An ongoing review of politics and culture

A Post About 2012

Had John McCain been chosen as Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, he would have been substantially better positioned to compete for the nomination in 2000. He might well have won, and had he done so he would have won the subsequent general election more decisively than Bush did.

Similarly, had John McCain lost with Tim Pawlenty as his running mate in 2008 (and he would have), Pawlenty would have had at least as good a shot as Mitt Romney of taking the nomination this time around, his uninspiring persona notwithstanding.

As things stand, Tim Pawlenty seems like he would make a perfectly adequate running mate for Mitt Romney to lose with to Barack Obama. Which would give Pawlenty at least an outside chance of being competitive in 2016 against Rick Perry and Jeb Bush.

A Peace Without Peace?

Speaking of Israel, David Samuels has actually met with more of the key players on all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than anyone I know, so it behooves anyone with an interest in same, and in the latest Administration moves (and Israeli and Palestinian responses thereto) to check out his latest on the subject.

To refresh everyone’s memory: as of 1988, when Jordan ended all territorial claims to the West Bank, Israel faced a difficult strategic problem: the only way to get out of ruling millions of Palestinians, and thereby becoming a bi-national state, was to negotiate with the Palestinians directly, rather than with Jordan. As Israelis generally understood, there was a natural asymmetry between the two parties that would work to the Palestinians’ advantage in negotiations. Specifically, the Israelis needed an agreement. Establishing some national entity other than Israel as the home of the Palestinians was the key Israeli objective, and that could not be achieved without Palestinian assent. But the Palestinians didn’t need an agreement. A one-state “solution” was a perfectly viable alternative – indeed, in many ways a preferable one to partition, from a Palestinian perspective.

But, if you think about it, why did Israel need an agreement? Once Israel withdrew from the Palestinian population centers, and allowed them to establish a government, wouldn’t that foreclose the otherwise inevitable end in bi-nationalism? Even if a de-facto Palestinian state refused to recognize Israel – even if it were still at war with Israel – wouldn’t the mere existence of such a state change the character of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, from one of “how do we share the territory between the river and the sea” to “how do we settle our border disputes/water use disputes/outstanding refugee claims/etc” – the kinds of disputes that are common between states.

Oslo was, arguably, the first phase of unilateralism, because even though there was an agreement and a handshake, what was agreed to was not peace or anything resembling peace. All that was agreed was a willingness to keep negotiating – the Palestinians conceded nothing fundamental. Except the most important thing: they conceded to the creation of an entity with whom Israel could negotiate, with territory under its control and a government of sorts. They agreed, in other words, to create the nucleus of a Palestinian sovereignty that was distinct from Israel.

Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was the next phase in the Israeli strategic retreat, more obviously unilateral in character. Leaving Gaza meant letting Hamas take over. Letting Hamas take over meant certain security risks – but it also meant creating the fact that Gaza had its own political destiny. It might reunite with the West Bank; it might not. But that fact that was established was that Gaza would decide which it would be. That’s another fact of sovereignty, and whether Israelis understood it or not it was the main thing they got out of the Gaza withdrawal.

I confidently believed at the time that, had Sharon not had a stroke, he planned to continue with a similar withdrawal from the West Bank, a withdrawal that would mean abandoning many settlements (though none of the large ones), leaving the Palestinians in the West Bank with a substantial contiguous territory. Israel would, in essence, have hung on to everything it wanted to achieve through negotiations – much more than they would actually be able to get at the table. The Palestinians would get their de-facto state: precisely the state that Israelis wanted them to get.

Whether such an outcome would have been just or not isn’t really the question I’m addressing; my point is that Israeli policy has been, since Oslo, aimed at creating a de facto Palestinian state to end Palestinian statelessness, which is the biggest threat to the legitimacy of the State of Israel, on terms that concede as little as possible in terms of Israel’s own territorial objectives. Peace has been a secondary goal at best – the goal has been to achieve a strategic retreat on the most favorable possible terms.

(Obviously not every Israeli has been pursuing these goals – there are genuine idealists on both the left and right, on the left aiming for something like a comprehensive peace, on the right aiming for something like an apartheid state. But I would argue that the broad center of the Israeli political spectrum has always been pursuing something like what I describe above.)

