaring his “great respect for the ability of human beings” to spend money “without vomiting”. However, his own predictions were also way off-beam:
Instead of a future in which people earned more money than they could spend, things turned out the other way round – or at least they did among those on lower-to-middle incomes. The productivity gains brought about through automation did indeed make us richer overall, but they did so unevenly:
In the post-war period, redistribution, especially through welfare payments, was the answer to the impact of automation on jobs. Akst believes that this must continue to be the case:
The trouble is that the post-war expansion of welfare was a disaster, creating a dependent and dispirited underclass. It cannot be the answer to the new wave of automation now threatening the livelihoods of middle income earners.
In any case, our public finances cannot take the strain – far from extending welfare up the income scale, governments are withdrawing it. Daniel Akst is right when he says that “the robots will surely keep coming”, but the same does not apply to handouts for the middle class.
The unveiled threat to religious liberty
23 Sep 2013 08:00:00 20 Sep 2013 06:55:26Time for a grown-up debate on early years education
19 Sep 2013 07:10:03Centralisation plus complexity: a fatal formula for welfare reform
18 Sep 2013 06:43:43The sinister purpose of academic jargon
17 Sep 2013 08:00:00The German economic model is a poor alternative to Anglo-Saxon capitalism
16 Sep 2013 08:00:00Heresy of the week: The case for abolishing patents
13 Sep 2013 06:01:27Journalists not politicians are the real masters of spin
12 Sep 2013 06:38:37Our banks behave like a bunch of toddlers – but the naughty step of regulation won’t restore order
11 Sep 2013 06:24:21Third world schools provide a stark lesson on the need for pupil testing and league tables
10 Sep 2013 06:43:35The real reason why we won’t act on gender-specific abortions
9 Sep 2013 08:00:00Heresy of the week: What if fat people people aren’t responsible for the obesity epidemic?
6 Sep 2013 08:00:00David Goodhart: Confessions of a liberal heretic
5 Sep 2013 08:00:00Germany’s eurosceptics dare to be different
4 Sep 2013 08:00:00How quantitative easing in the West screws up the rest of the world
3 Sep 2013 08:00:00