Returning to Samuels’s piece: what he argues, basically, is that Obama has left the door open for Israel to pursue something very like this objective, if Netanyahu has the sense to see it. The next phase of the so-called “peace process” would involve the following, according to President Obama:

Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met. I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair and that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinians are not going to agree to permanent borders without settling Jerusalem or the refugee question – and neither are Israelis. So this “agreement” on the “territorial outlines” of Palestine just means another unilateral Israeli withdrawal, this time from the various settlements that nobody expects to be incorporated into Israel in the context of an agreement. The Palestinians would be agreeing merely to allow Israel to leave – and thereby achieve another Israeli diplomatic objective: the creation of a contiguous Palestinian entity in the West Bank, further entrenching the reality of the division of the land between two sovereignties, one Jewish, one Palestinian Arab.

All of that sounds very persuasive, and I have little doubt that Ariel Sharon would understand it – and act on it. But Netanyahu? I doubt it.

The most serious obstacle to achieving the above has a name, as it happens. And the name of that obstacle is Hebron. Hebron is an overwhelmingly Arab city in the heart of Judea. It’s also home to a substantial Jewish settlement, probably the most intensely ideological settlement in the entire West Bank. It’s also one of Judaism’s holiest cities, burial place of Abraham and his family – and is holy to Muslims for the same reason. If Israel does not withdraw from Hebron, then Israel will have to maintain a substantial military presence in the heart of any Palestinian entity – the occupation will not end and be transformed into a border dispute. But to withdraw from Hebron would be to declare, in a very literal sense, that nothing is sacred.

Which would be a good thing, in my humble opinion. But I can’t see Netanyahu doing it.

What Are Friends For?

FIRST LORD: Might we but have that happiness, my lord, that you would once use our hearts, whereby we might express some part of our zeals, we should think ourselves for ever perfect.

TIMON: O, no doubt, my good friends, but the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you: how had you been my friends else? why have you that charitable title from thousands, did not you chiefly belong to my heart? I have told more of you to myself than you can with modesty speak in your own behalf; and thus far I confirm you. O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends, if we should ne’er have need of ‘em? they were the most needless creatures living, should we ne’er have use for ‘em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases that keep their sounds to themselves. Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits: and what better or properer can we can our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort ‘tis, to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another’s fortunes! O joy, e’en made away ere ‘t can be born! Mine eyes cannot hold out water, methinks: to forget their faults, I drink to you.

Timon of Athens, by William Shakespeare

Maybe it’s just because I’m working on a screen adaptation of the play, but it seems to me that Timon’s psychology is highly relevant to understanding our receptivity to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion that “America has no better friend than Israel,” which Matt Yglesias found so absurd.

Timon is an enormously wealthy Athenian who has spent his adult life dispensing benefits – giving extravagant gifts to everyone he knows, from his servants to his fellow lords. He is, consequently, everybody’s best friend. The arc of the play has him eventually give everything away, leaving him destitute, at which point he – with considerable relief – turns to his friends and beneficiaries for help, and discovers that nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

I’m not interested in drawing an analogy between America’s financial situation and Timon’s (not at this point), but rather between America’s psychological situation and Timon’s at the beginning of the play, when Timon still thinks he is wealthy. Timon has a desperate need to be loved. Not loved by a particular someone – he has no wife, no children – but loved generally. He showers the world with gifts as a way of buying that love, but he knows, deep down, that because he is the giver he is, in terms of love, in the inferior position. If he were the one in need, and others helped him, then he’d know, like George Bailey at the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” that he really was the richest man in town. And so he is semi-consciously spending himself into that position of dependency.

On some level, Timon cannot accept the idea of friendship on the basis of mutual and equal recognition – or, rather, he longs for this, but cannot imagine how it would work in practice. He gives, and acquires flatterers and dependents, because he wishes he could be a dependent, be cared for – but so long as he is wealthy, he cannot accept reciprocal return of kindness, but must always make sure that the other fellow is in his debt. There is something scary about the idea of being independent equals. He would rather live out vicariously the experience of being dependent and cared for through his beneficiaries than have a genuinely equal relationship.

The United States’ relationship with the world – for whatever reason – is similarly fraught. We have, from the earliest days of our nationhood, had a problem with the idea of mutual and equal relationships among states. Many, many nations on earth consider themselves to be exceptional in some way or other – the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, all have national myths about possessing a unique spirit that destined them for greatness or dominion. Even smaller nations often have flattering national myths – the Poles and Serbs have a myth of national martyrdom for (respectively) Catholic and Orthodox Christianity; the Swiss have a myth of national superiority to the barbarous foreigners around them; the Jews . . . well, that national myth is probably well-known enough not to need repeating.

But America’s national myth is distinct, I would argue, in that we swing wildly between an idealistic self-conception as entirely separate from the rest of the (fallen) world and an alternate idealistic self-conception that is globally imperialistic – in both conceptions, America is not merely better than the rest or the natural leader of the rest, but somehow is the world, unto itself. Our nation lacks a clear mental conception of its own boundaries. And such a conception is necessary for mutual relations on the basis of equal respect.

How does this play into our relationship with Israel? Israel is useful to America psychologically because it allows us to live vicariously through her, and thereby experience the tender care that we long for ourselves. Being universal is an extraordinary burden for any person or any nation. It is, among other things, a terribly lonely condition. America is not actually alone, but we experience our national existence as lonely precisely because we deny ourselves the experience of fellowship, as that would imply definitive boundaries between ourselves and more or less equal others. Israel experiences an isolation of a different kind, but when we show our friendship for her, the psychic benefit for us is that experience of feeling as if we received that friendship, as if someone else broke through our national loneliness. And that’s a considerable psychic reward.

Yglesias says in his piece that Israel does nothing for America – Israel is a burden, nothing more. This isn’t entirely true – Israel has, for example, proved a useful partner in intelligence-gathering in the past, helped battlefield-test American weapons back when we weren’t fighting so many wars ourselves, and was a useful proxy for undertaking certain unsavory tasks. But against this must be set Israel’s repeated violations of basic rules of friendship – spying on us, re-selling sensitive technology to our rivals without permission, etc. And that’s before you get into the question of whether Israel is a geopolitical asset or a significant liability.

But Israel has been a particular friend to America in one respect. When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion. Much of the rest of the world wants to subject American power to something resembling a system of laws and norms through institutions like the International Criminal Court. America, for understandable reasons, has resisted this, even when parts of the system were our own creations, designed to legitimate our own supremacy by limiting its absolute scope. We can debate whether our resistance is wise or not, but my point is that Israel has been consistently supportive of our resistance – again for obvious reasons. The psychological component of this comraderie is that we are simultaneously able to maintain our sense of ourselves as boundless and universal, and relieved of some of the burden of our solitude in such a position.

Obviously there’s more to the US-Israel friendship than the psychological dynamic I’ve outlined above. But I do think it’s a vital component of that relationship, a component that talk about the potency of the Israel Lobby on the one hand, or of America’s natural affinity for a fellow democracy on the other hand, doesn’t really capture.

By most objective measures, Israel is not our “best” friend. Myself, I’d bestow that title on the same country Yglesias does: Canada, whose friendship we take almost entirely for granted. But Israel is a unique kind of friend for America, a friend that provides us psychic benefits that we really cannot get from any other country. Asking America’s relationship with Israel to become “normal” is really another way of asking us to reevaluate why we want those psychic benefits, and whether we wouldn’t really be better off without them.

The Generally Sensible Parisian reaction to DSK

The DSK drama has pretty much replaced the weather as the default topic of conversation in Paris this week. It’s very easy to find self-parodic essays in various French journals that try to justify DSK’s alleged crimes, or turn this into an indictment of American “frontier justice.” But among the people I know here, the reaction to the whole event has been completely recognizable. While the tone and weight of various strands of reaction vary from person to person, in general, people have reacted with a mix of shock, disgust and introspection.

These are obviously informal impressions collected from a small, extremely non-random sample of people who might be censoring their real views when speaking with me. My only point is that contrary to how it might seem just from reading media analysis, the French and American public reactions to this event seem vastly more alike than different.

There are some differences between how the legal process is handled in America and how it would be handled in France.

The biggest complaint about the process thus far is the objection to the “perp walk” of a man accused of, but not yet tried for, a crime. There are sensible arguments on both sides of this question. On one hand, the freedom of the press to report, and principle that all accused, regardless of social station, should be treated alike are important values. On the other hand, this practice is rife with the potential for abuse, as the state can use it to try to influence the potential jury pool, and has done so in the past. Neither argument is seen as without merit on either side of the Atlantic, but the balance between these competing goods is struck differently in each place.

Second, while it is illegal in France for the media to show pictures of the accused in restraint prior to the trial for the reasons just indicated, major media outlets here have named the rape accuser. Laws around this were struck down in the U.S. starting in the 1970s / 80s, but major American media outlets will generally not do it before or during a trial.

Third, how sex crimes are defined, and the severity of the punishment, is not identical between the two countries. However, this difference in attitudes toward sex, marriage and the workplace can easily be exaggerated. I don’t advise you to explain to your French spouse that you have commenced an affair with your co-worker because “il est normal.” You’re very likely to find yourself and your clothes on the sidewalk, while getting an impromptu lesson on the creative use of the French language delivered form a third-floor balcony. And before people start building grand theories about what the sex lives of French politicians say about French society, they ought to figure out what the sex lives of Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, the “hiking the Appalachian Trail” guy and so on (and on and on) say about American society in general. I suspect what they really say is that narcissistic personalities in any society are disproportionately drawn to, and enabled by, careers that provide fame and power.

I’d say that a summary of French take on the differences between how this has been handled in America and how it would have been handled in France, is that (1) American justice is viewed as somewhat rougher than it should be toward the accused, but this is combined with (2) a simultaneous admiration that an immigrant chambermaid can trigger the machinery of the state to bring action against an extremely powerful, well-connected person without it being hushed up. Both sides of this contain elements of truth, and play to pre-existing stereotypes, so therefore get lots of traction with public opinion.

But the similarities in attitude are dominant. The differences in what can be shown or who can be named in the media are not some kind of ancient common law differences. The French legal prohibition on pictures of the accused in restraint is only about ten years old, and the non-binding practice of not naming rape accusers in the U.S. has also only evolved in recent decades. There are good faith arguments on both sides of these questions, and both are variations on a theme of trying to provide due process that is fair to all sides. I could easily imagine the French prohibition migrating to the U.S., and the U.S. prohibition migrating to France (or new media breaking down this practice in the U.S.). And for all the talk of French “aristocratic” attitudes or whatever, most people here hate the idea of the powerful abusing privileges – and specifically of a powerful man trying to rape a hotel chambermaid – and like seeing arrogant, privileged people being brought down a peg. As in America, most people recognize that so far we’ve only heard one side of the story, and that the guy should be fairly tried in court rather than in the media; but that if he did what is alleged, he deserves to go to prison.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

Raise High the Roofbeam, Legislators

You know, I’d never thought about it before, but it’s obvious upon reflection that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional.

Think about it. Congress’s most fundamental jobs are to tax and to spend – the “power of the purse.” If Congress passes a budget under which revenues are insufficient to cover expenditures, the Executive has three options, theoretically:

- Borrow the difference. – Raise taxes without Congressional authorization. – Cut spending without Congressional authorization.

Either of the latter two encroach on a core legislative function. If Congress also prohibited the first option (by refusing to raise the debt ceiling) it would be impossible for the Executive to perform it’s responsibilities.

The debt ceiling is theatre, a way of forcing Congress to acknowledge the consequences of its own budgets. If the Treasury were simply to ignore the debt ceiling and borrow what was required under the operative budget, Congress would scream, but really it would get what it wants: a free pass to disclaim responsibility for its own budgetary decisions.

What was that again about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others?

In Search of a Theory of Three Party Systems

As I understand it, party competition in mature democracies is supposed to converge around two major parties, one on the center-right and one on the center-left. The reason is quite straightforwardly strategic: if either party strays too far from the center, it gives the other party the opportunity to seize the center and with it a majority; and, if either party splits or faced serious competition for votes from a new upstart party, vote splitting would doom both parties on whichever side of the ledger they happen to be on to perpetual minority status.

Obviously, you can have periods where there are multiple parties competing to become one of the two stable alternatives, but these should be relatively short transitional periods, not the normal course of affairs. And obviously as well this analysis works better for some democratic systems than for others. It makes more sense for American and British-style systems than for proportional-representation systems, for example. And it works better when you don’t have a regional or sectarian or other identity-driven party throwing a wrench into the works. But it’s a sufficiently thoroughgoing assumption that whenever a political system doesn’t conform to this assumption, it’s treated as an interesting exception.

But the exceptions are starting to devour the rule.

Canada just had an election whose results might be described as “what was supposed to happen in Britain’s last election.” That is to say: the third party came in second, the NDP substantially overtaking the Liberals for the first time in history. If the assumption that two-party competition is “natural” is to hold, the Liberals should fold, leaving two major parties (Conservatives and NDP) competing for Canadian votes. But for reasons of history if nothing else, this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

But apart from history, it’s worth pointing out that if the standard assumption of two-party normalcy were true, then the NDP would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Ditto for the Liberal Democrats in Britain, who have been affecting the outcome of British elections for over a generation. Further afield, France, in spite of having a Presidential system, has nothing resembling two-party competition. Israel has a proportional representation system, so it’s a different case, but for a long time it was functionally a two-party system, with a right-wing bloc of parties competing with a left-wing bloc for the majority of voters, and with identity-driven parties for the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab vote that were open to any coalition (in the case of the ultra-Orthodox) or systematically excluded (in the case of the Arab parties). But not anymore. For over a decade, Israel’s political system has been rocked by the emergence of centrist parties aiming to be alternatives to the right and left. These parties have never won an election, but they haven’t gone away, and neither have Likud (even when it shrunk to a tiny rump after the first Netanyahu government) nor Labor (the former center-left powerhouse now dwindled to near-irrelevance and sitting in a right-wing coalition). Should I go on and talk about Mexico? Belgium? Switzerland?

What’s the current political science take on this? Why are third parties much more durable, under a variety of political systems (though not the American), than theory would suggest?

Got Him. Now What?

(I don’t need to link to anything, right? We all know what I’m talking about?)

For some time now, it’s been clear that the two most-likely places Osama bin Laden could be hiding are (a) somewhere in Pakistan; or (b) in the ground. Bin Laden had kidney disease, and needed access to modern medical facilities to survive for a lengthy period. Since he couldn’t just fly in for dialysis and then fly back to his cave, that meant he had to be hiding somewhere that such facilities were readily available. We already knew that he had fled to Pakistan immediately after the battle at Tora Bora, and Pakistan provided a better-connected network of al-Qaeda-sympathizers than probably any other country. So the odds were, if he wasn’t already dead, that he was in Pakistan.

And that’s where he turned out to be. Not only in Pakistan, but in a walled compound a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s military academy.

That location strongly suggests that the Pakistani military, and certainly Pakistani intelligence, knew where he was. Their behavior makes a great deal of sense. There was real political risk to simply handing bin Laden over to America given the level of emotional support for al Qaeda and the level of distrust for and even hatred of America within Pakistan. But bin Laden was himself a threat to the Pakistani state; they certainly wanted him neutralized. And America paid Pakistan a great deal of money to look for him. So keeping him where they could keep tabs on him, and keeping that fact a secret, was the most logical thing for the ISI to do.

Of course, that’s not proof, and neither I nor anyone else I’ve heard speculating has ever been to Abbottabad. But I have a hard time imagining that you could build a walled compound right near the Pakistani military academy without anyone in the ISI asking “I wonder who lives there?”

What does that mean about our relationship with Pakistan? Unfortunately, not much. Our own intelligence officials have suspected for years that at a minimum elements within the Pakistani “deep state” knew OBL’s whereabouts. We used both carrots and sticks to try to get the official Pakistani leadership to take action. The main carrot was lots of money and fancy new weapons; sticks included the escalating presence of American soldiers, CIA officers, and drones conducting operations within Pakistani territory. But none of this appears to have been sufficient. It strikes me as entirely appropriate that the United States, at least in this Administration, prioritized getting OBL higher than keeping Pakistan happy, but not so high that we were willing to risk an open break with Pakistan. Now that OBL has been killed, the balance ironically tips even further in Pakistan’s favor. Even though elements within Pakistan may have been playing a double game with us, our other interests in Pakistan apart from getting OBL haven’t changed. That’s just the way the cookie bounces.

We should be enormously proud of our intelligence services for tracking OBL down, and of the individuals who carried out this daring operation – and, as well, of the Obama Administration for setting the priorities that made the operation possible, and for successfully keeping it a secret until it was accomplished. Eliminating Osama bin Laden was an absolutely essential goal of our foreign policy; alive and at large, he remained an enduring symbol of defiance, the man who attacked the American capital and lived to tell the tale. Not anymore.

But the larger foreign policy dilemmas that we face in Central Asia haven’t really changed. Even al Qaeda itself (assuming one wants to treat it as a unitary organization for analytical purposes in the first place) won’t cease to exist by any means simply because its titular head and one-time financier is out of the picture. One can hope that, this essential mission having been accomplished, we can now have a serious conversation about what our other objectives are in the region, and what the costs and risks are of trying to achieve them.

As an aside: why was OBL “buried at sea” (i.e., tossed overboard)? Presumably so that there would be no grave for unsavory types to turn into a shrine. Conspiracy theories alleging that the whole operation was a hoax would proliferate under any scenario that didn’t involve OBL alive and in manacles, and even then some people would say he was an impostor (as some did with Saddam Hussein for a while). So, once we were satisfied that we got him, OBL’s body was just a burden.

A Moment of Communion with Paul Krugman

Steve Sailer was struck by the exact same passage as I in a profile of Paul Krugman:

Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the ­middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”

Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch ­houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”

To state the obvious, this is in many ways a profoundly conservative sentiment. Note the love of the particular, specific and local lived experience, and also the lack of conventional liberal observation (in this passage) of the greater racism of that era, or the conformity and sexual mores against which ‘the Sixties” rebelled. I think that seen in its best, and correct, light, what Krugman is expressing here is the desire that as many people as possible should have access to this kind of middle-class life.

I’m somewhat younger than Krugman, but as they say, the future arrives unevenly. I grew up in a small town with an experience not unlike this. I’m very sympathetic to Krugman’s choking nostalgia. It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it.

The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows. The idea of having, or being, “help” seemed like something from old movies about another time.

Almost anybody who experienced it this way (and of course, not everybody did), intuitively wants something like it for his own children. The tragedy, in my view, is that, though we all thought of this as the baseline of normality, this really was an exceptional moment in our nation’s history.

My motivation in writing about political economy is, in some ways, much like Krugman’s. But rather than seeing that moment as primarily the product of policies like unionization, entitlements and high taxes, as is Krugman’s view, I believe that it was primarily the product of circumstance. We had just won a global war, and had limited competition; we had a huge wave of immigration, followed by a multi-decade pause; oil was incredibly cheap; a backlog of technical developments had yet to be exploited and scaled up, and so forth. We can’t go back there, at least not exactly.

This difference in diagnosis leads me to radically different views about what we should do now.

(Cross-posted at The Corner)

A Gas Tax: Number vs. Words, ctd.

Yesterday, I wrote a post using data from Kevin Drum’s blog in which I argued that any feasible U.S. gas tax would be highly unlikely to free America from the need for sourcing massive amounts of oil from unstable regimes, or to make a meaningful dent in potential global warming damages. This is because, among other things, the price elasticity of oil is just not high enough. Ryan Avent at The Economist has written a good-faith reply that I think, ironically, reinforces this point.

Avent’s first criticism centers on long-run elasticity being much higher than short-run elasticity (essentially, that I can drive a little less this year if the price of gas goes way up, but that if it stays high over 10 years, I can buy a smaller car, and bring my usage way down). This is, of course, correct. It’s why I only quoted the long-term price elasticity estimates from Drum’s post. According to the IMF study on which these are based, “long term” here means twenty years.

Avent’s second criticism is that if one believes (as I do, and as I stated in the post) that the key to reducing ceteris paribus fossil fuels consumption in the U.S. is improved technology, “ then higher prices are a good way to encourage their development.”

They are a way to do this, certainly, but not necessarily a good way.

Start with a rigorous definition of “new technology” for this purpose. This doesn’t just mean geo-thermal powered rocket packs, but also things like better bus routing software, improved rail tracks, and more energy-efficient housing construction materials. Either consumers would or would not choose any one of these new technologies under current conditions. If you use a tax to push up the price of fossil fuels, and this changes the consumer decision calculus so that they are now willing to choose some alternative that they otherwise would not have, it is because you have foreclosed a choice they used to have that they prefer to any of the options that are available after the tax increase. Another way of saying this is that you have just lowered their material standard of living.

When I say “new technology,” then, I mean technical advances that create new alternatives that people would choose to employ instead of fossil fuel based alternatives at current prices. That is, improvements to material standard of living that also have the benefit of reducing fossil fuels consumption.

Now, to evaluate Avent’s argument that taxing fossil fuels is a good way to induce new technology, consider an analogy. Suppose that there is a chemotherapy drug that increases 5-year survival rate for a specialized type of cancer from 10% to 60%, but with horrible side-effects. Some scientists in a couple of university labs have had some promising results with basic compounds that might or might not ultimately be precursors to a new drug that could get better increases in survival rates, and without many of the awful side effects. If you believed that improving treatment for this disease should be a major public priority, would your preferred approach be to add a large tax to chemotherapy? This is, in effect, what Avent is proposing as way to encourage the development of alternative energy technologies. I’d fund NIH research into the new alternative drug.

Finally, Avent argues that a gas tax is a great idea whether or not it really reduces fossil fuels usage, because even if I’m right and it won’t eliminate that much oil consumption, then it will be “a great way to generate revenue” (i.e., will result in a ton of additional tax collections). That is an entirely different argument, which would concede the point I was making in my post.

(cross-posted at The Corner)